YouTube: BTS Podcast – Tech Tales; PD Videos; Vlogger Stories; Pop Culture (September 22, 2026)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Key Takeaways:

• Cheap accommodation comes with its own ecosystem of problems. A 25-ringgit room can be remarkably good value—right up until the air conditioning fails, the water disappears, or the Wi-Fi decides to take a vacation.
• The hardest part of making historical videos isn’t always the history. Sometimes it’s figuring out which name, date, story, or supposedly established fact is actually correct.
• My equipment has developed a personality. A malfunctioning GoPro microphone connection and a mouse that randomly double-clicks have turned ordinary video production into something resembling bomb disposal.
• Sometimes the best decision is to throw away hours of work. Several recent Melaka videos became much better only after I abandoned the original plan and concentrated on the part of the story that actually worked.

Life on Planet Doug: The 25-Ringgit Hostel

I’ve been living at the Discovery Guest House in Melaka for quite a while now, and it’s becoming an increasingly good illustration of the strange economics of budget travel.

The room is cheap. Very cheap. And that’s why I’m still here.

But the bargain comes with some interesting side effects.

The air conditioning stopped working. The Wi-Fi disappeared. On busy weekends, the water supply on the top floor can become unreliable. And because the room is on the top floor, it can turn into an oven when the sun is beating down on the roof.

Yet somehow, when the hostel empties out during the week, everything becomes strangely peaceful again.

One of the funniest episodes involved another guest who kept coming to my room asking questions about the things that weren’t working. First he wanted to borrow an air-conditioner remote. Then he needed help finding the hot water. Then he discovered that there was no water at all.

Eventually I showed him my solution: a bucket, a hose and a cut-up plastic bottle.

He looked at the setup, looked at his beautiful hair and hair-care products, and very clearly decided that he was not living on Planet Doug.

I couldn’t blame him.

He eventually moved to another hotel. I remain here.

The Hidden Cost of a Cheap Room

One thing this experience has reinforced for me is that the cheapest room isn’t necessarily the cheapest solution.

I found another hotel, M Candy, that appeared to offer a much nicer room with air conditioning for only a few ringgit more than my hostel room.

Then I looked at the final price.

Tourism tax. Heritage tax. Service charges. Other fees.

Suddenly that apparently 32-ringgit room was much closer to 55 or 60 ringgit.

And that’s the strange calculation I keep making. Is escaping a hot room worth another 30 ringgit every night? Or would I rather spend that money on food?

There’s another cost too: moving.

When you travel with a lot of equipment, changing hotels isn’t simply a matter of putting a toothbrush into a backpack. It consumes the entire day mentally. You pack, check out, wait, travel, check in, unpack and reorganize everything.

So I keep doing what I always do: Yeah, but…

Maybe I should move.

Yeah, but…

Maybe I should spend more.

Yeah, but…

Maybe I should find a long-term apartment.

Yeah, but…

That’s basically the Planet Doug decision-making system.

When the Camera Becomes Part of the Story

The GoPro has been giving me another kind of headache.

The connection between my Rode Wireless GO II and the GoPro Media Mod has become unreliable. Sometimes everything works perfectly. Then I touch the cable and suddenly there’s a horrible burst of crackling—or the audio disappears entirely.

The problem is that I can’t identify the culprit.

Is it the cable? The microphone? The Media Mod? The GoPro’s socket?

So now every important clip requires a little quality-control procedure. I finish recording, stop somewhere in the shade, hold the GoPro directly against my ear and listen to the audio.

From the outside, I must look completely insane.

And then there’s the overheating.

The funny thing is that I’ve actually found a way to turn this into an advantage. When the GoPro overheats and shuts down, I can’t record—but I can play back the footage.

So I sit in the shade and review what I’ve just filmed.

And that’s surprisingly useful.

I’ll hear myself say, “I’m going to talk about this…” and then realize that I wandered off on a tangent and completely forgot to talk about it.

I’ll notice something in the background that I hadn’t seen before.

I’ll realize that I need to research something.

So the camera’s tendency to overheat has inadvertently forced me to slow down, review what I’m doing and actually pay attention to my surroundings.

Every disadvantage has an advantage.

Even if that advantage is manufactured by a GoPro that is trying to cook itself.

My Mouse Has Become a Safety Hazard

My Logitech M720 mouse has been slowly dying for years.

The left button failed first, so I simply swapped the functions of the left and right buttons in the software and carried on.

Eventually the other button started failing too.

I discovered that you can apparently take the mouse apart and clean the switches with alcohol. I tried it.

Miraculously, it worked.

For about two and a half weeks.

Then things became much worse.

The mouse began double-clicking when I clicked once.

That’s a nightmare when you’re editing video.

It’s an even bigger nightmare when you’re working in a web browser. A single click can suddenly become two clicks, which can mean closing a browser tab, moving something, opening something, or potentially doing something you very much did not intend to do.

So I’ve improvised another solution: I’ve reassigned the mouse’s horizontal tilt controls so that one direction becomes a single click and the other becomes a double-click.

It’s workable.

It’s also ridiculous.

And it has made me realize something about technology: sometimes we tolerate an annoying problem for years simply because we get used to it.

It becomes part of normal life.

Then one day you finally investigate it and discover that you could have fixed it five years ago.

Or, in my case, fixed it for two and a half weeks until it breaks again.

When Historical Research Fights Back

The biggest surprise in several of my recent Melaka videos has been how difficult it can be to establish something that sounds incredibly simple.

What was this church called?

When did the name change?

Who changed it?

What did the Portuguese call it?

What did the Jesuits call it?

What did the Dutch call it?

And why does every source seem to have a different answer?

The Christ Church and St. Paul’s videos became particularly good examples of this problem.

I went out with a carefully researched story in my head, started talking—and discovered that I didn’t actually have the story straight.

So I eventually learned an important lesson:

Sometimes the honest thing to do is admit that the research is messy.

Rather than pretending that I have a perfectly clean historical timeline, I’ve started incorporating the confusion itself into the videos.

If historians, websites and historical signs can’t agree on what something was called, that disagreement is actually part of the story.

The Video That Got Smaller—and Better

The St. Paul’s Church video was a particularly good example.

My original plan was enormous. I was going to use the church as a lens through which to tell the entire history of Melaka—from the Sultanate through the Portuguese, Dutch and British periods.

I started at the bottom of the hill.

Then I climbed the hill.

Then I talked about names.

Then dates.

Then Portuguese history.

Then Dutch history.

Then more names.

By the time I reached the church I was exhausted and had completely lost track of what I was doing.

And then I looked at the tombstones.

Those were the interesting part.

So I threw away almost everything I had just filmed and started again.

This time I began inside the church, with the tombstones.

And I think the result is much better.

That’s something I’m learning repeatedly with these videos: a narrower story can sometimes be much more interesting than the grand historical epic you originally imagined.

Raffles, Farquhar and the Problem With Simple Stories

The video about Stamford Raffles and the old fortress gate was probably my favorite recent historical story.

Partly because it involved real people with personalities and decisions rather than simply a collection of dates.

But mostly because the familiar tourism story turned out to be overly simplified compared to the real underlying history.

The standard version is essentially:

Raffles arrived, saw the British destroying the fortress, intervened and saved A Famosa.

But the real story is considerably more complicated.

Raffles wasn’t a Hollywood hero dramatically riding in to save the day. He was a young company official who wrote a memorandum arguing against what was happening.

And yet that seemingly modest act may have had enormous consequences because the plan wasn’t simply to destroy one fortress. The East India Company’s plans for Melaka were much more sweeping.

That creates an interesting historical paradox: Raffles was less of a hero than the tourism story makes him, because he didn’t personally stand at the gate and stop the demolition.

But he may also have been far more important than the tourism story suggests, because his intervention potentially helped preserve far more of historic Melaka than that single gate.

That’s the sort of historical discovery I really enjoy.

Not simply finding a new fact, but discovering that the familiar story has been compressed until the interesting parts have disappeared.

And Then There’s the Movie and TV Department

After all the history and equipment problems, I eventually wandered into my usual pop-culture territory.

I watched The End of Oak Street, which turned out to be a much sillier movie than I expected.

There are dinosaurs.

There are serious family discussions while dinosaurs are presumably wandering around outside.

There is a gigantic prehistoric snake that somehow manages to crawl through an entire house without anybody noticing.

And somehow, despite all of that, Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor are good enough actors that I stayed invested in what was happening.

It’s not a movie I’d describe as a masterpiece.

But sometimes you don’t need a masterpiece.

Sometimes you just need a giant prehistoric snake to crawl silently through an entire house without collapsing it.

And then there’s Lanterns, which I’m currently watching.

I’m enjoying the grounded, True Detective-style approach to the Green Lantern universe, along with the performances and the slower mystery.

My one concern is that I’m getting increasingly impatient with the mystery box approach.

I’m perfectly happy not knowing what’s going on.

What I don’t like is not knowing what’s going on for too long.

There’s a difference.

Give me a complicated story like Dark, where eventually all the strange pieces connect and make sense, and I’m completely on board.

Give me strange things simply because they’re strange, and I’m considerably less enthusiastic.

So far, Lanterns has kept me interested.

I’m just waiting for it to start answering some of its questions.

The Real Behind-the-Scenes Story

Looking back over all of these videos, I think there’s a common thread.

The finished Planet Doug video often looks much simpler than the process that produced it.

You see me standing in front of a church talking about history.

You don’t see the hours of research where I’m trying to figure out which name is correct.

You don’t see the GoPro overheating.

You don’t see me listening to the last clip with the camera pressed against my ear to make sure the microphone hasn’t failed.

You don’t see me fighting with a mouse that may or may not suddenly double-click itself into oblivion.

You don’t see the entire section of a video that I decided was confusing and deleted.

And you certainly don’t see all the moments when I think:

“Maybe I should just move to another hotel.”

Followed immediately by:

“Yeah, but…”

That’s really what these Behind the Scenes videos are about.

Not just what I filmed, but how I ended up deciding what was worth filming in the first place.

A couple of thoughts that stuck with me

“Sometimes the honest thing to do is admit that the research is messy.”

And perhaps the unofficial Planet Doug philosophy:

“Every disadvantage has an advantage.”

Even when the disadvantage is a broken GoPro, a dying mouse, a 25-ringgit hotel room with no air conditioning—or a historical source that can’t agree with itself.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning and welcome back to Planet Doug behind the scenes for Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026. And I’m sitting here in my hostel room at the Discovery Guest House, the same place where I’ve been staying for the last little while in Melaka, where I’ve had all kinds of crazy adventures. I’ve got my liter of Dutch Lady milk to keep me going. And I’ll probably have a cup of coffee before long. And my previous videos, I was talking about this place because I moved here from a different hotel. There was a like a holiday weekend and all the hotels in Melaka got fully booked, including mine. So, I had to move and I came here and it’s a step down in comfort from where I was staying before. And in the time that I’ve stayed here, the stepping down in comfort has gotten more and more and more, you know, things like the air conditioner breaking and I’ve been unable to get it turned on. Things like that. And it’s kind of a funny place to stay because it changes dramatically depending on the day. If it’s like a weekday, which is today, a Tuesday, it’s completely empty, which is why I’m able to do this. On the weekend, it fills up. So, this room behind me will have people in it. The room in front of me, like rooms on all sides will be full and the walls are very thin. So, I can’t sit in here and babble away because it would be bothering people. But yeah, today the place is empty. I felt in the mood to do some babbling, so I fired up my GoPro. Hopefully, it lasts for a little while and does not overheat and shut down here in this room. We will see how it goes.

Yeah, I guess I have a couple of stories from this place. I have some notes here that like during the week whenever something interesting happens, I’ll like jot down a little note about it in a notepad. And then when that notepad fills up and I was like, “Ah, it’s time for a behind-the-scenes video because I have things to talk about.” Yeah. One other problem that occurred here, I was if I was going to write a review of this place, like positives and negatives, one of the positives I would have listed was that the Wi-Fi was really good. At least in my room, like Wi-Fi really depends on where your room is relative to the routers. And I guess this room, probably the worst room in the hostel, just happens to be right beside the routers. I see two of them out there. You know, these units with antennas bristling in all directions. I assume those are the routers. And it’s right outside my window. So, I’ve got like a 2.4G Wi-Fi network I can join and a 5G for what I do. I don’t think it matters which one I use to be honest, but I linked to the 5G network and it was stable and it was reliable and it was fast. So, I would have said that was one of the good things about this hostel. You know, low price, but you actually get really good Wi-Fi. But then it disappeared out of nowhere. I mean, the Wi-Fi was there, but then it said not connected to the internet. And that gets back to my whole the whole thing I talked about in my previous video about staying in a low-budget hostel. And if something goes wrong, you have to balance the benefits, the pros and cons of trying to get that thing fixed where if something goes wrong and you tell someone about it, maybe they’ll fix it. But somehow the telling them about it can lead to more problems than if you just left it alone. So I ran into that issue with the air conditioning and you know being no water in the week on the weekend stuff like that. There’s no point telling anybody about it. They are perfectly aware. It’s not like they can change it. So, when the Wi-Fi disappeared, well, when the internet disappeared from the Wi-Fi, I just didn’t bother mentioning it to anybody. It’s like, ah, it’s just too much trouble. If I told the guy who works here about it, he would tell me, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.” And then tell me to go talk to some boss. I’ve never met the boss, so I don’t even know who I would talk to. So, I just basically live without it. And then I ended up just switching my data package because if I have good Wi-Fi, I can upload videos using the hotel’s Wi-Fi. So, I don’t have to have a lot of data in my mobile package. But if I have no Wi-Fi, then I have to buy a bigger package. And Celcom Digi offers these packages where you can get like a thousand gigabytes for 9 ringgit or 2,000 gigabytes. They raise the price to 16 ringgit. Used to be 14, but it suddenly went up to 16. And then I’ll buy one of those packages if I have four or five videos to upload because that’s, you know, 100 200 gigabytes of data. And yeah, you can’t do that. Like a regular 30-day package might give you 10 GB and I can’t even upload one video with 10 GB. You can get like 20 GB, 30 GB at the most, and that might cover one video, maybe two. So it doesn’t really work. Then I have to switch to one of these data packages of 2,000 gigabytes and I upload all my videos all at once day and night. Just keep it running, uploading, uploading, uploading. Anyway, so I just got one of those data packages, uploaded all the videos and I just left the I didn’t worry about the fact that the Wi-Fi wasn’t working. And then a weekend came and the place filled up and then now I noticed today the internet is back. So I think during the weekend the other guests who moved in just for the weekend they tried to log on like oh there’s no internet they told the staff and then they investigated and now the internet is back.

So that was one of the small adventures I had here and the other one was quite amusing. It was during the weekend when some people showed up and because this room is so hot without air conditioning. The one way I make it bearable is I open the window, open the curtain and then I open the door like wide open so that I get a little bit as much air flow as possible during the day to keep the temperature down. So everybody who walks up and down the hallway, they have a perfect view into my room. Everybody can just look in and go, “Huh, what’s going on in there? What’s that foreigner doing there sitting on his bed with no shirt typing away on a laptop, you know, what’s that guy up to?” So, everybody sees me in the room and the doors open and I look like somebody who lives here with all of my gear spread around. So, I’m sitting here in the room. I have my earbuds plugged in while I’m editing video because the room is pretty noisy, loud fan, things like that. And my laptop isn’t loud enough in a noisy room like this for me to hear anything. So I have to plug in, you know, earbuds to my laptop. And then of course that also helps me because I don’t disturb other people. So at first I didn’t hear anything cuz I was sort of focused on editing video. But then I became aware of something happening. I look and there was a guy standing in the doorway. He wasn’t a native speaker of English. I don’t know. I don’t think he was Malaysian either. I think he was like an immigrant worker from another country, maybe Bangladeshi, something like that. But anyway, he did speak English enough to communicate and he would, you know, he was knocking on my door trying to get my attention, right? So, I’m like, “Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.” And I have to shut down my laptop, move it aside, turn everything off, and then I get up and go talk to him. And then he asked me, “Do you have a remote for the air conditioner?” Cuz he looked into my room, this hearkens back to my original long air conditioner story that my air conditioner can turn on with a switch on the wall. So I didn’t need a remote to run the air conditioner. I just turn on the switch and the air conditioner ran. So, I never had a remote, but then the air conditioner blew up. So, even though it is still powered on and has a power light, it isn’t working, but the light is on. So, anyway, this guy looked in my room and he saw, oh, the light is on. He must have a remote for the air conditioner. And in his room, there was no air conditioning. He’s trying to turn on his air conditioner because on his listing as well, he booked a room that said air conditioning, but he doesn’t have air conditioning. So, and he thinks, well, where’s the remote? And he thought he could come to my room, borrow my remote, go to his room, turn on the air conditioner, set the temperature, and then return the remote to me. Right? And now he doesn’t have to bother the staff because just like me, he would find it difficult to find the staff to talk to. So anyway, he thought that would be a clever workaround. So he said to me, “Oh, you know, I see your air conditioner is running. Can I borrow your remote?” So now I’m trying to explain to this guy through, you know, broken English this language barrier what’s going on. But I had to tell him, I don’t have a remote. And I hate saying no to people like that because I always get the feeling like they think you’re lying. Like you just don’t want to get involved or you don’t want to help. You don’t want to just you don’t want to be bothered. So he says, “Oh, can I borrow your remote?” And then I tell him, “Sorry, dude. I don’t have a remote.” And then he looked at my air conditioner and it looked like it was on. He’s like, “Well, are you What do you mean? You know, you know it’s running. You have a power light.” So now I’m trying to tell him the whole story about my air conditioner history and I basically I’m just trying to convince him that yeah I’m telling the truth. I do not have a remote. If I had one absolutely I’d give it to you but honestly I don’t have one. And he’s like come on. Like come on. Can you help me out? And I’m like I would I really would. I but I don’t have a remote. Anyway, he eventually went away. I don’t know if he ever solved his air conditioner problems, but you know, I’m back on my laptop editing, doing this, doing that. Knock knock knock on my door. I look up and it’s the same guy and he’s very apologetic like, “I’m so sorry to bother you. So sorry, so sorry.” Cuz when I’m working on the bed, I’m locked in. I mean, I’m drowning in gear. Laptop on my lap. Plugged in with my earphones and it’s not that easy to turn off what I’m doing, put my laptop aside, unplug everything, make sure everything’s safe, you know, I’ve got the mouse here. I don’t want to knock it off the bed. And it’s hard to get in and out of my workstation. But eventually, I did. Like, I don’t want to just talk to the guy from here. It just feels rude. So, I put everything away, make sure everything’s shut off, everything’s okay. I get up, go talk to him in the doorway, and he’s like, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” And he says to me, “Is there hot water? Like, how do I get hot water?” So, I go with him to the bathroom and I point to the hot water thing and, you know, the dial was not turned all the way on like the electric heater was turned off. And maybe he’s not familiar with these. So, you know, I show him. Okay, this is it. You know, it may or may not work. I never use it. So, but if you want to turn it on, yeah, click and you can turn it up to full whatever. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I come back in here. I’m doing my thing. I’m all plugged in again. Knock knock knock on the door. It’s him again. This is like quite a bit later. And then he comes back and he’s asking me, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, but how do I get water?” I’m like, ah, okay. It was the weekend and when the place is busy, there’s so much demand on the water supply that here on the top floor there is no water. So now I take him back to the bathroom and I show him that there is no water. And I’m trying to explain to him that yeah, these bathrooms on this floor quite often there is no water. Like I’m turning on the taps and I’m showing him nothing is coming out. There’s no water coming out of the showerheads. So I’m trying to explain to him again like the whole history about this. And I indicate the bucket that I that’s on the ground that I use with a water bottle that’s cut in half. And I say that that’s how I take a shower. I do a bucket bath and I let the water dribble into this bucket and over a couple of hours whatever it fills up. And I do that. So I’m indicating to him that that’s how on this floor, you know, that’s how you take a shower. You don’t have a choice. There is no water. And he looked at that. He looked at the hose that goes from the tap into the bucket. And the hose is black. like it’s covered in black mold. I keep planning to buy a scrubber, like some sort of a scrubber brush and soap, and just sort of give it a wipe cuz it looks really bad. I just keep using it anyway. I just haven’t been bothered. Anyway, he’s looking at the bucket. He’s looking at that hose covered in black mold. And then he’s looking at this crusty half cracked bent, you know, water bottle that I’m using. And he just he just shakes his head. No, I can’t do that. And he points to his hair. And he had really nice hair, a big thick full head of hair that was curly, you know, good-looking guy with this really nice head of hair. And then he was sort of pointing at his hair, this curly mop he had. And he was pointing at his like hair products, and he’s like, “No, that’s not going to do it for me. I need my hair to look good and I can’t use that bucket water. I need hot water for this shampoo to get this look. Like, dude, like I’m not going to live like a savage. I live, you know.” Anyway, I’m making all that up. He didn’t say any of those things. I was just trying to interpret what was going on. But yeah, he pointed at his hair care products and he pointed at his hair and he, you know, hot, you know, I need hot water to wash my hair. I can’t be living like you do. You know, I don’t live on Planet Doug. I live in a sensible world where we take showers with hot water in hotels. Right? So anyway, he just walked away. He says, “No, I’m not touching that bucket, dude. You know, you have at it. If you’re happy with that, go for it, but I’m not touching that bucket. Sorry.” So, I thought that was kind of funny. And then I never saw him again. So I don’t know whether he got air conditioning, whether he figured out that he has to go down to the other floors to find water when there’s no water here, whether he ever found a hot water heater that works. I don’t know that either. But once Sunday came around, everybody emptied. Like all the rooms were empty and I’m here all by myself again.

Of course, I have thought about moving. I even made definite plans to move. I would have to raise my budget because this place is still by far the most affordable option. Mainly because I guess I’m paying for a room that doesn’t come with air conditioning. Oh, actually somebody pointed this out to me in the comments because when I had the whole air conditioning issue, I was talking with the hotel staff and pointing to my listing on Agoda. This is the room I booked and it says it has air conditioning. It’s right there in my reservation. And of course, the hotel staff wanted nothing to do with that. He’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. But someone left a comment saying that I should use Trip.com instead because Trip is more rigorous about these things. And the commenter said that if a hotel does not list its rooms properly on Trip, they get banned. They’re more disciplined over on Trip. So just to test that, I loaded up Trip on my laptop. I wasn’t logged into an account or anything. And I’ve never used Trip so I don’t get special deals or benefits or anything like that. But I looked and yeah, they were absolutely right. If you look at the Discovery Hostel or the Discovery Guest House on Trip, the rooms are very much broken down by category and it shows what’s included in the room accurately. So on Agoda, my room lists air conditioning and blackout curtains, things like that. But on Trip, it says fan. Like it doesn’t go so far as to say fan only, but it only lists fan. So you just have to make the logical leap and say, “Oh, this is a fan-only room.” Because it doesn’t say air conditioning. And then if you jump up to their other building or maybe their other rooms that are more like double the price, then it says air conditioning. So it’s very clear on Trip, but Agoda is not clear. And I just ended up using Agoda all the time because I always got the best prices on Agoda and it always works with my credit card. I don’t have payment problems. And you know how you start using one of these platforms? You just get accustomed to it and it’s hard to switch to something else and I’ve got like platinum status and they give me a discount this and that. So, I don’t know. I just end up using Agoda but apparently if you’re looking for accuracy in the listings yeah Trip.com is better. Maybe all the others are better. Booking, Traveloka I don’t know. I didn’t check those. But Agoda definitely is, in my experience, their listings are very inaccurate. You can’t trust them. If your Agoda reservation says you’re getting blackout curtains, a kettle, coffee, tea, a mini fridge, well, believe it when you see it in the room because chances are none of those things are actually in the room. But maybe Trip is a better maybe you can kind of do both, right? You can check on Trip to get the room details and then on Agoda I can reserve it on Agoda. I can compare the prices. But anyway, I did think about moving because the heat in this room is really getting to me. It’s hard to sleep. It depends on the day. If it’s a cloudy day or there are heavy rains or something, then the building cools down and my room cools down with it. But if the sun comes out, because this room is on the top floor, the sun really beats down and this room becomes an oven and it does not become sleepable until very very late, like early in the morning, 1:00 a.m. 2:00 a.m. the temperature might finally drop to a point where yeah, you can fall asleep, you know, other than just lie here in a pool of your own sweat. So it’s not great value. Yeah, these hotels and these rooms having a fan only room doesn’t make sense because in the old days right before air conditioners everybody lived in like window only fan only rooms and they were fine because they all had big windows that created a breeze. They were designed to be aircon less. But these rooms in a hostel like that are deep in the interior of a building have no windows to the outside world. They’re designed to have air conditioning. So, you can’t really stay in one of these rooms without air conditioning. It’s just it’s just not logical. It’s not rational. But hey, Planet Doug is not often a rational place. But I did find out I stumbled across this new hotel. It’s very near the Mahkota Vibe Inn. This one is called the M Candy Hotel. Looks I mean it’s leagues better than this place like to go back one step here. I did think about upgrading here like just upgrade to a room with air conditioning. But when you do that, the price jumps up so high that you’re paying more than I would have paid at the Mahkota Vibe Inn or at M Candy. And those rooms are far nicer than the rooms here. So getting an air conditioned room here, paying their aircon prices makes zero sense at all. This place is pointless for doing that. If you’re going to jump up to that level in your budget, you definitely don’t stay in a place like this. You can get a much nicer room with air conditioning for cheaper than their aircon rooms here. That’s pretty obvious to me. So then I discovered this hotel, the M Candy Hotel, and I can see that today like this would be last minute booking. Sometimes the price goes up last minute, sometimes it goes down. But I see on Google Maps anyway, it says that a room at M Candy 33 ringgit. And if I click on Agoda to the link to Google Maps, I’ll probably get something close to that price. Let’s see what Agoda has to say about M Candy. Yeah, 32 ringgit. So I could move there today and my room here is generally 25 ringgit. So for seven ringgit more I can get a much nicer room, much nicer hotel with air conditioning, etc. However, there’s a catch because at a real hotel now they have to pay you they have to charge you the tourism tax. So, it’s not 32, it’s actually 42. And then these real hotels have all kinds of fees and service charges. So, by the time if I book this room at M Candy at 32 ringgit, it will end up costing 60 ringgit. It will be just about double, probably 55 ringgit. And this room flat rate 25. Like if it comes up at 25 ringgit per night, which is what I see right now, Discovery Youth Hostel, 25 ringgit for this room. And then I book it, pay for it, it’s 25 ringgit checkout price. So, for that reason, yeah, I mean, if I’m going to spend an extra if I have an extra 30 ringgit to spend, I’d rather spend it on two good meals or something rather than changing to a different hotel. You know what I mean? So, and not only that, it’s actually the moving that has kept me here because by I have a lot of complicated gear. Moving to a new hotel ends up occupying the whole day because you spend the whole morning anticipating moving out, right? Getting organized, packing up, getting ready. It’s not like I’m going to go out shooting video, exploring Melaka, and then rush back here because no, I got to get organized, pack up, the whole and then at noon you check out. And then you usually have a 2 hour, 3 hour wait time until you can check in at the other place. You check in, you know, you unpack and it’s a whole day really in terms of your mental focus changing hotels. So, when I do change hotels, what I do, of course, is I devote the day to video editing. So, I don’t waste all that time. I’m not just sitting here, you know, twiddling my thumbs waiting for checkout time. I’m working all morning editing videos and then I check out and then I check in and I just spend the rest of the day editing videos. So I make it a video editing day. But still it’s a lot. The whole day feels like it revolves around changing hotels and then when I wake up in the morning here I think ah do I really want to devote today to changing hotels? I just can’t face it. I just sit here in the heat and I sweat and I’ve been doing that on and on. But yeah, but yeah, M Candy, man, it looks like the place. 8.2 rating on Agoda or I think that’s a like a it brings in reviews from many other places, but total rating of 8.2 out of 10. 9.1 for location, which I understand cuz it’s right beside the Mahkota Vibe Inn which also has an excellent location. But yeah, the M Candy Hotel that looks like a very good option for Melaka for somebody on a budget and I don’t really see negative reviews. I don’t see any gotchas. And it does say the heritage tax is collected on arrival here. Even though I’m paying only 25 ringgit per night, the heritage tax is included in that 25 ringgit. So I end up I’m paying 22 ringgit per night for Paradise here on Planet Doug. So, but I have thought about skipping town and going over to the M Candy. It looks like pretty good. Yeah. Now, the only thing is, yeah, the price doubles with all the doubles the cost of this room once you factor in all the taxes, service charges, and all the fees. Yeah, that’s where they that’s where they get you.

Moving on to Planet Doug technology stories. I’ve definitely had a struggle with my camera gear lately. I don’t know how or why it started happening, but my Rode Wireless GO plugged into the GoPro Media Mod has started to become unreliable. I have to check it constantly because it might be recording fine, but then I’m out there in the real world and then I kind of have to adjust the camera, do something, and I touch the cord connecting the receiver into the Media Mod and I get this loud crackling sound and then the microphone connection may or may not return. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve had all kinds of weird experiences and I’ve done tons and tons of testing, but I can’t pin down exactly where the problem is. Is it the cord? Is it broken somehow? Is it like the 3.5 mm jack, the port in the microphone? Is it the microphone that’s broken? Is it the GoPro that’s causing the trouble? Is it the Media Mod? Like I keep unplugging one, doing a test, plug this in, change this, change that, and I cannot pinpoint where the problem is originating because it’s just totally random. And the only thing I can do is just keep checking. So, if I record a long segment and it’s an important segment, I’ll play back the video right away. I’m out on the streets. I’m shooting a video. I just duck into the shade and then, you know, play back the video. And people all over Melaka, they see me standing at the corner like at the side of the road and I’m just sort of hovering there like I’m lurking and I’ve got this GoPro like pressed up against my ear because it’s got a tiny speaker on the bottom and you have to hold it right to your ear to hear the audio. And I’m like going like this and people like what is this guy doing? I see people staring at me all the time when I do that. And I’m like yeah and people think I’m filming cuz I’m holding the camera and they’re like where is he aiming that? Is he filming his ear? What’s that dude up to? But anyway, I listen but it’s even hard to figure out. I did this on a recent video I shot at the Kampung Kling Mosque and the audio sounded fine to me, but then when I was editing I realized it was not fine. And I don’t even know what was recorded. It sounded a little bit like the microphone had disconnected completely and the audio was being recorded by the built-in mics of the Media Mod. But I don’t think so. The Media Mod doesn’t sound that loud. And it could be the Media Mod, but I don’t know. It could have been the Rode microphone, but not fully plugged in. And I find I have to really be careful with that when I change the battery because the GoPro batteries die pretty quickly and the GoPro overheats all the time. And a key component of that overheating is the battery itself. So, if I want to like if the GoPro overheats and shuts down and I want to get going again as fast as possible, I don’t just wait for the GoPro to cool down. I’ll open it, take it out of the Media Mod, pull out the battery, and the battery will be red hot. like it burns my hand when I touch it. And then I sit in the shade for a few minutes and I put in a fresh battery and I let the old battery, it still might have power left, but I don’t put it right back in. I let it cool down and then I swap those batteries in and out so that I put in a cool battery and you know take out the hot battery, put in a cool so I have two batteries running at the same time until they reach zero power and then I switch to the next two batteries. This is what we do on Planet Doug. I have this whole system worked out. But what I try to do is turn this disadvantage into an advantage. One thing I’ve noticed is that if the GoPro has overheated and shut down, it’s mainly because I’m recording video. That’s what is producing this huge amount of heat. Well, it’s Malaysia. It’s Melaka where all the heat is coming from. This GoPro would work fine in Canada or anywhere in Europe. It’s Malaysia that’s killing it. But it’s while the processor is running to, you know, record video and save it to the memory card. That’s what’s producing the heat. So, I learned that even if the GoPro has overheated and shut down, I can turn it back on and play video. Like, playback doesn’t produce the same amount of heat. So, if the GoPro has overheated and I can’t record anymore, I’ll just sit down in the shade and then I’ll put in a new battery, but then I will replay the video that I just shot just so that I’m reminding myself what I’ve said, what I’ve covered, and I’ll go back in time and then just review all the video I’ve shot. So, I take advantage of the downtime to listen to and watch all the video that I’ve shot. And then that helps me stay focused because quite often you open a clip where you say something like, “Oh, I’m going to talk about this.” And then you go off on a slight tangent and then you end the clip, but you forgot what you were supposed to talk about. And it was it isn’t until later on you review it and you’re like, “Ah, I never even got around to talking about what I was intended to talk about.” And then as I review the video, I pick up on these things like, “Ah, okay. Okay. You opened the clip saying this, but you never got back to it.” So then once my GoPro is ready to run again, I know where to pick up from where I left off. So I just take advantage of the time and I just think about what I’m doing. I review my notes for that video. I watch the people around me. If I’m at a mosque, where I was for this particular video, I just sit across the street from the mosque and I look at the architecture. I look at the details. Just think about things. Always look up on Planet Doug, look up at the top of the roof, the top of the tower, and see, oh, oh, I never noticed that detail. I’ll talk about that next in my video. And do a little bit of research because I’ll realize, oh, I don’t really know the history of this and then while I’m waiting for my GoPro to stop overheating, I do research out there on the street. So, I just lean into it, which is kind of interesting where this GoPro being so finicky, so prone to overheating, it kind of forces me to slow down and really take in my surroundings. So, it actually ends up being something of an advantage rather than a disadvantage, which is I’m sure the GoPro people did not think of that when they designed it, but yeah, it ends up kind of helping you in a way, helping you to stay focused, be more mindful of what you’re doing. Maybe if your camera just fires up instantly, runs for hours, never overheats, never glitches, never has audio problems, maybe you’re moving too fast and you’re not aware of things. With a GoPro, constant monitoring, adjusting, struggling, you know, you’re more mindful of what’s going on around you does drive you crazy, but hey, there are advantages to every disadvantage.

Next, technology topic. Interestingly though, between each of these sections, you don’t see it. It is behind the scenes of the behind the scenes. Before I move on to the next topic, I take my GoPro, unclip it from my tripod. I replay the video that I just shot. I’m listening to it, making sure there’s no crackling, that I’m getting audio, the audio sounds good. And while I’m doing that, it’s like I’m defusing a bomb because I don’t dare touch the cord or the microphone or where the cord is plugged into the Media Mod. So, I’m very careful to only hold the GoPro on one side away from the receiver and I carefully turn it around like don’t touch that, you know, don’t touch the blue or the red wire because the bomb could go off. And then I scroll up on the GoPro, listen to the video. Okay, I think everything’s okay. And I have to turn it off. And then I have to remount the GoPro, but I have to do it delicately as well. Just slowly screw it back on and click it into place with my quick release mechanism all the while being very careful not to touch the microphone. It’s like once it’s working just ah don’t touch it don’t touch it don’t touch it. So the other technology topic my mouse Planet Doug is in need of a new mouse. This story goes way back in time because in fact this mouse, it is a Logitech M720 Triathlon. The problems with this mouse go back probably, I don’t know, years. I’ve been living with it as kind of a broken mouse for a very long time. And it’s probably been much longer than I realize. It could even be in the years cuz yeah, I’ve owned this mouse for a long time. And yeah, I remember buying it, I’m pretty sure, when I was still in Mae Sot in Thailand. So that was during the pandemic. And one of the reasons I bought this mouse in particular, the M720, is because it is a multi-device mouse. So it has three settings, one, two, three. And you can with one touch of a button, you can jump from device to device. So you can pair this mouse with three devices and then switch from one to the other. And the reason I did that was because back in those days, I didn’t have a laptop. So I was using this mouse with a tablet and a smartphone. And I had like a wireless keyboard, like a Bluetooth keyboard that I could attach to a tablet or a smartphone. So, that was how I got around not having a laptop. And then with this mouse, I could switch cuz I had like at the time two smartphones and a tablet. And then this mouse was paired with all three of them. And I could just click, click, click, click. I could switch from one to the other easily. So, if I remember right, that’s why I bought this mouse. But then I came to appreciate most of the features that it has. The main one that I really appreciated was that the scroll wheel tilts to the left and to the right. And as far as I know, that’s very unusual in a mouse that it has a physical control tilting like normally you can spin the scroll wheel. You can click it has a button and that’s all you can do normally with a mouse. This one you can tilt it to the left or to the right and that triggers an action and you can program it to anything you want. I think the default action for that is horizontal scrolling and that’s why it became so useful to me because when you’re editing video you often you’re you always need to scroll up and down of course but you’re working on a horizontal timeline and then if you want to move up and down the timeline I can scroll left and right you know it’s just once you get used to doing that it’s very very hard to live without it. So, I learned to appreciate that feature. There are disadvantages to this mouse, but that scrolling feature, I really got addicted to that, and it was hard to live without it. And again, I can’t remember how long ago it was, but it’s a very old mouse, and I use it heavily, like constantly. And it’s always in a hotel room like this kind of hot, humid. I’m always using it on a bed sheet. It’s kind of a dirty, dusty environment. I’m not in a clean office environment on a glass table with a mouse pad. I’m doing this on bed sheets that can that may or may not be clean. There could be a lot of dust, hair, whatever. So, the buttons start malfunctioning very early on. And the 720 is known for the clicking to start malfunctioning. But I can’t remember when I started experiencing the problems, but problems started occurring and eventually it got to the point where the left click like hardly worked at all anymore. The only way to get it to work was like using the full you had to like press down like really really hard and it just became such a hassle. I switched button functions. So within the software app, you could switch it so that the left click goes on the right button and the right click goes on the left. So my fingers are now trained that this is right clicking and this is left clicking. I’ve swapped them. So that gave me the right click button is kind of fresh because you don’t use right click nearly as much as you do left click. Left click. So, I lived with the mouse that way for a long long time for years and it was still a hassle because I do use right-click all the time like for drop down like menu like context menus and you really have to fight with this thing to get it to work. But I just lived with it and lived with it and lived with it. And then quite recently the right-click button started giving me problems and I’ve been fighting with it. And then I discovered some YouTube videos which for some reason I never came across them in the past. They a lot of people talking about problems with the M720 and they said you can fix it yourself. And there were like tutorials on how to do it. You’ve got in order to take it apart, you have to get at the screws, which means you got to peel off this rubber thing on the bottom, which most people don’t realize. And that’s why you it’s hard to open because you don’t realize there are screws underneath this thing. But you peel that, take off, of course, you know, the door. And then suddenly you’ve got whatever one, two, three. I see three screws right now. There might be a fourth one somewhere. So basically I followed the steps and you can take this thing apart and then you have access to the actual mechanism and they say if you take like WD-40 and just put a drip it fixes the problem and they I did some more research and if you don’t have WD-40 or you don’t want to use it you can also use alcohol like methyl alcohol and I have a methyl alcohol stove. So, I actually have a bottle of fuel. I have alcohol fuel. So, I cracked open that bottle and I put drips of it in there and lo and behold, it was like a brand new mouse. It was like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, had I known this years ago, I could have fixed it easily with just a drip of alcohol. Perfect condition again.” So, I’m like kicking myself going, “Ah, why didn’t I look into this earlier?” You know, it’s funny how we live with one of these annoying problems for so long without ever fully coming to grips with it. I guess we just get used to it and it just becomes part of our life. And I think you really have to be careful not to fall into that trap. So, I was thinking I was a real idiot because I never realized I never did the studying before. But then it turns out that was very short-lived because the fix only lasted maybe 2 and 1/2 weeks. And now it’s back to running problems. And in fact, the problems are worse than they were before the alcohol. And right now I’m living in a very dangerous world because what happens now I have I still have the right button set up for left clicking like you just click on things right click click click clicking on buttons whatever now it double clicks like if I click once I didn’t realize it it will go it’ll do a double click really really fast because and this is a serious problem And I only figured out this was happening because I’d be editing a video and my whole video project would just explode all of a sudden. Like everything would change. I’m like, “What? What? What happened? What happened?” And it’s because I would click once and then I’m moving the mouse across the screen and then it would double click on something else. Like some it would click on things I had no intention of clicking on. And then I’d be like going on tabs on Google Chrome and I would try to click on an open tab and instead of opening it, it would close the tab. Like what the heck? I didn’t click to close it, but it turned out it was double clicking. So the first click would make that the active tab and then the second click would click on the X to close it. So, I’m like I’m trying to work and everything was like and it could be very who knows you’re on some you’re on some sort of a website and without realizing it you sign up for a $800,000 condo in Florida, you know, because you clicked on the button and agreed to the terms or something. You know, if you’ve got a mouse that has a mind of its own and it’s just clicking all over the place randomly, you’re just asking for trouble, right? So, that’s what I’ve been working with lately. I did more research and then I came up with a temporary solution to avoid the risk here is that I mentioned that the left and right scroll is programmable. So, what I’ve done is now I turned left tilt into clicking and right tilt into double clicking. So, if I ever want to just click on something, I do a left tilt click and it works perfectly. There’s no double clicking. And then if I want to like launch a program where you have to double-click or open a folder or play a video, then I just do right tilt and it automatically does a double click and opens the folder or launches the program. So now instead of using the buttons, I’m using this as my clicker. Click, double click, click, double click. So, I’m retraining my neural pathways that every time I want to click, it’s still it’s not perfect because quite often I need to drag and drop and you can’t use these click gestures for drag and drop. So then I must use this button. And then you got to like press down hard like and then you’re like carefully dragging it across the screen, you know, and if you let up on your pressure at all, it lets go before you’re ready. So it’s really made my video editing inefficient. So yeah, like I’m trying to drag a new video clip down to the timeline and I have to do it like five times. It’s like

And quite often if I’m replying to a comment on YouTube, I will write if it’s a long reply, I’ll write it on a notepad on my laptop, but then I have to select it to copy and paste it into YouTube. So I’m trying to drag like click and drag to highlight the section I want to copy, but it lets go in the middle. It’ll let go and then double click or triple click or who knows how many times it’s clicking and I end up deleting part of the comment, moving paragraphs around. It’s like trying to work with a with a time bomb and you never know when it’s going to go off and you never know what it’s going to do. So, my plan for today, to be honest, was to go to the malls and buy a new mouse. Unfortunately, I’m I can almost guarantee call it 99.999% positive that none of the brick-and-mortar computer stores carry this mouse or anything like it. I can guarantee it because on Planet Doug, the one item I want to buy is always without exception the one item they don’t carry. Like I can go to there’s like a huge shopping mall here called Eon. That’s probably where I should go. I there’s a nearby mall has a couple of computer stores. I might go there today. Who knows? I might get lucky. But Eon seems like the better choice. But I’m pretty sure that if I go all the way there, spend a lot of time getting there, I’ll probably take the local bus. So, it’s quite far away. They will have a huge display of Logitech mice. They’ll have a ton of them, but they will have every mouse in the Logitech lineup except for the one that I want to buy. This one is an older mouse and it’s still available. You can buy it, but you pretty much have to order it online. I don’t think you can get it in a store. Though, I am thinking about switching because they do have other mice. Now, this is an old old model. They have new ones that are very very close to this and have some advantages. So, it might be worthwhile updating, not upgrading the like the professional mice, the ones that are above this in the lineup. They’re crazy complicated, very expensive, and I don’t think they’re any better. This is This one really hits the sweet spot for me. But the one big problem with it is it has I guess these are most people call them the copy paste buttons. There’s two buttons here on the side and people they’re programmable buttons but I think the default is copy paste. People use them for that. But on the M720 they’re small. They’re really really small. It’s really hard to figure out which is which. And they’re so high up and so difficult to press that to me they’re useless. Like my natural way of holding the mouse, my thumb is nowhere near those buttons and I’ve got to like like try to get my thumb way back there and I end up I have to work so hard to twist my thumb to reach that button. I end up clicking some other button or moving the mouse all over the screen and it ends up causing trouble. So, these buttons are completely useless to me. And Logitech, I think, recognized that flaw. And the new mice they make, these buttons are bigger, lower in this area. And they’re more distinct. You can feel which one is the front one and the rear one. This one is overly complicated because it has three buttons. This third one is for that switching I talked about. So if I switch to a different model, I’ll no longer have the ability to switch pairings. I can live without that because I will get two new buttons that are that are hopefully are useful. But none of these other mice have the tilt scroll wheel. Only the 720 in this range has it and maybe none of the other mice have it. It might be unique to the 720. I’m not sure. But people say that if you really need horizontal scrolling, you do it with the keyboard. So what you do is normal scrolling. Horizontal you press like the shift key and scroll and that switches it to horizontal. So just by holding down the shift key, you can go from vertical scrolling to horizontal scrolling. And at first I didn’t like that because it’s like this is so easy. Tilt, tilt, tilt. But you know these things, the fact the fact that you are accustomed to the way your mouse works doesn’t mean it’s the best way. It’s just the way you’re accustomed to. You’re used to it. And maybe another mouse that does it differently will feel weird at first, but maybe after 2 or 3 days, you’ll go, “Oh, you know, actually this is better.” Like you just don’t know until you try it out. So anyway, I was doing a whole bunch of research into all the different mice that are available and there’s a Logitech. I had settled on like the M650, but the problem is I want the M650L, which is the one meant for large hands. And I can guarantee you if one of these stores has an M650, they will not have the M650L. You’ll have to order it online. But just this morning, I learned that they’ve come out with a new line I wasn’t aware of. And I think it’s the M850. And as far as I can tell, the M850 has all the features of the M650. And all of them are L. But the main difference for me, the one thing that bothered me about the M650 is that it doesn’t look contoured. The 720 is beautifully contoured for a right-handed person. Like there’s no left-handed, right-handed version. It’s not ambidextrous. It’s designed for right-handed use. And it just feels great. The contour, the shape, it looks very, very space agey because that shape just works. The M650, when I look at it, the photos, it’s just perfectly symmetrical. It’s just straight. It has no contouring. And I got the impression they designed it that way so that a right-handed person and a left-handed person can use it. It will be comfortable for both. But that tells me if it’s comfortable for a left-handed and right-handed, it won’t be perfect for a right-handed person. It will feel a little bit awkward. So, that made me hesitate about the M650. But the M850 looks like the M720. It has the same contour. It looks like it was specifically designed for right-handed use. And it they only make one version of it. There isn’t a small and a large or regular and a large. There’s only large, the M850L.

But it seems to have come out very recently. So I’m pretty sure it’s definitely not available anywhere in Melaka. Maybe not even anywhere in Malaysia yet. So anyway, I’ve been dealing with mouse problems. Maybe what I’ll end up doing is like a stop gap measure. Just buy a basic mouse, something that, you know, 30, 40 ringgit that has no fancy features at all, and just use it so I don’t accidentally buy a time share in Florida or delete an entire project because the mouse, you know, is clicking all by itself. And it won’t be the best mouse in the world, but I can use it until I have the opportunity to get an M720 or track down an M850 and see whether it works for me. I think I hear rain outside. That makes it a very good day to decide to sit here and record some stories. Yeah, I’m going to make a cup of coffee. I’m going to take a shower, cool down, and then after I do that, I’ll come back and move on to the next section of behind the scenes, and that’s going to be a look at the Planet Doug videos that I’ve shot recently.

I’m back. Fresh shirt. My Canada shirt was getting pretty pretty damp, pretty moist, hot and sweaty in this room. And I took a shower, dumped some water on my head, fired up the kettle for a cup of coffee. And interestingly, when I stepped out into the hallway, I found like the young man that I was talking about who stayed here, kept coming to my room, asking me about the air conditioning, the hot water, the lack of water, all these things. He was out in the hallway ironing some clothes. So, I got a chance I was out there chatting with him for quite a while. Turns out he’s from Saudi Arabia. That was his that’s his home country. I didn’t know that before, but he’s lived in Malaysia for a long time. We exchanged a little bit of life stories. And I asked him, “Oh, did you ever sort out your air conditioning problems?” And he said, “Yeah, he did. He’s actually not staying here anymore. He moved out, which he’s smarter than I am. Makes a lot of sense. And he gave me the name of the new hotel where he moved to. He recommended it for the price and the facilities, that sort of thing. But yeah, he moved out, but he did while he was here get air conditioning, but he had to double the price of the room to get that. So when he did tell them, “Hey, my air conditioner is not working.” They told him, “Well, you don’t get air conditioning at that price anyway. If you want me to give you the remote, then it’s 50. It’s like 50 plus ringgit per night, which is like, yeah, more than double the 22 ringgit per night that I’m paying for my fan-only paradise.” So, so yeah, he did get air conditioning, but then he had to like more than double the price of the room in order to get that. And it was kind of an interesting conversation. I have these conversations all the time. I think of them as yeah, but conversations. I have to say yeah, but over and over and over again because the other person will tell me things that based on what they see and what they know about me, things that I should do, and I always agree with them, they’re right. And I say, “Yeah.” And then I have to put in the Planet Doug twist and explain why that doesn’t really work for me. So I go, “Yeah, but so basically people give me all of this help like here’s how you fix your life. Do this, do this, do this, do this.” And I find myself always replying, “Yeah, but so in this case he, you know, was chatting with me about the rooms here and how he found a much better place.” And then he asked me how long I’d been in Melaka and I told him I’d been here for months and he said, “Oh, you know what? You and I, we could share an apartment and he looks into this. He knows all about it.” He did that in Kuala Lumpur, other places before he moved here. And he was giving me all the prices like, “Yeah, you know, if we got a an apartment, two-bedroom apartment, this is how much it would cost each of us this much per month. It would be amazing. Like, what do you think about doing something like that?” And then I’m saying, well, yeah, but and then I have to explain how I never intended to be in Melaka this long. It’s always a case where I book a hotel room for two or three nights and then I decide to stay a little bit longer, so I book another two or three nights, etc., and then before I know it, I’ve stayed for another month. And had I known from the beginning of the month I was going to stay for one month, I could have worked out a deal. Like I even could have I could talk to the hotel owner and say, “Oh, listen. I’m going to stay in your hotel for 1 month. Can we make a deal?” But then so he’s telling me this and then I’m like, “Well, yeah, but you know,” and then we were just talking about things that we did in life and of course my YouTube videos and YouTube channel came up and then he was like, “Oh, you know what you can do? You can go on to Fiverr and work as a video editor. You know how to edit video. You can be and like a you can work on Fiverr. And I have to go, well, yeah, but I don’t know how to edit video. I take video clips and I put them in a timeline and I cut them together. Occasionally, there might be a a blur transition. If I’m feeling exciting that day, there might be a push transition from one next clip, one clip to the next. I know how to put in an audio track, volume, up, down. So, I can put in some text. I can insert a photo, but that’s it. I’m not a video editor. I don’t know how to edit video. So he’s like, “Yeah, you can become a video editor and work on Fiverr as a freelancer.” And I’m like, “Well, yeah, but no, not really. I can’t do that either.” So he went around and around and around all these things he was suggesting that I could or should do. I’m like, “Yeah, I see what you’re saying, but” and then I have to put the Planet Doug twist on it. That is always always quite amusing.

So, Planet Doug videos that I shot since the last BTS video. I shot a video about the Christ Church here in Melaka in the square. And I’m going to try very hard not to just retell the whole story of the video. If you’re watching one of these BTS videos, chances are you’ve seen some or all of that Christ Church video already, so I don’t need to tell you all about it. This is for the behind the scenes elements to shooting that video. And the behind the scenes story is a little bit how I realized that the Christ Church, the history of it goes all the way back to the very beginnings of Melaka. So you can use you could make a video about that church, but then you can use that context, that subject to go back in time. And you could even begin with like the Melaka Sultanate and the fact that they had the, you know, they used the hill as the site for their grand the Sultanate palace complex and the grand mosque. And then of course when the Portuguese came, they took over, they put a Catholic chapel and then a church at the top of the hill. And the naming of these chapels and churches got really, really complicated. I mean, as far as I understood, everybody called it St. Paul’s Church. You go up on the top of the hill on all the tourism maps and the Google maps everywhere, it is St. Paul’s Church. And in some of the history, they call it St. Paul’s Church. But then it starts to get, well, no, the Portuguese didn’t actually call it that. They called it the church of the mother of god or the Our Lady of the Annunciation. And the deeper you dive into these names, like all I want is like break it down for me. Okay, this guy built a chapel. What was the name of that chapel? And then the Jesuits got the deed to that chapel and over time they kind of tore it down and built a larger structure. What did the Jesuits call it? Then what did the Dutch call it? Then you know all they just tell me the names, please. And every single website I went to gave me different names, different dates. And it was just like, oh, for Pete’s sake, all I need to know is the name of this place. And I couldn’t even figure that out. But anyway, I did all this research and I had all these names in my head. And you get to the point where the Dutch defeated the Portuguese and there was a large church on the hill, a Catholic church. And by that time, it might have officially been called St. Paul’s Church. But the story goes before that where the Jesuits built a school on the hill next to the chapel. And the school, I believe, was definitely called like St. Paul’s College. And because the school was called St. Paul’s College, everybody just started calling the church St. Paul’s. The whole place was just called St. Paul’s when the Dutch arrived. So, I think that’s how it goes. The Portuguese may have officially renamed the actual church St. Paul’s. I don’t know. But then I believe the Dutch changed it to a Protestant church and they called it St. Paul’s. I believe they officially adopted that name. Or maybe the Portuguese had a different name and the Dutch called it St. Paul’s. I don’t know. Anyway, I’m reading about all of this. And then eventually, of course, after a hundred years of Dutch rule, as I talked about in the video, they decided to build a new church in the square. That was in 1741. And then the church on the hill, St. Paul’s, was deconsecrated. And then they made the church in the square the new center of worship for the Dutch community. And again, some websites I went to, they said the Dutch called it St. Paul’s. They moved St. Paul’s Church from the hill to the square. Other places said, “No, no, no. It wasn’t actually called St. Paul’s. It was called the lower church, and the one on the hill was the upper church.” And now this was the the lower church. That was the official name, but in Dutch. Other people said, “No, no, no. That was the informal name.” People just called it lower church amongst themselves, but the real name was St. Paul’s Church, you know. And then, of course, you’ve got the whole Dutch period of time. And then the British took over and they renamed it Christ Church. So my idea for the original video was to tell that whole story starting way back in time moving up to the present and use the church as a window on the history of Melaka. And in the introduction to that video, I say that very specifically that in this video, I’m going to use this church as a lens to uncover the full history of Melaka. And then I started recording. But then right out of the gate, I’m diving into all this history. I kept screwing up cuz I realized there were things I didn’t know. I wanted to say with certainty, this was the name. Then the name changed to this. Then this happened. But every time I tried to say something, I realized I didn’t know. I didn’t know the real name. And I realized I was mixing up the Portuguese with the Dutch, with the British with I just could not keep it straight. And I kept stuttering, coming to a stop. Oh no, that that wasn’t right. I have to restart. And I did it over and over again until I got the history correct. As far as I understood it. And then when I edited the video, that whole section, I just highlighted it with my broken mouse, carefully selected all of that content, deleted it. It just made no sense at all. And it was just like, okay, here’s Doug again standing in front of a church that he says he’s going to show us, and then he sits there for an hour outside the church and gives us this complicated history that none of us can follow. And clearly, even he can’t follow it. That that’s what it seemed like to me. So, who knows? Maybe it was a mistake to delete all that. Maybe it was a really nice, succinct summary, and it would have been very helpful. But anyway, I deleted that entire section. It made the video much much shorter, which is a good thing everybody tells me. But anyway, that was kind of the behind-the-scenes story of shooting that video. And then, of course, I did a lot of research into the interior of the church, and I was particularly interested in the tombstones on the floor. But I discovered when I went into the church to and I saw them for myself, very little of what I had read matched what I was seeing. So once again, I had this plan to give this long detailed history of all the tombstones on the floor and then I just ran into a dead end. It’s like, ah, none of what I’m seeing here matches what I read, what I understood. So, I ended up just hemming and hawing and saying a little bit about it.

And I ran into this very strange unexpected situation that these tombstones, which what I thought were like a highlight of a visit to the church, were completely covered up by all the pews and the chairs. It was like they were an afterthought. I was I thought they’d be like way in the open and wow, look at this tombstone, but you actually have to grab your camera and stick it under the chairs to get a little bit of video of the tombstones. And I understood that the the center aisle was filled with tombstones. That’s what I thought when I went there. And then I got there and there were only two. And there was one at the back and then one at the front. And the one at the back turned out to be from an Armenian. And the Armenian angle on history in Malaysia and kind of worldwide really is fascinating. But in all the reading I did about Christ Church and the tombstones, I never came across a reference to this Armenian tombstone, which is the biggest, most ornate, most visible one in the whole place. So now there I was in the church going with my GoPro, oh look at this big tombstone and I don’t know who this person is and I can’t read any of this, but wow, it must have been an important person. It wasn’t until I was editing the video and now I was doing deeper dives and I realized I found a translation of the script on the stone and it was from this Armenian merchant, this Armenian trader. I was like, “Ah, I wish I knew that before I went into the church. It would have added a lot more depth and something new and interesting to talk about.” And then I was very confused as well because in all the research I did, I was reading about underground burial vaults. This information was everywhere about Christ Church and St. Paul’s Church, the ruins on the hill. And I’m trying to nail down the truth and I could not do it. No matter how hard I tried, every website, every article, everything I found, everybody contradicted everybody else. So some people were saying that underneath every tombstone there is a vault like an actual open burial vault underground and then the tombstone is lying on top of it like a lid and there’s an open space underneath it and the body is lying down there. But then when I’m looking at these things in real life and thinking about it and thinking about the tombstones that you see up on St. Paul’s Hill. I’m thinking nonsense. There is no way. Like nothing made any sense. It’s like there is no way there is an actual burial vault under each one of these tombstones. It doesn’t make any sense. These tombstones are massive. They weigh a ton. A ton and a half. You can’t just It just none of it made sense to me. And then I start to believe the articles that talk about how well no the bodies were just buried. Normally they dig a hole in the dirt, lay the body down there, and then they fill it in again and then they put the stone tombstone on top so it’s resting on the ground. It’s like, well, that makes more sense to me. But then when I went into the church fully armed to talk about this, I never even mentioned it. I think I maybe I came up once in passing something about a burial vault and was like but I didn’t know like I didn’t know what to say. There is or there isn’t a vault underneath this Armenian tombstone and there was one big one at the front a very plain one. I didn’t know who that person was. So, it really is like if you care about historical accuracy at all, I would have to go to Christ Church and pre-shoot the video. Like do a like I always do reconnaissance. I do reconnaissance. I do research as much as possible, but realistically, a lot of these issues don’t come up until you actually start speaking. So, it’s almost like I would have to shoot a test video, like go there with all my camera gear, go to Christ Church, film the entire video, exterior, go interior, and then film everything as if it’s the real video. And then I can note all the places where I don’t have the information. It’s like this Armenian vault. Oh, or this Armenian tombstone. This one, that one, that one. Okay, I don’t know about this. I don’t know the date for this. I don’t know the name of that. I don’t know. All these problems will become apparent. And then I can come back here, work through that rough video, see everywhere where I had no idea what I was talking about, learn all of that, and then go back and shoot the real video, like shoot the whole thing from scratch. It’s you really almost have to do that if you are that concerned about historical accuracy. So yeah, that’s kind of the story of shooting the Christ Church video. Much more in-depth, much more elaborate, much longer in its original form. And then I just deleted most of it that I shot about the history because I didn’t have I didn’t have my ducks in a row. I didn’t know what I was talking about.

The next video is the one about Stamford Raffles and the gate, the last remaining gate of the of the fortress and that whole story. I think I said in the video that that story is my favorite story of everything I’ve come across in Melaka. And I think that is absolutely true. It’s just it has so much personality. It’s not just we think this happened back in 1381 and we think this happened in the 1400s and you just don’t know. This is much more recent and you’re talking about actual people and personalities and that’s what made it so interesting. And it was so interesting because the way I approached the story was that the official tourism story was so different from what I read online. And I clearly had the theme in mind. I knew what I wanted my video to say and I wanted it to basically well two things I guess. The tourism blurb, as I talk about in the video, basically reads, “Sir Stamford Raffles intervened and saved A Famosa.” That’s the story. The evil British were blowing up the fortress and Stamford Raffles showed up, saw what they were doing and stopped them just in time to save that one gate which is on all the maps called A Famosa. That’s the story that I read when I first came to Melaka. That’s the story that you see on all the signs. And that story in those words is wrong on every single level. Everything about it is completely wrong. And if you want to make a video about that, you actually have to choose, well, how deep do I want to go in terms of everything being wrong? Because there’s layer after layer after layer of things that are wrong. I kept my story perhaps at this level, but if I wanted to, there was another level below that where the the real story was totally different from what we think happened. And it’s just it’s just absolutely amazing. So that was the first big theme I wanted to dive into. This is what the tourism brochure says happened, but this is what really happened. You’ll have to watch the video to get that whole story. I definitely don’t want to repeat it here. So, that was my first theme. And the other kind of well, three themes, I guess. The other one was this idea that Stamford Raffles was both less of a hero than we think and more of a hero. You see what I mean? I really tried to get that idea across, but I think I said it like three times, but each time I felt like I wasn’t really driving it home. And he was in reality less of a hero because the tourism story is that he was a powerful figure who came to the fortress walls and said stop the demolition and he saved the gate because of his personal intervention. And that makes him out to be a big hero. But he’s not that kind of hero because he was a clerk. He was 26 years old. He was very ill at the time and all he really did was write a report. He was a bureaucrat in a corporation and he sat down. He saw what was going on. He thought it was a bad idea. So he wrote a report. This is a bad idea. Submitted it and that report went up the chain of command. And then the guy at the top of the chain, he read the report and went, “Hm, I agree with you.” and stopped the demolition of Melaka. So he wasn’t this Hollywood hero racing to save the day. He was a junior secretary who wrote a formal memo, a memorandum and submitted it at the office. So he’s less of a hero. But the other the flip side is that everybody thinks only the fortress was at risk that he saved the gate. But in fact the British plan wasn’t the well it wasn’t the British plan. It was the plan of the East India Company. The East India Company’s plan was to raze the whole town. They wanted to turn, as I said in the video over and over, they wanted to turn Melaka into a ghost town, destroy it completely and move the whole population to Penang. And Raffles, his memorandum stopped them from fulfilling that plan. So if he didn’t write his report, the Stadthuys likely would have been completely torn down and demolished. Christ Church would have been torn down and demolished. All of the historic buildings that were government offices, administrative, had any kind of administrative role, they all would have been torn down. So Melaka as we know it today wouldn’t even exist. The river was going to be abandoned, allowed to silt up. So in that sense he was more of a hero, less of a hero because he was not a typical Hollywood star, Hollywood hero, but he was more of a hero because his memorandum didn’t just save the gate, it saved the whole city. You could argue, you could make that argument. So that was the third the second theme. And the third one was that the British resident, poor William Farquhar, though in the video I think I got mixed up and I think I kept calling him Farquor. Far, you know, you’re out there and you’ve been reading and reading and reading. I looked up the pronunciation of his name. I looked up I double checked, I triple checked all the dates, all the names, all the facts, all the pronunciation guides. I tried to get all of that in my head. Then I turn on the GoPro and the first time I tried to say his name, William Farquhar Farquhar. So I’m out there in the brutal hot sun, my GoPro is running. I’ve got trishaws blasting Baby Shark at me every 3 minutes. And now I’m trying to go back to my smartphone. I can barely see it because of the bright sunlight. And I’m trying to look up the pronunciation guide. How do you say this guy’s name again? And I’m hitting play for you know hit it again and again. It’s just it’s absolutely ridiculous. But anyway, I had to look it up all over again and somehow in the video I ended up saying Farquor William Farquhar Farquor Farquhar. And then as I was editing the video I was like, “Oh, that doesn’t sound right to me.” And I looked it up and I think the actual pronunciation is Farquhar. It’s an R. There’s an A, not an E. So it should be I think Farquhar, not Farquor. Anyway, that kind of got on my nerves that I made that mistake. Or maybe Farquhar is correct and Farquor is incorrect. I just, you know, you eventually reach a point when you’re researching this sort of thing, you just throw up your hands and go, I don’t know. I don’t know the name. I don’t know how to say the name. It could be like a Chinese name which has like five different versions. You know, you take one famous figure from Chinese history in Melaka and he’s got five different names. It’s like, you know, we poor dumb foreigners, we don’t know what to do with that. So, we just say what we say and hope we hopefully we get away with it. But anyway, the story about William Farquhar is that in the short simplified summary, he comes off as the bad guy. He’s the guy that blew up the fortress. Like it was his idea and he was doing it. And then Stamford Raffles stopped him. He’s the hero. Farquhar is the bad guy. And of course, if you watch my video, you know that is very far from the truth. So, I wanted to set the record straight about the role of William Farquhar and paint him in a much better light. So yeah, I went to the gate thinking I was ready to shoot that video. I thought I had all of my ducks in a row mentally. I had the story and then I started speaking and the whole thing just fell apart in my head. I guess you get hit by reality again as well because where I where I originally was standing to shoot the opening to the video, it happened to be right where the trishaws would come with their guests and then they would bring them to the gate, drop them off so they can go look at it and then the trishaw would park, wait for them to come back and then they would leave the music just blaring while they were parked there waiting. And I got interrupted by that over and over and over and over. I just like I’m I just launched my introduction. Baby Shark again. Apata, you know, all the big pop hits that you hear. And I had to stop over and over and over and restart and restart and restart. And then you lose your train of thought. You don’t know what you were trying to say anymore. You think you said something because you did say it five times in the cancelled introduction. So when you start again, you have this weird memory that you’ve already said that. So you leave it out and then you relisten to that, oh for Pete’s sake, I completely forgot that. And you got to do it again and again. And I ended up doing that. I hope it wasn’t too terribly apparent how many times I had to restart every time I started speaking. It was really hard that day

and that ended up making it go on much longer, taking more time, GoPro overheating and shutting down. That was a tough tough video to shoot to be honest. When I was editing the video, I was so unhappy with the final result. Again, it was similar to Christ Church video where I shot the video. Now, I came back here, I put all of the clips in the timeline, and I’m editing all of it. I saw all the mistakes, all the awkwardness, all the things I left out, all the things I forgot. It was after editing the entire video. Now I finally felt like I knew the real story and had it straight in my head. And I was that close, maybe even that close to just going straight back. I was going to go back the next day and reshoot the whole video because the editing forces you to really come to grips with the exact story. Every time I heard myself say something in the video, I would stop and go, “Oh, that is that really true?” And then I would quadruple check and find out more information or that what I said was not quite right. So, editing the video forces you to really come to grips with the with the material. And it’s after finishing the edit, that’s when you finally know your topic. So it was like when I finished editing the whole video and it was done, then I wanted to go back and now shoot it for real, make the real video, and it would have been much more efficient, to the point, better shot, etc., etc. But of course, if you’ve already invested days of research and an entire day of shooting and a day and a half of editing, you’ve already devoted enough time to this video that only the devoted followers of Planet Doug are going to watch. So the idea of redoing the whole thing, it’s like, yeah, okay, now you’re not a P, you’re not a professor at the Melaka School of History here. What you shot is good enough. Let’s just move on with our life. So I resisted the impulse to reshoot the whole thing. Though, to be honest, I really should have reshot it. It would have been much, much better.

The story about the next video that I shot about St. Paul’s Church up on the hill and the tombstones. The story of that video is exactly the same as the videos I just told you about. The exact same thing happened where I was the the main reason I shot that video to begin with was because when I did the Christ Church video, I had a whole section where I talked about St. Paul’s Church because that was the beginning of the story of Christ Church, right? But then I took all of that St. Paul’s Church material and deleted all of it. And yet I thought it was such a fascinating story and I already had done so much research and knew so many new things about it that I wanted to now shoot a video a dedicated video about St. Paul’s Church and I started doing the research again from the point of view where I was going to use that church to tell the whole history of Melaka again going all the way back to the Melaka Sultanate and moving through the Portuguese and the Dutch and the British you know all the way up until modern times. And I ran into this same problem of the names. The names. Oh, the names just about drove me mad. So, in the end, what I’ve started doing recently with these history videos is making my struggle part of the video. Like rather than just doing the research and then including that research in the video, in the video itself, I talk about how yeah, I tried to figure out the name of this church and then I found out that it was called this name and then on another website it said no, it was called this name and this name. And they’re actually I mean the original names were in Portuguese translated into English and they have a certain rhythm in Portuguese that just doesn’t fit into my memory banks. You know, you’re dealing with a foreign language and conflicting reports. And so I would basically tell the story of my struggle with the names and make it part of the video. So instead of saying in the video that this was the name of the chapel and then the name changed to this in this year and then it changed to this, I would say in my research at first I found out that it was called this. But then I found out that’s probably wrong. Somebody else was telling me it was called this. And I couldn’t make any sense out of the history and the different documents, the different websites, you know, none of it made any sense to me. And I tried to incorporate that into the video itself. So, I started the video down on the street. I wasn’t up on I wasn’t up on the hill. I wasn’t at the church at all. I was going to start at the bottom of the hill, frame the entire hill, talk about the history of the hill all through the Melaka Sultanate, Portuguese, da da da da da, and then I don’t know, I just kept stumbling over my words. The trishaws were going by constantly interrupting me. Crowds like big big group tour groups were going by. I kept losing my train of thought. And then I finally recorded something I thought I could use. And I started walking up the stairs cuz there’s a stairway staircase that goes up to the top. And right at the very bottom, there was a sign, very, very old sign with an arrow basically saying follow these stairs to go to. And it said St. Paul’s Church and then in brackets Our Lady of the Annunciation. So I was like ah look at that that’s interesting. So I pointed it out part of my story like look right here we can see the problem that we got two names right out of the gate. What is it called? Is it is it St. Paul’s or is it Our Lady of the Annunciation? Like what do we call this place? And then you go by that sign and you start climbing up the stairs and then there’s a big historical tourism sign there, like six dense paragraphs. So, me being me, of course, I had to stop to read that sign and decide whether I’m going to focus on it for the video or not. It was so funny cuz that entire sign, six paragraphs was all about the name of this place. Like what do we call it? And six paragraphs of at this time they called it this name, but then we think it was actually this name, but then when the Jesuits did this, they changed the name to this and then they built a college, called it this name, and that name got applied to the whole thing. And then the this and this and this. The whole thing was we don’t know what to call this place. The it was like a breakdown of the typhoon of names going on in my brain. And I thought that was so funny. I aimed my GoPro at the sign and I was like, “Oh, look at this.” I was just talking about how difficult it is to find something as simple as the name of this church. And I’m not exaggerating. Look, even the local history authorities don’t know what to call it. And then I go through the whole sign. And then I’m making my way up the stairs and I stop halfway to get to the next topic I wanted to talk about. I got lost in the names and the dates and the periods of history there. I fought my way through that. Then I got a little bit higher. I had so many topics I wanted to cover. By the time I got to the top, I was a wreck. I didn’t know what I was talking about anymore. I didn’t know what was going on. I’d lost track of the topic. I wasn’t sure whether anything I’d said made sense or whether anything I said was correct. I was already exhausted. My throat was worn out. I was hot and sweaty. And finally, I was at the church itself, which is what the video was supposed to be about. And at that point, I made an executive decision because I walked into the church again. I’ve been up there at least a dozen times, probably more than a dozen because I’m walking around Melaka all the time. And if I’m on one side of the hill and I want to go to somewhere else, instead of going around the hill, I’ll just walk to the top and then down. You know, I go through St. Paul’s all the time. So, it wasn’t a new place for me at all. But I walked into the interior of the church, but every time I go there, those tombstones hit me. They are so dramatic. It’s like that they’re visual. They they tell a story. They have a history. They’re fascinating. And I realized that’s the story. All this everything else, the name, the Our Lady of the Annunciation, the Portuguese nobleman who survived a storm and built a chapel. Then the chapel was they added a second floor and a belfry and then they tore it down and built this and named it this and name. Who cares about any of that? I was so fed up with the names of this place. I made a decision in advance. All of that material that I shot. Delete all of it and let’s start over completely. And the video on Planet Doug is the new version that I shot. I just started with the tombstones and I turned on the GoPro. I’m in the church. I’m not at the bottom of the hill. I’m not climbing the stairs. I’m not outside the church. I’m right in the middle. And I say right out of the gate, I’m inside St. Paul’s Church. Though even there it gets confusing because is it St. Paul’s Church? It isn’t anymore. It’s the ruins of St. Paul’s Church. You know what I mean? So even right out of the gate like what the vocabulary, but I said something about I’m standing in the middle of St. Paul’s Church up on Melaka Hill and I’m surrounded by these incredible tombstones and then I turn the GoPro around and show the tombstones. So all I talked about were the tombstones and I did a deep dive into those and for my money I think it was the the wise choice. Right now yeah that video hasn’t even gone live yet. I finished it. I edited it and I uploaded it. So, it’s on my YouTube channel, but I haven’t posted it yet. So, I don’t know when I’m going to post this BTS video. So, that video may not even be live yet. We’ll see how this works out. But anyway, I was happy with that decision to just focus on the tombstones. That was enough. And the tombstones themselves were really challenging to figure out. Oh, if I went through the whole story about all the pathways I went down because I would find things on the internet in an article that would say something and then I would find something else that totally contradicted it. And then I would find a third statement, but then the statement would be contradicted by the reality. It’s like there’s no way that is true. So, I really had a hard time. And this gets back to what I was talking about with the burial vaults because a lot of websites and articles and YouTube videos talk about how there’s all these tombstones. They used to be on the ground with burial vaults underneath them and that I kind of understood that oh okay there were vaults and when you go to St. Paul’s Church there is one exposed vault in the chancel at the front of the church a big underground vault and that clearly is a burial vault. So they they did exist, but people were saying that all of these were burial vaults. But then I’m thinking, look at the size of these tombstones. There’s no way you’re putting them as a lid on top of all of these vaults. They what is supporting the weight of them? Because I eventually found figured out that there are diagrams that showed exactly where the tombstones were on the ground. Like if you haven’t seen the video yet, the tombstones today are all leaning against the wall, but originally they were all on the ground. And when you look at the diagram that shows the actual placement of them, they’re right beside each other, like a checkerboard. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like not a full checkerboard, but there might be four or five of them right beside each other. And if each one of them had an empty burial vault underneath it, well, that just means it’s a basement. Like they’re right beside each other. They couldn’t have a wall dividing them. So now we’re talking about a complete underground basement, a lower level filled with bodies, a huge burial vault with all of these tombstones on top, which is completely nonsensical. There’s no way you’re building something strong enough to support like over empty space. These six four, five or six tombstones lying there. I mean, you need heavy-duty metal. I mean, it would have to be a structure of un of incredible strength cuz essentially those tombstones, if you accept that there were burial vaults, they would have been a floor of a building with a basement underneath. And that is completely impossible. So now I’m wondering where does all this discussion of burial vaults come from? There is no way that these burial vaults are there. So nailing even one simple fact was really really challenging for me and I ran into this word. It’s a good example of what I’m talking about. I found this word scattered all over the place where there it would be like a tourism article about St. Paul’s Church in the tombstones and it says okay when you go to St. Paul’s Church, all the tombstones are leaning against the wall and they were leaned there to preserve them from the elements and from people walking on them and wearing them out. So to preserve them, they were leaned against the wall. And then they all say these tombstones were originally scattered around the hill. And I kept seeing that word scattered, you know, which tells me, well, scattered. They would have been all over the place, all over the hill. That made it sound like they had all been thrown around randomly. They’d all been moved from where they were like vandals over history had torn up these tombstones, threw them down the hill, threw them around the inside of the church, and there was just a jumble of tombstones scattered around all over the place. And I’m thinking, well, okay, these tombstones were scattered. But then I look at the tombstones themselves. Most of them were in incredibly good condition, like highly preserved, much more than you would think. And I’m thinking, these do not look like they were randomly like ransacked by vandals and thrown outside, flipped upside down, and broken and exposed to the weather out there. They did not look like they had been scattered around. They looked really well preserved. And then I discovered two things. I discovered those diagrams that I mentioned. And the diagrams clearly showed where all of the tombstones had been located. All the ones lining the walls. All of them are accounted for with a numbering system one. This one S2, it was located here on the floor. And the diagram shows all of them on the floor and they are all perfectly aligned. So they were clearly in the exact place where they were put originally. So most of these tombstones go back to the 1600s. The Dutch period, the late early Dutch period, 1600s, 1700s. There were some Portuguese, but then mostly Dutch I believe. So somebody died back in those days and that person was someone important from a wealthy family, a noble family, something something and then they were buried in the ground inside the church and then that huge tombstone was carved and then placed over top of them. And then the next person buried beside them and a tombstone beside them and they were all lined up neatly side by side by side. And that was happening in the 1600s, you know, long long long long time ago. And then the 1700s and and 1800s. And then they stayed there up until modern times until they decided to pick them up and lean them against the wall to make it into a tourist attraction so that people are not walking on top of them. And you know, the roof was caving in, the roof was gone. It was now exposed to the weather. So they don’t want rain hitting it and wearing out the tombstones. So they were all perfectly placed where they had been for centuries right up until the early 1900s when they were picked up and leaned against the wall. That is what happened. So where does this word scattered come from? Everybody says these tombstones you see were scattered around the inside of the church. And I’m thinking, absolutely not. Why do people keep repeating scattered, scattered, scattered? Because I this word drove me crazy because they would send me down some research paths, you know, trying to understand these burial vaults, why they were scattered, and if they were scattered, why, you know, none of it made sense to me. And I turned to one of my AI buddies and I asked the AI, it’s like, “Listen, I see this word scattered all over the place.” And I pointed out to the AI, like I said to the AI, even you in your answers to me have repeated this idea over and over and over. You’ve kept telling me that all these tombstones lining the walls of the church, they were scattered around the interior. You said scattered over and over again. But, and here’s my evidence, they were not scattered. They were perfectly in place where they always were. Why does everybody say they were scattered around inside the church and scattered around the hillside? Why does everyone say that when it is clearly completely wrong? And the AI did its thinking and it said, “Aha, I know why.” And it said it started because of Wikipedia. If you go to the Wikipedia page, it says scattered. And some editor for the St. Paul’s Church Wikipedia page wrote that at some point in the past saying that the tombstones were scattered around the hillside. And then a YouTube vlogger like me or before YouTube existed, a YouTube blogger, you know, had a website was writing an article, writing a story about St. Paul’s Church and they read Wikipedia and they just copy and paste it. They would just say, “Oh, St. Paul’s Church. You can see the amazing tombstones lined up.” Originally, these tombstones were scattered around the hillside. Everybody repeated what Wikipedia said. This is according to the AI. So, one person grabbed the word scattered from the Wikipedia page. They repeated it. Somebody read the Wikipedia page and that article. Oh, it’s confirmed. They repeated it, repeated it. The tourism authorities copy and pasted. And everybody now says the tombstones were scattered around the church, scattered around the hillside. But here on Planet Doug, we do not believe that story. They were not scattered. They never were scattered. They were placed carefully centuries ago and they stayed in that location up until the early 1900s. Then they were picked up and leaned against the wall. They were never at any point scattered. Yeah. Anyway, I just found that interesting because in all my research in Melaka, I kept coming I keep coming across statements online that are wrong, that are absolutely not true. And I’m just wondering where do all of these mistakes come from? Like somebody said it originally and then I think everybody else just started copying and pasting it, parroting it. And something I’ve learned recently is that AI is extremely susceptible to this. I have been a big fan of using AI to sound out my ideas, to have someone to talk to, like a sounding board and asking general questions. But I have learned how dangerous it is to use AI. I had no idea. I mean, if you use Gemini or something, it says at the bottom, Gemini is an AI and it can make mistakes. So, I kind of internalize that idea. It’s like, okay, it can make mistakes. It’s a computer program. I get it. So, I double-check things, you know, I confirm things. I don’t take it at face value. But saying Gemini can make mistakes isn’t even close to the reality. What I’ve discovered is that an AI will happily just make stuff up. It will just invent entire stories. It will invent people. It will invent everything. And it doesn’t warn you about that. Like it says Gemini can make mistakes. Like it said 1841 but it actually happened in you know 1843 it made a mistake but that’s not what AI does. I actually I’ve asked AI about this you know I called out my AI buddies and I when I saw them making like just making up stuff like complete inventions that have nothing to do with reality and I asked them like what where did this come from? Like you just said this and yet now you’re saying the exact opposite. How in the world are you just inventing things and you sound 100% positive every single time? That’s the real danger. It’s not like the AI says, “Well, I’m not really sure about this, but I think it everything it says it says with 100% certainty this is true.” And you just you get convinced because it is so it sounds so convincing, but then you challenge it and then it says, “Oh, my bad. I made that up.” I was like, “Well, why in the world did you make that up?” And then it explained to me that, “Well, that’s part of my programming. I’m here to support you. And if you tell me something that you are saying is true, I accept what you’re saying.” And then I invent I invent reasons to explain what you’re telling me. It’s not my job to go back into the historical records and confirm that everything is true. Like the AI says, “Okay, what I do, the way I’m programmed is I just scan the internet and what everybody is saying, I just repeat it and then if you ask me a question about something, I will just make up a story to support what you’re saying that this is an explanation for what you’re telling me.” And the AI doesn’t say this could explain it. It just explains it. So, I don’t know if I’m getting this idea across, but I’ve seen this over and over and over again now, and it’s really woke me up. It’s open my eyes to the real danger of AI where it’s not that an AI can make a mistake, it’s that it will just invent entire people. It will invent stories. It’s really crazy how far it will go with that if you let it. And it doesn’t tell you what it did. I had this really funny experience with an AI the other day. I had a question about a movie that I just watched and I called it yeah there a newish movie because it just came out. Like quite often the AI isn’t aware of really recent events. Its memory isn’t up to date a lot of times. So, in talking with the AI, I said, “Yeah, I just watched this newish movie called Da Da.” And then I got this really weird answer all about the Jewish people. And it was like borderline dangerous. Like, you don’t want to be online going on and on about the Jews and Jewish this and Jewish that. And I’m like, “What are you talking about? I didn’t say anything about a Jewish movie.” And the answer was just so strange. And I’m like, “Hey, don’t associate me with like delete all of this.” And then I asked the AI. He’s like, “What what are you talking about? Where does this Jewish stuff come in?” And he says, “Well, you know, you asked me about this Jewish movie.” And I thought, “No, I didn’t.” And I went back to my original question. Oh, I wrote newish. I didn’t write Jewish. Like, it wasn’t even a typo. I said newish movie. A newish a recent movie. And then the AI went, “Oh, okay. I misunderstood.” Like when I scanned your question, what I do is I look for language patterns. What word naturally follows the next word? And in this case, the most common pattern I saw around the internet was Jewish movie. So I just changed it to Jewish for you. They’re like, well, hey, don’t be doing that. I mean, come on. No, I wrote newish. When I write something, I mean what I write. Don’t go changing what I what I write and answer a completely. It really was like a weird one. And even the word scattered is a good example. The AIs kept telling me over and over again that all these tombstones were scattered around the church. And then I finally called the AI on that and said, “Hey, listen. You keep telling me these tombstones are scattered everywhere. You know, based on the evidence that can’t possibly be true.” And then the AI went, “Oh, yeah. You know, my bad.” I just repeated what everybody else said. I’m like, “Oh, boy. Now I see where the problem is with AI. You really have to be careful. And again, it’s not because it makes mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. AI will just make up stories, will just go with just invent things out of nothing. And yeah, it’s really quite something. And I’ve been running into that a lot lately. And I’ve learned how the AI gave me for what I do and my style gave me some rules to follow. And I’ve changed the way I work with AI. So now every question I ask, I preface it with some reference to original sources, primary sources, confirmed, documented historical records. Now, here’s my question. Like, I don’t ask it you know, what was the name of St. Paul’s Church back in the 1500s? Cuz it will just make stuff up. It will just come up with all kinds of crazy names. So, what I’ll ask it, is there any confirmed historical documents that give us the name of this church? And now that triggers the AI to look beyond the surface. It goes searching for actual verified historical documents. And yeah, you have to do that. You have to be so specific in your question. And I’ve been getting much more useful answers now that I keep hammering at this idea of yeah telling it what and how to answer my question. Like not just ask a question but tell it only refer to documented confirmed things. Like don’t go don’t do these surface level searches on the internet because yeah, you’re just if you’re just repeating what a million idiots said. I mean, that’s no use to me, but that’s generally what AI does. And if it doesn’t know the answer, it just makes it up and then presents it as fact. Like, good grief, you know? Yeah. I think the human race really is in big trouble when it comes to AI cuz I can see a lot of people just Yeah, you get sucked into it. It sounds like it knows what it’s talking about. Everything it says is presented as fact. No uncertainty at all. And so you just accept, oh man, it really sounds like it knows what it’s talking about. I’ll believe it. But yeah, I don’t believe anything. It says nothing at all. You can use it as a tool, a sounding board, but you can only trust original primary sources if you’re talking about anything to do with history.

Just one last item behind the scenes about my St. Paul’s Church video. When I was up there, I had this really funny experience where I was walking around and I felt like I knew things about this church and the tombstones. I’d done all the research, all the reading. My brain was bursting with amazing insights into everything I was seeing. And the church was really busy at that time. There were like lots and lots of people there. And I could tell just by looking at these people, the way they were interacting with everything around them, they had no clue what this place meant. They didn’t know anything about the tombstones. They didn’t bother to read anything. You could tell like when they were even talking to each other, I just got this impression that the vast majority of these people were there because they were told it’s a tourist attraction. They climbed up the hill and then they’re mainly interested in taking selfies. The selfie activity at St. Paul’s was just like off the charts. It was really amazing to watch. There’s two windows in the front of the church that are perfect for glamour shots. So, all the women in their beautiful clothing. A lot of tour groups from China where the women like dress to the nines like looking absolutely fabulous and they don’t want to waste that look so they need a thousand selfies a day and they would be posing in this window climb into the window frame and then posing in 10 50 different ways. So selfie mania going on like crazy. So obviously they don’t know anything about the history. And then I would see people looking at a tombstone for example that had a skull and crossbones on it. And I talk about that in my video. I break down the meaning of that symbolism because I was really surprised by it too when I first saw it. It’s like whoa pirates. They buried pirates here, you know, skull and crossbones. But then I learned the real story. So I have this incredible knowledge in my head and I these people came up beside me and they were pointing at they were talking in English. It’s like what does that mean? Why is there a skull and crossbones? You know so I dove in to that opening and I approach these people. It’s like oh you know actually I know what this means. You know, it’s really, really interesting. And I’m like that classic old man that corners you at a party and just talks your ear off and you can’t get away from the guy. You know, these poor people, they’re just there. Who knows why? They’re taking some pictures and now this crazy Canadian comes up to them with this GoPro. Yeah. Yeah. You know, this skull and crossbones, this is really, you know, and I’m talking and you can see them kind of like, let’s back away from the crazy man. And of course they said, “Oh, thank you so much for telling us.” And you can tell as soon as they got away from me, they’re like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, that who was that dude?” You know, let’s let’s get as far away from him as possible. But I was so eager to share my knowledge cuz I had so much in my brain. And I and I realized, okay, Doug, don’t do that again. That that was that was super embarrassing, you know. And then right after that happened, an older man, like in his 70s, I’m pretty sure, a Malaysian man came up to me and started talking like small talk, just sort of, oh, where are you from? Oh, Canada. This, that. And then he started pushing the conversation to what was around us. And he was doing to me what I just did to these poor people. He knew a lot about the church. It was very obvious. Yeah. He knew about the tombstones. He knew about the symbolism. He knew everything about it. You know, he knew, for example, that the tombstones used to be on the ground. Most of the people there didn’t even know that. They didn’t even know that the tombstones leaning against the wall. Well, they all used to be and that all the bodies are still there underground. People aren’t even aware of these simple things. So he starts ask he’s quizzing me like do did you know that this you know the bodies are still here and he was waiting for me to be astonished like whoa really all the bodies are still and I had to kind of break his heart a little bit and say well yeah I do know that I’ve been I didn’t say you know I just spent 3 days researching this place for a YouTube video but I did say yeah I read about that I know about these tombstones and he quickly figured out okay he doesn’t really have anything to tell me. I know everything he’s already coming up with. And then I figured out quite quickly he does this for a living. So what he will do, I saw him doing it all over the place. He will approach people who look like they’re interested in what’s going on around them and then small talk. Oh, where are you from? Oh, and then he starts telling them all about the history of the tombstones. St. Francis Xavier, all the information, answering all their questions, and he’s hoping that at the end of it, they’ll give him a tip. So, he’s basically working as an informal tour guide. And then I talked about later on. I asked him exactly, you know, oh, so I you you work here as a kind of a tour guide and you’re hoping that people will give you tips because I’m pretty sure you can’t do it legally. He can’t walk around with, you know, business cards and brochures and because, yeah, he would have to have a permit to do that. So, he’s sort of in a gray area where he pretends to be just this helpful guy and then over time they figure out, oh, he, you know, he’s given us so much information, spent so much time telling us, guiding us around, we should give him some money. And as he told me, he says, “Yeah, I’m 75 years old, however old he was, and I can’t get a job. I don’t have any money, and this is this is how I survive day-to-day.” And his English was really good. And I don’t say that lightly. I know a lot of foreigners like me, like from Canada, who travel the world, they meet somebody who can just say, “Hello, how are you?” and and answer like very basic questions. They’ll say, “Oh, your English is so good.” It’s like, wow, they speak English so well, but they’re really exaggerating. This guy, his English was very colloquial, very natural. So, I could see him giving good value even to foreigners. A lot of local people, to be honest, I have trouble understanding the rhythm of their English, the accent, the way words are put together. Sometimes I’m like, I really have to concentrate to follow their train of thought. But with this guy, he had a natural English. Felt very approachable, easygoing to me. I understood everything. And I think he would normally focus on not hardcore history because that would bore people. He’s interested in more of the sensational stuff. How like if it’s a tour group from China, they may be a little bit sensitive about cemeteries and gravestones and bodies and then he would tell them like did you know that all underneath the ground all the bodies they’re all still here and then someone from China or tour group did who didn’t know that might be like really you know that might be a kind of a sensational factoid for them so he would focus more on that the bigger more interesting things rather than breaking it down you know British Dutch Portuguese on and on and on. He doesn’t get into those specifics, but anyway, I just found that that kind of interesting. And then when I was editing my video, I saw him in the background all through my own video. So, I saw him talking to other foreigners and then at one point I was filming myself and there was a doorway behind me and I saw him, this was before I’d ever spoken to him, he walked past the doorway and he looked in at me and he stopped for a second. And he’s like, “Oh.” And he was like, he’s scanning, “Okay, who who can I approach next?” And he saw me and he, “Oh, okay. Ah, I think that guy, yeah, he’ll be good.” He was sizing me up as a potential client. And then later on, yeah, he came up to me and and started chatting with me. And then, again, I had to tell him eventually, I don’t actually need any help. I got everything already figured out. So, he moved on to some other people. But yeah, I thought that was quite interesting. I did want to talk to him about modernizing, but then again, you do get into that gray area where if you get too modern now, it’s clear you’re doing something illegal. But I’ve seen a lot of these informal tour guides all around Asia, many different countries where people will approach me like I was in Vietnam and I remember people coming coming up to me on the street offering their services saying, “Oh yeah, I work as a tour guide. I’ve got this motorcycle. I can take you here and here and this this this.” And he’s trying to convince me to hire him as a guide. And I hop on the motorcycle for a day or half day and we go to all these different places. And that’s all well fine and good, but I’m always surprised that these guys don’t have a piece of paper to give me because the chances of me saying yes to a casual encounter like that is pretty much zero. But if he has a brochure to give me and it it gives information like tour A, tour B, tour C, half-day tour, full day tour, city tour, history tour, countryside tour, and then how much does it cost? How many hours is it? If he had something like that and then a QR code or a phone number, WhatsApp number and then after talking to me, he can give me that brochure. The chances of me now reaching out to him have gone up astronomically cuz now I’m back in my hotel room. I’ve got his brochure and I’m reading through it and I was like, you know what, that doesn’t sound that bad. Half-day tour, hop on his motorcycle in the morning, we go zooming around the countryside, you know, here’s the price. Three hours, four hours, I’m back in time for lunch. Let’s do it. I’ll give them a call. But it’s all because of that. Maybe that’s the way I think the brochure. And since I become a master of e-wallets, the Malaysian e-wallet, Touch ‘n Go, and in Sumatra, I used GoPay over there, their e-wallet. I think about street beggars all the time, too. It seems to me that now that the whole world is going cashless, anybody asking for money by sitting at the side of the street is getting far less money than they used to because people just don’t carry money. And even if they do carry money, it’s usually large bills. They don’t have small change anymore. Everybody’s using cards and e-wallets. So I mean if I were a beggar at the side of the road I think I would think very hard about just you know most of them have smartphones. Even the beggars they all have smartphones. I see them, you know, on their smartphone sitting at the side of the road and they can have an e-wallet and photocopy a big QR code for Touch ‘n Go and then if somebody wants to give them a bit of money and they don’t have any money, well, they just take out their phone, scan the QR code, here you go, and send him a few ringgit or something. So it seems like a very, yeah, natural progression. The whole world is going cashless. Those street beggars just to keep up. Maybe they have to go cashless, too. And then this kind of informal tour guide. It would be cool if he had a QR code. Cuz at the end, it’s a bit of an awkward moment where he’s been talking to you for 30 minutes and now you feel like, yeah, I should give this guy something, but do you want to get out your wallet? And you’re flipping through your wallet. How much should I give him? And but now if he he if he could whip out some sort of a placard a name card even and say ah here’s my QR code you know tourists from China can use it with Alipay and yeah people can walk away and now they’re down at the bottom of the hill having their iced coffee midday break and they’re looking at the card. Yeah, you know that guy was really helpful. Why don’t we send him 20 ringgit or whatever for his guiding services? Seems like a really useful thing to do. But then you get into this idea of now he’s out there handing out business cards and he can get in trouble probably with the authorities. And that is related to another idea I had because when I finished shooting my video and I saw that he was still there. I had this idea that I could make a video completely about him. Like I don’t know what he would charge for 30 minutes of his time. I was thinking I could put a microphone on him and just ask him like, “Okay, for this much ringgit, can you give me a tour?” Like give me your standard spiel for 30 minutes and I’ll film you as we go around and that could be a really interesting YouTube video. St. Paul’s Church from his perspective and I could put that as a video on my YouTube channel. But then as soon as I had that idea, I kind of dismissed it because now I’m putting a target on him. I think he wants to stay under the radar. He can do what he does because yeah, he’s under the radar. And if I make a whole video about him doing this and I pay him for his guiding services now, it’s like, oh, who is this guy and and does he have a permit to be a tour guide? That kind of thing. Cuz I recently saw actual tour guides. I’ll talk about that in a minute, I guess. And I spoke to them like in downtown Melaka and they had official placards, you know, they had a lanyard with an official thing with their photo and their IDs and everything. So I guess they are official accredited guides and the guy up at St. Paul’s Church. Yeah. He didn’t have he didn’t have that. He just had all the knowledge in his brain and a friendly demeanor and very good English and he spoke multiple languages. So yeah, he could be very good at his job. So yeah, I think that is the end of I didn’t intend to talk for quite so long about going up to St. Paul’s Church, but yeah, there’s the story, the behind-the-scenes story of shooting that video.

I guess I’ve been a very busy Canadian beaver because I have four more videos that I shot, edited, and posted that yeah, I haven’t talked about. I’ll try to put these all together into this one section and go through them more quickly. And they are some of them are very much shorter videos. So that that should work out.

I don’t know about this video whether people will think it’s insane or nutty or whatnot but I shot a video that I’m going that’s related to the number 50 and I realized that here in Melaka to understand the history I came up with this I just came up with it instinctively I started thinking of the history of Melaka based on the number 50 basically say the year 1350, 1450, 1550, 1650, 17, 18, 1950. And it’s a very handy thing for me because like I’ll be at St. Paul’s Church and I’m looking at one of the tombstones and it’ll have the year this person died in 1689. That’s the year. And then with this 50 structure, I relate 1689 to 1650 and I have the 1650 burned into my brain. It’s like, oh, early Dutch era, right? So, right away, oh, he died in 1689. 1650, oh, that was when the Dutch were in control of Melaka. It gives me a way to place it, the 1650. And I remember, oh, the Dutch defeated the Portuguese in 1641. So someone who died in 1689, that’s actually in the early years of Dutch control of Melaka. And I can visualize what was going on in the city at the time, that many years after the Dutch defeat of the Portuguese. Like, oh, okay, okay, okay, okay. And then I’ll look at the next tombstone and it might be yeah, 1620. And I like, oh, 1620, 1650. Oh, that’s still in the Portuguese era because the Portuguese era ended in 1641. So now that was this is probably a Portuguese person because their tombstone was placed here. Yeah, at that time. And then if I see another date for a building that was constructed in whatever 1740 or 1790 and I think oh 1750 ah late Dutch era and then Christ Church was completed in 1753 the height of the of Dutch control of Melaka. So, anytime I see a date inside the 1700s, like I guess the reason this works for me is that I get endlessly confused about the centuries. Like if somebody says to me, “This happened in the 18th century,” my brain automatically thinks it’s the 1800s, right? I think we all do that. But the 18th century is actually the 1700s. So every time somebody says, you know, 15th century, 17th century, 16th century, I have to stop and think, okay, 16th century, when is that? Is that Oh, that’s actually 1500. You know, it it just slows down my brain. So I really like this idea of forgetting about centuries. Just think about 1350. And then I think about 1350. Ah, Melaka hasn’t even been founded yet. So, what did it look like here in 1350? Who was living here? The river, the hill, the Melaka Strait. And then I jump ahead to 1450. Oh, yeah. 1450. That’s the golden age of Melaka. That’s the time of the Melaka Sultanate. So, anytime I see a year in the 1400s, I just think, oh, 1450. Oh, Melaka Sultanate. And then jump ahead to 1550. Ah, Portuguese era for Melaka. 1750. Oh, that’s the Dutch era. 1850. Ah, the British were now in control of Melaka. 1950, British still in control, but it’s post Japanese occupation, post World War II, only 7 years before Malaysia’s official independence in 1957. So somehow these 50 markings 1850 1450 it just clicks with my brain and I instantly can slot things into place a person or a building as long as I know tell me the year. I pick the nearest 1450 1650 I know what I’m talking about in terms of yeah the history of Melaka.

So what I did was I went out into Dutch Square. I stood in the middle of the traffic circle and then I just you I presented this idea as a suggestion. If you want to master Melakan history, you can use the Planet Doug method. And I focused on Dutch Square visually. Like if you are standing right here in 1350, what do you see? Right? And in 1350, oh, Melaka hasn’t even been founded yet. Ah, 1350. River, hill, jungle, mangrove, mudflats, some fisherman, 1450. It’s like, close your eyes. Imagine 1350. Now jump ahead to 1450. Open your eyes in the middle of Dutch Square. What do you see? And this is the Melaka Sultanate, right? Oh, there’s the Grand Mosque. There’s the Sultanate Palace on the hill. There was no fortress yet. Obviously, all the ships, the river 1350, completely empty. 1450. Now, the river jammed with ships, traders from all over the world, merchants. There’s the bridge. You know what does Dutch Square look like at that time? Now, close your eyes. Imagine it. Now let’s jump ahead to 1550. Open your eyes. Ah, Grand Mosque gone, destroyed by the Portuguese. Sultanate palace gone, burned to the ground by the Portuguese. Now we’ve got the beginnings of the Portuguese fortress. They’re building it. The the walls going around the city, right? So you can picture what did Dutch Square look like in 1550. Then continue that experiment all the way through 1650, 17, 18, 1950. Whether it makes any sense at all to other people, it kind of works for me. And then I did this whole video kind of a relatively short one offering it as the Planet Doug cheat sheet for understanding Melakan history. And I I I really like the idea as I talk about in the video because all you have to remember is the number 50. That’s it. And then you can go, oh, 1650, 1850, 1950, and everything kind of slots into place. The number 50, the key to understanding Melaka according to according to me anyway on Planet Doug.

And then while I was shooting the video about Stamford Raffles and the gate and you know tearing down the fortress walls, I came across the name of a Malaysian writer, Munshi Abdullah. Munshi Abdullah. In the video, I I made a whole video about him because I tracked down his autobiography. Munshi Abdullah, famous Malaysian writer. He was living in Melaka during the beginnings of the British era, the handover from the Dutch to the British. He was a witness to that key part of history and he was a personal witness to the destruction of the fortress when they were blowing it up. He was here. He was an 11-year-old boy living in Melaka and he watched them blowing up the fortress and he eventually wrote an autobiography. He was a personal witness to Stamford Raffles in Singapore. He witnessed a lot of key history and he wrote his life story in a book that he called Hikayat Abdullah. And in my video, I struggled so much. I tried so hard to learn how to pronounce that word. I think it’s hea yacht. He the emphasis is I think is on ca and the final sounds like the English word yacht, like a luxury yacht. So it’s hea yacht. He And I had so much trouble with that. And his name Abdullah. I’m like Abdullah. No, it’s Abdullah. I went back and forth, back and forth. I just h the pronunciation of names drives me crazy. So in the video you can see me, my brain freezes and I would say, “Yeah, I read the book Hikayat Abdullah Abdullah over and over. I screwed it up.” But I just left it. I didn’t restart every time because I don’t even know what is correct. I just I just let it go. But anyway, I got a copy of his autobiography, this book, and I started reading it, and I was so fascinated with his life story, that I thought, I have to make a video about this. Nobody on YouTube is going to watch it. Nobody’s going to care about it, but I have to talk about this guy. I found him so fascinating. And the key thing about him is that previous to his writing, most of the literature in Malaysia, in Malaya was kind of court-sponsored epic stories of, you know, legendary deeds of heroism like the stories of the royal court, battles and warriors and fighting kind of legendary stories. And then along comes Munshi Abdullah and he sat down and wrote his life story in normal prose which made it unusual and he included just personal observations about his life, society, culture, history. So it was a combination of like just storytelling about his life and a kind of journalism. So, he’s referred to quite often as the father of modern Malaysian literature, this new style of writing that didn’t exist before. So, anyway, I just found him to be very fascinating. I’m reading I haven’t finished it yet. I’m still reading his autobiography. And then I made this decision to combine talking about him, his life, and his book with kind of doing a guided tour of the downtown area of Melaka. I don’t know whether that was a good idea or a bad idea, but I didn’t want to just stand in one location and just tell a story. So what I did was inter like I integrated the two videos. So I start talking about him then I walk and I point out something interesting a building a mural a church I tell a story about it I go back to Munshi Abdullah’s story as I’m walking along going to the next location then I talk about that spot. So I went back and forth between these two stories whether it worked out or not. And then at the very end of the video, I made this incredible discovery. My original idea was to go to the literature museum because I thought there was a big exhibit about him at the museum. That was where I was going to end the video. Turned out there was nothing much in the literature museum about him. Just one simple like a Wikipedia entry basically. But then I learned that there was a Google Maps pin for his house. It said Munshi Abdullah’s house and I thought, “Wow, so there must be a plaque there or something.” And I went there in this same video and to my amazement, it turned out his house had been turned into a museum. So I guess the renovation of his house had been going on for a long time. Looked like they spent a lot of money on it. It’s right on right off of Harmony Street. So if you go to Harmony Street to look at the Kampong Kling Mosque and the Cheng Hoon Teng Temple and the Hindu temple right there you go down a little side alley and there’s the museum a complete museum dedicated to Munshi Abdullah. So that that was a really incredible discovery. So, I shot a video about him and I only covered his early childhood. So, I didn’t really cover his adult years where he went to Singapore the rest of his life. So, it was just sort of the early part, which that’s all that’s all I talked about.

And I shot a time lapse. Not a whole lot to talk about there. I just noticed how act how busy Melaka has been and I thought maybe it would be interesting to set up a GoPro and shoot a time lapse of all the tri shots like zooming zooming zooming zooming around and I couldn’t remember the settings like how to do a proper time lapse if you’re shooting if you’re shooting like cars if you’re shooting bicycles shooting people walking you choose different settings to get the motion. You don’t want to be too fast or too slow. And I couldn’t really remember what would be the best one to do. So, I did a bit of experimenting. It was like in the late afternoon. I went down to Dutch Square, climbed up onto a a spot that was a bit higher so I could shoot down over them the the whole square and then I ran two GoPros on different settings and filmed a time lapse. And I did that just for fun. and I threw it together very very quickly and tossed it up onto Planet Doug. It’s already up on the channel. And yeah, originally going way back in time, I had this idea that things like a time lapse would be a bonus video that I would put on Patreon. That was my grandm. you know, you want to give people something in return for supporting me through Patreon or people just joining the Planet Doug Patreon. And but what I did, what I discovered over time is that anything like a video, anything I posted to Patreon pretty much got zero views. like so I could take the time to shoot a time lapse, edit the time lapse, upload it to Patreon, and really it didn’t really do didn’t do any good for me, and it didn’t really benefit the Patreon members because Patreon doesn’t really work as a website for people to visit. It just doesn’t have that flavor. People just don’t use it that way. So, anything you post there just kind of goes into a void. So, I don’t now that this this time lapse, I knew it wasn’t going to be super popular. It’s not like the internet is going to go, “Wow, Planet Doug posted a new time lapse, millions of views.” No, it’s going to get 500 views. Some people like time lapses, some people find them boring. I love time-lapses. I would post time-lapses every day to Planet Doug if I could. I I just love them. But anyway, so I did that and so it’s just right there on the channel open to anybody to click on and watch if they if they want to. I think it’s kind of funny the more times you watch it and you watch certain people and you can see things that they do where they walk all the people taking selfies. These there might be like a group of three women and they all stand in a cluster and you can see them. They’re taking turns. One woman poses for all her selfies, her glamour shots. She hands the phone off to the other woman. The new woman poses. They, you know, they keep switching spots until everybody gets their selfies. And you can kind of see that going on in the corner. You see all the people that dress up in like a giant bear costume posing with the children to get money. They got a little box and people money in exchange for the selfie for their kids. And you can see that bear standing there for a long time kind of bobbing and doing his thing. And then he walks across Dutch Square, goes to a new location. You know, you see all these little details. I love time lapses. I think they’re kind of funny.

The last video that I shot was at the one I already mentioned in a way, Kampong Kling, which is a mosque. Not Kongling, Masjid Kampong Kling. And it is a mosque. And I got the idea to shoot that video even though I know it’s not going to be hugely popular. But I realized that Christ Church was very open to visitors. So I thought, huh, maybe even the mosques in the downtown core, like you go to Jonker Street or Harmony Street where this mosque is located, they are a mosque, a real functioning mosque where people go at prayer time, which is why I’m very reluctant to go to churches, mosques, temples with my GoPros. I don’t want to bother people. I don’t want to go in there like a a loudmouthed Canadian tourist with my GoPros. I here I am, you know, and people are praying or something. I I just don’t want to bother them. So, I hesitate. But I’ve learned that these particular mosques, temples, and churches, they do double duty. They are active parts of the community with a congregation. So, don’t bother them. go at the appropriate time, dress in the appropriate way, but they are also functioning as kind of open air museums where they encourage people to come in and and take a look. So, I thought I took I took my courage from going to Christ Church and I took my GoPro to the the mosque on Harmony Street, Masjid Kampong Kling. And just like Christ Church, you can use that mosque as a window on a big part of history. And when I went there, again, I had grand ideas. Everything I was going to talk about in detail in the end, I didn’t go into it that far. I just sort of skimmed a few ideas. the history wasn’t clear enough in my head and it got very very complicated and I could feel I was going to start tripping over maybe overstating some things and there isn’t enough historical evidence to back that up maybe understating other things. So I treated it a little bit more like just a casual walk through with a little bit of background to what I was looking at. A little bit of history. I really enjoyed it. I mean, I loved going there myself and my original idea was to ignore everything else. I was going to focus on the mosque, a very tight topic. But then when I got there, I started talking about how I did my research into this street, Harmony Street, the name of the street, why is it like when were these temples and mosques built, what was their history, how do they relate to the Portuguese era, to the Dutch era, to the British, you know, there’s a lot of fascinating history there. So I ended up talking quite a bit about the street itself, the name of the street and as I walked by the Hindu temple, I talked about it. Then I went up to the Chinese temple, Cheng Hoon Teng, talked a little bit about it and then I finally did the deeper dive into the mosque, which was the main topic. So I think it kind of worked out okay. I didn’t follow through on my original outline in my head for the video, but I probably did something a little bit better, a bit broader in terms of its topics and then not quite as deep a dive into the history. I just stayed a little bit surface level. That’s I think that was the wise choice because yeah, I didn’t I wasn’t confident in my understanding of the history. There was a lot going on and I didn’t want to overstate some things and understate other things. So, I I tried to keep it a little bit surface level. And I guess that’s yeah, the end of the Planet Doug video stories for now.

I’ve reached a point where I might normally stop talking because I’ve been talking for so long, but I think I’m just going to power through and cover the remaining topics that are on my mind. I also have my YouTube vlogger stories like talking about other YouTubers who are traveling around the world by bicycle or motorcycle in particular. I just sort of been following them more than other people lately and pop culture as well. So, this is the beginning of the vlogger stories. And in my last BTS video, I talked about a set of particular YouTube travel vloggers. And I I talked about them pretty much in depth. And I just wanted to go back to them and and give a little bit of an update of each one and then introduce a very unusual definitely unusual for me to talk about vloggers as well.

So, the very first one are these two they’re cycling right now, cycle vloggers from Finland, and they their channel is called Nomads Trails. And last time I talked about how they were doing this huge expedition all the way from the most northern part of Norway all the way to the southern tip of Africa. And they wanted to do it five different ways, like a five-athlon. It was like a physical challenge where they were going to be skiing, running, sailing, cycling, all these different ways, different modes of travel. And they had gotten as far as West Africa. And then where I stopped talking about them, they were in Senegal and they ran into a problem because the next country was Guinea. and they discovered that Guinea had changed their visa rules and it could take 45 days to get their visa approved. And that threw a monkey wrench into their schedule. And they did this little contest where they came up with three or four different options how to deal with this problem because they had to change their plans and they asked their viewers to vote and the winner was a pretty obvious one. I could tell instantly this is the one they wanted to win and it is the one that won. So what they did and what their most recent video covers is flying from Senegal to Kenya. So basically they skipped all of West Africa. So now instead of riding through West Africa, they put their bikes in boxes, put them on an airplane, and then they flew to Nairobi, and then they’re going to start cycling from Nairobi. And they did mention at one point they have very little time. I don’t know why they’re in such a hurry, but they they’re going to blast through all of East Africa and East and South Africa. They only have like a month and a half, two months to cover all of that. So, I guess they’re going to be cycling, cycling, cycling, cycling. But there must be something. They haven’t told, they haven’t mentioned why they have such a a firm deadline. I would want them to just slow down, of course. But anyway, this video was called We Didn’t Expect Our Africa Journey to Go This Way. So, that is the name of the video. And it covers them in Senegal trying to get bicycle boxes because you have to put you have to take your bicycle apart, put it in a box to give it to the airline and it has to fit into their certain specifications, all that kind of stuff. It’s a huge job. At least it has been for me in the past. I haven’t done it very often, but I’ve done it I’ve done it often enough that it’s a nightmare. I dread the process. And when I watched their video talking about this, I had the feeling at the end of it again where it seemed like bicycle touring, it isn’t worth it. Especially if you’re flying or you’re going through a lot of countries, like boxing up your bicycle, putting it on an airplane, border crossings, visas, visas, visas, changing money, new SIM cards, all combining all of that with cycling. It’s too much. It isn’t worth it. Cuz when when they were in Senegal, I think it took them had to take them at least 3 days to finish. All they were doing was boxing up their bicycles. You have to get a box to begin with. You have to get cardboard. And they ran into this situation where they were being charged. The local people were saying, “Oh, you want this cardboard box, this empty cardboard box? That’ll be €60, please.” And they ended up paying I think 4 boxes or 45 maybe €60 for two boxes. Anyway, a lot of euros for what is essentially garbage, you know, just cardboard. Like they went to places like a department store where they get these giant flat screen TVs and they’re thinking that huge box for this huge flat screen TV, but they can modify it. It won’t fit the bike perfectly, but they can take that cardboard and cut it and reshape it. And then people who had these boxes, they they get them to recycle them or resell them. But anyway, they were asking huge amounts of money and they eventually had no choice. I guess they couldn’t bargain them down. It was either pay what they were asking or go without. And they they they paid a lot of euros for just a couple of empty cardboard boxes. And then they had to spend like a 14-hour day doing nothing but dismantling their bicycle, putting it into the box, and then they were finally done. And I know what that’s like. You are exhausted by the time you’re finished doing all of that. You wouldn’t think it would take so long, but it takes a long time. And then you have to get those boxes to the airport, which they did. Huge. I mean, you got to find a big vehicle, pay a lot of money. It’s a big hassle. You get to the airport, you get dropped off, you go in there with these huge boxes. Oh, they’re heavy. It’s it’s really it’s really really hard. And then they got there and found out that their flight had been over booked and they couldn’t get a seat. So all that trouble and now they had no choice. Basically they had to wait. So they went all the way to the airport with their bicycle boxes and then they basically just had to turn around, rebook another hotel, go back into town. Luckily they could leave their bike boxes at the airport. they didn’t have to bring them back and forth, but still they had to wait 3 days before they could finally get a seat on this flight and they could fly out. And then you arrive in Kenya. I may not even have watch the end of the video now that I think about it. Maybe I did. I don’t remember watching them unpack the bikes and reassemble them and go through all of that, but maybe I did watch it. But anyway, by the time you’re done boxing up a bicycle, flying from airport to airport, unboxing the bicycle, reassembling it, you’re exhausted and you spent days and days and days and days doing nothing but that. So, it does make when I watch their video and then I contemplate, well, they only have 2 months to get to Cape Town. Don’t even bother. like just forget about the cycling and just explore where you are. You know, you’re in Senegal, an amazing country, just abandon the bikes, you know, just go out exploring the city, exploring the countryside, you know. Anyway, that was kind of my reaction to all of that all of the hassle that they had to go through.

The other vloggers that I’ve been following are two Americans husband and wife or boyfriend girlfriend. I think they’re married. I don’t really know. Call their their channel is called Too Up and Overloaded. And I went back to their channel to watch their videos because they started posting new videos from Malaysia. So that’s what got me hooked on their story again. So I’ve been watching a few of their videos. They posted one called Better Than America. I was terrified to do this in Malaysia because the woman I can’t think of her name right now. She got LASIK like LASIK surgery in Kuala Lumpur or in Malaysia anyway. And then they shot a whole video about that. the idea, you know, is it safe? You know, I’m always annoyed by these sorts of videos where every every travel vlogger does it, no matter what country they go to, they lean into this idea that, well, back in whatever your country is, it’s safe. But we they have this image that, oh, Malaysia must be dangerous. You know, every country you go to, is it safe? Is it safe here? And I’m like, yeah, it’s safe. stop worrying about it. And then going to a hospital, it’s always, you know, is it safe to go to a hospital to a dentist in the Philippines? And my reaction is, ah, get over yourself. Yes, it’s safe. They’re good doctors. They’re good dentists. They’re good hospitals. It’s perfectly safe. Anyway, the title, is it safe? You know, I was terrified to do this in Malaysia. I don’t think they were, but that’s what they put in the title, you know, and it is a very, very popular video. It’s an unusual topic. A lot of people find it interesting. So, that video got a lot of views. And so, she got LASIK in Malaysia. And of course, it’s cheaper in Malaysia than in the United States. That’s the whole reason they did it in Malaysia. Like, medical tourism is a huge thing for Americans cuz everything medical is so expensive in the US. It’s always cheaper to fly to it. You know, you can get it done in the US for this much money. Or you can take that amount of money, fly to the Philippines, fly to Malaysia, have a 2-month vacation, pay for the flights, get the procedure, get all of that for the same price as what you would have paid in the United States just for the procedure. So, you get a two-month holiday, roundtrip flights, and the procedure. and all you would get in the US would be the procedure. So yeah, it makes economic sense medical tourism. And then they posted a video called Malaysia is too hot for motorcycle riding. And that video was all about all they did was ride from KL to Singapore. It was a one-day trip, 5-hour motorcycle ride. And they shot a video about that trip. And apparently it was a very very hot day. No big surprise. And the theme of the video was it was hot. I started wondering whether they were going to get in trouble because as I as I’ve talked about in other videos in my last BTS video, I told the story, many stories about this hostel and how the air conditioner broke and then when I talked to the staff member, I didn’t get any help. You know, it was a very unsatisfying encounter with the hotel staff. So, I just told that whole story and then someone did leave a comment, a longtime supporter of Planet Doug saying, “Yeah, that was a good story, but maybe, you know, dial down the personal attack and the complaining.” So, there, you know, I’m replying to their comment. And I talked about how yeah I mean when you’re telling a story of something that happened overseas you know chances are something went wrong or something was challenging or something was difficult because yeah you’re in another country you don’t speak the language. You’re not familiar with the culture. You might be riding a motorcycle, riding a bicycle. things happen. And then when you tell the story, you’re trying to tow the line between telling hopefully a funny story and you don’t want to come across like you’re complaining all the time. And that’s often not easy to do because the most interesting stories are when something goes wrong. So you tell the story and then something else goes wrong. You tell the story, something else goes wrong. you tell the story and then you’re going to get that comment like, “Ah, quit complaining. If you don’t like it, go home.” You know, we we don’t want to listen to somebody complain all the time. And yeah, you have to be aware of the striking this balance. So, I was wondering with with Too Up and Overloaded, like I watched the whole video and all they did was talk about how hot it was. It was like over and over and over. Oh, it’s so hot. Oh, it’s so hot. Oh, I’m sweating. Oh, it’s hot. every single stage of the journey is like hot, it’s so hot, oh it’s melting, I’m sweating, I’m dying, you know, that’s all they talked about. And I started wondering, well, is there going to be a lot of comments like, dude, stop complaining. It’s Malaysia. It’s tropical. It’s hot. We know. We got it the first time you said it. You didn’t have to say it 20 times. Right. I but I don’t think they’ll get those comments because yeah, it just came across as a funny story, I suppose. But the interesting thing about this, most of the Malaysians watching this video are associating it with the weather this year, right? It has been a very hot year. When I did my little bit of cycling that I went on, it was very hot and sunny the whole time. And then all the time that I’ve been in Melaka to me it has felt brutally hot. I mean just hot. And so people are responding to that video like oh yeah this year it’s been so hot. So hot. But these videos that they’re posting they are from over 2 years ago. So I always find that kind of amusing. Like if if I take two weeks to post a video or one month or something like that, people’s like, “Oh, why?” You know, this video is from 1 month ago. It’s from 2 weeks ago. Well, what’s going on? But a lot of YouTube channels like theirs, their Malaysia trip was over 2 years ago. This happened long time ago, and they’re finally getting around to posting the videos now. And as a YouTuber myself, I look at their comment replies because I know they have to tow this tricky technique where somebody will say something like there like people will suggest cuz they say, “Oh, you’re in Malaysia and you’re on a motorcycle. You should go here.” Suggesting what they should do on this trip. But they don’t know that the trip ended 3 years ago. they’re not in Malaysia anymore. And then Too Up and Overloaded, they want to reply to that comment, but they don’t want to give away. They don’t want to make it obvious that they’re not in Malaysia anymore. So, what they do is write a generic reply. Someone will say, “Oh, you really should ride your motorcycle to here. It’s beautiful.” And they’ll say, “Oh, thank you very much for that tip. It sounds amazing.” Right? But they don’t say, “Oh, we’re not in Malaysia anymore. Thanks for the tip, but we can’t go there because this trip was 3 years old.” You know, and they don’t say, you know, “Oh, we would go there, but we’re not in Malaysia anymore. Sorry.” So, all in all their replies, they have to kind of pretend and they have to give the impression that they’re still in Malaysia without actually lying about it. It’s a very tricky thing. Luckily I don’t have to do that. So, but yeah, they changed their video style, which I find interesting. I remember when I first discovered them and what I noticed is they they did all their videos with voice over narration. So rather than like my videos, I grab my GoPro and I film in real time and all the audio is recorded in real time while it’s happening. But what they would do is go out with their motorcycles, film the day and talk during the day, but then the time frame from the video would be many days later where they would sit down, the two of them on a sofa side by side, set up a camera, and then they tell the story of the day like a behind-the-scenes video. And then they would take the video from the day and splice it in. And some people like that, some people hated it. It depends on people’s preferences, but they did that for a long time. But their new videos are completely different. They are like polished professional documentaries in a way. They’re done with almost exclusively voice over narration, but they’re not sitting down on camera. the narration is over top of live video. And for my money, I don’t like it. Like this style of video that they’re making now, I’m not the audience for this type of video. It’s so polished. It’s so produced. It’s just too much for me. And they have It’s scripted, too. You can tell it’s scripted to sound like a travel documentary. A lot of adjectives. Obviously, a lot of thought, a lot of writing went into it, and it just doesn’t feel edgy. It doesn’t feel real to me. It doesn’t feel I’m not engaged because it’s not I I’m not interested in that kind of tone, I guess. And they have music, a lot of music playing in the background and it never seems to stop. And I find it really annoying because I mean, yeah, it’s a lot of work went into choosing the music, timing it, the volume levels, it’s all done very, very well. But I don’t know when I’m watching the video and the music never ever stops. So I kind of like ah stop the music you know like as they’re narrating you can hear the music in the background never like it just goes on and on from song to song to song and the songs are carefully chosen to match the mood and they’re well done and this and that. I get all that. And of course, their videos are very popular, way more popular than mine. So, who am I to critique? But again, that’s why I keep adding the the statement that well, for me, it’s not I don’t like this style. I’m not saying it’s a bad style. It’s just not what I like. I like something that feels real, raw. So, I’m that’s more my impulse. But they have gone super professional and the professionalism is beyond that because they oh they they have this they have a a polished introduction. I noticed with this last video, the one about it being too hot, there’s like a two-minute intro, which is like a prologue clips of what’s coming up, what you’ll see in this video, and then they have their song. And the song is really polarizing. The two of them, they they sing their own song. If you haven’t watched one of their videos, I encourage you to click on one just to hear the song. You can tell me, are you a song person or not? I am not. I cannot stand that song. And it’s really polarizing. Some people love the song. It’s funny. It’s personal. It’s like, oh, let them sing. But I don’t know. I I can’t stand people singing. So, I fast forward through their theme song that they sing. I I just can’t I can’t stand listening to it. But again, that’s just the way my brain works. And then in the middle of the video, it’s a very short, these are very short videos, like 20 25 minutes long. Now they are offering guided motorcycle tours of Thailand, which is very interesting. And so right in the middle of this video, there’s like a 3-minute long advertisement for their tours. So, they’re trying to get their viewers to sign up for a guided tour of Thailand where you go with them by motorcycle and they guide you around Thailand. I think that is their main business now. That’s how they want to make their money. That’s what they’re interested in and that’s why it took them two to 3 years to even post the videos because that wasn’t their focus anymore. These videos from Malaysia are actually just packaging for it’s a they’re basically a commercial to advertise their tours. That’s that’s how they’re packaging these videos. So you’ve got this three minute long ad about their tours of Thailand and then the video ends with another minute or two of all of the advertisements and sign up for this and this and that. So it’s like a 20 25 minute video, but it feels like most of it is advertising for something outside of the video. There’s a lot in there. So, feels like if you’re trying to establish that balance, they went way too far in in that direction. And and yeah, but you you can watch the video and you can you can tell me, you know, they’re very again, very well done, professionally well done. They’re clearly making a lot of money. They’re very smart people. They’ve got all kinds of sponsors and ads and now they’re offering these tours of Thailand. So yeah, they are making it work. So like again, I’m the last person on earth to offer any kind of criticism because I’m not doing any of that stuff. But if I’m going to click on a travel video for my own entertainment, I would pick on I would choose something a bit more raw happening in real time. I know that it’s roughly real time. I know that if the video is in Malaysia, they are still in Malaysia right now. rather than this was done 2 and 1/2 years ago. that sort of thing. And not not to pile on with more criticisms, but yeah, this jumped out at me as well that they’re in Malaysia, it’s really really hot. They’re moto vlogging and then people would offer them drinks, right? Like it happens all the time when I’ve gone on my cycling trips. People in a car might stop, pull over to the side of the road, they see you struggling up this steep mountain and they know it’s hot and they say, “Oh, do you here’s a cold drink?” And they’ll give you a cold drink. This is this is something that people do. People do this because people are nice. People like to help and it gives them a chance to say hi, right? It’s a nice thing to do and they get something out of the interaction because they pull over and say, “Oh, Doug, oh, you’re riding a bike here and where are you going? How how long do you know?” And we have a nice conversation. Oh, here’s a cold Coke, a bottle of orange juice, cold bottle of water. Oh, good luck. And they we part ways. It’s what people do. I’ve done it myself. It’s fun and people are generous. People are nice. But in all these YouTube videos, and it happened in this one, it feels like the YouTube vlogger feels compelled to oversell it be to heap praise on the country they’re in. So when it happens to Too Up and Overloaded in Malaysia, there’s like a long sequence about, you know, oh, the people of Malaysia are amazing. They’re so friendly. They’re so helpful. I can’t believe it. These people, they stopped and they gave us water. Oh, it was so generous of them. They’re so amaz. And I’m always thinking, all right, you’re laying it on a bit thick. Maybe I’m a cynic, but like I said, to me, it just feels like a normal thing to do. You see someone doing something and you’ve got extra water in your car. Yeah, it’s a nice thing to do. Pull over. Oh, you need here’s a bottle of water. Oh, thank you very much. And it is a nice thing to do. But in my experience, that is what people do because people are nice. But they make it sound like it’s almost like an insult to the human race when they go so over the top about how amazing, how friendly the people of Malaysia are. It’s like they’re implying it’s a special quality only of Malaysians. Every other country, h people are horrible. People are mean, nobody does this, nobody helps you out. But here in Malaysia, you know what I mean? It’s like it’s like drawing a line between Malaysians being incredibly nice, incredibly generous. Oh, can’t believe it. But it’s like saying it’s like a backhanded slap to everybody else in the world, right? It kind of has that weird feeling to me when I find that people in every country are like that. They see you cycling under a hot sun. People in every country in the world, including Canada, have this instinct to sort of help you out, to just offer any assistance. Oh, do you need any help? Like, it’s just what people do because people are nice and you can acknowledge it. Sure. And but it feels like it goes way over the top on YouTube travel vlogs. Yeah, I’ve noticed that pattern a lot. It it always makes me makes me smile. So yeah, I think that is everything I wanted to say about Too Up and Overloaded. I’m not sure if they’re coming back to Malaysia on this particular trip from 3 years ago or however long ago it was. cuz they crossed over the border into Singapore. And I’m assuming they’re going to come back into Malaysia. So there might be more Malaysia videos coming up. Maybe going up the East Coast. That would be interesting. Yeah, on a motorcycle they can do the whole East Coast in one day. So, who knows? They might end up doing that.

The next travel vloggers I want to talk about, I’m I’m going to talk about them not because I’m saying, “Oh, they’re so amazing. You got to watch their videos.” To be honest, it’s probably the exact opposite, but they popped up in my feed, which happens a lot to me, precisely because they arrived in Malaysia and they posted that typical Malaysia video that every vlogger seems to make. You know, like Malaysia blew my mind. I couldn’t believe like Kuala Lumpur blew my mind. I can’t believe it when I saw Kuala Lumpur. every vlogger that comes to Malaysia, you know, shoots that same video. Everybody is so shocked by Malaysia for some reason. The idea, of course, that they never quite dive into this with specifics, but the idea is they’re coming to Malaysia. They’re Americans and their preconceived notion is it’s going to be nothing but rice fields, bullocks, rice farmers with conical hats, things like that. And then of course they land in Kuala Lumpur and KL has like some of the most skyscrapers of any city in the world. You know, it’s a hyper modern super advanced place with amazing MRT system and public transportation and internet and skyscrapers and luxury this and you know and everybody’s like whoa Kuala Lumpur blew my mind. That’s the standard video. And they got the they got the Malaysia bump. These people I I’ll give their name. I haven’t given it yet. They’re called Phase 2 Travel and it’s a retired American couple. Very, very, very American. You know, I’ve watched quite a number of their videos now. They just seem you like 2 minutes listening to them and you go, “Oh, these are Americans.” They just are. And so they’re called Phase 2 Travel, retired, traveling the world. and their previous videos all got like 200 views, 50 views, 180 views. You know, they’re kind of making videos. I think they’re hoping that their channel will take off and become popular, but so far all their videos are within that like 100 to 200 views range. And then they landed in KL. They didn’t they don’t post videos about their travels. They talk about them. They just basically sit down, talk into the camera, and tell the story. But their video telling the story about KL has like 10,000 views, right? So, they got the Malaysia bump. They went from 100 views to 10,000 views. So, that video about arriving in Kuala Lumpur ended up on my feed because I’m interested in these types of videos. I watched it and then I became interested in them as people. So, I went all the way back to the beginning and watched most of their videos. They haven’t been doing this very long. There’s just a few videos there. And I think their plan for their YouTube channel is more like a how to guide for other people from the United States in particular who want to retire and slow travel the world. So I think they they even put this where is it? I I wrote down their slogan. So their like title page, their logo is slow travel and then it says slow, intentional, meaningful and then it says in capital letters it is travel. And right out of the gate again I have to say this is not meant for me. Like everything about this is not meant for me. I even have this instinct. If anybody, any travel vlogger says the word travel as a noun, I want to punch them. I don’t know. I It just bugs me. It’s a pet peeve of mine. If somebody says, you know, they’re on the top of a mountain, beautiful scenery, and they say, “This is why I travel.” Or, “This is what travel is all about.” I instantly want to punch them. It just seems so pretentious to me this idea of defining travel. I am a traveler. Travel means so travel is my life. And I’m like, ah, get over yourself. So if anybody says the word travel, I want to punch them. And I’m so conscious of this instinct of mine that I try very hard never to say the word travel even as a verb because I have this gut instinct to see it as pretentious right out of the gate. And it pro I probably slip up from time to time. It will it will enter my natural vocabulary. How can it not? But I’m actively trying never to say travel, except when I’m doing a behind-the-scenes video, of course, cuz I’m talking about travel vloggers, moto vloggers, that kind of thing. But in my own videos, I try not to go off on these tangents and like, ah, this is why I travel, you know, ah, get over yourself, you know, I don’t I don’t never want to say anything like that. and their entire identity is based on that slow travel. It is travel, intentional, meaningful. So, right out of the gate, I had to smile about that. It’s like, okay, this is not meant for me. And then their entire identity of is based on slow travel. And you think that would speak to me, but of course everybody comes at everything from their own life, from their own perspective. So my life as a whole has kind of been based around sort of a backpacking lifestyle. And the last part of my life, of course, all began when I flew to South Korea in 1991 to get a job teaching English. And then my life ever since then has been around sort of the backpacking world. And in this world of backpacking, a year is not a long time, right? Like if somebody is backpacking around the world for a year, that that’s nothing unusual. It’s like, oh, they could have been in this one country for a year. They could be they could have been on the road for 5 years, 2 years, 3 years. These sorts of lengths of time are perfectly normal to someone like me. I grew up in that culture of the backpacker and then moving into like the long distance cycle tourist or someone who’s going around the world by bicycle. So you’re talking about an expedition that lasted for 5 years, things like that. I’m in the world of people who get jobs overseas and live there for years, things like that. So that’s how I come at this. They are more typical Americans who have spent their life working at real jobs. And I believe they’re educators, teachers perhaps. It feels a little bit like to me like they’re making more money than the average teacher. So maybe they were principals making a better salary because watching all of their videos, they’ve already lived a life of going to other countries, but going to other countries on vacation. So they’ve already been everywhere. So they live in the United States, they work in the United States, they’ve got everything you can imagine. They got the house and the mortgage and the cars. They’ve got the 401k, the pension plans, the medical insurance, the stock portfolio, you know, they got all that stuff, money coming in from all over the place. And then two times a year they take a holiday and then they will go to Greece for 2 weeks. So, and then they’ll go to Switzerland for a week. they’ll go to France and then you more adventurous they might go to somewhere in like Costa Rica, South America, Southeast Asia. So they’ve had a whole lifetime and they go on cruises. They love cruises. So that is how they’re approaching this world. So from their point of view, slow travel has a completely different meaning. So for me, slow travel, well, I’m kind of the poster boy for it because I’ll land in a place like Melaka and I’ll stay here for 3 months. To me, that is slow travel. And people who go around the world on a motorcycle, in a way, it’s not really slow travel because all they do is travel, travel, travel, travel, travel. They never stay anywhere. They’re always on the move, you know. But a backpacker can arrive in Vietnam and spend a month in in Ho Chi Minh City and then two months traveling up the coast to get to Hanoi. Then their visa runs out and they fly to Cambodia, come back in, get another 90-day visa, spend 2 months in Hanoi. You know, that is my conception of slow travel and you could end up spending 5 years in Southeast Asia. But they’re starting off from the point of view of a one-week holiday in Greece. They take a week off. They leave on Friday after work, go straight to the airport, fly to Greece, and then their whole idea because they’re spending a ton of money, the flight, they stay in nice hotels, they do package tours, everything is paid for upfront. They are there to experience the best that Greece has to offer. And since they’re spending so much money, they want to get as much value as possible. So every day is jam-packed with events scheduled, scheduled, scheduled. They do everything. Every meal is a banquet. They try, you know, going out at all the fancy restaurants, all the great restaurants, all the local places that are recommended, all the tours. They want to see as much as they can possibly see, do as much as they can possibly do in 7 days because on Sunday they fly back. Monday morning they wake up, they go back to work. So that has been their life for 30, 40 years in the United States. That is their experience. And then they go on a cruise, things like that. So now that they’re retired and they’re making their YouTube channel all about slow travel. So when they go somewhere and they stay for 2 weeks in that one place, that is slow travel for them. if they go to a place and then they wake up one morning and they don’t feel like touring five different attractions and they spend the whole day just relaxing in their hotel. That is slow travel to them because they never did that in the past. They were always like busy busy busy busy busy get as much out of this experience as possible cuz we’ve only got a week. So for them to take a day off, you know, quote, a day off and do nothing but relax in the hotel, that to them is a new experience. And they they’re basing their entire YouTube channel on this idea. So that is one way where yeah, we we don’t speak the same language. So that’s why I find their videos so entertaining because I feel it’s like a window into a world I’ve never experienced and I just don’t understand it at all.

So here another video that I watched from theirs it called the video is called the only three credit cards we need for slow travel. So, the whole video is about how out of all the credit cards, you only need these three credit cards. That’s all you need to travel the world. Like, this is some kind of a revelation like, “No, you don’t need 10 credit cards. No, you only need three of them.” And then they break down all the advantages to them. And it’s all about these cards offering points. And I I guess if you spend a lot of money and you funnel all your money through your credit cards rather than paying cash and you pay off the credit card bill at the end of every month, you can amass points. They have all these benefits programs and you get enough points, you get a free hotel room, a free flight. And I’ve heard about this in the past. I know people do this and I know people can benefit from it, but again, you might as well be talking about the other side of the galaxy in terms of my experiences. That’s another universe. I don’t know anything about it. Like they say, these are the only three credit cards you need. And I’m thinking, man, if I had two credit cards, oh, I’d be so happy. Like I’m barely by the skin of my teeth barely holding on to one credit card and I don’t get any points. Nobody’s pointing me giving me free meals, free upgrades, the fancy five-star luxury hotel stay because I’ve amassed all these points, right? I don’t know anything about that. So, an entire video about the three credit cards, the only ones you need for slow travel. Yeah, that’s it’s I don’t even understand the language and of course budget is a big one. So of course they had many videos about budgeting and many videos about planning, planning and budgeting. And that combination really brought a smile to my face as well because the way they talked about it, I mean, they’re really, really smart people financially. They do everything that I never did. They lived a fiscally responsible lifestyle, planning ahead for retirement, to get the most out of life, for medical emergencies, all the things you are supposed to do that I’ve never done that I don’t even understand, they did. So, they’re like a million times smarter than I am. So in fact, they have spent a lifetime planning for this moment when they finally can retire and slow travel. So they’ve been basically planning for the last 20 years. They’ve been thinking about all the different ways they can maximize their income. Do this, do that, do this. You know, they have a house with a mortgage and their daughter is now living in the house while they’re gone. So, she’s paying rent to be in the house and they’re still paying the mortgage and they’re getting this benefit and that benefit and they have this covered and they figured out from their vacations all the best ways to save money using the points with all the credit cards, buying certain classes so you get access to the lounge to get a new get a a free meal there and a massage there and coverage there. all these things. They’ve been planning it for 20 years. And then now that they’re ready to begin their journey, they’re very upfront about information, which I really appreciate. And then we finally got to their budget. And my jaw, of course, just dropped because their budget, they said, is $6,000 a month. That’s for the two of them. So it’s like 3,000 each, but of course, they can double up on hotel rooms and things like that. So, in fact, they they have a budget of $6,000 a month. So, I’m looking at that figure, and of course, I come from a very different world. $6,000, what I could do with $6,000. That that’s kind of my my approach to things. But the first thing I thought of is, well, if you have a budget of $6,000 a month, you don’t need to plan. Like, why are you even planning? Like, if you had a a budget of $6,000 a month, you don’t have to plan. You’ve been planning for 20 years. You got all this money, all these video after video after video about planning and budgeting and planning their spreadsheet, all their categories, their monthly budget for entertainment, for transportation, for health, for hotels, for accommodation. You don’t need to do any of that. and they plan ahead like the cruise they want to go on is cheaper in February so they’ve already pre-booked it a year in advance so they’re planning to get that planning on top of planning on top of planning and they’ve already been planning for 20 years and I’m thinking the planning is done you don’t have to plan anymore just walk out of your house with your bag fly to Ho Chi Minh City, lay there, and then just start living. Your $6,000 is going to cover you no matter what you do for the rest of your life. So, you don’t have to plan ahead. You don’t even have to worry about visas because you can stay in Saigon until your visa expires. You just hop on a flight to Cambodia, come back, get a new visa, keep moving. You like Hanoi, you want to stay there for 3 months? Just stay there for 3 months. $6,000. You won’t even begin to cut into $6,000 a month in Vietnam. You you you can’t spend that much money there. I mean, basically, I guess what made me laugh is the combination of $6,000 a month and unbelievable amounts of planning. They they to me they’re contradictory. Like if you have $500 a month to live on. Yeah. Planning. You gota you gota you got to plan your budget. Keep track of your expenses because planning you need to plan in order to make it to the end of the month on $500. But if you have $6,000, you don’t need to plan anymore. So the entire foundation of their YouTube channel is to help people plan their budget properly so that they can successfully travel on $6,000 a month. And of course, in my world, it it the language doesn’t even make sense because if you have $6,000 a month, you don’t need to plan. What’s the point of planning? You can just do whatever you want at any time you want. go anywhere you want. And I did run into a little contradiction with the slow travel as well because their YouTube channel is all about teaching other people the benefits of slow travel, how to slow travel, things like that. And then they started traveling. And where is it? give me a second. Here’s the notes. So their very first trip that they talked about where all of their budgeting and planning finally came into effect, I swear they went to Dubai, then Cape Town, then Southeast Asia, then they flew back to the United States to take a cruise ship. Then they went back to Southeast Asia. They flew. So they took a cruise ship from the United States back to the United States. Then they flew back to Southeast Asia, down to Singapore, then flew back to Europe, then took a cruise back home to the United States. So stick with me. So, we’ve got Dubai, Cape Town, Southeast Asia, back to the United States, a cruise ship, fly back to Southeast Asia to Singapore, fly to Europe, another cruise ship back to the United States. And from what I can tell, all of that happened in 3 months, like maybe two months. I it’s hard to figure out the dates, but when I’m I’m trying to break it down logistically and listening to their stories, they did all of that in somewhere between two and 3 months. And again, to me, the world I come from, yeah, that that’s not close to slow travel. And the only reason they could do all that, of course, is cuz they’ve got $6,000 to spend. So, you’re talking about flights from Southeast Asia to the United States, back to Southeast Asia, back there, from Cape Town to Europe, like just flying everywhere. And I I I don’t even know how that qualifies as slow travel. That’s the fastest travel I’ve ever seen. So many destinations, so many flights, cruises, two cruises, all Yeah. I guess if you’re spending that much money that fast, then suddenly $6,000 is kind of limiting. You got to make sure cuz you you could blow through $6,000 pretty easily doing all of that. Like just do the math. How many flights is that? How many cruises is that? And of course, they they’re very upfront about this. They talk about it. They’re very nice people and very open and honest and they say, “Yeah, host, shared bathrooms, you know, that’s behind us. You know, that was in our youth. We can’t do that anymore. We’re retired. We have money. We’re staying in nice hotels.” And then when he describes their experiences, he did. There’s another video. I don’t I don’t understand why they did it, but they split up. I guess the woman, her name is Sue. Sue wanted to go on a cruise with her mother and Mike wanted to go to Vietnam. So, as part of the slow travel adventure, they split up. She went on the cruise. Mike, he flew to Vietnam. And then he told the story of what he did in Vietnam. And again, as far as I can tell, just reading between the lines, he stayed at a very nice hotel, of course, and everything he did was part of a package tour. So like he bought a package for Vietnam where everything was organized in advance and then you you get picked up and then delivered here and then picked up and delivered there. Everything is organized and guided. So of course he had an amazing time. Every meal was a banquet. You know the people every country they go to they, you know, they can’t stop talking about how nice the people were and how friendly they are and how helpful. But yeah, if you stay in a four-star hotel, I mean, I had that experience here in in Melaka where the last video I talked about how Matthew, a friend of mine, had a couple of extra nights he he couldn’t use at a like a mid-range hotel and I got to stay in this hotel and I was like, “Wow, I came away from that hotel. I was like, wow, everybody is so nice. Everybody is so happy. Everybody is so friendly.” And then I come back to the low-budget world. I’m still in Malaysia. I’m still in Melaka and then the friendliness, the helpfulness is not quite as strong. You know, it’s not quite as apparent when you’re living at the low-budget level of things. But anyway, it is. Yeah, you live in different worlds in terms of it. A lot of it has to do with language to be honest. People even if they want to be friendly, if they don’t speak English and you don’t speak their language, there’s no way for them to be friendly, right? You go to a really nice hotel, most people are better educated. They speak English well. So, everywhere you go, everybody’s smiling and they’re nodding. You make eye contact. Oh, hey. How are you? Where are you from? Oh, I’m from Germany. I’m from I’m from Singapore. And you have a really nice conversation with these really friendly people from Singapore. You’re like, “Wow, what a what really friendly people live in Singapore.” You come back here, I meet people staying at this hostel and I’m sure they’re just as friendly as the people from Singapore, but they might walk right by me and not say a word because they’re on their way to the shared bathroom and we’re both wrapped up in towels or something, you know? So, it’s not the most not the best way to have a conversation, but at the same time, I don’t I don’t even know what country they’re from. I don’t know what language they speak. They don’t know where I’m from. They don’t speak English. So, you know, you get a very different impression of a country based on how much you’re paying for your accommodation. And you’re paying for a tour guide who speaks English and a driver who picks you up in a shuttle bus and he speaks English. And I mean, everything is amazing. And the people of Vietnam are the nicest people on the planet. And they are very nice people in Vietnam. But when I went there on a lower budget, well, most of the people I could not talk to. So, their friendliness has no way to be exhibited, if you see what I mean. So, yeah, I had I had a great time watching all of their videos. And I don’t know where they are now. I mean, I’d love it if they were still in Malaysia and they happened to be in Melaka or something and I could run into them. I would really love to meet them, man. And they are thinkers. Wow. I’ve never seen anybody think so long and so deeply about travel. You know, you can punch me in the face when I say travel. Like the openings of their videos, they’re talking about slow travel and how when they were planning, they were thinking about how they want to travel, the different ways of traveling. And again, my my like my I I want to punch people who talk like that, but hey, they’re coming about it. They’re coming at it very very honestly. And they started breaking it down and they were talking about things I never even occurred to me. So, of course, they chose slow travel. They decided slow travel is the best for them. And they started breaking down all the other options and they were talking about, you know, vacations, a style of travel, a one-week vacation, all luxurious guided tours. So that’s another way to travel. And then they talked about aspirational travel. So they said, “Yeah, we thought about aspirational travel and we wondered whether it’s sort of like speak with your doctor, find out if aspirational travel is right for you.” They were having these conversations with each other and I I was floored. I was like, I don’t even know what that is. What is aspirational travel? Is this a new thing and then through watching their videos, I got the idea that what we’re talking about there is like bucket list travel. You’ve lived your whole life. You’ve saved up a lot of money. You’re cashing it in, selling your house. And now you’re retired and you’re going to do all the things that you wanted to do all your life but never had a chance. So you wanted to go you wanted to swim with whale sharks. You wanted to climb Mount Everest. These are like these are on your bucket list items. You wanted to surf in Hawaii. You wanted like all these things. You wanted to see the Amalfi coast of Italy. stay in one of those gorgeous things. You know, you wanted to go on a cruise through cruise to Alaska to see the glaciers. So, these are all bucket list items that usually cost a lot of money. And that is aspirational travel. Never heard of it before, but I’ve heard of bucket lists, but aspirational travel. And then they talked about snowbird travel. I’m familiar with that, of course, because Canadians often, the ones who have money to do it. When winter comes in Canada, they fly to Florida and they’ll spend winter in Florida, wait for the weather to get warmer, and then they return to Canada. These are called snowbirds. Leave a cold country in the winter to go to a warm country, and then go back to your own country in the summertime. So, that’s snowbird travel. And then they talked about expat travel like they considered the expat life. Yeah. Go to a country, get a job and live there as an expat. And they kind of they talked about rejecting that. I guess they have enough money, they don’t need to work. And at the same time, he did talk about the visas and I wholeheartedly agree there. It’s like once they once you start looking into it like a retirement visa or a work visa, all the hoops you have to jump through, all the paperwork, all the restrictions, it’s like who needs that in their life when you can just get a tourist visa for 90 days and when it expires go to the next country. That seems a lot easier. And in fact, when they were talking about getting a visa, they made it sound like it was an unusual thing to do. like that’s a that that is actually a difficult thing. Like when he said, “Yeah, I’ve always wanted to go to Vietnam, but to go there, I had to get a visa.” And he he made it sound like this was like, “Oh, really? I have to get permission. Like, I got to get a visa. That’s kind of a hassle. Maybe I shouldn’t go there.” So, maybe all their vacations to Europe, yeah, you don’t need to do anything. You just land, you just book the flight and away you go. And you don’t have to get visas for any of these other countries. So this whole idea of even going to Southeast Asia and your life being dictated by tourist visas, that seemed like kind of a new idea to them. But yeah, expat, they don’t want to do that. Too many visas. And then there was they they consider doing residential cruising. And again, I’m like, what the heck is that? I had no idea. But maybe like there’s residential cruising. It’s not like a one-week holiday, but you live on the cruise ship full-time. Like, it’s like renting a condo and you live on the boat for years and years, and that’s residential cruising. And they considered that for their retirement. And then the last one I have on my list, repositional cruising. They kept talking about repositional cruising and they’re like, “Yeah, you know, there’s repositional cruising and there’s advantages.” And I’m like, “You lost me again. And I have no idea what that is, but it turns out that in the world of cruises, sometimes a cruise boat ends the season far away from its base and now the boat has to like if it’s an American company and the season ended and they’re docked in Japan, well, now they have to go all the way back to the United States. It isn’t technically a cruise, but they have to reposition the cruise ship and you can sign up for that and it’s a lot cheaper because it isn’t a full-on cruise in the normal sense. It’s a repositional cruise. So, if you plan ahead based on the seasons, you can sign up for repositional cruising and that can that can save you a lot of money. And they did break down their budget. You might find this interesting. For their 6,000 a month, it was 2,000 well 2,000 for housing. So, $2,000 a month for hotels, $1,000 for food, $1,000 for transportation, $750 for entertainment, $750 for medical expenses, and then $500 for miscellaneous, like little things. And they talked about, oh, it’s raining and we need to buy an umbrella. We don’t have one. Oh, we can dip into our miscellaneous budget. Things like that. And of course, all of that made me laugh, you know, coming from my world. And I’m looking at miscellaneous, $500 a month, and I’m like, well, that’s my budget for the whole month. Hotel, food, like, I wouldn’t even have an entertainment budget because I don’t think about entertainment as separate from living, right? My whole life is entertainment. Like, recording this video is is my entertainment. So, I don’t do things like arrive in a country, go out doing all the normal things, and then, oh, oh, I have, you know, $750 to spend on entertainment, and then I I don’t even know what that is exactly. To me, life is entertaining. I don’t sign up for specific entertainment activities. It just isn’t something that I’ve ever done. I guess that that just gets back to budget. I remember long time ago living in Toronto before I became this person. Once or twice I went out to a real entertainment and they were amazing events in my life. Like I went to see Les Misérables playing in Toronto and I went to see the Phantom of the Opera. Those were like the two big big things I did in Canada. And at the time, yeah, I mean, it was very expensive for me to buy those tickets and very unusual. I’d never done anything like that before in my life. So that is entertainment, buying a ticket for Broadway, a big show, that kind of thing. And very worthwhile. I mean, to this day, I’m still thinking about Les Misérables and my night out going to see The Phantom of the Opera. But my superpower, I’ve often talked about this, I’ve had a very, very limited life in so many ways. Right now that I’m in my 60s, I’m suddenly fully realizing how limited a life I’ve actually led. And it’s a little bit sad in a way. And it’s a little bit upsetting as I look back over my life and go, you know what? I I didn’t realize how empty my life was in so many ways. But my superpower is I seem to have this ability to get a huge amount out of small things, right? So like a normal person like Sue and Mike, they probably went skiing every winter, right? Right? They have a ski holiday every year. They go to Europe once a year or twice a year. So they have many many many many many more activities in their life. But I have this super tower superpower that I went to two big shows in my life. Les Misérables and Phantom of the Opera. And I have been remembering and thinking about and pondering Les Misérables for my entire lifetime. You know what I mean? It’s like after I went to see it, I was just thinking I was obsessed with it for weeks, even months. You know, I bought the cassette tapes listening to the music. So, one event and it has lasted me as a memory for my entire life. So, I don’t have to go to a Broadway show five times a year. I seem to be able to milk a lot of value out of very small amounts of entertainment and that that’s kind of kind of my superpower. I guess I sort of figured that out late in life. Yeah, there were so many things in their videos that I found interesting and thought-provoking and it’s all coming from this perspective of looking at the world and thinking about things from someone else’s point of view. and that’s why I really enjoyed their videos and I hope I’m not coming across in any way as critical because that that is not my intention. I think they’re really amazing people really intelligent really friendly and open and in ter if you’re just talking about getting value out of life and the benefits that travel can bring. I mean they’re way ahead of me. They’ve been to so many countries in the world, far more places than I can ever hope to go. They have had better experiences in all those countries than I’ve ever had cuz they’ve, you know, gone out to all the really nice restaurants and, you know, they’ve been to places like Greece and Italy and Spain and Switzerland and I’ve never been to any of those places and I almost certainly never will be. So, and they they they’ve done this in a very intelligent way. They live their life to get the most out of it. And yeah, I can only tip my hat to them. But at the same time, I mean, you could talk about the life that I’ve led and I’ve gotten a lot out of mine. They’re just different things. But it is fun for me to look at the world from their perspective and see all these little things that jump out at me. Mike was talking, he was telling the story about when he went to Vietnam on this quick little trip. And oddly enough, they started talking about his trip to Vietnam almost like reconnaissance, right, where they were going to go to Vietnam together as part of their slow travel experience as they enter retirement. but he decided to go there on his own first. A quick little trip, get a feel for the place and that can help them plan ahead for the slow travel, right? So again, they have a they have a budget big enough that he can do that. When I think of reconnaissance, for me, it’s like I’m going to take the bus to KL, you know, in a week. I walk to the bus station to do reconnaissance so that I know where the bus station is and I don’t get lost. That’s my reconnaissance. He flies all the way from the United States to Vietnam for like a two week holiday and for him that’s just a a random reconnaissance trip to get the lay of the land, right? So, it’s a whole different world. and he was telling the story and then he talked about he got he he was so excited he had an avocado smoothie and then he he turned to Sue was like yeah and she looked at him like he had done something amazing like whoa you had like you just got this avocado smoothie you know how was it and wow you’re you’re so adventurous and again I’m thinking about that when I was in Sumatra my entire diet was avocado smoothies It was like that was the only thing I would eat and drink day and night. I mean I every time I walked down the street like avocado smoothies everywhere because as a backpacker that’s just what you do. You step outside, you get all your food from the cheapest markets, the cheapest roadside stalls, and then you you just naturally have avocado smoothies. It’s not exotic for someone like me, but it sounded like it was an exotic kind of experience for Mike. So anyway, I will stop babbling. They are Sue and Mike from Phase 2 Travel. If you see them here in Malaysia, say hello for me from Planet Doug. Send them my way. It would be a lot of fun to have a chat with them about all the places they’ve been. Like I said, it sounds like they’ve been all over the world already, and now they’re finally beginning their actual trip around the world. So, yeah, they’ve had the chance to live a pretty interesting life.

One more, maybe two more travel vloggers before I go to pop culture. The first one I talked at I talked about at length in my last BTS video, Florence Ryan, and she’s the woman who was cycling through all of Africa from Cairo to Cape Town. And I focused mainly on her experiences in Ethiopia because one of my biggest experiences in my life was cycling through Ethiopia so I could relate to all her stories. And I talked at length about her videos from Ethiopia coming under quite a bit of negative criticism in the comments because, you know, she just described what happened to her in Ethiopia. And as I’ve talked about at length, I don’t need to repeat it. You know, the experiences with the children there when you’re cycling, the children harass you. They yell at you. They’re shouting all the time. They chase you, throw rocks at you. It can be really annoying. it can be overwhelming. And she talked about that and then she came in for a lot of criticism. It’s like, oh, all you’re just complaining all the time and you have, you know, the children were just friendly and they’re being curious, you know, why don’t you talk to them? You know, giving her all this advice which was based on my experience in Ethiopia. Utter nonsense. All these people giving her suggestions. You should have done this, you should have. None of it made any sense at all. So, I just found that really fascinating. But Florence Ryan has since in her videos, yeah, her videos are old as well. I talked about that. She actually did her trip in Africa, I think 3 years ago, and she’s finally posting the videos now. So yeah, a lot of these are old old videos, but they’re posting them now as if they are happening in real time. You know, being a little coy about it. But anyway, she’s she made she made it through Ethiopia and the newest video that I watched was called Cycling Across Kenya with a stranger. Bad idea. It’s a clickbait title. I hate clickbait titles because in reality they met a local well a woman right now. I can’t remember where she was from. She might have been Kenyan herself, but this is a woman who knows them through their videos. They have friends in common who are cyclists and YouTubers. So, not really a stranger, like someone that she got to know through her YouTube channel, a lovely woman, speaks English perfectly, could be from Kenya, could be somewhere in Africa, I’m not really sure. And then this woman joined them, joined Florence and Ryan, Rob. Florence and Rob for a couple of weeks. you know, she had her own bicycle, got her own bags, and just traveled with her for a couple of weeks through Kenya. So, this whole idea of, oh, traveling with a stranger, is it safe? Oh, am I taking a big risk here? Is it a bat? All of that title is complete nonsense. They they knew this woman. There’s nothing. Anyway, the whole thing was just normal. Just somebody cycling with her for a little while. It wasn’t like she was in some sketchy part of town in the dark and then some random drunk man came up and said, “Hey, you know, I wouldn’t mind traveling with you for a while.” You know, total stranger like and she said, “Yeah, come let’s travel together.” And I mean, it was nothing even remotely like that. So, there was nothing about is it a bad idea? But anyway, that’s just the title of the video. I’m very sensitive to that sort of thing. But anyway, she did cycle with this woman for a couple of weeks in Kenya and it came across much more pleasant than her time in Ethiopia. She did say towards the end of this video she was still suffering anxiety and PTSD from her time in Ethiopia. It was still really affecting her mood. Yeah. really really got to her. Even though Kenya, entering Kenya was pretty hard. The the scenery they went through, the cycling was pretty difficult. But now they’re in a part of Kenya where it’s very green and very lush. People are nice, people are friendly. So, it was a much better experience. But at the end of the video, she did say, “Yeah, she’s really struggling with cycling.” And I can understand that, you know, this cycling day after day after day. She’s not enjoying it. She’s having trouble enjoying it. She wants to quit. And by the end of the video, what she did was put her bike in storage in Nairobi. They basically took like a shuttle bus to Nairobi with their bicycles, loaded them onto the bus, put their bikes in storage, and then she’s going to go to Kilimanjaro and do a hike up and down Kilimanjaro, like get off the bike for a while. So that is those will be her next videos. So kind of makes me sad because I’m kind of interested in their cycling journey and they keep doing things other than cycling. Even in Ethiopia, she I haven’t even watched any of them. She posted three videos where she went to visit I think the Omo Omo people in southern Ethiopia. They’re quite famous there and they have very elaborate piercings and yeah facial decorations and things like that like tribal very very tribal look to them and then people tourists go there to visit the Omo because they’re so exotic looking and so she quit cycling for a while and did this overland trip to visit the Omo I think they’re called Omo or Mo Omo I haven’t even watched those videos I I kind of wanted to see the cycling videos and now she’s He’s doing the same thing in Kenya, hiking up Kilimanjaro. See how that goes. Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say about Florence Ryan.

Last one. The channel is called The Lantern Pepper. And I think this woman is from China. Hainan Hainan Island, I think she said. Is that an island? Hainan Island. That’s where she’s from. Speaks Chinese, speaks English perfectly, and she’s a YouTuber. I haven’t watched any of her other videos, so I don’t know anything about her, but she came to Melaka, and she posted a video about Melaka. So, because of my search history, it popped up in my YouTube feed and I watched it and yeah, it was really kind of fascinating. Again, not really as a travel experience. I’m thinking of it more as a YouTube video because I noticed one person left a comment which was a little bit critical that was saying to her, “Okay, great video, but who are you? Like, what are you all about? What’s your story? Why were you in Melaka?” And then he said, “I I want to know these things because your video essentially is a Melaka tourism advertisement.” like, okay, it’s a good video and I enjoyed watching it, but why did you make a tourism advertisement? Like, what’s your story? I didn’t think that was a very fair comment at all because she put in a huge amount of work into this video. And the opening of the video is a pretty cool summary of the history of Melaka. and she put in a lot of historic drawings and sketching, a lot of historic documents, and then she put it in with special graphics that made it look old-fashioned and shaking. And it it had a really nice quality to it, very professional editing, graphic design. and she ran through the history of the Melaka Strait, its importance in history as a trading route and then Melaka, the city of Melaka right on the Melaka Strait, what is important about it, what is its history and then she dove into that and gave the whole history of the Melaka Strait, Melaka as a city. And then she segued into her experience. She stayed in a big condo, like a condo tower, way out in the countryside near that big performance center that I featured in one of my videos. It’s like the whole area where the land has been reclaimed, and there’s nothing out there other than a a scattering of big towers, condominium towers, and that’s where she stayed. But her whole video was about downtown, like historic Melaka, the UNESCO heritage zone. And I think she only spent one day, which is just like mindblowing because I mean, she’s a very attractive young woman. looks fresh, clean, happy, healthy at the beginning of the video and by the end of the video, she looks just as attractive and clean and beautiful and happy and smiling. Me, you know, I walk down the street to the local shop, buy a cold drink, and I look like crap. I look like I’m I’m the crypt keeper. Like just walking from one block in Melaka, the heat and humidity finishes me off. So if I’m out there for a whole day shooting one of my videos, at the video, beginning of the video, I look normal. By the end of the video, you can see it. I look dead on my feet. You might as well just dig the grave. Pop me in cuz I’m done, you know? I look I look like I’m dead on my feet. one short like a 2-hour walk around Melaka and and I look like I’m I’m ready to cash in my chips. Apparently, she spent an entire day early morning to late at night and she went everywhere, did everything all in one day, and at the end of the day, she looked fresh as a daisy. How in the world she could do that, I have no idea. But again, she’s a professional videographer, I think. So, she was not documenting her day like this is a normal day of a tourist. She didn’t show how she got from her condo to downtown, you know, the Grab ride, how much she paid this, that. It just basically jumps from the condo to a gorgeous shot of one of the classic, beautiful historic buildings of Melaka. And then the whole video is nothing but carefully curated, carefully framed, beautiful shots with a nice camera. I’m sure it’s some sort of a Sony full-frame camera, you know, just beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, historic, atmospheric. Like, she never once aimed her camera at, you know, the 10,000 tourists in tour groups and and all this kind of thing. She never showed the reality of Melaka. She packaged it as a historic, amazing, gorgeous place. And anybody can do that if you take your camera and only aim it at the beautiful buildings. Yeah, you can make Melaka look incredible. The Planet Doug style, of course, is just to grab my GoPro and go, “Hey, hey, Planet Doug here and show everything.” And that’s what Melaka really looks like. She didn’t show herself walking down the street in real Melaka. She would just turn off the camera, go to the next beautiful place, set up the camera on a tripod, get a beautiful video, and that that’s how her video looks. And then she talked to a lot of people like she would find like a craftsman in particular, there’s a guy who was carving a wooden sign by hand and because she can speak Chinese, she went into the shop and then talked to this man and recorded his answers in Chinese and then put subtitles asking him about his craft, how many years he’s been doing this, are his children going to take over the business, you know, interesting, penetrating questions about the work he does, his life, his family. So, that amazing, amazing job. And then she was in a taxi at one point and she interviewed the taxi driver all about his life. And these are things that I wish I would do, but I’m more hesitant and I don’t have the language skills, but she asked the guy, “Okay, how much money do you make per month? How much money does it cost to live? And if you have a family and you know so the inner the taxi driver was very open about this you know if you’re have this kind of a job this is the base salary we don’t make a lot of money here it’s really hard to get by from month to month and I have a family I have two children if I want to pay for my children’s schooling and living expenses and this and that I need this much money and it’s really hard to get by inflation you know so he he gave a lot of numbers of specific ific figures, how much money he makes, how much money he thinks cost, the effect of inflation. So that was very very good YouTube journalism on the part of Lantern Pepper. So yeah, I I thought the the video was a really nice piece of work. A lot of history at the beginning, beautiful cinematography, deep dives, conversations with the local people. And she ended it at the mosque on Melaka Strait. That’s where everybody goes to film the sunset. She went into the mosque, you know, dressed up in the proper attire that you can rent there and took video of the sunset, chatting with some little children, chatting with local people, putting all of that on video. Yeah, I thought it was a a wonderful video. I realize now I never gave the name of the video, but the channel is called The Lantern Pepper and it’s called I Visited Malaysia’s friendliest and most diverse city, Melaka. And you can look at it from two points of view. From one perspective, the video is a bit of a fantasy. It’s showing Melaka in a ideal way. And if you come to Melaka as a tourist, you won’t see that Melaka. Your experience of walking the street will be very very different from that carefully curated historic cinematic vision of the best that Melaka has to offer. Right. But beautiful video, really interesting, really well done by the lantern pepper.

A complete makeover for the final pop culture segment. Another shower, dumped a bunch of cold water on my head, nice dry shirt, and new pillow, too. The pillow behind me tends to get soaked with sweat as well in this hot room. I’ve had the door closed the entire time. There’s I don’t think there’s anybody else staying on this floor right now. All the rooms are empty like I said, but still sound carries in a place like this. And yeah, keep the door closed so I’m not bothering people as little as possible. And one more cup of coffee to wind this up.

And I changed my microphone. I normally up until now I’ve been using this Rode Wireless Go 2, but I’ve been talking for so long and I was using this microphone the other day as well. So the battery was already kind of drained. So then I worry that the battery is going to die in the middle of me babbling and then I won’t notice and I’ll have no audio. But I also have my old set. Like these are the Rode Wireless Go twos. I started off with the original Rode Wireless Go and I still have those. I come Yeah, it’s really nice to have the two sets. This battery dies. I just switch over to my other set. So I have the other Rode underneath my shirt and the receiver plugged in there. Might sound a little bit different than the other one, but audio should be clear enough. So, I don’t have a huge amount to talk about in pop culture. Couple of things. I watched the movie The End of Oak Street, and this is a it’s an interesting movie to talk about. I I saw some advertisements for it online, so I got the gist. Kind of the sci-fi element. I don’t think there I don’t think there’s any mystery. I’m not giving anything away here when I tell you. It’s the story of a typical American suburb, Oak Street, and somehow or other there are suddenly dinosaurs running around everywhere. I don’t think in the trailer they explain what happened. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. But the point is, you basically got a typical American family. Mom, dad, two kids, dog named Starbuck, and they’re living a life, normal American life. And then suddenly there are dinosaurs everywhere, and now they are fighting for their lives. That’s the basic premise. So yeah, it’s designed to appeal to someone like me. I love sci-fi. I love if time travel is involved. I love time travel. Dinosaurs are always fun. And it all it should come down to the tone of the movie. How do they do it? I mean, there’s a ton of the later Jurassic Park movies are terrible, but the first Jurassic Park was amazing. So, you know, having a movie about dinosaurs in real life can be really good or it can be really bad. Depends on what they do with it. So, the subject matter is, yeah, neither here nor there. But I had good feelings about it for two reasons. One is that my friend Daryl from Wander Eats, the YouTube channel Wander Eats, he was in Indonesia at the time and he went to see it in the theater and then he sent me a message. Yeah, I’m going to go see this movie in the theater. I looked it up online just to see some details and it was getting really good reviews at that time and I realized that the the dire the writer and director same guy was David Robert Mitchell and the name didn’t mean anything to me at first but then when I did a search for David Robert Mitchell I found out that he is also the writer and director of It Follows and It Follows was one of my favorite like low-key the sort of independent style horror movies of the last forever. I thought It Follows was done so well. Love the storytelling. Love the characters. Just a fabulous movie. It Follows was like it was made for me. I love that movie so much. And this guy wrote and directed It Follows. Now he made a new movie, The End of Oak Street. Yeah, that that’s a pretty good pedigree. And then Daryl watched it, sent me a message afterward. He didn’t give away the plot or anything, but he said it was amazing. Like really, really, really good. So, I waited and I finally got a copy of it. And I watched it for myself. I think the movie eventually got made because they signed what is her name, the star of it. I had it here. Anne Hathaway. So they got Anne Hathaway to sign on to to star in this movie after she she and her agent I guess read the script. And once she was connected with it, then of course the funding comes in. Everybody gets excited. Once you got your star attached to your script, then everything becomes much easier. And then Ewan McGregor signed on, played her husband, and then the young kids, Maisy Stella, then Christian Convery. It was originally known as Flowervale Street. That was the original name for it, and then they pivoted on the marketing and and changed the name to The End of Oak Street. So, yeah, what to say about it? There’s a lot of different ways to approach this movie because overall, I mean, I have to say that I liked it because as much as I disliked about it, I’m still thinking about it, right? I watched the whole movie and then when it was over the next day I just started re-watching it again because I think I went into the movie with certain expectations based on the trailer and the tone of the trailer. So I had this idea of what kind of movie it was. They set up expectations for me and the fact that he was the director and writer of It Follows that also gave me expectations. So my first viewing I had expectations and the movie didn’t really deliver on those expectations at all. The movie was very different from what I thought it would be like and that may have fed into some negative feelings about it. But the characters and the story and certain plot points that I didn’t quite pick up on and I didn’t quite understand cuz these days I do tend to be multitasking like crazy. I’ll be researching a video, editing a video, uploading a video, and having a movie playing in the background. So, I’m not always fair in my, you know, summary of a movie or of a TV show because I wasn’t like Daryl. I wasn’t in a dark theater giving it my full attention. I was sort of letting it play in the background. That’s not really fair to a movie.

So I missed a few things, some very key details. And it was only later on because I missed a few things, I started thinking about it again. And then I decided to just rewatch the whole movie. And then now that I was re-watching it a second time, I was enjoying it much more because now I knew what kind of movie it was, the tone it was going to set, and some of the slapstick comedy, some of the dumbness of the plot, the dumbness of the story, how dumb the characters were. That kind of I let it go this time cuz now I was expecting it to be that way. And I guess I’m I’m a little bit more interested in hardcore storytelling, which is what It Follows is exactly. So if I’m going to watch a movie about people trying to survive in a world filled with dinosaurs, my brain goes into survivalist mode. What would I do if suddenly there were dinosaurs everywhere? You know, how would I behave? What would my what would my actions be? And I get a little bit frustrated when in a movie the characters don’t do any of those things. And in fact, they do the dumbest things. They talk about the dumbest things. They worry about irrelevant things. It was like it was pretty clear for this family that the old world was gone. Completely gone. So maybe in your real life, you’re having a fight between a husband and wife. They’re arguing about something in real life, you know, money problems, something like that. And suddenly it’s post-apocalyptic. The world is gone. You’re living in a world with nothing but dinosaurs. Well, your perspective has changed, right? It should change. You shouldn’t still be worrying about the things you were worrying about. The things you were arguing about before, they don’t matter anymore. The second you step outside, you’re being torn to pieces by a dinosaur. Survival is the most important thing right now. And whether or not he did the dishes last week or whatever silly household thing you’re arguing about, that doesn’t matter anymore. So, I did get a little bit impatient with these characters taking so long to adjust to the new reality. And then in terms of survival, the dumb things they did that make no sense at all. The decisions they made and then things that happened in the movie just made no sense at all. It was just like slapstick comedy and really, really dumb. But once I accept, okay, that is the kind of movie we’re talking about. You’re not supposed to take this movie seriously. Just go along for the ride. And once I made up my mind to do that, I watched it a second time and I enjoyed it much much more. And in terms of my thoughts, there’s a couple of things in particular I want to talk about, but these are spoilers. So, if you haven’t watched The End of Oak Street, skip ahead to the next pop culture item. Don’t listen to me talk about it. If you’ve seen the movie or you’re never going to watch the movie and you don’t care, keep listening and I’ll talk about these. So, that’s this is your final warning. I’m going to be spoiling the movie now.

So in this movie, what happens is with vague references to Carl Sagan, wormholes, giant solar flares on the sun, the result is there’s a giant sphere that forms, a bright sphere, and somehow this sphere is like a wormhole. The sphere goes over the entire neighborhood and the whole neighborhood of Oak Street gets transported back in time hundreds of millions of years or many, many millions of years. They don’t specify exactly how long ago it was. And then that piece of land from in the past comes into the future. And that’s very key to my reaction to the movie. So essentially you’ve got a American dead-end street, a suburb, Oak Street, and then suddenly there’s a bright light and they’re living back in the time of the dinosaurs. So that’s basically the setup. So now, of course, everything is gone. There’s no water running, there’s no electricity, there’s no internet, there’s nothing. The world as you knew it has disappeared. You’re in your house. the houses were moved and outside the house are, you know, deadly dinosaurs of all variety. And that that’s the setup for the movie. And then I mean some of the dumb things that happen really got me going where the dog runs away, breaks free and runs away and the boy in the family I think the character was written to be 5 years old but they actually cast a teenager. So a lot of the things this kid does I think it was supposed to be normal for a 5-year-old but a teenager wouldn’t be that dumb. It’s like these are this is how a a kid a tiny child would behave. But anyway, this teenage boy, he goes out in the middle of the night. He sees the dog and the dog runs away because a dinosaur is chasing it. And then what what he does is climb out his bedroom window, climb down the outside of the house and go running off into the darkness to find his dog, which is like no sane human being would ever do that. I kept thinking, well, call out the dog’s name for Pete’s sake. You know, just go to the door, Starbuck, Starbuck. And the dog will run to the door and comes in the house. But instead of doing that, he like he never even calls out the dog’s name, never calls to it. He just goes outside and his weapon is like a child’s bow and arrow that you get at the dollar store. And then there are moments in the film, you know, where he’s shooting these little arrows at like an Allosaurus. I think everybody wants to call it a T-Rex, but I think in fact it was like an Allosaurus, which is like a bigger T-Rex, maybe. Anyway, giant dinosaur weighs 50 tons, big teeth, and he’s down there with his little, you know, little bow and arrow. I don’t know. The whole thing was silly. And I mean, you could tear the movie to pieces when it comes to realism. I guess that’s kind of a cheap way of looking at the movie, and I shouldn’t do that. But there’s definitely a scene where Anne Hathaway’s character is like one second away from being eaten by the Allosaurus, this massive multi multi-ton beast. And then the husband, Ewan McGregor, the hero, he shows up with a sledgehammer and he hits I think he hits the tail with a sledgehammer. So the Allosaurus turns to him and you and McGregor takes a swing with his sledgehammer and he knocks the dinosaur out cold, hits it on the head and like Rocky knocking out knocking out his opponent, the the dinosaur is unconscious. And I mean, I almost turned off the movie at that point, is okay, I’m done. I’m done. I can go a little way with the slapstick, with the with the silliness, but hitting a dinosaur of that size with a sledgehammer, it’s just bouncing off him. Nothing is going to happen. And somehow we’re supposed to believe that he knocked it unconscious. It It was just the silliest thing I’d ever seen. So, there were a lot of things like that in the movie that kind of threw me out of the story. I just thought they they were so dumb. I could see what they were going for, but I I couldn’t I couldn’t go with them in that direction. And crucial to the point I’m about to make is that right after he knocks the Allosaurus unconscious, he turns his back on the dinosaur and then the dinosaur is unconscious, but only for a few seconds. So, it actually wakes up, grabs Ewan McGregor, and then eats him. Basically, rips his leg off. He’s bleeding out because he’s missing a leg. It was pretty brutal. And then the Allosaurus just goes like one big chomp. And Ewan McGregor is dead. And I thought, whoa, that’s a surprise. Because you don’t generally expect light-hearted movies to kill off the main characters. like where’s the happy ending going to come from now? So, I was like, whoa, okay, that’s a little bit of the the seriousness of It Follows. I like that. But then I kind of knew because we’re dealing with time travel. Okay, he’s coming back. There’s going to be some handwavy time travel mechanism that he’s still going to be alive at the end of the movie. You knew that was coming. So what they end up doing is they see another one of these spheres, a smaller one. It keeps appearing and disappearing, appearing, disappearing, and they get this idea that hm, we could jump into it and maybe it will take us back to our time. Of course, there is no reason to believe this at all. They have no idea what’s going to happen if they jump into one of these spheres. They’re just guessing that maybe it’s a time portal. We jump into it. Maybe we’ll end up right back in our world, back in our neighborhood, back in our time. So, they take the chance and lo and behold, after some adventures and mistakes and problems, they all jump into the sphere and then Anne Hathaway, the son, the daughter, and another girl from another family, they all go back to the future. And luckily, they’re back in their neighborhood, but they’re not only back in their neighborhood, they are just outside of where the sphere appeared. So, they’re out of the danger zone and it is like 20 minutes by the clock before the time travel takes place, which is pretty darn lucky in terms of the plot. It It makes no sense at all. There’s no reason why this would happen, but it’s very convenient for the plot. And this is something I did not pick up on on my first viewing. Like, I thought about it, but then I kind of handwaved it away because now that Anne Hathaway and the kids are back and it is before the time travel happens, what she does, very clever of her, she makes a phone call and orders a pizza. And the reason she orders a pizza is because her husband is working as a pizza delivery guy, right? So this is before time travel. So as far as she knows, her husband is still here. There’s a copy of her husband at the house. And what she wants to do is get him to come out of the house, deliver a pizza out here, and then when the bubble sends the whole neighborhood back in time, he won’t go back in time. So, he won’t go back in time. He won’t be killed and he’ll still be alive in the present. So, that’s how they get their happy ending. And I remember thinking at the time, huh, okay, that that’s kind of clever. Kind of saw it coming, but it was also kind of clever. But then you realize that, well, if there is a copy of her husband there, there is also a copy of her and her children and the dog. But she only saved her husband, which is really, really dark. I don’t know if the movie intended people to realize this, but Anne Hathaway, who’s the the hero of the story, who’s supposed to be the good person. Essentially, what she does when she goes back to the future, she steals her husband from herself and then allows the other copy of herself, her other children and her dogs. She sacrifices them, lets them go back in time. And now they’re going back in time without the husband and father cuz he was saved. So they are going back alone to a much more dangerous place because they don’t even have the help of the husband and father. So they’re all going to die. So I was thinking about that. I says, “Man, that is dark that she made that choice. She basically condemned herself and her family to death so that she could get her husband back. And I was like, man, that that is so so dark. And I was thinking, I mean, she could have maybe called the house and said to them, you know, listen, you’re not going to believe my story, but I’m you and I went back in time and I need you to come out of the house and like come up with some way to convince her whole family to leave the house and exit the danger zone. And I was kind of handwaving it away, thinking, “Yeah, maybe she thought about it, but how would you do it? Nobody, they’re not going to believe you. And the the way she thought of was, well, I can’t tell the truth, so I will trick my husband into coming out here by ordering a pizza. So, she managed to save her husband, and yet she condemned her family to death in the past to be eaten by dinosaurs. I don’t know. And that got me thinking that this was supposed to be a happy ending. She got her husband backed back back, right? But when you think about it, at the time before the family went back in time, they were having a lot of trouble as a married couple. They were almost certainly going to get a divorce. They had big marital problems. They were fighting all the time. They were on their way to a divorce. But when they got sent back in time, Anne Hathaway had a transformation because she was fighting for her life with her family. Her attitude changed. Her values changed. She saw what was really important in life. What they were fighting about were small things, unimportant things. So she underwent a life-altering transformation. So she came back to the future. She’s a completely different person now, ready to live with her husband happily. But this husband is not the one who went back in time and went through this transformation. He died. He got eaten by an Allosaurus. This husband never went back in time. He never changed. So, he’s still the same person. So, how are they going to have a happy marriage? He didn’t have this experience. And as far as he’s concerned, this isn’t his wife. His wife, he left her back at the house. She went back in time along with her with his children and and they all died a 100 million years ago in the past. This woman Anne Hathaway is a copy, like a copy of his wife, but it isn’t really his wife. So, how in the world is he going to suddenly, oh, here you are. She tells him the story. Oh, we went back in time to the age of the dinosaurs. You died in the past. We managed to figure out how to return to the future and now I saved you. So, let’s hug and kiss and then be a happy family. Ewan McGregor, I don’t think he’s going to be down for that. So, it was a very interesting little twist at the end of the movie that I really appreciated and I wish the whole movie had been that dark and that realistic. And I mentioned that they also saved a teenage girl from a different family. She came back to the future with them and they managed to save her family, get her family, well she did. The teenage girl ran to her house, got her family and her other self, warned them of the danger, convinced them to leave the danger zone. So at the very end of the movie, we see that family and there are two copies of the same girl because of the time travel. The one who went back in the past came back to the future. So now there is two daughters because of the time travel. So they confirmed that when people return to the future, it actually makes a copy of that person. So that confirms there was a copy of Anne Hathaway, a copy of the children, a copy of the dog. So I really like that. And because the land switched places, so land from modern time, I think it was set in the 80s, 1982. So this big chunk of land from 1982 went back to the past. But that means the land from the dinosaur time came to the future. So basically you had land with humans on it going in the past but this land that came to the future had dinosaurs on it. So even in 1982 suddenly there was a whole bunch of dinosaurs in 1982 running around this neighborhood eating people. So you had people being eaten in the past, people being eaten in the future. and it kind of delivered on the promise of one of the Jurassic Park sequels. I remember they they shot a sequel where the dinosaurs escaped and in the end of the movie they promised looking in the future that now we’re going to see a world where humans and dinosaurs have to learn to coexist and live side by side. That was going to be what the next movie was going to be about and it was going to be very very exciting. But then they never shot that. They never they at the beginning of the next movie they had some news reel a little bit about a dinosaur here and they killed it and a dinosaur here and they killed it and they just abandoned that story line. So we never really got to experience humans and dinosaurs coexisting. But here in The End of Oak Street, at the very end of the movie, you just get this glimpse of a typical American suburb in 1982 and now there are dinosaurs running around all over the place. Not a lot of them, only as many dinosaurs were standing on that patch of ground that switched places. And I I thought that was very very clever as well. That whole idea is a lot of fun. And yeah, I mean, if you accept the movie as silly and goofy, slapstick, just having fun with the genre, I think it’s okay. It could be better. I would have preferred the darker version that I was expecting. I think the trailer makes it seem like a very dark movie, but in reality, it was far more light-hearted. They played fast and loose with logic. And in the movie itself, the main characters spent way too much time just sitting around bickering with each other and talking about things that didn’t matter anymore. That that really annoyed me. There was a there was one moment where well I guess I’m thinking about what I would do in that situation. I mean, there was a scene early on where they’ve just they’ve realized there’s dinosaurs everywhere and they’re boarding up the windows in the house, but now they’re all just sitting on the floor having a conversation and they’re talking about what’s happening and arguing a little bit. It’s kind of a philosophical discussion about, you know, God and has God abandoned us? Are we going to die here? Do you believe in God? I do, I don’t. You know, they’re having this intense family discussion and it’s kind of an argument. And the whole time they’re sitting there having this discussion, I’m thinking, if I were in their position, I’m looking out the window. I mean, my eye would be glued on the window just watching the outside world nonstop. Right? You’ve gone back in time to the age of the dinosaurs. Okay, you’re in danger. Things are looking pretty grim. You’re probably going to die. But at the same time, you know, I I would be s, you know, maybe I’m talking with the members of my family, but I’m not sitting in the middle of the floor. I’m sitting in a chair right by the window and I’m looking out the window and I got my binoculars. Every time a dinosaur goes by, you know, I’m going to watch it, watch what it does. And oh, look at that. That’s a Stegosaurus. There’s a pterodactyl. There’s is that a you know I I saw that one in Jurassic Park. You know is that that one from Jurassic Park you know I would be watching out the window constantly just to see what the dinosaurs are doing out there getting a glimpse of them walking up and down the road fighting each other doing whatever it is dinosaurs do. But these people seemed like they were completely uninterested in anything to do with the dinosaurs. The husband, Ewan McGregor, he was out in the garage getting more tools and he pulled out a flask of whiskey, you know, I guess he had a bottle of whiskey hidden back there and he’s like go, you know, had a had a shot of whiskey and then he went back to boarding up and then his wife was like, “Do I smell whiskey? Are you drinking?” And then it gives him this big lecture about, “Oh, you shouldn’t be drinking. You know, don’t you?” And I’m like, “Lady, let it go.” You know, we’re probably going to live for 5 minutes. There are tin there are dinosaurs trying to break into our house and eat us. I think I can have a shot of whiskey. If any time in my entire life called for a shot of whiskey, it’s this time. And the fact that you smelled alcohol on my breath, well, don’t give me a hard time about it. Anyway, I I thought that scene and Hathaway’s character for me, she didn’t come across very well. Maybe a lot of female characters are portrayed in in modern Hollywood scripts this way. I thought they did her kind of a disservice that she was came across like a little bit of a nag, like constantly criticizing, nagging her husband. And I kept waiting for him to stand up for himself. But like maybe in the past he had a drinking problem. So taking a shot of whiskey was like a sign of something a bigger problem. But again at the same time I think they had bigger fish to fry and her giving him such a severe lecture about taking a little shot of whiskey out in the garage. you know, I I think he deserved a shot of whiskey at at about, you know, anyway, that that struck me as kind of funny that she would be so worried about that at that time. Her priorities seemed to be a little bit misplaced. I said it wouldn’t be fair to like nitpick this movie with logic and stuff like that, but oh man, it’s it’s really hard not to. There was one funny scene like earlier on they established that this huge snake I mean not like a modern snake we are talking dinosaur weird looking white creature that the size of a car like the the thickness of a car and such a length the thing probably weighed 15 tons. It’s a massive animal. So, we have this scene later in the movie where the house, they’re in their house. All the characters are in the house. They’re all separated. Everyone is in a different room doing something different. I think the boy was brushing his teeth in the bathroom. The daughter, I think she had headphones on, like listening to music in her bedroom. Who knows what Anne Hathaway was doing. Maybe she was in the kitchen. Ewan McGregor, each of them was in a separate room doing something and then this massive animal finds an open window in the house and it crawls through the window and it does not make a sound. Nothing. Whisper quiet. This massive creature far bigger than any snake you can ever imagine. I’m not talking about, you know, imagine a python from today. It’s more like imagine a brontosaurus but long and long and yeah a long brontosaurus. I mean a huge animal and it’s crawling through the window and it fills the entire house. I mean, it’s so big and it’s so long that it goes through the window all the way down this like up upper floor all the way down the stairs into the living room around the wall coming back up the another set of stairs or going down a hallway. And while it’s going down the hallway, its body is still coming through the window. So, it has filled the entire house. This massive animal is going by every open. All the rooms, the doors are open and yet nobody in the house notices it. It never makes a sound. Nothing at all. Nobody hears it. Nobody sees it until finally, you know, the snake comes into the kitchen. Yeah. Anne Hathaway is in the kitchen. She’s doing something on the refrigerator and then this massive animal rears up, opens its mouth with, you know, massive teeth. And then it finally goes and she turns, screams, everybody turns and they see that their entire house is nothing but snake. I mean, it fills every room and every doorway. I mean, this animal is so big. I’m Yeah, I’m I can tell you with some certainty the floor couldn’t even support it. Like, it’s trying to go through the window. It would just crush the entire wall. the weight of this animal would the entire floor that it was on, the whole house would just collapse under the weight of this thing. Everything would be creaking and groaning and snapping and the whole house would collapse. And yet it managed to sneak through the entire house and turn around and all four characters are in the house and not one of them hears it, sees it, even notices it. It was pretty funny. And if you can accept that as a funny scene, then yeah, then then you can enjoy the movie. But that’s the kind of ridiculous logic you have to put up with, you know, when you watch it. I think that’s it. I think that is it for The End of Oak Street. Planet Doug recommended. I mean, overall, just for fun, sure, get a copy, throw it on, enjoy the goofiness. I mean, Anne Hathaway, she’s good. I don’t know, there’s something about her. She’s a real actress. I mean, she comes across the screen. Ewan McGregor as well. I totally believed these two characters were real. I never thought they were acting. The kids were fine. They were also good actors. The situations they were in, the things that happened were just utter looney tunes. Made no sense at all. But you really were there in the moment with them. So the I think the the acting and Hathaway’s performance in particular still carried me along through the movie. So yeah, you know, a half-hearted sort of thumbs up. It’s not a great movie by any means, but yeah, it’s kind of a lot of fun.

One last item for this behind-the-scenes video and one more pop culture roundup item. The TV show Lanterns. I don’t think I’ve talked about it before. I am currently watching it. It’s a new show that is being released right now. I don’t know how many episodes there are this season and I don’t know how many episodes have been released so far, but it does feel like we’re getting towards the end of season 1. I’m in the middle of the latest episode right now. Let me pop it up on my tablet and maybe I can tell you the episode number that I’m on. So, I’m on episode six. Maybe there’s eight in total.

Yeah. I mean, the fact that I’m talking about it means there’s something interesting about it. So, there’s that. In terms of the creative team, the showrunner is Chris Mundy and he has a history with the shows Ozark and True Detective and Night Country. And that’s that’s a good resume to have. And I did read that they were aiming for a tone of the Green Lantern, but like a dark mystery to be solved. So, they were aiming for Green Lantern, but in the style of True Detective, and I’m I’m here for that. But in terms of the writers, there’s one name that I absolutely dread and I think some of the things in the show that I don’t like it all because of this guy. This is my nemesis in life. And you can tell him from me that I said so. Damon Lindelof. Every time I see that name, I recoil in horror. He’s a writer, very famous, very popular writer. And he he’s been involved in things like Lost. I think he was the main brain. Lost was his brainchild. And if you think about the story Lost, where hundreds of crazy things happen and then when you get to the end of the show, you find out none of those things are explained. None of them meant anything. None of them had any significance. It was just a bunch of crazy stuff. That’s Damon Lindelof. That’s what he’s all about from what I’ve seen. and he’s ruined so many movies and shows for me. The Lindelof effect is so severe drives me crazy because when something really weird and strange happens in a show, you have to pay it off. You can’t just throw in a bunch of weird things because you think it looks cool. I’m not into that. I like story. And if you’re going to show me something that’s just totally bizarre, some crazy monster, whatever, there has to be a reason for it to be in the show, and by the time we get to the end of it, you have to explain it. Everything you insert has to be paid off at some point in the story. And that’s not Damon Lindelof’s style. He gets hired, I think, just to go nuts, just to take an existing script and then fill it with a bunch of crap. just as much weirdness, stupid imagery, creatures, anything you can think of. He just like jams it in all over the place and then none of it means anything. None of it gets paid off. Nothing makes any sense. That’s Damon Lindelof. Anyway, he is involved in Lanterns. Luckily, so far I don’t see a huge amount of the Lindelof effect. So maybe he kept his worst instincts under control this time. There are definitely some things in the show. As soon as I saw his name, it all made sense to me. Like, okay, that’s why that’s in the show. Now I get it. That’s Lindelof. I can pick them out. That’s Lindelof. That’s Lindelof. Things that are just weird and don’t really fit in and don’t make a lot of sense. Okay, that’s that’s a Lindelof. I can pick them out, but they’re not interfering too much with the story. If I have a problem with the story, it would be that, and I I even hate saying this because my usual attitude is the opposite because I love a slow burn. I love a show that takes its time, that operates in different time periods, and you have to figure out what’s going on. The classic example of that is the German show Dark. I mean, it it is the gold standard for a incredibly complex plot that you really have to work hard to understand. And as you go through episode after episode, a lot of what you’re seeing, you don’t know what’s going on yet, but by the time you get to the end of Dark, everything ties together. Everything gets explained. So that that’s Dark. So, and I love Dark. So, I can watch episode after episode after episode not understanding yet what is going on. I’m fine with that. I like that. I think it’s a great way of telling a story as long as they, you know, wind it up nicely at the end. But there’s something about Lanterns where they’re doing this where you don’t really know what’s going on. They keep hinting at and referring to something big that happened at the end of the story kind of like it already happened in some of the timelines. But you don’t know what it is. But they’ve been keeping this up for so long. I’m just getting frustrated with it. It just it they’re not doing it very well. I love the tone of the show. The main character who plays the main Green Lantern. Let’s let’s look for his name. Kyle Chandler. Very well-known actor. He plays the main Green Lantern and he plays the older Green Lantern who’s kind of tired by this point. Very kind of worn out, world-weary kind of Green Lantern. He’s not your classic superhero. Young and eager and clean-cut wearing his Green Lantern suit. He comes across more as an an old man who’s h just can’t take it anymore. But he’s great. I love Kyle Chandler. He’s a great actor. I love everything he does. So, he plays the old Green Lantern and then Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, who is kind of the young and up-and-coming Green Lantern. And both of them are good, but I do have the feeling that if you don’t know the Green Lantern lore, like I to I don’t know Green Lantern. I’ve read some comic books when I was a kid. Green Lantern, this I’ve watched the Green Lantern movies, so I I have a feel for it, but I don’t know who John Stewart is. And they have a real history, John Stewart and Hal Jordan. I think you have to know their history from the comic books to really know what’s going on here. There’s like a lot of weird attitude between these two and the lore involving the guardians. I guess they’re called these godlike beings that create the Green Lanterns and do this and do that. There’s a lot of lore and I don’t know any of it and you have to kind of piece it together, which again I don’t mind that much, but I was just saying that I love the tone of it. True Detective. I was reading about the production history and it said that originally it was meant to be a space opera spectacle, maybe like Guardians of the Galaxy sort of thing. But then James Gunn and Peter Safran took over DC Studios. They scrapped that concept and then they decided to rebrand it as a grounded True Detective style mystery set on Earth. I love that. I love superhero stories that are grounded. You know, the whole Marvel the the Avengers story lines. I’m not really into those cuz they’re too big. You know, the universe is at risk every time. And you can’t keep track of all the characters. And when you get all the characters together, their superpowers don’t make sense anymore. The things that one can do and the other can do and why they don’t just ma mix and match powers. You know, the classic example, I I I’ve got such a logical brain. I mean, I I can never stop thinking about it that in the modern Avengers, Tony Stark builds the Iron Man suit, but he can build hundreds of them. So, every one of the Avengers could have their own Iron Man suit. So, you’ve got somebody like Black Widow. All she can do is a little bit of haha judo stuff and she’s very smart. You know, she’s a spy, but she doesn’t have any superpowers. And they go into all of these battles where she could be killed very, very easily. And I’m thinking, Tony, dude, give her one of your suits. I mean, you know, she’s a super she’s got reflexes and battle tactics. Well, give her an iron iron woman’s suit and she can have all the blasters and the missiles and the anti-tank weapons and if she gets hits by hits by a bullet, it bounces off. So, it doesn’t make any sense to me that in any battle Black Widow does not have an Iron Man suit or even you think about the new version of Spider-Man. I love the very first Spider-Man movie because only he can be Spider-Man because he was bit by the radioactive spider. His DNA changed and he shoots webbing out of his wrist and only he can do it. But the modern, you know, the Spider-Man, the later movies, it’s just a little gizmo that he invents. Peter Parker invents the web shooter and the web fluid and he can invent it because he’s like a super genius. Okay. But if he can have this incredibly powerful weapon, web shooters again, Black Widow, give her a pair. So when she goes into the battle, you know, shoo, she’s nabbing the bad guys with webbing. Why not? So anyway, it makes no sense to me these giant ensembles. So, I like to have Spider-Man by himself, the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man fighting in his neighborhood with down-to-earth threats. I love those stories better. So, the fact that they took Green Lantern, which is some kind of like a go cosmic uni, you know, going around the galaxy kind of adventures, but they put him in a True Detective story in a small American town that I love. So, I love the tone. I love the mystery. I love the acting. I’m into the lore. There’s just something about the plotting and the story that it isn’t really working for me. In this case, the slow burn, the slow reveal. I’m like, I I think you can just lay it out for us. Like, maybe in this episode, episode 6, finally going to learn what happened. like what is all the drama about? But yeah, a lot of the things, like I said, it’s got that Lindelof feeling to it. I’m thinking back over what I’ve seen up to now, and there’s a lot of weird things in the episodes. Yeah. Okay, that’s Lindelof and Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But the overall story, the plotline, it feels like they didn’t have to be so fancy with it. We could know from the beginning what’s going on. Like here in episode 6, we’re still in this small town and everybody hates the Green Lantern. Again, I’m not giving anything away here because everybody hates the Green Lantern from the very beginning of the first episode. And everybody hates him and there’s this thing where something terrible happened and people died and it’s all Green Lantern’s fault. And I’ve been hearing about this and hearing about it and hearing about it and hearing about it and we still don’t even know what it was. May maybe we did see it already and that’s what they’re talking about or some other terrible thing happened and we haven’t found out about it yet. Anyway, it feels like it’s being a little bit too clever for its own good. But that that’s my one criticism of it. But other than that now I love the characters. Enjoying the story. Enjoying the tone. So, Lanterns, thumbs up from Planet Doug.

So, that is it. At long last, I again, I had no intentions of talking this long. I really was going to just knock this thing out and hit the topics I wanted to talk about, but I I guess I was in the mood to talk. And if you were in the mood to listen and you had this podcast just playing in the background, keeping you company with some of my rambling and some babbling, well then we make a good team. And again, kind of apologizing for how long I’ve been talking. You know, any section that you don’t are not interested in or I’m going on too long, there’s always the skip button. I’m putting in chapter titles. You can just skip ahead. And of course, eventually there will be a transcript on the Planet Doug Patreon and you can just scan what I said like what did what was Doug talking about things like that. So there you are. There is my apology for talking so long once again. All right, that’s it. Shutting down for now. See you in the next video.