Welcome to the Virtual Expats Podcast, where we investigate the question of how does where we live affect what we do online. Technically, we are on an interview hiatus right now until the beginning of March, but I could not resist putting out an extra episode in celebration of Podbean, our amazing, wonderful hosting site, actually picking us as the podcast of the week. Thank you, Podbean! If anybody, if any of you are thinking of starting a podcast, please do go over to podbean.com. I seriously have not had this good an experience with a company in ages. They are absolutely, positively fantastic. Let's get to it. So just a quick reminder that Virtual Expats is uh branching off into a podtube, which is part podcast, what you're listening to right now, and part YouTube channel, and that'll be in the show notes. In the YouTube channel, I'm delving into a little more of the personal effects of the virtualness on my own expat life. And in this podcast, we're delving into other people's experiences as they move around and what that does to their online presence. Today I'm super excited to share with you a conversation I had with Greg of the Bangkok Podcast. The Bangkok podcast is hosted by Greg and his co-host Ed Canuze, and they really delve into much more than you would ever think about a location expat podcast being. Without further ado, let's listen to Greg on the interesting trajectory his life, both on and offline, take as he moved out of his home country, Canada. Thank you so much, Greg, for joining us on Virtual Expat today.
SPEAKER_05Happy to be here. Thanks for asking me.
SPEAKER_02Can you do a quick introduction about yourself for our listeners?
SPEAKER_05Sure. Starts when I was born. No. I'll keep I'll keep it simple. My name is Greg, I'm a Canadian. I came to Bangkok, uh, Thailand when I was 26 in 2001. That was for four months with a buddy of mine. It was all his idea, actually. We came over here and we were planning on traveling around, going to the beaches, having some fun, whooping it up a little bit. And then he went home after 12 days, and I was just kind of like, well, the hell with you, I'm gonna stay. Bombed around until I ran out of money, and then I thought, geez, I better get a job. And I got a job, and then 17 years later, married with a little kid and a condo and a job that I quite like, and I have no plans to go anywhere else.
SPEAKER_0217 years. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_05I can't believe I was 26 when I think how old I was when I came over here. I was a young punk, I was a kid.
SPEAKER_02And I was just talking about this yesterday with someone when we're like, man, I was so restless in my 20s, and I thought I had to do everything within like a year. There was just so much momentum, and I was just so frustrated that everything wasn't happening all at once, and now I never had that.
SPEAKER_05I think it's one of my great drawbacks is that I've never been very aggressive or ambitious. I've just sort of been like, yeah, whatever, whatever happens, you know, all you can do with roll with it. I'm like, I'm like spicoli from fast times that reach my high. Except I don't smoke weed, which would probably make everything better. I'm just like, yeah, man, whatever, just roll with the punches, yo. And I've done pretty well so far. That being said, I'm still broke. I have a five-year-old car.
SPEAKER_02So what we we generally do on this podcast is we kind of map out your geographicalness and your virtualness and kind of see if one affected the other. When would you consider the beginning of your online presence? When you started having kind of like, hey, this is virtual Greg existence online.
SPEAKER_05I have kind of a weird, not for kids story about that. I went to film school and uh I was taking a film course in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. And this was about 1995 or early 1996. Yeah, I was living with a friend of mine who was a little bit older than me, and he had a computer, and we used to go on the IRC chat boards at night, and just it was all text-based. And you would just sort of join this chat room, and then the list of people who were there would come up and we would start chatting with people. It was so cool and interesting and new because it was a completely virtual experience. At that time, it we would still say things like, Let's go surf and uh let's go to cyberspace, you know.
SPEAKER_02Things that are completely I don't know if I want to ask this question, but what's IRC?
SPEAKER_05IRC means internet relay chat.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay. The way you prefaced that, I was like expecting some sort of really weird virtual setup there. Okay.
SPEAKER_05It was a computer with an orange text screen and a keyboard one piece. I and I started to meet these people and uh I started to get to know this one girl, and she invited me out out to uh to a movie one night. I remember we went and saw pulp fiction. It was a blind date basically, and um this girl was like, I'm wearing a purple coat and I have long blonde hair and I'm tall, and I'm like, Oh wow, this sounds interesting. And I went to the mall and she was a lovely girl, but tall was a bit of an understatement. I'm six two, and she was about six five and probably twice as heavy as me. I was like, Oh, hey, nice to meet you. And it was just the first time that my expectations smashed up against reality. But anyway, we went to see the movie, and then afterwards she invited me to an orgy.
SPEAKER_02Oh, that same evening?
SPEAKER_05No, not the same evening, thank you. She's like, oh, me and my friends getting together like next week, and we'll sometimes we get drunk and we get naked, and you're welcome to come. And I was like, I'll think about it. And uh, don't think we ever talked after that, but thankfully it didn't turn me off the internet.
SPEAKER_02Your first fat uh room experience was very different than mine.
SPEAKER_05Sadly, nothing of the same excitement level has ever happened to me since online.
SPEAKER_02Do you remember what your handle was for that?
SPEAKER_05Uh yes, it was Sir Greg, S-I-R-G-R-E-G, because that was my nickname all through school. It's a long, stupid story, but I wrote it on a test one time and the teachers started calling me Sir Greg to be sarcastic.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And stuck. And by the time I got to high school, everyone called me Sir Greg. And that was that was my nickname.
SPEAKER_02That's a pretty cool nickname to have. Pretty respectful.
SPEAKER_05Everyone who knew me was like, this guy, Sir.
SPEAKER_02Okay, how did they say Sir Greg?
SPEAKER_05Sir Greg.
SPEAKER_02That's not sarcastic.
SPEAKER_05I guess no. Sarcastic, maybe.
SPEAKER_02Sarcastic. Oh fair play. So you got on the chat rooms, and then there's still debate on if email really counts in this timeline that I'm creating because it it's more of a private existence. So let's stick to the stuff that's most to most people. I'm intentionally using that word considering a last story. So, what was your next online experience?
SPEAKER_05I mean, we continued going into cyberspace and surfing, and we used to go to internet cafes, you know, and this was back when Friends was the number one show on TV. So going to coffee shops was extremely hip. It never really stopped. It just sort of morphed. And then afterwards, I went back to college to film school. It just sort of slowly started becoming a bigger and bigger and bigger part of how things evolved. And it sort of the internet's footprint continued to grow and spread and move into your life sort of imperceptibly and slowly. And it was a really interesting/slash awful time to go to film school, especially, because this was 1996, 97. It was just at the time that digital technology was becoming easy enough to use and affordable enough to buy for most schools and things like that, that it was completely changing the industry that I was training to work in. It was a two-year course, it was a technical school. First year, we learned how to edit films and things like that. And we were literally cutting with razor blades and taping how they've been doing it since the advent of the technology in the late 1800s. And the year after that, year two, they bought an Avid, a digital nonlinear editing system with 32 gigabytes of storage. And we were like, we'll never need any more storage. And so it was a completely different feel set. Everything was digital. And we used to have with my professor and my my fellow students, we used to have raging disagreements and arguments, not serious, but debates about how far digital technology would displace traditional technology that we were all used to. And I remember the one of them being my teacher, Phil. He was absolutely sure that digital technology would never be able to be used in film projection in a theater, because he said the picture's not clear enough, the light bulbs aren't powerful enough, it doesn't have the throw to get from the back of the room to the front, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And some people were like, no, no, you don't understand the way it's evolving, you know, and back and forth and back and forth. And of course, now almost every movie theater is digital. And this is something I think about when I hear someone say, like, oh, X technology will never be able to do this. And I just think, well, you know, that's what they said about a lot of things.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. It's more a matter of when than never.
SPEAKER_05Exactly, yeah. Yeah. So the internet just sort of became slowly more and more and more a part of things. And, you know, a few years after I had graduated from film school, digital was sort of the standard. And I have more technology on my iPhone here than I had access to in my entire two years of film school.
SPEAKER_02Oh, for sure, for sure. Let's slow down a sec. When you were in film school, what things were you doing online? Where was Sir Greg virtually at that time?
SPEAKER_05The curriculum that I was in didn't have an online component. It was more the digital part of things and how that was changing things. So it wasn't part of the curriculum I was doing, but I did enjoy being in a school that was considered like a technical college. So I have another sort of slightly risque story. I remember our building got wired up for the internet. Fantastic. You know, you get an educational institution, they have fast internet. And so we got, you know, like probably 60, 80, 100 computers in these rooms hooked up to the internet at blazing fast speeds, which looking back was probably like a 512 modem or something like that. So I used to go up there after classes and just enjoy open up Netscape and be like, this is amazing. Like there's so much information online. And of course, because you know, I'm 20, whatever I was, 22, 24. And of course, I'm like, I wonder if there's porn on the internet. And of course, it was just like unlimited porn. And I remember, I remember one time I was ch you know, I was I was seeing what was out there and what was available and what was going on. And of course, there's little postage stamp thumbnail videos of porno movies and stuff, and this was incredible, you know, like wow, this stuff is coming over the internet. And I was in a room and there was no one in the room, and I took the back row computer in the corner, of course, and it was a partitioned room with one of the like plastic accordion curtains.
SPEAKER_03Oh gosh, yeah.
SPEAKER_05So I'm sitting there in the back and Netscape's open, and I got all these windows open, and I'm like looking at this. Oh, what's that? Oh wow, that's interesting. And then I hear this like click click click click click click click click. And a teacher next door had opened the curtain and was looking in, and he's like, Hi, what are you doing? And at the time I had dozens of pop-up windows, you know, like Britney Spears, Amy.
SPEAKER_02I shouldn't be doing right now.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, just really crude animated drawing, like two-frame gifts going off and stuff. And it was just like, Oh, oh, I'm just on a meantime, I'm like click-click madly trying to click the X's in the corners of these messy videos. It was like, I think we should close down now. And I'm like, Yeah, okay, okay, I'll go. And I've I've continually found new ways to embarrass myself online.
SPEAKER_02It's easy to do. I mean, things can happen so fast, even in even back in the in the late 90s. Things can happen so fast with technology that before you know it, you're like, oh, I really shouldn't have done that. Too late.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, it's it's it's it's cheesy, but it's true. The old line is like, I'm glad there was no social media back when I was I put a lot of thought into this as a father, son is growing up. I'm like, Jesus, I'm gonna have to really sit him down and give him several talks, you know.
SPEAKER_02I don't know if I would have the smarts at the time to not post a lot of stuff or to have other people post stuff about me as I did stupid stuff in my teens and twenties. So I'm glad that's not an option.
SPEAKER_05Well, it's an interesting time rank. We've only been online for for what 20 years, sometimes even less than that for like really online, you know, like social media. When did Facebook come out like 2006?
SPEAKER_022004, 12 years.
SPEAKER_05We still don't know the long-term effects of all this stuff.
SPEAKER_02Right. Yeah, and I was actually looking through a timeline of social media because I always forget how late things started, because I always just think, oh, it's been a long time. But I'm looking at live journal and friendster, and I'm like, oh yeah.
SPEAKER_05Oh, I was huge on friendster.
SPEAKER_02I learned I barely remember friendster, but I do remember what was that music one.
SPEAKER_05My space. I mean, my space was big on music too.
SPEAKER_02I think that might have been it. What were you doing on a friendster?
SPEAKER_05Same thing you do on Facebook, just meeting people and posting pictures and trying to find out how does a website find me, you know? And uh the problem with friendster is like they were underfunded, no one really understood what they were, and they were never able to acquire enough server power to keep up with demand. Space swooped in and just sort of took it all over and friendster language. They were really popular in the Philippines for a long time after the rest of the world forgot about them, but eventually they died.
SPEAKER_02That's what Wikipedia is saying. They're saying the service would be popular in Asia and the Pacific Islands, and I didn't realize it got popular anywhere. There was like a blip in the US, and I'm guessing in Canada too, and then it just kind of went away.
SPEAKER_05Well, that's one of the things you you learn about living overseas is that you're like, oh, like trends in America are by no means global.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_05All your all your friends in this country are using this app or whatever it is, and then all your friends in the other country are like, we don't use that over here, we use this one.
SPEAKER_02Oh gosh, this explains why there are so many friggin' apps on my phone. I'm like, oh, I need to be on this one for these people, this one for this person. My worldwide clock has 13 different cities in it for different people in different times.
SPEAKER_05Ridiculous, but it's the price of being a communications person in the uh 21st century.
SPEAKER_02Just once you've gone overseas and met people who live in various different countries, then it's just a never-ending cycle of where is everybody now and what time zone is that? And how do we keep up?
SPEAKER_05I wake up in the morning, my my iPhone wakes me up, I pick it up, I turn off the alarm, and I open Twitter, and then I check out and make sure the world hasn't ended overnight. And then and then I get up and I and I watch a few cartoons with my kid on the TV through Netflix through Netflix as we as we eat breakfast and get ready. And then I go to work and I look at a computer for eight hours. I have three giant monitors on my desk.
SPEAKER_01Oh, three?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, you know, I'm very important.
SPEAKER_02And then um just thinking position-wise, two can kind of be veered in towards each other. Do you have them just three in a row?
SPEAKER_05No, I have a 15-inch MacBook that I use on below, and then I have a shelf with two 17-inch monitors sit on.
SPEAKER_03Gotcha.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and then I look at computers all day, and then when I take a break, I'm on check on my phone, check on Twitter again, check the mail messages, whatever. And then when I come home, I maybe watch a bit more TV with my son, and I on the train home, I look at my phone, and then I get on the on my computer at home and I do some freelance writing, which I sometimes still do, or I do my own podcast, or I update my blog. Like it's just constant online. The graph charting my like minutes per day of how long I spend online has just risen steadily and consistently over the years.
SPEAKER_02Can you pinpoint when that started? When you started to be such a digital soul, when you started to check these things more and more and more, when that progression started.
SPEAKER_05I can pinpoint the time when I really became interested in being on a computer all the time or as much as I could. That was when Napster came out.
SPEAKER_02Oh, Napster, yeah.
SPEAKER_051999, 1998. I had bought my first computer. It was a compact computer, 800 bucks a few months before all this started. Say what you will about the morals. There's arguments for both sides, whatever. At the time, it was just it was just mind-blowing, like unlimited music. And this was before the iPad and anything, right? So you're you wanted music, you had to go to the store and you had to buy a CD. When Napster came on, I was like, oh man, I gotta get as much music as I want to. So I spent a lot of time looking at music, listening to music, downloading, organizing. And of course, like I said, you couldn't take it anywhere. It wasn't portable. So you had to be at home computer listening to the music with WinApp.
SPEAKER_02WinApp. Oh my god, memories are flowing back so fast right now.
SPEAKER_05Then you had to get Winamp to look cool. So you had to go on and get skins and stuff like that. And that was when it really became like, oh, this is internet thing, might be here for a while, and I think it's gonna be a big part of my life.
SPEAKER_02What kind of music were you looking for at that point? What were you listening for?
SPEAKER_05I remember the first track I ever downloaded was a Metallica song, ironically. And then after that, it was Macy Gray. That was a big song.
SPEAKER_02So that was only a couple years before you went to Thailand. I'm making a bad assumption here that that's the first drastic geographical shift. So let me not make that assumption. From you the beginning of your IRC days to when you left for Thailand, were you in one location in Canada?
SPEAKER_05When I first got on the internet and the IRC days, I was in Ottawa, Ontario, and then I moved back to Calgary, Alberta. And that was where I stayed from 1994 till 2001 when I left.
SPEAKER_02From Ottawa to Calgary. Was that a big shift for you at that time?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, because I'd spent all my time on the west coast of Canada, or Calgary, which is sort of like the not as close to the coast as possible. So basically Calgary is above Montana.
SPEAKER_02Gotcha.
SPEAKER_05Ottawa is above Chicago. I spent my whole life basically on the western side of Canada, but I did have some friends in Ottawa that I that I was able to stay with when I was there. Just looking right now. No, Ottawa is uh directly above New York State. Sorry.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay. Yeah, that's pretty eastern then. You were in Thailand when a lot of the big ones came out.
SPEAKER_05I remember doing research for the trip that we were coming on to Thailand. And there was really a couple of websites, early, early text-only websites written by sex pats in Thailand that actually kind of turned me off of the country. I'm like, really? And there was Lonely Planets Thorn Tree, where you'd post a question and then come back in like 10 hours and see, please someone answer me.
SPEAKER_02I got a lot of jobs from that site.
SPEAKER_05Nice.
SPEAKER_02And and travel advice.
SPEAKER_05That was it, you know. There was no cell phones. At least, at least not that weren't hideously prohibitively expensive. I set up my own blog, which was really unique at the time on Homestead. You remember Homestead, and it was like it was like Angel Fire or something like that. And it was I had homestead.com/slash Thailand. You basically reserved your little website. I made a little website with the drag and drop templates they had. And I thought instead of emailing everyone, because not even everyone, not everyone even had email back then, I thought, like, I'll just write my blog and then everyone can come and check at their leisure. Not realizing that only my mom was ever really checking the blog. But I used to spend hours every day sitting in an internet cafe in Chiang Mai, you know, uploading pictures that no one cares about, writing stories that no one ever read.
SPEAKER_02I met people were reading it.
SPEAKER_05Uh I don't know. There was no kind of stats available at the time.
SPEAKER_02What? Okay, I started my first blog in 2003 and I I had a stat thing here. I think I actually had to add it. It wasn't it automatically on the website. I had to find some code and shove it in there. But I watched that thing every day.
SPEAKER_05Or maybe there was like one of those counters at the bottom, you know, like both people have visited. Yeah. I don't think I ever bothered with that.
SPEAKER_02You're such a good man. See, you were doing it because you liked it. I was like, I liked, I really liked doing it, and I wanted to see that people were reading it.
SPEAKER_05I think you're right, but I also think I was doing it was because I thought what I was doing was so cool. Everyone wanted in, you know. My friend Mark and I first decided we would come to Thailand, telling people, like, oh yeah, you know, yeah, I'm going to Thailand. You know, I'm gonna go over there and go to Thailand. People were like, Oh, yeah, I've been to Thailand four times. I was such a noob, I had no idea. And I literally thought that I would be like walking through jungles and hacking away vines and like exploring places that no one had ever been before. And I just could not have been further from the truth. I was so unprepared.
SPEAKER_02Oh, you were unprepared. My first place in Asia was Taiwan, and I saw the temperature and thought, oh, tropical island. Great, it's gonna be like Hawaii. People will be in shorts all the time, and it'll just be like this surfing culture. And I'm like, wait, what? No.
SPEAKER_05You get there and you're like, why are people wearing business suits? It's 212% humidity outside.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, why is everybody yelling at me for wearing a tank top on my scooter? Oh, wait, culture, that's why. So, what did you write on the blog then?
SPEAKER_05Just silly observational stuff. Today I went to this waterfall. Here's a picture of it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, first year stuff.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, but I don't have a copy of it anymore. Um I don't know what happened to it. It got lost to the to the ether, to the bits and bites of the and you were in Chiang Mai first. Came over here to sort of see my friend Penny, who had moved to Chiang Mai to teach at an international school. And it's kind of sad because we got there, we did this um amazing eight-day adventure tour with this company called Smiling Albino, run by two Canadian guys from Calgary, same as it was fantastic. Quick plug for Smiling Albino. They're still going strong, and they've significantly upped their ante in terms of sort of high-end luxury travel. Back then it wasn't luxury. They're still going strong. Two guys who founded it together are still two of my best friends in Thailand. Did eight days with them and we finished in Chiang Mai, and then four days later, my friend went home. That's when I said, Well, the hell with you, I'll just stay and do my own thing. And I I really regret it because I spent the next, I can't remember, nine months, eight, seven, nine months in Chiang Mai doing jack shit. Just I would wake up tan, I would go to Sizzler, some sausages or something like that. And I would go to the internet cafe and I would update my stupid little blog, and then I would go to the shopping mall and watch a movie or something. You know, I just I didn't I didn't eat Thai food, I didn't talk to Thai people, I learned no language. I was the kind of person that I hate right now. It was a complete waste of time.
SPEAKER_02I wonder if on some level you were adjusting even though you weren't fully immersing yourself. I don't know.
SPEAKER_05Maybe, but I mean there's no there's no excuse. I could have adjusted a lot sooner.
SPEAKER_02Did you go after that point down to Bangkok?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that's where I I had I had literally had like $50 left to my name and a return ticket. This is when I talked about earlier of not having a plan of any kind. I was just kind of like, oh well, whatever happens, happens. And I went down to Bangkok and I was like, I'll spend a few days in Bangkok just chilling out before I get a plane home. And I called up my friend Dan, who was the co-founder of Smiling Albino, the one of two or three people that I was still in contact with who I happened to get on the phone because there was landline, there was no cell phones. So I called him and I was like, hey Dan, uh just wanted to say thanks for everything. I'm going back to Canada. Ran out of money, so you know, what are you gonna do? And he said, Well, I I might know a guy who's looking for a teacher for a summer camp. I said, Oh, well, yeah, give me his number, I'll call him. And a few years later, I was sitting in an interview on a little kid's plastic chair in the little small little kids table talking to this dude. Yeah, I got a job as a teacher. I was like, Yeah, all right, I'll stay for a while and see what happens.
SPEAKER_02And here you are. Or there you are. Yeah. Okay, so how long did you keep that blog going for then?
SPEAKER_05I think probably about a year. And then by that point, hotmail was the new thing. And after about a year or so, almost everyone had an email address. And I thought, I don't need to update the blog anymore. I can just write an email to everyone. So I'll just fill in the C C fields. And also I moved to Bangkok and I didn't have a computer and I had a job, so I couldn't spend four or five hours a day anymore sitting at the cafe updating the stupid blog. So I figured it was just easier to email everyone.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's interesting. We went totally different directions because I started my blog in 2003. I started off emailing. People and they were sending the email to friends, and it got too long of an email thing. So I ended up doing the blog because it was easier than CCing all of those people. But it was just time difference from 2001 when you did the blog until email got easier, and I did email until blog got easier. It's like just that's funny. Just those two years made that big a difference.
SPEAKER_05Things changed so fast in those two years.
SPEAKER_02And then social media hit. Let's see, Twitter was 2006, YouTube was 2000. It's so hard to imagine YouTube being 2005.
SPEAKER_05You know what's funny about YouTube? And this goes back to my story about film school. And I remember for to get into film school, we had to do the final step was a table meeting where three of you had to sit across the table from three teachers and they grilled you and you had to answer the questions.
SPEAKER_02Oh boy.
SPEAKER_05I didn't prepare. I was like, I don't know, I'll just speak honestly. What else can I do? Um it worked out okay because I got in. But I remember one of the guys that um was sitting with me, I forget what the question was, but it came up what idea do you have? What technology idea do you have that you want to like implement or something like that? He said, I want to open a video store, but instead of renting movies, you would rent other people's videos. And at the time I thought that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. You know, and then like 10 years later, YouTube is sold for a billion dollars or whatever it is, which is essentially nothing but other people's videos. So he had the right idea, just a slightly different concept.
SPEAKER_02But tell you what, the first few years of YouTube were kind of um you know anyway.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it was iffy, and then just sort of one day it was like the thing.
SPEAKER_02And then it started having music, and that's when I kind of jumped on board, like in about 2003. See, when I moved to Taiwan, is when I had the fastest, most easily accessible internet of my life. I went to internet cafes and I did session. I have the world at my fingertips. Let's go.
SPEAKER_05Right, right, right, right.
SPEAKER_02Did you spend a lot of time on YouTube or Twitter or Facebook when it first came out? Like, where did where did you spend your social media time in the early aughts?
SPEAKER_05Well, MySpace was big. I'm still friends with a few people that I met on MySpace. Back at that time, Facebook was still very new and it was only open to college students with a like an EDU email address. If I was on Facebook, it wasn't what it is now, it was very new. Twitter was huge in Bangkok and Thailand. Like we were saying earlier, like different countries have different things that they glom onto. But in Thailand, for at least for the expat community, it was Twitter. And it was the central repository for everything for several years. It was where I I still have very good friends who I met on Twitter back in the day. We used to have tweet ups and we used to tweet about hanging out with the Twitterati for such a particular thing.
SPEAKER_02What is the tweet up? Is that when you just meet people that you're in Twitter groups in person?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it's just it's just like, hey everyone, tweet up on Tuesday at 7:30 at this restaurant, and like 12 people would show up. Twitter was really really became vital in 2010. And that was when the first of my life, the first big violent protests happened in Bangkok.
SPEAKER_03Okay.
SPEAKER_05The redshirt, the redshirt protest of 2010. And that was when Twitter became indispensable because this was when you know bullets were flying, people were getting shot with sniper rifles in the streets. Oh my god. Like the 80 people were killed, but thousands of people were injured. Whole downtown core of Bangkok was shut down. It was a war zone. It was tires on fire, there was tanks. Everyone was basically like, okay, just stay home for a week until they sort this shit out. But that was how you found out about things was Twitter. You it was on the ground, real-time reporting from your friends, from reporters followed. Yeah, it became an indispensable tool for finding out what was going on in the city where there's a language barrier, and so you can't read the newspapers, the language press is basically. So it became a really, really important tool. But even before that, it was important socially to getting to know people and sharing photos and things like that.
SPEAKER_02So it's the go-to social media in Thailand right now.
SPEAKER_05Um Instagram, Insta is the kids.
SPEAKER_02Instagram. Oh my god, it really has taken over all over.
SPEAKER_05It's ridiculous. I have it. I don't get it. But Suwanapoom Airport in Bangkok last year or the year before was the most Instagrammed location on earth.
SPEAKER_02Wow. I I have to admit I've gone over to the dark side, although I'm still resisting Facebook after like a decade of being off of it, I think. There's a big language learning community on Instagram, and I I like it now. Yeah, well, I'm I don't want to.
SPEAKER_05I'm I'm on it. I'm on it because I'm I'm kind of a social nerdy guy. I I I use it on um with the Bangkok podcast with my podcast with um, you know, that it's connected to the our Bangkok Podcast Facebook account. So when I post photos, it automatically goes to there. And also I have it set up, I have an alternate Instagram account, which I'm and what I use that for is it's connected to an app on my phone called Chatbooks. And so I use this alternate account only for pictures of my son. It's set to private and it's got one follower, me, and my main account. And then every time I post 60 pictures, it links to chat books, and chatbooks automatically prints those 60 pictures in a book and ships it to my mom in Canada. So Oh my god, it's brilliant! Every couple of months or so, she gets a nice photo book of her grandson in Canada. But going back to your question, Instagram is huge here. Line is massive, that's what everyone uses. Snapchat is big, and that's probably the top three.
SPEAKER_02Um, I've never got online. I've spent stretches between contracts, like uh mostly up in Chiang Mai, but I've never gotten on social media there. Usually when I'm there between contracts for like a month or two, I'm so disconnected from everything, or I'm just job searching like crazy that I'm not terribly social at all. What does lying look like?
SPEAKER_05I think a very good analogy would be WeChat.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05It's basically the WeChat of other countries, not China, but it has doesn't have nearly the same social integration, the level of social integration of you know, paying bills and groceries and stuff like that. Oh yeah, you can't do that. Although um we do have a professional line account for our podcast where we chat with our listeners and we send out a link to the show every week.
SPEAKER_02So some foreign podcasters in China that have official WeChat accounts for their podcast, and then they do similar things on like that. I struggle with that because I have three and I refuse to have three additional accounts. I I'm on social media mostly for the pictures at this point because I'm so sick of reading uh tons of stuff. But I just, oh gosh, it's it's so time consuming, and how the different sites decide what I see bugs me because there'll be people that I want to keep up with and they're not in my feed for weeks on end.
SPEAKER_05Facebook has shrunk enormously in my life. I used to check it all the time, and just in the past three or four months, I've turned off all the notifications. Yeah, I still use Messenger because a lot of people are still on there. My sister in Australia, my mom. But yeah, if Facebook drives me nuts, like they decide what I see, and all I think all anyone wants is just like let me see a chronological feed of stuff. And Instagram is the same way. Instagram got rid of the chronological feed, and now it's like you you look at it and then you close it and you open it up 10 seconds later, and it's a completely different set of photos. You're like, what the hell am I looking at here?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, it's very, very, I'm almost to the point where I'm gonna go up to the people that I follow and just click on them individually. Like, who do I want to whose stuff do I want to look at? Because I'm so frustrated by what they're showing me.
SPEAKER_05Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Just scroll through your list of friends and then but it's not as easy.
SPEAKER_02So I haven't done it yet, but it's because I feel like I am missing some stuff I really truly want to see. And then I've all the stuff that I'm like, okay, I started following someone because they had some good pictures of art that they're doing, but I don't actually know them, so they're not as important to me as people that I know that I want to follow and see what they're following. You know, it's just ah algorithms. My goodness. Hey there, this is Stephanie. I'm really excited that you're listening to this interview. I certainly had a wonderful time talking to Greg about these issues related to moving around and what it does to our online selves. Here's the deal. I really would love to grow this community. I'd really like to get more stories from other expats, and I'd like to hear from those of you that are not expats about what you think about all of this stuff we're talking about. So here is my request, my call to action. I would like you to please screenshot this podcast image from whatever app you're listening to it in and send it to three people and say, I think you'd like this, or something to that effect. Letting other people know about this podcast is the best way I can think of to increase our community, to have more to talk about, and for me to find other expats to interview. Thank you so much for spreading the word about virtual expats. And again, on every social media now, I'm even on Facebook. Oh my gosh. I am S-T-E-P-H-F-U-C-C-I-O, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, WeChat if you're in China. You can reach me anywhere if you'd like to send me information directly about what you think about this project, or if you'd like to participate yourself. Thank you so much. Three people. Three people. Thank you. Do you have a Greg persona and a Bangkok podcast persona online at this point? Or are they the same?
SPEAKER_05On most of my accounts online, I'm BKKGreg, Twitter, Instagram, probably a few other things. My podcast is linked to my blog, and my blog is linked to my podcast, and they're all linked to Twitter and the podcast Facebook page. So BKK Greg is like my online presence, I guess. When they do happen, tweet ups or something like that. I still meet people. Oh, are you BKK Gregg or something? That's what I'm known as, if anyone knows me at all.
SPEAKER_02What do you use social media more for? Your own posts and and whatnot or for the podcast?
SPEAKER_05Personal, just information digestion. Um keeping up with what's going on in the world, which these days is not a very enjoyable thing. I I would say actually social media plays a relatively minor role in the podcast. Maybe it's just that I haven't put the work into it. I mean, we have our Twitter account and we have our Facebook account, and we do a minimal amount of upbeat, but it's sort of more acts as like just a channel to vomit things out into the world.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I do hear people saying, you know, to increase your audience, you have to tweet like 35 times a day because the tweet lasts like so many minutes or whatever, and that just sounds like spam to me.
SPEAKER_05Did an influencer say that? Ooh, an influencer.
SPEAKER_02Oh, influencers actually even more than 35 at times. I know it is their job. So I mean, yeah, that part I suppose makes sense.
SPEAKER_05I hate influencers. The problem is I know some of them and some really lovely influencers. It's hard to write off the entire category. Seeing like an independent coffee rope, you're like, ugh at the same time, you're like, oh, that's just an independent coffee roast. She's a really nice guy. So it's you can't paint the whole thing with a same brush, but it's just that word has to me has taken on a really hipster douchebag tint.
SPEAKER_02Although I suppose celebrities have been doing that forever in my lifetime. We've used movie stars and TV stars and and whatnot to advertise different products.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, but at least they can do something. Anyone stand on a cliff in front of a sunset holding your boyfriend's hand while he takes a photo. Like, show me something new and interesting and cool. Like anyone could buy a plane ticket.
SPEAKER_02On the podcast, we're playing with three-letter acronyms because there's IRL that already exists in the world, right? It's in real life. In a previous episode, we were playing with the idea of VRL, like virtual reality life, because there isn't really a term for the opposite of IRL.
SPEAKER_04Oh, yeah, okay, okay.
SPEAKER_02You know, a work-life balance, that that's a phrase. So I want uh IRL, VRL, I want like a phrase like that.
SPEAKER_05That's a really good point because you know, if you say something like, oh, you know, he's a friend IRL, even on my Facebook page. Um, if you're not my friend, the message you see when you go to my Facebook page was sorry, I only friend people I hang out R I L.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah, see? I think I would say probably, oh, I know them online, but that's a lot of work. And again, when you're doing the pairing, IRL and online. That's not that's not right. So going with that, it do you consider your IRL, VRL lives balanced at this point, or do you feel like your VRL's out of control?
SPEAKER_05No, I think they're balanced. I do put a certain amount of restraint on what I put out there. I think, especially living in Thailand, of course, you understand this living in China, you have to be very careful what you say in Thailand. The the royal family is a very sensitive topic. And censorship right now, I mean, it's Thailand is basically a military dictatorship, whether it seems like it or not. So I'm careful never to say where I work on on the podcast. Um, I just say that I work in an office, which is true, but I never say what company. I probably tweet less than I want to. There's many, many, many, many days where I've written something and read it and read it and read it and read it. And I'm like, huh. And I keep coming back to something that a good friend of mine told me because when the former king of Thailand passed away a few years ago, we actually did a show on the king, why he was such an important part of Thai culture and why he was such a well-respected, revered person. It was incredibly reverential. There was nothing controversial about it at all. We said only good things, but just to be careful, I sent it around to a few friends who have been in town for a long time. One of them was the co-founder of Smiling Albino. And uh he wrote it back to me and he said, Yeah, you know, it's fine, but you know what? Foreigners don't need to have an opinion on everything. Stuck with me, put my message out there far less than I probably want to. Because after a while, I'm just like, uh, I don't want to get involved. I just don't if I don't tweet, who cares? So I do keep them separate. My personal life is Facebook, and the security settings are turned way up, and I'm only friends with people I actually know. And I don't follow a ton of people on Twitter because who has time to check thousands of tweets after not looking for a few hours? I do put a bit of work into keeping them separate.
SPEAKER_02Like every now and then I'll go through my Twitter when I'm not locked out and I'll try to unfollow people that I haven't seen tweeting for a while. And I'll try to kind of fit to a lower number because I don't want to just follow people to follow people.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. I I do the same thing with Facebook. Anyone I haven't talked talked to or interacted with in like a year or so, I just unfriended.
SPEAKER_02In one way, WeChat is kind of nice because you have to be on it. There's so many things related to work and finance that you can't not be on it. So literally, just everybody's always there. You know that one platform everybody's on outside of China. It really is what do you use? And everybody's on different platforms, and you have to remember which one this person uses and kind of go over there and and contact them that way. I do kind of want one thing that connects all of the platforms.
SPEAKER_05Oh, that'd be nice. There used to be a few chat apps like Adium and things like that that used to connect things like hotmail and messenger and all these other things, but they never really caught on. I don't know why.
SPEAKER_02I don't know why either. I mean, I understand there are different slightly different ways that the different ones look and how what they do and that kind of thing. When you're saturated by too many choices, I feel like that's where I am with social media on some level. The paradox of choice. I feel like I'm in the way too big North American grocery store and I don't need 20 or 30 kinds of ketchup.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah. And it's it's it's a it also applies to the media landscape too. You know, like years ago you had 12 channels or whatever it was, and you watch a show and that's it. Now there's thousands of channels, and I watch way less TV than I used to because it has time.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I watch actually more YouTube stuff than I do to this point. Cause I, yeah, I actually know the days of the week, some of the folks that I watch on YouTube actually post new videos more than you're flirting with danger there. It's just a show. It's very theme-oriented. Some of them are travel, some of them are food. They're just l slightly less polished, slightly funnier versions of what I would have watched on TV if it had existed.
SPEAKER_05Okay, okay. So I subscribe to three channels, three or four channels that I watch regularly, and that's about it.
SPEAKER_02Three or four? Oh no. I was doing a YouTube channel for a while also, so that I ended up subscribing to too many because I tend to poach ideas from a lot of folks when I'm doing something.
SPEAKER_05And so imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
SPEAKER_02Right, there you go. So, but I've tapered back since then. But it was it was fun to see how different people were doing different things. But but going over into the trending area in YouTube is really discouraging. I like either the informative, the educational, the kind of brain scratchy, kind of learn something part of YouTube that's developed, and the trending stuff tends to be the goofy, extreme, hyper sexualized, or just kind of like bizarre stuff that I'm not sure why it exists.
SPEAKER_05You know what? I just started uh pondering over. Have you ever heard of um ASMR videos? Have you ever seen ASMR videos on YouTube?
SPEAKER_02Yes, I have.
SPEAKER_05There's one woman who lives in Victoria, which is a town I spent some years in when I was a kid in Victoria, Canada. And all it is, she's she's looks like a very attractive Asian woman, and all it is is from her nose down as she sits there and goes, I'm about to eat a plate of this. And she'll just like go and eat all kinds of food. And she's got two million subscribers. And I'm like, I could do this. There's got to be enough weirdos in the world who want to watch a fat man with a goatee eat food. Like, come on.
SPEAKER_02I don't want to be judgy. If somebody enjoys something and that's their entertainment, that's cool.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, go nuts. I'm all for it. Like, whatever floats your boat, my friends. It's just, you know, people out there that put so much work into their stuff, yeah, and they make these incredible videos, and then you're like, that's all you do is eat in front of a camera.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05I want I want to put a I want to put a little webcam underneath my desk at work, pointed at my feet. And like there's gotta be a thousand people in the world who are freaks enough to pay two bucks a month to get access to watch me my feet all day.
SPEAKER_02They probably would. They probably would. You know, I don't know if it's like this in Thailand. I can't say in China, in Shanghai, because we're a tier one city and there's a lot of wealth here, and there's a lot of young people doing things that they whatever they can do to make enough money for the next designer bag, and yada yada yada.
SPEAKER_05So they can pretend to fall out of a car and have it splayed all over the ground in front of them.
SPEAKER_02No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, we're talking about the wealthy wanting to stay wealthy. So you'll see when you go to restaurants and stuff, not even super high on restaurants, you'll see women set up their multiple cell phones and you'll see them being filmed live stream as they're eating. And people are paying, they're like sending them money as they're eating.
SPEAKER_05I just want to jump in the middle of that and start kicking tripods over and like, stop watching you zombies.
SPEAKER_02And now, having said that, because my judgy side is out of control, I have to admit that I have watched some study with me videos language learning, and I've been staring at myself while I'm watching them, going, This shouldn't be interesting. But look how they're writing that. Oh, look at that column. Oh, oh, look at all those highlighters.
SPEAKER_05I But that's totally different from watching someone eat.
SPEAKER_01Is it? I don't think it is.
SPEAKER_05What the hell are you gonna learn from watching someone eat? Like new fork technique or something. At least watching someone learn languages, you pick some up.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but after a while, how many tips can you really pick up? I don't know. I feel like it's it's along the same line. I sit here and I make podcast after podcast and have made five bucks. And these women go to a restaurant, eat one meal, and they've got you can see the like the RB, like little little thingies popping up how much people are paying them. And I'm like, look, they figured out how to make money online.
SPEAKER_05I'm not so much making fun of them, I'm just making fun of the people watching.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_05I've had a friend named um Conan Stevens. He's an actor. If you look him up on IMDb, he's like seven feet tall, huge, muscular dude. I remember him telling me years ago that he used to get a lot of people searching for big feet. He used to come to get sort of shunted over to his website. That's what gave me the idea. I'm like, oh, there's a lot of weirdos out there looking at feet. Like, I've got size 14 feet, which is a perennial problem for me to find shoes in Thailand because I've linked your six, I've just never, never once found a pair of shoes that fit me.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And I'm like, yeah, like 14 foot in Thailand. Come look at my live stream for two dollars or whatever it is.
SPEAKER_02You should try this. You should definitely try this. Oh my gosh, he's huge.
SPEAKER_05Oh, yeah, yeah. He's a really nice guy. He's he's super funny and he's very abrasive. And hey, you know, and of course, because I've got a dirty mind thinking, like, and for five bucks a month, I'll just tilt that webcam up. You can look at my crotch all day while I'm sitting in my two like a Patreon, two tiers of service. I'm just providing something to the weirdos that are already out there.
SPEAKER_02Oh my gosh, there's so much potential for so much weirdness online. Have you ever put anything online that you regretted later?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, there have been a couple of blog posts that I put up, especially in the wake of the 2006 coup in Thailand, um, that were very critical of the government or certain people in it. Actually, the guy I just told you about Conan, he wrote me an email and he said, Hey man, uh just read your posts. As someone with a lot of experience online, he basically gave me the whole foreigners don't need to have an opinion.
SPEAKER_03Nice thing.
SPEAKER_05And he said, like, you might want to just take this down. If it's taken the wrong way, you could be in trouble. And I reread it again. And I'm like, Yeah, you know, you're right. So I took it down.
SPEAKER_03That is a good friend.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah. And there was another time when I sent out a particularly harsh tweet that was making fun of. I won't get into details because they're boring, but I was making sort of taking the piss out of a particular aspect of Thai culture. And this was only only a few years ago. And the CEO of my company wrote me an email the next day. He's like, hey man, you might want to tone it down. Like the guy in charge is this and this and this. You know, you work for a big company, and if it goes bad, it's gonna go bad in a big way, and you're not gonna come out on top. I didn't delete it, but it just sort of reinforced that I think it's easy to lose track of the fact that people are watching whenever everything you put online, and maybe not everything, but if it's online, it's out there, it's in the public domain. You need to be responsible for everything you put out there.
SPEAKER_02Do you ever go back and delete or save or do anything with any of your social media regular feeds or posts or anything like that? Do you do anything with those?
SPEAKER_05Um no, once they're done, I forget about them and move on. I don't think I've ever deleted a tweet. Maybe one or two. I can't remember why.
SPEAKER_02I have, but it's usually within an hour, maybe five or ten minutes afterwards. I'll go, maybe that wasn't such a good idea.
SPEAKER_05I'm kind of proud of that actually, because it's so easy to just get riled up. And there have been a couple of times when, like, sort of trolls who are very notorious in Thailand have come after me, taking every ounce of restraint in my body to not respond, to just ignore them, and they go away. But I'm sure I would have regretted saying something, but I didn't.
SPEAKER_02When I did the blog in Taiwan, I had a full on stalker. I didn't know he was because you meet people that you meet online in person sometimes. And so I thought, oh yeah, he seems like a nice guy. Yeah, let's. Meet up and go get food. And then afterwards, like he kept texting me every time I posted, he'd text me like all day about my post, different questions and different things. And then I was just like, Hey, dude, you know, cool it down. Like, like what's happening? Like, look, just could you stop with all the texts? And he just got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And then he was like meeting me outside of my work and he was doing all this creepy stuff. And I was like, okay, there wasn't really any security stuff online yet in 2003. And I was in a different country anyway. So I was like, what the hell do I do? And I'm like, oh wait, I have his phone number. I met this person. So I literally put his phone number on the blog and was like, if anybody's in Taiwan, if anybody's in this the city that I was in, I was like, please could you call this guy and talk him into like be like just backing the hell off? And somebody did.
SPEAKER_03Really?
SPEAKER_02I was just terrified. I was like, I have no way to talk to I no communication, no local language skills. I didn't really know a lot of people there at that point. It was just a few months in. And I was like, I have no idea what to do. I mean, I have these people reading the blog. Maybe one of them will be able to help me.
SPEAKER_05Wow, you basically crowdsource the bodyguard.
SPEAKER_02Kind of, yeah.
SPEAKER_05That's cool.
SPEAKER_02It is cool. It is cool. It was creepy that it had to happen, but there's a lot more stuff online now that it can it can stop before it gets to that point.
SPEAKER_05I think it's uh weird because you know, obviously it's different because you're a woman and and I think you're women sort of are we get this more a lot more, obviously. But I've even experienced where people like they they're fans for lack of a better word, and they you know, you extend a little bit of friendship and they maybe take it the wrong way. I've never had anything that bad, but I've had people that got like a little too familiar. They mean like, hey, I'm having dinner, they sent me a picture of their food, and I'm like, I don't care what you're eating. Like you're it's just they put more stock into what I'm doing than I do, maybe. Like, I'm just some asshole talking about Bangkok with a friend. But to them, there's sort of like this wall and it separates, yeah, you know, like you were talking earlier about your online persona, they don't know what's behind that. So when they get a glimpse, it's it's maybe interesting. And I'm I'm guilty of it too. There are people that I admire or follow. And if I'm talking with them, like Mike Duncan, who's a podcaster who does the amazing history of Rome podcasts and uh Revolutions podcasts, which are, if you're a history nerd, like unbeatable. Him and I have had a couple of chick quick chats on Twitter. He followed me back and I was like, holy this is really cool, you know. But I was very cognizant of the fact that to him, I'm just some nutcase out there in a pool with six billion people, and I don't mean anything special to him. Whereas he is unique and special to me because of what he does.
SPEAKER_02You brought up a really good point because I do I do contact people a lot, whether they are on YouTube, on Twitter, on like anywhere I see them online, if they're doing something that is interesting, I ask questions, comment on things, and I'm like, oh my god, that was wonderful. And I'll even quote them to themselves because I'm like, you there's so little that comes in when you're doing stuff online a lot of times that I'm like, I I feel the need to let them know that something is happening, somebody's listening, something's happening. I don't know. And when they reply, I have that, oh my god, connection has happened moment.
SPEAKER_04Exactly. I'm special, they've chosen me.
SPEAKER_02Meanwhile, it could very well be their assistant or something that's doing it. We had a podcast last week and I was like, Oh my god, this is exactly one of the questions that I'm trying to get at with this very podcast, the virtual expats one. And I was like tweeting about it, and I emailed him this long, long, long, long email. Four days later, somebody who has access to his social media account hearted my tweet to him. And I'm like, proof that he agrees with what I said. No, no, it's not.
SPEAKER_05We're on the same page.
SPEAKER_02We're totally best friends now.
SPEAKER_05You could not be more in sync. He's like, Oh, I was in my pocket, accidentally does a butt heart.
SPEAKER_02It's so weird though, because with podcasts specifically, we're in people's ears and we listen to people who are in our ears when we're listening to podcasts. You know, it's really bizarrely intimate experience.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I use podcasts to drown out the noise of the city on my morning commute. I'm in my own little world with this other voice.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. So it's hard not to think I know this person. Have you received any weird feedback about the podcast or about the blog too? We haven't even talked about your blog. Greg to differ.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, not much to talk about. I think last time I updated it was like six months ago. I'm actually working on something now. It's not really anything useful, it's just random thoughts that I have. It's the blog exists sort of as more of a uh patch of real estate on the internet that I like to have just because why not?
SPEAKER_04Fair enough.
SPEAKER_05Um there's also a page on there that talks about the walking tours that I've done with another company called Voice Map. The last post I have on there is I made a I photoshopped up a Crayola crayon color palette based on Bangkok. It's just a weird idea I had that it's it's nothing more than like a little bit of a laugh. And the next blog I post will probably be something similar with an idea for like um bingo sheet based on Bangkok experiences. You know, they don't really add anything to the conversation, but they're just sort of more of a little like fun goof of an expat living in Bangkok.
SPEAKER_02There's nothing wrong with that at all. I mean, they're entertainment and you're funny. So with any of the things that you've put online, have there been any weird feedback that you've gotten from your audience that threw you off guard?
SPEAKER_05There have been a few comments on the podcast where we've had a guest on, and one of them stands out. One of our regular guests is a British monk who've been here for 22 years.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And a pandit. Um just had lunch with him the other day. Actually, he's a very nice guy. He came on a while ago and we did a talk about this particular sect of Buddhism in Thailand called Dhammakai. And his temple, the pandit's temple, is associated with this uh sect somehow, very vaguely and tenuously. But there is an association there. So he is somewhat of a controversial person to some people. And we did the interview and it was very interesting. Blah blah blah. I put it up there, and you can still say now it's on the site. Um this was months and months ago, but someone in with a comment on the post, and it was like super long, like paragraphs and paragraphs long about what Pandit said and what actually the scriptures say, blah, blah, blah. There have been a few things like that where I am clearly out of my element and I don't know how to respond. I can't respond because I don't know what the guy is talking about. There have been a couple of times where someone has left a comment or something, and that if I was much more intelligent, I could probably debate or or answer back. But at the time I'm like, thanks for your comment. Yeah, okay. Thanks for listening or whatever. I can't really say anything because I'm just not smart enough.
SPEAKER_02It's not that you're not smart enough, it's that's not your specialty. I mean, you bring on guests because people are experts, and then you you shouldn't have to be responsible for every single topic that other people are experts for.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. But I'm the conduit and the guest and is on one side and the commenter is on the other side, and I'm in the middle going, I don't know.
SPEAKER_02So it would feel weird to say hey to your guest, hey, could you answer this? Because they've already done their job, right?
SPEAKER_05I mean, they've been on there, they're a wonderful guest, and then this particular case I did talk to Pandit and I was like, hey, there's a comment on the site if you want, go and answer him. And then he was like, Nah, fine. Very Buddhist of him.
SPEAKER_02No, it's all right.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, he gives an opinion. I'll leave it to him.
SPEAKER_02You mentioned earlier how young the internet is, how young social media is. I feel like we're still kind of floundering and figuring out where we are in our VRLs. In school, we learn how to read, we learn how to write. Do we need some sort of VRL training as we're growing up so that we don't make mistakes that a lot of us make as we're using social media and the internet in general?
SPEAKER_05I would say yeah. When I was in high school, my friend Alec and I came up with the idea like we're learning the things we need to know. We need a class called real life experiences or whatever it was. And it was we were half joking and half serious. We were thinking, we were sitting there in our free periods going, like, no one teaches us how to balance a checkbook back when these things were used. Um, no one teaches us how to do taxes. No one teaches us, you know, how to change a tire on a car. And you know, jumping forward 25 years, yeah, I definitely think that like navigating the digital landscape in the 21st century should be compulsory because I think a lot of people just don't know or understand how far the ripples can go after they dropped a rock in the pond. You know, this is a funny story about when I was at a the company I used to work for. We all had to go to this hotel ballroom, several hundred of us, and the CEO was on stage, and it was a compliance training afternoon session with uh the legal counsel for the company. CEO got on stage and he was like, blah, blah, blah, this is why you're here. Thank you for coming. Uh, this is very important, and we all need to know how to navigate online and when to, you know, sort of like when to post something and when to shut up. And as he was talking, yeah, someone in the audience, uh, an employee of the company, took a picture and put it on Instagram. The caption was like, boring. Oh, we got back to the office. At the time, I was working in the in the PR part where we dealt with all this stuff. And my coworkers and I were like, Are you fucking kidding me? Like, that's galactic level of of incompetence and just cluelessness onto how these things are perceived and distributed, you know. And of course, we sent an email to it right away, and we're like, you might want to delete that post before someone seems back. You know, but like it's it seems so obvious to a lot of people. But it's but you have to realize that out there people just don't know. They think that they can say anything and do anything, and they don't really think about the consequences. So as I said before, as a father now, that's one of the things that freaks me out. Oh, great, my son gives his first girlfriend, I'll take a picture of his dick and put it on something something, you know, pretty soon I'm called into the school. It only takes a second.
SPEAKER_02It's so quick and it can be so lasting.
SPEAKER_05Exactly. Yeah. You know, someone who's 17 has a 15-year-old girlfriend, and they change a couple of sexy pictures back and forth, and suddenly you've got a child sex, you know, offense on your permanent record. You need to think about these things.
SPEAKER_02We were playing around in one of the episodes about maybe there being a time delay with posts, for example, a tweet, and then you'll press submit and it will like go for maybe a minute. And then after a minute it'll say, Are you sure you want to do this?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that'd be really good. Google kind of has that with their beer goggles app, um, add-on option you can turn on.
SPEAKER_02I don't know that. What does that do?
SPEAKER_05I think they used to be called beer goggles or something used to be called beer goggles. But anyway, there's a thing now at Google where you can with Gmail you can turn it on and it delays like a minute. So you can unsend something.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I I think I had that at some point.
SPEAKER_05I think I'm it's a minute is not long enough to rethink the entire theme of the argument. It's more, it's more like, oh shit, I forgot to see one guy and then just recall the email.
SPEAKER_02No, that's true. For me, I'm less likely to do something really stupid in an email than I am on social media.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because I don't know why that's oh, I'm trying to think of that right now, actually. They're both representations of you. Emails can be forwarded, social media can be shared. Yeah, they're both kind of the same thing. You read emails over and over again, you read tweets over and over again.
SPEAKER_02So I think I'm more emotional on social media than I am in an email. I'll do enthusiasm, rah, rah, rah, kind of cheerleader stuff for my friends on email, but I won't necessarily be angry or frustrated or or have like a negative emotion. This is the first time I'm saying this out loud. Wow, is this true? Um my frustration tends to come out. Yeah, I think it tends to come out more in social media than it does to a specific person or group in an email. Are you enjoying this conversation about our virtualness and our geographicness colliding? Me too. Hey, I would love to interview you. Do you live in a country that is not your home country? Let's talk about your experience. Let's do it. Contact me at Steph Puccio, S T E P H F U C C I O at Gmail.com. Or you can hit me up on any of my social media platforms. I am Steph Puccio on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr. So contact me. Let's line this up. I would love to get your opinion into these questions. Out into the world. Let's do it.
SPEAKER_05I think because social media is social, an email is more measured, it's a more structured representation of you. I guess if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_02It could be. And I think a lot of my emails these days, they're very matter-of-factly, they're very scheduling, or there are some that are personal, but a lot of them are very transactional. Whereas my social media has the range.
SPEAKER_05I just think people are less inclined to forward an email unless it's particularly offensive or something like that. Yeah. Social media, it's easy to just click a button and boom.
SPEAKER_02Oh, you know? Oh, I just had the flash. I did send a very long, very angry email to the wrong person about, oh, I know the exact year. It was 2001. And it backfired in a way that was just like I was writing about one person and thinking of I was sending it to this other person. Like I was thinking of, I was sending it to my best friend and I was talking about somebody else, and I accidentally sent it to the person I was writing about. Yeah, it was not good. It's part of the burnt past thing where I'm like, okay, we're not gonna do that anymore.
SPEAKER_05That's um yeah, there's nothing quite like that seeking feeling in your stomach when you realize what you've done. Oh no.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and there was no taking it back then. And oh boy, I don't know if Line has like a voice feature where you can leave audio messages. Does it have something like that?
SPEAKER_05I assume it does. I've never actually done that before. I know WhatsApp does. A friend of mine communicates only via voice messages.
SPEAKER_02And for WeChat, I use that thing. I'll do it via voice message because those you I don't think you can forward those.
SPEAKER_05And so Yeah, I I just check line does have a thing like that. It does.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_05I don't usually like using a dictation a lot because unless unless it's for something very clinical and very basic, because otherwise I'm sending messages to my friends or like, I can't believe this ducking thing or something like that.
SPEAKER_01Did you say ducking thing?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01After all the things that you said, you said ducking, really?
SPEAKER_05Well, because well, because I say like oh this fucking thing sucks, and then the computer auto-corrects it to ducking. But you know what? Actually, you might find this interesting. I actually I actually a workaround for that. If you save a contact on your phone as fuck fucking, then it won't auto-correct that word to ducking.
SPEAKER_02That is really funny.
SPEAKER_05I thought it was brilliant.
SPEAKER_02Oh my gosh. I don't actually use autocomplete. I hate the suggestions they give me, but that is a really good workaround.
SPEAKER_05I thought it was brilliant. Person figured that out should work with NASA.
SPEAKER_02Oh man. You you basically adult grew up with the internet is basically what's happening. Like to the question of did your geographical changes affect your online-ness, the only stab in the dark I can make at a very, very thinly lined answer from an outside perspective is that when you went from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, it looks like you went more from um megaphone to a community. You went more from the, you know, the blog where you're sending stuff out there into when you started to do the Twitter and the other things and doing kind of community stuff.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, that's a great way to put it. That's a great way to put it. It became a little bit more personal. You know, you got to meet some of these people in person. It was also a lifestyle change, too. Before in Chiang Mai, I was just kind of living it up and not really doing anything. But when I came to Bangkok, I was working and I was part of a community, is ten years as the connection.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_05You know, those connections were mirrored from the social media. They were also mirrored in real life, most of them. So I could chat to someone on Twitter, but then I would also see them at work the next day. So it's a very different interaction with people.
SPEAKER_02Wow. Okay. So we're inconclusive, but it is interesting to watch the internet develop as you went from place to place.
SPEAKER_05It's fascinating. And it's it's just like I said, it's been it's been a consistent, steady, upward trend as to how it became part of my life. And I'm not, I'm, you know, I I just assume that everyone's like me, but without the internet, I I would have so much free time. I wouldn't have a job. You know, it just I don't know how people can not use it as much as I do because I I get so much use out of it. It's like watching an old TV show and they don't have computers on their desks, you know, and you're like, how did you get stuff done?
SPEAKER_02It's absolutely puzzling. I'm like you. I my first response to most things is I'll look it up online or I'll I'll create this online or I'll contact this person online. It's like I just a phone or a computer, but there's always something kind of digital involved with a lot of things in my life, and not everybody's like that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and a lot of my conversations actually, which I realize is kind of probably annoying, is like, did I ever tell you about this one thing I saw? Blah blah blah. Let me show you online. And so most of my anecdotes can be bolstered by a GIF or a meme or something like that. It's actually gotten to the point now where I'm doing these interviews uh online or the podcast, or if I need to send some questions to someone, I prefer doing it completely online, um, whether it's voice or text, like meeting people, like oh now I gotta get out, sit and meet this guy and do this, deal with whatever. And like, why can't we just do it online? Right like you and me now, you and me have never met. There's no reason to meet, really. We're having a conversation, yeah, and the conversation's gonna be put out to the world. We communicated before via email. So there is something definitely lost when you don't have a face-to-face relationship with someone, like in terms of the conversation and the body language and the nuance and things like that. But but yeah, I prefer to just do things online, it's just so easy. Everything's traceable. There's a paper trail, you can find things, maybe when just a nerd.
SPEAKER_02No, I agree with you on so many levels. I wonder sometimes that time period when something's going to happen to the internet, when somebody's going to hack something super important and part of it's going to go down over here or over there for so many days or so many weeks or whatever. Is that an inevitability? How will I stay sane when that happens?
SPEAKER_05Who's going to emerge from the ashes as the new leaders are the people who still have the old encyclopedia, right? Britannica encyclopedias. Like these weren't affected by the EMP that went off in the atmosphere. I have all the knowledge, you know.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. I mean, just the thought of even a day of everything being blacked out. It's just okay, a day might be okay. But beyond a day would just be like, okay, that's just affecting too many things.
SPEAKER_05The comedian Joe Rogan has a great uh joke about this, and he says, paraphrasing, but he said, When I was a kid, I thought, like, oh, no worries if I don't understand anything. The adults have it all figured out, no worries. But now I'm an adult, I'm scared shitless, because I don't know how anything works. He looked to the audience and he goes, Imagine all of us in this room were stranded on a desert island together. How long do you think it would be before someone could send an email? I have no idea. Like, there's just so much stuff that we take for granted.
SPEAKER_02I understand my dependence on it. I just I uh I don't want to wean myself off. It's way too much fun. Were you a library person when you were a kid?
SPEAKER_05I enjoyed them, but I didn't rely on them.
SPEAKER_02I did. So for me, the internet is just turned into my digital library. Like if I want to find anything, learn anything, it's all there.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, unavoidable, and it's something that I rely on every day for my work, for jokes, for anecdotes. My friend and I at work where we have a common thing to say, like, oh one what year did the Bismarck sink? He would say, like, if only there were a way that we could say that.
SPEAKER_02If only there's a device that could tell us that information. Thank you, Aaron. Okay, final question. What is the thing that you wish you could do online that does not exist yet?
SPEAKER_05Besides make feet videos and just watch the money roll in?
SPEAKER_02I bet you those do exist now. You're gonna make me YouTube right now. I'm looking. I swear I'm looking right now. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_05Oh god, is there stuff on there? Oh, oh I gotta check.
SPEAKER_02Please amputate my size 16 foot.
SPEAKER_05What?
SPEAKER_02Oh, oh yeah. Oh good, gross. No, I'm going away from this. Uh no.
SPEAKER_05Oh, ASMR relaxing foot massage. Oh, there's Kenny Loggins foot loose video. That's kind of credible. Oh god, I saw this. Please amputate my size 16 foot. Oh god.
SPEAKER_02Foot painting DIY? Wait, why would you paint your it's live now? Oh my god, we could go into the live stand foot painting video live. I'm curious about this.
SPEAKER_05I I tested a crazy foot peel mask. You know, Reddit, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, there's a whole subreddit called popping, which is exactly what you expect. And it's it's one of the most popular ones.
SPEAKER_01Popping? P-O-P-P-I-N-G.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, just people popping zits and cysts and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_01Oh.
SPEAKER_05And there's uh there's a doctor known as the Pimple Popper, and she's got crazy huge audiences on YouTube just popping pipples and getting blackheads out of people's noses and stuff. Like okay.
SPEAKER_02I get the practical side of that because sometimes those can hurt. Oh god, oh wait, oh, sorry, just nail fungus. But there being that many people watching it. Wait, we've completely veered off with the question. Was that your serious answer to the question? Was the foot video thing? Okay.
SPEAKER_05No, no. I'm just sort of a little bit stunned that this guy's got 11 million views, size 16 foot thing. Please rephrase the question. I'm gonna close a tab.
SPEAKER_02His his um, I forget what they call the picture that goes on the video, but that's a great picture that he's got there.
SPEAKER_05Oh, yeah, the video thumbnail. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_02Oh my god, it's like sponge feet.
SPEAKER_05Okay, is there anything that I wish that I could do online that I can't do right now?
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes, yes.
SPEAKER_05Not really, no. I I was thinking maybe the VR thing. It interests me, but it's not something that I want to get involved with. I just want to avoid turning into a zombie by I mean, I already sit in front of the computer all day. I don't want to sit in front of the computer with a mask all day. No, but I mean I can play video games if I want to. I can chat with video, I can chat with audio, I can type, I can be creative, I can Photoshop, I can make things, learn things. It might be a pretty limited answer, but I I can't think of anything that I want to do that I like I've never said, oh I wish I could do this. What about you?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, my initial answer most of the time is smell, and then I walk outside and go down the road street. You you live in Asia, you get this, right? Yeah. There's some pretty powerful smells in this part of the world.
SPEAKER_03There is.
SPEAKER_02And then I go, Well, do I really want that? I don't know. If I could scratch and sniff Instagram and like make the choice, not just have it hit me. Like sometimes the video just starts on its own. I don't want that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah. I mean, it'd be nice to be able to go to YouTube and watch uh a video of like someone mowing their lawn in a Midwestern town on a summer afternoon, and I could smell barbecued hamburgers or something. That'd be nice.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay. And then if we're gonna do that, some sort of like like if there was a video of a beach to have the wind come out of the video too.
SPEAKER_05That'd be nice. Or you could turn on a fan, but not really the same thing.
SPEAKER_02It's really not. No, no, no. I want that hair to come through the video, damn it.
SPEAKER_05It would be nice if I could smell my Kindle and it would smell like an old book.
SPEAKER_02Oh, there you go.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I guess that would that would be interesting, but it's certainly not something that I miss.
SPEAKER_02Well, there's still real books around and I I actually do sniff those.
SPEAKER_05So do I. So do I, yeah. I love it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's hard not to. Okay, I lied. This is the last question. Do you think there's a difference between how expats use the internet and how non-expats use the internet? Internet and social media.
SPEAKER_05Serious questions.
SPEAKER_02Their VRLs. Is that serious?
SPEAKER_05I mean, I mean, seriously that I have to think about it. But I can't just come up with a pithy quip. How do Thai's use video the internet in the ways that I don't use the internet? I have nothing to back this up, no stats or anything, but Thai culture is very family-oriented. Everything revolves around the family. So I think that for a lot of people, the internet is seen as sort of a bit of an escape in Thailand, just a fun little trifle to play with. And there's obviously other people here that use it very seriously for business and learning and education, et cetera. But I think it's seen as sort of like an add-on to their life, which mostly centers around their parents and their cousins and brothers and sisters and stuff. Whereas for me as an expat, it is my life. It's not an add-on. It's how I have a family. It's how I maintain contact with my family overseas. I think it's a bit more vital to me than it is for a lot of Thai people. I mean, we would all miss it terribly if it went away, like we were just talking about. But you know, I see it as like if I didn't have the internet, I would feel probably very, very cut off from my home culture, from you know, the pop culture that comes out of it, from the family and the conversation and the updates I get. This is related to something that my friends and I talk about a lot too, is that how, you know, my wife is Thai, and as as well as we get along, we're never going to be able to get along as well on a cultural level as me and my friends who meet at the pub and chat about old TV shows or like Seinfeld reruns or something like that. And you need that cultural input, you need that cultural mirror to bounce things off as an expat living in another culture, which is something that I think the internet provides. Because I can look up a funny scene from Seinfeld if I want to on YouTube. I can go and read the headlines from the newspapers in my hometown. It provides a doorway to me that I think a lot of people living in Thailand don't need because everything they need or want to have is here.
SPEAKER_02And it's funny because the first place I lived, not just traveled in overseas. I thought I'll use the internet for a while, then I'll immerse myself in the local culture and I won't need to have a foot in Western culture, American culture anymore. And yeah, I literally almost went crazy because I didn't make sense. Why do I need to be completely disconnected from where I came from? But I thought that that was the progression that needed to happen. And I don't think so. I think we can balance both. And I think it kind of helps us do that.
SPEAKER_05Definitely. Yeah, it it gives you a hit, like a little bit of like, oh, I want to see that one scene again from that funny show that I watched when I was a kid. Boom, there it is, back to work, you know.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Like I'm watching stuff that's happening in the US, some of it. And even entertainment-wise, like I'm I'm aware of some things that are happening, but there's a lot that I'm not, because I'm not hearing everybody talk about it all the time or that kind of thing. I'm missing some, but I'm getting some, but it still feels like I've got one foot kind of there, and it feels kind of grounding sometimes.
SPEAKER_05Definitely. Unless you want to go fully native. Yeah, I don't think any of us really want to. Like, that's where we came from. That's it's in our DNA.
SPEAKER_02Moving overseas in as an adult, do you need to? Do you want to? Do you well could you completely divorce yourself from your home culture to that degree?
SPEAKER_05Well, it's funny you say this now because I this is a bit more on a personal note, but um, my sister just moved to Australia. My mom is going to move to South America in the next in the next year.
SPEAKER_04Wow.
SPEAKER_05That that's it. My mom raised me, my sister, by herself. So I've got a couple of cousins and stuff scattered around. But suddenly I find myself like there's not really anything left in Canada for me anymore. And and now I'm thinking about my son, he's half Canadian, but like, how important is that to him now? Because I'm not gonna go home every year to see grandma. So if I don't tell him about Canada and go there regularly, which I now have no reason to, he's just not gonna be Canadian. He's gonna be fully tied. Nothing wrong with that, but he's gonna lack that connection to Canada that I take for granted. I actually wrote a blog about this a while ago when there's a Canadian band called The Tragically Hip. They're sort of like Bruce Brigstein for Canada, like they've been around forever, and everyone knows the hip. The lead singer, Gord Downey, he died of brain cancer about six months ago, maybe eight months ago. And they knew it was coming and they did like a final tour, cross-country tour, and they played all these amazing dates, and like all these famous people were there and stuff. And so it was sort of like a farewell thank you to her before he died. He died. It was very sad. And so I went back and I I re-listened to their stuff because I never used to like their music, and I really liked it when I re-listened to her this time. And it struck me that the Canada that I knew that I identified with, that I think of when I think about Canada in my mind, it doesn't really exist anymore. So when I say, like, oh, I miss living in Canada, it's not really true. I miss living in Canada 20 years ago.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_05But that's not the Canada today. The Canada today I don't really know much about politically, you know, culturally is okay. I've got some touchstones that will never go away. But you know, there's there's so much about Canada that I just don't know anymore.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_05So it would almost be like moving to a totally new country if I ever did move back. So where I was going with this, but keeping on top of your culture is complicated.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's very complicated. Well, my parents both emigrated from Italy and then had three kids, and I'm the youngest. And so I grew up, like they brought us over to Italy a few times and stuff, but I grew up in the US. So I was surrounded by Americans and I had as much American culture as I could get outside of the home, but then I had kind of Italian culture inside the home. And so there's bits of both that I have and bits of both that I miss. And I wonder if part of that is what your son's gonna have. And is is that so bad to have your part of Canada in him as what he knows about it?
SPEAKER_05I don't think it's bad, but I'm just putting some more thought into it. And my grandparents came from the UK when my mom was about 12. She grew up in Canada since then. So he's gonna have the same connection to Canada that I have to the to the UK, which is not a lot.
SPEAKER_02Back in the beginning of this podcast, it was a completely different creature, and I was just kind of investigating different kinds of people living overseas. You have the business expats, and you have the people in teaching English, and then you have the, and that's when I learned about TCKs, the third culture kids.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, we did a show on that recently too for the for our book.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I actually connected with a woman who wrote a book after doing all this research on that. Oh my gosh, they the similarities between TCKs and immigrant kids and a lot of that multicultural, but kind of there's also black holes culturally, you know, that kind of goes together. Like you've got this extra stuff and you've got stuff missing, and it's just it's complicated.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I never even heard that term until about six months ago.
SPEAKER_02I I think I don't know, I could probably date it if I had to because it's in one of the episodes. But I was just like, oh my god, I didn't know this was a thing. And then I started like looking at videos that that different TCKs did in and reading the descriptions and the the identity issues that they had, and I was like, Oh, oh, I've got some of those. There's a serious Venn diagram that we can overlay here. I was like, wow, that's that's some complicated stuff.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it's a struggle, it's a constant back and forth. And after being overseas for so long, I mean 17 years, do I even want to go back? Do I even care anymore? Like, you know, I mean, I'm super proud to be Canadian, I'm always gonna be proud to be Canadian, but that fades over time. It just has to because it just becomes a memory. And like I said, the Canada in my mind is not the Canada that exists that my friends live in.
SPEAKER_02Is that kind of true when we're staying in the same place? Like, is is Thailand even the Thailand that you knew when you first moved there?
SPEAKER_05No, it's not, but at least I can say, Oh, this is how it's different.
SPEAKER_02That's true. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05I don't know what's different now. Like, Gord Downey's dead. Um, you know, I say if I went back to Canada, got a job, water cooler talk, I would have no idea. Like, oh, this politician was in. Remember a few years ago when he did this? And I'd be like, no, I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, remember when this when this sports team won this thing? No, I don't know, I wasn't here. Yeah, there's all these like cultural touchstones that that they take for granted that I wouldn't know. Again, which is why I need to have my Western friends here, because we can joke about Seinfeld and we can joke about the stuff that we all used to share back in the day.
SPEAKER_02No, it's complicated. When I first started living overseas, I'd I would spend like six months or in different countries, and then I'd go back to San Francisco and spend six months there working and saving up to do the next round of working overseas for almost nothing. And broke again. And I'd do that a few times back and forth, and I'd work in offices and I would have those awkward conversations where they're like, Hey, so what'd you do this weekend? I was like, Well, I spent all the time on Thorn Tree, like researching my next move.
SPEAKER_05And I'm like, What? Sounds fun.
SPEAKER_02They're like, Oh, where did where are you from? And I'm like, Oh god, that question I could just start lying, and they're like, oh da da da da last month. And I was like, Oh yeah, I was in Taiwan then, and they're like, Wait, what? Like it just every conversation would just end as soon as I would speak, and I'm like, This is awkward. Like, I think I think it's more comfortable if I just didn't come home because it would just, it's just such a strange conversation to have so many times.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, no doubt. No doubt.
SPEAKER_02For example, if you decided to move back, then your son's Thai side would be the opposite of what it is now. Like now his Canadian side is kind of not as strong as his Thai side. But if you guys move to Canada, then his mom would need to make sure that his Thai side would be like a strong memory. You do you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I consider a whole other conversation. I don't think we're gonna be moving back mostly because we can't afford it. It's just so goddamn expensive to Canada.
SPEAKER_02Oh my god, yeah. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_05I'm here for I'm I'm here for the next little while. And I mean, I said that it was supposed to be four months, 17 years ago, so I think I'll be here for a while yet.
SPEAKER_02Like went kicking and screaming from Asia, like, oh gosh, the first gazillion years, and yeah, just before we left the PhD, I was like, I think we should go back to China. And my husband just kind of like dropped everything out of his hands and went, I'm sorry, you want to go back to Asia? Well, that's a different thing.
SPEAKER_05Oh, it's good you got a partner that's open to that.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we we met overseas. We met in Vietnam.
SPEAKER_05Oh, cool. Cool, cool, cool.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, because it makes sense for Americans to meet in Vietnam and get married, and yeah.
SPEAKER_05That's an interesting dynamic. We could probably talk about that on a whole other sh uh topic. Your my wife is Thai, your husband is American, you're American, so you you have that someone with you all the time, which must be really nice to chat with and joke around and stuff.
SPEAKER_02It is, it's not as much of a Venn diagram as you would think. I'm from the coasts and he's from a very conservative in a very, very different part of America. There's some overlap where we'll laugh at the same thing or get references or get what each other's talking about. And there's a lot of times where I'm like, wait, why did you say that? Or what does that mean to you? Or so thank you so much, Greg, for joining us on Virtual Expats. This has been a wonderful experience.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, no, my pleasure. It was a great conversation, and it's nice to have you know stimulating uh conversations about the expat life with someone outside of Thailand because uh every country is different. So um, yeah, I really enjoyed it. Have you back on anytime.
SPEAKER_02All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Virtual Expat. And special thank you again to Damon Castillo for the music and to our special guest this time. If you'd like to be interviewed for this podcast, just send me an email or contact me on social media in the show notes. You can find all my information, or you can just jot it down right now. Are you ready? You ready? Here we go. Steph Fuccio, S-T-E-P-H-F-U-C-C-I-O, Gmail, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr. There you go. Contact me. Oh, also LinkedIn too. You know what? I keep forgetting about that one. Hey, thank you so much for listening, and I look forward to your questions, comments, feedback, any information, and volunteering to be on the podcast as well. Thank you so much and have a wonderful, wonderful day. On or offline.
SPEAKER_00Membership fees apply after free trial. Cancel any time. You know what's wrong with health and fitness? You weaponize it against yourself. Why didn't you go to the gym today? You're so lazy. Ah, why did you eat that? You have no self-control. Stop it. At Beachbody, we think training and caring for your body in a way that works best for you should be about loving yourself. Let us help you without all the judgment. Here's how. Go to Beachbody.com to claim your free membership and start feeling great.