Hal On Earth, Especially Vietnam

Welcome to the Wanderlearn Show. I'm your host, Frank Stepon. I'm here with Hal on Earth. We're not Hal on Mars.

Not Hal on Earth.

Not Hal on Earth either. So Hal on Earth and he's got a YouTube channel that is fantastic.

It doesn't have a lot of videos, but he's already accumulated well over what 10,000, 12,000 subscribers by the time this releases maybe 13.

And maybe we can get him up to 20,000 and be on. Maybe by the time you're watching this, he'll have 100,000.

Because you know, it's maybe a year or two in the future. He makes videos about Vietnam,

primarily, and the culture and stuff like that, and how I really want to compliment you,

publicly, and how great your videos are. I know how much work it takes to make the kind of videos you make.

And it's clearly a passion of yours. So what I want to get into in this conversation is

I want to talk a lot about the culture of Vietnam, the unseen sides of Vietnam,

and then also talk about the artist making process of how you go about all this stuff.

So let's start off first. Like, what are the why? In other words,

why the fuck are you doing this? Why the fuck am I doing this? I first moved to Vietnam in 2009.

Well, I should preface this. I first traveled in Vietnam back in 1991. That was one of the first

lathe of backpackers when they were just after Doi Muay, when they were just offending up the

country to foreigners. And that was just one of the epic trips of my life. It was it was fun.

How was it? 28, 28. I was born in 1963. So that's that cheap. Like, did you go earlier?

That 1991 was my first organic app. And so this was, so to put that in perspective in 19,

I think, 86. Doi Muay. Doi Muay, which is the kind of like the glass notes if you want to call

a perestroika moment for Vietnam that they really kind of open things up. Yeah. And so you came

about five years after that happier. So there was an enormous churn in transition going on.

What a time. But it was still very like, I mean, 50 people would come out to watch me eat a bowl of

soup. I mean, they just have to be not have borders. I would do that today. Well, that's it's

you know, that's a lever to don't hate because I'm beautiful. But no, I mean, it was it was a

real, it was real traffic. It was real like, you know, nobody in the country spoke of English.

There was a little bit of French I could get by with. And but but it was all, you know,

goodwill and hand gestures, man. And how long did you say six weeks illegally? It was illegal.

So this is this is another thing at the time. You can only fly into Saigon or Hanoi. And you were

allowed free travel within the city. I'll put a link to the video in the upper right hand corner.

You should see it. He talks about this story. Um, but you you're only allowed to wander through

the city legally. And if you wanted to explore anything outside, you would have to go with an

official driver and official car and and you know, that's not me. So my girlfriend and I

ran to the motorbike. We tore off into the May Kong Delta. And we sort of like lied our way into

a week in the May Kong Delta. Like every night was just we'd go up to some hotel. They'd be like,

you're not supposed to be here. And we'd be like, Oh, no, Mr. and we and Ed Vietnam tourism told us

we can do this. Yeah, we're okay now. This is legal. And you know, it was pure balls.

It was what happened when you tried to finally leave. Oh, nothing. We made it from from Saigon

all the way up the coast, all the way up to Hanoi. And then we left and it was great. It was no

problem. So no, no, no problem. There you go. So next stop North Korea. Yeah, that's not my jam.

No, I don't think so. But anyway, um, so that that sort of stuck in me and that was during a time

in my life. I spent about six years in Southeast Asia or I should say Asia and general

century on travel and life and um, make a long story short 2008. It's Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

I'm recently divorced. I own a big house and it's now feeling very empty. Time out.

You're born in New York. Yeah, Brooklyn in Brooklyn. And you're of Cuban immigrants.

Descendant. And then you, how did you get the Pittsburgh? So the roundabout through Seattle,

of course, of course, I mean, the south, I can see on the way everybody does that. It's a come

and no, I went to a college at the Evergreen State College or Washington state, made Seattle my

base for a very long time. I met a woman there who I ended up following through Penn State,

so where she was getting her PhD in the process of follow her to Penn State. I got my own

master's degree there. I was still bored. I got a master's degree. And uh, but fell in love with

Pittsburgh really. It just, just that was, that's about 2003. And just, that's, that is my town

in the States. I'm never going to go back to the States, which I will. But okay, if I ever did,

we're going to do a diversion quick, sell us on Pittsburgh. Why, why Pittsburgh is, is, because

it's overlooked by 99% of tourists in America. A lot of reasons. It's first of all just, um,

it surprises people when you see it because it has this old industrial history and right,

you know, people think of it as this old, polluted place where it certainly was in the 1930s.

But what the, what the videos never showed you is that because of all the hills and rivers,

there were large areas that were never able to be built on. So it has a really also western,

western U.S. balance of nature and human. So you have this incredible architecture. You have

these beautiful hills. You have these rivers. So it's just a scenic as well. Hell. Second of all,

it's just a, it's just a, um, this blue collar heritage gives it a complete lack of

pretentiousness. You know, it's a, it's a, people there are just salt of the earth as they were.

I mean, you get your jag-offs like everywhere, right? But, um, but, uh, no, it's just, it's,

it's just my jam. I just absolutely love it. And then, also, it's at a place where I think Brooklyn

was in the 70s before we got here to fight. This is at a nice place where cool artists are doing

things. There's, we've got to create a vibe. So I went there once and I was impressed.

I was impressed. It was because, again, like you said, we have a connotation of, there was a time

period when they, I read and correct me from wrong that you had to turn on the street lights at noon

because there was so much sit in the air. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, it's documented. That's real. Yeah.

And so, but now it's a pretty pristine, clean city that is probably a nice medium-sized

city that has all the amenities you need. Absolutely. And that kind of stuff. So, okay. So I

apologize for the diversion back to Vietnam. So 2008, divorced. I have this house. It's

looking big. Um, this, we have, um, thing had been in my head since 1991. And I'm like, uh, you

know, I think I'm ready to kind of go back to Asia. Now I'm in my 40s. So let's, uh, let's,

let's do this with a different lens, a different pace, a different perspective on life. Um,

I have a master's degree in education that was 30 years in English testing and English teaching

in salsa. It was very easy for me to get work here. So I came out, um, 2009. And then, you know,

nothing, you don't do this by plan, right? You know, you know, nobody scripts out of life. You

know, I met a woman 16 years later. We were married. We have a kid, you know, and, uh, and how did

you meet? Uh, we were in office real mess. Yeah. She was working at the same company where I was

at Emma with just like, she was like doing what you worked on as a team together. Then I'll send

boom. Yeah. No, she was, uh, the personal assistant to the, um, to the owner of the school. So

she was like the personal and you are to each other. And I was a manager there. I was like, yeah,

and love it first. Maybe a second. Yeah. No, it was, it was with you and needs to say.

No, it was a nice small, small courtship, man. It really was. It was, it was about the right thing

I needed in my life too. So, you know, I will get later on too. I want to talk, touch on

relationships in Vietnam and, and how the dynamic between men and women is in Vietnam versus other,

like the United States, for example, or maybe Cuba, for example. Um, but before we get that,

let's dive in into your video making. So,

we were at what point did you decide it? I'm going to have this video, the YouTube channel and do

this. So this, this, well, let me link to what I was just talking about because when I came here in 2009,

I had a blog and I wrote, uh, it's, it's offline. You can't find any of my old posts anymore,

but it was called Hanoi Scratch Pad. And it was just observations of Vietnam and life and

why did you take it off? Um, it was, it was, it was time. It's just very old. The, the, the

observations were of a different Vietnam than, than now. Um, it was getting spam bots and stuff

like that says I had to do a lot of cleanup on, on it all the time. Um, but, but so I had this really

creative year, year and a half where I was blogging and learning Vietnamese and being in this new

relationship and, and just everything in Vietnam until you Vietnam in 2009, 2010, it was really

exciting time. And, um, so, but the fact that I had this blog kept me engaged in, uh, the country,

it kept, it kept me having to not just sit around the house after work and, you know, watch TV.

It was like, no, let me, let me go study something and then we recently we know something about.

So now having lived in Vietnam quite a bit since then gone back to the US a couple of times and,

and whatnot. We just came back about a little over a year ago from, uh, we had to, we had to go

back to the States because my mom basically was dying. So we had to take care of that. Um, but

so we came back about a year or a half ago and I just wanted to rekindle that relationship to get

know that, um, how do I stay engaged in the place where I'm living? And you can do this anywhere.

I mean, I could have, I could have logged about Pittsburgh. I mean, it says it's really more

a quality of how you live in a place that, and, um, and that's what I wanted. And, and the other

thing is, you know, maybe this is a little bit of, of humble bragging or something, but he,

I've studied Vietnam so much over the last years. I, I, I clear. I know its history really well.

I speak its language reasonably. You know, um, there's little cultural quirks by virtue of being

married into the, uh, the, and I'm not, I don't hang out with expats. It's like my life is Vietnamese.

I, I will say this. I've showed his videos to a couple of Vietnamese people and they said,

how knows Vietnam better than most Vietnamese?

Nice of them to say, you know, it's like, but I've been, you know, I've been walking around with

all of this, like, you know, um, you know, talking about the, you know, all the mother goddess

worship traditions of Vietnam or, or even just basic history of the French, you know,

occupation, you know, um, and all this stuff is like in my head. So like, oh, let me, let me do

something with this. Let me, let me transform this into, um, something that keeps me learning

but also begins to share, you know, and I think the fact that I'm a teacher, I'm a natural educator.

I think I just, you know, I think my teacher tone comes across in my videos a lot. I mean,

hopefully I'm not, you know, you know, professor, Tweety, all Tweety and, uh, and, you know, elbow patches

and stuff, but, oh, no, I mean, I try to, I try to, I try to educate, you know, I try to keep

people entertained and you succeed. Your videos are very informative. One of the things that I also

appreciate are the graphics. You, you, the maps. How do you generate those? You use cap, cap, cap,

cap cuts, a little combination. I mean, I, I source a lot of things from, from, um,

free sources. So there are math collections all over the world that you can go find historical maps

all of these things are past the point of copyrights that I can use them. We could, we can be,

yeah, we can, we can meet your commons itself as fantastic maps. Um, I'm really fortunate in that

I'm able to search in English Vietnamese and French. That's kind of my secret weapon there, you

know, I'm interested in archives also how I get a lot of my old footage. Sometimes I'll do a

searching English and I won't turn up anything. I'll switch the French or I'll switch to Vietnamese,

you know, and it just completely changes. So, um, so that's it. That's sort of, you know,

I'm constantly geeking out. Yeah, but, but you're creating animations. I mean, one thing is just

to do the Ken Burns effect and just take a static image and go across it. Okay. But you're, you're,

you're making animated maps that have like arrows and things like that. Yeah, I mean, honestly,

I don't, I, I figure out the story I want to tell you then I, I kind of figure out how to

work the visuals. I don't have any professional, uh, skills. I mean, I'm getting better.

Right. You know, I can see the production qualities of recent

for videos are better than a year ago. For sure. Um, but, uh, you know, I mean, I started from

a good base already and I know already you're good, but you have to definitely improve it. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. Um, no, I mean, you know, I start with the script. I start with the story. I

work really hard. Like, what's the story I want to tie? I, I, I see myself still as a blogger.

I still might see myself as a writer. So I imagine like, for example, you go into the streets

and then you say, let's say one or two sentences in the middle of the street of Hanoi or Ho Chi Man

or wherever you are. And then so obviously you had already planned to say part of the script

on the street. No, I scripted. Yeah. And all those are almost, almost always entirely scripted.

I don't want to waste time. I don't want to waste my, um, my, my audience's attention.

Really? I mean, I kind of, you, you can make a dance. Yeah. And put it all in. Yeah, it gets

it so effective. Let's, uh, and then any other like, uh, interesting tools that you've learned,

like you've used with a cap cut. Yeah, I use cheap stuff, man. I, I, everything's filmed on my phone.

I use Canva for graphics. I guess cap cut for video editing. I do my, I mean, I have a cheap

microphone. I have a gimbal. I mean, I don't have a whole, I don't have a high-tech setup. I mean,

I probably spend two and a 50 bucks a year on, on, um, on, uh, subscriptions. And then other than my

phone itself, it's the most expensive thing I have. It's one of the subscriptions. Let him,

I mean, like, canva and cap, cap, paper, paper, paper, paper, paper, paper, paper, those. Okay,

got all. You, they have three versions, but I do the papers. It says, I'm, it's worth it. Yeah,

I totally understand. Thank you for listening all the way to the end of this wonderland show.

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