I Turned the Tables on the Old Dog - Boomers Being Cool

Introduction to Old Dog New Tricks

0:01 Not all men do find happiness here. That's when the Forbes article came up, and Little Dumag Getti was number one. Back then, she may be pregnant with his baby; he doesn't care, he's gone. If we don't make something happen, it's never going to again. I don't care what they do, 'cause I don't care what they think.

0:16 Hey YouTube, Alex here, and in today's video, we are sitting down with the one and only Old Dog New Tricks. I'm sure most of my subscribers are familiar. If you haven't already, I provided a link in the description below. I know that many of you have come to this channel from the interview that I did with him. I was very fortunate to be able to turn the camera on him and to get some of his thoughts.

0:38 We did overlap a bit with the lunch rush hour, and so there's a little bit of noise. I did try to cut that out. Thought I'd let you know, so let's get into the interview with Paul. Well, I want to thank Paul. As you all know, he is the old dog with the new tricks. I've been a fan of Paul for years. I started watching Paul back in 2019. I felt that he had this brilliant way of telling stories, and I'm so grateful to have finally met him. It's a pleasure and it's an honor.

Paul's Move to the Philippines

1:07 Paul, without further ado, I'd like for you to introduce yourself to the two people that subscribe to this channel that aren't familiar. Well, you got two people watching, that's one more than I normally get. I feel honored to be here. What do you want me to tell them? If you could just, uh, introduce yourself. Oh, okay. My name is Paul, and I moved over to the Philippines seven years ago, looking for a different way of life, primarily for economic freedom. And here I am, seven years later, enjoying the benefits of that move.

1:39 Very good, Paul. That's a great introduction. So let's go ahead and get into the questions here. I see you as a pioneer. A lot of guys see that you came here. How many years ago now? Seven years ago. So you've been here for seven years. Whose footsteps were you following in? What inspired you to go halfway around the world?

1:57 That, my friend, is a very good question, a very fair one. I'm glad you asked it. There were three guys in the Philippines that I knew of. One was his name is R, has a little channel, Great Channel, Life Beyond the Sea. Um, there was a gentleman by the name of Ned, and he had a channel called Philippine Dreams. And then there was a gentleman by the name of Bud Brown, and I think his channel was called Bud Brown in the Philippines or something like that. He since moved back to America.

2:25 And so those were the only guys that were really out here. There were some peripheral people that were in other areas, but as far as quality of content and information, those guys were the were the stars. Yeah, so that's who I followed.

2:37 That's super helpful, and I also think it's humble to, uh, share those guys who help to inspire your journey. The next question I have for you, a lot of younger guys are watching channels like yours. They're seeing the success in your journey, and also just the beautiful life that you've built for yourself and for your wife and your community. What is your best insight for younger guys who, they're not getting a Social Security check, but they want to make the move? Maybe they're in a solid career, they're a tradesperson, they're a salesperson, and they're thinking, 'Okay, I can't do it today, but maybe 10 years from now or 15 years from now, if I live below my means, then I can do it.' So, yeah, what's your insight for guys in that situation?

Advice for Younger Men

3:19 That is very easy, easy peasy to respond to. If they are your age, 30s, 40s, even 50s, I would suggest what I did. Well, actually, what I did, I didn't do. I was invited in 2005, so we're talking 20 years ago, practically, to go visit with my friend in Thailand. The thought had never even occurred to me to go halfway around the world. I thought that my best friend at the time, he's my best friend today, and we had worked together for so many years. He told me what his experience had been there. He'd been going there since the 70s or the 80s.

3:56 So I said, 'You know what the hell.' At that point in my life, I was doing very well financially, and I had a lot of free time. It was easy for me to take a couple of weeks off or a couple of months off if I wanted to. I was doing my own thing. So at 2005, I made the trip over there, and I was in my early 50s. If, if 50, yeah, like 50s, something like that. It set me in stone. I knew what my future was in my 50s when I came over to Thailand, not the Philippines. I saw an entirely different world that I never knew existed.

4:29 You'd watch National Geographic, right? It doesn't give you, you know, you see the people starving on the desert, or you see the safaris. Or if they went to Thailand, they would just show a bunch of long boats. They had no desire to go over there and fish with that guy. You know, when I went there and I got immersed in the culture, my two-week vacation turned into two months. I just kept extending out my plane ticket until they finally said, 'That's that's the last one.'

4:56 Sport. And so I begrudgingly came back home. But you know what happened? From 2005, I knew what my destiny was, and it gave me inspiration. And it was just this almost total reassurance that came over to me is that for once in my life, I knew what my future held. I didn't know the details of it, but I knew I had this objective and I had this goal line to carry the ball over, make the touchdown in life. Every time I had a tough time at home, tough time at the job, tough time in life in general, it was so cool because I could just fall back and remind myself, 'Dude, one day you're going to be back to where it is you love to be.'

5:42 And then in 2009, four years after that, I actually moved there for a year. So I was still doing okay and went to Thailand, bugged out for a year, really immersed myself, really cemented the entire concept. I know I moved to the Philippines, but I had always had the objective of Thailand. And so the reasons I changed from Thailand to the Philippines, that's another story. That was basically just a setup due to research and watching videos and YouTube videos a couple, three years prior to retirement.

6:12 Because when retirement started to loom, that is when I knew I would have a cash flow, a steady cash flow. That was when I started to get on Google and best places to retire. That's when the Forbes article came up, and Little Dumag Getti was number one. Back then, now it's not even on the list. It's all your fault.

6:30 Yeah, I'm thinking, 'Oh hell, I should have gone to Ecuador.' Thank you so much for sharing that insight, Paul. I think that you talk about getting this taste, and that taste is what gave you the drive to keep working toward your goal, to hang in there with your stressful job, the challenges in your life. We all have challenges. Probably most of us watching this that are back in the US or UK, Australia, we have stressful jobs, we're trying to pay the bills, we're trying to move up, we're trying for that promotion, and we want to just keep our job right in a downturn. I know firsthand what it's like to go through a layoff. You want to keep that ball rolling. So you had that taste, and it helped to motivate you through those difficult times.

Potential Missteps for Young Expats

7:14 So the next question I have for you, I think this is a pressing one because a lot of guys my age only look at the vacation mode. They're seeing the vacation mode videos. They don't understand the potential missteps. What do you see as the biggest missteps that younger guys make trying to come over here?

7:28 I honestly don't see the guys that I've associated with that are younger, that are your age, really. I don't see very many missteps, to be quite frank with you. I'm sure they happen, but I have to tell you the truth, most of the guys that I see that are coming over here, they're your age, maybe a little bit older, have simply gotten sick and tired of being sick and tired with their situation in America. With the advent of the internet, they've been able to come over here and perhaps work remotely, or they do YouTube. They find a way to try, at least, to generate an income stream. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. And a lot of them are just traveling throughout the Philippines. They're younger, they're stronger, they've got their wits about them. They're not an old man like me who can't, you know, stay on a motorcycle for more than an hour without needing to rest or, you know, whatever.

8:28 And so I have not seen the misdeeds. What I have seen is that there are guys that come over, as you say, in vacation mode because they're younger, because they're good-looking, because they're flashing some dough. They've been able to attract Filipina girls, and I say that plural, more than one. And they have created absolute havoc in some of the women's lives. These were friends of mine, women that I knew as friends only, and then they hooked up with these guys. And the drinking, getting their bodies tatted up, coloring their hair, just as decadent kind of behavior. The men were in, they brought the girls along, and the girls played into it. And then, guess what? The guy did. He got up and left. He went back home to America or Sweden or Norway or wherever he came from.

9:12 And so all of a sudden, he's now absent. She may be pregnant with his baby. He doesn't care, he's gone. And she is aged 10 years in nine months, you know, because of the, the drinking and all that. That's a very small minority, but I have observed that. So I would say that's the worst thing they bring is they bring in this sort of, um, oh, I don't know, just a decadent type of lifestyle and they introduce that to the culture, which I think is a crime.

Cultural Clash and Life Experience

9:41 Yeah, I think that's so accurate, right? That there's this cultural clash where people, they're inexperienced young people, just haven't had the time to learn from hard lessons. They just haven't lived enough of life. Inexperience, that may not be a big deal in their home country, right? They've got their community around them saying, 'Hey, you get home at a decent time.' None of that exists here for young travelers. There's nobody telling them, 'Hey, do the speed limit.'

10:05 So I think it's so powerful to just be cognizant that your actions do affect people here, even though you may have an expiration date. You may have.

10:12 You may have your $110,000 and once it's done, you're going back home. The people that live here have to live with those decisions, whether positive or negative, that you make on them. So, to just be self-aware, what you do really does matter. I think that's so powerful.

10:28 I'm not here to chastise you guys, but I do think it's important to just be aware of that. Moving on to the next question, a lot of us have had challenges back in our home country, whether we're 30 or 70. Naturally, the guy who's 70 has had more challenges than the guy who's 30 in most cases.

10:44 Do you feel that the struggles of your life back home have enabled you to better savor the life that you've built here? That's a great question. I think the difference between a 31-year-old and a 61-year-old or a 71-year-old is just, as you put it, life experience.

10:59 We are at the realization that we are in our last chapter and we realize that our proverbial days are numbered. And that if we don't make it now, we're never going to make it. If we don't make something happen, it's never going to. When we come over here, we find a lot of opportunities that just didn't exist for someone our age.

11:23 We're also able to embellish the experience with our wisdom and our life experiences. We have a little different attitude. We stop becoming takers and we start, as we get older, to become givers. I think that's just an instinct in us. We've already understood and come to terms with the fact that we're not out to impress anybody.

11:45 That's probably the biggest life lesson that an elderly person like myself will share with a younger person: you're wasting your time if you're trying to keep up with the Joneses or show off or impress people. Because there's always going to be somebody bigger, better, richer, better looking than you. So it's a non-stop cycle, and it's one that is just an absolute total waste of time.

12:10 How much better it is to jettison all that, to just come in and understand that material objects, things, what other people think, just don't have any relevance. It's more about the experience, it's more about the journey than the destination. We know where we're going to go, we know that our time is limited, so we do try everything we can to live each day as full as we can.

12:35 Every day, our capacity to do so diminishes. I was here at the age of 62. Today, at the age of 69, I cannot do some of the things I could do at 62. That's a true fact. So in seven years, I have already noticed that there's a physical degrading going on that you're not going to stop, you're not in control of.

12:59 That actually is a good wakeup call. Every day, you know what, a year from now, when you're 31, you think you're 32, you're going to be the same guy, same body, same mental capacity, same full head of hair. You can't say that at my age. One year from now could be a lifetime, and you realize that.

13:19 So you want to take each day. I think the beauty of it is that with the wisdom that we obtain, it's okay to do absolutely nothing. Some of my best days are the days where I just stay home because I feel like staying home. I don't feel compelled to go meet with somebody or be invited to the party.

13:38 I don't get all butt-hurt if I see other guys are getting together and I wasn't called to attend. Big deal. It just, again, I don't care what they do because I don't care what they think, and I'm not here to impress them. I'm here to live my life, and so there's where the joy lives.

13:56 You come comfortable within your own skin, even though it's saggy and wrinkled and a bunch of hair in weird places. You know, those are some of the things you get to look forward to. Pal, stop laughing. Thank you so much for sharing all this.

Living in the Present Moment

14:16 I think it's so powerful that you're able to live in the present. You're not thinking about tomorrow, you're not thinking about yesterday. You're living in the moment. You've got days where it's just you and your life, and that's plenty, maybe even more than enough for you.

14:33 You feel that your cup is overflowing with joy and a sense of connection. You don't feel like, 'Oh, I'm missing out because I'm not the life of the party.' Which a lot of us salespeople, we love being the center of attention. I've gotten that from so many of my sales mentors, like we're naturally the types that we love that.

14:50 Sometimes, you know, we miss that. But I think when you self-actualize, then you realize that's not the end all be all. So I've got two last questions, and I'd like to tie them together. Why does so many men find happiness here? The second part of that is, in what ways are you happier here?

Finding Happiness and Financial Freedom

15:06 First of all, not all men do find happiness here. Some men come here and are totally unhappy and they bail out and they go back home. It's not their cup of tea. I want to be really clear about that. This is not the magic pill that you get to swallow.

15:20 The Philippines for some people is a horrible fit. But I have always, always, always, when I've had the opportunity to meet those guys, I've always commended them for giving it a try. You at least get up there and check it out yourselves. But some can't handle the weather, some can't handle the language, the food, the lack of medical care like that.

15:43 So those things exist, and that's the one thing I want to just put out there. I've never used the word 'paradise' when I'm explaining the Philippines because if it was paradise, everybody would be here. Okay, you know what I'm saying? So I kind of forgot your question.

16:00 What was it? The second part of the question is, in what ways are you happier here? Oh, okay. I have to say, I've, you know, I've been saying this for seven years, is I love the financial freedom that the Philippines affords me. That was my goal when I came over here. I'm still bearing the fruits of that.

16:20 We use the term 'minimalist' a lot. Well, minimalist is almost the only way to go here. You're almost not forced into it, but you certainly have more choices here to cut back on the outgo. You find that it's not what you make, it's what you spend.

16:35 And that's true at our home country. If you're out racking up credit card debt and buying two cars and a bigger house and taking on all this luggage as far as financial burdens, well, you're going to end up losing at the end. It's going to kill you, it's going to take over.

16:50 So immediately when I came over here, there was just this roof or this house lifted off my shoulders of, 'I can stay within my goofy little social security check and still save money.' I couldn't ever accomplish that in America. That's my fault. I didn't put enough throttles or governors on myself or those that I was married to or the kids.

17:08 But that was then, this is now. So like I said, I focus on now. I have saved more money over here than I ever did in a lifetime in America. In seven years, my savings account is bigger here than it is there. There's the financial aspect of it.

17:24 As far as romance, that wasn't even on my radar when I came over here. It wasn't a priority for me. But it only took about six months for me to open my eyes and leave myself open to that opportunity again. I thought when I came over here, that was in my past.

17:43 I had made so many poor decisions. I'm not ex-wife bashing, I own it. You know, it was shouldn't no, there was no shotgun wedding. All right, it was my choice and I made it for the wrong reasons. So I have to own that. I cannot blame the woman.

17:57 But I didn't trust myself when I came over here when it came to selection of a significant other. So I said, 'Well, if a date comes along, maybe I'll go on a date. Maybe I won't. I'm perfectly comfortable with just being by myself anyway. I could explore the island, I can go here, I can go there, I can make some peripheral friends, but nothing too deep.'

18:17 And I found the opposite to be true. I found that whether I wanted it to or not, I made some very strong intimate connections with other expats and with other Filipinos, both men and women. And so that just was sort of like this unintended consequence of moving over here.

18:34 From a guy that never wanted to have anything to do with women again, not a woman hater, a woman lover, her, but I didn't trust myself. From a guy that didn't even want to entertain that thought, I'm now married. So there you have that.

18:47 And so it was a very slow metamorphosis. It didn't happen overnight. And I think that that was because it wasn't my intention. I've met other guys that their only intention is to meet somebody, and I found, unfortunately, that a lot of those guys fail because they tend to lack impulse control.

19:06 And the first pretty face or the first person that's nice to them, female, they jump right in with both feet. And I've always said in my own little world, when people ask advice, I say, 'Slow down.' Just take your time. Work on that decision. Decide if you need it or if you want it.

19:24 If you want it, don't get it. But if you need it, you'll buy it. And a big difference between want and need. I think that's so powerful, Paul. I think it's so helpful for the audience to understand that they need to come with a backpack full of patience.

Building a Fulfilling Life

19:35 That coming here, and I agree with this too, hinging on the make or break is the relationship. No, if you want to stay here long-term, which is certainly not for everybody. Some guys will come for a month, they'll find, 'Ah, it's a nice place to visit, not a place for me to live.' But if you want to live here long-term, you really need to have the patience to develop a deep appreciation for the country.

19:57 It's not going to be vacation mode here every day. And I think that's what you found, is that it's not just that you love your wife, but also that you love her country, and that you love the community that you've built. You've invested the time to really build this beautiful life.

20:11 And I think it's just something that we can all appreciate and look up to. And I think we all in some way want to achieve some of what you've achieved in your life, not exactly this and that, but the sense of fulfillment that you really exude in your videos. And we can see your transformation over time from your videos.

20:29 From your videos, you first arrive to the videos today. I personally can attest that you smile more and more, and your smiles are bigger and deeper. You really have undergone this beautiful transformation. So definitely, if you haven't watched Paul's channel, Old Dog New Tricks, I'm sure you have if you're watching this, but if you haven't, go over there and check it out. He's an incredible storyteller. I think one of the best storytellers in this country.

20:54 I do want to give him a chance. By the way, we'll throw the link to his channel in the description below. I do want to give him a chance. Do you have any final words for our audience today, Paul?

21:00 Well, I want to thank you for the opportunity to talk to you. I really enjoyed interviewing you more than you interviewing me. I've never been comfortable on the side of doing this, you know. I got to be honest with you. I'll be asking the questions.

21:37 So I don't know. I would say follow Alex. My channel is just a little video diary in my life. That's what it started out as, it's what still is. And I think V Alex is going to duplicate that with much more efficiency and a much different perspective and a new and fresher one.

21:54 I'm ready for the younger guys to come over here and pass the baton and let you guys start showing it. I would love nothing more than for this to stop being a retirement community and have it turn into more of a gymnasium. You'll get some young, fresh blood in here.

22:12 I think it would not only help the individual, but I really think it would help the A generation. I think if more and more younger people get up off their, put the phone down, put down the video game and all that other hoopla, and just come over here and take a good kick in the face, and take a good look at poverty and take a good look at not getting your way.

22:33 Be challenged. Challenged is so important because there's such a feeling of accomplishment when you get all these little roadblocks that are put in front of you, man. When you first, you're laughing because you're like, 'I, you know what? You want me to do what? And you're going to do it how?'

22:54 And I could give you examples, but we'd be here for three days. But you know what? You have to go out and you have, especially when you're first here, you have these tough days where you're just trying to figure out how to acclimate, change money, fit in, where to go, what to see, what to do. And at the end of the day, you got to sit back, you can't help but give yourself a pat on the back because you survived it and you were challenged.

23:17 And you were taken out of your comfort zone. And you know, there's a clinical fact that if people are taken and put into a strange environment, it actually activates parts of your brain that you never would have activated had you not challenged yourself.

23:53 And sometimes you're afraid, and sometimes you're in panic mode, and sometimes you're lost. And other times you're overwhelmed with joy and with pleasure, and your brain actually starts to grow as opposed to degenerate. And so, I don't know, it's to me, it's just been like a swallowing the Fountain of Youth, a little sip of the youth water, you know?

24:15 I don't know how else to put it. Instead of the Kool-Aid we're drinking, we're drinking the Philippines water. We've been drinking the freaking Kool-Aid for 62 years, and now we're getting a little Aquafina in us, okay?

24:30 So remember folks, no matter what you do, hydrate. Okay, those are my last words.

24:36 Well, thank you so much for your time today, Paul. It's been brilliant. I think that you have a wealth of insight to share with us. I can't thank you enough for joining us. I've really enjoyed our time together today. Thanks so much, everyone. We'll see you soon.