On Expatdom and Life on the Fringes: A Podcast W/ a Texan in Jakarta

My uncle once told me regarding life stories: “Most people just aren’t that interesting.”

This is largely true, and it’s true with expats broadly, but less so than in the general population. The kind of person who voluntarily relocates to the Third World is bound to be, by definition, heterodox.

Such is the case with this gentleman, Bernard Grover of Radio Far Side, a Texan gentleman living in Jakarta, with whom I recently had an enlightening conversation about expatdom and people and things.

Our wide-ranging discussion encompassed:

·       What drives expats to leave home

·       The pitfalls of drinking heavily overseas and over-the-counter narcotics in Bangkok

·       Alternatively, the merits of sobriety

·       The unique resilience of the Slavic national character and its provenance

·       Mexico’s lockdown policies

·       The best Mayan ruins in Mexico (not Chichen Itza)

·       The dirty globalist work laundered through non-government organizations (NGOs)

·       Pain as a catalyst for change (either political or personal)

·       The relevance or lack thereof of American pop culture worldwide

·       The rapidly depreciating cache of DC Swamp creatures

·       The divergent character of corruption in the West vs. the developing world

·       My unending, limitless contempt for war criminal Anthony Fauci

·       The legacy of George Carlin

… And a lot more.

There’s something here that everyone, save for a Social Justice™ activist or a Pfizer executive, can love and deeply appreciate.

I also appeared more recently, once again, on the Hrvoje Moric radio show hosted on the TNT Radio platform, during which we touched on current events in the Middle East as well as the peculiar #MeToo campaign against dead novelist George Orwell, among other topics du jour.

 https://tntradiolive.podbean.com/e/ben-bartee-on-the-hrvoje-moric-show-28-october-2023/

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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