Due to the visual nature of this episode, we would recommend that you watch the accompanying video on our YouTube channel.

Greg's work

Before the Kowloon Walled City was demolished in 1993, Greg Girard was doing something very few, nigh on zero, local Hong Kongers were doing. Greg, camera in hand, was documenting a place which to many immediate residents and neighbours was utterly ordinary. It was a jangly juxtaposition of overbuilt and underbuilt, a seedy, sensationalised tourist myth, also simply "home" for hundreds of everyday hardworking families. For all those reasons it was a fixture, and furthermore like most fixtures was taken for granted-- even after the announcement of its pending demolishment. Somehow, Greg, an award-winning Canadian photographer whose work spans five decades across Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, and beyond, decided this place was in fact remarkable. He was both plucky and persistent enough to essential bet his imaging career on it.

His books include City of Darkness, which compiles a defining visual record of the Kowloon Walled City, and Hong Kong PM 1974–1989. His work has appeared in Time, National Geographic, and major galleries including the ICP in New York, and is held in the collection of Hong Kong's M+ Museum.

In this episode, we walk through some of the most striking images from Hong Kong PM with Greg, discussing what it felt like to arrive in 1974 as an 18-year-old on a cargo ship, and why many of the most extraordinary photographs come from the tension of ordinary x extraordinary.

We also dig deep on the headlining Walled City project, and why Greg felt a sense of responsibility to document it. Greg explains how he won people's trust after years of sensationalist press, and why every single former resident he's spoken to is grateful the record exists, even as some outsiders still misread the work today.

We hope you enjoy.

What does it take to build a work of art by yourself, on a macbook, in a Brooklyn rare oatmilks only coffee shop, with zero team, no water cooler, no corporate handbook, and no guarantee whatsoever it'll work?

That's the question at the heart of this conversation with Sam Eng, the rad indie game developer behind Skate Story - one of the most visually and emotionally striking games to come out in recent years. With an 85 on Metacritic and a perfect ten on Steam, Skate Story puts you in the shoes of a glass demon skating down into the underworld. It's part Dante's Inferno, part vapourwave fever dream, part meditation on fear and fragility. And I love it. Needed some sharp elbows to make sure I can get Skate Story gametime over Mario Kart or Animal Crossing on the Switch 2!

In this episode, Sam walks us through the building blocks of solo indie game development: how everything from 3D modelling and animation to code, sound design, and world-building comes together inside the Unreal engine on a 16-inch MacBook Pro. He talks about how he cold-emailed the band Blood Cultures via Bandcamp, met them at a coffee shop on the Lower East Side, and built one of gaming's most hyper-simpatico audiovisual collaborations.

We also get into the culture underneath the game. Sam is a skater, traversing Manhattan as his primary mode of transport. He unpacks the no-pads ethos of street skating, the elemental simplicity of a skateboard as material culture, and how the metaphor of a glass demon who must skate despite being made of breakable material connects directly to the vulnerability of stepping onto a board.

The conversation opens up into a debate about gaming as a medium. Is it taken seriously enough? What separates meaningful play from fast food gaming? And what can it teach kids about agency?

We hope you enjoy.

Expat Prep on Substack

In this episode, we are joined by our first repeat guest (we dig him that much) on Vanilla Club Podcast, Expat Prep, where we explore what it means to reorient your life when bedrock assumptions fail. Expat Prep is an anonymous Substack writer from unnamed Midwestern City (I think he stole this from the Simpsons by the way), who writes with a wide-ranging knowledge of financial and tax matters (disclaimers of course apply!), wry humour full of pop-cultural references, and an abiding, if subtle, patriotism. He is one of our favourite follows.

With Uruguay as the case study, buckle-up gauchos, as we venture between Montevideo and Punta del Este, where scale changes everything. Hat tip: Susan Sontag, as we get environmentally deterministic in this joint. Expat Prep dodges bullets at night (yes really!), surf bums, tax advisors, and overzealous tenedor libres by day.

What is driving people, expats specifically: is it safety and opportunity? Or is it something more subtle, like the ability to simply feel at ease? Adventurism? Uruguay is hot right now, low-key becoming a top flight option for prospective-expats American and otherwise.

One of the central themes is that planning, even in uncertain times, is not purely defensive. It can be hopeful, value creating in finance-speak. Building optionality is one of Expat Prep's underpinning, most resonating themes. And whether it is in blunt pragmatics or in the abstract we have a brilliant guide here indeed. Let's go!

We hope you enjoy.

We almost didn't publish this one.

Spending even an hour inside the headspace of dogmatic, violence-approving ideologies isn't exactly our jam. But far-right extremism is a real, globally networked phenomenon - and ignoring it doesn't make it smaller. So we called Dr. Heidi Beirich.

Dr. Heidi is a political scientist and co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, and she joins us to unpack the globalisation of far-right ideology - what these movements actually want, how the idea of a "white ethnic state" gets framed and sold inside far-right communities, and why these worldviews are spreading faster than the institutions built to contain them.

We also get into the on-ramps. Gaming platforms, social media, identity-based grievance communities, and the adolescent boys who are quietly being pulled in through all of them. And it is happening in quaint suburbs and exurbs, all over the place.

Then the harder question: what do we actually do about it? Dr. Heidi walks us through the erosion of federal prevention programs and content moderation frameworks in the United States, the limits of what's left, and makes the case for the unglamorous tools still on the table - civic engagement, protest, voting, public accountability.

It's a sobering conversation. But if you want to understand how extremist ideologies form, spread, and reshape political systems in real time, this is the one.

In this episode, we are joined by Kella Narki Merlain-Moffatt, to explore the role that language plays in shaping identity. As a multilingual, transnational kinda person, this is my kind of topic.

Kella is the Associate Director of the Africana Center at Tufts (Go Jumbos!). Raised in a multilingual Ghanaian-Haitian household, Kella shares how early exposure to multiple cultures dynamically shaped her life journey. Her research interests center on linguistic accessibility - particularly how the seemingly innocuous default choices that we make about what language to use, and when to use it, has lots of downstream effects. Including some unintended consequences.

The discussion challenges the notion that the lingua francas of trade and commerce should rule the day--- at least by default. Neglecting indigenous languages, or dismissing multilingualism, isn't free...

And if not free, at what cost? Jump straight into the episode to find out!

We hope you enjoy.

Allan Wexler

Michael Yarinsky @ Tangible Space

In this episode of Vanilla Club Podcast, we are joined by visionary artist and teacher, Allan Wexler, to explore the groundbreaking Farm is Table project. With all the distress in the world at the moment, we couldn't think of a more welcome time to go "back to the country." In this case, with a small dose of wryness (we love it!) Allan takes us "into" the country, or, the farm, so to speak, quite literally.

Allan, whose corpus of work spans architecture, fine art, and visceral, experimental culinary experiences, takes us mise-en-scène of a dining concept that's rather "earthy," shall we say. This is a loaded word "earthy;" is it earthy in the sense of "crunchy" and "granola" sort of au naturale? Or is it earthy the way that "tu" is suggestive of in Chinese parlance: base. Allan challenges all of these notions, and with a righteous, and hard-earned absurdist touch. Farm is Table has caught much attention on the interwebs, and spawned a number of copycats in the flesh.

Co-created with architect Michael Yarinsky of Tangible Space, the project is a playful reimagining of the farm-to-table experience. Farm is Table literally integrates the table into the earth, with diners seated in a trench carved between rows of trees, and hand-picked wildflowers serving as the table centrepieces. This immersive design transforms a simple meal into a multi-sensory exploration, both playfully jousting with and seriously interrogating conventional notions of dining and art.

Allan's work reminds me so much of Walter De Maria's New York Earth Room, which I visited in 2001 as a student at Tisch. The Earth Room was a gallery space with white walls, displaying a pile of dirt--- and here is the key---and displaying nothing but that pile of dirt (maybe it was more like a bed of dirt, as it was spread relatively evenly). It was "found art," it was so natural, but marrying a $0 commodity to $$$$ commercial-residential Manhattan property constraints was so ludicrously unnatural; it was so simple, but so improbable; so real (what is realer than a pile of dirt?), but so abstract. I was enthralled. It is my favourite installation ever in NYC. Allan's work harkens back to this tradition, and in the episode you will see that Allan can effortlessly place himself and his work into a much broader critical context. He poses some of the same questions as De Maria, and from the first moment I encountered Farm is Table, I'm like whoa!

Allan also situates the project within a particular lineage, linking it to F.T. Marinetti’s 1932 Futurist Cookbook, which was all about merging culinary and fine arts through provocative and absurdist meals. Farm is Table is, in many ways, a modern update of this avant-garde spirit. We also touch on some of the other project's from Allan and Michael's New Futurist Cookbook, which they are hoping to release in the near future.

Simple vs complex is a recurring theme on Vanilla Club Podcast. It seems that the virality of Farm Is Table has a lot to do with making the ordinary into something extraordinary. And as Allan reminds us in the podcast, "You don't need to use expensive materials or complex construction. You can work small. You can work from a corner of your apartment and make amazingly important work."

We hope you enjoy.

This episode is a first for the show: a live, walking conversation recorded on-premises at Vanilla Club, on the lush Cassowary Coast in Tropical North Queensland, before picking up later in the urban jungle of Sydney. (Please give me some credit for my assimilation into Aussie culture--- if you watch the video you will see I am reppin' the "high-viz," screaming neon orange hat, and a ripper of a neon yellow vest, thank you!) What unfolds here isn't a typical interview, but a shared journey through neolithic rainforest, across rivers with “potential for crocs,” and into deeper reflections on place, and community.

Our guest Danny Kinzer, is a former high-school classmate of mine. Physically speaking, imagine a composite of Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa; you get the picture stature-wise; but Danny has a better smile than either of them on their best day, and is one of the warmest braddahs you'll ever meet. Danny describes himself less as a storyteller and more as a voyager, guide, and student of relationship. He has worked in education and some adjacent spaces with some big names like National Geographic, Hōkūleʻa Crew, and The Biomimicry Institute, and has been associated with some stellar institutions, but a name-dropper he is not. And the tenor of this conversation is a lot more subtle. So we will just go with the braddah-ship.

As the walk begins, the conversation opens into the Hawaiian ecological concept of "kipuka" - pockets of life that survive disruption and seed future regeneration. Vanilla Club becomes a living example: a working farm that also acts as a sanctuary, and a meeting place for human, animal and plant life.

From there, we flow across disciplines and life chapters. Danny reflects on stepping away from competitive sport, when he realised the game mattered less to him than the people. That same instinct, to choose meaning over metrics (and the persistent, omni-optimisation that surrounds so many of us), threads through his studies in neuroscience and psychology, his later work in biomimicry, and a life shaped by walking, wandering, and listening.

Rather than chasing famous destinations, Danny speaks about “Lake Okobojis”: ordinary places made extraordinary through relationship. A small island village in China reached on foot. A spontaneous visit to Anaconda, Montana. Swimming mangroves in Bali. Danny is the type of guy who would be down grabbing a bag of rice and heading upriver in to the wild, and I just love it. Tripadvisor... schmipadvisor

The ocean emerges as a central metaphor - less a boundary than a vast connector, “a million rivers flowing at once.” Living in Hawaii, Danny shares how voyaging canoes and intergenerational knowledge have shaped his understanding of community, where children, elders, and ancestors are all part of the same crew. If I said it it'd be cliché, but Danny just lives the Aloha spirit.

Returning to the Cassowary Coast, the conversation closes where it began: with gratitude for a place that feels alive, unfinished (in a good way!), and willing to move without a fixed destination.

We hope you enjoy.

vanilla.club

In this episode, we are joined by Alex Woo, director of the Netflix hit "In Your Dreams."

As founder and CEO of Kuku Studios, Alex is a business-creative hybrid - something he is all too modest about, but something that is a key part of Alex's secret sauce.

Alex is also a dear friend and classmate. We went to the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU together. I don't have any beer pong gone wrong stories to share, or drunken late night hijinks to tell, probably because Alex was in the cutting room, perfecting his craft, all the way back to the last millennium. I can tell you that even in high school the lore was that Alex was destined to be a master filmmaker.

We also learn plenty of tidbits about the movie making process. Alex gives some specific examples of how particular jokes get woven into the film---sometimes they are core elements in the early script, other times they are monkey-wrenched in there---like a particular "Don't Cha!"

Alex gives some vignettes of his childhood in the States and the Hong Kong, and how certain cultural and family experiences came to inspire the film.

Ultimately, 'In Your Dreams' really reminds us why storytelling is king, and why in a media landscape filled with lots of mediocre and increasingly AI-generated content, parents should opt for the high quality choice, like In Your Dreams.

We hope you enjoy.