Follow Brando
Follow Brando is about rebuilding the second half of your life after the old version stops working.
I’m doing it from Southeast Asia.
I make films about money, work, family, health, aging, identity, freedom — and what happens when you finally get the freedom you thought you wanted.
Sometimes that means Vietnam, Cambodia or expat life. Sometimes it means fatherhood, retirement math, making money, getting older, staying useful, or figuring out what comes next.
I’m Brandon David Cole — filmmaker, father, entrepreneur, and work in progress.
The question behind all of it:
Does the life you’re building actually make you better?
Free tools, videos and everything else:
followbrando.com
Follow Brando
I turned the channel back on.
I took a few months away because work got busy, I became a dad, and I wasn’t sure what I had left to say about living in Southeast Asia.
I think I know now.
Life here feels different when you’re no longer just a guy traveling around the world. When you have a family, work, responsibilities, and you have to think seriously about the culture and community you want to raise your child in.
That has created some unexpected conflicts — with people here and people back home — and forced me to think harder about where I come from, what I still believe in, and what parts of it I want to carry forward.
I’ve lost a lot of faith in my home country and in some of the people I know there. At the same time, I’m losing some of the respect I once had for the places where I’m a guest.
So here’s the question I keep coming back to:
**Is there still value in being an American when you live outside America? Beyond the passport, what does American citizenship — or American identity — actually mean anymore?**
Does it still make sense to live in America with the blonde, demanding, perpetually aggrieved dating culture I remember? With limits creeping around what people feel free to say? Where meritocracy sometimes feels like an old idea collecting dust in a library? Where the level of political hostility is high enough that talk of civil conflict no longer sounds completely insane?
I believe there’s still something valuable about being American. I’m just less certain than I used to be about what it is.
And increasingly, I get the sense that the rest of the world is less certain too.
That matters when you live abroad.
Let’s let your responses shape the next few videos.
1 month ago | [YT] | 18
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