Poddmanus

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hor [00:01:00] at for to and Manisha. has been very important to me during the last year. He has helped me with this podcast that i am now sitting and talking about. But this podcast journey that he has helped me on has meant so much more than just creating this podcast. There has been so incredibly much else that has emerged during this journey, I am very happy that he wants to be here. He does not speak Swedish, so it will be in English. This is intervjun eller samtalet. Hoppas det känns okay. So let’s switch over to English then. [00:02:00] I would like to welcome my podcast mentor, the rock star, Jedi Master and my friend, Curtis Goodwolf.

Well, hello Christopher. Thank you for that wonderfully long Swedish introduction that I had no idea what you were saying. And that incredibly short English introduction that I understood. Thank you very much. It was so heartfelt.

And i told, or I spoke in Swedish and told about how important you have been to me. For me, the last year, not only creating this podcast, but this podcast journey, it has, it has really been a journey. for me that has brought up old [00:03:00] demons, old fears, old insecurities. And I would like to begin with just saying that I’m so grateful.

that you’ve been here for me this year and you has been a great inspiration and you are a fantastic human being with a great sense of humor.

So please tell me a bit more about yourself. Who are you and what are you doing

thank you for that. I really appreciate you saying that. Uh, you did the work. I did nothing. But anyway, uh, who am I? What am I doing? I’m living the time of my life in Vietnam. Uh, I’m Irish and I left, I left Ireland in 20, 2019 for a holiday and came to Vietnam and fell in love with the place, went back to Ireland, vowed that I’d return to Vietnam, came here in 2020 again and got stuck here in Covid. So I’m a recovering [00:04:00] I’m a recovering Irishman based in Vietnam, uh, doing my best to, to live live life one day at a time and uh, immerse myself in new cultures and, and, and we’re getting deep real quick. But it’s, it’s amazing when someone says like, you know, who are you and what do you do? Five years ago I would have said I am such and such and I would have given my job title, And that’s one thing that VDAM has taught me, living here has taught me. It’s like, your job title doesn’t matter. so who am I? You know, I’m, I’m, I don’t know. I’m still figuring it out. I know what I can do. I know I can play music and I know I can produce podcasts and, and things like that, but who am I? Who knows? Changes every day. The,

yeah, life is really a journey. And before I [00:05:00] forgot or forget, I must ask you about, yeah, you said music, I said rockstar in your introduction. You actually have one of the coolest rockstar last names ever, Good Wolf. Is that your family name or is it taken?

that name was, was something that I chose because. One day, i was taking a poo in my sister’s bathroom, and i noticed on the back of her door was the story of the old Indian parable, uh, and every time i took a poo in my sister’s bathroom, there was nothing else to do. But to read that story over and over again.

Uh, so, there are, there is, or there were, a grandfather and a grandson sitting around a fireplace, or a fire, and the grandson says to the grandfather, why are some people good and why are some people evil? [00:06:00] And the grandfather basically said, well inside each person there are two wolves, and you become the one you feed.

So, i read this. Over and over again, because i took many poos in my sister’s bathroom, uh, she always fed me. That’s why and eventually I thought to myself, well, I’ve got a lot of negative traits and that that parable that story made me maybe rethink about what my negative traits were and what were the things that I wanted to change and what were the things that.

I had inherited as a habit, one of the things that I decided on that we’re going, that we’re, that we’re now a part of who I was and how I acted, how I treated people, my belief system, my thought system, everything that I did, it made me question everything and it kind of gave me hope of, of change. You become the one you feed. So [00:07:00] the seed was planted in my mind to change my name eventually. And after many, many poops, I did. Not legally, but what had happened is I had I’d stopped playing music for about 10 years. And in 2015 or 14, after 10 years of not playing any music, any gigs or anything like that, I decided to, to to start playing music again. And I didn’t go under my old name, or my real name as you say.

I call myself Curtis Goodwolf. And that is the story of why my name is Chris Goodwolf. And it’s just a reminder to me that it’s a constant Like you said, journey, there is no perfection in it, but I needed something to remind myself of the direction that I wanted to stay on. And it does [00:08:00] help.

Wow, that’s a great story. real poop story. shitty story. Um, And I like that it’s also a part of your journey from, as I call it, the old Curtis to the new Curtis. And that’s a similar story that’s, that I have been taking in my life. The journey from old Christopher to the new Curtis. You, Christopher, or the real, the authentic Christopher.

Uh, but, And I’m really interested to know more about this journey, how you went from old Curtises to the real curtises, But I also know that you are a bit older than me, a a few years older, so you were older during the amazing eighties. So how was it to growing up in the eighties?

Oh wow, that’s a very big question to [00:09:00] ask because it was a rollercoaster. So my family are mixed race. They’re mixed race. So my, and I’m adopted, so let me just give you the context first now, and I’ll tell you how, what it was like. So I’m adopted to, I was adopted in the eighties uh, to a Singaporean woman and a Norwegian man who ended up living in Ireland, moving to Ireland. My birth family, however, are 100 percent Irish, 100%. And I only found that out when I was. i think in my 20s or 30s. But anyway, so, so, Anita and, Kurt and Anita Nicolaisen moved, or were moving around the world, uh, uh, because of my father’s, uh, father’s position in, in, in, in his business And they came to Ireland and they adopted [00:10:00] myself and my, my sister and so my other sisters, my other two sisters who came to Ireland with them, they were, and they are Malay, Chinese, Singaporean that kind of a mix And then the sister that got adopted in, in Ireland is half Trinidad, Tobago, half Irish. So everybody in the family was dark skinned, except for my father, who was white because he was a pasty, tall, viking, Norwegian dude. So, so as you can imagine, growing up in the 80s in a Catholic country, um, was quite interesting because We were the only outsiders on the block.

We were the only foreigners there. And there was quite a lot of pushback because of that, including letters and [00:11:00] petitions sent around the neighborhood to have us removed because we were foreign and things like that. Now, i was quite young to remember that. i only found that out when I was about 12 or 13 but I was always protected by my three older sisters, you know, what same also saying that i was always treated as an outsider, you know, especially in the, in the, In the in the, uh, in the community that I grew up in, in the city that I grew up in in Cork. um, That’s one of the reasons why I left Cork and went to Dublin. uh, is because I was, I was always treated as someone who was not from there. And, And I do love the town, and I do love the city, I do love the people there. I found that I had too many experiences of closed mindedness. parochialism. You had to know somebody who knew you. Or your your, your father had to play a sport with somebody else’s father to be accepted.