All images by Anna Grace Wang for RICE Media
On a humid afternoon in Singapore, Eddie Jui sits in the driver’s seat of his taxi. A small DJI Osmo camera is set up on his dashboard. He begins to speak—not to a passenger, but to the thousands of strangers who will later find his words on YouTube.
The 48-year-old, who also goes by LazyCabbie on YouTube, has over 9,000 subscribers who keep up with his vlogs. In his videos (he uploads multiple times a week), Eddie bares his soul.
In one, he talks about his anger issues. In another, the former paralegal recounts the shame of meeting an acquaintance and having to admit that he’d gone from the corporate world to driving a taxi.
Eddie tells me that he never intended to go viral. Instead, he was simply looking for an outlet to process his anger and shame after his company went bust. He’d tried gaming and talking to his fish, but his wife offhandedly suggested making videos.
When he picked up the camera three months ago, he found himself naturally pouring his heart out.
“I didn’t think so much of it. It was unscripted,” he says. “I just let it out from my heart. So you can say I treat my camera lens like my fish.”
His first viral video was one where he talked about driving six hours just to break even, racking up nearly 10,000 views.
“I was shocked. Why do people want to listen? It’s not like my voice is very nice.”
His newer videos have eclipsed this. One listing taxi drivers’ favourite food spots has over 76,000 views.
Unlike influencers chasing views, Eddie stumbled into vlogging as an outlet. But maybe it’s his candour and the novelty of seeing an older man in touch with his emotions that’s earned him views and success on YouTube. Of course, it helps that his videos look professional too, of higher quality than vlogs shot on mobile phones.
Besides giving digital natives and influencer wannabes a run for their money, he’s also doing something far more important. He’s creating space for other middle-aged men in Singapore to feel it’s okay to be in touch with their feelings.
From Business Owner to Cabbie
It’s raining when we meet Eddie at Yishun Pond Park, one of the nature-lover’s favourite spots.
As the RICE videographers line up their shots, raindrops collect on Eddie’s glasses, but he gamely remains in the rain so we can finish our shoot.
I almost feel like I already know the guy from watching his YouTube videos. In person, he’s the same friendly, straight-talking personality.
I learn some tidbits that his YouTube channel hadn’t revealed to me. Fun fact: He’s held an eclectic mix of jobs, including electrician apprentice, a presenter at Jurong Bird Park, a diamond salesman, a paralegal, and a business owner. But the transition from entrepreneur to cabbie was the hardest, he says.
As a paralegal, Eddie had wanted to strike out on his own. So he built a business in 2010 around intellectual property rights, helping clients register trademarks and copyrights, and handling infringement cases.
For a while, things were good. He even expanded from a small office in Aljunied to a bigger space at Oxley BizHub in Ubi. Then during the pandemic, his business folded, undone by a mix of his own missteps and an industry that was digitising quickly while he lagged behind.
He returned to his old legal company in a sales role, tasked mainly with bringing in new accounts. The work didn’t suit him—he left again. But by then, he was saddled with about $2,000 in monthly debt payments with two children, now 9 and 12, to support.
In 2021, when the gig economy was heating up, private-hire driving seemed like the quickest way to earn some cash. “It was the lowest hanging fruit,” Eddie recalls.
It’s an honest living. But going from running a company of eight employees to driving strangers around stung, Eddie says.
“I was devastated. I was feeling really bad about myself… I was driving, feeling lost. I was thinking, ‘Where will this bring me? How long can I try this?’”
The social stigma of his job pivot weighed heavily. For a year, he avoided reunion dinners and family gatherings, ashamed to admit that his business had failed.
The shame curdled into anger. He lashed out at those closest to him.
“I manifested that anger and projected it towards anybody around me, especially my kids. They would just get a scolding from me or my wife,” he recalls.
Even small things, like his kids spilling water, would set him off. But after blowing up at them, he always felt the guilt gnawing away at him.
“That’s when I tried to tell myself I cannot be like this. So I slowly moved from the anger to looking inwards and finding out what is actually happening to me.”
YouTube Therapy
Even as he tried to make peace with his new reality, Eddie felt he had no one to confide in. His parents belonged to a generation that believed in keeping a stoic front.
His wife, he says, didn’t fully understand his emotional turmoil—she, too, was stressed over the family’s finances.
As for his friends, they stuck to safe, surface-level conversations whenever they met.
He needed another outlet. For a while, he turned to his tetra fish.
“When I was young, my father used to keep fishes as a hobby. And I love nature things… So that’s how I got into aquariums. So I just talk to my fish like how I would talk to a very good friend. That allows me to share honestly, from my inner self.”
Besides the fish, he also picked up a slightly less healthy coping mechanism: gaming. He’d escape into World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy for hours, he says. In an effort to reduce his gaming hours, his wife—who came up with the Lazy Cabbie handle—suggested he try making videos instead.
In April, Eddie picked up the camera to make his first video. He never expected people to watch them. But his raw honesty struck a chord.
In one, he admitted that losing his company felt like losing his purpose, confidence, and identity. In another, he spoke openly about how his anger issues led to arguments with his wife.
He talked about going for marriage counselling, and about realising he wasn’t truly angry with his family but with himself.
“It was definitely not easy to share this kind of thing,” he says. “But actually, when I was recording, I didn’t think so much of it. It was unscripted. I just let it out from my heart.”
For men of his generation, this openness is almost taboo.
“Our generation and our parents… they are the typical Asian parents. They say things like, ‘You are a man. Why you cry? So soft. Useless. You’ve got broad shoulders. You are supposed to carry your burdens with you.’ So we don’t tend to share this kind of thing.”
Now, though, Eddie sees that his videos have created a kind of community where middle-aged men can be candid about their struggles.
“I think it’s important to get more voices up. Because men in general, when we are going through a midlife crisis, we have fewer forums to find kakis—to find people who are genuine to talk to. For some, there’s a struggle behind the smile, but they don’t have an avenue.”
The Secret Behind His Success
In today’s YouTube ecosystem—saturated with content and optimised for trends—it isn’t easy to stand out. Which makes it all the more striking that a cabbie rambling about his life has struck a chord with people and amassed a following.
And perhaps an added layer of novelty is how he does it in the same format as YouTubers half his age, with cleanly edited vlogs, stylish colour grading, crisp audio, and distant B-rolls of himself.
Eddie chuckles when I compliment his video quality. Honestly, his efforts are impressive for someone who’s only been at it for a few months. But he’s self-deprecating, telling me that he owes his editing skills to YouTube tutorials.
“My videos are quite long, so it’s my responsibility to give my viewers a good experience!”
Eddie insists that his content creation approach is simple, nothing much to it. It’s mostly what pops into his brain during those long hours behind the wheel.
“I usually have a topic first. Like, for example, maybe I’m driving and I’m hungry. I want to talk about food and whether we eat to survive.”
But I think what’s also impressive about Eddie is that in a few short months, he’s mastered a key component of meaningful content creation. “There needs to be one main point; if not, I don’t do the video. I want each video to have a good takeaway.”
Viewers often praise him for being relatable. On a video about switching from private-hire to taxi driving, one commenter wrote: “Content we all vulnerable Singaporeans can relate to. Well done sir.”
Unlike others, Eddie avoids imitating trends. “When I consume content, I watch, and after 30 seconds, I stop. Because I’m scared I’ll become like them. I like the idea. I like how they present it. I pick the inspiration, then the rest is all up to me to build it up.”
His audience, mostly Singaporeans aged between 35 and 60, seems to want exactly that: the voice of someone who feels like one of their own.
His videos have even become conversation starters for couples facing the same troubles. One commenter writes on his video about dealing with anger: “Hi Eddie, thanks for sharing your pain and anger. I forwarded this video to my husband. He has been getting easily irritated and angry with me over no issue [sic] after he lost his money to scammer.”
Part of Eddie’s appeal is also that his videos feel like a chat with a friend. Or a taxi trip with a particularly verbose driver.
“Even though I have 9,000 subscribers, I don’t picture myself up on stage, speaking to 9,000 people,” Eddie reflects. “Instead, I think of what I’m doing as having a one-on-one conversation with 9,000 people.”
When Vulnerability Finds an Audience
Eddie’s unlikely rise suggests that there is a hunger for authenticity. People don’t just want aspirational, glossy success stories, but the unfiltered voices of ordinary people.
The fact that these reflections come from a taxi driver—someone ubiquitous yet often invisible—probably adds to the appeal.
His willingness to be vulnerable online marks a generational shift. Eddie grew up in a culture that equated masculinity with stoicism. But his audience, made up largely of his peers, has shown just how much they crave spaces where weakness is not shameful.
It’s hard to quantify mental health struggles. But the male mental health crisis is very real. Globally, suicide rates are consistently higher among men than women.
In Singapore, too, men account for more suicides than women. In 2024, men made up 64.3 percent of all suicides. We also saw an increase in suicides among those aged 30 to 39.
Against that backdrop, Eddie’s videos feel all the more important.
“It turns out that when I share, I feel more liberated. And it’s an outlet for me,” Eddie says.
“I found out that some of my videos actually helped some viewers. I’m very happy, because by sharing something that happened to me, it can help somebody out there.”
In some ways, Eddie has built more than a YouTube channel. He has built a forum that did not exist before—for men who rarely admit their struggles, and for middle-aged working-class Singaporeans who rarely see their lives authentically reflected online.
For Eddie, his driver’s seat has become a confessional booth. For his viewers, Eddie’s videos are a reminder that they are not alone.
