In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe talks about how he went from a poor family in Minnesota to becoming one of the most watched travel shows on the internet, and how he did it all by failing out of college three times. He also talks about why he left his job at a radio station in order to travel the world, and why he decided to move to Korea to teach English as a second language. Joe also shares the story of how he ended up teaching English in a foreign country, and what it was like being on the most viewed travel show on the Internet. It's a great episode, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, Joe! Cheers, from the bottom of my heart, and thank you to everyone who helped make this podcast possible. I appreciate you all so much, thank you for being a part of this journey with me, and it was a pleasure to have you on it! XOXO, -Jon Sorrentino and Jon & Timestamps: 1:00:00 - How did this all happen? 3:30 - What was it like growing up poor in Minnesota 6:00 7:15 - Why did I go to college 3 times 8:40 - Why I left my family for Korea 9:20 - How I ended up in Korea 10:30 11: How did I learn English in Korea? 11 - How to learn English? 13:00- How I moved to Korea 16:00 | What it s hard? 17:40 18:40 | How I m a hard worker? 19:20 21:30 | What I m going to study English 22:10 23:00 // 22:00 + 22:30 + 23:15 24:00+ 25:00 Intro: How I got here? 26:10 | What s my biggest takeaway from this podcast? 27:00 & 27: What s your favorite meal 28:00 / 29:00 What s 35:00 <3 32: What do you think I m looking for? 33:00 My favorite meal? 36:00 Can you tell me what s my favorite thing? 37:00 How did you like it?
00:00:24.000And I say that because, not to be too grandiose from the start, but the way I grew up, I grew up white trash from central Minnesota, super poor family, one of six, failed college three times, and now, somehow years later, I have the most viewed, most followed travel show Online or otherwise,
00:00:40.000and I'm on the motherfucking Joe Rogan experience.
00:00:53.000You know, when you reached out to me for the first time, I was in Egypt with COVID. I was going through one of my worst travel experiences ever.
00:01:17.000And so, hence the reason I failed out of school so many times.
00:01:22.000In high school, I was really into filmmaking, because fortunately we had a filmmaking course there, but it's just not something I pursued afterwards.
00:01:31.000And so around the age of 24, I felt like I was pretty rudderless.
00:02:40.000And to me it made sense, because I could go there, I could travel, I could see the world, I thought it would maybe last an hour, and then I would come back.
00:02:48.000But I ended up staying there for eight years.
00:02:50.000And so, maybe I'm giving too long of an answer.
00:03:03.000Korea was really challenging because it was my first time in a different country, and I'd really only been in central Minnesota at that point.
00:03:45.000So people, Korean, folks in Korea are very desperate to learn English, and as you may know, people, they study their asses off, they're very hard workers, and they're very hard studiers, maybe to a detriment.
00:03:59.000Like, kids go to school so much, they study so much, they get tutors, and things like that.
00:04:06.000And so, when I went to Korea, I was gonna be a tutor.
00:04:43.000And so to teach, you would think like, oh, it's going to be difficult to teach people if you don't have any experience or any credentials teaching English.
00:05:02.000And so I'm teaching people conversational English and I'm doing that for maybe 40 or 50 bucks an hour, which seems pretty good, especially in 2008, except for it takes maybe you can do two or three lessons.
00:05:55.000And so, eventually, after being there for maybe six months, I finally figured out how to make a full-time income decision.
00:06:02.000Teaching English in Korea at a kindergarten.
00:06:05.000And I know some people might judge that and say that's not okay to do because I don't have a proper degree in teaching English.
00:06:10.000But really, to teach English in Korea, all you need is a four-year degree in anything.
00:06:14.000I could have had a four-year degree in interior design and also taught kids English.
00:06:20.000And so, living in Korea was the show I do now.
00:06:25.000There's no way I could have done it if I didn't have all that time living abroad for so long.
00:06:30.000Living in Korea was the first taste of living in a society and a culture completely different from the USA. In the USA, we have a very individualistic society here, and Korea is much more of a communal society.
00:06:45.000People care a lot more what other people think.
00:06:47.000I tried dating a Korean woman one time.
00:08:53.000I looked at filmmaking systematically.
00:08:56.000Like, how can I... Week by week, day by day, improve at this and get better at this.
00:09:04.000I created something called the Soul Filmmakers Workshop, which was a place where I could bring my films.
00:09:11.000Maybe there were little comedy sketches, short documentaries, stuff I did for clients, corporate work, and people could come and tear apart my content and then that would help me to improve and get better over time.
00:09:22.000And so Over a number of years in Korea, I was able to transition from teaching English to doing filmmaking full-time for clients.
00:09:30.000And so at this point, I don't have any really artistic goals in mind.
00:09:37.000It's just I want to figure out if I ever get deported from this country.
00:09:42.000Am I going to be able to go back to the USA and have a skill or a job or a trade I can fall back on?
00:09:51.000But living in Korea for eight years was one of the most nerve-wracking things I had ever done.
00:09:57.000Because I was there on a tourist visa.
00:10:01.000And it's not something I've talked about a lot, but a tourist visa means you get to stay here for 90 days.
00:10:06.000As an American, you don't need any visa ahead of time, but you land on the spot, they give you a visa for 90 days, and then within 90 days you need to leave the country, but you can come back right away.
00:10:16.000But I did that for eight years straight.
00:10:19.000So you just kept leaving and coming back?
00:10:22.000So I really got it perfected and I could do it for the least amount of money possible.
00:10:26.000I went from Seoul in the north of South Korea all the way down to Busan in the south to an island called Tsushima in Japan.
00:10:36.000And so I could wake up at 5 a.m., go all the way to Japan, and come back by evening.
00:10:42.000The nerve-wracking part wasn't the trip itself or the amount of money it cost, although that was a burden, too, because I didn't make that much money.
00:10:48.000But at immigration, on both sides, they would always ask, Hey, you're teaching.
00:10:56.000Even in Japan, going into Japan, they would say, what do you do?
00:10:59.000And I would have like a whole list of stories and answers lined up in my mind because it was so anxiety-inducing, especially coming back to Korea because this is the stamp I really need.
00:11:10.000I need 90 days more of freedom when I land in Korea.
00:11:14.000I shouldn't say land, but I pull up at the port because I would take a ferry.
00:11:18.000If I get this stamp, I get 90 more days to figure out my life, to move forward, and to have freedom.
00:11:26.000And standing in line for immigration, I'm looking, okay, there's an older guy over here.
00:14:59.000At my level, I wouldn't have been able to do that here in the USA. And so I got to take part in things and jobs and experiences that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
00:15:10.000And so along the way you say, I want to make some food videos.
00:15:19.000I've read Gary Vee's first book, Crush It, and I want to crush it.
00:15:25.000And I love the book, and it taught me about content marketing, and that's something I started doing.
00:15:30.000Hey, instead of a corporate video, let's make you weekly videos or monthly videos.
00:15:34.000And from there, you can offer value to the people watching, and then you can have a call to action.
00:15:40.000And I just thought, well, I could do this for myself.
00:15:44.000And I had a couple of different ideas, but the idea that stuck was doing food.
00:15:48.000And at the time, I had a couple of channels that really inspired me.
00:15:52.000I listened to H3H3, who did comedy at the time, and then I listened to...
00:15:58.000I watched a channel called Jack's Gap, and he had this very wanderlusty travel videos that he did.
00:16:05.000It's a young kid from the UK who would go to India, who would go to these interesting countries, and it felt so remote.
00:16:10.000And at that time, maybe this is 2014, 2014, 2013, there's almost no travel content on YouTube, and if there is any, people are just trying to emulate what already exists on the travel channel, which is what I didn't understand at the time,
00:16:26.000because all the shit on the travel channel was so dry.
00:16:29.000It's just like, today we walk in Cairo, a city thousands of years old, rich with history, and I was like, this is so fucking boring.
00:16:37.000Why not mix something more spontaneous, a little bit more humor, the pacing, the pacing of YouTube, faster pacing, And make a completely new travel format that people hadn't seen before.
00:16:49.000Now, it took me a few years to get it right, but that was the initial idea.
00:17:54.000He'd grab a magnet from the fridge, rub it on his chest.
00:17:56.000Somehow that made the seizure go away.
00:17:59.000When that wasn't happening, I was watching Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods and Bourdain's No Reservations back-to-back on the Travel Channel.
00:18:54.000I remember watching Andrew Zimmern when he was in Taipei, Taiwan, and he was eating something called stinky tofu, and he ate something that was so smelly, so intense that he couldn't even handle it, and he had to spit it out.
00:19:04.000And to me, that was just fascinating, and the story behind that.
00:19:07.000And so I made this pivot early on in the channel.
00:19:10.000I said, I want to go explore more bizarre foods, exotic foods, foods that seem way out there.
00:19:18.000Those types of foods just have an intrinsic story attached to them.
00:19:21.000If you're eating something strange, bizarre, exotic, however you want to term it, there's naturally a story of why are people doing this attached to it?
00:24:03.000I said, I need to eat this food, I need to put my mouth around this sandwich, and I need to have the perspective and the mindset of a local person.
00:24:10.000I shouldn't be like someone on Fear Factor trying to get it down and just...
00:24:24.000And that's what I do anytime I'm eating something pretty unusual around the world.
00:24:28.000It's not always something I'm pumped to eat.
00:24:30.000But when I was with the Datoga tribe in Tanzania, and they've just ripped open this cow, they've got blood in one gourd and then gastric acid from the small intestine, essentially liquid green shit.
00:24:42.000And they're tearing off pieces of raw liver.
00:25:01.000So they go blood, gastric acid, they toss it down, and it's one of the most strange experiences I'd ever had, but I loved it because I loved how the people there were so into it.
00:25:13.000And for them too, you know, people talk about, you never want to be overtly disrespectful on camera, but oftentimes people are aware within their own culture if they're eating something strange.
00:26:08.000It's the most bitter thing you'll ever taste.
00:26:11.000All I can compare it to is if, you know, when you are a young man, if you dry heave to the point of just throwing up stomach acid, it's that.
00:26:18.000So why would they want that on their food?
00:26:22.000Remarkably, cultures around the world develop a taste for the extremes in different directions.
00:26:27.000I mean, there's the four main tastes that people talk about, whether it's like sour, savory, sweet, places like stuff that's really salty or bitter in the case of bile.
00:26:37.000In Northern Thailand, they will take the buffalo bile and drip it over their rice, their sticky rice, over raw buffalo meat.
00:26:45.000It's just been a taste that they've acquired over time.
00:27:30.000Yeah, it's an interesting question because I guess if you're looking at the lens of evolution, like, what do you call it?
00:27:40.000Through evolution, looking at societies and cultures through evolutionary biology, you might assume like, well, people ate things because they were the right things to eat, but sometimes they ate things because they were available.
00:28:39.000And here, they would take the cow, they would tip it on its side or on its back, and then they would essentially suffocate it.
00:28:46.000They would put different logs, like wood, long pieces of wood or branches into its throat.
00:28:52.000It would take about 10 minutes, and eventually it would pass away.
00:28:56.000Then these same women cut it open, they get to butchering, they have their first initial feast, They get dibs, which you don't see in most cultures, especially in Africa.
00:29:07.000Usually stuff is going to go to the guys first.
00:29:09.000They take what they want, then they mix the rest of the bile, blood, and organs all together and present it to the men.
00:29:53.000And he said it would be far more cruel to slash the animal's throat, to make it suffer from that, and then to have it also suffer from dying afterwards.
00:30:03.000So it's kind of like two points of suffering compared to one.
00:30:33.000So they want the blood to pool within the body.
00:30:36.000So I think it's more, but I think it's practical too, because then they can cut the body open, the blood's pooled in there, and they can scoop it out.
00:30:43.000They don't waste any of the blood because they eat the blood.
00:30:45.000Now, when the women get first dibs, what do they choose?
00:31:33.000Put it into a live cow's neck, drain some of the blood, then seal it up with some shit, and then drink that blood or mix that blood with milk.
00:32:32.000Yeah, so they're just trying to get into that vein.
00:32:35.000Yeah, and they tie it off like a heroin chunky so the vein gets all big.
00:32:40.000And the point I wanted to make, getting back to the liver, is that the way they section up meat is really interesting among the Maasai tribe and many other tribes are like this too.
00:32:49.000So how they separate the meat is that each quarter, each piece goes to a different group.
00:32:54.000And so they have ribs, they have front quarters, they have hind quarters.
00:32:58.000Some might go to pregnant women, some goes to young women.
00:33:02.000But the liver, the liver always goes to the older men.
00:33:58.000And it's said with pride, not like I wouldn't eat that because I'm a pussy.
00:34:01.000They're like, oh, I would never eat that.
00:34:03.000And that's something I don't really understand.
00:34:06.000When it comes to how many Americans look at food from around the world.
00:34:10.000And so, I mean, part of my show, really the point isn't to be like, ew, look at this icky, weird food.
00:34:16.000It's to try to create some understanding and empathy for people around the world and understanding as to why are people eating this way.
00:34:24.000And so when these cultures, it seems like they all go to the organs first.
00:34:32.000And you see that in animals too, you know, and you see that in lions, you see that in wolves, like wolves, the alpha male always gets to eat the liver.
00:34:42.000And did they have any sort of explanation as to why they do this?
00:34:49.000So I've seen this dozens of times at this point.
00:34:52.000I've not asked, and I have my own assumptions.
00:34:57.000My assumptions would be meat is easier to preserve, period.
00:35:01.000So people have tons of different ways of preserving meat.
00:35:06.000Mostly, you know, drying, turning it into some kind of a jerky.
00:35:10.000But I don't think it's as easy to take a liver or a heart or something like that and preserve it.
00:35:16.000I also think it probably has the most flavor because people love getting in on the stomach too, the intestines, and this is really powerful, potent, gamey parts of the animal.
00:36:28.000Well, I've always wanted to know what zebra tastes like too, because I know people that have hunted zebra and eaten them and they said it's very good.
00:38:58.000They're like, okay, we had this idea that people are going over there and they're just shooting a rhino because they're an asshole and they want to take a poster with it or a photo with it rather and put the head on their wall.
00:39:18.000It goes to protect habitat and Keep them maintained, you know, the structures and the fences and all sorts of different things they use to keep these animals healthy.
00:39:27.000But they have higher numbers of all these animals that were at one point in time endangered.
00:39:34.000They're much higher than they've ever been before specifically because they're valuable.
00:39:40.000It can be very conflicting to a lot of people because you think of Wildlife conservation is what we need to do is protect their habitat, give them more food, keep people away from them.
00:40:15.000And at this point, I wanted to take on the challenge.
00:40:18.000I wanted to see, can I Do a video that some people are going to hate and can I try to educate people along the way and educate myself along the way?
00:40:29.000Because there's a lot about game reserve hunting that I didn't know.
00:40:33.000And so specifically what we did in that video is going to a game reserve.
00:40:37.000So somebody privately owns all this property In South Africa, it was maybe five miles by three miles.
00:41:25.000I don't know that people set out to do it, but if some cynical bastard on his way to get some other creature, if he saw the vervet monkey, he could be like, how much is that again?
00:42:56.000So somebody, I think it was a dentist in Minnesota, actually, where I'm from.
00:43:00.000He went there, he shot a lion, he posted the picture, it got on the wrong websites, and then this guy, I think, had to shut down his dental practice.
00:43:09.000And so they wouldn't let you bring any lion mounts and perhaps maybe not certain types of meat or maybe not any meat at all.
00:43:16.000And so what's interesting is I talked to the game reserve guys when I got there and I thought some questions would be layup questions or even dumb questions.
00:43:23.000And I said, what kind of animals are not okay to hunt?
00:43:27.000And these two brothers look at each other like, oh, people, this is a tough one.
00:43:32.000Yeah, and basically people, because I thought for sure they would say lions are not okay, but they said there's every type of hunting basically you can imagine in South Africa.
00:43:45.000Well, there was an issue after the Cecil of the Lion thing where they no longer had lion hunters going over there because they didn't want to get attacked, and even people that wanted to hunt lions wouldn't go over there.
00:43:57.000Some large number of lions, because if you don't do that, then it decimates the antelope and all the different game species that the lions eat and kill.
00:44:09.000Well, okay, so that's tough, because I know that they had too much supply, and the demand was no longer there, and so that was a problem.
00:44:17.000For sure that those lions are mixed in with other live valuable creatures.
00:44:22.000I think they do it differently in different game parks.
00:44:54.000And so there's a lot of gray area, too, because the zebra populations, even the zebra I hunted, they said that was nearly extinct years ago.
00:45:02.000But because of this, you know, this personal interest people have in the animals being around, they'll help try to breed them and make sure they're healthy, make sure they have enough water so that people can come and shoot them.
00:45:14.000Yeah, exactly what we were talking about before.
00:45:17.000This is, like again, it's a very, very controversial topic.
00:45:22.000Yeah, and that's why I wanted to go for it.
00:45:25.000And I think we did a good job of presenting their case and their point of view and just logistically how it works.
00:45:33.000And I think it's a fascinating topic and I probably wouldn't do it again.
00:45:38.000Well, I mean, it's a food source for those people.
00:45:42.000I mean, zebra is something that's traditionally eaten over there.
00:45:45.000And it's, according to you and according to people that I know that have eaten it, it's very delicious.
00:46:14.000But he did this whole thing where he stayed over there for several weeks and really annoyed them.
00:46:21.000And, you know, like really just constant questions, constant this, constant that.
00:46:26.000This guy who was running this game park basically laid it out to him, like, the only way these animals survive is if they're worth something.
00:46:33.000And even then, you have to spend so much money to keep them from getting poached.
00:46:37.000Because while they were over there, they're constantly finding animals that had been snared.
00:46:41.000And then the meat had gone to waste because they didn't get to the animal before, you know, it died early and then was rotten.
00:46:47.000And it's very conflicting because we like to think of Africa as this just wild, amazing Narnia place where all these animals are running free and you can go there in a Jeep and they won't kill you.
00:50:30.000I mean, it sounds too cold, but I don't know.
00:50:31.000It's like paintball, but on another level.
00:50:33.000Because you kind of know you're going to get an animal.
00:50:37.000And you go through a couple of fences, you get into the reserve, and you have a tracker.
00:50:43.000And so I'm guided the whole time, which is what I would prefer.
00:50:46.000I hunt maybe once a year, and I do it for the show.
00:50:49.000And so eventually they triangulate, you know, they send out the Khoisan guy to rustle up some zebras and maybe three came by and they were basically like, whichever one you can get is fine.
00:51:51.000It's like I don't feel nervous, but my body doesn't care.
00:51:54.000My heart's beating like crazy, and if you're off by one millimeter, by one hair, it's like that second shot, they could have told me, oh, you missed by like 15 feet, and I would have believed them, but it was like dead nuts on.
00:52:53.000What's funny is I got two practice shots that day, and then I had to go to the hospital, and then my head was swollen, and I had to wake up the next day at 5 a.m.
00:53:32.000It was even a stranger feeling with the zebra because it's a mix of accomplishment and And duty, I would say.
00:53:40.000Because when I just injured the animal, I was like, it's my duty, it's my obligation to put it down as quickly and efficiently as possible.
00:53:46.000But I can't just go crazy and just start shooting like crazy.
00:54:25.000It felt like a sense of accomplishment for sure, and the meat was incredible.
00:54:28.000I guess I was most taken aback by eating this type of meat that I'll never probably eat again in my life and just having the privilege of trying that.
00:54:36.000And is that like a common cuisine amongst the people that work in that ranch that you went to?
00:56:42.000And so, one of the ways they preserve the meat, it's interesting, because they dry it, but how they dry it is they have a big hearth or fireplace in their home, and then above that, they'll hang the raw meat.
00:56:55.000And they don't do anything special, the meat just gets dried out over time because of the fireplace.
00:57:00.000And so, I have that one, and then I have one more that you're probably going to want to throw away, because I looked at it this morning, and it's a little bit moldy.
00:59:21.000I was told if you see one and you approach them and you film, they will destroy your camera because they've had so many issues with protesters there, among them Sea Shepherd, who's trying to put an end to the wailing.
00:59:33.000So the whaling they do there is far different from the whaling that you're going to see in a place like Japan.
00:59:38.000Japan, I think they're hunting blue whales.
00:59:40.000They're hunting whales that are actually vulnerable species, and they're doing it under the guise of research, and they put research on their boat.
00:59:47.000Right, but then they're selling the animal.
00:59:49.000Yeah, and then they sell it, oh my gosh, and some people there.
01:00:04.000What they're doing in the Faroe Islands because they're not going out to sea.
01:00:10.000And so their method of getting the whales is never going to lead to their extinction.
01:00:15.000The whales populate the Atlantic and the Faroe Islands is just a tiny small collection of 18 islands in the middle of the Atlantic between like Scotland and Iceland and they've got 50,000 people.
01:00:27.000So when a pod of whales comes by and somebody spots them, they kind of sound the alarm.
01:00:32.000First of all, they'll get some boats together and try to guide them to one of the bays.
01:00:36.000At this point, this is what I love, this idea that everybody is so into the grint, this event that happens, that you could be in your corporate job in a room talking about quarter or four sales,
01:00:54.000doing your report, pitching to your team, and then you could get a phone call, hey, the whales are here, let's go.
01:00:59.000Everybody, when the alarm goes off, if you've got to leave church, if you've got to leave work, you do it, it's understood, yeah, go get the whales.
01:01:29.000They go down there because the amount of meat you get depends on how much you help out.
01:01:33.000They have a very detailed system for how to allocate the meat.
01:01:36.000The process of actually getting the whales though, they steer the whales towards the shore.
01:01:42.000Then once they get close to the bay, they start clanging on the boats and making noise and trying to throw off their sonar.
01:01:49.000Eventually the whales get close enough to the shore where people can run out from the beach and hook the whales in their blowhole and start pulling them up.
01:04:48.000And so I actually got to go into someone's home, look in their freezer and eat a whale meal that they prepared and experience that with them.
01:04:57.000And I guess my biggest takeaway was it's so different from any other animal.
01:05:02.000It's got a big layer of blubber on the outside.
01:05:04.000There's skin, which is about a quarter of an inch thick.
01:05:07.000And then the blubber must be, I don't know, three, four inches thick.
01:05:10.000And then it's just protein, this dark red protein after that.
01:05:14.000And there's no taste you could compare it to.
01:05:18.000And so it's not like, well, you know, just eat chicken instead.
01:05:30.000I don't really want people's opinions or points of view when it comes to this.
01:05:34.000And my biggest thing in going there was finding out, is this sustainable?
01:05:39.000And from everything I could see, it seems this is sustainable.
01:05:43.000It's something that they could keep doing long term because they're not going out into the ocean to seek out whales.
01:05:48.000And so I kind of get why they do it and why they're going to keep doing it.
01:05:54.000Well, I get why they're doing it if you think of the fact that these people have lived in this island for who knows how long, probably thousands of years, right?
01:09:30.000It might not even happen once in a year because it depends on if the whales come to the island or not or come near the islands and if they're spotted and if they're able to corral them and bring them into the bay.
01:09:41.000So it's just a normal part of their culture.
01:10:43.000But, of course, as I've seen with many tribes in Africa, they're very cooperative and they have ways of eating and working together that Ensures that there are no fights or conflicts or reduces the amount that there might be.
01:10:57.000So when I was with them, I planned to go there for three days.
01:11:24.000And when I show up at their camp, it's so far from anything.
01:11:27.000We were in a tiny town, we drove a couple of hours to the base of a mountain, and we hiked for another hour and a half to get to where they were.
01:12:57.000This is what I love about doing this show is I've seen so many different tribes, stories, cultures around the world, and I just want to dig into that really specific food part.
01:13:59.000Not on a stick or a grill, just throw it in the fire.
01:14:02.000The guts, eventually that gets fed to the dogs.
01:14:05.000Some of the bones, ribs, and stuff like that will get put in a pot and boiled, and that will make kind of a juice that they can soak up the ugali with, that kind of cornmeal and water.
01:15:31.000So salt is the only thing that they cook with that would actually give anything flavor.
01:15:35.000But for them, it's not about flavor at all.
01:15:38.000It felt like everything with this tribe had to do with hunting and hunting stories.
01:15:43.000You could really tell these were the original storytellers.
01:15:47.000What I loved about going here is you hear people say, oh man, if I had a time machine, it'd be cool to see how people lived thousands of years ago.
01:16:02.000They would see sticks that they liked and cut them off.
01:16:05.000And they would, when they hang out by the fire in the morning or night, they smoke cigarettes nonstop and they bend the arrows with their teeth to get them straight because they look so perfect.
01:16:13.000It looks like, where'd you buy that from?
01:19:06.000What's interesting is they speak a clicking language.
01:19:08.000Like, the main guy I spoke to, his name was Chaba, and there's another guy called, like, Gufufu.
01:19:16.000And they speak in this amazing clique language, and they do a lot of impersonating, and they'll talk about the arrow, and when they talk about the arrow, they'll go like this with their elbow, point their elbow out like a bow, and so it's kind of half sign language, or just very, there's a lot of gesticulations and speaking going on at the same time,
01:20:08.000What's funny about the translator is his English felt limited sometimes, so I was like, hey, man, are you better at English or at the click language?
01:20:41.000So maybe once a week or every couple weeks, which was astonishing to me because it's like, are there really that many baboons out there to get?
01:20:50.000So it seems like their primary food source is primates.
01:22:10.000They seem super comfortable just letting you hang out and eat with them and share their food.
01:22:15.000It's not the first time that they've done this.
01:22:17.000And that's something I revealed in our final episode because I didn't want to make it seem like, oh, I've had this cool experience and no one else has done this before.
01:22:25.000Of course, it's part of a package that's available in Tanzania.
01:23:02.000And I filmed a lot of stuff in Africa.
01:23:04.000The thing with shooting in Africa, not to generalize too much, but with some countries, if you're dead set on shooting something, someone's going to convince you that you can shoot it, and they're going to tell you that you can, and they're going to try to set something up, whether it's authentic or not.
01:25:32.000Now there's fences, there's roads, there's all these obstructions within the country.
01:25:37.000And so when the dry season comes, the animals will naturally move to where there's more water, where there's more grass to graze.
01:25:44.000And these guys can't follow the animals.
01:25:47.000They have to stay within a big space, but still, it's drought time now.
01:25:51.000And so the government, what they do is they might go shoot a...
01:25:56.000Wildebeest, something like that, they'll drop off more grain and say, here's an animal, here's some food to hold you over until the rainy season or until the animals come back again.
01:26:07.000And so I think part of that deal is, like, you guys hang out with tourists with their bandanas once in a while, and then we'll help you out.
01:26:15.000We'll give you some food and some game meat when times are tough.
01:26:19.000So it seems like that's the deal that's been struck between the two.
01:26:23.000And so that's why they take Westerners on these little adventures.
01:26:33.000And so when you're around them, how many different things did you eat?
01:26:37.000You ate the monkey, you had some of that mountain goat?
01:26:41.000Yeah, the Clipspringer, I had some of that.
01:26:43.000There wasn't, let's see, they had a little bit of a, they had a tiny bird, and they had a, some kind of a rodent, I forgot what it was called.
01:27:02.000It's like I'm glad we had something big and I'm glad they had food, something big for the video.
01:27:06.000But then like the next day is like day off.
01:27:08.000They throw half of the Cliffspringer in the tree and they'll eat it the next day.
01:27:14.000My first night sleeping there in the tent, I heard these crazy sounds just like, And the next day I was like, hey, what the fuck was that last night?
01:27:24.000And they said, well, that was a hyena.
01:27:41.000And you wouldn't want to be face-to-face with one.
01:27:43.000They look disgusting and brutal and intense and strong and brutish.
01:27:47.000And the dogs will chase them away, but you can see also the dogs have scars from hyenas, from baboons, from the different animals there that they come in contact with.
01:27:59.000What's funny, you know, it's just such a different way of life.
01:28:03.000I remember when I first moved to Korea and I came back to Little Minnesota and my friend's mom was like, Hey, Bill, my real name's Bill, don't tell anyone.
01:28:12.000Hey, Bill, do you find when you go around the world that, you know, we're just a lot more alike than we are different and we're all just kind of the same?
01:28:23.000Of course, we have similarities as humans, but that's what I like about visiting these different people is just seeing what's so different about them.
01:28:32.000And so my guide there, who wasn't Hidzabe, he said, hey, you should ask them, what do they do if somebody dies in the tribe?
01:31:23.000I was so lucky during the pandemic that we had about a year where there was no...
01:31:29.000Like when everything was going to crap here in the USA, we had like a whole year where no one was even wearing masks because they locked it down early.
01:35:26.000We can find a video of them harvesting mad honey because it's really fascinating how they have to do it.
01:35:32.000Yeah, so it was about maybe a 12-hour drive from the capital of Kathmandu that we went to this village of maybe 500 people and we joined these guys as they collected the honey.
01:35:46.000And they basically risk their lives taking these ladders.
01:35:51.000They have these ladders, these rope ladders, and the reason they need rope ladders is because they need to be able to hike sometimes up to several hours to go to where the honey is.
01:39:16.000This is why I want to build up a little bit so you can see how gung-ho about trying the honey you still are, but I think we should still absolutely do it together.
01:39:47.000I've heard similar stories from people while I was there and it seemed interesting because at least in the village I went to, I know it's different in different parts of Nepal, but at least where I went, people seemed like I've done it and I'm good.
01:40:00.000And they didn't really want to do it much more.
01:40:03.000Well, there's a big market in places like Japan and especially Korea, they said, where people want to buy the honey and eat the honey, which is interesting because I looked it up and it's actually illegal in Korea, it said.
01:40:42.000And I gotta go to bed, because I got work to do the next day.
01:40:45.000And so I'm in his room across from mine in the hotel, and I give him a couple spoons, and I'm like, you should just do a couple spoons, wait 30 minutes and see how you feel.
01:40:52.000He goes, uh, yeah, no, just give me more, you're going to sleep soon, just give me more, if I want more, I'll take it.
01:40:57.000So while I'm still there, he takes more, maybe five, six spoons.
01:41:01.000Then I go, alright, I gotta go to bed, have a good time, let me know.
01:41:04.000Actually, I said, why don't you text me the effects during the evening, and I'll know what to expect when I do it.
01:44:36.000At least here in my throat, I'm feeling it.
01:44:37.000How did your brother feel after it was all over?
01:44:40.000So this guy said, if you drink water, you're just going to want to keep drinking more and more water and you'll never stop drinking water and it'll make you more sick.
01:45:55.000Well, at least it's a rough estimate, right?
01:45:57.000Here it says, Mad Honey has been commonly used as an aphrodisiac, sexual stimulant, and alternative therapy for gastrointestinal disorders, peptic ulcer disease, dyspepsia, and gastritis, and for hypertension for a long time.
01:47:15.000I don't know what I'm going to do with it.
01:47:17.000Maybe I'll find this perfect ratio, and it'll be the perfect sleeping aid.
01:47:22.000But I do think there's probably a lot of bullshit online, because how hard would it be to take this, mix it with 10 gallons of honey, and be like, yeah, it's mad honey.
01:47:29.000Whatever, put a little red dye in there.
01:47:31.000Yeah, our friend the beekeeper, Erica, what's her last name?
01:50:38.000I love Indian food and I love Thai food.
01:50:42.000I love a lot of Asian food and sharp flavors.
01:50:45.000And I just love the fact that people that live in different parts of the world will find local ingredients and create their own very unique cuisine.
01:52:11.000Yeah, it's really good and it has just a very clean, neutral taste.
01:52:15.000I think sometimes, it depends on what kind of beef you're getting, sometimes beef could take a little bit of work to make it not so beefy, but camel just had a really clean...
01:53:48.000Most of the time, I use what's called the reverse sear method.
01:53:52.000So, you know, I have a Traeger grill, you know, one of those pellet grills, and I'll set the Traeger to 265 degrees, which is fairly low.
01:54:00.000I put a meat thermometer in it, and then I'll slowly get it up to about 110 degrees.
01:54:05.000And then I use a cast iron skillet, and I get that cast iron skillet very hot, and I put beef tallow in the skillet, and then I sear it like a very, you know, very hot pan for about two minutes per side, depending on the thickness of the steak.
01:54:22.000And then I'll let it rest for about 10 minutes, then I slice it, and then I'll put kosher salt on it.
01:54:29.000So to me that doesn't sound simple at all.
01:54:31.000And I think it's simple for you because you've done it many times and it's a routine you're accustomed to.
01:54:36.000I think if you gave the average person a steak, They would just like either throw it on a grill and maybe cook it too much or they'd throw it in a skillet and they wouldn't have the delicious sear that you have.
01:54:49.000But it's simple if you just follow instructions.
01:55:11.000And I eat a lot of wild game, too, which is more difficult to cook.
01:55:15.000Like, wild game, I'll slow it down even more and get it to, like, 225, and I'll put it on 225 degrees, and I'll get that up to about 100, a little lower temperature, and then I do the same method where I just sear it, cast iron, with beef tallow.
01:55:55.000American Wagyu, so the real Japanese Wagyu, that DNA is never going to be in the USA. So they have some DNA that they've crossed with American breeds, and it's a version of Wagyu.
01:56:08.000What the Japanese have done expertly over time is create a brand around Wagyu beef.
01:56:44.000Yeah, it's a good question, because it's like, is that marbling?
01:56:48.000That's what makes the Wagyu so expensive and so renowned, is this intramuscular fat, this web of fat throughout the protein that's kind of evenly dispersed.
01:57:39.000Japan's an incredible and unusual place.
01:57:42.000So you go to an auction house in Japan and they have to judge all the meat.
01:57:46.000And so they're not at this point, it's just it's a half of a cow.
01:57:50.000And And they have kind of a computer system, like a big piece of hardware that they put up to the tissue.
01:57:57.000It does some kind of a reading, and it weighs into what they graded.
01:58:01.000So you're familiar, I'm sure, with A5. A5 is the top of the top, but there might be A, B, C, just all these different ratings that the beef can get at that point.
01:58:11.000So I think they're doing whatever they can.
01:58:13.000To get the highest rating possible, I don't think the beer does much.
01:59:20.000We go to Sushi by Scratch, which is a restaurant my friend Philip Franklin Lee opened up out here that he serves Kobe and they lightly sear it.
01:59:31.000And then there's a whole process that he does and puts it on a piece of rice like sushi.
01:59:39.000You see, watch them cut this Kobe and it's just, the whole thing's fat.
01:59:43.000It's just like a little bit of meat, a little bit of fat, a little bit of meat, a little bit of fat.
01:59:47.000Like the whole thing is like, it's a pink.
02:04:50.000And that's what they do with so much different food.
02:04:54.000We did a whole raw food episode there.
02:04:57.000I mean, you're familiar with all the typical sushi stuff, but we even had raw shark heart as well, which they have to wash it for hours because it has a really strong, potent ammonia smell to it.
02:05:09.000But the horse was delicious, but it's small.
02:05:13.000Again, everything's like a little bite size.
02:05:15.000You just put it in your hand, give it a little bit of a dip in the soy sauce, and then delicious.
02:05:20.000Bourdain said the most disgusting thing that he had ever eaten was fermented shark meat in Iceland.
02:06:33.000It's like, yeah, guys will get a hot cast iron steaming plate, like, instead of fajitas, they've got chicken testicles on there, and they pair that with beer, and they just love that contrast.
02:06:58.000I like heart meat in general because it has a peculiar type of density to the meat that you don't find in other meats where it's dense but not tough and chewy.
02:07:38.000In Korea, I transitioned finally into filmmaking, and I was trying to make content for myself, and I started with the show, and I was making the international food.
02:07:49.000I transitioned to trying to do something more like Andrew Zimmern.
02:07:52.000And then I just really went all in on trying to make these shows about exotic and bizarre and interesting food.
02:07:59.000And in the course of doing that, I got the opportunity to go to Vietnam to film for a few days.
02:08:04.000I had a friend come with me to come film with me.
02:08:06.000And when I went to Vietnam, I met a company there, a tour company, who was interested in hiring me.
02:08:12.000And so, at this point in Korea, I'd finally started to make a decent living.
02:08:17.000I'm not teaching now for years, and I'm a filmmaker, like a commercial filmmaker for corporations and stuff, doing music videos.
02:08:26.000I did a music video for BTS, or actually for Rat Monster from BTS. I'm sure you're a big K-pop fan.
02:09:54.000You think that that's common that people achieve success and get depressed?
02:09:58.000I think there's a lot of people who focus on a goal so strongly and they think that achieving that goal is going to give them some sort of fulfillment and then they get there and they go, this is it?
02:10:11.000You've never heard somebody express that?
02:10:13.000I think when people are trying to become happy through their work and they think that there's an end point, well, finally they'll become a different person and be happy.
02:10:22.000And then when they reach that end point, they realize they're the same person.
02:10:25.000But I think when people are focused on doing good work, and that's the goal, and they become more successful at that, but if they can continue just focusing on doing good work, I think they can avoid that.
02:10:57.000And I've had a journey, a transformation in the last few years of doing what you're saying.
02:11:03.000It's not about getting to a particular destination.
02:11:07.000With the channel, this is all still getting back to why I moved to Vietnam, but with the channel, when I got 100,000 subscribers, when I got a million subscribers, you can get a plaque on YouTube.
02:11:50.000I met a company there who said, and so at this point, I have some money in my bank account, and I have a YouTube channel that's not making any money, and I've made like 20 videos.
02:11:59.000And they said, hey, if you move here, they were a tour company, a travel company.
02:12:03.000They said, if you come here, if you make videos for us once a week, we will give you a thousand bucks a month, we'll give you a place to live, and we'll supply you with one of our camera guys to shoot your stuff.
02:12:15.000So this is like round two, burning the boats, I'm moving to Vietnam, and I'm going there for the purpose of making this channel actually work and come to fruition.
02:12:24.000I'm next to Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, a close plane ride to the Philippines.
02:12:29.000Southeast Asia is rich with really interesting food and culture, and overall it's inexpensive enough that I can afford to shoot for a long time without needing to make money.
02:12:38.000And so that's what brought me to Vietnam initially.
02:12:58.000More people started watching the videos.
02:13:00.000And eventually, we started making money so I could hire staff.
02:13:04.000But that was probably about two years, starting in Korea and then going into Vietnam, that I was able to actually start making money and build out a team there.
02:13:14.000And what's incredible now is most of my team is Vietnamese.
02:13:17.000If you told me years ago that I would have a team of Vietnamese editors who speak English as a second language and edit videos that are on par with or I think better than much of the shit that you see on network television now, I would not have believed you.
02:13:33.000Somehow that's what's come to fruition.
02:13:34.000And so we have an incredible team there now and we've been able to just focus on raising our standards every month, every year to get to this point and then hopefully we get somewhere beyond this in the future.
02:13:50.000And so, in moving there, what was that transition like?
02:19:04.000Benchmark, and then I got kind of depressed.
02:19:06.000And recently, I had this revelation this last year, which was, my wife and I, it's going to be a long, meandering answer, but my wife and I left Vietnam because of the pandemic.
02:19:58.000The series wasn't challenging in any way.
02:20:01.000And by the end of each shooting day, I felt, I'm fucking tired anyways.
02:20:05.000Why am I shooting this and not something more satisfying?
02:20:09.000Something where I could feel more accomplished at the end.
02:20:11.000And so after that, I plotted out every country I wanted to go to for the next year.
02:20:18.000In the past, we'd always focused on a country maybe within the next month or two and little by little and thought about, okay, maybe we could go here next or go here next.
02:20:27.000So now I have the whole next year plotted out.
02:20:29.000And so for me, my mission is to go to places that people have heard of but don't know anything about.
02:21:49.000But I love being able to get it done and to accomplish something and then to look back on, hey, we got through that really difficult situation.
02:21:58.000This last year, you wrote me when I was in Egypt for the first time.
02:22:05.000This was the worst production we'd ever had.
02:22:50.000I know you can't have a drone there already, but it was like a two-hour process for them to go between 12 different people and have me give my drone to somebody who would put it in a locker.
02:28:01.000So he's acting as like a spokesperson for the country, like for PR? Yeah.
02:28:05.000Like he doesn't think that your footage is good enough?
02:28:07.000It's confusing to understand the motives sometimes, especially because we had a permit that said we had permission to shoot on the sidewalks and to do exactly what we were doing.
02:28:17.000And it's not like, you know, a lot of people watch my video talking about this and they're like, well, idiot, you can't just show up.
02:28:22.000Yeah, okay, we've been doing this for a while.
02:31:26.000What's awesome about it is the time we went was like still, it was right at the beginning of 2022. So everyone's freaked out still about traveling.
02:31:34.000I mean, there must have been just like 100 people just in this huge area where there's usually thousands.
02:32:11.000But it doesn't sound like you recommend it.
02:32:13.000So one good thing that came out of all this, and I can't say whether or not my team is responsible for this consequences or this result, but a few months after we posted the videos about Egypt, the laws changed in Egypt, and now tourists and locals are not required to have a permit to shoot on the sidewalk.
02:32:33.000And there's an article now How one U.S. street food blogger exposed CC's authoritarian rules.
02:35:30.000He literally can't get into the country now.
02:35:32.000And Graham Hancock has been one of the, I mean, if anybody has made people excited to go to Egypt on a grand scale, I would say Graham Hancock is one of the very top of that list.
02:35:44.000He had the show about pyramids and structures around the world on Netflix.
02:37:43.000And now what they think happened is European diseases that just wiped out the Mayans because we know that it also wiped out 90% of all North American people when they came over here.
02:38:05.000I think one of the big takeaways from his message is that there's a certain arrogance to modern man and no one could be smarter than we are right now.
02:38:16.000Well, you know the whole theory behind what he's promoting?
02:38:20.000It's actually based on this thing called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.
02:38:25.000And this has been substantiated by science that somewhere around 11,000 plus years ago, Earth was hit by comet debris.
02:38:33.000And this is substantiated by levels of iridium that is very common in space but very rare on Earth.
02:38:39.000A sheet of it across the world at that certain time period when they do core samples of the Earth and nanodiamonds that also indicate impacts that are all throughout Europe.
02:38:54.000The melting of the polar ice caps, or the ice caps rather, on North America and all the ensuing destruction that came from that, the extinction of 65% of all megafauna almost instantaneously.
02:39:32.000So does he think we would have gotten to the Industrial Age that much sooner if that wouldn't have happened?
02:39:36.000They don't know what they were doing back then.
02:39:39.000That's what's interesting, because everything was wiped out to the point where all we have left is these immense stone structures, which we have no understanding of the construction methods at all to this day.
02:39:50.000There's some half-assed theories of how they did it, and no one really knows.
02:40:26.000What's amazing is you have evidence that human beings who lived in Egypt thousands and thousands of years ago did things that we really can't do today.
02:41:17.000Maybe it'll seem unrelated, but this idea like, oh, if we ever meet aliens or see alien technology, will we be able to figure it out or understand it?
02:41:25.000It's like there's so much we don't understand about what's already here right now.
02:41:36.000Humans that were living in Africa 5,000 plus years ago, 10,000 years ago, whatever it was, they had an incredibly advanced civilization.
02:41:44.000And that they, you know, if you think of how long modern anatomical human beings existed, they used to think we went back like 50,000 years and then they pushed that to like 150 and now some believe it's 300,000, even more.
02:42:00.000That's people that look essentially like you and I. If you gave those people time, if you look at like, go back from the Romans, go back 2000 years ago to today, what an insane amount of progress has taken place in 2000 years.
02:42:18.000In 2000 years, they've gone from slaughtering people with swords and bows and arrows and catapults To making incredible videos like you made with a fucking iPhone.
02:42:27.000A little tiny thing that slides into your pocket easily.
02:42:30.000You could travel around the world in metal tubes that fly through the air.
02:42:35.000You can send video from your phone all the way to United States within seconds.
02:42:40.000I mean, it's amazing just in 2,000 years.
02:42:43.000So if these anatomical human beings existed 200,000 years ago and they had enough time and enough agriculture and enough food and resources to develop incredibly complex Really advanced technology that's dissimilar from the advanced technology that we have today.
02:43:04.000We like to think of advanced technology as only involving internal combustion engines and silicon chips, but what if they develop something on a totally different path?
02:43:14.000Just developed it to this level that we can't possibly comprehend.
02:43:19.000What if they had 10, 20,000 years to do that?
02:43:23.000That's likely what we're looking at when we look at the structures in Egypt.
02:43:27.000We're likely looking at what at one point in time – look, we know all human beings came from Africa.
02:43:33.000That's the birthplace of humanity itself.
02:43:36.000And then the most complex structures that have ever been created also are in Africa.
02:43:42.000So if you would imagine that those people had been given enough time, whether it's 20,000, 30,000 years, to evolve these technologies, and then, boom, hit by giant rocks from the sky and millions of people are killed.
02:43:58.000The people that are left live a barbaric existence for thousands of years and then relearn civilization and starts from scratch.
02:44:07.000That's what Graham Hackonk is talking about.
02:44:10.000That's what Randall Carlson is talking about.
02:44:12.000That's what John Anthony West was talking about while he was alive, who has an amazing series called Magical Egypt.
02:44:18.000It's a multi-part DVD series that details the incredible complexities of the structures and how they related to the cosmos.
02:44:31.000That's what I think probably happened.
02:44:33.000Obviously, I'm not an expert, but when I'm talking to these people, that makes the most sense when you look at the immense amount of data that points to this Younger Dryas impact theory.
02:44:45.000It's a theory that's embraced by cosmologists, and they know exactly the meteor storm, the comet storm that we pass through every November, and I believe it's every June as well.
02:44:56.000And that, you know, you could see the meteor showers in the sky.
02:45:01.000Well, occasionally, you go through a bad spot, and you run into some serious chunks of debris, and those slam into the earth, whether it's every 10,000 years, every 20,000 years, and it just fucks everything up and knocks whatever progress we've enacted,
02:45:54.000Cultures as they exist now, traditions and customs are slowly being eroded, and soon we're just going to have this kind of Eurocentric, like, metropolis cities look like this, they should have a grid pattern, streets look like this, stoplights look like this, and then that's just going to be replicated throughout the world,
02:46:20.000I think one of the things that you're doing that's really amazing is you're giving people, without them having to travel, you're giving people a window into these cultures.
02:46:27.000That's what I always said about Bourdain and all these different travel shows where, you know, most people don't have the time or the resources to go to all these different places, but you're going there and you're getting involved and you're hunting with these hunter-gatherers and you're eating this food in these strange places.
02:46:42.000You're eating rats and all kinds of wild shit.
02:48:04.000And I have friends that have gone over there to train and they always come back with these amazing stories of how friendly the people are and about how beautiful the country is.
02:48:13.000And, you know, we went over there and hung out with elephants and did the whole deal.
02:48:38.000It's really incredible when you think about, like, the nicest, friendliest people have the most brutal, striking style.
02:48:45.000Yeah, I went, last time I was there, maybe six months ago, I went and watched some of the matches.
02:48:52.000This is funny, as I was watching this, I was like, oh, I'll ask Joe Rogan this one day.
02:48:56.000When they fight, I forgot how many rounds they do, maybe three or five, and it feels like they don't go for it until the last couple rounds.
02:49:15.000First of all, they do the waikuru, which is the dance that they do before they start.
02:49:20.000You know, if you've ever seen it live, you know they play the music and they go through this.
02:49:24.000It's like a combination of stretching and then loosening up.
02:49:28.000And they have a bunch of different things that they do.
02:49:30.000And part of that is a warm up exercise.
02:49:34.000And part of it is just a tradition to sort of honor what they're about to do.
02:49:38.000And then they start the first round and Muay Thai, a lot of it is about gambling.
02:49:44.000So there's people in the audience and they're making bets and placing bets and that all takes place during the first round.
02:49:51.000And then the second round and third round determine How the fight goes, then oftentimes when a fighter's ahead, they'll coast in the last round.
02:49:59.000They don't fight hard at all in the last round because they might have to fight again in a week.
02:50:29.000Because he's a fascinating guy, too, because he has a very different style than a lot of the Muay Thai fighters, where he's not like a plodding, stiff guy.
02:50:38.000He bounces around, he moves very fast, and he's known for his footwork and his clever maneuvers.
02:50:46.000I mean, these guys oftentimes start fighting when they're six, seven years old, and they amass this incredible record of 315 wins, 41 losses, 5 draws.
02:54:09.000I mean, I tried Vietnamese food for the first time in Vietnam, and I had it for years, and then I came here and tried it, and I was like, what is this?
02:54:43.000But it's interesting how just Asia is just this massive, incredibly diverse place and – In the USA, it just gets boiled down to just Asia, Asian, the Asian community.
02:54:57.000Right, right, which includes India, which most people don't even think of as Asia.
02:55:23.000When we were here during the pandemic, when we kind of escaped Vietnam during the bad times over there, we went to a sushi place in Minneapolis.