Eddie Huang joins Joe Rogan to discuss his Vice show Wong’s World (April 28), a five-year project exploring identity through food in places like Sicily and Juarez, using verité-style filming. They debate a $500M global salary cap, with Eddie arguing it could fund $30K baseline incomes for struggling Americans while Joe counters that ambition drives progress. Huang critiques cultural awards favoring media-savvy chefs over authentic voices, citing Rick Bayless vs. Andy Ricker, and shares his upcoming book Double Cup Love (May 31), blending personal memoir with provocative themes. The conversation ends with Huang’s praise for Rogan’s podcast—even if it aired on hypothetical Anunnaki Planet—while teasing Rogan’s Seattle shows on 4.20. [Automatically generated summary]
Because, like, I went salmon fishing, and this is really kind of brought home to me when I went salmon fishing.
Me and Ari Shafir, a couple years ago, we went up to Alaska.
And right when we were getting up there, they had turned into catch and release because they have like a salmon weir.
Do you know what a weir is?
It's like they have these sort of pathways that the salmon have to go through, and they set them up so they can accurately count how many salmon go through at any given time.
So they can estimate how strong the schools are that are coming upstream and downstream.
So they can estimate pretty accurately how many salmon are in the river, what the populations are, how healthy they are.
So the salmon weir, there it goes right there.
You can see it.
They got like right before we were going up there.
They got poor numbers And it was kind of ironic because the day we got there, the numbers were off the fucking charts.
We got there at, like, one of the best days for salmon fishing ever.
For fresh water, there's Lake Castaic, which is nice.
They have striped bass, which are great.
It's all fresh water.
It's kind of an artificial lake, but right now they're hurting because of this drought that we've had up here for the last few years.
We used to film Fear Factor up there, and especially there's this place called Tahone Ranch.
This is the most shocking.
There's this place called Tahone Ranch that had this beautiful lake for largemouth bass, and we used to drop people on Fear Factor out of helicopters in this lake.
When you say that New York has more haters, when you're becoming successful in New York, you felt like it's just much more criticism, much more scrutiny?
Yeah, I think for the most part, 80% of the feedback's terrible, but every once in a while, a lot of our lower thirds on the show, like the nicknames we use and shit, it's like fans in the YouTube comments leave them.
Especially if worried that the grandma might actually look at the picture with her granddaughter and be like, they're out there trying to come on my granddaughter's titties.
Last year, I just turned 34 last month, and last year was the first year I was like, yo, I actually got a lot worse at basketball because I was getting incrementally better.
Yeah, I think a lot of that has to do with lifting weights.
It could.
For a lot of people, when you're sore, you know how, I guess, I don't play basketball and I'm terrible at it, but I would imagine that it's similar to Poole in that you've got to know exactly how much effort to put on that ball.
Exactly.
I know when I crumple up a paper and I throw it in a trash can.
It's a weird thing, right?
Because you're kind of estimating the drop, the arc of that little thing.
Well, what that does is, those are exogenous ketones, and ketones is what your body burns off, and it's not burning off carbohydrates.
There's a couple of benefits to it, and I'm not a scientist, and I'm not that smart, so I'm going to butcher this.
But essentially, one of the biggest benefits is that when your body's eating carbs all the time, your body feeds off carbs, For me, at least, what I would do is I'd have these big peaks and then these crashes.
Like, I would eat, and then after I ate, I was like a bear that got shot with a tranquilizer dart.
Like, I've worked out after 16 hours of not eating and be fine.
Like, what I'll do is I'll go to bed, like, early at night, and I'll work out at noon with nothing, eat nothing in between that time, and work out at noon and be fine.
And he talks about the correct way to do kettlebells and the correct way to strength train.
And one of the things that he's saying is you should never do more than five repetitions.
You should, like, say if you can lift something, if you have a hundred pounds, you can lift a hundred pounds nine times.
You shouldn't do it nine times.
You should do it five.
Do it five, then put it down.
Don't go to failure.
And the idea is the body's not designed to go to failure.
The idea that going to failure all the time, you think, like, we have this idea in our head, and I'm guilty of it more than anybody, is that more is better.
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You know, I'm gonna fucking work harder than everybody else, and that's what's gonna do it.
Well, that's not really the right way to do it when it comes to the human body.
Because even though your mind can push your body to extreme limits, Oftentimes you get better results by not pushing your body to extreme limits, by pushing your body intelligently, allowing your body sufficient time to recover, and then doing it again.
And then doing it more often, but with less repetitions.
We started this idea, and then we went through it, did it on the internet.
You know, eight minute clips, ten minute clips, and we did that for two years.
And the last two years I haven't had any episodes out because we've just been grinding and we've been in the lab eight episodes and it took us eight years and I have to give respect you know a lot of people look at say other travel shows or Tony Bourdain and you hear a lot of people pitch things around town in New York Oh, yeah, this is like the new Tony Bourdain or that's the new Tony Bourdain.
You know what?
We got in the lab and we made an hour-long travel show.
It's a similar format and, you know, thing that Tony is doing because he created this format.
And Tony is the first one that put a narrative to a cooking show.
He gave it a narrative and a story and character.
And so...
He created this format that a lot of people have followed in his footsteps.
But I've always felt like, you know, when I started, people were like, oh, next Tony or whatever.
And Tony was really helpful to me in my career and he really supported me.
But I was like, you know what?
My purpose in life wasn't to be another version of my dad.
My dad wanted me to work in his steakhouse when I was a kid and just be like, you own this restaurant after me.
And we're going to sell steak.
That's what the Wongs do.
And I was like, Dad, I don't think that can be the point to my life.
It can't be just to emulate you and be like you.
And when it came to me doing this Vice stuff, I've been for five years figuring out how to get my voice and my story and the things I care about to translate to tape.
And it maybe looked a lot easier than I thought it did, but once you get to it and you start to see what really makes these shows great, you want to honor it, you want to respect it, and you want to work hard.
So we took two years to make these eight episodes.
But it's even the people on your crew getting everybody to buy in and believe.
We came back with the footage and these things, it gets in a post and then everybody who gets to watch it in post has an opinion about what this show should be.
And I just, I fought and fought and fought all eight of these episodes.
Finally, we're going to put them out.
And all eight of them are exactly how I feel about the places I visited and the people we met.
And my biggest struggle was travel shows, they voice over a lot.
There's a lot of voice over and it's almost like these shows are written before people go to these towns and these cities.
And what the people say sometimes doesn't matter because the producer or whoever is going has already decided the story he wants to tell.
I go out there And we booked the scenes, and the thing that made everybody nervous in pre-production was, I was like, I don't know what these people are gonna say, and we're gonna live with the footage.
And they're like, no, you have to have an idea, you have to direct the conversation, we need to write voiceover, and we need to set it up.
And I was like, let's just go to these towns, meet these people, and let them tell us about their lives, their cities, their identities, and accept the footage.
And I think being honest, accepting footage, not manipulating the footage with a ton of voiceover is the real innovation of our show.
It's verite.
You see us making the show.
So it's never like you're not aware we're making a show.
I'm exploring and deconstructing identities through what people eat.
You're basically like going through their shit.
Like, what's in your poop?
You know what I mean?
Fucking red tuna, olive oil, you know?
But I'm going through these countries and exploring their history and identity just through what they eat.
Because what you eat tells you so much about who you are, your culture, your values, your politics, and your history, and what has happened to your ancestors.
There's a lot of violence people are afraid to go outside and This is one of the symbolic things that the youth out there do is they try to take back the city in the town and By riding through it with bikes.
I can't remember if it's they did the shows in El Paso and went to Juarez to party after, or it's they did the show in Juarez and went to the taco stand because they did have a venue next door to this thing.
So I think it's some bands did El Paso, came over, some bands did the venue next to the taco spot and went over, but it was a combination.
The Rolling Stones, I can't remember if they were El Paso or Juarez, but there were tons of bands in that triangle going back and forth between the border.
And people would come across the border to party in Juarez, and it was a thing.
You know, they would all talk about donkey shows and all the crazy shit that you'd go over there and see, but it was never like, don't go to Tijuana because of drug violence.
The murders are real, but then the thing is, is that we have to remember, in all these towns, you see these murders, you see the gang violence, there's real people living through that shit.
There's real people trying to live normal lives, and that's why we did this episode on the border towns in Mexico.
We went to Tijuana, Mexicali, and Juarez, and we tried to show the lives that these people are trying to live next to a superpower.
Because just by the sheer nature and geography of them living on the border next to a superpower, of course, crime is going to leak into their towns.
But I mean, that's sort of the same way people have to look at about Mexico, although I do have to tell you this one story.
I went to this resort recently in Mexico near Puerto Vallarta, and I was like, wow, this place is so pretty.
How is it that Mexico has all this drug violence and all these problems, but there's this beautiful resort, and all these wealthy people go to vacation at this resort, and they have these little golf carts that they give you on the resort to move around the resort.
And we took the golf cart, and they're like, you can go into the city if you like.
You know, you can take the golf carts anywhere you want.
It's like, alright, let's go into the city.
So we go into the city, and we went a block from that resort.
One block.
And we found a fucking small military base with Armored vehicles with dudes sitting on there on machine guns with steel plates in front of them ready to rock at a moment's notice.
So that's how they keep these wealthy people protected.
I was like, wow, this is a wake-up call right here.
And that's the thing that our leaders never do a good job of.
That violence on the South Side of Chicago, that should affect all Americans, but it doesn't.
And until it affects somebody who doesn't live in the South Side, and the murder accidentally bleeds into the wrong neighborhood on the North Side, nobody really cares.
Nobody pays attention.
And that's why we went to Mexico, too, because there's this border.
And the thing is, is that the world needs more transparency and mobility, right?
The thing that I noticed for two years traveling around the globe, going to all these places, Mediterranean, Sicily, where there's the immigration issues, Istanbul, You know, Mexico on the borders.
We need transparency because the leaders of this world are drawing lines all around creating divisions that are not there between me and you or Jamie or people in Mexico that I met, you know?
And we need to have mobility because it can't just be my dumb luck that I was born in America.
Yeah, well, stockpiling wealth is a weird thing, right?
When people get to this point where they just constantly...
Well, if you have billions and billions of dollars, but yet you're still involved and constantly trying to accumulate wealth, that's a little weird, too.
It's interesting, but someone who makes more than $500 million could take that money and start a gigantic business and hire hundreds of millions of people.
Did you just promote Reaganomics, Broke?
Trickle-down economics is real.
Just like God had us born here in America, God also made it so you don't have a salary cap.
It's interesting, but if you play Monopoly, which is what everybody's doing, right?
I mean, capitalism in a lot of ways is a lot like a game.
You're trying to accumulate.
And some people are more dedicated to that game, and they try to accumulate constantly.
I mean, if I was more dedicated to just doing the things that I do, if I was more dedicated in a capitalist sense, I would accumulate more money.
But...
My personal belief is that it would fuck with me creatively because it would take away resources that I use for other things.
It would fuck with the way I do the podcast.
If you only think about how much money you can make, there's certain things you wouldn't say, there's certain ways you wouldn't speak.
And the irony in my business is that would ultimately cost me money because my product would suffer.
So I think in a lot of ways the game of capitalism itself, just calling it a game, It's very problematic if you have a cap on how much money you can make in that game.
Because there's always going to be these outliers, these Michael Jordans of sport that take things to the fucking nth level and go deep and want to make as much money as they possibly can.
And I don't necessarily think that that's bad.
I think you should have the freedom to be fucking crazy.
You should have the freedom.
If you want to be the first guy that makes a hundred billion dollars, you should have the freedom to do that.
But As a human being who makes that much money, you also should have an understanding of what kind of an impact you can have on other people with that money.
From your own personal perspective, you can take that money and invest it in different communities.
You can start programs.
You could give people scholarships.
You could do all this amazing stuff with that money that you wouldn't be able to do if somebody put a cap and said you can only make 500 million bucks.
Well, the problem is that there's so much money involved in red tape and bullshit and employees and overhead and all the different operating costs.
When you look at the actual operating costs involved in charities and you compare it to how much money actually goes to the charity that you're sending money to, it's disturbing.
Like, when you don't have money, like when I was young, and I didn't have any money, man, I remember the first check that I got, I got a big check from Disney.
I got a development deal when I was like 24. And all of a sudden, I didn't have to worry about my bills.
It was the first time in my life I didn't have to worry about my bills.
And I was like, my rent is taken care of this month.
I can go out to eat.
And I remember it was like a physical feeling of like, Like a physical feeling of relaxation.
Like now, all of a sudden, the overhead cloud of debt and worry about my bills had lifted and the sun was shining.
And I was like, oh!
And I will never forget that feeling.
Because that feeling was a revelation as far as like how much stress I was under and most people are under on a daily basis.
So because of that stress, what people think about is, man, I got to make money because that is the way to get away from this fucking stress.
And he was like, some people want to play the game, Eddie.
He's like, you wake up every day.
You want to write.
You want to go do something.
You want to be productive.
He's like, some people, they just want to live.
And so after the salary cap, after $500 million, what if that money from those billionaires and one percenters goes into guaranteeing A baseline amount of wealth.
Maybe it's $30,000 and it goes to American people who are not making that much money.
And it's like, here's 30,000.
Here's your bills taken care of.
Here's an apartment.
Now you have no excuse.
You have no excuse.
Go do something you care about.
Go do something you love.
Contribute back to society.
Because this wealth that this guy's making is going to guarantee you a baseline amount of living.
If you take people from scratch and make them entitled from scratch and just have them programmed to think that money comes free and it's coming off, then you have a nation of spoiled kids.
You ever seen a spoiled kids that come from rich parents that get everything they want?
It's also about understanding yourself and knowing that you can accomplish things.
And not just accomplish things from a financial standpoint, but accomplish things as far as going on a diet and taking care of your health, pursuing an athletic goal, pursuing a creative goal of finishing a book or writing a manuscript.
There's a lot of things that people won't do if you just give them money.
In this country, if you look at the amount of people in this country that have baseline need issues and how much money they earn as opposed to the rest of the world, there's a crazy statistic that I've quoted before.
If you make more than $34,000 a year, you are in the 1% of the world.
Yeah, there's a few cases, not a few, there's tons of cases where you don't pay your parking tickets, they pull you over again, late parking tickets, they'll end up putting you in jail.
Like there was a case- For how long?
I think it was in- I think there was a couple cases in Ferguson, Missouri that people were talking about last year with a woman, a couple people, who did not have the money to pay their parking tickets or traffic violations, and then over time, you can't pay.
And not only that, you have this fucking asshole on a bus or this little scooter thing that goes around and gives tickets and marks your tire with chalk to make sure that you've...
Well, we have to figure out a way to make the hands that people are dealt with in life far easier to move with.
And there's a lot of people that are dealt with a fucking terrible, shitty hand, and we just turn a blind eye towards these terrible, impoverished communities that are fucking filled with crime, and these children that grow up there, by the time they get to be 17 and 18, they've seen so much shit, and the programming in their mind is so...
It's so disturbing because everything that they've been involved with, everything they've seen, they've seen loved ones get incarcerated, they've seen people get shot, they've seen crime, they've seen a lack of hope, they've seen police brutality, they've seen all these terrible things.
That is what we need to clean up in this country, not keep people from making tons of money.
Well, the thing is, alright, if I take the salary cap thing away, my idea is this, though, is I want to guarantee a baseline of living for people in America.
We sold shit outside the cake shop, whatever, right?
Weed.
I was selling weed, whatever.
It's not a big deal.
Whatever.
Weed, Xanax, selling a few things, all right?
And then he also was like a night manager at Target.
He's a night manager at Target.
He's kind of wasting away.
He was like 19, 20 years old.
Incredible basketball player.
One of the best AAU basketball players I've seen.
And he got offers to play at some JUCOs and things like that.
And I remember one day, we went up to Harlem to get the work and I was coming back down on the train.
I was like, fam, you should sign up.
You should go to that JUCO. You should enroll.
Like right now, it's July.
There's still time.
You enroll now.
You could be in there for the fall semester and you could play ball.
You're 19 years old.
Do this, man.
And I remember we just passed the stop and he's like, nah, man, it'll never happen.
I'm like, why?
And he's like, you don't get it, Eddie.
Like...
The way you are, your parents, like, they've taught you, you have a chance.
I don't have a chance.
He's like, I've been told my whole life, I don't have a chance.
You know, I live with my grandmother.
And whether he's right or not, I disagree with him.
He does have a chance.
But he had psychologically been broken, had no hope, and did not believe he could do anything.
And when I saw that, it fundamentally changed me.
Because I was like, I'm privileged.
I'm privileged because my parents, maybe they beat the crap out of me, maybe they were hard on me, but I never...
I never didn't feel like I had a chance if I worked hard.
There's a lot of people in this world that just for 20 years they've lived in America and they're like, even if I worked hard, even I see my parents working hard, we just never got the opportunities.
And he didn't want to listen and he was telling you, he was consciously aware that he had been programmed to think there was no hope.
If that's what he was telling you, that's on him, man.
And there's always going to be that.
And that is an example for you.
Because the people that fail in this weird fucking race that we're all in, or this weird...
If you can't help them at least you can learn from them, you know And we can look along the way at different people that have done terrible things and we could say well What they did was awful and they should be punished and that is almost definitely true But also we can learn that this could happen to anybody who's in the wrong circumstances have the wrong mindset and chooses the wrong actions These all these things are important and These are important not just for the person that's involved in that situation, but for everyone else observing.
Because we learn from each other.
We don't just learn by experience.
We learn from other people's experiences.
And it's very, very important that way.
Because we can experience other people's lives just through sheer communication.
And it's one of the most beautiful things about social media.
Is that we can all share much more information than has ever been possible before.
And through that, you can learn, hey, you know who else was told that he would never amount to be shit?
Jay-Z. You know who else grew up in a shitty neighborhood?
You know, this fucking basketball player, or that MMA fighter, or this stand-up comedian, or that artist.
There's a million examples of people who were told they're not going to be shit.
He's decided to retire young, which means like 34. Eventually, young, not today.
Listen, man.
Unless he got fucking head kicked today and knocked into oblivion.
The idea that he's gonna go out on a loss like that to Nate Diaz.
Look, he's got plenty of cash.
If he wanted to retire young and step away, I mean, I guarantee you he probably made somewhere in the neighborhood of five million bucks for the Jose Alda fight.
He probably made more than that for the Nate Diaz fight.
I would imagine after he spent a fuckload of it, he's probably still got a few million bucks laying around.
He's a hero in Ireland.
He could always make money.
He could always run a gym and be fine, but if I had to guess...
It doesn't make any sense.
The only reason why it would make sense, the only reason why it would make sense is Conor had actually thought about retiring from MMA before he got the call for the UFC. There was a point in time where he had some friends that were experiencing some serious health issues from fighting and then most recently that young man from the Portuguese guy died in an MMA contest which I think took place in the UK. Wasn't...
But as far as social things, you have great fun with your friends that you'll never forget.
There's moments of...
There's moments during...
Alcohol intoxication where you kind of see things for what they are because the the veil that's in front of your mind the veil of inhibition and Struggle and bullshit and insecurity is removed by that alcohol for the most part alcohol makes people a lot of makes a lot of people assholes Because they lose their inhibitions, because they get cocky, because they don't have fear anymore.
I knew some people that had been into trouble and I learned from other people's experiences.
No, I've never been a fan of drunks, especially girls.
Like, I just feel like if you're on a date with someone, If you date a drug addict or you date an alcoholic or something like that, man, the burden of just getting to know someone, enjoying their company and being even with each other and enjoying each other's company, it's hard enough to figure out if you're compatible with someone socially without this monkey on their back.
Someone's got a heroin problem and you're going to date a girl with a heroin problem.
I have a buddy, my buddy Brian Callen.
He's the best.
But he always used to try to clean these girls up.
When you find someone's problems are greater than your own, it lets you concentrate on things other than your problems, which you are not fixing because you are a lazy fuck.
So you procrastinate.
And people find really strange ways to procrastinate.
And one of the ways they find to procrastinate is to create other problems in their life that take precedent over the problem that they're avoiding.
The only thing that they have to do is they have to help subsidize the small mid-sized businesses to compete with like the Walmarts and the Best Buys and the Targets.
Tax incentives and things like that to the small mid-sized businesses because to absorb this new salaries right now immediately, the big companies have a lot more of a cushion and a margin to absorb this shit.
I mean, all these restrictions on behavior and what you can and can't do are a gigantic part of the problem with the fiber of our economy and the fiber of our culture.
We've got all these weird restrictions that are in place that are archaic and don't make any sense.
And when you accept one thing that doesn't make any sense, well then it leaves room for a lot of other weird shenanigans, like Ted Cruz wanted to lock people up for dildos.
This dumb motherfucker is really close to being president.
Ted Cruz was trying to pass a law that would put you in jail for having dildos.
Pull this up, Jamie, because this is just one of the most hilarious things about this dumbass that people are trying to force down the American public's face because the Republican candidates are all a joke other than Donald Trump.
No one can get past that guy, and he's a joke.
No one can get past that guy, so the Republicans are panicking.
They don't know what to do, so they put this fucking Ted Cruz dummy in, not knowing there's a million different things that are wrong with him.
The time Ted Cruz defended a ban on dildos, his legal team argued that there was no right to stimulate one's genitals.
Scroll up, please.
In one chapter of his campaign book, A Time for Truth, Senator Ted Cruz proudly chronicles his day as a Texas Solicitor General, a post that he held from 2003 to 2008. Bolstering his conservative cred, the Republican president candidate notes that during his stint as the state's chief lawyer in front of the Supreme Court and federal state appellate courts, he defended the inclusion of under God in the Pledge of Allegiance, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Scroll up to the the dildo case Battle concerning privacy and free speech right 2004 companies that owned Austin stores selling text sex toys and a retail distributor of such products challenged Texas law Outlawing the sale and promotion of supposedly obscene devices And we'll put put the thing where he wanted to have how much it you should go to jail for it because it was like two years and Here it is.
Under the law, a person who violated the statute could go to jail for up to two years for selling dildos.
It's some, not enough, but it's basically people, leaders of countries, like the British Prime Minister's dad and Brazil, the guy Brazil's involved, but there's people, leaders, presidents, prime ministers have been keeping their money in offshore accounts Not paying the taxes that they owe in their country and keeping this money off the books.
And then somebody gave this information from a law firm that does most of these transactions and it's now being published.
So you can see where all the money is being hidden.
I'm glad people are looking at it that way, though, that they've ostracized him instead of like concentrating only on the guy who is banging other girls, you know?
Yeah, priorities in that case, because regardless of whether or not the guy who did the deed shouldn't have done it or should have done it, like whatever your opinions are about cheating...
That guy's violating a friendship.
Like, that guy didn't tell him that because he wanted the world to know.
He told him that because they're friends.
I have friends that tell me dark shit all the time that they do, and we laugh like pigs.
And I'll never tell a soul.
I'll go to my grave with all that knowledge.
And that's what a friend's supposed to be.
So any guy would do that, it's a piece of shit.
So I'm glad that the rules and principles of friendship have overtaken the rules and principles of monogamy.
But no, it was interesting though, because that same week, it was this girl Kalani had supposedly, people had assumed she had cheated on her boyfriend who was in the NBA, Kyrie Irving, right?
So then this D'Angelo thing happened, but when it was the girl, everyone beat her up over cheating or whatever, and she actually didn't.
She didn't even cheat.
With the D'Angelo-Nick Young thing, everyone was just mad at D'Angelo.
Which, D'Angelo deserves, he's the worst person of that week.
But then also, I was like, well, if you're gonna be mad at Kalani, then you gotta be mad at Nick Young.
Or just don't be mad at either one of them, because who fucking cares?
It's cool But there's one of you this is just for all the boys out there listening Okay, and girls too if you're lesbians if you go to a girl's page And it's all this stuff about love and what true love is and you when you find the one you'll know Fucking run.
Run from that person.
Run now.
Because that person's probably never happy, and they just sit around posting memes about what true love is.
And you open up a comedy club, and some whack-ass comedian comes to perform.
If you're a stand-up comedian, and you open up a comedy club, and some whack-ass comedian comes and performs at your comedy club, no one says, hey, Joey Diaz's comedy club, I went there the other day, and this guy went up and performed, this guy sucks, so Joey Diaz must be a bad comedian.
Like, if you were gonna judge Rick Bayless, you would have to judge him by his own cooking.
I was known for catching this bad review at Xiaoya.
I had a restaurant.
Sam Sifton came in.
I was sitting in the dining room.
I was not cooking.
And he did not have a great meal.
And you know what?
I took it on the face and I owned it.
And the thing is, Rick Bailey, he doesn't make bad food.
It's just...
It's not...
For all the accolades he has, it's not the best.
But also, there's a bit of a thing with food that...
The literati, the intelligentsia, the blogs, the magazines, they're always electing people that they can tell a story about, speak English, have this shishi dining room.
It's not about the food.
They always talk about the food, but it's not.
And I think that people of ethnic cultures, from the background of Mexican food and things like that, people get upset when there's somebody else that didn't live the life, didn't grow up with it, isn't The best at it, representing it.
You know?
Like, if it's gonna be somebody from the outside, he better be the fucking best.
Otherwise, get somebody who lived this life and knows all the history and identity and culture attached to this food and let them speak for their own food.
Okay, I think part of the problem of this conversation is you want to talk about the restaurant this guy runs.
I want to talk about him as a chef.
And I'm saying you haven't had his food as a chef.
And what I've read is that he makes excellent Mexican food and he really is a student of the culture and is enamored by Mexican culture and Mexican traditions and he's essentially a scholar of Mexican food.
I just feel like, you know, if you're leaving it to someone else to do it, I mean, you might have had the bad...
It's like, if you're an architect and, you know, you're a builder of a house and someone comes along and does a shitty job building your creation, are you responsible?
Well, if you were supposed to oversee every single aspect of the construction, yes.
I'll even get beyond him because I don't think he's done anything wrong.
And this is the one thing in this discussion that I feel is unfair to some of these chefs, especially the white chefs.
It's not their fault that journalists and people want to give them more.
Somebody wants to give them more.
I don't expect them to throw it in the fucking ground.
You know?
The problem, though, is the media and the people giving these awards and the ones selecting saying, this is the best chef, this is the best Mexican food...
It's really obnoxious to the people of that culture that are like, dude, that's not really representing who we are, but now this guy's representing our food in America, and he's the one you go to for information.
But my point being, does this guy, so you think it's deserved, that he's getting shit, not because he's the best Mexican, because he's getting all these accolades, not because he's the best, but because it's easy to write a story about him because he's a white guy from Oklahoma.
And the people that select the gatekeepers and the people who speak for culture, they're picking a guy that they can communicate with easily, makes their job easy, and can tell a story that's easily disseminated amongst the masses.
And I don't think it's Rick Bayless' fault.
I don't think Rick Bayless has done anything wrong Like, in this context ever.
It's the media selecting him as, you are now the spokesperson for Mexican food in America.
Actually, on the show, right, so when we went to China, I was craving American food.
I was in China for 17 days.
And I was like, you know what?
I miss fucking hamburgers and a salad and nachos.
And we went to a place called Deli Burger.
It was the most popular American restaurant for expats in Hunan, China.
And we went.
This place had like Pulp Fiction posters, Big Lebowski.
It was interesting.
They had like a Phillips, like fucking French dip logo thing in there.
They collected all these American artifacts they bought on Amazon.
We ate their hamburger and it tasted like Chinese food.
It was hilarious.
It was a delicious hamburger, but it wasn't a hamburger.
It tasted like they had a Philly cheesesteak and my buddy was like, he's from Van Nuys, he ate it and he was like, listen, I have so many friends that are Mexican or Asian growing up in LA that get mad when white people or people not of the culture make their food and they're like, this isn't representing us.
This isn't what they said.
This is not Mapo tofu.
This is not a soup dumpling.
This is some chef's creation.
And he goes, I never understood why they got mad until I ate this Philly cheesesteak because this is not a Philly cheesesteak.
This is like stir-fried beef in bread.
And they should call it the Hunan Hoagie because it tastes good, but it is not a Philly cheesesteak.
And I love Philly cheesesteaks and I love hamburgers.
And it's like when you see something that you love being called something else and being represented a different way, it's upsetting because that's your identity.
Yeah, there's a few people that I've done interviews with in the first five minutes that could tell they're out to get me, but then once they can tell I'm pretty genuine and honest and straightforward, they're like, alright, I'll level with this guy.
I'll talk to him.
So no, I would not say that there were people that were out to get me.
There's a couple, but I can't even remember them because I don't care.
It's harder and harder to do that these days, too, because of the internet.
You know, if someone writes a shitty review, it's so easy to out that person and describe what exactly was going on behind the scenes and who that person really is.
It was about my journey back to China with my brothers.
So I wrote that book.
But I think...
Non-fiction, it's hard to keep putting yourself out there in the most honest way.
So I started writing fiction because I want to write about my life, but I want to kind of ground it in other characters and things like that and explore it and work through the ideas.
I play one song and I'll loop it and I'll listen to the same song for like 12 hours.
Just over and over and over.
What song?
It'll just be a song that day.
Like I've had like a random...
Jazz song or it'll be like Smith and Wesson or Lana Del Rey or Can't Blow and I'll just play that song looped for hours and hours and hours and it gets in a trance because you stop listening to the song.
I used to write a bunch of different stuff, but now primarily what I do is I write essays, and out of those essays, I take stand-up ideas.
I used to write a lot of blog entries, but I found out that a lot of those blog entries would eventually become stand-up, and it was almost like I was giving people a preview of the stand-up.
I'm like, better to write them for myself and then just steal from them.
I'd like to be in the lab and just only put something out and I put out a lot of shit about my life in the last few years, so I'm kind of making sure I really want to share these things now.
But nobody put it out there in that way where the rest of the world could look at it, and the rest of the world can see virtually anything that you put online today.
It's just a strange thing because when you're young, you also don't understand the consequences.
And that person knows someone who's got a million.
And in three or four steps, all of a sudden a million people have seen that.
And then if it's funny or it's crazy or it's interesting...
Like here's another cultural appropriation story.
There's this kid who was taking shit from this girl because he's a white guy with dreadlocks.
And I don't know if you saw this, but there was this black girl and there's this college in Northern California.
And she was giving this little tiny white dude a hard time.
She was just bullying him, man.
It was gross.
And she was telling him, you know, cut your hair.
Say to her friend, do you have any scissors?
I'm going to cut your hair.
And he's like, why can't I wear this?
She goes, because you're stealing from my culture.
Which is ignorant on her part.
She doesn't even know any better because the Greeks had dreadlocks.
The Vikings had dreadlocks.
Dreadlocks is what happens when you have dirty hair.
When you have dirty hair and it knots up in these loops.
Well, anyway, that video, someone was filming her bullying.
He's a little tiny dude.
And this video of this black girl bullying this tiny little white guy.
God fuck.
In millions and millions of hits within a day because people recognize it and they were disgusted by it and then people are also tired of all these Self-appointed gatekeepers self-appointed, you know people that can tell people one of the beautiful things about culture is that culture can be shared and that people can like like me I grew up learning taekwondo and in teaching classes in Korean because I grew up that's what I spent my life doing and And so that culture became a part of my culture.
It's not like I was stealing it or culturally appropriating it.
I was doing it honor and trying to do it justice.
But people have decided it's another new way for someone to stand above them and take the moral high ground and try to control people's behavior.
When your only basis for an argument is your race versus somebody else's race, you got a fucking shitty argument.
Do you know what I mean?
When it becomes something about intention, and we're talking about intentions, and we're talking about, like, are you trying to take a culture?
Are you trying to support it?
Are you a fan of this culture?
Are you giving back to this culture?
Those are productive conversations.
Like, the one we had about Rick Bayless, look, dude, I'm not out here to try to slam dude's food.
Like, I know a lot of people love his food.
So I'm not saying, oh, I know this shit.
I know Mexican food.
I'm a fucking Chinese guy.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, my opinion about Mexican food doesn't matter, shouldn't matter.
But my opinion about this appropriation, co-optation stuff is I wish people didn't have to have a gatekeeper or a tour guide or somebody culturally similar for them to try this food or go to this neighborhood.
I would love if people didn't have to have a shishi dining room with like American-style service or a whiteface or a great article to try this Mexican food.
I wish they would just go to the neighborhood and go to the source.
And then there's no problem with Rick Bayless's food if we're all informed about it.
And in that strange shit is like what we were talking about before.
We can all learn.
Anybody that tells little white lies maybe, they'll watch Rachel Dolezal or someone else who got busted in some gigantic cataclysmic lie and go, oh, that's why you shouldn't lie.
Oh, that's why honesty and integrity are very important to people.
We communicate through noises that we make with our face that's supposed to level out the intent of your mind.
What people also don't realize is, a lot of the times, they think that we're friends with them for the peripheral shit, but I think most people, like, good people that you actually want to be your friends, they're not your friend because you have dreadlocks, they're not your friend because you're aping or you're doing this shit.
They're your friend because they fucking like you.
I mean, I'm joking around a lot about YouTube comments.
There's actually some people that get involved.
I mean, I go to science pages.
And you look at the...
There's some interesting YouTube comments where people debate the actual ramifications.
I'm fascinated by this Planet 9 thing they're trying to observe now.
Because this is something I've been studying for a long time.
That they've been thinking...
There was very little evidence of it up until recently.
But that there was another planet outside the Kuiper Belt.
Somewhere outside of Pluto.
It's one of the reasons why they declassified Pluto as a planet.
But now they're almost positive...
There's a planet out there.
I think they said within 99% certainty that there's a gigantic planet somewhere around four to five times the size of the Earth that is out way, way, way past Jupiter.
And so I was going to a lot of these YouTube videos that were describing it and then reading the comments.
The comments were fascinating.
So that's a totally different sort of world.
People are debating the ramifications.
And then every now and then, one of those Zacharias Hitchin people would jump in there.
Yeah, and this was 6,000 years ago when a lot of people didn't even think that the world, they thought the world was flat, right?
But it also depicted this What they believe is one of the things that the Sumerian texts describe is this elliptical orbit of this planet called Nibiru.
And this planet is the outside edge of our solar system.
It comes between Mars and Jupiter.
In this Zacharias Hitchin translation, I think it was 3,600-something years, and that this is where the Anunnaki came from.
And what they did is they came down here, they studied some lower hominids, they introduced their DNA into these lower hominids and made human beings.
And so he had predicted this planet being outside of our solar system for a long time.
The size of the orbit is different compared to what he described.
No, we don't even have a picture of it, so we definitely don't know what it looks like.
But the Anunnaki, as described by Zacharias Hitchin, is the same thing as in the biblical term of the Elohim.
There's also different descriptions of these giants that came from somewhere else.
I think the description of Anunnaki, what it means is those from heaven to earth came.
And the idea is that these advanced beings came down here and genetically engineered human beings.
It's widely discredited by other scholars of ancient Babylonian and Sumerian culture, but fun as shit to pretend and read and wonder, well, what if he's right, man?
But see, when you do look at some of the stuff, though, you go, okay, well, how did they know about the solar system?
How did they know about all those planets?
Not only that, they had the caduceus, the symbol for medicine, and It's also the double helix of DNA, and that's what he believes it represented.
He believes that Caduceus symbol that they had represents DNA, and that that's what the ancient Sumerian people were trying to describe when they carved these things into clay tablets.
They were trying to, as best they could, Make some sort of a rational, logical depiction of what they are being told by these ancient people.
There's also some weird shit in terms of some of the imagery that they had.
The solar system one is one of the most telling because it's really bizarre that without a telescope they were able to draw a detailed image of the solar system.
Like, how the fuck did they do that?
How did they know that there was that many planets out there?
How were they able to differentiate between stars and planets?
Not only that, they also had a detailed depiction of the creation of the moon.
They have two, you know, scientists and astronomers, they have Earth 1 and Earth 2, meaning that Earth was a certain size and a certain shape in the beginning, and then it was hit by another planet.
That's also in the ancient Sumerian depiction of how the universe was created, or how the solar system was created.
There's a planet called Marduk and Tiamat, and Tiamat collided with Marduk or something like that, I forget exactly what they, but essentially it's Earth-1 and Earth-2.
It's the same model that actual astrologers or astronomers use today when they're describing the Earth.
He believed that that's what the ancient Sumerian text was trying to describe.
But there's a whole website called SitchinIsWrong.com.
And SitchinIsWrong.com is from other scholars who were tired of listening to all this, what they felt was nonsense.
And they, you know, they sort of laid out what they think is incorrect about his translations.
But at the end of the day, put the translations aside, and you're looking at a 6,000-year-old depiction of the solar system.
It's like, what the fuck is that?
Not only that, there's also depictions of these enormous people with these little monkey people sitting in their lap.
And this was what he believed was describing the Anunnaki's genetic alterations of monkeys, of taking these lower hominids, introducing their superior advanced DNA into these monkeys, and creating something that's very different.
But if you look at that image that you had pulled up before, Jamie, there's an image of one of those Anunnaki having a little monkey-like person sitting in their lap.
It's not on this page.
It's before when you had some of those other images.
There's these ones where these guys, these enormous-looking characters, have these little tiny monkey people with thumbs on their feet, and they're sitting on this guy's lap.
Yeah, they're smaller and they have thumbs on their lap.
And according to the text this guy described, the text is very confusing too because it's something called cuneiform.
And cuneiform, it's like, have you ever been in an old building that has like those old school nails?
Do you know what those old school nails looked like, like in the turn of the century?
They were like a flat top, but it was almost like a wedge, and that's what nails looked like.
That was their writing.
That's not it, Jamie.
But that's one of them that's similar, but this is Egyptian.
You're looking at something that's Egyptian.
But the Anunnaki one, you had had it from just, if you go back to that window that you had before, go back to that window that you had before that had the depiction of the solar system.
Yeah, because when you went, whatever search that you used for that, there was one of them that had, one of those homeboys had one of them sitting on his lap.
It would be just awesome if somebody showed up like, this is what life's about, this is what you're supposed to do, Eddie, your fucking ideas are terrible.
But I think we're supposed to figure it out on our own.
Look, if we've got Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders, there are only hopes to be the commander-in-chief of the greatest army the world has ever known.
For fuck sure, we're doing it wrong.
We're 100% doing it wrong.
These are not the great scholars and the great intellectuals that we need to help run this world.
There's no one amongst them that has a brilliant philosophy.
Even when you're looking at Bernie and Hillary, and Bernie, as much as I love him and as much as I love some of his ideas, you see that guy and Hillary and they're bickering back and forth during these debates.
That's so unbecoming of someone who's supposed to be the president.
Yeah, especially a dude who's in his 60s and some lady, you know, she covers everything except the very top of her neck.
I mean, it's bizarre.
It's bizarre.
Like, you're supposed to be further along in this crazy journey than us.
If you want to be the president, you should be so far ahead that you have some lessons that you can impart upon the rest of us.
You have some ideas about how we can improve our policies.
You have some ideas on what laws that we can establish that would probably be better to protect us from greed and from evil corporations and from people that are raping the world of all its natural resources.
Well, maybe he feels like the system is broken and he's in a situation to give his life meaning and maybe enhance the lives of other people by helping.
I don't know, because I don't know him.
I'm not even familiar with him, but I'm just playing devil's advocate.
Devil's advocate would say that, I mean, if you have all that money and you have all that freedom, why wouldn't you try to make the world a little bit of a better place?
You say that, but what if it's a really smart, clever, crafty person and an Anunnaki that's been getting $30,000 a year and really doesn't have any motivation and they're weak.
You say that, but take one of the dumbest people today and put them in a room with one of the smartest people from ancient Rome and who would be running shit.