William Sonbuchner, "white trash from Minnesota" turned viral travel show host, shares his unconventional rise—teaching English in Korea off-the-books for eight years while mastering filmmaking at Soul Workshop. His documentaries on extreme foods, like Faroese whale meat (controversial but sustainably hunted) and Tanzanian Hidzabe tribe’s monkey hunts, clash with modern ethics, yet highlight vanishing traditions. Mad honey mishaps in Vietnam and mud-red honey’s neurotoxic risks in Turkey’s Karkar Mountains underscore the dangers of unregulated exotic cuisines. Sonbuchner’s 15M-view Egypt series, despite bureaucratic censorship, sparks debate on lost ancient knowledge, from Giza’s 2.3M-stone pyramid to Graham Hancock’s Younger Dryas comet theory. Rogan’s travels—Muay Thai in Thailand, rice harvesting—contrast with Sonbuchner’s deep dives into global food and culture, proving immersion beats superficiality. [Automatically generated summary]
And 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, and I'm on the motherfucking Joe Rogan experience.
And so I was at a point in my life where I just thought, I need to do something.
I'm still youngish.
I was 24. And I want to travel.
I want to see the world.
I want to figure out something before I actually develop a long-term career.
Because at that point, I had nothing.
And so I had a friend.
My brother had a friend who lived in Korea.
And at the age of 24, I moved to Korea.
To teach English.
And 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.
So 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.
Like, kids go to school so much, they study so much, they get tutors, and things like that.
And so, when I went to Korea, I was gonna be a tutor.
And 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.
And that wasn't the case at all.
Because when you speak to people, you know, they'll say something like, oh, today I go to store.
And you go, oh...
I know how to solve that.
You know, today I went to the store.
And 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 a day because you need to take the subway, you need to go around the city, and you except for it takes maybe you can do two or three lessons a day because you need You do the lesson, you come back.
And so eventually I learned how to get a full-time job in Korea, which was what was really necessary.
So I reached out to a school, and I find out the code word is can you pay cash?
So with many schools, you need to have the right kind of visa, right?
They want to see that you have a proper degree, which is understandable.
And so, if you just asked, can you pay cash?
Some would get your point.
They would say no, or they would say, oh, yeah, cash is fine.
We'll do cash.
And so, eventually, after being there for maybe six months, I finally figured out how to make a full-time income decision.
Teaching English in Korea at a kindergarten.
And 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.
But really, to teach English in Korea, all you need is a four-year degree in anything.
I could have had a four-year degree in interior design and also taught kids English.
And so, living in Korea was the show I do now.
There's no way I could have done it if I didn't have all that time living abroad for so long.
Living 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.
People care a lot more what other people think.
I tried dating a Korean woman one time.
Challenging.
Because she's not just looking at, what do I think about the dynamic of this relationship?
She's looking at, what are my parents going to think?
What are my friends going to think?
What are my coworkers going to think?
And so on.
That's just one random example.
But being steeped and immersed in this different culture gave me enough experience to...
It gave me perspective.
And it's perspective that if I didn't have that, I couldn't make the show that I make today.
Because...
The show would be a much more judgmental show if I wasn't so used to and accustomed to being among other cultures.
So, after a number of years in Korea, I switched to filmmaking.
So I guess in the beginning I wanted to be good at whatever I could be good.
I wanted to be good at everything.
And I didn't have a direction quite yet.
So I read this book called Talent is Overrated.
And in that book they talk about the 10,000 hour rule.
I'm sure you've heard about it in Malcolm Gladwell's book.
And the 10,000-hour rule is just essentially you need 10,000 hours of practice, deliberate practice to become masterclass at something.
Even people talk about this with comedians, too.
I think Louis C.K. has talked about people needing at least 10 years to get good or even decent.
And so I broke it down.
I looked at filmmaking systematically.
Like, how can I... Week by week, day by day, improve at this and get better at this.
I created something called the Soul Filmmakers Workshop, which was a place where I could bring my films.
Maybe 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.
And so Over a number of years in Korea, I was able to transition from teaching English to doing filmmaking full-time for clients.
And so at this point, I don't have any really artistic goals in mind.
It's just I want to figure out if I ever get deported from this country.
Am 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?
And eventually that answer was yes.
Luckily, I never got deported.
But living in Korea for eight years was one of the most nerve-wracking things I had ever done.
Because I was there on a tourist visa.
And it's not something I've talked about a lot, but a tourist visa means you get to stay here for 90 days.
As 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.
So I really got it perfected and I could do it for the least amount of money possible.
I 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.
And so I could wake up at 5 a.m., go all the way to Japan, and come back by evening.
The 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.
But at immigration, on both sides, they would always ask, Hey, you're teaching.
You're a teacher, right?
You teach.
Even in Japan, going into Japan, they would say, what do you do?
And 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.
I need 90 days more of freedom when I land in Korea.
I shouldn't say land, but I pull up at the port because I would take a ferry.
If I get this stamp, I get 90 more days to figure out my life, to move forward, and to have freedom.
And standing in line for immigration, I'm looking, okay, there's an older guy over here.
This lady looks nice.
This young guy looks like he's got something to prove.
And I would rehearse my story.
What are you doing here?
Oh, I love Korea.
I love Korean.
I love Korean food.
Try to get him on my side.
I plan to go to university soon.
In Korea, I hope to study here.
And then eventually, Were you speaking to them in Korean?
No, in English.
So everybody, I would say in most places you go around the world at immigration, they're going to speak English.
And a couple of times they took me to the side room.
And that's really terrifying.
Especially because it wouldn't be as terrifying now because now I have resources.
You might have heard of this tragedy recently in Korea where a bunch of people got crushed during Halloween.
So Itaewon is known as the foreigner neighborhood and all the foreign restaurants from around the world are there.
Tons of foreigners live in the neighborhoods around there.
So there's a huge expat community there in Itaewon.
And so much so that you see what I had.
I had the Soul Filmmakers Workshop.
People had the stand-up soul.
So people did comedy locally.
And in fact, they would invite some comedians from here.
I think Kyle Kinane came once.
James Adomian came once.
And so they would fly over comedians.
And the audience is, of course, all people who speak English.
Some of them might be Korean who speak English.
But there is between Yongsan.
Yongsan is where there's a huge military base next to Itaewon.
And then there's all the expats and teachers who are there too.
So there is a gigantic community of foreigners there.
And for whatever reason, Korean folks, some of the business owners there, especially in media, are interested in working with filmmakers, with voiceover artists, actors who are from outside of Korea.
You know, for example, doing corporate videos, doing Red Bull videos.
I did videos for Red Bull in Korea.
At 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.
I've read Gary Vee's first book, Crush It, and I want to crush it.
And I love the book, and it taught me about content marketing, and that's something I started doing.
Hey, instead of a corporate video, let's make you weekly videos or monthly videos.
And from there, you can offer value to the people watching, and then you can have a call to action.
And I just thought, well, I could do this for myself.
And I had a couple of different ideas, but the idea that stuck was doing food.
And at the time, I had a couple of channels that really inspired me.
I listened to H3H3, who did comedy at the time, and then I listened to...
I watched a channel called Jack's Gap, and he had this very wanderlusty travel videos that he did.
It's a young kid from the UK who would go to India, who would go to these interesting countries, and it felt so remote.
And 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, because all the shit on the travel channel was so dry.
It'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.
Why 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.
Now, it took me a few years to get it right, but that was the initial idea.
I 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.
And to me, that was just fascinating, and the story behind that.
And so I made this pivot early on in the channel.
I said, I want to go explore more bizarre foods, exotic foods, foods that seem way out there.
And for me, the reason is that...
Those types of foods just have an intrinsic story attached to them.
If 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?
The thing about the tofu, this is what I was going to say.
And this was a pivotal moment for me, a realization, which is I literally had anxiety before walking in there.
I was like, oh my god, what if I eat this and I throw up?
It's going to look disrespectful.
Then I didn't show up, Andrew Zimmern.
And I looked at it this way.
I 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.
I shouldn't be like someone on Fear Factor trying to get it down and just...
I need to accept it.
I need to try to enjoy it.
And I need to think about what would local people enjoy about this.
And that worked.
And that's what I do anytime I'm eating something pretty unusual around the world.
It's not always something I'm pumped to eat.
But 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.
So 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.
And 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.
Remarkably, cultures around the world develop a taste for the extremes in different directions.
I 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.
In Northern Thailand, they will take the buffalo bile and drip it over their rice, their sticky rice, over raw buffalo meat.
It's just been a taste that they've acquired over time.
Yeah, it's an interesting question because I guess if you're looking at the lens of evolution, like, what do you call it?
Through 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.
Yeah, so it was nice to be distracted by the green poop juice on there.
No.
So at that time, they ate...
You know, so to back up a little bit, this Datoga tribe was super interesting.
We're way out in the middle of nowhere in Tanzania.
They have these beautiful huts with a flat roof, grass growing off the top of it.
And in this tribe specifically, it was a woman's job to dispatch the animal and to butcher up the animal.
And so the way they kill it is...
Because this is a whole different topic we could get into, but the way people dispatch animals around the world...
It varies greatly.
And here, they would take the cow, they would tip it on its side or on its back, and then they would essentially suffocate it.
They would put different logs, like wood, long pieces of wood or branches into its throat.
It would take about 10 minutes, and eventually it would pass away.
Then 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.
Usually stuff is going to go to the guys first.
They take what they want, then they mix the rest of the bile, blood, and organs all together and present it to the men.
I don't really shy away from how the animals are dispatched or how they're killed.
And I think it reveals something about the culture and about people.
I just find it fascinating because it's different every place you go.
With the goat that you just showed.
With the Maasai, they killed a goat and they suffocated it.
So they put their hands on his nose and mouth and they held it there for three, four minutes until it stopped moving.
And I asked the guy in the interview, why are you doing this?
Doesn't that seem cruel?
And 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.
So it's kind of like two points of suffering compared to one.
Yeah, and they tie it off like a heroin chunky so the vein gets all big.
And 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.
So how they separate the meat is that each quarter, each piece goes to a different group.
And so they have ribs, they have front quarters, they have hind quarters.
Some might go to pregnant women, some goes to young women.
But the liver, the liver always goes to the older men.
It's like a hacky joke from, like, 80s or 90s TV. Like, oh, liver and onions.
Gross.
Liver's great.
I find there's a lot of food in the U.S. that people just don't know how to cook well.
And it's just not part of our...
culinary lexicon here.
And this is something I talk about a lot.
I find it very lame that in the U.S., this country of extremes, this country where people are so into, whether it's entrepreneurship or extreme sports or fighting, we're so extreme with everything But then when it comes to food, that's a little bit outside of like salads, wraps, burgers, sandwiches.
People are like, oh, I would never eat that.
I would never eat that.
And it's said with pride, not like I wouldn't eat that because I'm a pussy.
They're like, oh, I would never eat that.
And that's something I don't really understand.
When it comes to how many Americans look at food from around the world.
And so, I mean, part of my show, really the point isn't to be like, ew, look at this icky, weird food.
It's to try to create some understanding and empathy for people around the world and understanding as to why are people eating this way.
And so when these cultures, it seems like they all go to the organs first.
And 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.
And did they have any sort of explanation as to why they do this?
My assumptions would be meat is easier to preserve, period.
So people have tons of different ways of preserving meat.
Mostly, you know, drying, turning it into some kind of a jerky.
But I don't think it's as easy to take a liver or a heart or something like that and preserve it.
I 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.
And again, I think people...
In many places, they've developed a taste for those really intense, gamey flavors.
That's the thing when you talk about animal preservation and wildlife management.
One of the things that people who are not in the know must take into consideration is that when you have older males that are no longer viable, so they're not breeding, but they're still dominant.
And so they attack the younger males to keep the younger males from coming up and challenging them eventually.
And they wind up killing all these younger males.
And the only way to preserve the younger male population to keep them healthy is to kill this very aggressive older male.
They actually had to do that with rhinos sometimes.
Even though rhinos are in danger.
Like that was the story of, I don't know if you remember that story, but there was a big deal.
It was on CNN many years ago where there was an endangered rhino and there was an auction to shoot this rhino because they had to kill it.
Because this one large rhino who was no longer viable was killing younger rhinos.
And he had already killed at least two.
And they were very concerned that, you know, they have a small population already.
And so the only way to solve this was to either, A, move this animal somewhere else or shoot it.
And so they decided to auction it off.
And I think...
What's the gentleman's name?
Corey Knowlton.
Corey Knowlton, who had been on the podcast before.
I actually had him on and talked to him about this.
I think he wound up paying a quarter million dollars to go over there, and CNN followed him around.
But what was really interesting was their perspective was...
Educated.
They learned along the way.
They'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.
But there's a lot more to it.
And then that money is the $250,000 is the money that goes to wildlife conservation over there.
It goes to protect against poaching.
It 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.
But they have higher numbers of all these animals that were at one point in time endangered.
They're much higher than they've ever been before specifically because they're valuable.
It 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.
But that's not really profitable.
And the way to make sure that their numbers are high is actually to make them valuable.
And the best way to make them valuable is people pay a lot of money to go over there and hunt them, which sounds so counterintuitive.
I 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?
And especially ever since the Cecil the lion debacle years ago.
Yeah.
So somebody, I think it was a dentist in Minnesota, actually, where I'm from.
He 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.
They changed laws from that point.
And 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.
And 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.
And I said, what kind of animals are not okay to hunt?
And these two brothers look at each other like, oh, people, this is a tough one.
Yeah, 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.
Well, 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.
Some 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.
And 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.
But 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.
But he did this whole thing where he stayed over there for several weeks and really annoyed them.
And, you know, like really just constant questions, constant this, constant that.
This 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.
And even then, you have to spend so much money to keep them from getting poached.
Because while they were over there, they're constantly finding animals that had been snared.
And 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.
And 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.
Because you kind of know you're going to get an animal.
And you go through a couple of fences, you get into the reserve, and you have a tracker.
And so I'm guided the whole time, which is what I would prefer.
I hunt maybe once a year, and I do it for the show.
And 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.
They all looked about the same size.
So it didn't seem like they were pushing me to shoot a specific one.
It wasn't like they had an outlier that was creating trouble for them.
Yes, and luckily I was able to do that quickly, but again, it's like buck fever.
I'm doing my best.
It's like I don't feel nervous, but my body doesn't care.
My 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.
So ideally you should have your, I don't know, maybe three inches back from the scope to have the full view.
And I didn't realize that at the time.
I was like, I'm going to get right up on this fucking scope.
And then it kicked...
What'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.
So we took out a whole yak when we were in the mountains, in the Himalayan mountains.
This is just a few weeks ago.
And 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.
And they don't do anything special, the meat just gets dried out over time because of the fireplace.
And 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.
I 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.
Yeah, and then they sell it, oh my gosh, and some people there.
I mean, somebody took me on a market tour in Japan and they're like, well, the meat is left over.
They don't want to waste it after the research.
So they sell it here.
And I'm like, you buy that?
You believe that?
And she did.
So what they're doing is different in the Faroe Islands because they're not going out to sea.
the And so their method of getting the whales is never going to lead to their extinction.
The 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.
So when a pod of whales comes by and somebody spots them, they kind of sound the alarm.
First of all, they'll get some boats together and try to guide them to one of the bays.
At 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, doing your report, pitching to your team, and then you could get a phone call, hey, the whales are here, let's go.
Everybody, 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.
I went to the most normal family's home ever, and I did a fridge tour on Men's Health on YouTube.
And it was all like, here's a whale that we got from earlier this year.
We got about 300 pounds.
It was so interesting.
And this is like the most normal corporate white-collar guy ever.
And so they all get the call.
They go down there because the amount of meat you get depends on how much you help out.
They have a very detailed system for how to allocate the meat.
The process of actually getting the whales though, they steer the whales towards the shore.
Then once they get close to the bay, they start clanging on the boats and making noise and trying to throw off their sonar.
Eventually 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.
Well, 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?
But, you know, it's something that they don't eat every day.
And maybe they eat it once a week.
And they're also very aware of the mercury levels that are in the seafood.
And they want to be careful about that.
And so people like it.
They want to have the right to do it.
The other tricky thing is it's not like...
It happens every day.
It 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.
Just for the people listening, the Hizabe are, I think they're known as the last hunter-gatherers in Africa.
Tanzania, the government there, has an amazing program to help them keep living the lifestyle that they're living.
There's maybe, I don't know, 3,000 to 5,000 still living the traditional way out there.
They're usually in tribes of, let's say, 5 to 10. And they are obsessed with hunting.
Everything is about hunting.
And even when I asked, like, who's the chief here?
Why is the chief the chief?
They say, because he's the best hunter.
And I'm like, really?
Does anybody want to contest that?
No.
They're like, he's the best hunter.
He's the chief.
He makes the decisions.
But, 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.
So when I was with them, I planned to go there for three days.
I didn't even bring my crew.
We had just shot three different countries back to back.
We got COVID in the middle of it.
And I told them to leave.
I shot it on a phone and a camera and I basically just shot it by myself.
Usually we try to plan our videos a lot, as much as we can, to be efficient with our time.
But in this case, I can't say like, hey, let's go hunting, then you guys will shoot a baboon with your arrow.
I don't know what's going to happen.
And when I show up at their camp, it's so far from anything.
We 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.
I get there.
They bring out a vervet monkey.
So it's this white monkey.
It's the monkey I was talking about earlier that you could shoot for 40 bucks.
This 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.
A friend of mine, Mike, who has a YouTube channel called Fearless and Far, he went there before me and I was like, this is incredible.
He went there during the pandemic and I was stuck in Vietnam for a year and I was like, this is incredible.
I want to do what you're doing.
But I want to just do it through the food lens.
What are you eating from day to night?
How are you getting the food?
How are you cooking it?
The way they prepare it is...
It's just, it's nothing about flavor.
It is insane.
So that monkey, let's break it down.
They'll cut his stomach open, gut it, throw the guts in a tree.
Then they throw the whole rest of the monkey in the fire.
Just the whole thing.
Then they scrape a bit of the hair off, but not really.
From there, they cut the arms and legs off.
They throw that in the fire.
Not on a stick or a grill, just throw it in the fire.
The guts, eventually that gets fed to the dogs.
Some 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.
Yeah, that one right there.
And from there, different people are given different parts of the animal.
They would see sticks that they liked and cut them off.
And 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.
It looks like, where'd you buy that from?
No, I made it from a piece of wood.
I know how to spot the wood.
And they have different types of arrows too.
So they have an arrow with poison on it that's meant for piercing a bigger animal.
And I saw how they make the poison.
They make it from a tree.
They have this type of tree.
They squeeze, they kind of dig into it, get the pulp from the inside and squeeze it and then cook that down.
And then that, once it pierces an animal, will help kill it faster.
They put it behind the head of the arrow.
But then they also have arrows where it'll look like a wine cork at the end of the arrow.
And that's for shooting little birds, because you're not going to use the same tool.
Then they'll have a little arrow with a hook at the end.
So that would be for some kind of a rodent that likes to go on rocks.
So you hook it, and now you can pull it out when it tries to get away.
So they have a whole arsenal of different arrows in their pack.
And this is all these guys are about.
It's just hunting, day and night hunting.
And they just must get such an incredible rush or dopamine spike from just like conquering the animal.
And the second day, so the first day I get there in the afternoon, I eat the vervet monkey with them.
The second day, it's time to go out hunting.
At the time, I'm in pretty good shape.
It's a bit post-COVID, so that maybe affected me, but we went for eight miles.
I mean, there's no paths.
It's just rocks.
It's trees.
And they know how to dodge.
There's so many sticky trees and bushes.
And these guys, they move like Neo and the Matrix through everything.
And they have no issues.
They're not wearing shirts.
And I'm just getting stuck on everything.
I'm getting poked.
I'm getting stabbed.
I made it...
Before we ran out of water and energy...
I made it about five, six hours, and they didn't get anything in that time except for one small bird.
I had to go back because I lost them.
These guys would be a tiny opening in some shrubs, and they would just go in.
At some point, I was like, I can't fucking do it.
They're so fast.
I go back to camp.
I wait a couple hours.
They show up with something called a clip springer.
It looks like a little fuzzy, cute mountain goat with two horns that go straight out like this.
And what's amazing is they're not like, check it out, look what I did.
They're like, here's dinner.
There was no bravado, at least that I could see, among the men there.
And so that's why we had dinner for dinner that night.
What's interesting is they speak a clicking language.
Like, the main guy I spoke to, his name was Chaba, and there's another guy called, like, Gufufu.
And 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, and I had a translator, this is...
And 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.
Of course, it's part of a package that's available in Tanzania.
So people can pay...
I mean, I paid about $5,000 for the experience total, and that included having a tent and the guides and stuff like that.
The 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.
Well, I know that they like primates, and I'm not sure if that taste has been shaped by what's available.
The government has been instrumental in preserving this way of life.
And if you went to a thousand years ago, the difference would be that they would be nomadic and they would be able to follow the animals.
Now, they're still nomadic to a point, but they still have a small designated region within which they can hunt.
So that is the issue.
Now there's fences, there's roads, there's all these obstructions within the country.
And so when the dry season comes, the animals will naturally move to where there's more water, where there's more grass to graze.
And these guys can't follow the animals.
They have to stay within a big space, but still, it's drought time now.
And so the government, what they do is they might go shoot a...
Wildebeest, 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.
And 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.
We'll give you some food and some game meat when times are tough.
So it seems like that's the deal that's been struck between the two.
Yeah, they're like big, ripped, nasty, gnarly beasts.
And I've seen them because I did in Tanzania.
I also went on safari.
And you wouldn't want to be face-to-face with one.
They look disgusting and brutal and intense and strong and brutish.
And 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.
What's funny, you know, it's just such a different way of life.
I 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.
Hey, 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?
I was like, absolutely not.
No.
Of 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.
And 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?
What do they do?
It's a dark thing.
He knows it's gonna be a dark answer.
And so I ask, and they go, yeah, just like, throw their body on the cliff or something.
There's a place in Vietnam on the coast called Vum Thao.
So I live in Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon.
And two hours from there, you can go to this coastal city and you can get Stingray.
And we were doing...
Oh, this is like mid-pandemic.
I was so lucky during the pandemic that we had about a year where there was no...
Like 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.
And it didn't spread, fortunately.
And so during that time...
I didn't stop shooting.
I have no reason to stop shooting.
We can still move around.
And so we did a whole series just about eating different animal organs.
Okay, today we're going to eat four different types of animal hearts.
And then eventually four different types of animal livers.
Yeah, 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.
And they don't have like honey boxes.
The honey is on the mountain sides.
And they basically risk their lives taking these ladders.
They 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.
But also, just like a lot of insects don't like smoke.
So it's like...
They know they have to leave because there's smoke, but they want to protect the hives at all costs.
So that's one aspect.
The other aspect is the hallucinogenic lightheaded effects that are purported to come from eating the honey.
So how does that happen?
The bees collect, I forget if it's nectar or pollen, from certain types of flowers that grow there locally.
These flowers have some kind of chemicals inside.
It creates a neurotoxic effect in your brain when you eat it.
So I interviewed a villager.
This 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.
I went to a villager there.
I was thinking everyone's just going to be jacked up on honey all the time, and it's a great time.
And so I talked to this guy.
He was the one who owned the cliff where the honey is.
And I said, how often do you do it?
He goes, I did it 20 years ago.
That's the last time.
I said, can you walk me through the experience?
He said, I took a lot and I couldn't walk for 24 hours.
I said, oh, you couldn't walk.
Okay.
That's pretty extreme.
I'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.
And they didn't really want to do it much more.
So why are they collecting it?
Well, 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.
So this brings me to...
That day I tried a bit.
I tried about a spoon.
And I got scared about trying too much because we still had to hike an hour out of there, then a three hour drive.
I'm like, I need to use my legs.
But my brother, my brother joined me, my brother Scott joined me at a hotel in St. Cloud recently about a week and a half ago.
And he knew I had the honey because I talked about bringing it here.
And I gotta go to bed, because I got work to do the next day.
And 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.
He 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.
So while I'm still there, he takes more, maybe five, six spoons.
Then I go, alright, I gotta go to bed, have a good time, let me know.
Actually, I said, why don't you text me the effects during the evening, and I'll know what to expect when I do it.
So 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.
I don't know.
So my brother felt hungover the next day.
He felt stiff.
He said that, so what happens is it can lower your blood pressure.
And I think that's what makes it difficult to move and to walk.
So your next question might be, why the fuck do people want to take this?
Here 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.
See what the recommended dose...
Of Mad Honey.
So they're selling a bunch of Mad Honey online, but is that real or is a lot of it phony baloney?
Maybe I'll find this perfect ratio, and it'll be the perfect sleeping aid.
But 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.
Gathered by beekeepers, braving forest full of bears in the Karkar Mountains above the Black Sea in Turkey.
Their native species of rhododendron flowers produce a potent neurotoxin called graham toxin, which can affect the nerves, heart, and respiratory system.
If bees feed on enough rhododendron nectar, the mud-red honey they produce is said to have a sharp scent, bitter taste, and a trippy high.
Yeah, it's really good and it has just a very clean, neutral taste.
I 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...
Most of the time, I use what's called the reverse sear method.
So, 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.
I put a meat thermometer in it, and then I'll slowly get it up to about 110 degrees.
And 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.
And then I'll let it rest for about 10 minutes, then I slice it, and then I'll put kosher salt on it.
I 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.
And I eat a lot of wild game, too, which is more difficult to cook.
Like, 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.
I bought a $1,000 grill and I never use it because food is so incredibly cheap there.
You can go, you know, we could drive five minutes and get high quality Wagyu steak.
Steak better than the American Wagyu, which isn't real Wagyu.
It's not?
American 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.
What the Japanese have done expertly over time is create a brand around Wagyu beef.
And I've been there.
I went to Kobe, Japan, and I got to see the farms, and they're not feeding them beer or playing classical music or any of that bullshit.
Yeah, it's a good question, because it's like, is that marbling?
That'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.
It's very rich, very delicious.
And you just need, you don't need a big steak to feel satisfied.
I think that it's all about the DNA. And I think the real secret there is years and years of breeding.
I went to one of the shops, one of the auction houses where they grade.
It's amazing.
Japan's an incredible and unusual place.
So you go to an auction house in Japan and they have to judge all the meat.
And so they're not at this point, it's just it's a half of a cow.
And And they have kind of a computer system, like a big piece of hardware that they put up to the tissue.
It does some kind of a reading, and it weighs into what they graded.
So 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.
So I think they're doing whatever they can.
To get the highest rating possible, I don't think the beer does much.
And that's what they do with so much different food.
We did a whole raw food episode there.
I 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.
But the horse was delicious, but it's small.
Again, everything's like a little bite size.
You just put it in your hand, give it a little bit of a dip in the soy sauce, and then delicious.
I think it's also wanting powerful flavors while you're drinking.
So, I mean, there's so many foods like this in Vietnam.
I mean, even testicles, an assortment of testicles.
I think I've had them all now.
But, like, chicken testicles.
It'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.
So eventually, after they got the ammonia out of it, it was good.
It was cold, dense.
I 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.
I was telling my story earlier, and we got off track a little bit.
The main point was...
In 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.
I transitioned to trying to do something more like Andrew Zimmern.
And then I just really went all in on trying to make these shows about exotic and bizarre and interesting food.
And in the course of doing that, I got the opportunity to go to Vietnam to film for a few days.
I had a friend come with me to come film with me.
And when I went to Vietnam, I met a company there, a tour company, who was interested in hiring me.
And so, at this point in Korea, I'd finally started to make a decent living.
I'm not teaching now for years, and I'm a filmmaker, like a commercial filmmaker for corporations and stuff, doing music videos.
I did a music video for BTS, or actually for Rat Monster from BTS. I'm sure you're a big K-pop fan.
Huge!
If you're a young girl, you'd be like, oh my god.
This was before he was super huge.
And so I wanted to get out of that world.
I'd saved enough money, and I was just ready to see if I could go all in on making a YouTube channel actually work.
And so this was kind of, you know, moving to Korea in the first place was like my way of burning the boats.
I knew a lot of people who moved to Korea who got homesick or lonely or whatever, and they quit their teaching contract halfway through.
Through and then they just went home.
For me, when I went to Korea, I had $2,000 in my pocket, in my bank account.
I had nowhere to go back to.
I sold my car, my lease was up, my dad had some dilapidated piece of shit trailer house.
I wasn't going back to that.
And so when times got tough in Korea, it was like, you gotta make this work, you gotta be resourceful, you gotta find solutions.
After I figured out how to make money as a videographer, as a director in Korea, I was looking for the next challenge.
And it's a funny story because sometimes success can make people depressed.
Sometimes achieving something can make you feel depressed.
And so in Korea, I remember I got a $15,000 contract to shoot a bunch of content for a liquor company.
I 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?
I 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.
And then when they reach that end point, they realize they're the same person.
But 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.
And at this point, I think I was more focused on the money because I was just scrapping for so long.
And that getting the money didn't make me feel, well, it's 15,000 bucks, but maybe a million bucks would probably feel better.
But, joking.
15,000 bucks didn't do it for me.
And I've had a journey, a transformation in the last few years of doing what you're saying.
It's not about getting to a particular destination.
With 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.
I didn't want the plaque.
I just wanted to keep plowing forward and moving ahead.
And that's how I see the mission for the channel now.
It's like, I'm really happy with where we're at.
I love my team.
Obviously, I'm the face of the team, but we have an incredible team of 20 people.
I think some of the world-class people, I think some of the best in the world at documentary filmmaking.
And I want to just keep doing, keep iterating doing what we're doing and trying to get incrementally better video by video.
In Korea, I went to Vietnam.
I 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.
And they said, hey, if you move here, they were a tour company, a travel company.
They 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.
And I said, alright, I'm all in.
So 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.
Vietnam is an affordable place.
I'm next to Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, a close plane ride to the Philippines.
Southeast 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.
And so that's what brought me to Vietnam initially.
And from there, it was just a slog.
It was just week after week of trying to figure out how can we tell better stories?
How can we make the videos better and more appealing?
I think I was too corny and silly and irreverent in the beginning.
And eventually, we got some traction.
More people started watching the videos.
And eventually, we started making money so I could hire staff.
But 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.
And what's incredible now is most of my team is Vietnamese.
If 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.
Somehow that's what's come to fruition.
And 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.
And 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.
Finally, the virus got in.
They were locking things down.
They were closing down restaurants.
You couldn't order food.
The military for some time was helping to deliver food.
And so we left and we couldn't come back for 10 months.
She could have.
I couldn't.
The borders were closed for 10 months.
And so I had a long period of time being just in hotels, traveling.
I think we did 12 different countries in a row.
Sounds awesome.
It was exhausting.
And so by the time we got back, we did this noodle tour in Vietnam.
And the idea was like, do something easy, go to Hanoi, go throughout the country, go down to the Mekong Delta in the south, shoot noodles.
I love Vietnamese food more than anything.
I love noodles.
The series wasn't challenging in any way.
And by the end of each shooting day, I felt, I'm fucking tired anyways.
Why am I shooting this and not something more satisfying?
Something where I could feel more accomplished at the end.
And so after that, I plotted out every country I wanted to go to for the next year.
In 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.
So now I have the whole next year plotted out.
And so for me, my mission is to go to places that people have heard of but don't know anything about.
That's one mission.
So in the past, we've gone to places like Madagascar.
People know Madagascar from the movie, but they don't know anything about the country.
And so we went there, and they had really interesting, unique food.
But my other mission is just to go to places that are difficult to go to.
I mean, recently we went to northeast India.
It's completely different from mainland India.
Everything you know about Indian people and cuisine, it's different in the northeast.
So there's a place called Nagaland.
Nagaland doesn't even want to be part of India.
These people eat anything, anything that walks.
They have the joke, like if it has four legs and it's not a table, it's okay to eat.
The year before, it was the pandemic year, we'd done all these...
We went to Bahamas and Jamaica and Mexico, and it's fine.
It's interesting.
And I was like, I want to do something.
I want to go back to our roots.
I want to shoot something that's difficult.
I want to get out of this pandemic mindset, this safety mindset.
Let's go shoot Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Egypt.
So, we did Zimbabwe first.
Awesome.
Lovely people.
Then we landed in Egypt.
As soon as we landed there, The airport is a mess.
So I have a drone.
I have a drone because we're flying with the drone.
I didn't leave from home.
I 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.
Fine.
It's like 1 a.m.
We're getting to our hotel.
Finally, we're going to get some rest, and then we have the next day to do a little scouting before we start shooting.
Now, you know you're not in the best place if your hotel has as much security as an airport.
So we pull up at this hotel and they are like, you need to scan the bags.
I'm like, nah, no thanks.
Don't worry about that.
They're like, yeah, we're scanning all the bags.
In big, giant scanners outside the hotel.
So every time you walk into this hotel, it's like you're going through airport security.
It'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.
And 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.
Yeah, okay, we've been doing this for a while.
We didn't just fucking show up.
We had a plan.
We had a fixer there.
We had permits.
We went through all this tedious process before even landing.
And so with the permit, It's funny because I asked our fixer.
So 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.
No, they definitely, like, Graham Hancock has nightmares.
I think, isn't Graham Hancock banned from Egypt now?
I believe he's banned.
He literally can't get into the country now.
And 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.
I went to see the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, and just that alone, you're like, holy shit.
Like, what were you guys doing?
Like, how did you do this?
Like, what was the culture like back then?
And what happened?
And 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.
Well, you know the whole theory behind what he's promoting?
It's actually based on this thing called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.
And this has been substantiated by science that somewhere around 11,000 plus years ago, Earth was hit by comet debris.
And this is substantiated by levels of iridium that is very common in space but very rare on Earth.
A 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.
The immediate...
The 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.
It's really, really fascinating stuff.
But what he believes is that there was a massive natural catastrophe due to Earth getting hit.
And this is all backed up by legitimate researchers and scientists and a man named Randall Carlson who's absolutely fantastic.
Really fascinating, in-depth understanding of this impact theory.
And that human beings were essentially knocked back into the Stone Age.
That'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.
There's some half-assed theories of how they did it, and no one really knows.
There's 2,300,000 stones.
in the Great Pyramid of Giza.
And some of them, again, were cut from a quarry that was 500 miles away.
I've been reading about this for years and years and years.
They really don't know.
And that's what's amazing about it.
What'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.
We really don't have the equipment.
We really don't have the understanding.
I mean, if you're off by a little bit with each individual stone, by the time you get to the top, it doesn't meet up right.
And they just nailed it.
They nailed it to the point where they have these immense stones.
You can't even get a razor blade in between them.
I mean, incredible construction.
Back when people had just come out of hunter and gathering.
I mean, it was like 5,000-plus years ago they were doing this.
I think human beings used to have a very, very advanced civilization.
I think we, and when I say we...
Humans that were living in Africa 5,000 plus years ago, 10,000 years ago, whatever it was, they had an incredibly advanced civilization.
And 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.
That'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.
In 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.
A little tiny thing that slides into your pocket easily.
You could travel around the world in metal tubes that fly through the air.
You can send video from your phone all the way to United States within seconds.
So 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.
We 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?
Just developed it to this level that we can't possibly comprehend.
What if they had 10, 20,000 years to do that?
That's likely what we're looking at when we look at the structures in Egypt.
We're likely looking at what at one point in time – look, we know all human beings came from Africa.
That's the birthplace of humanity itself.
And then the most complex structures that have ever been created also are in Africa.
So 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.
The people that are left live a barbaric existence for thousands of years and then relearn civilization and starts from scratch.
That's what Graham Hackonk is talking about.
That's what Randall Carlson is talking about.
That's what John Anthony West was talking about while he was alive, who has an amazing series called Magical Egypt.
It's a multi-part DVD series that details the incredible complexities of the structures and how they related to the cosmos.
Magic stuff.
Just amazing, amazing stuff.
That's what I think probably happened.
Obviously, 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.
And it's not like some loony theory.
It'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.
And that, you know, you could see the meteor showers in the sky.
Well, 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, knocks it back to the Stone Age.
It's certainly not my area of expertise, but it seems plausible to me.
Totally plausible.
I know for some people it's controversial.
I'm not sure how controversial the idea is.
I've not looked into it enough.
For me, seeing enough cultures and being to enough countries around the world, I can see that there are so many different ways of living.
And sadly...
Cultures 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, and that's really fucking boring.
And that's tragic.
And I want to go to all the unique places I can before that happens...
I 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.
That'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.
I've always loved the art of Muay Thai, martial art.
And I just think it's an amazing place.
It's interesting.
And 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.
And, you know, we went over there and hung out with elephants and did the whole deal.
First of all, they do the waikuru, which is the dance that they do before they start.
You know, if you've ever seen it live, you know they play the music and they go through this.
It's like a combination of stretching and then loosening up.
And they have a bunch of different things that they do.
And part of that is a warm up exercise.
And part of it is just a tradition to sort of honor what they're about to do.
And then they start the first round and Muay Thai, a lot of it is about gambling.
So there's people in the audience and they're making bets and placing bets and that all takes place during the first round.
And 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.
They don't fight hard at all in the last round because they might have to fight again in a week.
They fight so much.
Like some of the elite Muay Thai fighters, like Sanchai, who is probably, if not the greatest, one of the greatest of all time.
He's got hundreds of fights.
I mean hundreds and hundreds of fights.
He fights constantly.
And to this day, and I think he's 37?
Like, go to San Chai Muay Thai record.
Let's find out his Muay Thai record.
Because 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.
He bounces around, he moves very fast, and he's known for his footwork and his clever maneuvers.
I 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.
And I think when you do something like going to Thailand, you realize how different Asian food is.
In Asia versus here.
At least to me.
I 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?
But you'll see – and I'm like, well, I do like Japanese and Thai.
I'll do it.
I'll give it a shot.
But 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.