Julian Dorey Podcast - Sabbatical on “Devil Worshippers,” The Aztecs, Samarra Holy Site & DARK Discovery in Argentina | 468

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

SPONSORS: 1) MARS MEN: Head to mengotomars.com and for a limited time, our listeners get 50% off for life plus Free Shipping AND 3 Free Gifts. Mars dot com. 2) MOOD: Get 20% off your first order at https://mood.com with code JULIAN. JOIN PATREON FOR EARLY UNCENSORED EPISODE RELEASES: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey CLIPPERS DISCORD: https://discord.gg/8QmWEKJ3BT NEWSLETTER: https://juliandoreypodcast.beehiiv.com/get-julians-top-10-books (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Sabbatical (Tommy Beard) is an American travel YouTuber and polyglot known for exploring off-the-beaten-path destinations and immersing himself in local cultures and languages TOMMY'S LINKS - YT: https://www.youtube.com/@UCib80j_q5o_C5XsCA9YsAFg - IG: https://www.instagram.com/sabbatical.tommy/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY IG: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://x.com/juliandorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 - Russian Prison, FSB Sting & 15-Minute Trial 11:31 - Day to Day in Prison & Getting the Footage Out 22:31 - Living in China, COVID & Tanzania 33:00 - Learning Aztec Language & Filming With No Experience 46:35 - Nazi Descendants in Argentina & Colonia Dignidad 57:31 - First Viral Video, Polygamy & Safaris 01:07:50 - Nigeria, Iraq 2025 & Going Viral on National News 01:16:00 - Iraq Now, Holy Site in Samarra & Shia Militants 01:29:31 - Yazidis, Devil Worshippers & The Kurds 01:41:37 - Turkey, Iran War & Three Weeks After October 7th 01:52:30 - Palestine, West Bank & Why It Is Unsolvable 02:02:13 - Eritrea, Horn of Africa & Being Questioned as a Terrorist 02:12:10 - Detained in Wuhan & Ukraine After Russia 02:22:30 - Largest Attack of the War & Unintentional Journalism 02:32:30 - Strait of Hormuz & What He Actually Saw 02:44:03 - Lebanon, Cuba & The World Gets Small 02:52:35 - Tommy's Work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 468 - Tommy Beard Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I gotta ask you, how's Russian prison? The food was all right. The food was all right, really? Yeah. They feed you, like, at all in there? I'm surprised at that. They gave me some soup. Besides that, not the best experience.

I don't recommend it for people. I've got to be honest with you. Yeah, now what happened there again? You were, like, taking video on the border or something and ran into the military, was that it? More or less. So what happened was me being my adventurous self. I decided to wander over near the Chinese border with Russia.

And Russia has some complicated laws that most foreigners wouldn't know. Like certain parts of the country, you can't be within like 20 minutes of the border without a permit. I did not know that. This actually isn't like a major crime. It's like if you get caught doing that, they're supposed to put you in prison for like, I'm not prison, like the local jail for like two days, 48 hours. or you pay a $5 fine. $5.

Yeah. So that shows like the severity of this. That should have been the end of it. But yeah, so I wandered over there and like these big, scary military Russian-luckin' dudes come over. They're like, you're not supposed to be here. An hour after that, I'm being like questioned by like the local police there. And then three hours after that, I'm being questioned by the FSB, which is the KGB. in like their newer iteration.

And that's when I knew like shit was going to get a lot more serious than that. So it's like there was one guy in the FSB who basically made it his mission to like find something to pin on me to like keep me there. And it was pretty fucking scary, not going to lie. Yeah, I can imagine. So seriousness. Yeah. Yeah. Like I do the 48 hours in the jail.

they release me. And then what happens is they literally set up like a sting operation to get me back in prison. I wish I was making this up. It's like they set up like a taxi to take me back to like the closest city and waiting there

they have like 10 guys waiting for me and then their whole idea was they knew I didn't have my passport because I got caught without it. And so they were going to claim that I resisted arrest because I didn't present my passport when asked. And so within like seconds of arriving in the city,

they just throw me into a van. In a van? In a van. Like a white, like rape fan kind of deal? Exactly. Oh, no. A van of nightmares. Yeah, I've been thrown into one of those.

And they didn't even give me any candy or anything. Yeah. They take me to like the bigger jail in that city. And then they tell me like, tomorrow, you're going to be on trial. On trial? On trial. For what? For resisting arrest?

Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. The excuse they gave at first was, this is also ridiculous. They had like gone into my YouTube portfolio and I'd like willingly told them I'm a YouTuber because I thought, you know, that would be a simple enough explanation to show I'm not like the big CIA spy.

That's where I was going with it. Yeah. But they, and I made, what's really frustrating is I made like two videos that I had released in Russia. And obviously, this is a very sensitive time to be making like videos in Russia. Yeah. But I made videos that were basically positive about the country. I was like just going around. And this is what I do.

Normally in my videos, I'm just like meeting Russian people. They're giving me vodka shots. They're being awesome. They're showing me stuff. I had like no problems. whatsoever up until this point. But my mistake was in the, not even in the video,

in the description of the video, I had written that something like, before Russia invaded Ukraine, like the world was different, you know, like something like that. They saw that and they're like, no, you can't write that. You're applying that this was a war.

We would, protecting ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. So they said, yeah, we're going to put you on trial for that. For having that in your YouTube description. Literally. Yeah, you're offending the Russian armed forces or something. Now, do they have like a Russian Saul Goodman you can talk to, like lawyer, or what's the deal here? Well, it's good you ask that because they were, I was allowed to have a lawyer at that trial, but they didn't tell me that. And also I was supposed to have a translator with me for the trial. It turns out the translator they give me was the girlfriend of this FSB officer that wanted to put me in prison. That's nice.

So she's just like mistranslating stuff I said. Probably didn't matter. And then the judge that I get for this trial, I looked it up. And she had actually sentenced a Russian guy to prison who later died from a hundred. younger strike. Oh, no. She had like pictures of Putin all over like the courtroom. Uh, yeah, very uncomfortable situation. Uh, arguably the, uh, scariest situation of my entire life. And the trial, it just gets going. It's over very quickly within 15 minutes. 15 minutes. Yeah. Yeah. You get a witness up there or something? Nothing, nothing. But they had witnesses against

me, which were basically all the police and the FSB. He is CIA. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much, yeah, they would say things like, look, he speaks Chinese. Like, he must be, like, you know. And so, yeah, they hit me with those two charges that I offended the Russian armed forces. And I resisted arrest. And the only fortunate thing is, like, they didn't, they couldn't put me in prison for like 10 years, according to their laws for that. gave me two weeks or 15 days. In prison.

In prison, yeah, which is still horrifying. Like Siberia or? This actually was basically Siberia because it's far eastern Russia. That's nice. Yeah, yeah, pure nightmare feel. So they like just take me over there and I'm like trying not to lose my mind. Because, you know, if you've, very few people will ever be put in prison for something they didn't do, you know. And knowing that, I just assumed they were going to like do the worst at that

point. Like they were going to like plant drugs on me. They were going to like do something to keep me there for 10 years. And then I was going to be like on US national news like within like a couple of days. We made a deal. We got them out. That would have been you. It would have been. I might have been that guy. Ironically, this actually happened during the U.S. election. Oh, no. And there were this is very interesting. When I was in the prison, the warden came up to me and he was like, Thomas,

we want Trump to win the presidency. I shits you not. They were very, very pro-traught. That's not to open the application. It was one of the few things I made me laugh while I was there. Oh my God. Wow.

Yeah. So the warden actually talked to you though Yeah yeah he came out today I mean I was probably the most interesting prisoner They had ever had like because this is like Bum fuck Russia They told me like yeah we've never had an American here before So we're very excited about this

They got you in prison uniform obviously and all that too At least in that prison No they don't do uniforms in Russia So you're just like this in prison But sitting in like a steel cot or something Pretty much. Yeah. Do you have a shellmate?

That was another interesting thing. I started off with no cellmate. Then the second day I was there, they just, for whatever reason, they decided to move me to another cell that does have a cellmate, like this 50-year-old guy. And, you know, like, I've never been to prison before.

So I was a little concerned. I was like, let me feel this guy out. Let me see how he is. Yeah, pause. Well, literally like, I don't. want to be like fighting for my life to not get raped or some shit. So, you know. But thankfully, yeah, the guy was cool.

He was schizophrenic. Schizophrenic. I assumed. What was he in for? Drug possession. Weed is still very much illegal in Russia. Oh, so he wasn't like a murderer or something like that. No, thankfully.

He had actually done six years in prison for having like weed plants in his house. Wow. And then he just got, like, caught again. And so I think he was actually being held for, like, 15 days. And then they were going to try to put him, send him back to prison again, like, long-ass prison. Jesus. What's it like, like, are you locked down for, like, 23 hours a day in the cell? Or what's the cadence?

Yeah, it's, like, basically almost every day. It's actually almost like 24 hours in the cell. It's, like, close to, like, solitary confinement. for like a couple days out of the week they let you have some exercise and in Russian prison exercises they put you in a cage with like snow on the ground

and you're allowed to walk around in circles for like 10 minutes or so but yeah actually the guy in my cell a weird thing about him was I didn't fully think this at the time but some people were like maybe they put that guy in there to like inform on you because he was

asking me some weird questions. Like what? He would just like out of nowhere be like, Thomas, I want to ask you about drugs. He would just ask me like, have you ever like smoked weed before? Have you ever like done cocaine or like? And I just had to have like, I mean, I guess I'm a fairly paranoid person to begin with. So I was just like, you know what? No, no, I've never done anything. Never. Like I don't agree with America legalizing that shit. Like, I'm sorry. When my dad got into his 50s, he hit a brick wall. He was doing the same workouts. He had the same diet, but he felt like he was moving through mud and had no energy. And of course, the problem here was testosterone. Most men start losing testosterone at around age 30, and it can decrease at about

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For a limited time only, our listeners are going to get 50% off for life. Plus free shipping and three free gifts at men go to mars.com. link in my description below. That's men go to mars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them I saying you. And I'm pretty glad I said that. I was going to say, is he like leaning in like this?

He did actually lay it in a bed from his bunk bed. When did they, I'm trying to remember the timeline, when did they make the deal for where they traded boot for a grinder? Was that 2023? It was before you were in there? It was before. Right. Yeah. So you already had that in the back of your head.

Like she got, they were giving her hard time for a little hash or something. She. She went to a real gulag also. Like they had her doing hard labor. Yeah. So you didn't have to do hard labor the two weeks. You were just pretty much locked down. No.

Yeah. So apparently what they did to me was like a tactic that goes back to like the Soviet Union times where when they don't have like a real crime to pin on someone, they'll just like make up one. something that seems plausible. And then they'll use those 15 days to, like, gather more shit on the person or, like, gather an excuse to, like, charge him with something deeper. Yeah.

Like being a spy or... I think at some point, like, they realized they were not going to get me for being a spy because I'm not. But they were like, he's American, so maybe he'll have, like, you know, drugs in his bag. So a super scary thing that happened was, like, they just kept drug testing me over and over again.

And then at one point, they... Oh, they're drug testing. Yeah. They bring... And they do it in, like, the most frightening way as possible. Like, my first night in the prison at, like, 10, 11 p.m., they just show up and, like, they send, like, the nice, like, female CEO to come on and be like, Tomas, you're going to come out for a little bit.

The FSB's there. They throw me into, like, the rapist van again. and then they take me to like this sketchy looking hospital and they give me like the most sketchy looking warrant ever. It's just like handwritten and it says, we're going to drug test you and you need to sign this. And I was like, fuck.

And like I try, I'm not going to lie, I tried to resist at that point because I'm like losing my mind and they're just like, Thomas, if you actually resisted, if you don't do this, you're going to be charged with resisting the police again. You're going to get another 15 days. This not go well. Yeah. So I was just like, can I at least see this as the test is happening?

And they're like, yes. And luckily, luckily it was a fair test. Right, you weren't on drugs. But like it, so is it a, were they doing a blood draw or were they having you like pee into a cup? P in a cup. Yeah. It's usually like how they do a drug test and everything.

They're not like holding it for you, right? No. That's good. Yeah. You didn't get a Wizzinator in there? No, no. That's good. Yeah.

Good for you. So they would take you out of the prison to go to a hospital to do that. That's kind of interesting. Yeah. It's not the most efficient way of doing it. No, no, yeah. But it's definitely paranoia fuel. Because you're like, why are they taking me to like a third site to do this?

When they stick you in the van, do they have you like prone on the ground? No, what they'll do is they'll have like four dudes. They pick like the four biggest dudes from the FSB and then I'm just like in the middle of them. You talk with them at all? Yeah, that's the surreal thing. They're like trying to joke with me. They're like, oh, Thomas, that was life. You know, you make YouTube videos.

Can I be in your YouTube video? Oh, my God. With that said, there was a few of them, like, as they're taking me to places, that actually were sympathetic to me. And they actually reached out to me, like, afterwards. And they're like, we're really sorry about what happened. They're just like, we know this is bullshit, but, you know, they think you're a spy.

Like, we've got to go through with this. Well, how many languages do you speak again? you were telling me out there. I usually tell people I speak 10, but I've studied like 20. Could you see why people might think you're a spy? I did understand it. I'm not going to lie.

I'm not going to lie. And I'm American. So we usually speak like English and five words of Spanish. That's right. Yeah, and definitely like you said, it's in the middle of like the war and it's a tighter time and all that. It's like I just don't,

As long as something like that's going on, it's almost like the risk versus reward of going there, especially if you're someone who has checked in publicly on the map in a lot of places. It's a big risk, huge risk. It was. Yeah. And I do take some responsibility for being a little naive and like going there. I mean, my general philosophy and travel has always been that people are not their governments. And, you know, I, that's what I try to show on my videos usually.

Like, I just go to places and they could be countries that, like, hate America. And yet the people are, like, so friendly. Like, I went to Iraq, for example. And people are like, American, I will give you a free taxi ride. Let's go. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So I naively thought I could go to Russia and, like, do the same thing.

And to be fair, I met many friendly Russians. Sure. But because of the situation, you know, you get just asshole cops that want to make their career. by like catching an American. And I got caught in something bigger than myself, I guess. For sure. I love that quote, though. People are not their governments.

It's funny. My friend Eric Zooliger, who has also similarly gotten himself in some interesting situations internationally. He said that a few years ago on my show. And he said two things. He said, people are not their governments. And countries are just stories. The borders are just stories that have been told and accepted at some sort of social. level over time. And I think that's probably the coolest thing about tools like YouTube and

guys like you who are willing to go out there and do it is that you bring home to people like me who are just here in New Jersey so many different perspectives of cultures and people and places that, you know, are usually just a word in some headline as a full country doing something involved with something and show that there's so much more below the surface there, which is a really, really important thing. it is a risk to go to Russia. And I got to say, you got some balls to do it, and it didn't turn out the best. But it's kind of cool that you were, because I was also going to ask you, like, how you got the footage out there.

But you were able to get footage and talk with people and actually show that it's not all just people screaming, yeah, Putin the whole time. It's not that simple. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there were a few people that were screaming, yeah, Putin. But there's many more people that were saying, fuck Putin, like privately. and you had a whole range of perspectives across the country. Getting the footage out, interestingly, it's just like, I don't know, like, how deeply they went into my footage.

I assume, like, they took my laptop and, like, tried to get into it. But nothing was gone, except for, like, the footage of the actual border. Because, like, on that border, apparently there's, like, a bridge that goes to China and it's not listed on any map. and my speculation was like China was helping Russia avoid sanctions over that bridge. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. It's not listed on any map.

Yeah. Tim Cook, what are we doing? Come on. Yeah, so that probably like rang the spy alarm dolls even harder for them because of that. You're like taking pictures of the most important bridge in the world. Yeah, this is my problem. I just wander like off the beaten path so much. I accidentally wander in some shit sometimes.

Fuck, yeah. What, dude, what got you into this in the first place? You've been doing this for a long time since like COVID, right? Yeah, yeah. I actually started at the height of COVID because this is interesting. Like I lived in China for six years during like the 2010s. And I just like woke up one day. Well, not one day, but it's a gradual process.

I was like, I want to go to China. want to like it seems like the place to like build a business or whatever in China yeah in the 2010s it actually was um have you ever heard of like Y Combinator like the yeah yeah they were setting up like a branch over there they're like China's the future like oh here to start a business wasn't Sam Altman involved with that why he was the president yeah i actually uh you're not beating the allegations in here man uh yeah i know all this sounds really weird uh I understand studied international relations. God damn it. Yeah. God damn. In economics. Check the bathroom after you leave. But so anyway, I was in China, not doing anything spy related, I promise.

Running a little business. It was actually like events. And then what happens is COVID happens. And if you have anything that involves like meeting people in person, you're basically fucked. That's right. So wait, you were in mainland China when COVID hit. Yeah. Yeah, literally. All right. Step back for a second. What the fuck was that like? Because it hit earlier over there than it did here. It did. And was it, I mean, obviously it was bad here and they shut the whole fucking place down. But in China, they had like drones watching people in the windows and stuff. Again, I just saw what I can see on the internet. What was it like when suddenly it was like, oh, COVID is here. We're fucked. Yeah, I had, you could say, the greatest luck during COVID. Because I started off there when the, when COVID was just getting. taken off and you start seeing like Chinese people slowly starting to wear like face masks which they never did before it's not like Japan where like I was going to say they all wear it there yeah they'll do it even if they have like a cold or something but in China the Chinese people are more like the the more rowdy version of Japanese people right they also didn't get hit with two

nukes so yeah yeah yeah there you go so yeah I just start seeing that and I start thinking uh you know what? Maybe this is not the best time to be here. Being that, like, my business was like temporarily shut down anyway. You know what? I'm just going to fly to New York, hang out for like a few months, come back, see my family. You're from Long Island? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I fly back to Long Island, basically, stay at my family's house. And what happens is, no joke. Like, the day after I get back to Long Island, the Chinese government puts out a notice saying, we are shutting the borders. foreigners are not allowed to come back. It doesn't matter if you have permanent residency.

It doesn't matter if you have a wife and kids here. You cannot come back. And they kept the border shut like that for three years. Three years? It was that long. Yeah. Yeah, they were the last country to reopen after North Korea. Or North Korea was the last after China.

So China shuts down the borders and then Langley calls you and says, change your plans. Yeah, exactly. I just accept the call. All right. I was thinking about that, but instead, I had been just watching YouTube videos to like pass the time when I'm back in my family's house, bored as fuck as we all were. You know, we got to do like, you know, the quarantines and stuff. New York actually became like the hot spot of the world at that point. So I was like, huh, fuck that luck.

Because I love traveling and we couldn't go anywhere at that point. Everybody was like Americans are like the most dangerous people in the world now. more than normal. Yeah, you're also on Long Island, which is like landlocked too. Yeah. There's nowhere to go. There's no mountains to hike or anything. It's like, shit.

So, yeah, this is pretty wild. I looked up like a list of countries Americans could travel to, and it was a very short list. It was something like Mexico and Tanzania in Africa. I think the UK allowed you to go there for like two weeks, but you had to do like a quarantine. I know they're not fucked that. So I was like, you know what, I've never been to Africa. I'm going to go to Tanzania, booked my flight. There was a mix-up at the airport.

They thought I needed a COVID test to go to Tanzania. They had like this crazy president at the time that was like, COVID doesn't exist. You don't need anything. You can just come over. So they didn't let me on that flight. I told them they fucked up. They didn't refund me. But I was like so desperate to get out of the U.S.

I just booked like the next flight and went over there. And while I was there... Did you know anything about it? Like, before you went there? I knew that... I knew that the president said there was no COVID. Right. And I knew I didn't need a COVID test,

but this was such a crazy, like, unprecedented situation that the airline employees were like, that's not possible. You must need a COVID test to go here. So I ended up, like, going and printing... Should I say, it was like a fake COVID test? That boy. For the next day.

It turns out I didn't need it because then I actually, like, found an employee that knew the actual rules, and then got over there. And I was like, you know what? This whole experience is insane. It's like all of this. I'm like, I should film this. I should like make videos of this. Oh, so you didn't already have the idea that you were going to film when you went to Tanzania. You were just going to full send it for yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I just wanted to like take a vacation. I like an insane vacation. Wow. Yeah. So what would you get like a vacation?

camera offline and ship it? Yeah. So what ended up actually happening was I spent like a month of Tanzania. This was like a gradual process. I was like, you know what? I'm going to make some videos. Maybe I'll go back to America first. I'll get the camera.

I'll do some planning. And then I actually flew back. Touchdown. And my YouTube channel, I did make some videos in Mexico first, but it really kicked off when I was in Africa, like traveling around. All right. wait, let me make sure I understand the timeline. So you go to Tanzania, you're like, fuck, I should do YouTube.

You come back to America and then you went to Mexico first before we're going to Tanzania again? Yeah. Okay. Well, confusing. Got it. Yeah. All right. So what month did you go to Mexico?

That was December 2020. All right. So you went to Tanzania for a month. You come back home. You get the YouTube thing figured out. And then you're like, well, there's still only two countries I can go to or whatever. So I'll go to the other one I haven't been to. Yeah.

What was your first content down in Mexico? This is pretty wild, but I was like, yeah, I met with Sicario's, you know. That, no, I wasn't, we weren't at that trend yet on YouTube. I was like, you know, I thought this was like a pipe dream at first. I'm not going to like, I thought like, you know what? I'm kind of like, I'm honestly like, I'm an adventurer, but I'm kind of like a nerd at the same time. So I was like, I thought I would make like a language channel. I thought I would just like talk to people different language.

languages and like they were like viral videos at that time of like guys like speaking languages and people will get excited and they're like oh my god well they still have those but i think they're less popular now but anyway i was going to do something like that so i was like i'm going to learn the language of the astecs which i thought would be cool and just find people that speak it which i did there's still people that speak that yeah it's a language called uh nawatal nawital yeah that's kind of hard it's well the pronunciation's crazy yeah so you start learning nawita i did Yeah. Then there was like no resources in English. I had to find like some Tudor in Spanish. They had like their own website in Mexico. So you already spoke Spanish at least. I did.

Right. Okay. But still that's wow. Yeah. Do you still have some of it today? The Navato? Yeah. A few words. All right. Let's stick it on the mic. Take me back to 1492. Plus okamati. Wow. There you go. That means that's cool. Thank you. Awesome. They have that fun, I don't even know what that's called, but like you have to stick your tongue against your teeth. Like that, yeah, yeah, yeah. They just like mix a bunch of consonants together.

Very pronounced, pronounced. Yeah, it's kind of cool. Yeah, it's a fun, well, actually, it's not a fun language still. The grammar is, like, really fucked up. But meeting the people was amazing. And that was, like, that was my first experience with thinking I could actually, like, do this. because I like took this trip to like the middle of nowhere in Mexico. Yeah, where is it?

Where is it's, this is like East Coast, Mexico, near Betakruz. I don't know if you know where that is. Yeah, let's pull it up on a map just so people can get an idea. Do you remember the name of the town you were in? Yeah, yeah. The heart of it is called Huahutla de la radius. Is that J-U-E? It's H-U-E-J-U-T-A.

And then... H-U-E-J-U-T-A Yeah, it should come up with that J-U-T-A Yeah I want to see this on map Just get an idea Like how many people

Live in a town like this Probably like a few thousand Okay Something like that So it's not like a couple hundred Yeah there we go All right yeah So this is like

There it is Wehutla There are you Yep That one right there So it's like I don't know I'm totally eyeball on it

But maybe like An hour and a half Two hours in land Kind of deal Yeah, it's about, I think it was like maybe five or six hours from Mexico City. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, it's pretty interesting.

It's like the one part of Mexico where people still use that language in like daily life. So they're literally still speaking like Aztec to each other. And you just went alone. Yeah. So do you have one of those personalities where you lack a lot of fear? Because you do, from day one, I mean, you're going down to Mexico. We know there's a lot of safe parts of Mexico. But obviously, like, you're going out into the heartland out here.

You don't know what's out there. There's a fucking lot of cartels and shit. And you don't appear to have been worried about that too much in your calculations. I'm going to be honestly, I didn't even realize that could be dangerous. I mean, yeah, I thought like, ah, the cartels are like over there. Somewhere Jeff Nade do was just hitting his head against it. I mean, there's a coastal light here, but, you know, it'll probably be all right. Yeah, you're like a nice enough guy that I feel like in a lot of dangerous places,

certain people, if they're not government-related, we'll see you and be like, he's got no clue. That's all right. Yeah, I do fly under the radar. That's good. Yeah, that's what good spies do, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's too bad.

I never signed up. Right. Anyway, so I still don't believe you. But how long were you down there learning the language and doing this? I did that whole trip in a little less than a month. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door and that they found a way to combine THC with carefully selected functional ingredients to create gummies, bake goods, and flour for whatever type of buzz you'd want?

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backed by a 100-day satisfaction guarantee, but as I mentioned, our listeners are going to get 20% off their first order by using Code Julian at checkout. So head on over to mood.com, link in my description below, find the functional gummy that matches exactly what you're looking for, and let Mood help you discover your perfect mood. Don't forget to use promo code Julian when you check out to save 20% off your first order. Try it today at Mood.com. I think. And you picked up a, like, a decent part of the language in that short of time?

Yeah. Yeah. I try to tell people this. You're not going to become, like, an expert in a language in two weeks, but it is fully possible if you use, like, the right tactics to get. it semi-conversational. What are the right tactics? So just like do a speed run of like, let's say the most important 100 words,

learn like the important grammar aspects. And as soon as you can just start talking to like a teacher or like real people that speak the language and they can like basically bring you up to speed where you'll just be like, oh, they say it like this. Oh, okay. Oh, they ask questions like this. Oh, I get it now. okay and like you're still not going to understand everything they say back to you but yeah i managed to

have like legitimate conversations wow doing that and i've done this with like yeah literally like 20 languages i think did you film yourself learning the language was that part of it too no no i didn't do that you just filmed the people and you walking around is that video still up it's still up yeah it's the very first video ever did the oldest um i want to see this yeah so how do you say name of the town again. Huehutla. Huehutla. Oh yes, back when everyone had to be masked up and shit.

Yeah. They're all wearing it. I don't know if you've ever had another YouTube around here, but it's usually pretty cringe for them to watch their first video. I've had plenty of you guys on here. Don't worry. It gets easier by the second one. Yeah.

Also, look at that fucking thumbnail, Lessie made over there. That's just a complete AI-fied version of all of us. Amazing. I'm in a lot of the other colors are there. Sweet. No, indeed, look at 30thian. All right.

I'm in a city in Mexico. Also known as Mexico City. Also, also known at the Nochtitlan. The former capital of the Aztec Empire. Now, the Aztecs, they had a language. It's called Naot. And what many don't know is that this language is still spoken by over a million Mexicans today.

today spread around the country. Oh my god, I was trying to take on like this kind of their voice. This is great. This is great. I have too much free time. I wanted to see here in the former capital of the Aztec Empire how many Mexicans still understand this language? Well, we're about to go and find out. That is way better than my first video. I'm making a video of my life here. Could I ask you a few questions?

They're looking at you like you have ten heads. Okay. So first question, what's your name? Ken Motoka. And you got to understand them under the mask, too. Yeah, I forgot about it. Yeah, how old are you? No, no, not you.

That's what you were saying? So what language are you speaking? So basically, they didn't understand anything. Why are the fucking bothering us? You're like I was testing my skills and they just walk away. Not good. This is basically the entire video. I just go around, the annoying Mexicans.

Okay. We can pause it right there. I love the walk and talk like it was the old history channel videos where you're like narrating, like you're Steve Irwin, but you're in the middle of like Mexico City. Pretty cool. Yeah, it was great. I thought that would fly. Well, I did something.

That wasn't quite the video that got me popular, I guess. But built up my confidence. Yeah, that's what you got to do, man. I think that's like the biggest thing with anybody that creates. anything online, you have to start somewhere. And when you turn on that faucet the first time, it's not clean water that comes out. You got to be, you got to like embrace absolutely fucking doing cringe shit or sucking at something. Like, you obviously had the skill.

But like the whole now you can go, we'll talk about it later, but you can go to the straight of whore moves and like film the whole fucking place for a few days and capture a perfect video. And you know in your head what it's looking like while you're doing it. You don't know that when you're doing it the first time. Yeah. Yeah, that's like way into the drug cycle. Right. That's a good way to put it. You've graduated like needles at that point.

You're going to the straight of hormones. Yes, no strap either. You just go straight in the vein. I got you. So had you ever edited before? No, no, that was my first time. And it's actually pretty simply edited, I would say. I started off with like I-movie.

And because like my thinking was just like, it's more about the experience I'm just going to show what I'm doing. Right. I don't have to throw like any special effects or anything in there. The only tricky part about editing is just you can't just like upload like a video for like two hours. That's right. That's going to get boring as shit. So you have to like zoom in on like what's interesting, what isn't.

And I slowly like learned that over time. That's kind of hard though too because you're in it. And so all these little moments stick out to you. And then you've got to pull yourself out and be like, okay, I know all this stuck out to me, but if I'm someone who has no idea I just did this and is clicking the video, what is actually going to stand out to them? That's a hard job when you're going to a lot of different places. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. On that same trip, like, later on, like, I meet, like, this guy on a bus who, like, also speaks that language, Nautil, and he's the one that takes me to, like,

that town. And at the time, I'm just like, this is, like, the greatest friendship ever. Like, this is so interesting. Everyone's going to, like, feel this the same way. But now, looking back, I'm like, I probably should have cut that down to like just one video instead of four. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's a learning process. Yeah, it's how you experiment. Yeah. So you were doing all your own editing then?

Do you still do all your own editing now? Or you have some work to? Nowadays, especially since the trips are getting like crazier, more grander. The videos are getting longer. I do currently have an editor. He's another American. That's great, man. He's doing a pretty good job.

Yeah. Yeah, and he kind of gets your vision, obviously, because it's still very, But like your videos, there's, I don't know who your main influences were, but there's some similar vibes to your videos as like Peter Centinello's. Like they're very, you know, he's just on the ground what's happened. And you're on the ground what's happening. It's not overedited, overproduced, trying to do all bells and whistles at all times, which some channels do a great job with that. But yours is like very almost like first person POV, you know. Yeah. I would say if there's any like guiding philosophy to like my videos, it's like I want to make this as natural as possible. I want you to feel like you're there. I want us to have like a spontaneous adventure, you know, just like go where people are not going and just see what happens. I try if I can not to ever get like a guide or like a fixer or something like that. And I've had some problems because I didn't do that in a few places.

Yeah, I can imagine. I've also had amazing experiences that wouldn't have happened if I had taken, like, the guided route. So I think it's, at least for me, it's the best way to do it. Yeah. Now, once you finish up in Mexico, you said you went back to Tanzania? Yeah. Was that straight from Mexico? So this was right around Christmas, went back for Christmas.

What's your family saying at that point? You just spent a month in Mexico. You're making a video. Yeah. What are they saying? It's really funny because, like, my parents are, like, the most normal lower middle class, like, people. They're just like, what the hell are you doing, Tom? But they were like, they're just like, I mean, at this point, I had like, I studied in Argentina for like a few years.

I lived in China for like six. They were kind of like, oh, this is another crazy thing that Tommy wants to do. Right. Our son's a little bit unusual. Whatever. I'll go over there. You were in Argentina studying out there? Yeah.

In college? Yeah, so I studied Spanish in college and then I did a study abroad. And then afterward, I was like, you know, what if I like stay over, do like a master's program? Didn't finish it. But I was like, yeah, I mean, Argentina's fun. Yeah, so you spend a lot of time there. Yeah. You spend time in some of those enclaves filled with people that were somewhere else between the years of 1939 and 1945?

Oh, yeah. I did actually. I actually made a video about it, though. Oh, you did? Let's pull that bitch up. Yeah, you might like that one. Okay. I actually met the daughter of a former Nazi.

And, like, without a fixer, I just found her on the street. It was amazing. You found her on the street. Or I found her at her house. She was wearing the swastika? Yeah, she just had the full uniform on it. That's her. Oh, that's her?

Yeah. Seems like such a nice lady. Yeah, she was very nice. Very polite. So you could tell the Germanic. vibes looking at her. You sized her up and you're like, just look at it. You ain't from there. Why, she's a little far right now. I can't tell yet. Well, yeah, look at the sweater.

Let's, uh, let's, uh, you had to do what he did because something, if you're a soldier, you have to do with the captain order. Oh boy. I see what this is gone. Okay. Are you drinking matte there? That's the matth. Good for you. Hello. All right, chigos. Come on me, I was having my afternoon matte.

Very popular drink in Argentina. Basically. If you want to skip the head, the part with the ladies. I'm kind of enjoying this right now. It's really good. I just arrived in Bariloche. Oh, I actually know Barry Loche. It's beautiful.

That is beautiful. Popular tourist destination in Argentina for Argentinians. Famous ski resorts. It's famous panoramic views. Lake here. Lago. I won't want to be. Now we'll walk.

All right, let's go to the lady. And it's also famous for one other thing. Oh wait, wait. You about to be like, Nancy's? Uh, yeah, I wasn't that. That was, uh, I was gonna drop the ball. This used to be the house of Eric Priepke. No, he was high up.

And what is it now? I'm just translating what's on the screen. Everybody. It's a family house. I just rocked up to this house on the street. He doesn't look, German. No, he's like. I think he's like son-in-law.

Got it. So you're married in. It's your house. You live here? The guy says yes. Could I ask you a few questions if you don't mind? It looks like he minds. Oh, here she comes.

That's the mind. I'm exploring the history of Bariloche. It's German history and all. I don't want to be too direct. Where are you from? he would say from the U.S. And she goes, his son Jorge was something, but he has also been married and myself as well.

I was a widow and him as well. He was divorced. But I was a widow. That is my son, but not from Pribkeke. Okay. Oh, so she was married to Pribkekeke. So she's like the daughter-in-law. Daughter-in-law.

She was married to his son. There's no one. Neither my father nor my husband. They all passed away. Now there's just the granddaughters. I don't know where they live. Okay, and you grew up here in Bariloche? No, no.

I've now been here for 30 years. I met them because they were German. The majority of the people in Bariloche are of German descent. Yes, but now there's nobody left. What happened? They left? And she goes, I speak German, they all did, but they all died. but they all died and that's a shame. And I'm losing my German too because I have no one to speak it with.

I can find some YouTube videos. And my children also don't speak it. They don't speak it either? No, they don't want to. Good for it. All right, we'll pause it right there. Yeah. That's interesting. It's like you ask them their political opinions or didn't want to go there? So right after that actually, she starts like,

kind of defending, not like forcefully, but being like, you know, he was just following orders. He was doing what he had to do. You know, it wasn't his fault, you know. But have you heard of Eric Prepeke? Yes. Very familiar. I can't remember if he was one of the guys that they ended up catching. They did, actually.

They did catch him, right? In the 90s, I think. Oh, there's like a famous video of him talking, I think, with a newscaster. That's him, right? Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah. So this was, this happened late enough that you had like full TV coverage of it and everything.

And then I forgot, I guess they took him to Israel after that. Can we pull that up? Eric Priepke, just go to his Wikipedia so we can just refresh people on that. But yeah, there's like a famous video of, I believe it was an American newscaster, went down there. They did an investigation. They thought they found him. And then they start interviewing him. I want to say he was stationed in Italy during the war.

Yeah. Yeah. So here we go. I believe what he did was he let him master. massacre of Italian POWs or something. Yep, yep. This, well, he was a German mid-level Schutchenstaffel commander in Shishard.

I don't know what the fuck that says of Nazi Germany. In 1996 he was convicted of war crimes in Italy for commanding the unit which was responsible for the Adrianine massacre in Rome on March 24th, 1944 as the Americans were advancing to the country in which 335 Italian civilians were killed in retaliation for a partisan attack that killed 33 men of the German and SS Police Regiment Bozen.

Priepke was one of the men held responsible for the mass execution after the end of World War II. He fled to Argentina, where he lived for almost 50 years. In 91, Priebke's participation in the Rome massacre was denounced in Esteban Buk's book El Printer de Suiza, Argentina. In 1994, 50 years after the massacre, Priepke felt he could then talk about the incident and was interviewed by American ABC news reporter Sam Donaldson.

This caused outrage among people who had not forgotten about the incident and led to his extradition to Italy for a trial. lasted more than four years. Yeah, can you actually go to YouTube, Dief, and pull up Sam Donaldson, Eric Prieke? This is actually pretty wild footage. He's just like an old man. He's like, yeah, you know, it's following orders. And that's it right there. Boom. So they find them. Here we go. Yeah. It's almost like what I did. Prepke. Sam Davidson of American television. Yes. You were in the Gestapo in 1944, were you not? In Rome?

Yes, in Rome, yes. You know the communists blow up, there are a group of our German soylians. Yes. For every German soirean, ten Italian had to die. Civilians? Well, civilians, they have been, no, they have been more terrorists. But children were killed? No, not a war.

14-year-old boys were killed. No. But why did you shoot them? They had not done anything. You know, that was our order. You know, in the war, you know, that kind of things happened, you know? You were just following orders? Yes, of course, yes.

But I didn't shot anybody. But you killed civilians in the caves. No, no. You told me you were there. Yes, I was there, but that was a thing that was ordered by our command. But orders are not an excuse. That's wild. At that time, all of an order, you meant.

And you carried it out. We had to carry it, you know, yes. And civilians died? Civilian died, yes. Many civilians died. On all parts in the wars, still they are dying. You live in this time, but we that live in 1933. You understand that?

All Germany was in it. Nobody won't speak about it now. But the most part of Germany was Nazi. Well, we didn't commit a crime. We did what we all. We did what we ordered us, you know? That was a crime. That was...

Did you deport Jews to concentration camps? You? No, nobody, no. Never? No, no. No. I never was against you. I'm from Berlin.

We live together in Berlin, there's many Jews. Oh, I say this. No. You're not a shenzeman. You're not a shamed? I'm not a gentleman. That's good right there. Yeah, that's one of the wildest, like,

man on the street videos, if you will. Sam Donaldson pulled off. Yeah, it was really wild also because I remember he had actually built himself into the community. He was like a respected member of like the community in Battle Loce. Like he set up like a German school for people to learn German. And like I think as far as I know, everybody liked the guy in Body Loche. And then it was just like a big shock to everybody like when these interviews started coming out and then they came and captured him. Isn't it wild?

And you've heard other stories and other contexts about this. before where someone does like wicked things and then they change their identity, go on the run, whatever it is they do and live for decades by all accounts like not doing those things at least and totally like flip over to trick people into into hiding what they once were, which shows like this is what I psychologically can't get with it. It's like are they so sociopathic they can flip on a switch of goodness for 50 years? or do they actually like wake up from being a monster and be like, you know what, I shouldn't do that anymore.

I'd love to know. Only he'll ever know which one it was or if it's a mix of both. I don't know. But it's a really strange thing. It's super strange. Yeah. I mean, I would lean towards the guy was probably a little sociopathic to begin with. I believe I've encountered some sociopaths in my life.

And it's like amazing how they can lie. And they just switch on a dime to like accomplish whatever they're trying to do. Right. But it's like they have to get their fix, right? Their sociopaths, they need to manipulate, lie, cheat, steal, do whatever. Like they get off on doing that to other people. So it's like, did he do that secretly in other ways over those 50 years? I'll bet he probably did.

But if he didn't, is he that committed to the bit of sociopathy? They can be like, no, I have to be this good guy. now, even if it's all pretend, I'll just be that. And then does it? I don't know. It's weird. It might have been like, I'm going to show you. I can be a good guy. Yeah. I think of my Nazi.

And you're talking to his fucking daughter-in-law on the property that he owned. Yeah, it's trippy, like, how little, like, security or whatever they had over there. It was just like, to be fair, I guess there's not a lot of crime in that city. But, yeah, like, considering their reputation and stuff, I was like, come on, I could just rock up to their house. and she comes out you ever think of visiting that colonial dignidad thing you ever hear of that

that was that is that in Argentina or in Chile might be in Chile Colonial Dignad Dave's pulling it up right now there was a it's I'm definitely pronouncing it wrong Is this your show?

No is it Chilean German film Actually yeah yeah so it's based on that Colonia which is which is a film starring Daniel Bruill, they did make this that came out like a decade ago. That I don't remember if it's like fictionalized. But yeah, it's in Chile. So there's a place called, I believe it's called Colonia Dignad. Right there.

Yep. A settlement of German colonists founded in Chile in 1961 by the preacher in Petto, Paul Schaefer. It is located in the commune of Paral, Lanari's province, Mali region. It became notorious for funding as a clandestine center of detention. torture and murder during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It adopted the name Villa Bavario at the suggestion of German former Waffen SS officer and arms dealer Gerhard Martins. And it's like rumored, it's been a while since I look at this.

So like they were trying to like reseed the master race or something there. Like it was just all, it's like this like army base. Almost. That's just all fucking German people. This looks insane. Yeah, that's your next video. Go down there. It was about to say, where is this?

Go knock on the door. Let's see what's happening back there. Thanks for the tip. All right. You want a commission? You know, I'll just watch the video safely from the confines of my New Jersey home. How about that? Sounds good.

Yeah. I got the coordinates for you right here. Yeah, there you go. Excellent, excellent. All right, 36, 23, 15 south, 21, 35, 15 west. Excellent. There you go. I hope that doesn't count as doxing.

I'll be there next week. This is public information. So, all right. So, when did you? did you do that video by the way uh that was 2021 so like four years ago pretty early on yeah pretty early yeah so you went back to your roots in argentina you're like let's go find some germans yeah exactly like um i like without covid i probably would have started the channel somewhere like argentina or china but like most of the world was like blocked off at that point right so i was like as soon as these

places started opening their borders again i was like yeah i'm going there yeah now did you have before you were starting YouTube, did you have like some money saved up from the work you were doing to be able to fund yourself for a while? Because obviously you got to travel places that cost money. And like at the beginning, as we all know, when you're starting a channel, you don't make money. Yeah. That's a good question because I had actually basically used up like all my money at that point. Right. Because this was like, it was almost like a year before I started doing this from like when I left China and like my businesses hadn't been running anymore.

So, yeah, what's funny was like, they were sending out those, like, those checks during COVID, like, Biden and Trump. Yeah, the stimulus checks. And with literally with that stimulus check, I booked my flight to Tanzania. And I was probably on, like, my last $1,000, like, no joke. So this was like, I was literally doing like a Hail Mary. Was that the second flight to Tanzania? The second flight to Tanzania. Right.

Yeah. So you're like, it's got a way. work. I got to do something viral in Tanzania. Yeah, it's a good sign of my insanity or stupidity that I thought this would be a good idea because like the chances of it working were pretty minute. But somehow it did. Somehow it did. I think it's because there was like literally no other videos of Africa at that time, or at least vlogs like that. What happened? You get on the ground in Tanzania. Did you have any idea what kind of content you were doing or you're like, I've got to go find something? Yeah. I mean, I had like a mild idea, but

what I usually do is I just fly to the country and then I start research and when I'm there because I feel like I could learn more by like talking to locals. Right. And they'll be like, yo, this is cool. You should go here. Or like, this is crazy. Or there's Nazis over there. So, uh, yeah.

You ever seen Tanzania Nazi? A fun fact, it was a German colony. Oh, God. I originally. God damn it. There was a big World War I, excuse me, World War I battle. Okay. back in the day. All right. We'll leave that one to the side. But you get there, you start

talking to people. What stories piqued you that you ended up going after? So at that point, those were like really early days. So you know what? I thought people would just be interested in watching me like walk around, talk to people. And that's basically what I did. Zanzibar is actually pretty awesome. It's like a big like resort destination, like the Europeans like to go to it. Yeah, yeah, Billy Joel's on. Yeah, there you go, yeah. He's a Long Island guy.

I think Freddie Mercury was born there or something. Was he really? Yeah. Frederick Mercury, born in Zanzibar. Yeah, because he's like, I think, Iranian Indian descent or something. No shit. Yeah.

So a cool place. A very cool place. I recommend it. It used to be like this like Omani colony. Keep that mic close, by the way. Oh my bad. It used to be like an Omani colony. and they built like these crazy cities there that still stand it's called stonetown stone can we google

that stontown zanzibar yeah that's also a hard name for a video yeah going into the stone ages of zanzibar there you go here we go all right so that that's zanzibar right there on the coast we can see that yeah and then is that one right below it what you're talking about if you go up up to the right teeth right there yeah is that it yeah that's it so is this like castles old castles so it's got um it almost looks like an old city in the middle east a little bit but um yeah they had some like forts and just the whole city is like yeah architecture from 400 years ago and they got like markets down there too that's really cool bazaars yeah i'm sorry that is the correct term um yeah not No, it's a really awesome place to walk around.

I heavily recommend it. It's a very unique place in Africa also. I don't know of anywhere else like it. So you had videos that did really well of you just talking to the people here at the time. Yeah, yeah. This was the moment when I realized, like, I could just start filming and I might encounter somebody that would say something so insane that it could be a video. So what did they say that was insane? Well, my first viral video, I don't know if I should be proud of this,

But like, was like in a village in rural Tanzania. And I'm just like trying to find like this mystical banana liquor that they have there. A mystical what? A banana liquor that's made from bananas. Yeah. I wanted to try it. And that was supposed to be what the video was about. But like I stop at this bar to like find it.

They don't have it. And then like the, I think she was like the owner of the bar. She's just like, hey, my daughters are here. Do you want to talk to them? And then like it slowly turns into, I'm like, is she trying to like marry me off to like her two daughters? So we just like travel around and then we finally find like a shack like serving this liquor. It's kind of nasty. But I was like, you know what?

YOLO like for the experience. And I just uploaded that. And I was like I was forced into polygamy in Tanzania. That was the title. That's a good title. Yeah. So wait, you were forced into polygamy. So when the camera stops, some cool things.

happened? Well, that's a trade secret, but, no, I actually didn't see them again. Are you married legally in Tanzania? Is that what you're telling me? I'm actually not sure. I'm not sure. I think I got married like four times when I was in Africa. You get the benefits of marriage? I don't know if I could say that. I don't know if I can put that out there. That's to protect identity. Okay. It's a good title. Yeah, it was a great, it was a very noteworthy experience. Excellent.

And for some reason, that video has like 9 million views. You know, I'm not surprised. Can we just, I didn't need to see that title. I need to look at the title. What was it, the polygamy? I was forced into polygamy. It was forced into polygamy against your will. It was totally against your will.

It was, yeah, completely. You were not happy about it. It was torture. Have you talked to a therapist? It was worse than the Russian prison. It was worse than a Russian prison. Yeah, it was rough. It's a great title.

Okay. Yeah, let's, oh, you're still doing the walk and talk with the cam. Yeah, let's roll that real quick, call on. Roll the beginning, Dief. I just want to see where the walk and talk is. Good morning. Good morning. From the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro.

The Chaga people for a thousand years have lived on the side of the mountain. And they still continue to do so today. They're known for two things. One is being very good at business. The second is that they frequently get to, drunk of bananas. Today, I'm going to go and investigate both of these things. I like to marry. So if you've never seen a Tanzanian bus station before, this would be a

first thing. There's a spike. How do you say beautiful in Chaga? Okay. Oh, they're eye and you up. They're eyeing you up, dog. I need to go to us. You are beautiful.

All right. You are beautiful. Yeah. If you want to say that, you have to say it like this. I should teach you. It was really going. It was right. Okay.

At what point did the sexual favors begin? Okay. At what point did the sexual favors begin? That's around like minute 30. Okay. All right. Yeah. Let's go to the next spike. Yeah.

Right there. I think there's like an only fan's link in there. Got it. Oh, is this the father marrying you off of them? Oh, they got kids too. You're about to be. You're about to be the father that stepped up. You like the white guy?

They're saying, yeah. The kids are saying yeah, too. Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea what they're saying. Can you help me get to Embigge? She said, let's go together. I see where this is going.

So it took like a van to like some shack or something like that. To a shack. To a shack, yeah, as you know, which is where they serve the actual liquor. I don't think it was even like a bar. It was just like a shack where you just like pick up your cup. You went to the back room in the shack, too? There was not actually a back room, but there was a back of the shack. That's right.

Yeah. And then. I can't think. Oh, this is where it's, yeah. So, and then you can say, I have a new husband. That's a great screen grab right there. Look at her face. She's like, fuck yeah.

And then the chick on the other side's like, get the cameras up. Let's go. Yeah. This is like one of those like Mormon porn videos, but there's no Mormons around. You know what I mean? You got like eight wives and the dude. Tanzania and Mormons. Yes, that's right.

I can see that. I can see your future there. Yeah, yeah. So, you never brought them back. to the U.S.? Unfortunately not. I unfortunately did not see them again after that. We were going in different directions.

Well, you got a side piece in the country if you need it. Yeah. If I go back to Tanzania, which I do love Tanzania, by the way. It's a wonderful country. It seems like it. Recommend everyone to visit. They got safaris also. I've heard great things about the safaris in Tanzania and some other countries over there.

It's definitely a dream of mine to go do that. Yeah, yeah. Did you get to do that? I take it over there? I did. Yeah, off camera. Didn't think it would be like... You didn't roll camera for the fucking elephants and shit? What's wrong with you?

No, I did because you could actually... I think this was in Uganda, actually. You can see elephants walking on the side of the road. I was just like, you know what? I think that's more fun. Just like, it's not even a safaris. Yeah. It's fucking elephants on the side of the road.

Did you get video of that? I did. All right. Yeah. It's in there. I love elephants. Yeah. It's the best.

Did you look at any of the poaching culture? over there at all because obviously that's a huge problem across a lot of Africa. Yeah, I think that might have been in the back of my mind, but, uh, my bad. You're good. I think that was in the back of my mind, but, uh, no one over there gives a shit. So no one brought it up. Um, it wasn't really a thing. Um, that was being talked about. So yeah, didn't quite explore it. Yeah, it's, I was also, um, I had like barely any money at that point.

So I had to find like the cheapest safari ever. Normally they're like $1,000, $2,000. Because it's, you know, for like these rich American, European tourists. And I had like 200 bucks. So I found one that was like, you know what? There's not going to be any lions on this one. Hopefully. But we'll show you some giraffes and shit.

They're like handing you a gun from 1870, dropping you off. It's your safari, boy. Yeah, yeah. For this one, we don't have a car. We're just going to, like, throw you out there. And then if you make it back, it's good tests. Yeah. Good test out there.

It was a fun experience, though. It's amazing how a lot of these places, like you talk about Zanzibar, which is obviously like a major metropolis and all that. But places like this, because of where they are geographically, you can have that. And then, like you said, on the side of the road, there could be elephants. And when you walk across the road just out of the city, it's a full-blown. open national geographic shoot, you know? It's unbelievable.

Yeah, seriously. They do have laws there where, like, the people can't build their houses, like, in the actual grazing lands. Because these safaris are, like, a major cash go for these countries. So, yeah, they go out of their way to protect them. But there are towns just close enough where, yeah, you might have, like, a lion wander in once in a while. Yeah, that's not fun to find in your backyard. So you did find a lion in your backyard?

Unfortunately, I still have never seen a lion in person outside of a zoo. That's for the best. Yeah, you would think so. I did make a video with this one Maasai tribe where they have a tradition where you're not a man until you go out and kill a lion with your bare hands, supposedly. With your bare hands? I think that was it. So on like 21,000 lions in Africa.

Like, what the fuck are we doing? Come on, tribe. they might be responsible for like half of the deaths yeah i don't like that i don't like that that's uh yeah um i'm all for tribal you know doing their traditions and stuff but you know there's a few things here and there it's like yeah there's a lot at stake uh if they don't kill that lion they can't form their own village and then they can't have like 10 wives or 50 wives like this one guy did so 50 it's a big deal it's a big deal oh no he had 10 wives and 50 50 kids. 10 wives and 50 kids. Yeah. That's a lot of alimony checks. They don't have alimony there.

So he was, uh, he was busy. It wasn't wasting any time. The Messiah tribe of Kenya and Tanzania is famous for the traditional rite of passage where young men had to kill a lion to become recognized as a warrior. However, the idea that they did this with their bare hands as a myth, they historically used iron spears and shields. So they went straight up. Maximus Desimus Meridius on these motherfuckers. They're like, oh, you're not entertained? That's nuts, man.

So they were trying to show off to me. They're like, no, we actually use our hands. Where else have you been in Africa at this point? Quite a few places. I started off in East Africa, which I like all of Africa, but I would say if you're a beginner, that's the best place to start. Beginer.

If you're just getting into it. Like, because Kenya, Tanzania, They're a little more used to tourists. People are really friendly, though. But I've also been to West Africa. Those countries were pretty crazy. Nigeria, especially. Nigeria's popping off.

Nigeria was insane. It's probably the second most corrupt country in the world. I don't always say second because Congo was number one, which is also in Africa. Yeah. But I actually went viral on national news in Nigeria. because, again, not trying to do this. I bring a camera into the airport. And it's the most, like, horrifying airport in existence.

It's just like you could literally bribe anyone in the airport to do anything. So it's just like, you want to cut the line? Okay, just give this guy like five bucks. You want to bring this through security, give this guy maybe $10. Yeah. They're like, there's people like shouting at me for no reason because I see I have a camera. I mean, you can imagine why. The police, they try to, like, have me delete the footage,

but they didn't realize that if you just, like, delete the footage, but not out of, like, the deleted files folder, it's still there. That trash can's helpful. It's very helpful. So that footage survived, and I uploaded it. And it just went crazy in the country. They were like, all these Nigerians started contacting me. They were like, thank you for doing this.

Like, we've been complaining about this for so long. Like, the government said they're actually going to do something now, which I think they actually did. They, like, went in for, like, a month or two and we're, like, making sure there was no corruption. But, I mean, I kind of, yeah, I know Nigeria more or less. And I think they went back to it after that. But, yeah, it was wild. Yeah, and, like, the Nigerian diaspora is unbelievable. Like, every Nigerian I know they're, like, a doctor, a lawyer.

Yeah. Company. They're like fucking geniuses. And it's like a lot of them, it's because a lot of them are leaving the country too because there's all kinds of issues there. Yeah. Well, it's kind of like New York. It's like if you could make it there, you can make it anywhere.

Right. Because it's insane there. It's like, so as soon as like, yeah, you want like a better job, a better life. You know what? They're just like, yeah, we're not going to get that here. So let's go over to the U.S. Let's go over to Europe. Yeah.

So that was, what year were you in Nigeria? Um, uh, 2021. Yeah. Okay. So we just, all these things we've been looking at actually happened the same year. Wow. That was a packed year, 2021. It was very busy.

Okay. I think I made like something like half my videos actually just that one year. In 2021. Yeah. Wow. But I think a lot of travel bloggers like make the same mistake when they start off. They're just like, I'm just going to film everything and upload everything. And I was kind of in that mentality.

So I was making like a billion videos. Yeah. But again, you got to figure out like, like, what's working and what's not and what you're interested and what's not as part of it. But yeah, because didn't we just, wasn't there like Trump just like bomb Nigeria? I can't even keep back all this shit. He bombed them like six, seven months ago or some shit for like. Yeah, that was like last year.

On Christmas Day. Perfect. Perfect celebration. All right. What do you do, thief? All right. So on December 25th, 2025, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. launch airstrikes against ISIS militants.

in northwestern Nigeria, the strikes involving Tomahawk missiles were conducted in coordination with the Nigerian government and targeted militant camps in Sokoto State. Yeah, I think it was like they were killing the ISIS guys were like killing some of the local Christians and stuff. So he hit him on Christmas. There you go. That's exactly what Trump would though. Yeah, do you ever like, because you're all over the world all the time. And so you hear the news while you're in all these other places. I imagine it comes up. as you've already alluded to with the people around you,

does it give you like a totally different perspective on like the things that the United States does around the world because you're in these other places while you're hearing about it? I'm glad you asked that because, yeah, one of the things I discovered was like living, especially living abroad, but even just traveling abroad for like a long period of time will give you a different perspective on America. like and you can only I feel get that perspective by doing that there's maybe like halfways to it but and then you go to these countries like Nigeria Iraq whatever and then you meet these people and you ask them like damn what was it like what was it like when the

US was here like bombing shit and stuff and it was like yeah that sucked it's over now but you know life goes on and and again yeah the people are not their government you realize they're people just like you uh some of them i mean like in iraq there was a few times where i had guys that were like we need to make sure he's not like a jewish spy there was a guy like saying that's like right in front of me uh and i was like which forced me to say things like uh i'm not jewish I'm not Jewish, by the way. You're holding up a cross or some shit? Pre-Palestine.

You know what you got to do in those situations. You do what you got to do. Yeah. When were you in Iraq, 2021? No, so that came much later. That was actually last December. So not too long ago. What was that like being in Iraq?

now. That was a very interesting trip for sure. It was very surprising also because I basically went from the north all the way to the south, so I saw all different parts of the country. And I kept meeting people that were like, wow, you were the first American I ever met. I'm so happy about this. I want to give you food. I want to give you this. I want to give you this. It's like the most generous country I've ever been to. And you would never expect that necessarily before going. But there are some like division. in the side i guess americans now there's some divisions in the country and um there's like all these different groups have different opinions on america so their like reactions would vary um so for

example the kurds uh they had kind of been like screwed over by the u.s a few times but they also remember that like we were very supportive of them so we still haven't given them a country though yeah yeah so they were i guess like neutral neutral towards positive weirdly, like, in my experience, the Sunnis were pretty positive towards Americans because, like, they disliked the Shias who are, like, in control of the country now. And we also helped get rid of the Islamic state, which they didn't like, so. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. And then, but the majority of the country in the south is, like, Shia.

And I don't think I've ever talked about this anywhere, actually. Like, there was this one place, I believe. it's like the holiest place in like Shia Islam. They have like this tower there. And I really wanted to see this. We'll find it. Yeah. Yeah.

I actually forgot the name of the city. I think it starts with a S. But it's like an hour or two hours north of Baghdad. Imam al-Shrine in Najaf housing the tomb of Ali ibn al-Talib, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad and the first Shia Imam. Yeah, there was one other. Yeah, I don't know if you could find it. Yeah. Holiest Shia sites in Iraq.

If you can definitely point it out. Okay. We'll get it. And you said you visited this place? Yeah, I went there. Yeah, just zoom in a bit. Okay. Just like a little north of Baghdad. You can zoom in near Baghdad.

A little north. Let's see. Khan Ben al-Assad, Tarmi-ish. Bukabak, ad duaghi, sorry for my pronunciation. The S one up there, Samara. Yeah, that one. That's where it is? Yeah, that's it.

All right, so can we Google Shia Holy Site in Samara? That's the tower, yeah. That's probably, yeah. Is that what you're talking about? That's what I was talking about. Yeah, so the very... Wow, that's fucking cool looking. Looks like a wedding cake.

Yeah, it's... So that's what I thought I'd be doing if I went there. I thought I could, like, climb the tower and take a picture like that or something. They didn't let you do that. So I don't know when they stopped letting people do that, but now it's like fenced off. You can view it from a distance.

But the really notable thing that I did not quite realize before going there was that this city is actually controlled by Shia militants, not the Iraqi government. Right. So all over Iraq, you have like checkpoints, and they're run by like the Iraqi military. And they'll like check your passport. And they'll be like, oh, you have a visa.

up, okay, fine. They'll be friendly, usually, and let you go. The militias are a little bit different. They're like, you're American. That's very suspect. They had me, like, get out of the car, the taxi. Like, go through all. Do you have this on film?

To be honest with you, I was really shook at that point. Yeah, I can imagine. I didn't know if you just still had it in your hand, though. I still had Russia in the back of my head, and I was like, I don't want to fuck with this. I don't want to fuck with this. This was supposed to be like a more calm year or something. I was like, but... So they pull you out of the car, the question in you?

I do have footage. It's in my Iraq video, actually, of being, like, pulled out of the car and just having my baggage search in another city. Do you remember where? Don't ever come to Iraq or else? Another great title. There you go. Right there?

The first spike. Probably earlier, yeah. It's before I get to, like, the town. It's along the way. I go before that. Yeah, go even earlier. Yeah, somewhere along there. Yeah.

All right, let's get some volume on this and roll it. Yeah. The passport. I have my passport. You have your passport? Yes. Let's make sure we plug the Instagram, sabbatical dot Tommy. Who is this?

Can we pause that real quick? Who is that guy? So these are just some passengers in the taxi. In Iraq, they have shared taxis, which people usually take instead of buses. Yeah, we have those here, too. Do we? Yeah, we got shared Uber's. Oh, shit.

Damn, I've been out of America for too long. Okay, so these guys are just randos in there, but they could be spies. I mean, theoretically. Theoretically. All right, let's keep going. You're going to Al-Azer. Yeah. Yeah, I'll be off in Al-Zar.

They were trying to guide me to, like, the right place. I didn't even know where I was going. I was very curious about where I'm going. Yeah, the right place. No lines on the road. No? Okay, so this is the actual checkpoint. Oh, right, so you're outside now? Yeah. Oh, I'd be shit.

I left my camera on in the bag and they just take it out. That's port. Oh, they're holding the bag. Yeah, just got it. You're like Russia part two. Yeah. Abu Kramer. Didn't actually put the police on film because apparently that's very illegal. Is he Moroccan? He's American. You don't look Moroccan.

I don't know where to hell they're about that. Yeah. Is he Moroccan? I'm not really, that was actually a little bit stressful going through those checkpoints. Sometimes, I really feel American here. I'm a surprising one. Yeah, you look at it. All right, that's good right there.

So that was, you got through it. They just were like, you're good? Yeah, they were like, nothing weird here. But the, so the checkpoint in Samara that was run by the Shia Militans, they like took me out of the car for like 20 minutes. And it was like holding up the entire taxi. And I felt like really bad about that. And they were being nasty towards me. So like by the time they finally like let me in and I realized like I'm fully within like a zone control.

But like Shia Militants that like still have like a grudge against the U.S. I just got like completely shook. I was like, I don't want to film here. I don't even want to be here. Like, I'm like, I'm just going to get out of here. And I ended up like just finding another taxi. And like about 20 minutes later, I was on the road back to Baghdad. Back to Baghdad.

Safe to Baghdad. Yeah, the safe confines of Baghdad. When people talk about Baghdad in here, it's usually, you know. You know, so it's a little different. A bit of a different vibe. When was the part where they were calling you a Jewish spy? Was that the cops there? Oh, that's actually in that video.

I believe, or they say something about Israel in there. You were a masad. So there's This is actually really cool This is the part of Iraq I wanted the show Where it's like this guy With like 15 kids again

He's like hey You know you haven't had lunch Yeah I'll come I'll make lunch for you Do you know where I was Probably in the middle of the video They actually ask me Are you Jewish

I'm not before that I'm not Jewish I'm definitely not Jewish In this country He got the call in the background I'm not talking about this. I'm gonna be a heart of you.

I'm good. I'm good. It's a little bit past us. Nice to meet you. What's interesting about this town, actually, I just explain this. It's like there's a shrine, like a Jewish shrine, and it still has like the star of David and stuff inside of it,

but they, I think they converted it into a mosque, but they still like... But they keep the star. They keep the star. Out of respect. Yeah, yeah. It was interesting. It's the only place in Iraq. in each other's religions. Yeah.

We need more of that in the world. Exactly. All right, where... This is it. This is it. Okay, so they're in... Okay, Shedra. Yeah.

This is like the living room, basically. Possibly dining groups. I wonder who's on the wall there. Those are, yeah, like Shia prophets or, you know, important people in Shia as well. Got it. You can see that this is a Shia household. Shia household.

Prophet Imam Hussein up there, the most important person in Shia Islam, besides the main man himself. Most of this region is Shia. That's not what I was expecting when I came back here. So I've basically been sitting here for like five minutes by myself. That would naturally leave me to the conclusion that I literally at the riverbank just said I'm hungry. They brought me to their house and now they're just cooking a meal on the spot.

How many countries in the world would that happen? Are you a friend? Are you a journalist, he says? You say, I'm traveling. He goes, are you a journalist? He's just traveling. Yeah, so step up. Okay, these people are super nice. Except for the guy's brother, he's like the uncle, he keeps asking stuff like, am I a journalist? Even worse, are you Israeli?

Because I see him here's fine. You take everything's fine. Here we go. He's eyeing you up. Yeah. Are you looking at you like you're a fucking alien? He goes, let me handle it. No, don't touch it.

Don't touch it, Massad, spy. Come in? I want to check that for poison, bro. Check that for poison, bro. Bring some water in here. You like fish? One of the most tense meals I've had in the while. Oh, it's good, very good.

Imagine you're like choking it up. Yeah. Another brother of yours? Yes. How many brothers do you have? How many brothers do you have? Six. How many sisters?

Three. Three. Wow. No, rubbers in that, I hope. That's a lot. Oh, they're going on Instagram live now? Facebook friends. Take it a picture.

Kenneth. Were you here during the war, you're asking? America, Iraq, that way. Oh, yeah, yes, you said. Keith Kenneth. How was life? Well, it's war. I don't know.

Very descriptive. Oh, that was so good. It's not like now sitting in peace, sitting here. War is tanks, missiles, a family burning. A family gets killed, this one dies, that one gets shelled, cars burning. Governments are governments, is what you said, people are people? Yes, she said. Thank you.

All right there. All sweet people. Very nice, do. Yeah. I was just a funny delivery, bro. Oh, for sure. How was it? Well, it's war.

It's all serious. Yeah, yeah. It's like I was really nervous about asking that question. But I was like, yeah, there's no other way to ask this. So let's just go for it. Do you think like you were as a foreigner in all these places, obviously there's a lot to build in social anxiety when you go anywhere? Even for you, I'm sure after all these countries, you still go to new places. and you're still like, all right, I got to feel this out.

Do you think some of that, like, is kind of channeled to be able to actually get good shit? You know what I mean? Like, you're on such high alert that you end up asking questions that get you to a farther place and actually get real information out of people? Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, I think even that day I had, like, in the back of my head, like, I should probably ask somebody here about the war, you know, like, that would be interesting.

I just don't want to, like, offend them and get some shit started. but yeah no it's it's interesting like when I first arrive in a country I'm actually like usually pretty nervous because like every single country has different first of all laws about filming in public they have different attitudes towards cameras there's some countries where the people like really hate that you're filming others like love it they like try to get in front of the camera and and then I'm also just thinking like all right I mean this is my my travel but but it's got to be interesting. So, you know, what can I like ask the people here? What would be good? So, yeah, it's always different for every country.

Not wearing a Bush-Cheney-O-4 shirt was a real missed opportunity. That's a real conversation. Unfortunately, yeah. I would have made some real friends with that one. Or maybe like a Halliburton, you know, just wear that shirt in there. Be like, what do you think of this? Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Haliburton. Like throw them in the dungeon. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

talk about uh yeah ask where the oil is um didn't get to ask that you ever you ever get to um get to meet any of the uzidis or some of the groups that were like i did actually you did that's actually the other video i made in iraq oh wow all right so they were obviously massacred in large numbers or also sold into slavery when isis came in and everything they are not they have their own religion it's not Islam it's their own different thing and there's what like 1.5 million of them or were 1.5 million of them in Iraq yeah um they're a very very interesting group of people and i knew their story before going so i just became really obsessed with the idea of trying to find them but um they've been displaced from their homeland which is like this mountain that's like

near the border with uh syria and uh so a lot of them are still like in these refugee camps and stuff spread around the region. They're actually Kurdish. So, like, I don't want to say, like, a lot of people in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East have, like, no sympathy for them. But it definitely doesn't, like, endear them to them. And then on top of that, they have, like, a different religion, which is not that they actually, like, worship the devil or anything,

but it's more like, I don't even know how that got started, to be honest with you. Like, their main God is actually, it looks like a peacock or something. Yeah. And it's, like, it protects them from the devil. or something like that. Can we Google, just so we get the specific, Steve, can we Google Yazidi religious beliefs? And we'll just literally pull up to CIA a PD on that and see what they say.

I mean, listen, you know who's editing that. All right. So Yazidism is a monotheistic ethnic religion. It developed through a complex historical process involving a pre-Islamic Kurdish religious substratum and the teachings of Sheikh Abin-Idin-Musufir. Scholars generally regard it as an independent religious tradition with deep roots in ancient Iranian beliefs, shaped by later Sufi influences, its followers

called Yazidis are Kurdish-speaking community. Yazidisism is based on the belief in one god who created the world and entrusted its guardianship to seven self-eminated angels. Preeminent among these angels is Tuasimelik, Peacock Angel, who is the leader of the angels and has the greatest authorities over the world. There's a girl Nadia Mirad who won the Nobel Peace Prize, I want to say, in like 2018. who was a young Yazidi girl whose family, many of them were massacred by ISIS, and she was actually sold into slavery with ISIS and wrote a book,

I believe it's called The Last Girl, about the whole thing, which is a phenomenal book. I highly recommend it. I never want to read it again, though. It's one of those. It's very, very important to read, brilliantly written, tells the whole story, but like, you know, not obviously. not a not a pleasant story she's a really really really resilient woman who i'd love to have on the

podcast sometimes if she ever does that but yeah you know i hadn't really known about that part of it until i learned her story and then saw how many people were in the middle of this and when i've talked to like a lot of my navy seal guys and stuff guys were serving back then they're like oh yeah dude it was it was nasty oh yeah yeah i mean there were like reports of it in the media and stuff i'm sure they were like hide in like 90% of the details right but even like the 10% that we know yeah it was horrific you know they were just like straight up sex slaves for ISIS just like I think they would keep them in like cages and then just like take them out to like rape them and stuff and that it's horrible it was horrible yeah in every way in every way but so you did a full video where you went and found

some of them many of them displaced in some of these camps where were these camps again like some of the ones did you go to them or I did yeah and I actually went to the holiest place for the and yeah they were I was just really struck by like how kind they were because this is like the holiest place in their religion and they're like yeah you can go in yeah you go ahead like take some pictures you know show it off I made like this faux paw where they have this thing where you're not supposed to step on like the doorstep or something and I accidentally did that and they came over and they're like no no no don't do that but they were like smiling as they said it so I mean there's maybe some other

other regions where they wouldn't be that friendly. So yeah, they were just like very nice, very kind. It was a little bit hard to communicate with them because actually they speak Kurdish, not Arabic. Some of them spoke Arabic. You don't speak any Kurdish? Just the basics of it, like some greetings and stuff. But for the people I found that spoke Arabic or English, there were some people that spoke English. I got to know like their story. Basically they're not getting like any funding or anything for the refugee camps now. So they're just kind of like stuck in their situation. That's horrible, man.

Yeah, we went around and we bought a bunch of stuff for like the kids in the town. Got cutest kids ever. They look like they could be like anything. Some of them look like they were Swedish. Some of them looked like they were from Saudi Arabia or something. Like every kind of like ethnicity. That's kind of like the Kurds in general. Yeah.

Yeah, it's amazing. There's like 33 million Kurds and they have these provinces where basically they rule. Yeah. but they don't have on the map lines that show that they have a country yeah yeah it's uh one of the more forgotten uh quest for self-determination in the world i would say because like yeah they're spread across four countries including iran and turkey most notably um and yeah just because of pure geopolitics it will probably never happen i made another video called uh the country that will never be a country, which I filmed in southern Turkey, southeastern Turkey, I should say,

which is like the Kurdish region. Yeah, my buddy Eric Zulagir's banned from Turkey for life because he was on a train and they came by and asked him where he was coming from and he said Kurdistan. No shit. Yeah. No shit. Well, I hope I'm not bad. They don't like that.

They don't like that there. All right, inside the country that will never be a country. Let's give this some violent roll. Yeah. You could skip towards like maybe the middle of it. So this is the Kurdish enclave. You're in? Yeah.

King of the castle. King of the castle. I think I actually like the later parts of the video. We go to like this place where that a major war with the Turkish government. Yeah. Over the many years of conflict. Hey, hi. Hi.

Salamolikam. Al-a-a-a-sala. How's the life here? Life here? Life isn't quite, everything is so expensive. And I'm not a feeling. So the new year, things are worse. Bread costs 25, which is $1.25, so no bread?

What is your hometown? I have no idea. That is like me to be like a Turkish expert here. No, mehik. Deibate here is not your hometown. Where are you from? Ahkadas. You pause it a quick?

Who's the woman your whiz right there? She also has like a small YouTube channel. I make videos with her once in a while. Yeah, she's kind of adventurous. Also American? It's from Indonesia. Indonesia. How'd you meet her?

In Indonesia, just in the capital. We had like a chance encounter. Chance of counter. That's what you did there. And yeah, we found out she was interested in making videos and then went from there. Hope you told her you're a married man. Uh, yeah, yeah, I was, you want to be the fifth? So that was how I worked it up.

So there were four. Yeah. All right. Nice to meet you. Bye-bye, yeah. Friendly Kurdish people. Yeah. Here in the neighborhood.

Trying to make sure that there's nothing, uh, inappropriate going on here. Oh, yeah. Hello, Slav. Okay, buddy? No. Money. You hit some. towards the Grand Mosque of Diyarbakir.

I think that was a garbage truck. That is a good idea. It's just a very narrow streets. It was something that came up with it myself. All right, so this is the Grand Mosque of Diyarbakir of Ahmed. May needs a hijab to go in, so... It's not supposed for a man though. That's supposed to be like a Kurdish scar.

Oh, it is? Yeah. No. This is the bandana that I bought back in Izmir. The head shuffling is a head cover. And you're also showing Turkish pride. You're showing Turkish. Oh, that guy turned back.

He's like Turkish? Say that shit. Inter, Gyrish? Spoke, like, very basic Turkish. They're speaking Turkish. I didn't know what the hell I was saying. And then Turkish women are not of you wearing jets. Once again, even out here, Turkey is more liberal than you thought.

So is that like an open? So here we have the grand mosque of the Arbakiya. So it's open air. The big mosque. Yeah. Or I think the prayer is indoors, but like the foot-washing areas. History going back almost 5,000 years. Of course, there have been many different groups and religions that have passed through this area.

It has been Muslim for the last 1500 years. All right, May, as someone from a Muslim country, how does this work? Do you wash your fear, your hand? Really? Yeah. You did so much effort. That's pretty cold. It is cold.

Water was freezing. And they actually praying while you do it. How long ago is this one? Around the same time I went to Iraq, so I asked somebody. Where I'm from? America. Where you're from? Yeah. You came to me from America? Yeah. I'm a YouTuber, yeah.

I can't know. I can't speak from here. Yeah, I'm from Europe. Particularly 100% from here. Nice, nice. Yeah. How is life here? Yeah, it's good. Before I was living in Ontario, Istanbul. After 15 years, I came back to my home. You missed home? Yeah, I miss here. Sometimes I wasn't here. Okay.

They're here or? Yeah, we are really friendly. We are very open. You do seem to have some nice people here. Yeah, be careful. Fair enough. We do have a nice welcome to me. He did say, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Nice to me. He had some more controversial takes off camera, but uh you want to enlighten us. Still want to get him in trouble, but, And you can imagine what he thought about the region. Okay. Yeah, free the Kurds. I got you.

Yeah, that's like a whole thing now because now you got like some of the hardliners in Israel trying to scream that Turkey's the next Iran or something. I mean, you know, are we just going to keep trying to find a fucking war everywhere? It gets a little tiring. It gets exhausting, right? A little exhausting. Yeah. I mean, I tried. if I can stay out of politics in my videos I'm like pretty like even on that I think both

sides are fucked up good but I my one opinion is I think the Middle East is the Middle East and I mean if we're not if we don't have like a direct reason to be there then we shouldn't be messing around there so it is unfortunate that yeah we keep being drawn into conflicts there or starting shit yeah it's when you look at everywhere where we've been for the past over, you know, like basically 25 years, it just seems to destabilize a bunch of places. And you get to see the human side of it to where the people who are forced to live with the bombs dropping all the time are now, you know, adjusting to their life and the aftermath of that whole period that still continues in many places, obviously. But it's like,

to me, especially the more we get involved with things that are completely avoidable. I'm not saying like everyone is great and there's not evil out there there is you can't just go fucking bomb everyone you don't like though it to me it just creates more and more generational distrust and dislike towards america and you know i would obviously you've met a lot of these people in person and stuff it's like they're normal people and they may hold some of those beliefs because of the things that have happened to them and their family and you know i wish it wasn't that way and i didn't have anything to do with that myself, but I understand why they feel that way. Yeah. That was the really hard thing about traveling through the Middle East because you meet

all these different groups and they all have like different like hopes and dreams about like what state they should be living in. And they all really have like valid claims to what they're saying. You know, it's like so I'd meet like the Kurds. I'd meet the Palestinians. I'd meet people in Iraq, all different kinds of people in Iraq. I met, I haven't talked about this before, I met Iranians in Oman and Dubai afterward. After the war started. After the war started. Yeah.

And what was really trippy for me was they would be like, we want Trump to continue bombing Iran. We want Netanyahu to keep bombing Iran. At least the Iranians I met, they're all like very pro-war, pro-Trump, pro-like everything. But I mean, obviously the, I don't know if I should be saying that when I want to go there, but yeah, the government there is maybe not the best. And it's like, yeah, you just end up having a lot of sympathy for all these different people. You're like, yeah, I want you guys to have like your ideal government. I want you to have freedom. I want the Kurds to have freedom.

I want the Turks to have like the best country possible. I love all these different people. but they all hate each other. So it's like, fuck, I don't know what to do. I just know that America can't solve it by itself. That's right. And it's a good point you make, too. It's like, you know, an unfortunate casualty information-wise in the ongoing Iran war

is that people are so pissed off about us being in this whole thing that there's now people who are like, well, maybe their government's not that bad strictly because they're that pissed off. And like, that fact doesn't change. It's been, obviously, they've been living under a totalitarian regime since 1979. I covered that over the years on this show many different times. And like, that doesn't change. It's horrible.

And I wish they could have a new government. The fact of the matter is, and I would imagine this is even harder for someone like you who knows these people on the ground and wants the best for them, like you were just saying. But the fact of the matter is, it is on people to change their government sometimes. times like it's not you can't just have other countries like the united states try to come in and wreak havoc and get a new government because it ends up like i think if we've proved anything we're not very good at rebuilding nations at least at this point in time you know and so in some ways it's like you feel like you're stuck between a shit and a fart right like you stay out they stay under the control of the regime you go in you cause massive fucking third fourth fifth and tenth 10th order effects

And it's just not, the world, unfortunately, is really, really complicated. It is. Yeah. It's like just one of those situations where there's no good answer. That's right. I would think. That's right. Have you spent any time in Palestine and Israel at all, like since the conflict really popped off there? Obviously, it's always been popping off, but in the last few years. Yep. That was another very notable experience on my channel, you could say. again I swear I did this unintentionally I ended up being in Israel and Palestine

just like about three weeks after October 7th three years ago you have remarkable timing I really do it's almost like you have good intelligence yeah I wish I did but it was like I had been planning to go there anyway I had the flights booked and then I was like I'll still go But yeah, so that was a very, very interesting experience. As soon as I got there, I had to fly into Tel Aviv. Literally, as soon as I check into my Airbnb, there's sirens.

There's like missiles or whatever coming from Gaza. So I'm like, okay, that's how it is here. I met with all different kinds of people. I met like protesters in Israel that are against, like, against like the constant fighting. I meant obviously the majority of the Israeli population is like super pro, everything they're doing. But I would say probably the highlight of the trip

was going into the West Bank and again doing it like I would do in any other country. I just was like, all right, I'm gonna try to travel in the West Bank in like the most tense time ever. So I went to a city called Ramallah, which I believe is the biggest city in the West Bank, had like, I did have one contact there. He was this guy who had, he was Palestinian. He had, he had lived in Israel briefly, but I guess he was kind of like an illegal immigrant there. So they

like put him back in the West Bank. And he had like a very like normal, peaceful view on everything. He was just like, why can't we just have like an open border and like, you know, go back and forth and whatnot? He looked kind of like Jesus. interestingly enough. This is on video. It is on video, yeah. He's in there. Yeah.

And yeah, that... He's got it. Okay. So, yeah, like, he helped me out. And then I had, like... It turned out this was a crazy idea at the time, but I was like, I want to go see the Dead Sea. But there was literally, unsurprisingly,

zero tourist in the West Bank at this point. So there was like no buses running. That one. It will shoot you at the checkbook. Yeah. Rapped in Palestine. Your titles are hard as fuck. All right.

So the guy that looked like Jesus. It should be like maybe middle halfway there. It's like, yeah, at the start of it, I'm in Jerusalem. Is Ramallah a place where they have settlements as well? Yeah, that guy, yeah. They do, yeah. He actually lived in what was supposed to be. a refugee camp but it actually looks like a neighborhood okay let's play them

here now i really don't know but usually the scouts they said they train here and here it's a dorm these are dorms for the soccer players are up here yeah okay the funerals of people who died doesn't have money like to pay for stuff so they can't really do it here so you and medical staff right here yeah like you can see people and then there's an image the alox on us very important in Palestine. So all the people here, they were refugees after the 1948 war? Yes. Okay.

Yeah, they were expensive. They are old from my villages around the Haifa, mad, the drummed... This is my house, my house. This is my parents' house. That's my family house. You hired the sandwich shop? Yeah, this sandwich is for my... Shannon shopped is owned by a sister in a home home country.

So very poor economics in a place like this, right? Yes, it's pretty striking, coming from, like, the Israeli part, whereas that is, like, fully a first world developed country. Like, there's parts Tel Aviv that look like New York, basically. And, yeah, with that said, I mean, I try to be as honest as possible with my videos. Like, in Palestine, it wasn't as bad. like some of the other Middle Eastern countries I'd been to. Hmm.

It's like, it was definitely less developed than Israel, but not as bad as, let's say, like, what I saw in Iraq or... Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So this was a few weeks after October 7th, literally. Literally. Yeah. Did you go to any of the settlements? Um, like the Israeli settlements in there? Uh, no. I did not have like a contact. do that and I don't know if this is still going on but at that time what was kind of dangerous about it

was there weren't really buses running between the different cities because the Israelis had set up like checkpoints I think they're always there but like at this point in time they were super severe like literally Palestinians would need like five to ten hours to like pass these checkpoints so you'd have to spend like an entire day so I get like get past them and so um The reason I titled the video like that, like, they will shoot you at the checkpoint, trapped in Palestine, is because I ended up at this town near the Dead Sea. And this, like, really friendly guy, he had a hotel. It was closed because they had zero tourists.

He reopened the hotel for me. Like, let me stay there. But I actually had a flight the next day, my planning. And I had to get back to Tel Aviv to take it. And I was like, fuck, I'm going to be. missed this flight. So they tried to help me, like, set up a plan so I could pass the checkpoint without getting shot because, like, apparently Palestinians would walk up to these checkpoints and Israelis would just, like, unload on them. So it was kind of like, a intense thing to do.

But they managed to get, like, a taxi driver from Jerusalem. And the Palestinians that live in Jerusalem are the only ones that can go back and forth between the two places. Why is that? It's just a specific rule that they have. I believe they come from East Jerusalem, which I guess is part from like a special jurisdiction. And they get like a special license plate that allows them to pass between the tow. Israelis are actually not allowed to drive into Palestine. I think that's the Israeli government telling them they can't do that.

And then Palestinians obviously cannot go into. Israel proper. So, yeah, they get that guy. He's, like, waiting on the other end of the checkpoint, and I just, like, walk across it. And thankfully, they were definitely kind of curious why the hell I was doing that, but obviously, did not get shot.

You're walking across it like the bullets might be hitting me. I had that thought in the back of my head. Were you shitting yourself? I was very nervous, like, what the interaction was going to be, for sure the interaction yeah Jesus Christ yeah

do you think that do you think that situation is solvable in our lifetime uh my honest opinion is no I agree yeah because the Israelis

their mentality is they have no other home and so they consider like any kind of antagonism to Israel is just like a fight for survival. And so there and plus obviously the the Hasidic birth rate is like super high and like they're super conservative super yeah like pro like just fuck off Palestinians. And then uh you know the

Palestinians rightly also have their claims to the land and they're going to continue to want their land back and yeah the best we could hope for is I don't even know just like no more fighting. Yeah, I don't think we'll see that. think a lot of it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think, again, like when you see leaders of the government openly advocating for war with the NATO member, because they're already bored of this war, that they're not sending their guys to go fight, by the way. You know.

You're talking about Turkey? Yeah. And it's like, because they, well, they're boarded the Iran war, and they're talking about Turkey now as like an enemy. And it's like, you got to read the room a little bit, man. You know, you don't have the international support. The support in America below age 55 is at fucking zero on, you know, not literally, but you know what I mean. And you can't keep asking for these conflicts because at some point, and I think we've crossed that point with a lot of generations around the world.

It's like, well, who really is it asking for the war? Is it you getting attacked or is it you provoking people to attack or attacking attacking them first? I mean, have you spent time in Lebanon? I did, actually. When? I actually went for the first time. I did another study abroad there when I was in college. Oh, no kidding.

Randomly. In Beirut? In Beirut. Yeah. Beautiful place I've heard. Yeah, I loved it. It was really nice. It's a very unique place in the Middle East also.

It's got like beach clubs and like all this stuff going on. And, how should I say this? I was planning to go there this year. also, maybe within the next few months. Oh, so you're working on it. Yeah, I've been really anxious to get back there at some point. But yeah, it's Lebanon is, I don't think any country has a more complicated cluster fuck of history and political situation than they do.

Why do you say that? The country was founded as basically like a Christian colony by the French, because he used to be part of Syria, or I guess. broader Syria, which used to be part of the Ottoman Empire. And the French were like, you know what, you got all these Christians in the mountains. Let's let them have like their own land. Was that the Sykes-Picot where they did that? That's where the British and French divided the territories. I think the French already had Lebanon. They already had it. Yeah. Okay. But yeah, so like the government that they came up with and no other government has this,

It's like every position in the government is reserved for like a specific religion. So like the president is always Christian. The Speaker of the House is always Shia, Muslim, I think. The prime minister is always Sunni. And it just leads to a lot of like crazy corruption and like all this stuff in the country. And and then to make things even like more complicated, like a ton of Palestinian refugees came over the border. I believe that was in the 40s or 50s or something like that And the Palestinian situation was actually what led to their big civil war in the 70s

Which it was basically like the Christians and Israel against the Palestinians and then later the Shia Muslims It was crazy fucking complicated And it's still like that today When I was there I will say like a lot of of Lebanese people are like really cool they're just like yeah hey do you want to go out to the bar you know like let's go but a lot of people there would like meet me and be like you're american okay let me just like voice every grievance i have about your country yeah like yo listen

like i'm a college student i probably agree with you just calm down and um so that's even years ago they were doing that yeah yeah that was like 2011 yeah so that was a while again yeah it's It's, you were saying when you go to a lot of these places, you try not to use a fixer and stuff like that if you can avoid it and you're doing a lot of stuff alone. So you are literally still traveling just as yourself. Yeah. I mean, unless I travel with like another YouTube buddy or whatever. I might be able to hook you out with somebody to help in Beirut. My friend Arab has been on the show.

He's got to be, you know, Arab. You can say he's my friend also, actually. Oh, all right. So you already know. Yeah. You should talk to him. He's from, I mean, he's from here, but his family's Lebanese and he goes back there. That's true, yeah.

Yeah, I think he's there right now. He definitely was last month. I don't know if he still is, but yeah. Yeah, that would be pretty cool. We could set that up. Yeah, let's hit him up afterwards, for sure. How do you know him? At some point, I feel like every travel vlogger contacts the other one.

Right. Yeah, we all know each other on Instagram. Who are the other, who are some other cool guys, you know? A small-brained American. I'm Connor. Yeah. I don't know him. Let's pull that up.

We did a big trip through China together. Small-brand Americans. Small-brained, American. Small-brained. Okay. Yeah, these are some of my favorite types of creators. Yeah. Okay.

There you go. So he travels all over the world, too? He does, yeah. He's got probably a slightly different style. India sucks don't ever come here. Yeah, I think that's what he's known for at this point. Just saying countries are kind of fucked up. That's funny.

Really funny, dude, though. You know him, Amanda? You've seen his videos before? You've seen Mike O'K? I have seen Mike O'Kee. He's probably the only one I haven't talked to, actually. I've talked to Bold and Bankrupt. I know him.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. He's probably the most. He's very famous. Who else? Yeah. Probably like, yeah, almost all of them at this point. Send a message.

Yeah, my one buddy, Brandon Buckingham, who does a lot more American stuff. I've talked about this before, but he did a great documentary in Lebanon a couple years ago now. But what's really sad about it is he was supposed to go to India for some thing. He was covering for a documentary. He has two flights to get there. And when he's on the layover flight somewhere in the fucking Middle East or Europe, they realized like his visa. that didn't come through for India. So he couldn't go.

So he's like, well, I'm already halfway around the world. Let's find a place. So he goes to Lebanon right before the bombs start dropping. So he gets there and the bombs start fucking dropping. And he's there like capturing the story of what it is for like a week or two. And what's really sad is you see all these young guys in the video that he's talking to who are talking about what a beautiful place this is, so nice, opening their world to him. and within weeks they were all dead oh that's fucking crazy that's crazy yeah that is the trippy things

that can happen while traveling have you run into that where people you get really tight with are killed after you do a video the closest thing I had to that thankfully I don't know anyone that died after I met them. But I went to a country called Eritrea, if you've heard of that. I have heard of that. Can we pull that up on the map, Dave? Someone else talked about that on the podcast, but what happened? It's become popularly known as like the North Korea of Africa because they're like very,

the government doesn't allow the people to have like Wi-Fi for the most part. It's very cut off on the rest of the world. And right next to Sudan and to the North. worst of Ethiopia in Germany. Yes, in a real hotspot region. I went there from Ethiopia, actually. And so it's unsurprisingly another country where they really don't like you

showing anything bad about it, which wasn't my mission going there. I just wanted to experience the country. What happened was, like, I was sitting at, like, this one cafe. What's cool about it is, like, it was an Italian colony, and the Italians, like, poured all this money into it.

So they have like these cities that like, look vaguely Italian. And they have like these cafes and stuff. And these are pizza and stuff. So I was like, oh, I want to hit one of those up. And I just sit down. And then there's frequently like power cuts. And there's like no like electricity or anything. And this one guy there is just like, hey, I'll get you a coffee.

And he tries to do it. And he's like, sorry, I couldn't get you a coffee because the power was off. That's literally all that happened in the video. After I leave, they start. sending out these flyers on Facebook in the local language, which was Tigrinia. One is just of me saying, like, I went there to, like, cause trouble. And then another one was, like, this guy who said there was, like, no power in the country. And the only fucking thing that I can hope is just, like, these were just, like, nationalists

that are just, like, you know, like trying to point this out and be like, hey, these are bad people. I really hope nothing happened to that guy and nothing should have happened to that guy because he didn't say anything against the government but I do like worry about that it's like for all this shit that's fucked up here that we got to take care of which you know obviously interesting times we're living through

man there are so many times I'm so grateful to live here to where you can do this and you can say what you want and you know obviously there's been some issues with that with like censorship in the past but there's not people showing up to your door to shoot you or take you away in the middle of the night, so to speak. That is the single greatest thing about this country.

Yeah. I don't think there's any other country that has as great a freedom of speech as the United States. Have you... Obviously, you're spending most of your time on the road now, but in doing this now for like six years and then even before that, obviously living in China, we can come back to that.

but like do you have a greater appreciation for what we do have that's good in America because of being in so many places that don't even have the most basic things? Yeah, for sure. So I said earlier, like, when you live abroad, you start to view your own country differently. But that's like both good and bad. Yes. There's like, you realize all the stuff that you wish, you know, I wish that the U.S. Metros could be more like Japan's.

But at the same time, I'm like, I kind of enjoy the fact that people are actually have personalities here unlike Japan. There's like good and bad in every single country, I would say. But yeah, no, like the good things about the U.S. I usually say is like especially for people coming from like developing nations or just anyone that has like a dream or whatever. It's like there's no better place to be. You know, you can accomplish your dream here. like you can make more money in the U.S. If that's your goal, it's probably the best place in the world to do that. And also just the amount of like land and stuff you can have at a relatively affordable rate.

You know, like just the houses that we have in middle class neighborhoods in America would be like mansions in most parts of the world. You know, in Hong Kong, for example, like people pay like $10 million to live in like, a three-story building that looks like a mini apartment building or whatever. Yeah. And in most European countries also, I think, it's very unheard of to have a house like we do here. So, yeah, no, it's great. And we also, I would say, like, many Americans are friendlier, I would say, than, like, most of the developed world. Yeah.

You say this as a New Yorker, too. Yeah, well, I'm kind of, I'm not going to lie. Like, I'm imagining, like, the South would I say this? It's like I did some traveling down there. But New Yorkers are going to be nice, too. You know, it's like we're pretty friendly to, like, tourists and foreigners and stuff. I think so. Yeah.

I think so. There's more of a aggressive letting people know how you feel here, which I actually appreciate more than some other places where in this country that I won't name where they smile in your face. And the minute you turn around, they stab you in the back. Yeah. We're very direct. Yeah.

Or in this part of the country. I like that. I do value that. And you got to be direct where you go, obviously. We're seeing it in your videos because, you know, you're an outsider. So you got to make very clear that you're just here to do YouTube videos and not spy on people. So that probably helps. It is true.

Yeah. I can't joke around too much. I got to be pretty. As soon as I, usually as soon as I said, there's any kind of possible issue with police. And I have been, like, detained, like, maybe like five times during these travels. All right. So there's been a bunch of other stories besides Russia. We saw the one where you were at least talking on the side of the road in Iraq.

Where else did you get arrested? See, I wouldn't even count that one as an arrest. But thankfully, I've only been to prison once. You get a tattoo out of that, by the way? I did not. No prison stats? I know. Like, what the fuck?

We're even in prison. Yeah, it's a good point. Yeah. That's something I showed down. But you have four other times you were detained. Let's start with the first one. First one, and I believe this is in a video. It was actually in Kenya.

It's like, this is such a weird experience. It was like, I'm just like walking through Mombasa, which is another kind of old, cool-looking city. And I filmed this church. And then so what happens is the people that work at the, the church, they call the Kenyan police on me for like filming a church. And this is wild. They think I'm like a Muslim terrorist. You? Yeah, they think me. My beard was bigger at that point. Maybe they thought you were Chechen. Yeah, something like that. Apparently what happened

was there was like a girl from like Scotland that like went down there and then she, this is kind of close to the Somalia border. She like crossed over and joined Al-Shabaab. afterward and then they did some attacks there or whatever so they're like all right white people like to come here to do terrorism it was supposed Scottish al-Shabab chick yeah so she was probably like pale like as pale as I am so like it's the weirdest racial profiling like I've ever seen but the way they did it was super sketch it was like I'm just on the street and this like Kenyan police officer who's not in a uniform gets out of a car and he's just like hey I'm police uh We need to like question you.

You need to get in this car. He's not in uniform. Yeah. And his car is not a police car. Oh, I would have been thinking this is like, you know, yeah. Fucking human trafficking one of one. I was like, fuck, I never should have come to Africa.

This is what happens. Eventually, I just like, I do get in because there's like no way out of it. I just hope for the best. They take me to a police station, an actual police station. They questioned me for like four hours or something like that. They figure out I'm not. a Muslim terrorist, shockingly. And then they

dropped me back off of my Airbnb, and on the way there, they ask, oh, by the way, can you buy us dinner? And I was like, no. Not really an option to say no. You're supposed to like let me off early. Like, you want me to do that? You know, like, isn't that how corruption works? Yes.

You didn't do corruption right. Yeah. So, probably this was an actually serious thing. It's like, they they do not do corruption for terrorist suspects. Okay. Yeah. So you were confident enough to say no when they said you got to buy a dinner now, even though they had just detained you and questioned you for being a Muslim terrorist?

Yeah, yeah. I was... Bold move. I tried to like, you know, make a joke out of it. I would have said, what do you want? What do you move for? Italian, Vietnamese, what do we got? Yeah, I was like, ah, I still need to buy dinner for myself.

So, you know, sorry. Wow. I think the restaurants are closed. Did they ask you while they were questioning you if you spoke Arabic? No. No. I could totally see you'd be like, yeah, I'd just start speaking Arabic. They're like, got one.

Yeah, yeah. And again, at times, knowing languages, not the best luck in these countries. All right, so there's three other times you get detained, though. Where else? Right, right. Yeah, so straight of Hormuz, which was very recent. Yeah, let's hold off on that one. Give me the other two.

We're going to come back straight to the finale, I guess. I believe I was thinking Russia for one of them. And then the other one, and for reasons, I can't say everything about this one, but China, actually. When? So this was right after they reopened to tourists. And I was probably, I believe, like the first travel vlog. to go around like you know like with like just a camera talking to people just winging it and me being me i decided to go to wohan uh yeah because you know why not i mean i was uh this is in like 2023

this is 2023 yeah and um i i uh i don't want to say like who stopped me i'll just let you use your own interpretation but i did get stopped by somebody you don't want to get stopped by in China. And they take my information. They note everything down. And then they let me go. But then, like, a few days later, I'm at my hotel. These people show up again.

They take me into a hotel room. I get interrogated for like eight hours. For eight hours. For eight hours. How many people interrogating you? Three people. They brought somebody that, like, spoke English for it. Just the case I didn't, like, know what they were saying in Mandarin.

Oh, so you decided still to converse with them in Mandarin? You feel that good with your Mandarin? Especially at that point, honestly, like, my Mandarin probably wasn't good enough to, like, do a full interrogation. But I did want to be, like, guys, lesson, you know, like, I like your country. I lived here. do we have to do this? I'm a YouTuber, you know. And what's funny was like there's now like a billion people going to China to like make videos and being like, yeah, look, China's awesome. Like, oh, look at this hotel, look at how like nice it is. Look at Chongqing. Look at the lights and stuff.

This was before any of that. So they were just like, why were you filming? Like this is very strange, you know, like. And so I think they were trying to go to the Russia angle, but credit to the Chinese, they did not do what the Russians did. They were just like, this guy is clearly a YouTuber. And they probably, should I say the thing, probably bugged my phone and then let me go. Is your phone still bugged? I have, that was probably like seven phones ago.

Okay, I was going to say, you're switching that out a lot. Yeah, yeah. So when you switch out a phone, once you take the SIM card out, well, I don't even know, like, would the bug be in the SIM card? From what I saw, they download, I looked this up afterward because it was an iPhone. And, you know, like, you can't just, like, upload, like, malware onto, like, an iPhone because you got, like, the App Store and stuff. It has to go through that.

There's some, they have literally, like, downloaded some kind of, like, app that allows you to, like, hack the iPhone and then just, like, do, like, in, like, a third-party way, start uploading shit onto it. They had left that on the phone when they gave it back to me. And I even pointed it out, I was like, hey, what's this? There's like, don't worry about it.

You can delete it if you want. We are listening, though. That's a country that is not very direct. They're a very indirect communication style. Yeah, they keep minors on everyone who comes in. Yeah. Yeah. But I do believe they concluded I was not a threat or fucking CIA or whatever.

But they were talking to you for eight hours? Yeah. That's a long fucking time. You can watch the whole Godfather trilogy in that time. It's a really long time. Yeah. The nicest thing they did was they showed up with McDonald's. And they were like, we wanted to bring something from your country.

You're going to eat. You haven't had lunch yet. You want chicken finger It's like thanks I guess Yeah the finest of American cuisine Oh my God So how did they interrogate you though Is there a lot of like nothing nothing nothing

Until they try to hit you with something Or what's the Kind of jab and cross and hooks And I want to be very clear for my own situation That this was not the secret police basically what they did was they just asked me a series of questions and I think what they were doing was they would ask you like casual questions

and then kind of like veer the conversation into the territory of like oh do you actually know a guy that might you know be doing anything against our country stuff like that they also needed time apparently to like upload all this shit to my phone. So I think that's the main reason why it took like so long. But yeah. How do you keep calm during that whole period? Yeah, that was, I was weirdly like very calm during that looking back.

Because I was just like, I know I'm just a YouTuber. I know I'm like not doing anything bad. I know I've even like said nice things about this country. And I usually say nice things about it. So like, why are they gonna do anything else? So I just waited for them to figure that out. And, but afterward, I thought about it. And I was, like, pretty angry, pretty annoyed about it.

And just ended that particular China trip pretty early after it. Are you afraid to go back to China now? I've actually been back multiple times since then. Well, China, it's tough. I lived there for six years. I had a lot of friends there, had girlfriends there, like all kinds of stuff.

So, like, in some ways, because I lived there for so long, like my social circle, social circle, excuse me, is about as big as the one I have in, like, New York or even bigger. So it'd be really tough to not go back there.

Tough to leave it back. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm not going to lie. Like, the, I think the time I went back after that, I was, like, pretty nervous rocking up the customs. but it was over in like five seconds. Didn't even give like a second glance to the passport.

Do you look for tails in countries? Like are you looking for people tailing you? In Russia, that was... Don't tell me you're going back to Russia. No, no, no, no. That's off limits. That's legally off limits too. They officially banned me for five years, but...

Don't get any ideas in 2030. fucking gone back either way. I'm putting that on the record. Okay. Did go to Ukraine though, but I don't know if you want to talk about that. You went to Ukraine? When? After you were arrested in Russia?

After I was arrested in Russia. Oh my God. All right. Where'd you go in Ukraine? I went from Lviv to Kiev to Odessa. You're just hitting all the hot spots. I just, yeah. Oh, I did go to the front lines at least.

Not that insane, I guess. But I did get bombed. I was there. So there's that. You got bombed? Is that on camera? Yeah, yeah. We pull that up. We could pull that one up. That's, uh. What's it like getting bombed in the middle of a war zone where 1.8 million casualties have happened over the last four and a half years? Pretty fucking shitty. Right? Pretty fucking shitty. Yeah. So, um, Ukraine was not what I expected. What the fuck did you expect? Yeah. Well, I go into that a bit, but, I go into that a bit, but this is actually me looking at a notification on my phone

saying that like 500 drones are coming to the city. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Okay. I was found in a hotel bathroom? Yeah. I was spoken out by a loud siren noise and then I got these messages on my phone

telling me that a fleet of drones is going across Ukraine specifically to LeViv right now. Right. And that's where you are. a shoulder. You still go drinking, even when there's sirens out? Oh, of course, dude.

Savage. That would be deep. That's what I didn't expect. In late on October of one year ago, while traveling across Russia as a slightly naive tourist, the local FSB, aka the KGB, they decided I must be an American spy.

In order to get time to investigate me, I was sentenced to jail for 17 days by a compromised judge, for such vague crimes as resisting authority. and calling the Russian invasion in Ukraine an invasion in my YouTube video. I was interrogated a lot during that time, and they would always come back to the same subject. Who do you know in Ukraine?

When was the last time you were there? They went through my phone looking for some hidden Ukrainian connection, but the truth was I had never been there. But I always promised to myself while I was in that jail. If I ever got out, I would go and visit Ukraine. I'd go and visit the people struggling for survival against the same ridiculous regime that had put me there. Well, now I'm free.

And I'm keeping my fucking promise. This is my trip to Ukraine. You're getting better at the intro. You can see the progression. Yeah, the progression's there. So you went to all the different places. So Kiev, Odessa, and then what's this place called in? The first place you were at?

Lviv. Lviv. And, yeah, that was really crazy because Lviv is supposed to be, like, the safer city because it's closer to the college quarter. Yeah. So apparently that attack that I experienced was the largest attack they had ever launched on that city during the war.

So it was like a huge surprise to like everyone there. And that was like second or third day in the country. And I was like, oh, Jesus, fuck. But I tried to make the most out of it. Unsurprisingly, the one political stance I heavily take because I'm very anti-Russian government at this point. I can understand that. Yeah.

And so I was like, all right, at least I can do some good here. I'm going to go to like the places that were hit, which I show in the video. I managed to convince the Ukrainian police to like let me in and film it because I was like, you know what? I'm not a journalist, but I'm going to show America what's happening in your country. So you don't consider yourself a journalist doing what you do?

That's a good question. I feel like I'm like in some ways trending in that direction, but no, I don't. I think I just try to follow and show what I think is interesting. And if I can help some people by doing that. Yeah, I think that's, I don't want to say by definition, but I think it's not the right term to use right here, but I can't think of the right word. It's like just kind of a consequence of you doing the work you do is that the result, is that there is an element of journalism to this from the outside like that's what i see you're showing me

places you're not going in there what's great is you know maybe minus like the rush ukraine thing because of your own experience like you're not going into these other places with like an agenda of here's what i want to get out of it which by the way that's good journalism but you are showing people stories of other people that exist around the world and places they exist in and what they think of the places that they exist in in a way that a lot of people don't do and that by definition I think is really giving people an element of journalism so that people can decide for themselves. Yeah.

I mean, I think I've said in my videos a few times I'm like an unintentional journalist. Yeah. Sometimes, like I just end up filming something that maybe a normal journalist wouldn't even get to because it's, you know, there's some, like, very unique situations that I get myself into and, to say the least.

That's for sure. And I'd just end up, like, reveal, stuff. I believe there's been times where like I've made a video and then I see like a news organization making a video about it like a year later or like a few months later or something like that. So yeah, yeah. Do you have, how long were you in Ukraine again? I think I spent about two weeks there in total. And what is the war for people at home because you were in several different places. So you got to see it from multiple different angles. Obviously we've seen. like there's drone attacks and stuff we hear about all the violence and all the continued casualties

on both sides but like what for lack of a better way of asking it what are the vibes of the people on the ground with respect to this being a war where it continues to be sometimes you know two weeks a bunch of guys fighting and killing each other over you know 14 yards yeah um it's wild the ukrainians were some of my favorite people in the entire world they like that intro i did with like the guys at the bar just being like, yeah, we got to keep drinking. We don't have a choice. That's the attitude of most of the people there, especially the people that are like still living there. I met so many people. There's a girl in the second video that I made in Ukraine. I made two of them in total where this girl could literally like move out, move to like Europe

or wherever and just find like a normal job. But she's like intentionally choosing to stay there and like support like the war effort and like the country and everything. And there's so many people like that. They're just like, you know what? Like, we got to support our country. It's fucked up what's happening. If I can't join the military, then I'll do something else to, like, help out. And, yeah, there was all this crazy.

What do they say about their government with respect to the leadership and the war and where things are? I don't think I met a single person inside Ukraine that disliked the government. Really? Yeah. They were all very supportive of it. I did meet Ukrainians outside of Ukraine that voiced opposition to the government, but they also had other weird opinions like maybe Russia should take over Ukraine. So, yeah.

Did you go, so you didn't go to those regions, though, like the Donbos? No, it's impossible to go to the Donbass. Yeah, that's pretty much like a death wish going there. I did have somebody that invited me to go to Kharkiv, which is a huge city that's right near the Russian border. And I almost went, but more just for like time reasons. I ended up skipping it. I'm like, hey, I'm in Kiev. There's already like sirens.

Going to go to Odessa. That's like getting bombed like all the time. Yeah, maybe that's enough. Maybe I'll like limit the danger. Yeah. Probably not a bad move. Yeah. You're putting yourself in the middle of the shit all over the place, you know?

Yeah. That's the one thing. It's like you get, you also get, you got to not fall into that trap of like, oh, there's amazing content here or whatever when you keep going harder and harder and harder because the fact of the matter is, think of all the stories you would leave on the table for the rest of your life. If you went somewhere, you really, it wasn't worth it to be and the worst thing happened, you know? Yeah.

No, yeah, I have to remind myself of that all the time. Does your family get worse? worried about you? Of course. Yeah. Yeah, they were obviously especially worried when I was in the prison. It was kind of difficult to contact them. You really know who your true friends are, like, when you end up in prison. Go to Russian prison, learn who's got your back. Yeah, yeah. I don't do that sometime. Everyone that actually cared about me was like doing everything they could to get me out of there. I try to find a lawyer, try to find some kind of aid organization. that was used to foreigners being in Russian jails. Yeah. So, yeah, kind of like because of my family, I've tried to, like, maybe tone it down a little bit since that. Doesn't sound like it.

I, yeah, I mean, I guess I do have like adrenaline rushes that like, you know, which I can't control. But I mean, yeah, there are like I, there are some locations I don't want to name, which I was thinking about going to, but then I crossed off the list for my friends and family. One of them were currently at war with. Yeah. So I do it again.

Yeah. Before you ever did this stuff, though, were you like an adrenaline junkie? And did you get that out in other ways? Yeah, you could say that. I've always liked climbing mountains. I've always like just going to places you're not supposed to go to, trespassing a little bit stuff like that

trespassing trespassing yeah into like you know just like train stations or whatever

I don't know um perfectly normal yeah yeah you know yeah it's just what you know it's just what you know

like the quiet dude who's like yeah just you have a good time always got a fucking wild streak to you yeah yeah you know you can't judge a book

by his cover that's right that's god damn right. Yeah. Spoken like a true spy. Exactly. Now, you did go to look at the Strait of Hormuz, and you put out a full, I think it was like a 50, 55 minute documentary on this, which, you know, until February 28th or actually even probably a few days after that, most people in the world didn't know what the Strait of Hormuz was, but then it became the most important thing because you realize how important it is from an economic standpoint to basically like world

trade continuing to happen and it has been the choke point in a lot of ways of the Iran conflict that continues to just go back and forth and somehow get worse. But you went and looked at it for yourself where we hear about a lot of these attacks and stuff happening. First of all, where were you like on the actual physical ground? So, well, at this moment, I'm in the UAE. But so where I went was the Omani side of the Strait of Formos. Oman is actually like separated into like two pieces. There's like one that's on the other side of the UAE, which like juts into the Strait of Formos. Okay.

That is the Strait of Formos, basically. And that's where I went. I went there. I went to, I got obsessed with like this one village that's on like the very tip of it. like the very tippity tip It's called Kumzar Yeah there it is And there's actually no roads that go there

You can only go there by boat And you went on a boat to go there Got on a damn boat You weren't worried about the mines and shit Or they nowhere near there You wouldn't be anywhere near there Yeah that would be probably like If you got closer to Iran

Right so they're not planting it like across the straight That's more on their actual got it Yeah I'm crazy but not that crazy All right that's good So you took a boat? Are we talking like a dingy boat or, you know? We're talking a dingy boat. A dingy boat. Are you rowing? Are you rowing?

Not rowing. It did have an engine, thankfully, a motor. Which it takes like from the place I got the boat. It took like an hour through pretty rough waters to like get to that village. Yeah, how is the water there? Is it like the Atlantic Ocean and the northeast here where you can't really see your hand or is it more clear? What's it like? Oh, that's a good question.

No, you can't really like see into the water. Got it. I would say. Yeah, it's not really brown, but. I mean, there's a lot of fucking chips coming through there and stuff. There's a lot of shit in there. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So you go up to, what was the name of that place again? Kumzar. Kumzar. Yeah. And that's an interesting place because if they speak like this weird language that like nobody else speaks because it used to be like this like meeting place for trade between like the Persians and Arabs and even the Portuguese at one point.

So like their language is a mixture of all these different languages. And so I was like, you know what? That sounds interesting. Let me try talking to the people. They were fairly friendly, I would say, except there was like a weird thing with the women there. Like the women did not want to be like talked to by a man. The men were like very overprotective. So I was like, okay, don't talk to the women.

Right. Got it. They're like, you have enough wives. yeah yeah exactly I don't have any room for number six no it was four earlier there's a fifth it just keeps increasing

you know it's like might have added one like during this conversation I don't know anyway like I saw I'm walking through the village and at some point this guy is like you know what you should go down like this road

there's like this cool like mountain thing like it's like probably like the best part of the village go see that. And so I'm like, I started walking that way. And then I can even have this on camera. Like, a police car just like starts rocking up on me from behind. And they're just like, get in the car. Oh, no. They don't say why. They're just like, get in the car. And so my boat driver is in there. I guess they found him first. Where you work for him. Yeah. And then they put me in the backseat.

And the only thing that makes me not panic as much is the fact that they didn't like slap any handcuffs on me, anything like that. So I'm just like hoping for the best at this point. No zip ties even? No, no, yeah. No bag on my head or anything. When the bag comes out, it's a problem. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

So the weird thing about this place is like, again, like you only get there by boat. And they're like, we need to take you to the beach. big police station. So we're going to throw you on this police boat and we're going to just ride you all the way back to like the bigger town of the area. So we do that. It's I go on the police boat. It's like an hour ride back. And they take me to this police station and they tell me like, yeah, we want to know why you were filming. We don't, you know, it's probably not a good idea that you're filming because, you know, there's like a conflict happening. And, I'm like, you know, that's a good point.

That's a good point. Like, thankfully, it wasn't too intense. Like, again, they're just, they're not, you know, restraining me or anything. They're just asking, like, what I'm doing. And after, I would say, about 15, 20 minutes, they're just like, okay, you know, probably best if you leave Oman because we don't really want you to film anything else. So, but they didn't, like, deport me or anything. They didn't deport you.

Yeah. So what'd they do? Just dump you out on the side of the road and say get lost? Pretty much. Pretty much. They're just like, okay, yeah, you can go. We're not going to give you a ride back to your hotel. It's not Kenya.

Less customer service here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So just walked back and I had rented a car, which was actually like a pretty complicated thing because I drove it from the UAE from Dubai. Into Oman. Into Oman. Yeah, you have to get like these special permits to do that.

Okay. So I'm like, all right, I think I'm going to get in that car and then drive back to Dubai and then just go to like a pool party or something. Yeah, that was that was pretty intense. Different world. Now, what did you see in the Strait of Hormuz, like with your own two eyes? What did it look like, you know, because like we have this picture in our head of like, do, do, doosh, do, do, do, shoo, and, you know, a bunch of boats backed up and, and like, people with guns on the ships and stuff like that. But the fact of the matter is it's probably more, I'm guessing of a. situation where it's like a lot of boredom until something happens. But what did you actually physically

see? Yeah, definitely more of the latter. But I did see, I believe I show that in the video, you see like just these boats like backed up. Some are like clearly like shipping container boats, ships. Some clearly had like petroleum on board. And so like you'll see like the traditional Omani fishing boats and then in the distance beyond them you'll just see like these tankers that have been like stuck there probably for months at that point so nice goats right there yeah they were guarding the bus stop there that's a bus stop that's a bus stop it looks like it ain't been used in a while oh never oh okay yeah got it well it's good thing I ran through the call I was actually asking him if the buses were still coming oh there they are yeah look who's helicopter

That's the Omani military. Yeah. So we're now in Haasab, which is the closest thing to civilization here in the Osama Peninsula. It's right here you got a spot promoting dives and crews into the straight of almost. Cool points of lunch.

Unfortunately, it seems to be shut down. Anyway, what I've heard is to get to the furthest northern tip of the Strait of Formos, the northern tip of this peninsula. What you have to do is you got to take one of these. You've got to take a boat. Because there's a village up there. That's a little more.

That speaks a unique language that's isolated. It's a little more than the rest of the peninsula, the rest of the country. Now, I might be the only person insane enough to want to take a boat tour in the Strait of Hormuz at this point in time. So I don't know.

I don't think, but it will take me, but let's find out. My friend. Tours over here. How much was the touring? I think I paid about, and there's like a tour, like it's not a real tour, but to get the boat operator and the ride over was about, I think it was like $300, something like that. Yeah. There were more expensive options, but... But what do you get on that?

Like a catered meal? Apparently, yes, you know. Because before the conflict, they were like bringing people to this village and like stuff like that. So but and to keep the rich tourists entertained, they would like give them lunch. By the way, when you were saying earlier you met Iranians who were talking about the war and saying they're happy to see it happening. You mentioned they were in Oman. Were you talking to some of these people when you went up to the tip there as well? They weren't there. They were in, I guess, like, you can call it the mainland of Oman, like, Muscatus.

I didn't actually film anything there. Got it. So when you were just coming in country? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so you didn't see anything like blow up or gunfire exchange out on the street you just saw backed up boats? Thankfully, yeah. Or for YouTube purposes, maybe not thankfully, but no. Thankfully, all things considered. Yeah, like I think this is the part where I'm just like trying to find the boat But when I'm actually on the boat and like looking out yeah you can see some of the boats back down Yeah let's let's get him on the boat let's see if we can find that Yeah, that might be about like five minutes later or something like that

Yeah, because now it's last afternoon and the wind is coming So maybe 10 So it will be difficult to go later Yeah right around An exciting journey. Potentially a very stupid journey. I'm not sure to say. It was at this moment.

The daughter of Tupac Chouacourt? You know a two. Got I forgot about that good. Oh, let's go. That's where we're listening to when you walk in the studio. Right, yeah. I knew I was dealing with some legends as well. Was that your driver?

A different guy. He was a different road driver. First of all, you'll notice that even though this is a line, This part of Oman is completely disconnected from like the heart of the country. Oh, wow. So it's like a last one. The UAE is in the middle. Yeah. And then another crazy thing is to get to the very tippity tip of this peninsula, of Moussandum, you can only go there by boat.

And there's a village there. In that village, they speak a rare language that no one else speaks. It's called Khomzari. It's a mixture of Persian, Hindi, Portuguese, Arabic, all these different places that traded. with the region and passed through. This is very exciting. I don't think anyone else is going to be there for good reason. But that's what we're going to do today.

We're going to go check out that village. To be honest, I found out about that when I was there. Maybe I'll see my people off the way at the Strait of Hormose. Who knows? Is it? Oh, that's the boat? Yeah, that's the boat driver. Thank you.

How are you? How are you? Yeah. Where? Lolo? Lolo? He's like, the white boy's crazy. All we can do now is just hope for the best.

You know Arabic? A lot of it's in a little bit. So he wanted you to explore his identity? Pretty much, yeah. And I mean, I'm pretty sure he would get in trouble for this also. The water is. choppy. You gotta feel like, yeah, you say, I can't believe I'm taking a photo on the damn

trade room. There they are. Yeah. What a mess. You're not worried about getting too close to those things? I was definitely pretty nervous on this boat. Like, more than some of the other trips I've been on. Because I realized like, holy shit, like, this was a really stupid thing to them.

tanked though. But yeah, I just hope for the best. It's my understanding also that these these tankers, they try to park like closer to Oman. So, I mean, as long as you don't go past them, I guess, you're okay. In moments like this, do you feel like the world gets really, really small because you're this little speck in the middle of it and yet you're at the heart of like the world's greatest crisis at that time? Yeah, that's an interesting way to put it. Yeah. That's how usually feel when I'm traveling I'm just like one person out of like eight billion and uh so much shit going on at this very moment hell yeah it's eight billion people all with their own thoughts where'd the name sabbatical come from by the way it's interesting um i actually like when i was in

china i was like trying to build like a startup company so it was going to be like this ed tech kind of thing and that was actually the name that I gave that company. I had to think about it for a while. And I was like, you know what? That name is not bad. Like, why don't I like reuse it for a YouTube channel? And that's basically it. I mean, I did also think about it like,

this is probably going to be like a four-month sematical. And here we are. I'm going to go later. I'll go back to some real job after. Where are you looking forward to going to next? The most. Yeah, well, I hinted at it before, Lebanon, possibly, possibly. That entire region again, don't want to like say it just in case, but multiple countries in the Middle East.

Okay. But I guess like on a personal entertainment level, this was supposed to be the year that I go back to Africa or like Sub-Saharan Africa, where I basically started the channel. And so I wanted to, like, do this, like, trip from Egypt down to South Africa somehow. Still figuring out how to do that by land, because there's some... Yeah, there's some insane countries in the way there. But, yeah, I'll do some variation of that later on. All right, don't get caught in Congo, for sure.

But the one other thing we haven't talked about today is you just got back from Cuba? I did just get back from Cuba. All right. How was that? And you weren't funded going there, were you? What was that? You weren't? Apparently they investigating that now, so I got to ask. I was not funded. I was fully self-funded. In fact, that was a problem. I did not bring enough funds with me to Cuba. And they don't have ATMs in case you haven't heard. Yeah.

So, yeah. No, it was a self-funded trip that I did with a friend of mine. and we flew into Havana from Cancun and the situation is definitely not getting better there. What's it like? So a perfect symbol of like the entire experience was as soon as we got to like this Airbnb, which interestingly, they have Airbnb's in Cuba. Did not know that beforehand. It's the only thing you could stay in now. I like all the lights in the city go off like complete blackout power outage and

for the majority of the time I was in Cuba like they had like no power anywhere so like the country's already like adapting to this like anyone that's trying to have like tourists stay at their hotel or whatever or their Airbnb they will have like a generator in there but I did end up staying in places there that did not have one because it's obviously expensive. And you just have to hope for like a miracle that like the power would stay on while you're sleeping because it's Cuba and it's like very hot.

They're in the night. But like there was other wild stuff. Like there was like no water in the faucets. So like I was just like, oh shit, all right. I guess no showers on this trip. The people of their understandably very paranoid. which is funny because I've done a lot of traveling in Latin America and they're some of the most like you know extroverted like oh put me on camera

like yo it's all let's go like they're very like relaxed with like being filmed Cubans not so much because you know they're I guess worried about saying the wrong thing and then being thrown in a Cuban dungeon so I did have even with that said I did have multiple Cubans that speaking very honest about what they thought about the government. And you got that on camera? I did, yeah. And I don't want to name names,

but there was another travel blogger that went there, who's kind of infamous now because he just recorded a ton of Cubans talking shit, doing crimes and stuff. And then supposedly they all got thrown in prison after he went. So trying to be responsible with this. But, yeah, very interestingly,

the Cuban people, what they most often told me was we think freedom is finally coming or like we think it's like just around the corner but you know we're getting really tired of this like can your like government hurry up and help out the only people I met that were like supportive of the Cuban government

as far as I could tell were like government employees like at like you know there was like this cool castle I went to and the lady was just like you should talk to Trump and tell him to stop doing this. Tell him to, you know. I want to get back. Yeah, I'll put that on the agenda.

Got a direct line to them, you know. How long? How long were you there? About, I think it was like 10 days or something like that. Wow. Yeah. You were never worried? I was worried flying in.

They have some, like, for Latin America, a pretty intense security at the airport. it's like they like have you empty like your entire bag they go through everything um like i didn't realize this beforehand but apparently like you're not allowed to bring like meta glasses into it which i just bought and then i don't even end up using them on the trip but i was like super paranoid about that going in they didn't they actually like pulled it out like looked at it and i guess didn't realize they were metaglasses but you didn't chance it uh like after Did you use them or?

No, yeah, I didn't. I just didn't really see like a reason to use it. And then I thought if I like, you know, the one thing that it might be useful for was like rocking up on like the police or something and like talking to them. And I was like, yeah, that's not a good idea. Yeah, it's not a smart move. Yeah, yeah.

It'd be interesting to see what happens there. Because again, it's like, you know, awful regime, feel bad for the people and all that. But like, you know, what do you get involved in and what don't? Yeah. The one common theme I've noticed in a lot of, of these countries, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, is that the people honestly do support, like, U.S. military action into these places. They generally hate their own governments and they really want the U.S. to intervene.

They'll be, like, more pro-Trump or whatever than, like, the most Republican person in America. Yeah. And it's just, it leads to, like, this, like, weird situation where it's like, yeah, yeah, like, I don't know what to think anymore. It's like, I want to help you. But I don't know if like our people should be dying for that. It's complicated because it's also what's the success going to be? What does success look like?

What does it take to get there? Is it even possible to get it? It's very different, you know, going in and abducting one guy in a coordinated microwave weapon military operation in Venezuela overnight versus going into a country and 93 million people protected by insane geography with a crazy regime in the dead. center of the Middle East. These are just not the same thing. So, you know, it's like I'm always willing to look at situations on a case-by-case basis for sure. It's just you do want to make sure you learn lessons and the mistakes you've made. And I feel like we don't do that sometimes here.

Yeah. I think that's an understanding. Yeah. Well, listen, dude, you're living in a very interesting life and you're obviously doing some pretty brave things out there in the world and going to get stories that people probably wouldn't see in many cases. So I think it's really, really cool. It's amazing to see how far you've come since the earliest video. And I really appreciate it when guys like you come in here from literally halfway around the world to tell these stories, it's always amazing. So thank you for doing this while you're home. It's really happy to be here. All right.

Everyone goes subscribe to sabbatical. If we collab this, you'll be able to subscribe on the actual title right there as well. You can just see his channel and check out everything that you've been doing for six years now. And we'll have to do this again, my friend. Yeah. Very nice. All right. Nice meeting you.

Everybody else, you know what it is. just to like it back to me. Peace. Hey guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you.