The Jordan Harbinger Show - 483: Drew Binsky | Vicarious Trips and Travel Tips

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

Drew Binsky (@drewbinsky) has been to 194 countries (probably more by the time you're done reading this sentence), shares his prolific adventures on YouTube, and hopes to inspire us all to become better world travelers. Take in the vicarious trips and travel tips with him here! What We Discuss with Drew Binsky: What it's like to spend 24 hours with an isolated tribe of pygmies in the middle of a forest in Africa. The story of Zablon Simintov, the last and only remaining Afghan Jew in the country of Afghanistan. What Drew considers to be the most dangerous country in the world (without even a close second), and how he fared during his six days there. Why the most expensive countries in the world are ones you've probably never heard of. How Drew protects himself when he's traveling in war zones and countries that are particularly hostile toward journalists. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/483 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Some of the scariest moments are hiding the fact that I'm a journalist at these checkpoints in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, even in Maritania, where I just was. I have a decoy-Sdecorter and it's always, I just press one button on my camera and it goes to the slot number two. I was like going into villages and filming women who gave me permission, and if they would have seen that, dude, they would have cut my head off on the spot.

So I have two iPhones for the same reason. I showed them my decoy iPhone, but they essentially thought it was a spy. I have a camera right now on my chest. I wasn't wearing this mic, but if I was man, I would not be right here doing this interview. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional organized crime figure, economic hitman, or neuroscientist. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom

into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, we now have episode starter packs. And these starter packs, these are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topics to help new listeners or just old listeners who are looking for something new in a new category here. Looking to get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started. to help somebody else get started, which of course we always appreciate. Today on the show, more of a story time type podcast, which means no homework for you as a listener. Yay, right? I know a lot of our shows are a little intense. You got to go grab the worksheets and download those and make time to apply this stuff. This is just you enjoying a little bit of fomo from a guy who's traveled a lot. Drew Binsky, he's a YouTuber that is just killing it with his travel videos.

I was introduced to him through a fan of the show, which again, I always appreciate when y'all do that. Drew has been to nearly every country in the world. He's managed to make a great living out of travel and making new friends and new places. Some of these places are pretty sketchy. Today we'll share stories of our own travels, especially in off-the-beaten path places like the Gaza Strip and Palestine. Syria, Lebanon, visiting the Pygmies in Africa, Somalia, hanging out with the last single Jewish guy. Not that he's single. It's just there's only one Jew in Afghanistan. Eritrea, Somalia, Turkmenistan, aka the North Korea of Central Asia. and more. We even dip into traveling through war zones, our scariest border crossings, and more. This was a fun one for me, and if you're looking for some light listening that doesn't involve our usual brain science or psychology elements, this is a great episode for you. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all of these authors, thinkers, creators every single week, it's because of the network. You've got to dig the well before you get thirsty, folks. I'm teaching you how to do this for free. You don't have to enter any of your personal details or anything like that.

Just go over to Jordan Harbinger.com slash course and take a look. It takes like five minutes a day. It's called six minute networking. What can I say? Five minute networking was taken. By the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they help out with the course. Come join us.

You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Drew Binsky. So I want to start with some of your wild travel stories. They are all actually pretty wild. I mean, the first video that I watched was you visiting these. Is it a tribe called the Pygmies, or is it like a ethnicity? What is Pygmy, actually? It's both.

It's an ethnic group and tribe who live in the forest, the rainforest of Central Africa. Okay. Yeah, my friend Justin Wren, who I think we talked about before the show, he's a fighter who went to visit them for some reason, I forgot now, and ends up donating his prize money to buy them clean water and land, because they get bullied a lot. Yeah, yeah. He's called the Big Pygmy.

Is that right? Big Pygmy, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I re-looked him up after we talked about it, and I had been in touch with him before about the Pygmy tribe. So we've spoken. He's a very inspiring guy. They only live in like three different countries in the central part of Africa, and they're very remote.

There's only a few thousand left. It's hard to find them. You have to have the right local guides, and luckily I did, and it was probably one of the craziest adventures in my life. Yeah, they show you, well, they. It's you. You film yourself walking through.

It's funny because, right, TV is usually they, and YouTube is usually, there's no they. It's like, who's they? That's me, man, holding the GoPro on my waist. But you film yourself walking through this tall grass and it's like, it looked like you went pretty far, like an hour plus. I mean, how, what was the trek like to get there? First of all, it was hot and humid as hell, you know, where we were. Maybe 100 Fahrenheit, but like extreme, like a Florida, like June in Florida type humidity. We drove seven hours from the capital of Bangi to this little town. And I was just with one local friend who spoke English.

he had a driver. So we didn't really know, we just knew the area of the pygmy. So we went to this town, met a couple locals, and they said, hey, you have to stop the car here and walk an hour and a half through these weeds that are as tall as my shoulders, as you saw in the video. And then hopefully you'll find the tribe. And if not, you could die trying because we didn't have enough water. So sure enough, we walked through the weeds. I almost gave up a few times. And boom, we like went through the last tree, whatever you want to call it, grass, tall grass. And then there were like little huts, and then we just found them. And they were really shocked to see anyone, a white person, of course, but they were shocked to see any visitors. And then the story started from there.

That's crazy. That is wild. I mean, you don't necessarily know if you're going to find anything, or like, what if you run into, I don't know much about this country, but were you worried about, like, walking into a cheetah or a freaking boa constrictor or something? I mean, you know? And malaria. I wasn't taking malaria pills at the time. I have taken them off and on. They give you these really bad nightmares, they mess up with your REM or your sleep cycle, your dream schedule. So they give you like these terrible nightmares. And that is enough to turn me off of the pills. I'd rather take my risk of getting malaria. But where we were specifically had a high risk of malaria. And I had shorts on and short sleeves. And so there's mosquitoes everywhere. So that was

my biggest concern. There's a lot of risks, man. I mean, if something happened to me, God forbid, the closest hospital would be back in Bangi, the capital. So I'd have to go on another seven. I'd have to walk back through the rainforest and then take a seven-hour car over these dirt roads back to the city. So it's an incredible risk, but high risk, high reward. Yeah, it seems like that's the kind of thing where you get carried out if something goes wrong. I mean, maybe you get carried out or maybe you just end up being buried in that little village. So who are these people? They're a tribe, they're an ethnicity, they're in the middle of the forest, but what's crazy to me is you'd ask them if they'd ever been to town, right, through your translator. And they'd never been out of

this little forest, jungle village that they built. They didn't go to the city. They didn't go buy stuff. They didn't go to school. I don't even know how they got Western clothing. I guess probably maybe people bring them there and dump off huge boxes and stuff and they're like, all right, this is my shirt now. Yeah, they were donated. So there is a little road and you can have a motorbike and every now and then someone passes through from the nearby town. And my assumption is that there was a big donation and they brought them to clothes because I didn't understand the Western clothes either, but they're 100% reliance off of the environment to live. One of the most beautiful things I've ever witnessed was one of the elderly men's, he went off and he killed a goat, you know, with these like bow and arrows.

They had some kind of shotguns and I guess they were donated by them as well. So they killed a gazelle. Did I say goat? It was a gazelle, which is a baby antelope. And I watched it happen. And then he brought, he slung it over his shoulder, brought it back into town, gutted it with his hands. within 10 minutes had it over a fire and 10 minutes later, you know, cooked it and served the whole, you know, 30 to 40 people were feasting on this gazelle. And it was just incredible. It just clicked. It just made perfect sense of how I don't want to use the word hunter-gatherer, but this is just how humans have survived all this time. And it was just a really amazing sight to witness. And after they all ate, they just went on with their lives. And so it was really cool. And I didn't eat it. They offered me some of the food,

but I had peanuts and stuff that I had brought and I just felt bad, you know, eating the limited food supplies that they had. So, but it was just really cool, man. It's such a cool experience. Yeah, you got kind of a front row seat to the first couple hundred thousand years of humanity for 99, well, for everyone, actually, for everyone alive at the time.

Exactly. And they were super friendly. And there was one, if you saw the video, there was one moment where I said, like, what does it like to, if I, when I visit you? Because I had never seen another white person ever. And he said something like, well, you're just a human. just like me. And that was a really touching thing to hear because that's my biggest realization

from visiting every country or every country. But three, is that all humans are the same. You know, we all, you know, we need a roof over our shoulder just over our heads to sleep. We need to eat when we're hungry. We need to feel loved by people around us. You know, we laugh when something's funny. We cry when something's sad. And that's something that I've realized from, you know, whether I'm with the pygmies in the middle of the Central African jungle, or I'm in Siberia and Russia, or I'm in Rome, Italy, or I'm in L.A. It doesn't matter where you are. People are always the same.

It was really cool to hear that little, that young guy say that to me. Did they think that you were, like, albino? Because I noticed in one of your video shots, there was an albino pygmy baby. There was an albino pygmy baby, and I learned that that was from a lot of incest that is happening because it's such a small community, and they can't, you know,

they need to walk, like, a full day or longer to reach the next set of pygmies. and they're all so closely genetically related. So I was told through research and also by local friends that there's a lot of incest. And that's why there was three albino childs in this small community that I was with. And it was really interesting. I don't know if they recognize me as an albino. I don't know if they know.

I really don't know the answer to that. But they knew I was foreign. I told them I was from the U.S. They'd never heard of the U.S., but I just told them that I come from a different place. And I spent 24 hours with them. It was fascinating. It was so cool, man. They must know that your hair is dark, so you're not. You're just a really, really white person

compared to them. Right. Right. And the local guy that we were with who we picked up on the way brought a bunch of palm wine. So you saw in the video, they were all like up all night, you know, doing it. Yeah, they were lit. They were so lit. They were so wasted, man. I guess it's like once a year for them that they get brought this local wine. The wine is grown, you know, in the trees in the jungle. So it's not a foreign substance to them. It's palm wine, which is popular all across the African continent. But dude, they were up all night drinking that thing and, like, beating the drum. And I couldn't even fall asleep. I was trying to sleep, you know, on the floor next to them. But literally, like, the video opens up at like 7 a.m. during sunrise. And I'm like, I've just been up all night,

like, hearing the pygmies, like drinking and singing and dancing. And it was just the most surreal celebration of life. And it was incredible. They didn't just drink, though. They were rolling up some dubies. I was going to announce it here. I don't know how PG-13 or whatever. They have their own source of weed, which they get from the jungle, which makes perfect sense. And I shared it with them. This is pre-COVID, by the way. But they rolled it up and they smoked it out of a leaf. And I just took a couple of rips, definitely enough to feel something.

It was not the strongest stuff I've ever tried, but it was they have their own supply. And that just shows again that we're all humans are the same. And everyone is trying to find an alternate state of happiness. So it was so cool, man. Well, marijuana, from what I understand, I'm no expert at all, but it's been sort of bread and I don't know if that's a right word.

You know, when you, yeah, I guess it's been cultivated so that it's super strong compared to what it was, even in like 1968, 1978, 1973, USA, used to smoke the whole joint by, you know, yourself or with a friend and you'd be like, okay, I'm high.

Now, if you're anything like me, you have one hit and you're like, okay, I hate this, why do people like this? Everyone's looking at me. I want to curl up in a fetal position, This is not fun. You know, I'm going home now. That's the marijuana we have now.

And so I think what they have is far different. It's more natural. You know, it's just more, it's probably a tenth of the THC that we have and what we get at the dispensary here. Yeah, and what you just said is the reason why I don't like smoking because I feel too anxious and I don't like being too high and just like out of control of my own thoughts.

Sure. You're right. What we smoked with them was very chill and it was just a very mellow high and everybody was feeling it. And they were just giggling around. there was some funny shots I had of them just like giggling at nothing, just giggling at the fact of we were face to face, just hanging out.

When people ask me what's my favorite travel experience, I always go back to that story of the Pygmies. And I think in my future, my evolution of like content creation, and when I finish the countries, I want to find more remote tribes like the Pygmies. You know, there's a lot in the Amazon. There's a lot in Siberia and in Eastern Russia and in Papua New Guinea. And I think these are the most fun stories for me to tell. And they're the most rewarding stories, I think, for my audience to hear.

about. And I think I, you know, I see myself having, you know, maybe a crew, people filming and making higher quality. Instead of going for 24 hours, I would go for a week and, like, produce this amazing 40-minute documentary in my own style. But that's kind of how I see my future. And the Pygnees is a primary example of that. Yeah, you can call it Jews in the Jungle. Something like that, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. That's going to be one of those things that's funny right now and sounds incredibly racist or horrible in 20 years and tanks my entire career. I'm just calling that out right now. It should be okay. I can't think of anything wrong with it, but you know, our discussion before the show was that, you know, you're, well, in fact,

that's on that note, you went to Afghanistan, but you're Jewish and you visited the one other, there's one Jew in Afghanistan, and you went and hung out with them. Tell me what that was all about. Yeah, I've actually been Afghanistan twice. I've spent five weeks in my life in the country. It's an amazing place. But on my first visit, I wasn't planning to go to Kabul, which is a capital city. I was in a place called Mazar Sharif in the northeast. And my local friend slash tour guide told me, hey, did you know there's one Jewish person left in Afghanistan? I was like, get out of here.

He knew I was Jewish. I was like, there's no way. So I looked him up online, and he's living in a synagogue or a Jewish temple, former synagogue in Kabul. So the next morning, we booked a flight, showed out. Kabul is extremely dangerous. That's why I wasn't planning to go, but showed up. And we knocked on a bunch of doors, went in the areas that we thought we could find him. And it took about an hour.

Finally, we found him. We rolled up. His name is Zablon Simitov, about a 63-year-old man whose entire family left him for Israel and for Europe. He still as a wife and kids, they don't live in the same country. He wanted to stay in Afghanistan because he loves it so much. And immediately I walked in and there was this like spiritual connection because he'd never really met another Jewish person in the last. I think the BBC went and did one piece on him. but it wasn't Jews that physically went to meet him.

So the fact that I was Jewish, he just felt this amazing connection, and so did I. And he didn't speak any English, but through a translator, through my friend, we were able to connect and hear his crazy life story about how the Taliban put him in prison from several months, and they burned all of his possessions, and they threatened to kill him. And until now, he's in danger of being killed. And I told him, hey, listen, I don't want to put you on camera and expose you if you don't want. He goes, no, no, no, I've already lived through the worst of the worst of the worst. worst. And I don't want to do that because if I don't share my story, then essentially they win.

And I want to still preserve my culture and I want to let the world know about it. So he was very open to sharing his story, which was amazing. But I spent a full day with him and, you know, we read some Torah together. And he does it in the Jewish tradition, you blow the shofar, which is like the horn of a bull. And he could know how to how to blow it. And I did. And so that was, you know, he let me do it and it was incredible. I was most amazed how he's orthodox, which is like extremely religious and how he keeps these practices and the fact that there's no other people in Afghanistan that are Jewish. Nobody keeps kosher. You know, kosher is like the Jewish diet, but he does. The whole story was incredible and I really enjoyed my experience with him.

I think Judaism and Islam have enough commonality where keeping kosher in an Islamic country is probably not nearly as hard as keeping kosher in the United States or Western Europe because I think halal, right, is essentially like Islamic kosher, and the rules are probably almost the same. You're exactly right. They don't eat pork, both religions, and the way that they do eat meat, beef or chicken, it has to be slaughtered in the name of Allah, in the name of God.

Same in kosher, same in halal. It's almost exactly the same. What you find in halal, you can find it kosher. So you're exactly right, but it still was just fascinating how he just keeps all of his, like Shabbat, if you're familiar with Shabbat on Friday night. He's the only one that's keeping this by himself in his little house, sitting on his floor. They don't have couches or beds in Afghanistan in Central Asia and Middle East.

They prefer to just chill on the floor. They put like a little rug and they sit and they sleep on the floor. So that's actually how I found him. When I walked in the door, he was just sitting on the floor, just eating bread or whatever. So I don't know. What a crazy cool story. And that kind of triggered this Jewish series for my channel. And I went in Turkmenistan and I found this Jewish loose.

lady who's living there. In Ethiopia, I found this Jewish tribe. There's thousands of them still living in northern Ethiopia, and they're super religious. So I'm not religiously Jewish. I'm culturally Jewish in the sense of I like to go to these faraway corners of the world and find Jewish communities and connect with them and just be like, hey, what's up? I'm also Jewish. You know, let's hang out. And like, an albino Jew has come to visit us. In Ethiopia, they may have thought so, but it's so cool to see. I know all the prayers from growing up and going to Hebrew school and having a bar mitzvah and they have the same prayers. When I was in Yemen, my tour guide was actually Jewish, but he didn't want to be on camera about it.

But I can see, I can say it now. But we had a Shabbat together. And when I started saying the prayer, he started crying because he thought his Judaism in Yemen was so far removed from the Jewish of the Western world, Judaism of the Western world. And he started crying because he's like, that's the same prayer that I know. And I was like, dude, that's such a cool moment. So Judaism is just kind of like an offshoot of my content, but it's becoming more relatable, I think, to people around the world. It's wild that the chief of the pygmies had never heard of the United States and that you're finding these connections with people that live in some of the most remote slash dangerous parts of the whole world. I mean, this guy, the Jewish guy from Afghanistan who's still in Afghanistan, do you worry about that guy?

I mean, once the USA leaves Afghanistan, the Taliban is going to creep in there in about a week and a half. Listen, he gave me the full consent to make the video and I would never put him in that risk to do it. I just mean worried about him just in general, not because of something you did, just period. Yeah, I do worry about him. I do. Because the Taliban is very scary. Right now, they're controlling more and more of the country. When I went, the first time, they were controlling 50% of all the land in Afghanistan.

Now it's like 65% because I went back about two months ago. So I am very worried that the Taliban, when the U.S. pulls out, which it's looking like the Taliban will control the whole country like they did before 9-11. and up until 2000 and early 2000. So it's very scary. There's a major offensive going on right now that I just read about yesterday. I mean, depending on when we air this,

it could have been months ago, right? But as of what I forget what month it is, as of February 2021, there's a major offensive and they're just pushing out the Afghan army and the police and they're paying people to leave and if they don't go, then they're just invading and taking over the stations. And I think now it's just like,

it's the writings on the wall and everybody that I know who is, working in Afghanistan right now. I mean, the common refrain is the second we leave, this place is going to fall. I mean, just like not even, when I say a week, week and a half, I mean, maybe that long. They might just roll in there and meet some scattered resistance while people escape and that's it. I mean, they're really not. I guess at the end of the day, he's going to say, look, his only defense is you already punished me for being Jewish. I was already in prison. Leave me alone. I'm an old man. I mean, that's hopefully going to fly, right? Hope so. There's definitely a general consensus on the

streets of Afghanistan. Everyone is scared of the Taliban. My local friend, Anur, who's a good friend, who's a tour guide, and it's very scary that how much they rely on the U.S.'s presence of being there to fight away the Taliban. And as soon as we leave, sadly, the U.S. wants to leave so they can kind of say, oh, look, we made peace in Afghanistan. We did our job. We're out. But for all the local civilians and the innocent people of Afghanistan, their lives are going to be in crazy, more danger than they already are of the Taliban, just killing innocent people and kidnapping them. It's really sad, but it's just a reality of Afghanistan.

Yeah, I think you're lucky to have gone when you went, because I don't know, I don't think in a year or two you're going to be able to roll into Afghanistan as a tourist who's Jewish from the United States. I think that would be a suicidal visa. Yeah. And just a really, really quick note of that. In Myanmar, I was there one year ago today. Oh, wow.

on Valentine's Day with my girlfriend at 2020. It was fun. Now there's a coup that has come in. The military has taken control of Myanmar. And pre-2011, it was like impossible to visit. They closed the borders to tourism. Now they've just closed the borders again to tourism indefinitely. So I don't even know when I can go back to Myanmar again.

It's just crazy how the world is and just the timing of visiting countries. And I was just in Baghdad also. We can talk about that if you want. But yeah, that might be off limits again. So I don't know. I'm just really lucky with timing. I think it's also you're lucky you're traveling when, how old are you right now? 29.

29, yeah. So when you become, I think it happened around like 35, 36 for me, I just went, you know, I could die doing some of this shit, man. And then I stopped doing a lot of the risky stuff that I was doing. And I stopped going to North Korea. I stopped being like, yeah, let's just hitchhike there through Bosnia, which I did a bunch, and it was fine. And you'd get arrested by the cops, and then you'd bribed your way out.

And you'd be laughing about it as you had a beer. Now I'm like, they could have just thrown us off the cliff. So much risk. I did hitchhacked through Bosnia. Did you actually do too? I did that. Yeah, I hitchacked through Bosnia too. It's the only country I've hitchacked in.

And I've been to North Korea once. We are now blacklisted to go back as a U.S. passport holder. But yeah, I think about this stuff all the time. I mean, the most dangerous country in the world by far does not even a close second place in terms of all around risk is Yemen. Yemen is a free for all. You know, there's no law. There's no legislative there.

If something happens to you in Yemen, nobody's going to bail you out. There's no U.S. Embassy. There's nobody to call. There's no system. There's no court that someone can bail you out. If you get kidnapped or if something happens, you're gone in Yemen. And there's no cell phone service. It only works in the middle of the main cities, which I wasn't in any main cities. There's no cell phone service. You have to get like a burner phone. The locals use this like, it only works to call local numbers. So I couldn't get that because if I needed to call for help, I don't have any Yemeni friends to call with a local number. So my phone didn't work. There's no Wi-Fi in Yemen. It's another level of danger.

And I went there by myself, which is probably the craziest thing I've ever done. Yeah. I'm increasingly realizing more and more that, dude, I'm so insanely stupid from doing some of these things. But once again, I'm the only one to go into these places and make content and tell these stories. And for me, it's worth it. As a 29-year-old, maybe when I'm 35, we'll talk again and I won't be doing these things.

No, you'll be going, wow, I'm glad I did that when I did. Like, it'll be fun, it'll be exciting. I don't regret it. I'm just like, okay, that was lucky, right? It's kind of, it's more of that kind of thing. And I went to, when I lived in Israel in 2000, I, when you were nine years old, I went to the Gaza strip with a friend of mine, not really getting what was going on at all. I mean, I knew that what it was, but I didn't know, no.

And she had gone to college with some girl who was Palestinian. That girl had returned home. She's like, I want to go visit my friend. Can you come with me? I said, I don't know. maybe next time she said, I can't go without you because it's too dangerous and I'm not going to be going again because it's dangerous. And I was like, all right, I got nothing to do this week. Let's go. And we drove all the way to the Gaza Strip, go through the Israeli checkpoint, get picked up by this,

her friend's brother and father. We're driving through and I'm like, wow, this is a really sketchy looking place. And they're like, yeah, it's a refugee camp and we can't leave. And I went, oh, okay, I kind of get it now. Like I didn't really know. know what was going on. I was 20. I wasn't really paying that close of attention. I'd never really read up on that kind of thing. I mean, I'd read about the Palestinian conflict, but that was kind of it. And then I remember walking around the Gaza Strip, and people would be like curious and following me around, but I was with their brothers. So I wasn't really in danger, danger, but they were just kind of like, who's that guy? He kept saying, they're asking if you're Jewish. They're asking if you're Jewish.

They're asking if you're Jewish. Because they would be like, what's that guy doing here? How do you know that guy? You're not Jewish, right? I am. You are Jewish? Yeah, it's like a German, Yiddish, possibly, not sure. Yeah. And then on the older, you know, when you go back generations, it's like, Melnick, Livshitz, you know, that kind of stuff, the super Jewish names. But, you know, we would talk with these Palestinian police officers, and they would talk casually. And I mean, scary casually. Yeah, we arrested this guy the other day and we made him sit on a bottle. And I'd be like, what do they mean when they say sit on a bottle? And they're like, they shove a glass Coca-Cola bottle up the guy's ass.

And I'm like, okay, they literally mean that. And they're like, yeah, sit on the bottle, sit on the bottle. I'm like, that was like their favorite kind of torture. And I'm like, who are they doing this to? And they're like, oh, yeah, just people they catch stealing things. And I'm like, oh my God, these people are, like, and what are they doing? They're torturing each other. ISIS stuff.

It was like ISIS. I mean, they weren't beheading people. They weren't cutting off your arm. But the police were just like casually laughing. They'd be like, yeah, sit on the bottle. sit on the bottle. I know if we catch somebody, we'll make them sit on the bottle. And I'm like, this is just creepy. And the house that I stayed in, super nice people, they worked for the Palestinian Authority. But on the wall, they had this big green flag. And I said, is that the

Palestinian Authority flag? And they said, no, that's a Hezbollah flag. And I went, aren't those two things kind of like, aren't you a button heads? And they're like, yeah, nobody knows where Hezbollah supporters. So maybe we should take the flag down. So they took the flag down. And they said, did you take a picture of that? Because I told them earlier, I'd been taking pictures of their house. I hope you don't mind. They were like, fine. And then they said, please don't share the photo of the flag, because it will put our whole family in danger because our dad works for Yasser Arafat, but is like supporting the enemies of the Palestinian Authority. I mean, it was just a wild experience. You know, sitting on the roof, you'd see the Israeli jeeps drive by, shine spotlights on

you. There was a girl in the family. And so we would go outside and hang out, like all of us. And if I had to go to the bathroom, I had to walk pretty far away from the girl. You know, if you're hanging out with the girl in the United States and there's a bunch of people, you walk around the corner a little bit, you take a leak, nobody. She was like, go far that way because I can't really be around, I can't even be spotted with you whipping it out while I'm like within 50 yards. You know, it's just not a good look. Two days ago, not to change your subject, we'll come back to this. Two days ago, I was in Maritania, where I just came from and doing a crazy iron ore train right across the Sahara. But I was staying at a local family's house and we were eating on the floor with our hands. Amazing food, by the way, in Martina. It's like

Moroccan food. But there were women in the house and they went to the faraway room just to eat. I mean, it wasn't like the next room. Like they had to choose the most faraway room in the house to eat separately than us. So, I mean, yeah, that's the same Islamic culture of what you're saying. Is it because they were taking off their hijab or whatever? I never asked any questions. I don't know if they took off their, you know, hijab and their protection, but or if they just wanted to separate men and women from eating. But I mean, in Judaism, you know, when you go to the Western Wall, they pray in different parts of the wall. So it's deeply rooted in the culture. But yeah, dude, I can't believe you went to Gaza. That is like, it's actually impossible to go there right now. It's impossible.

Even if you're the top journalist of the top, it doesn't matter if you have, like, there's no way to go to Gaza at all. With an American passport and Jewish being Jewish. So the fact that it's so off limits makes me want to go so badly just to see what the hell's happening there. But I know that's not a place. I'll be going into time soon. I think you could go to a set. but that's obviously not the same thing. That's like going to an all-inclusive resort in Mexico and being like, I've seen Mexico, you know, when I went to the beach there, you have to pass this Israeli, like, mini checkpoint because they don't want people to have free access to the ocean. But at the time in 2000, before the second Intifada started, it was pretty flexible. There's garbage piles on the beach,

just huge piles, because I guess stuff washes ashore from Egypt, but also they just throw things in there and then it comes back. And what was shocking was, first of all, I was swimming in the ocean, and the people would surround me and it started to feel a little dangerous because I'm trying to like tread water in waves and they're all so curious they're coming near me but they were all so friendly and it was like that feeling you must have when you go to an African country and everyone's surrounding you and just trying to touch you because they're like wow look at this guy they weren't touching me but it was damn close the women though would go in the ocean but they had the full burka on and they would just walk into the water and then walk back out with just

soaking wet robes because they couldn't undress at all. Dude, I was in Dahab, Egypt, which is on the Red Sea, great scuba diving spot. I was there about six months ago, and there was a spot for women that were in the water, and they were in the full burqa headwear. They had these snorkeling goggles on over the... It was just, I was like, wow.

That's crazy. Hey, I have no judgment at all. That's their religion. That's what they want to do. But just seeing that was very, very interesting. It's shocking, and I also, I'm laughing not at that. I'm laughing because I can't imagine a snorkeling,

mask works when it's over top of like a burqa. I mean, they're used to it, so somehow they made it work. Yeah. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Drew Binsky. We'll be right back. And now back to Drew Binski on the Jordan Harbinger show. The one time that I almost possibly died in Gaza actually wasn't anything to do with Palestinians at all.

I was walking and she said, if you're going to pee pee in the desert, but don't go too far, you know, left because there's a sewer pit. that like all the sewage is in, and she's like, you'll smell it. You're not going to miss it, but you could slide in because it's sand. So I'm going to the right. And in front of me, about 100 yards, if that is the Egyptian border, which is a wall and a fence and guard towers. But to the right is the water and then Israeli checkpoints. So I'm in the desert going to the bathroom, and I think no one can see this. And a Israeli spotlight aims right at me. And of course, now 2020 hindsight, they have FLUR, which is like heat vision. And they can see

when someone's walking towards them in the dark, there's probably an alarm that goes off. And they're yelling through the bullhorn and they're yelling in Arabic. And I'm like, I don't understand because I speak English. And I'm just like, hands up, dick out. You know, like, go in.

And they, you can see after a while that they realize what's going on. And they basically like come out and with the spotlight on and they kind of like wave me off from what I can see. and I just sort of like waddle back, and they left us alone. But the people I was with were, like, not thrilled because they thought, great, now they're

going to come over to our house and be like, where's the guy who tried to approach the checkpoint? I think the tell was that I was, that I had my wang out. No, no, usually. You put a very vivid scene in my head of like what it was like to be yelled at with, as you're peeing on the Gaza slash Egypt slash Israel border. Dude, that's a pretty crazy story, man. Yeah, I think they were like, probably not. of terrorists because usually those guys don't approach like with their bottoms down and basically

at their ankles and their hands of the air. Thank you for reminding me of that story. I haven't told it in 15 plus years. I'm glad all your listeners can hear it. I love going to places like that, but you're right. Like I think the original point was at one point in your life you're going to go, this is just too freaking scary, too freaking dangerous. Speaking of, you went to Somalia, which is on my list because it's got to be amazing. But speaking of dangerous places, man. that's got to be towards the top of the list. Jordan, you have no idea, man. Mogadishu as a city is the most dangerous city in the world.

I said Yemen is the most dangerous country as a country. I didn't really go to cities in Yemen, big cities. Mogadishu, so al-Shabaab is an offshoot of al-Qaeda or ISIS, whatever you want. They're all the same. They are just car explosions. They're going into hotels with guns and just, I mean, they're like hardcore. So let me tell you one story about Mogadishu. I went with my friend Lee Abamanti, who's been to every country in the world.

He's now 42, but when he did it, he was the youngest American to do it 10 years ago. Great friend and a mentor. So he came out. We did Ethiopia together and then we flew into Mogadishu. We got our visa on arrival through a local Somali friend who was kind enough to help us out. A friend that I know through Instagram, but we show up. We stay at Peace Hotel. That's one of the only hotels in the city that's safe.

It's called Peace Hotel. To get from the airport to the hotel was one mile. It was a 20-minute drive because of all the checkpoints. Once again, one month. mile, 20 minute drive. When we show up at the main gate, there are these like, you've probably seen them before, these bags of sand, but like, they're like 10 tons each. So like you can't push them over. They like, they can stop like a plane coming through. They're that heavy. And the whole thing is barricaded, but it's in like a maze. So you do the first checkpoint and then the car drives and it

does like five more turns. There's another checkpoint. Five more turns, another checkpoint. All of something like, where are we going? Finally, welcome to Peace Hotel. You get in. It's like this beautiful garden, there's a ping pong table, a pool table, like a little cafe, and just like, what is going on? So we check in the guy's name is, I think his name is Hussein, like the guy who runs the hotel, very nice guy. So he takes, he goes before, we need to do orientation. Okay, let's do orientation. We go down like two staircases.

We're like 50 feet below the ground, okay? We enter this room. It's like straight up like a movie. There's all these monitors. We're in Somalia, okay? There's all these monitors, crazy technology. He has a camera set up, cameras, plural, all over the city so he can see live updates of what's going on a Mogadishu.

So he pulls up this like Google Mac thing. He's like, okay, get comfortable. We get comfortable. He's like, no pictures in here. I was like, fine. He pulls up all these little red dots on the map of Mogadishu. Go see all these dots? These are all of the terrorist attacks that have happened within the last year in Mogadishu.

The whole city is covered in red dots. He's like, we are located here. You know, just a few weeks ago, this hotel was bomb. on this. And me and my friend Lee are just like, dude, what are we doing right now? It was a crazy orientation. And then throughout the trip of Mogadishu, we could only leave for like two hours a day. And when we left, why is that? Safety. They didn't want us. We huge threat to get kidnapped. If anyone saw us there, a huge kidnapping threat. So when we had when we left, we were in a bulletproof truck, bulletproof windows and black windows. There was a truck in front of us and a pickup truck

and a pickup truck behind us. Both pickup trucks in front and behind had four guys and full bulletproof helmets, military gun. So there's four guys sitting on each corner of the pickup truck for our safety. And every time we would pull up to like a beach that we wanted to see, they all the eight guys would get out

and like fucking scout the place like crazy. And they had like their gun. Dude, I'm not making this up at all. They like scouted out. They would like look over fences, like look through corners and like, okay, you have 20 minutes to walk around this beach. and they were like guns out as we were walking

and then we'd get back in the car and go to the next place. It was absolutely insane. One last note on Mogadishu, we went to this ice cream shop, which is this like Shisha place, you know, really cool ice cream place. This is a year ago when I was in Mogadishu

two months ago, so 10 months after I left, whole place was bombed, destroyed, 15 people in five. You can look it up right now. 15 people were killed in this ice cream shop. Everything is destroyed. It's sad, man. It's very sad. It's a shame.

Somalia, I haven't been there, obviously, but I meet tons of Somalians here in the United States, whether it's New York, Denver, somewhere around L.A., these are some of the friendliest people that I've ever encountered, just as a culture. I'm not sure what it is, but they're all smiles all the time, generally. Obviously, Al-Shabaab is the major exception to that, where they want to just kill everything that moves.

It's got to be, what people don't realize is, war zones are really expensive. And I think journalists know this because you go there and you go $300 for breakfast in, I can't remember, like Angola or something. You know, it's just like you'll spend $100 to get some fruit there because it's, that doesn't, they can't get it in. Angola is a most expensive country, by the way, like, for tourism. Angola?

That doesn't surprise me. And what, Equatorial Guinea? Equatorial Guinea, yeah. Exactly what you said. There's like, it's a monopoly on tourism because there's one nice hotel. And if you don't want to sleep in a little box on the street with a local family, then you sleep in a nice hotel. And it's $400 a night, and you pay the $400 bucks a night because that's all you can do.

Right. Yeah, and you get your, like, you get what you get in that particular hotel. Well, anybody there who stays at that hotel is working for an oil company, NGO, CNN, yeah, with a world health organization. So they're like, these people are not paying their own money. They don't care, jack the prices up. You mentioned the bodyguard situation in Mogadishu. How much is it to have eight guys follow you around with guns all day?

Good question. Nobody asked me prices about this. I think it was about 2,500 all-in for three days in Mogadishu, including the hotel and including the security protection and the food. It's like an all-in package. Yeah. That's about the most I've ever spent for any. That's about almost a thousand a day.

I never spend that much money. Libya is the only other country that I had to spend that much for the visa and the tour guide and stuff. But yeah, it's pretty pricey. A guy I know who was on this show actually was kidnapped in Somalia by pirates and kept on a boat for, I want to say, two, two and a half years. And they, I don't have any stories to share like that, but that's wild. Yeah, good. You're lucky you don't, man.

That would put a stop to your traveling, I think, pretty quick. He was lucky to survive. He got really sick, you know, because they're feeding you just crap, and they're not going to give you good food. And he was so sick, and he had to see a doctor. And they're like, yeah, we'll bring you a doctor. And what they do is they call, like, someone's uncle who has given Tylenol to somebody one time because he used to live in Canada.

And so that guy's like, yeah, this guy's going to die. And they're like, oh, okay, you should take him to a real hospital, but I know you can't because he's a kidnapping prisoner. So, you know, try and drink water and sleep on the concrete floor and the cardboard that they give you as like a pillow. I mean, he was in a miserable, miserable situation. He got kidnapped going from the airport. He's a journalist, so he was going to do some sort of interviewing

coincidentally about Somali pirates. I'll get the episode number and I'll put in the show notes for people that are wondering. His name is Michael Scott Moore. He was on this show earlier. a couple years ago. He was doing a report or was going to do a report on pirates. He rolled to a checkpoint. A couple guys in a technical, which is a truck, came up, machine gun in the back, and they said, get in. And he was like, guess these guys aren't with us. And his friend, who was like an hour late for some reason, he got to the point just fine and didn't get kidnapped. So he basically

got intercepted during that one mile. You think, how many checkpoints do you need in a mile? Enough to make sure that you can't get intercepted. And apparently even then you still can't. I know all about checkpoints, man. The reason I've developed severe anxiety is because of being stuck at checkpoints. I was in one checkpoint in Yemen on the middle of the freeway, and they're like makeshift checkpoints. They have like a little rope that they attach. These are all run by different groups. Some of them are terrorism groups.

Some of them are Al-Qaeda. There's ISIS flags like wait. Like you said, you saw the Hezbole flag. I've seen ISIS flags like waving on the street. So you don't know who's stopping you. They saw my camera. I'm also hiding my profession as I'm a journalist. Yeah, for sure.

It's extremely risky to go to these countries. the same risk that your friend had. I was on the side of the road in Yemen. They saw my camera. I'm really smart in that I have two SD cards. My camera has two slots. So one is all my video footage. And the other one is just like photos, like selfies and just photos of my breakfast. Just in case they look through my camera. Decoy SD card. I have a decoy SD card. And it's always, I just press one button on my camera and it goes to the slot number two. This is like a genius trick, man. If they would have seen all the, I was like going in the villages and filming women who gave me permission.

And if they would have seen that, dude, they would have cut my head off on the spot. So I was showing the decoy card, but they were still suspicious. I have two iPhones for the same reason. I showed them my decoy iPhone, but they made me take off, step out of the car, take off my shirt, okay?

Take off my shirt. I was wearing this traditional Islamic, like, dress, this long outfit. So I had to take it off, empty all my pockets, put my hands on the car. They were like searching everything of me. They essentially thought I was a spy.

That's what they were suspicious. about. So they were searching for like, dude, if they saw, I have a camera right now on my chest, which I hide. Oh, God. Yeah, the microphone. Dude, I'll have a microphone. When I travel, I don't like to I don't like to clip on the mic. It just looks like two stage. So I wasn't wearing this mic. But if I was, man, I would not be right here doing this interview. So yeah, my point is some of the scariest moments are hiding the fact that I'm a journalist at these checkpoints in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, even in Maritania, where I just was, like, dude, it's so stressful. And my biggest fear is getting kidnapped, period.

Yeah. And this, going through these checkpoints, you're in their hands. Whatever they want to do, they can do. And the thing is, they use their phone and they call the next checkpoint, hey, we got an American coming. Like, it would be so easy for them to kidnap me, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. The fact that I haven't been kidnapped is kind of a miracle, because I've traveled by land

through all these countries. I think you're right. I think you're really lucky. I went to Mexico, got in a fake taxi, and that was my first, and I put this in air quotes as kidnapping, because that's a green belt, maybe even a yellow belt kidnapping. Well, I've been in Serbia, and I had it happen there, but it was, you know, state security officers, and I lived there for a while, so I know it's not a crazy place. But you're going to places where there are no tourists, and so you are just like, they're licking

their chops when they think they can get even a hundred bucks for, you know, one of your fingers, right? Yeah, and there's no, once again, there's no U.S. embassies in these. countries for obvious reasons. So if something happens to me, who do I call? My phone doesn't work in the middle of Yemen or even in the middle of Afghanistan. Like the sim, you guys don't know, it's hard to let you know that I can't just use my phone to call for help. So I just take all the precautions I can. And in these situations, I'm very, very calm. You know, you say salam al-a-com, you know, you just say what you can say to them, which means may peace be upon you. It's a way to say hello in Arabic, for those who don't know. And I usually have, you know, some kind of head scarf on. And I have,

I always have my beard because that's like, I just shaved yesterday. I have a baby face, but I had this like two-month beard, that's travel beard. And when you travel through Islamic countries, that just shows respect. Is your hair red? Yes, I had this big red beard. Okay. I just do everything that I can in my power to minimize the risk of getting kidnapped, but I can only go so far.

Yeah. If they wanted to kidnap me, man, it's literally, as I said, when you go through these checkpoints, they're like every two miles there's a checkpoint. It's so easy for them to call the next checkpoint to be like, hey, this Toyota Corridor, has an American in it kidnap it right away. And I'm done. Yeah, sure. And you said a hundred bucks, dude, we're talking hundreds of thousands of bucks. And they would get it from me because I would call my grandfather and my parents and anyone who I know who has money and being like, hey, I'm kidnapped. Send 50 grand right now where I'm going to die. And so they would get that money, which is scary as

hell to think about. Yeah, you're lucky you're getting some of these places out of your system now. And hopefully when you go back in your older, these places are a little more stable, right? Hopefully, yeah. What about Eritrea? This place has been on my list for a while. It's like, it's a surprise. Most people never heard of it, first of all. It's kind of like the Ethiopia,

the other side of the coin for Ethiopia that used to be the same country, I think, right? Yeah, I'm really happy you brought up that country. It's one of my top five favorites in Africa. The visa is extremely hard to get. There's an embassy in Washington, D.C., where you have to send your passport, but you have to have a good letter of invitation.

I'm sure you know your fair share of getting visas. It's very hard to get it. It takes a month to process. apparently they can just turn you down for no reason if they don't want to. And it's pretty expensive. But I got the visa. I have two passports, by the way. That's a good travel hack.

Anyone who travels a lot, you're allowed to get two valid U.S. passports. And one of them, I keep in the States and my dad will just ship my passport to the embassy to get the visa while I'm traveling. So that's what I did. Got the visa. It's really beautiful. So Eritrea is like you're in the 50s. It was an Italian colony, which most people don't even know that Italians colonize other

countries. It's not the typical Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch colony. It's an Italian colony, which means you have these beautiful coffee shops, these amazing plazas, these cobblestone streets, these Italian churches, and the coffee culture is huge. And so, because Ethiopia used to be one country before the Civil War in 1991. I know it was the early 90s, 1993. Then they broke into two different countries.

But, dude, it's so unexpectedly amazing. You're walking down Asmara, which is the capital city, which is cold. You think of all of Africa, and not to generalize, but almost generalizing, the whole continent is hot. There's very few cold climates in Africa. Asmar is cold. You need a jacket. It's really high in elevation. So the first thing you do is you're like, whoa, there's cold wind coming here.

Everyone has a jacket on. But you have these amazing like tree-lined boulevards and these old churches that were built by Italians. And you walk into these coffee shops, I kid you not. They have these cappuccino machines from the 20s, from the 20s that they're still using. and it's just normal life for them and they're still working. And I'm like, dude, that is an antique item that can be sold on eBay for $50,000. Sure, yeah. It's just like a normal cappuccino that they're making and it's delicious.

I don't know. Like coffee originated in Ethiopia. It's where the first coffee beans. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Coffee in Ethiopia is like, as I said, it's where it comes from. But it's the same in Eritrea. So you're just hanging out.

There's all the older men are speaking Italian. They have these old fiats or these Italian cars. Oh, the ones that are like this big? Yes, like from the 1950s and before, everything, the cars, the way to cafes, the restaurants, like the hotels, everything. There's like this old drive-in, like movie theater, and it literally has like a drive-in sign, and it's still functioning with these 1940 cars. Dude, it's literally a time machine.

It sounds like Cuba, but it's in Africa. Kind of. It's actually been dubbed as a Cuba of Africa. Oh, okay. So it's really, really interesting. They speak to Ghira, which is a language in Ethiopia, but as I said, the older generation speaks Italian because that's what they were taught in the schools. And it's really cool, man. It's on the Red Sea. So you can, you know, it's really hot on the coast. There's a city called

Us, not Aswan. I'm forgetting the name of the city, but it's really fascinating culture. And I highly, highly recommended if you like off the beaten path places. Yeah. So there's no modern buildings. I saw in your video, there's no modern buildings. There's only stuff that is built recently that is you wouldn't call modern and things that were built by, I guess, is it Mussolini basically built these? Yes. during the time of colonization. So everything is kind of grand. And it's what you think of when you think of like modern Italian cities that still have a bunch of old stuff like Rome. So it's not ancient Italy, but it's still like what you imagine to be Italian, except it's in Africa. And I mean,

is it well maintained? It seems like it would be hard to maintain something like that with very little resources. Not really, man. Everything's pretty normal when you're walking around. It's also been called the North Korea of Africa. That's what I've heard. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. much about it and I didn't get into politics in my video because I try to stay away from politics. But yeah, if you can look up, look it up online and there's some human rights issues going on. The UN does this ranking of like countries listed by human rights. Eritrea is like in the bottom five. So that says something.

And there's like crazy like restrictions on what news. Like there's one newspaper and it's like a local Eritrea news like North Korea. And they can only consume that content. It's really hard to get Wi-Fi almost impossible. I think I had to like, my hotel had Wi-Fi and I had to pay like five bucks for like 30 minutes credit and it's really slow. So you do get these North Korean vibes. North Korean people, in my opinion, are very depressed and they're not happy people. But in Eritrea, it's opposite.

They're like friendly and they're welcoming and hey, welcome to Eritrea. It's a different feeling as far as like the smiling of the locals. Like they'll welcome you into their shop and that kind of stuff. Yeah, North Korea, as you know, there aren't shops. really to be welcomed into. They open things for tourists when you arrive and they kind of go, I mean, the person lives there generally and they're like, oh, I've told this on the show before, but you knock, the woman answers the door in a jacket, she opens it, turns all the lights on and stands there and pretends like she's happy to see you and then goes back and washes dishes

when you leave. I actually can speak Korean because I lived in South Korea before I went to North Korea, so I took that as a huge advantage and I leveraged my ability to speak to the locals. That's why I did the Pyongyang Marathon because that's the only time where you can like run through the streets of Pyonging without having a tour guide with you. And I was just like high-fiving the kids on the streets, like speaking to them, like what's going on? And it's very like in the metro, which I'm sure you took, I tried to speak to some people, which is a really depressing place of Pyonging Metro. But yeah, you don't get the feeling of people being open-minded or hospitable or even really friendly. Like, it's very odd. It's xenophobic to say the least. To say the least. Absolutely. Absolutely. So it's

different. In Eritrea, it's the opposite of that. They're like happy. Like, Turkmenistan also is called the North Korea of Central Asia. I'm sure you've heard about Turkmenistan. Yeah, we'll talk about that in a second when we're done with Eritrea, because I've got questions about that crazy place. What I was going to say is the people are very welcome. Like, it's a Central Asian country, and it's an Islamic country, and people are welcoming by culture. You know, before this crazy regime has come in, the people are just so, you know, come into my house, let's eat for a meal, and that's how it is in Turkmenistan, and that's how it's very different than North Korea.

But, dude, let's talk Turkmenistan. Yeah, we can. One note on Eritrea is I looked up Eritrea because I wanted to, first of all, I wanted to get one of those cool domains where it's like Harbinge.r, but.org, but.org, dot, er,r is Eritrea. And I went, oh, okay, I probably have to pay like $100

to some registry to get the domain. It's literally impossible because it's owned entirely by Eritrea, telecom, or whatever, and no one answers the email, no one answers the phone, and that company is wholly owned by whatever generalissimo is in charge of Eritrea, and he's not interested in your $100 for your domain name, like at all. So I'm out of luck there, and it, what's is a bummer, because I'm sure they're dot-e-r, they could probably make a couple million dollars for the regime just selling dot-ear domains, but they're,

they're not interested. Very, very quick side note. The country of Tuvalu is dot-tv, is dot TV. So every country was given dot whatever. Right. Dot TV, their number one source of income, and I made a video on this. is selling the Dot TV. They make $5 million a year,

which is a lot for a tiny island nation of a couple of thousand people just by selling the DotTV domain. That's funny. I always wondered if Dot TV was a country or if they made it for television. Okay, so that's pretty funny. I met some cab drivers back when I lived in New York.

This is like 10 years ago now. And one of them told me, I always say, where are you from? Because you get countries you'd never even heard of, you know. And she was one that I'm thinking of right now. She was from Eritrea. And we had an airport ride.

So we were talking for about an hour, hour and a half because, you know, New York traffic. She said that, and my question is always, do you go back to whatever country? Because that's when you get the stories. She said, no, I can't go back because I do, at the time, it was like 2010. So she was a blogger. That was a thing. Now she's probably some other thing. But she blogged about the regime.

And she wasn't, you know, you can't do that. It's like saying, hey, Kim Jong-un is a fact. fatty that eats too many hot dogs. You can never go home after that. So she said that even in New York City, the Eritrean secret police were following her around, talking to her friends, because they have agents in New York, because there is a, of course, it's New York City. There's a little Eritrea, for sure, even if it's one half of a block, you know, a three Eritrea. She said there's people that she can't really talk to you because they're like friends of her family, but they have connections to the regime, and she said she can't tell them anything. Yeah, she had a radio show or something

in Ethiopia, and then they came after her, and then she came to New York, and now she's a cab driver. Just that regime is, if you look at press freedom index, which is, I guess, how free the press is in any given country, North Korea, I thought, for sure, this is the lowest at the bottom. It's not. It's the second to the bottom, and the bottom is Eritrea, because at least North Korea, I think, has two or three newspapers, even though one's the army and one's the civilian government. It's still the same crap. Eritrea, only one.

Same message everywhere. government broadcasting, government print, nobody can write or do anything that's not approved. It's crazy. That's exactly right. Yeah. Sad. I assume that it's a military government because when I went to college, actually, a friend of a friend, his dad or uncle or something was a general in Eritrea, and we heard all these war stories. That was before I really understood that it's possible that his uncle was a proper bastard and not a good person. It's true. I don't know if it's true what you just said. There's a lot of history that's happened in North Korea. We're talking about Eritrea.

And Eritrea, once again, I don't get too into politics as I travel. Because once again, I don't want to just be this opinionated guy. I'm just going to experience the hospitality and the food and learn about the ancient wonders of different countries. Who am I to go there and be like, oh, this is a messed up regime, like blah, blah, blah. So there's always two sides of the coin, right? But there's definitely a lot of shit that's been going on in Eritrea with the regime and with neighboring Ethiopia. when I went, the borders had just shut again between their land borders between Ethiopia because there was another scare of a civil war happening again.

So at the end of the day, I feel bad for the local innocent people of these countries, like Eritrea, like North Korea, like Turkmenistan, who just want to live their life and like the kids, they want to run around on the streets and play badminton with their friends, but they can't. And they want to play video games and watch American films, but they can't. And it's really, really sad. And it just, you don't choose where you're born. And me and you, dude, and people, everyone listening to his podcast,

podcast right now. You're so lucky to be born in the country that you were born in and not having to worry about these crazy restrictions and having a passport that only lets you visit. Dude, I was just in Iraq, and I was with my buddy who has an Iraqi passport. It's the worst in the world in terms of countries he's able to visit without needing to get a visa. He can only visit 29 countries visa-free. And all those countries are like Syria, you know, Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, all the neighboring countries, like Saudi Arabia. And dude, we, as a U.S. passport holder, we can visit pre-COVID and post-COVID, we'll be able to visit 179 countries

without needing to get a visa. That is literally booking a plane ticket, showing up, and that's it. And my girlfriend, she's got a Philippines passport. She can only visit like 70 countries, so she needs to go to the embassy, get a doctor's note, prove her bank statements,

prove that she's willing to come back to the Philip dude. We're so blessed, and that's the point I wanted to make. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Drew Binsky. We'll be right back. Thanks so much for listening.

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All of that is on one page at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. I would very much appreciate it if you supported our sponsors. Whenever you get a chance, that helps keep the lights on around here. That's how we get paid. That's why I don't sell things on the show. I'm not sitting there going, by my mastermind, come visit our thing of a jig where we charge you every month and we don't get your permission. I don't do any of that crap because you guys can support the sponsors and I feel

like that's a fair exchange. So please, if you get a chance, do consider supporting those who support us. Don't forget, we've got worksheets for our episodes if you want some of the drills and exercises talked about during the show. They're all in one easy place as well. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. Now for the conclusion of our episode with Drew Binski. When I was in college, I'd been doing fair share of backpacking and traveling, and I was like, I'm going to go to Ukraine because I'm learning Russian at the time. I don't know Russian anymore. It's become Serbian due to interference of the language. I said, what do I need to do? I want to book a ticket. And of course, they're like, okay, we need your visa number. And I said, visa number.

Don't I just get that when I arrive? And they were like, no, you have to get a visa before you come here. And I was like, really? I've never done that before. And they're like, yeah, you can't just walk into any that you want. I remember being like confused at age 20 or 19. Americans and Canadians and Europeans, they don't understand that you like a visa is basically you have to be granted permission by a local government to enter their country for a limited amount of time. It can be in Iran. I was only given 15 days. It can be 30 days. It can be 90 days. It can be a year. But you have to like pay a price and you have to prove to them that you're a good person. You don't have a criminal background. You work for whatever company and you're going to go in as a

tourist, only as a tourist, and leave. That's what a visa is. And so, yeah, you're right, man. It's crazy. When I went to Germany as an exchange student, I stayed there for a whole year, and they were like, oh, you've overstayed your visa once because I hadn't left the country. I think I was supposed to leave every 90 days for like even one day or go to an office and get a stamp. And I just didn't do it once. And it was me and a girl from Thailand had both done that. And she was, they were like, we're going to deport you. And I was like, I'm so screwed. And for me, they were like, you know what, don't worry about it. I'm just going to initial this space right here

with your stamp. But for her, they were like, we're going to deport you. And they had to go through a whole riguma roll to make sure that that didn't happen. Because she, you know, we're in high school. It wasn't really her fault. You had a student visa or a tourist visa? I just showed up as a tourist. I didn't even need a student visa because it was Germany, man. You know, they're like,

an American in Germany, we're not worried about this guy. But the Thai girl, they were like, you're going to vanish into our country and try and work. You know, there's a totally different set of fears. So you do realize after you start traveling how lucky you are, like for all the complaining we like to do in the West about how things don't work. And some of those complaints are very valid. We have it pretty good.

Like the fact that I didn't even know I needed a visa to go to Ukraine. And then all I did was pay $100 for a letter of invitation, which is just a bullshit formality from some travel agency to be like, esteemed Jordan Harbinger is going to come bless us with his presence if you grant him this visa. And they're like, whatever, I'll take the 100 euros now. No, there's a lot of under the table that happens with these letter of invitations and visas, dude. And to get my Libya visa, I had to go to the embassy in Rome and there's no tourist visas to Libya. They don't give you tourist visas. So I had to get a work visa and I had to be in disguise as an oil consultant to get the work visa.

So I had to prove to them, had to get a letter of invitation that I'm an oil consultant through this one company out of Tripoli, the capital of Libya, that issues them. You won't believe how expensive it is. I told you it's more than I paid on my trip to. I'm blinking out. That country I said was super expensive. Somalia, more than Somalia. Yeah, this was like almost $4,000 for like a three-day trip in Libya, just to get the formalities, to get the letter of invitation. Then I had to ditch my backpack in Tunis, in Tunisia, where I came from,

and I had to get a briefcase, and I had to get a collared shirt. And I'm not kidding you, man. I made a video about it. And I had to enter Libya as an oil consultant, and they took me in the back room in immigration, and they questioned me and they asked me all these questions, which I was prepared for. Wait, like what?

Like, you're lucky they didn't ask you, about oil consulting? They asked me what company do I work for? They asked me, which I had like a bullshit name company. And they asked me, what am I doing here? How much money do I make? What's my plan to do in Libya? And they told me like they're going to ask you these questions. So be prepared. And then I had the number of my driver. This is as I'm at immigration in the AAA airport, they took me in a separate room. So I'm in the separate room, like sweating balls. And I had the number of my driver. So I made them call my driver. And then he explained who I am. And that helped a lot. But dude, I don't even remember where I was before that story, but...

Well, we were going to go talk about Turkmenistan, because this is a place that's been on my list. It's a very weird place. 10,000 visitors a year, which makes it, I think, the seventh least visited country in the world. In fact, what's the least, like Nauru or Tuvalu or something like that? On paper, it's Nauru. There's less than, like, 150 visitors a year. So when I was almost 1% of the visitors for 2019, when I went to Nauru. Yeah.

So Turkmenistan is, like, the... Speaking of North Korea, of the Middle East, North Korea, Turkmenistan is the North Korea of Central Asia. So it's in terms of the totalitarian crazy pants leaders. I mean, this guy, we could go on for days with how crazy Turkmenbashi is or was. That's the dictator's name. He gave himself that title, which I think means like leader or father of all Turkmen. He renamed the calendar months after his family or his mom or something like that, right? He changed all the names based on his family's names.

He banned opera because he didn't like the sound. he banned dogs because he doesn't like the smell of dogs. He literally would, it's like the most totalitarian regime, it's like worse than North Korea as terms of like what I say goes. I make the rules and you guys follow. So he, this is a news story a while back. I don't know if you caught this. He was visiting some university

and a woman came up and smiled or something like that or he was talking to the students and she had a gold tooth as many people in Turkmenistan have. And he said, you know, I don't think women should have gold teeth. And apparently that month, all of the women in the whole country had their gold teeth removed. And it was like, it wasn't a law. It wasn't a directive. It was just, well, he said publicly women shouldn't have gold teeth. So that was as good as ironclad law, make your dentist appointment now and have that shit removed. It's like Kim Jong-un, man. I don't see much

of a difference, really, in what you're saying. So it's going back to what I said, it's terribly sad for the people of Turkmenistan. But, dude, if you want to know, about what it's like to travel there, hit me up. I mean, we can talk about it now. Well, I would love to hear about your trip. I mean, you have to be on an organized tour to get in, I assume, just like North Korea, you can't just roll in, right? You can't just show up and be like, hey, I want to check this place out. You can. You can get a transit visa, which is only valid for three days, and I don't know if they do that for Americans, but for EU passports, you can get a three-day transit visa, and you can just roll in. But for the purposes of everybody else, you have to

be on an organized tour, but it can be a private tour. It doesn't have to be, it's like Iran. With the U.S. passport, you have to go on an organized tour to get the visa. And I hired a local company for like a thousand bucks for a few days. There was a local guide with me the whole time. But it's a really interesting place, man. Ashgabat is the capital city. The whole, so Turkmenistan is very rich in terms of natural resources. They have the fourth biggest natural gas reserve in the world. And it's like buried under the deserts of Turkmenistan. So they're exporting this natural gas to China, to Russia, and they're getting a lot of money. And what do they do with their money is they import this white marble from Italy, expensive white marble,

and they construct the whole city of Ashkabat in these tall white marble buildings that are like, there's like thousands of them. And it looks like Disneyland in the middle of the desert. And you're just like, what is good? Like there's not that many people living here. What's going on? There's like a huge wedding banquet, like like a huge like room for a wet like it's like 10 stories high and there's like how many weddings are happening and it's just like it's just very eerie. The word is eerie when you're walking around. Streets are perfectly clean, but they're really quiet. Like, you don't see anybody outside.

No cars, nothing? You see white, everything's white. So white buildings, white cars. You do see cars, but they're like taxi cars. And you're just like, what's going on? Like, you're always questioning, how are people living in this country? It's very, very odd. There are restaurants, contrary to North Korea, there are, like, signs that say restaurant

here. In North Korea, notice there's like no sign. No signs. There's almost no signage. Where's a hospital? There is a hospital in Pyongri, but, Where's the hospital? There's no signs. It's weird. So in North Korea, there are sign. I sorry, in Turkmenistan, there are signs. But Ashgabad is really interesting, man. There's

like big ferris wheels that are made out of white marble and there's like amusement parks and all these statues everywhere that are just staring at you. Have you ever been to the capital of not Kosovo? What's in Macedonia? Macedonia. Yeah. Have you been? Yeah. So there's all these statues in Skopje that are just staring at you when you're walking through the city. And it's like, why are they spending all their money on these statues. It's the same thing in Turkmenistan, and you're just like, what is going on? But the coolest thing in the country is not Ashgabad. It's the gates of hell. Have you heard of the gates of hell?

So is that the giant only could happen in the Soviet Union gas crater that was blown up when this, well, tell me about it. What is that? It's exactly what you, so in the middle of the desert, there's a burning fire pit that has been on fire since 1969 when these Soviet miners went through and they were searching for natural gas, and they lit it on fire for whatever reason. And there's some chemical reaction and some scientific reason. It hasn't stopped burning. And it's like, it's a huge fire pit. Like to walk around the perimeter would take you 30 minutes.

Oh, my God. Wow. Huge. I mean, I flew my drone and like I had to fly it like hundreds and hundreds of feet high just to get the full circle in the frame. And if you sleep overnight there, it's beautiful. Like at night it like illuminates the sky. But even in like rain and everything, it doesn't go out.

So it's like a worldwide. wonder, like what is going on here? It's called the Gates of Hell or the Burning Fire Pit of Turkmenistan. But dude, it's definitely the coolest thing to do in Turkmenistan, and one of the coolest things I've ever done in my life. It's a four-hour drive from Ashkobat. You drive in the middle of nowhere, and they have these, it's a touristy thing. For the limited 10,000 tourists who go there, they have like little tents, literally like a tent that you sleep in and they cook you food and stuff, which is pretty cool experience. But if you ever go to Turkmenistan, you have to go to the gates of hell. So this is, I assume they were exploring, I don't know, the mine,

and they thought, let's clear this chamber of the natural gas by lighting it on fire. And what they didn't realize was that it was probably one of the world's largest natural gas reserves ever. And if there's hundreds or, I mean, millions of cubic meters or billions even of cubic meters in there, it's never really going to go out. And I don't know if they can estimate how long it's going to be on fire. But yeah, you're not going to get it put out with rain because it's a gas that's ignited. And it's just rushing up from the ground.

And it's not going to stop anytime soon. So again, I say like only could happen in the Soviet Union because I feel like anywhere else they go, you know, maybe we shouldn't just light this on fire because we don't necessarily know what's going to happen. And Soviet Union back then is just like, you know what? Nah, we're just going to see what happens. It's like it's not our place. What's the worst thing that can happen? We'll find some gas. They can't cap it.

Or I guess it's probably impossible or it's too difficult. Or maybe they didn't have the technology then. And now it's just, it makes more money as a tourist attraction than it does selling gas. Those are all valid points. Whatever the reasoning is, whatever's happening, it's absolutely incredible to witness and sleep overnight in the desert. And you can see like the Milky Way. There's no light pollution, except for it.

And then on the side of it, there's this burning fire pit. And you're just like, dude, it's like evil. Yeah. My friend who I was with had these like glasses on, like just reading glasses. I'll never forget. Like, she was looking at it. And I was looking at her. And I just see this burning fire like gates of hell in her reflection.

And I was like, holy crap. This is really cool. So, yeah. Are there any places that you did not like and you didn't have a good timing? Because you seem pretty positive about all these different countries and all these different cities, even crazy war zones and places that are dangerous.

Is there any place where you went, you know what? This place kind of sucked. No fault to the people that live there, but I'm over it. Yeah. Chad, in Central Africa is very unwelcoming. I had huge issues with my camera and people just not even giving me the time of day to explain who I am and they're just very unwelcoming people and I made a video about it. Another country is Brunei.

It's in Southeast Asia. It's on the Borneo Island. It shares a border with Malaysia and Indonesia. It's a little peninsula called Brunei. And I was very, like I went into the main mosque there and it's a Muslim country and they just kicked me out for no reason. And they were just not friendly people and there's nothing to do there. And it's just like not, just get a bad, sometimes you get a bad feeling about a place.

And that's another place. There's a couple other in West Africa. Guinea is one Sierra Leone. Once again, I would go back and give them a second chance, but I just didn't have a great experience. And a lot of this is subjective. Like it depends on who you're with, depends on the weather. If you visit a country and it's pouring, if it's hailing for four days, you're probably not going to have a good time. And if you visit a country and there's sketchy people that are showing you around, it's probably, so there's a bunch of different

variables that can make or break your experience. And some of these happen to me in these countries. So I would give them a second chance, but I am very optimistic and I'm very forgiving. And I look at the world from a very positive light. And 99.5% of my experience. have been positive. Yeah, I was just curious because I think, you know, in the travels that you've done, there had to have been some places you didn't like. The only place, and I loved Egypt, but I'd never felt that level of hostility anywhere else. And bear in mind, this is the year 2000. I had people corner me in an alleyway. I had people tell me I couldn't use the internet cafe because they didn't like Jews. And I was like, how do you even know? Like, your Judar is really good, man. You know,

nobody, I mean, how do you even know? I had people rip me off a bunch, not even, just like tourist rip-offs, but like pushing me down and being like, give me your wallet right now, like mugged. I got mugged, basically, even though it was kind of like they pretended like they were just kidding, but then they still took my money. I had people sell me fake things a lot, and I wasn't even in super touristy areas. In fact, it seemed like when you go to less touristy spaces in any country that people are a little nicer, it was almost the opposite with Egypt, whereas when we went to smaller places, they were just like, no, you can't buy ice cream here. No, you can't eat any food in my restaurant. And I'd never really felt that anywhere. There were so many nice people in

Egypt, but it seemed almost like a coin flip as to whether or not we were going to be welcome in any given place. What was ironic about it was we went to some sketchy underground bars, which you thought, okay, this is going to be like rough characters. You'd walk in there and everyone was super nice because everyone was breaking the law. And they were probably just like, hey, look, I won't mess with you. you don't mess with me. But going to like a cafe, it was a coin flip if the table next to you is going to be like, get out of here. I don't want to see your stupid face. You know, that kind of thing happened. It's the same in 2020. I went back a few months ago and for the second time, for the third time. It's very tense, especially when you have a camera in your hand. You're very unwelcomed all over the

country and there's a lot of checkpoints and they ask you questions. And at the airport, they confiscated my drone, my brand new drone, which was $2,000. They took it and they didn't give it back. I have a problem with the Egyptian officials and with how the countries run. Even at the pyramids, man, that's the most touristy place in the world. They, like, don't want you taking pictures there. I'm like, what are you doing?

Like, how are you going to want any more people to come here if they're scared to come because they can't take pictures? It's still a problem in 2020. Yeah, that's too bad. I mean, Egypt, again, was an amazing place. The pyramid, it goes about saying that the historical attractions are incredible. And the people that I always try to emphasize

how great the people were, but it's unfortunate that there are so many, it's probably, in fact, it's probably a lot like the United States when you come from another place. You meet a ton of nice people and then you meet some real A-holes that don't like you because you're brown and you're like, what the hell? I would imagine it's similar to coming here. In fact, I don't, because I don't want to give the U.S. a pass on that sort of thing because I've seen, you know, people getting this treated here as well. How do you find the locals to hang out with when you're in some of these random places? Like, I get meeting someone in South Korea. I get meeting someone in France to help you out.

What are you doing when you're in Namibia or Chad? How are you finding people to kick it with and go around with? Yeah. So my travel style is really unique in the sense of I meet locals through Instagram and I put my full trust in them to show me around and keep me safe and help me have a good time. So I will just literally go on Instagram stories. You know, I built a pretty big community of $8 million to this point. And I'll just be like, hey guys, you know, in the next four weeks I'm going to be in Tunisia, Morocco,

Maritania, and Libya. if you are there or if you have any friends or brothers or uncles who are there who would be willing to show me around, please send me a DM and we'll talk. And so basically I'll get 50, 100, 200 messages from people in those countries. And I just kind of filter through them on Instagram and kind of see if they seem like a cool person that would be fun to hang out with. And then I call some of them. And then I'd be like, hey, you know, I'm coming. I'm shooting content. Would you mind being in the videos? Would you mind showing me around? And I've never failed to find a local in any country. Name me a country. I mean, this is what I've been doing for the last four years.

and it's great because it's a win-win. You know, I pay for everything, so I treat them to a full, like if we're traveling around, I'll pay for the hotels, the food, the taxis. So, and they get to hang out. You know, it's a cultural exchange. We get to share our thoughts, and they get to introduce their culture, their country to the world through my videos. And they're like a local guide and friend.

So it's a win-win. And a lot of these local guys have become my really good friends. I just got back from Iraq in Baghdad, which is from a guy named Barachan, who's a good friend of mine. He showed me around Iraqi Kurdistan, which is a northern region. That's cool. And he's actually born in Baghdad. So he hadn't been home in like five years to his hometown.

So I just got back like six weeks ago. So we went through Baghdad together. And it was really cool, man. So yeah, that's how I find locals through Instagram or a friend of a friend. I'm in this travel community. It's very small, people who are going to every country. So sometimes you just hit up friends like, hey, you know, Turkmenistan. Who do you know there?

But I like to find them through social media. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. That's really, really fortunate. Do you make videos every single day? I did for a period of two years. I posted seven videos a week. Then I got burned out.

When COVID hit, I didn't have enough content coming in, so I started doing three times a week. Now I'm doing once a week, but my videos are 20 minutes long. So I'm doing longer, you know, deeper dives into each story as opposed to just like, you know, you said you saw my Turkmenistan video or whatever. Those videos.

Yeah, I saw all the short ones, I think. So those are like four minutes. It's very much like crammed. but now I'm like, I'm speaking to camera more. I'm just being a little more relaxed and bringing people along the journey with me in my recent videos. So I think that's kind of been

how I've pivoted my own content to do longer stories. I got to say, I saw some of the longer ones. I greatly prefer the longer format. I think it's much more interesting. I mean, when the short ones are over, you just go, like, my head is spinning. I saw like a hundred things.

The longer, for me, I'm like, if you're going to do an hour and a half long video in a country, I'll watch that thing. I mean, I think it's better. I appreciate that. As I told you at the beginning, my evolution is to do longer form content, like 30, 40, 50 minute videos.

And so I appreciate that feedback. Yeah, no, your channel's good. Obviously, we'll link to it in the show notes. And I like the way that you travel. I like the style. I like the way that you hang out. And you're not like, it's not too formal, but it's also, you're not like jumping off things in every shot,

if that makes sense. You know, it's not like, there's travel bloggers that jump off rocks into water constantly. And I'm just like, this shit is so played out. You don't do that. You keep it fresh. and I appreciate that. Awesome, man.

I really appreciate it. I'm amused to see we, actually, you use pretty much the same equipment as I do from audio gear to the camera. The only thing I have that you don't is this studio set up here with the rack mount stuff and this mic, but everything else from camera type

to the task cam, you know, you're using and it makes sense you're 100% mobile. Oh, you know what I was going to ask you? I'm wondering if you ever used cot on your travels, which can tell us what it is because people don't know what it is. Oh, yeah, cot or chat? It's this plants that you chew.

It's a stimulant. It's the same effect as cocaine to some people, but it grows on these trees in Yemen and Somalia. We're talking about the same thing, right? Yeah, yeah. It grows on trees in Yemen and Somalia and they consume it like crazy. They're all the men, like 90% of the men. It's exported around the region a little bit. In Oman, you can find it, some of the Middle East and Ethiopia you can find it.

In Kenya, you can find it. It's legal. It's not illegal. So it's 100% allowed. The policemen are doing it. The taxi drivers are doing it. People in their homes, those are those are safe. sit and watch TV and chew cut all day.

It's like a baseball player when they have like tobacco in their cheek. It looks disgusting. I tried it. I mean, it tastes. It literally tastes like you'd think if you grab leaves off of a tree and you ate and you crunch them in your mouth and you like, you don't swallow it. But tasting leaves is what it tastes like. So it doesn't taste good, but the effect is strong.

You definitely feel like you just drank three, five hour energies. That's literally what it feels like. And they want that feeling all day because there's no alcohol. alcohol is banned in these countries. They're dry countries. So this is their way of finding their alternate happiness and their way to get effed up, essentially. So it's very common. There's chop markets all over the place. You go and there's really cheap. It's like five bucks for like supply for a week. And then it comes, it's like you have to buy like a trash bag full of chot. It's not like a little pill or anything. It's like they literally like chop off the branch of the tree and they put it.

And you just like take it, you unravel it and you're just like peeling off these leaves like, It's crazy, man. It only lasts fresh for like two days because they literally take it off the tree and it expires, like it can't eat it after a while. So I think, if I'm not mistaking, in Somalia, because I did a story on Chatt when I was there, in Somalia, the Chot economy represents 10%

of the underground economy, the Chot market. That's how popular it is there. So it's really interesting, man. It's really interesting. It's vile. And look, you said you tried it at a taste, or it had an effect like three, five-hour energies. So it's a jittery, uncomfortable effect, I assume.

For me, but if you do it all day, every day, I'm sure your tolerance goes down. It's highly addictive. I know that much. You build up a tolerance like that. So the guy Michael Scott Moore, who was kidnapped by Somali pirates, he said his guards were doing shot all the time, and they would get really, really upset because they would run out and they can't go buy more. They need people to bring it, but there'd be nobody for like five days.

So they would start, like, harassing him. And they would, in fact, if they didn't get any for a while, he was thinking about escaping because they'd be rolling around and sweating because they're going through withdrawal and it's just like not something you really want to get addicted to I guess no but that's all they have there and that's what they take for their stimulants as I said there's no alcohol there's no kind of getting there's probably not that much weed and I don't even know there probably is but I don't know if they do it so their way of passing the time is by chewing cot and it's highly addictive yeah this is also fascinating there's so many other things that I was going to talk about that

We just ran out of time. Like, you've got some scary border crossings. You stayed in a, well, Libya, the whole thing was a war zone, hearing gun shots from your hotel room. I don't think I could ignore that, by the way. That's pretty crazy. Hearing, it was the sound of bombs from the hotel. Bombs.

Yeah. So the bed was, like, vibrating every 10 minutes. But there's a couple of videos, a link in the show notes, such as your favorite cities and why, because some of them are off the beaten path. You know, you think, like, okay, one of them's going to be Paris. Not really the case. You know, there's stuff that I didn't expect.

And I like that because we kind of slam a lot of these countries in the Western media. So I also like to showcase, hey, Beirut, which was on your list, is one of the coolest places around, period. And yes, Berlin is really cool, and I love Berlin, but also this place in Iran is really cool. And this place in Pakistan is really cool. So I want to link to that. You've got your hardest visas to get, I thought was entertaining. You've got the most interesting country in Africa. I won't spoil what the answer is.

I'll link to that video on the show notes. But thanks so much, man, for coming on the show. I really dig travel stories. The listeners love them, so this has been a lot of fun. Jordan, thanks a lot, man. I can't believe an hour and a half of time just passed. I feel like we've been talking for five minutes. Kindred spirits, man.

Thanks so much for coming on. Of course, man. Keep in touch. See you guys later. As usual, I've got some thoughts on this one. But first, we talk to legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone on why the American media is partially culpable for the state of the world, interviewing Vladimir Putin and so much more.

Here's a quick bite. You weren't even drafted to go to Vietnam, right? You wanted to go. I went to Vietnam because, as I tried to say in the book, partly suicidal. It was a death instinct. It was like I have no place in the world. I come out of Vietnam, and I'm completely zonked, and I'm back in civilian society. I'm free.

No one's telling me what to do. I don't know a soul. So I go over to Mexico, get bombed, laid, all that stuff, get crazy few days, come back in a zoned out and come back at midnight, trying to cross back the border in midnight, carrying my Vietnamese grass, which I'd smuggled back from Vietnam. Of course, I get stupidly busted. Federal smuggling charge five to 20 years. Oh, my God.

That's a crazy punishment. How much grass are we talking about? Two ounce. That's ridiculous. Maybe less. I heard you once put LSD in your dad's drink at a party. That's a bold move, man. Yeah.

Why not? Because he needed it. What do you mean? His attitude on the war was fucked. I put a heavy dose of orange sunshine into his scotch. I really dumped it in. And he got so fucking high. He never knew what hit him.

Do you think you could make a movie like Platoon now? Do you think an American studio would touch a movie like that these days? No, not with friendly fire and killing civilians. No, it's impossible now. National Security Cinema, read it. He goes into detail on some 800 movies the Pentagon has worked on. You have no idea the influence, how deep they've gotten. What I've said to you at this interview is important.

If you think about it, listen to it again, you'll see why it's suffocation is in order here. For more, including the lesson Oliver Stone learned when he was a cab driver prior to becoming a world famous director, check out episode 411 on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Hope you all enjoyed that. I really think Drew's an interesting guy. He does other videos on his favorite cities and why, and it's not like Paris. You know, not that there's anything wrong with Paris, but he picks Beirut, Berlin. There's a couple cities in Iran, I think. Lahore, Pakistan is one of them. And it's not Tehran, it's East Vahan, Iran, which is just totally random and such an interesting place to go and visit.

Turns out his favorite city is Prague, which is where producer Jason lives and is listening to this right now and probably shaking his head because he knows that Prague is dope. And we're going to do a company retreat and we may go to Prague. I don't know. Jason, though, you don't want us to go to Prague, right? You live there. You want us to go to Greece or Italy or something. Maybe we'll retreat to Prague later and come visit you. The hardest visas to get is another video that he did. Surprise, surprise, Iran, Eritrea, Syria, Venezuela, and Libya. Can't even tell us how he got the Syria visa. That's how shady it is to get a visa to Syria these days. And also, you crazy for going there. You notice a lot of people are coming the other way, right? I especially enjoyed Drew's videos that are like what you can

get for 10 bucks in Pakistan or Vietnam or Libya. It's insane how inexpensive things are in some places. There was a video where he did this in Pakistan, and he goes and gets like breakfast, lunch, dinner, a massage, a camel ride, a hat, a Pakistani flag, and a haircut. And he's like, I still haven't spent $10. So money goes pretty far. I can't even get a sushi roll for $10 here in the freaking Silicon Valley. Got to move to Pakistan. Links to Drew's videos and YouTube channel will be on the website in the show notes. Please use our website links. If you buy any books from the guests you hear on the show, that helps support us. It's a little bit of pennies here and there, but those pennies, they stack up.

You know, we got a lot of people listening, so please do that. I really do appreciate it. Worksheets for this episode are in the show notes, transcripts for the episode are in the show notes. All the sponsors are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals, and there's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can hit me on LinkedIn. I love engaging with all of you there.

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The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you like people who love travel, if you know people who are really into going to off the beaten path places, this episode is definitely for them. I hope you find something great in every episode of this show,

so please share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. You know the name Michael Cohen, the former attorney and personal fixer for Donald Trump, who once vowed to take a bullet for the former president? On his podcast, Mayaculpa, Cohen is on a mission to write the wrongs he perpetuated on behalf of his old boss. The podcast is raw and unfiltered, shining a light into the dark

corners of our current American apocalypse. Tune in weekly for a candid conversation with the New York Times bestselling author and the self-proclaimed gangster lawyer as he sets to dismantle the Trump legacy and finds the truth and nothing but the truth as he sees it. Download and subscribe to Maya Copa with Michael Cohen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast,

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