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

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I don't recommend it for people. I gotta be honest with you. Yeah, now what happened there again? You were like taking video on the border or something? And ran into the military? Was that it? More or less. So what happened was, me being my adventurous self, I decided to wander over near the Chinese border with Russia. And Russia has some complicated laws that most foreigners wouldn't know. Like certain parts of the country, you can't be within like 20 minutes of the border without a permit. I did not know that. This actually isn't like a major crime. It's like, if you get caught doing that, they're supposed to put you in prison for like. Well, not prison, like the local jail for like 2 days, 48 hours. Or you pay a $5 fine. $5? Yeah. So that shows like the severity of this. That should have been the end of it. But yeah, so I wandered over there and like these big, scary, military, Russian-looking dudes come over. They're like, "You're not supposed to be here." An hour after that, I'm being like questioned by like the local police there. And then three hours after that, I'm being questioned by. The FSB which is the KGB. Yeah. Like they're like newer iteration. And that's when I knew like shit was going to get a lot more serious than that. So it's like, there was one guy in the FSB who basically made it his mission to like find something to pin on me, to like keep me there. And it was pretty fucking scary, not going to lie. Yeah, I can imagine. So. Seriousness. Yeah. Yeah. Like I do. I do the 48 hours in the jail. They release me and then what happens is they literally set up like a sting operation till I get me back in prison. I wish I was making this up. It's like they set up like a taxi to take me back to like the closest city and waiting there. They have like 10 guys waiting for me. And then their whole idea was they knew I didn't have my passport because I got caught without it. And so they were going to. And so they were going to claim that I resisted arrest because I didn't present my passport when asked. And so within like seconds of arriving in the city, they just throw me into a van. In a van? In a van. Like a white, like rape van kind of deal? Exactly. Oh no. A van of nightmares. Yeah, I've been thrown into one of those. And they didn't even give me any candy or anything. Yeah. They take me to like the bigger jail in that city. And then they tell me like, tomorrow, I'm going to jail. And then they tell me like, tomorrow, you're going to be on trial. On trial? On trial. For what? For resisting arrest? Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. The excuse they gave at first was, this is also ridiculous. They had like gone into my YouTube portfolio and I like willingly told them I'm a YouTuber because I thought, you know, that would be a simple enough explanation to show I'm not like the biggest. The biggest big CIA spy. That's where I was going with it. Yeah, but they, and I made, what's really frustrating is I made like two videos that I had released in Russia. And obviously this is a very sensitive time to be making like videos in Russia. Yeah. But I made videos that were basically positive about the country. I was like just going around and this is what I do normally in my videos. I'm just like meeting Russian people. They're giving me vodka shots. They're being awesome. They're showing me stuff. Right. I had like no problems whatsoever up until this point. And, but my mistake was in the, not even in the video, in the description of the video, I had written that something like, before Russia invaded Ukraine, like the world was different, you know, like something like that. They saw that and they're like, no, you can't write that, that you're implying that this was a war. They're like, no, you can't write that, that you're implying that this was a war. We were protecting ourselves. Yeah, yeah. So they said, yeah, we're going to put you on trial for that. For having that in your YouTube description. Literally. Yeah, you're offending the Russian armed forces or something. Now, do they have like a Russian Saul Goodman you can talk to like lawyer or what's the deal here? Yeah, well, that's, it's good you asked that because they were, I was allowed to have a lawyer at that trial, but they didn't tell me that. And, yeah, and also I was supposed to have a translator with me for the trial. It turns out the translator they give me was the girlfriend of this FSB officer that wanted to put me in prison. That's nice. So she's just like mistranslating stuff I said, probably didn't matter. But, and then the judge that I get for this trial, I looked it up and she had actually sent it, sentenced a Russian guy to prison who later died from a hunger strike. Oh, no. She had like pictures of Putin all over like the courtroom. Yeah, very uncomfortable situation. Arguably the scariest situation of my entire life. And the trial, it just gets going. It's over very quickly within 15 minutes. 15 minutes. Yeah, yeah, seriously. Did you get a witness up there or something? Nothing, nothing. But they had witnesses against me, which were basically all the police and the FSB. He is CIA. Yeah. Pretty much, yeah. They would say things like, look, he speaks Chinese. He must be like, you know. And so, yeah, they hit me with those two charges that I offended the Russian armed forces and I resisted arrest. And the only fortunate thing is like they didn't, they couldn't put me in prison for like 10 years according to their laws for that. They gave me two weeks or 15 days. In prison. In prison, yeah, which is still horrifying. Like Siberia or? This actually was basically Siberia because it's far eastern Russia. That's nice. Yeah, yeah, pure nightmare feel. So, they like just take me over there and I'm like trying not to lose my mind because, you know, if you, very few people will ever be put in prison for something they didn't do. You know, and knowing that, I just assumed they were going to like do the worst at that point. Like they were going to like plant drugs on me. They were going to like do something to keep me there for 10 years. And then I was going to be like on US national news like within like a couple of days. We made a deal. We got him out. That would have been you. It would have been. I might have been that guy. Ironically, this actually happened during the US election. Oh, no. And there were. This is very interesting. When I was in the prison, the warden came up to me and he was like, Thomas, we want Trump to win the presidency. I shit you not. They were very, very pro-Trump. I opened the application. It was one of the few things that made me laugh while I was there. Oh, my God. Wow. Yeah. So the warden actually talked to you, though. Yeah, yeah, he came up to me. I mean, I was probably the most interesting prisoner they had ever had, like, because this is like bum fuck Russia. They told me like, yeah, we've never had an American here before. So we're very excited about this. They got you in prison uniform, obviously, and all that, too. At least in that prison. No, they don't do uniforms in Russia. So you're just like this in prison, but sitting in on like a steel cot or something. Pretty much. Yeah. Do you have a cellmate? That was another interesting thing. I started off with no cellmate. Then the second day I was there, they just, for whatever reason, they decided to move me to another cell that does have a cellmate, like this 50-year-old guy. And, you know, like, I've never been to prison before, so I was a little concerned. I was like, let me feel this guy out. Let me see how he is. Yeah, pause. Well, literally, like, I don't want to be like-- like fighting for my life to not get raped or some shit. you know um but thankfully yeah the guy was cool he was schizophrenic but schizophrenic i assumed what was he in for uh drug possession uh weed is still very much illegal in russia so um oh so he wasn't like a murderer or something like that no thankfully he had actually done six years in prison for having like weed plants in his house wow and then he just got like caught again uh and so uh i think he was actually being held for like 15 days and then they were gonna try to put him send him back to prison again like long ass prison jesus what's it like like are you but are you locked down for like 23 hours a day in the cell or what's the cadence yeah it's like basically almost every day it's actually almost like 24 hours in the cell it's like close to like solitary confinement uh for like a couple days out of the week they let you have some exercise and in russian prison exercise and then they let you go to prison and then they let you go to prison and then they put you in a cage with like snow on the ground and you're allowed to walk around in circles nice for like yeah like 10 minutes or so um but yeah actually the guy in my cell uh a weird thing about him was uh i didn't fully think this at the time but some people were like maybe they put that guy in there to like inform on you because he was asking me some weird questions like what he would just like out of nowhere be like tomas i want to ask you about drugs he just asked me like have you ever like smoked weed before have you ever like done cocaine or like and i just had to have like i mean i guess i'm a fairly paranoid person to begin with so i was like you know what no no i've never done anything never like i i don't agree with america legalizing that shit like i'm sorry when my dad got into his 50s he hit a brick wall he was doing the same workouts he had the same diet but he felt like he was moving 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sent you man the kids really love that playhouse huh it's not just a child's playhouse it's a rental property kids off gary's roof he's got a movie to stream in there wait someone actually lives in there lives works and thrives that playhouse is basically a smart home now your wi-fi reaches the playhouse that's amazing of course we're giggling airs it reaches everywhere can i check it out i'd love to get in there sorry but solid gary's got it locked down for a while another six months what about the treehouse that's marie's who's marie our neighbor who's renting the treehouse she's up there streaming her british baking show all right um what about the shed look have your people call my people okay you have people it's just me live without limits get home internet from at&t and cover your whole house even your playhouse turned rental property at&t extended wi-fi coverage service required limited availability visit att.com forward slash internet to learn more um and uh i'm pretty glad i said that i was gonna say is he like leaning in like this he did actually laid in a bed from his bunk bed so when did when did they i'm trying to remember the timeline when did they make the deal for where they traded boot for a grinder was that 2023 it was before you were in there uh it was before right yeah so you already had that in the back of your head like she got yeah they were giving her hard time for a little hash or something she 2022 she went to a real gulag also like they had her doing hard labor yeah i heard so you didn't have to do hard labor the two weeks you were just pretty much locked down no yeah so apparently what they did to me was like a tactic that goes back to like the soviet union times where when they don't have like a real crime to pin on someone they'll just like make up one something that seems plausible and then they'll use those 15 days to like gather more shit on the planet and then they'll just like make up one something that seems plausible person or like gather like an excuse to like charge him with something deeper yeah like being a spy or i think at some point like they realized they were not going to get me for being a spy because i'm not but uh they're like he's american so maybe he'll have like you know drugs in his bag so uh a super scary thing that happened was like they just kept drug testing me over and over again and then at one point they're drug testing me yeah they bring and they do it in like the most frightening ways possible like like my first night in the prison uh at like 10 11 p.m they just show up and like they send like the nice like female ceo to come over and be like tomas you're going to come out for a little bit the fsb is there they throw me into like the rapist van again and then they take me to like this sketchy looking hospital and they had give me like the most uh sketchy looking porn ever it's just like handwritten and it says we're going to drug test you and you need to sign this and i was like fuck and they're like i try i'm not gonna lie i tried to resist at that point because i you know i'm like losing my mind and they're just like thomas if you actually resist if you don't do this you're gonna be charged with resisting the police again you're gonna get another 15 days this not go well yeah so i was just like can i at least see this as the test is happening and they're like yes and luckily luckily it was a fair test because right you weren't on drugs but like it so is it a were they doing a blood draw or were they having you like pee into a cup pee in a cup yeah it's usually like how they do the drug test and everything they're not like holding it for you right no that's good yeah thankfully you didn't get a wizenator in there uh no no i guess yeah good for you so they would take you out of the prison to go to a hospital to do that that's kind of efficient way of doing it but no no yeah but it's uh definitely paranoia fuel because you're like why are they taking me to like a third site to do this when they stick you in the van do they have you like prone on the ground uh no what they'll do is they'll have like four dudes they pick like the four biggest dudes from the fsb and then i'm just like in the middle of them you talk with them at all or yeah that's the surreal thing they're like trying to joke with me they're like oh thomas how is life you know you make youtube videos oh can i be in your youtube videos and they're like oh oh my god with that said there was um a few of them like as they're taking me to places that actually were sympathetic to me and they actually reached out to me like afterwards and they're like we're really sorry about what happened they're just like we know this is bullshit but you know they think you're a spy like we got to go through with this well how many languages do you speak again you were telling me out there uh i usually tell people i speak 10 but uh i've studied like 20. could you see why people might think you're a spy i i did understand it i'm not gonna lie i'm not gonna lie uh and i'm american so right we usually speak like english and five words of spanish that's right yeah it's and definitely like you said it's in the middle of like the war and it's a tighter time and all that it's like i just don't as long as something like that's going on it's almost like the risk versus reward of going there especially if you're someone who has checked in publicly on the map in a lot of places it it's it's a big risk huge risk it was yeah and i do take like some responsibility for being a little naive and like going there um i mean my general philosophy and travel has always been that people are not their governments yes and you know i that's what i try to show on my videos usually like i just go to places and they could be countries that like hate america and yet the people are like so friendly like i don't know i don't know i don't like i went to iraq for example and people american i will give you a free taxi ride let's go oh that's cool yeah so i naively thought i could go to russia and like do the same thing and to be fair i met many friendly russians sure but because of the situation you know you get just asshole cops that want to make their career by like catching an american and uh i got caught in something bigger than myself i guess for sure i love that quote though people are not their It's funny, my friend Eric Zuliger who has also similarly gotten himself in some interesting situations internationally he said that a few years ago on my show and he said two things he said people are not their governments and countries are just stories the borders are just stories that have been told and accepted at some sort of social level over time and i think that's probably the coolest thing about tools like youtube and guys like you who are willing to go out there and do it is that you bring home to people like me who are just here in new jersey so many different perspectives of cultures and people and places that you know are usually just a word in some headline as a full country doing something involved with something and show that there's so much more below the surface there which is a really really important thing and like it is a risk to go to russia and i gotta say you got some balls to do it and it didn't turn out the best but it's kind of cool that you were because i was also going to ask you like how you got the footage out there but you were able to get footage and talk with people and actually show that it's not all just people screaming yay putin the whole time it's not that simple yeah yeah i mean there were a few people that were uh screaming yeah but uh there's many more people that were saying fuck putin like privately and you had a whole range of uh perspectives across the country um getting the footage out interestingly it's just like i don't know like how deeply they went into my footage i assume like they took my laptop and like tried to get into it but uh nothing was gone except for like the footage of the actual border because like on that border apparently there's like a bridge that goes to china and it's not listed on any map and uh i my speculation was like china was helping russia avoid sanctions over that bridge oh that's interesting yeah so it's not listed on any map yeah tim cook what are we doing come on yeah uh so that probably like rang the uh spy alarm dolls uh even harder for them because of that you're like taking pictures of most important bridge in the world yeah this is uh this is my problem i just wander like off the beaten path so much i accidentally uh wandering some shit sometimes fuck yeah what dude what got you into this in the first place you've been doing this for a long time since like covid right yeah yeah i actually started i started doing this for a long time since like covid right yeah i actually started at the height of covid because um this is interesting like i lived in china for six years um during like the 2010s and uh i just like woke up one day well not one day but it's gradual process i was like i want to go to china i want to like it seems like the place to like build a business or whatever in china yeah in the 2010s it actually was um have you ever heard of like y combinator like the biggest yeah yeah they were setting up like a branch over there they're they're like china's the future like go here to start a business wasn't sam altman involved with that he was the president yeah yeah i actually uh you're not beating the allegations in here man uh yeah i know all this sounds really weird uh i understand uh i also studied international relations god damn it yeah god damn it economics check the bathroom after you leave um but so anyway i was in china not doing anything spy related i promise uh running a little business it was actually like events and then what happens is uh covid happens and um if you have anything that involves like meeting people in person you're basically fucked that's right so um so wait you were in in mainland china when covid hit yeah yeah literally all right step back for a second what what the fuck was that like because it hit earlier over there than it did here it did and was it i mean obviously it was bad here and they shut the whole fucking place down but in china they had like drones watching it and they were like oh my god they're watching people in the windows and stuff i again i just saw what i can see on the internet what what was it like like when suddenly it was like oh covid is here we're fucked yeah i had uh you could say the greatest luck during covid because like i started off there when the when covid was just getting taken off and um you start seeing like chinese people slowly starting to wear like face masks which they never did before it's not like japan where like i was gonna say they all wear it there yeah they'll do it even if they have like a cold or something like that and then but in china the chinese people are more like the the more rowdy version of japanese people right they also didn't get hit with two nukes so uh yeah yeah yeah there you go so um yeah i just start seeing that and i start thinking uh you know what maybe this is not the best time to be here um being that like my business was like temporarily shut down anyway you know what i'm just gonna fly to new york hang out for like a few months come back see my family you're from long island yeah yeah exactly so i fly back to uh long island basically um stay at my family's house and what happens is no joke like the day after i get back to long island the chinese government puts out a notice saying we are shutting the borders foreigners are not allowed to come back it doesn't matter if you have permanent residency it doesn't matter if you have a wife and kids here you cannot come back and they kept the border shut like that for three years so three years it was that long yeah yeah they were the last country to reopen and they kept the borders shut like that for three years after north korea or north korea was the last after china so china shuts down the borders and then langley calls you and says change your plans yeah exactly i just accept the call uh all right you know i was thinking about that but instead uh i had been just like watching youtube videos to like pass the time when i'm back in like you know my family's house bored as fuck as we all were you know we got to do like uh you know the quarantines and stuff uh new york actually became like the hot spot of the world at that point so i was like ah fuck my luck because um i love traveling and we couldn't go anywhere at that point everybody was like americans are like the most dangerous people in the world now more than normal yeah you're also on long island which is like landlocked too yeah there's nowhere to go there's no mountains to hike or anything it's like shit so um yeah this is pretty wild i i looked up like a list of countries americans could travel to and i was like oh my god i'm gonna go to new york i'm gonna go to new york i'm gonna go to new york and it was a very short list it was something like mexico and tanzania in africa i think the uk allowed you to go there for like two weeks but you had to do like a quarantine i would not fuck that so uh i was like you know what i've never been to africa i'm gonna go to tanzania uh booked my flight um there was a mix-up at the airport they thought i needed a covid test to go to tanzania they had like this crazy president at the time that was like covid doesn't exist you don't need anything you can just come over uh but so they didn't let me on that flight i told them they fucked up they didn't refund me but i was like so desperate to get out of the u.s that i just booked like the next flight and went over there and while i was there did you know anything about it like before you went there uh i knew that i knew that the president said there was no covid right and i knew i didn't need a covid test but this was such a crazy like unprecedented situation that the airline employees were like that's not possible you must need a covid test to go here so i ended up like going and printing should i say this like a like a fake covid test like for the next day it turns out i didn't need it because then i actually like found an employee that knew the actual rules um and then got over there and i was like you know what this whole experience is insane it's like all of this i'm like i should film this i should like make videos of this oh so you didn't already have the idea that you were going to film when you went to tanzania you were just going to full send it for yourself yeah yeah i just wanted to do it like take a vacation wow yeah so what would you get like a camera offline and ship it uh yeah so what ended up actually happening was i spent like a month in tanzania and this was like a gradual process i was like you know what i'm gonna make some videos i'll maybe i'll go back to america first i'll get the camera i'll do some planning and then i actually flew back um touchdown and i was like and um my youtube channel i did make some videos in mexico first but it really kicked off when i was in africa like traveling around um all right wait let me make sure i understand the timeline so you go to tanzania you're like fuck i should do youtube you come back to america and then you went to mexico first before you're going to tanzania again yeah okay a little confusing but uh got it yeah all right so what month did you go to mexico um that was december 2020 all right so you went to tanzania for a month you come back home you get the youtube thing figured out and then you're like well there's still only two countries i can go to or whatever so i'll go to the other one i haven't been to yeah what'd you do what was your first content down in mexico um this is pretty wild but i was like yeah i met with sicario's you know that uh no i wasn't we weren't at that trend yet on youtube uh i was like um i would you know i thought this was like a pipe dream at first i'm not gonna lie i thought like you know what i'm kind of like i'm honestly like i'm an adventurer but i'm kind of like a nerd at the same time so i was like i thought i would make like a language channel i thought i would just like talk to people different languages and like they were like viral videos at that time of like guys like speaking languages and people would get excited and they're like oh my god wow they still have those but i think they're less popular now but anyway i was gonna do something like that so i was like i'm gonna learn the language of the aztecs which i thought would be cool and just find people that speak it which i did there's still people that speak that yeah yeah it's a language called uh nawato nawato yeah that's kind of hard it's it's wild the pronunciation is crazy yeah so you start learning nawato i did yeah then there was like no resources in english i had to find like some tutor in spanish they had like their own website in mexico so you already spoke spanish at least i did yeah right okay but still that's wow yeah do you still have some of it today uh the nautil yeah uh a few words all right let's uh stick it on the mic take me back to 1492. wow there you go that means that's cool thank you awesome yeah they have that uh fun uh i don't even know what that's called but like you have to stick your tongue against your teeth you make one of those like that yeah yeah they just like mix a bunch of consonants together very pronounced pronounced yeah that's kind of cool yeah it's a fun well actually it's not a fun language really up uh but the meeting the people was amazing um and that was like that was my first uh experience with thinking i could actually like do this because i like took this trip to like the middle of nowhere in mexico yeah where is it where it's this is like east coast mexico near betacruz i don't know if you know where that is yeah let's pull it up on a map just so people can get an idea do you remember the name of the town you were in uh yeah yeah um the heart of it is called huejutla j-u-e it's a h-u-e j-u-t-a and then h-u-e-j-u-t-a yeah it should come up with that j-u-t-a yeah i want to see this on the map just get an idea like how many people live in a town like this probably like a few thousand okay something like that it's not like a couple hundred yeah there we go all right yeah so this is like there it is there are you yeah that one right there so it's like i don't know i'm totally eyeballing it but maybe like an hour and a half two hours in land kind of deal yeah so it's like a couple of hours inland kind of deal yeah it's about i think it was like maybe five or six hours from mexico city okay yeah so um yeah it's uh it's it's pretty interesting it's like the one part of mexico where people still use that language in like daily life so they're literally still speaking like aztec to each other and you just went alone yeah yeah so do you have one of those personalities where you lack a lot of fear because you do from day one you're i mean you're going down to mexico we know there's a lot of safe parts of mexico but obviously like you're going out into the heartland out here you don't know what's out there there's a lot of cartels and and you don't appear to have been worried about that too much in your calculations i'm gonna be honest i didn't even realize that could be dangerous i i mean yeah i thought like ah the cartels are like over there somewhere jeff nade dude was just hitting his head against the desk i mean there's a coastline here but you know it'll probably be all right yeah you're like a nice enough guy that i feel like in a lot of dangerous places certain people if they're not government related would see you and be like he's he's got no clue that's all right yeah i do fly under the radar that's good yeah that's what good spies do you know yeah yeah it's still bad i never signed up right anyway so i still don't believe you but how long were you down there learning the language and doing this uh i did that whole trip in a little less than a month did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal thc right to your door and that they found a way to combine thc with carefully selected functional ingredients to create gummies baked goods and flour for whatever type of buzz you'd want well the company i'm talking about is mood.com and their incredible line of cannabis gummies and today you can get 20 off your first order at mood.com using promo code julian that link is my description below forget one size fits all supplements that only get you high mood's functional gummies are optimized to kick in in as little as 15 minutes and take you directly to the mood you're looking for d if you love those mind magic gummies right man they get me in a perfect mood oh hell yeah you heard it straight 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looking for and let mood help you discover your perfect mood don't forget to use promo code julian when you check out to save 20 off your first order try it today at mood.com at harmony bank we believe that better happens together we're a locally owned bank built on relationships and personally committed to your success our community bankers are ready to make quick decisions no big bank bureaucracy just a custom approach to help you thrive from business loans to mortgages and everyday banking needs harmony bank provides a secure modern experience with a touch of texas hospitality we're harmony bank where better happens together i think and you picked up a like a decent part of the language in that short of time yeah yeah uh i try to tell people this you're not going to become like like an expert in a language in two weeks but it is fully possible if you use like the right tactics to get semi-conversational what are the right tactics so just like do a speed run of like let's say the most important 100 words uh learn like the important grammar aspects and as soon as you can just start talking to like a teacher or like real people that speak the language and they can like basically bring you up to speed where you'll just be like oh they say it like this oh okay oh they ask questions like this oh i get it now okay and like you're still not gonna understand everything they say back to you but yeah i managed to have like legitimate conversations wow doing that and i've done this with like yeah literally like 20 languages i think did you film yourself learning the language was that part of it too nah no i didn't do that you just filmed the people and you walking around is that video still up it's still up yeah it's the very first video i ever did the oldest um i want i want to see this yes how do you say the name of the town again way way hootla way hootla oh yes back when everyone had to be messed up and look at them yeah they're all wearing it i don't know if you've ever had another youtuber on here but it's usually pretty cringe for them to watch their first video i've had plenty of you guys on here don't worry it gets easier by the second one yeah also look at that thumbnail alessi made over there that's just that's just a complete afi aified version of all of us i'm in a city in mexico also known as mexico city also known as the former capital of the aztec empire now the aztecs they had a language it's called naut and what many don't know is that this language is still spoken by over a million mexicans today spread around the country yeah i was trying to take on my so i had the phone that's their voice this is great this is great i have too much free time i wanted to see here in the former capital of the aztec empire how many mexicans still understand this language well we're about to go and find out that is way better than my first video i'm making a video about life here could i ask you a few questions they're looking at you like you have 10 heads and you got to understand them under the mask too yeah yeah how old are you at uh 39 no no not you that's what you're saying so what language are you speaking i don't know basically they didn't understand anything oh you're like i was testing my skills and they just walk away not good this is basically the entire video i just go around annoying mexicans okay we can pause right there i love the walk and talk like it was the old history channel videos where you're like narrating like you're steve irwin but you're in the middle of like yeah mexico city pretty cool yeah it was great um i thought that would fly uh well i did something it um that wasn't quite the video that got me popular i guess but uh built up my confidence yeah that's what you got to do man you gotta i think that's like the biggest thing with anybody that creates anything online you have to start somewhere and when you turn on that faucet the first time yeah it's not clean water that comes out you gotta be you gotta like embrace absolutely doing cringe shit or sucking at something like you obviously had the skill but like the whole now you can go we'll talk about it later but you can go the straight of whore moves and like film the whole fucking place for a few days and capture a perfect video and you know in your head what it's looking like while you're doing it you don't know that when you're doing it the first time yeah yeah that's like way into uh the drug cycle you could right that's a good way to put it you've graduated like needles yes you're going to the straight of hormones yes no strap either you just go straight straight in the vein i got you so had you ever edited before nah nah that was my first time and it's actually pretty simply edited i would say i started off with like iMovie and because like my thinking was just like it's more about the experiences i'm just going to show what i'm doing right i don't have to throw like any special effects or anything in there um the only tricky part about editing is just you can't just like upload like a video for like two hours that's right that's gonna get boring as shit so you have to like zoom in on like what's interesting what isn't and i slowly like learned that over time that's kind of hard though too because you're in it and so all these little moments stick out to you and then you got to pull yourself out and be like okay i know all this stuck out to me but if i'm someone who has no idea i just did this and is clicking the video what is actually going to stand out to them that's a hard job when you're going to a lot of different places exactly exactly yeah on that same trip like later on um like i meet like this guy on a bus who like also speaks that language nautil and then he's the one that takes me to like that town and um i'm at the time i'm just like this is like the greatest friendship ever like this is so interesting everyone's gonna like feel this the same way but now looking back i'm like i probably should have cut that down to like just one video instead of four yeah yeah yeah but uh it's it's a learning process yeah it's how you experiment yeah so you you were doing all your own editing then do you still do all your own editing now or you have some uh nowadays um especially since the trips are getting like crazier right grander the videos are getting longer um i do currently have an editor he's another american that's great man it's a pretty good job yeah yeah and he kind of gets your vision obviously because it's still very like your videos there's i don't know who your main influences were but there's some similar vibes to your videos i don't know who your main influences were but there's some similar vibes to your videos it's like peter sentinello's like like they're very you know he's just on the ground what's happening and you're on the ground what's happening it's not over edited over produced trying to do all bells and whistles at all times which some channels do a great job with that but yours is like very almost like first person pov you know yeah i would say if there's any like guiding philosophy to like my videos it's like i want to make this as natural as possible i want you to feel like you're there i want us to have like a spontaneous adventure you know just like go where people are not going and just see what happens um i try if i can not to ever get like a guide or like a fixer or something like that uh and i've had some problems because i didn't do that in a few places yeah but uh i've also had amazing experiences that wouldn't have happened if i had taken like the guided route so i think it's at least for me it's the best way to do it yeah now once you finish up in mexico you said you went back to tanzania yeah was that straight from mexico um so this was right around christmas went back for christmas uh and then what's your family saying at that point you just spent a month in mexico you're making a video yeah what are they saying it's really funny because like my parents are like the most normal lower middle class like people they're just like what the hell are you doing but they were like they're just like they i mean at this point i had like uh i studied in argentina for like a few years um i lived in china for like six they were kind of like oh this is another crazy thing that tommy wants to do right our son's a little bit unusual yeah whatever let him go over there you were in argentina studying out there yeah in college yeah so i studied spanish in college and then i did a study abroad and then i went to i was like you know what if i like stay over do like a master's program didn't finish it but i was like yeah i mean argentina's fun yeah so you spent a lot of time there yeah you spent time in some of those uh enclaves filled with people that were somewhere else between the years of 1939 1945 oh yeah i did i did actually um i actually uh made a video about it though oh you did let's pull that bitch up yeah you might like that one okay um i actually met uh the daughter of a former nazi uh and like without a fixer i just found her on the street it was amazing you found her on the street all right i found her at her house in the swastika yeah she does have the full uniform that's her oh that's her yeah seems like such a nice lady yeah she was uh she was very nice so you could tell the the germanic vibes looking at her you sized her up and you're like just look at her you ain't from here why she's a little far right now i can't tell yet well yeah look at the sweater let's see we had to do what he did because something if you're a soldier you have to do what the captain ordered oh boy okay are you drinking mate there that's the mate good for you don't mind me i was having my uh afternoon mate very popular drink in argentina basically if you want to skip ahead the part with the ladies i'm kind of enjoying this right now it's really good i just arrived in bariloche oh i actually know bariloche yeah it's beautiful that is popular tourist destination in argentina for argentinians it's famous for ski resorts it's famous for panoramic views the lake here all right let's go to the lane it's also famous for one other thing oh wait wait wait you're about to be on the road like nazis uh yeah i wasn't that's okay that was uh all right this used to be the house of eric pripke all right he was high up and what is it now i'm just translating what's on the screen everybody it's a family house i just rocked up to this house on the street okay he doesn't look german i think he's like son-in-law got it so you married him it's your house you live here the guy says yes could i ask you a few questions if you don't mind it looks like he minds oh here she comes that's the model i'm exploring the history of bariloche it's german history and all that i don't want to be too direct where are you from you say from the u.s and she goes his son jorge was something but he has also been married and myself as well i was a widow and him as well he was a widow and him as well was divorced but i was a widow that is my son but not from pripke okay wow oh so she was married so she's like the another daughter-in-law daughter she was married to his son there's no one neither my father nor my husband they all passed away now there's just the granddaughters i don't know where they live and you grew up here in bariloche no no i've now been here for 30 years i met them because they were german majority of the people in bariloche are of german descent yes but now there's nobody left what happened they left she goes i speak german they all did but they all died and that's a shame and i'm losing my german too because i have no one to speak it with my children also don't speak it they don't speak it either no they don't want to good for them all right we'll pause it right there yeah that's interesting it's like uh you ask them their political opinions or didn't want to go there so uh right after that actually she um she starts like kind of defending uh not like forcefully but being like you know he was just following orders so he was doing what he had to do you know it wasn't his fault you know um but uh have you heard of eric prepake yes before this very familiar i can't remember if he was one of the guys that they ended up catching they did actually they did catch him right in the 90s and oh there's like a famous video of him talking i think with a newscaster that's him right yeah that's exactly it yeah yeah so this was uh this happened late enough that you had like full tv coverage of it and everything and then um i forgot i guess they took him to israel after that can we pull that up eric preepke just wanted to know if you know if you want to talk about that a little bit go to his wikipedia so we can just refresh people on that but yeah there's like a famous video of i believe it was an american newscaster went down there they did an investigation they thought they found him and then they start interviewing him i want to say he was stationed in italy yeah so here we go i believe what he did was he led a massacre yes italian pow yep yep this well he was a german mid-level schnitzel commander in schischer i don't know what the that says of nazi germany in 1996 he was convicted of war crimes in italy for commanding the unit which was responsible for the adrian teen massacre in rome on march 24th 1944 as the americans were advancing through the country in which 335 italian civilians were killed in retaliation for a partisan attack that killed 33 men of the german ss police regiment boson pripke was one of the men held responsible for the mass execution after the end of world war ii he fled to argentina where he lived for almost 50 years in 91 pre-case participation in the rome massacre was denounced in Esteban Buch's book El Printi, tour de suiza argentina in 1994 50 years after the massacre preppy felt he could then talk about the incident and was interviewed by american abc news reporter sam donaldson this caused outrage among people who had not forgotten about the incident and led to his extradition to italy for a trial that lasted more than four years yeah can you actually go to youtube def and pull up sam donaldson eric preepky this is actually pretty wild footage he's just like an old man he's like yeah you know he's following orders and that's it right there boom so they find him here we go yes here we go it's almost like what i did preppy sam donaldson of american television you were in the gestapo in 1944 were you not in rome yes in rome yes you know the communists blow up a group of our german soviets yes for every german soviet 10 10 italian you know the communists blow up a group of our german soviets yes for every german soviets 10 to die civilians well civilians they have been no they have been morally uh terrorists but children were killed no not a boy 14 year old boys were killed no but why did you shoot them they had not done anything you know that was our order you know in the war you know that that kind of things happened you know you were just following orders yes of course yes but i didn't shoot any everybody but you killed civilians in the caves no no you don't know yes i was there but that was us i think that was ordered by our command but orders are not an excuse it's wild at this time and you carried it out yeah i had to carry it out yes and civilians died civilians died yes many civilians died on all parts of the world still they are dying you will live in this time but we did live in 1933 you understand that all germany wasn't it they all they want nobody won't speak about it now but the most part of germany was nazi well we didn't commit a crime we we we did what we ordered us you know that wasn't a crime that wasn't if you deport jews to concentration camps you don't know nobody no never no no i never was a gay i never was a gay i never against jews i'm from berlin we lived together in berlin there's many jews oh i think you're not a gentleman yeah that was that's one of the wildest like man on original man on the street videos if you will sam donaldson pulled off yeah it was really wild also because i remember uh he had actually built himself into the community he was like a respected member of like the community in badaloche like he was like a respected member of like the community in badaloche like he set up like a german school for people to learn german uh and like i think as far as i know everybody liked the guy in badaloche and then it was just like a big shock to everybody like when these interviews started coming out and then they came and captured him isn't it wild and and you've heard other stories in other contexts about this before where someone does like wicked things and then they change their identity go on the run whatever it is they do and live for decades by all accounts like not doing those things at least and totally like flip over to trick people into into hiding what they once were which shows like this is what i psychologically can't get with it it's like are they so sociopathic they they can flip on a switch of goodness for 50 years or do they did they actually like wake up from being a monster and be like you know what i shouldn't do that anymore i'd love to know that only he'll ever know which one it was or if it's a mix of i don't know but it's a really strange thing that's super strange yeah i mean i would lean towards the guy was probably a little sociopathic right to begin with uh i believe i've encountered some sociopaths in my life and it's like amazing how they can lie and just like switch on a dime to like accomplish whatever they're trying to do right but it's like they have to get their fix right they're sociopaths they need to manipulate lie cheat steal do whatever like they get off on doing that to other people so it's like did he do that secretly in other ways over those 50 years i'll bet he probably did but if he didn't is he that committed to the bit of sociopathy they can be like no i have to be this good guy now even if it's all pretend i'll just be that and then does it i don't know it's yeah it's weird it might have been like i'm gonna show you i can be a good guy yeah i think i'm a nazi and you're talking to his fucking daughter in law on the property that he owned yeah it's uh it's trippy like how little like security or whatever they had right over there it was just like to be fair i guess there's not a lot of crime in that city but uh yeah like considering their reputation and stuff i was like well i could just rock up to their house and she comes out you ever think of visiting that uh colonial dignidad thing you ever hear that no is that is that in argentina or in chile it might be in chile colonial dignidad dave's pulling it up right now there there was a it's i'm definitely pronouncing it wrong no is it chilean german film actually yeah yeah so it's based on that colonia which is which is a film starring daniel brule they did make this that came out like a decade ago that i don't remember if it's like fictionalized but but yeah it's in chile so there there's a place called i believe it's called colonia dignidad right there yep a settlement of german colonists founded in chile in 1961 by the preacher in pedo paul schaefer it is located in the commune of peral lenares province malay region it became notorious for funding as a clandestine center of detention torture and murder during the military dictatorship of augusto pinochet it adopted the name villa bavaria at the suggestion of german former waffen ss officer and arms dealer gerhard martins and it's like rumored it's been a while since i look at this so like they were trying to like reseed the master race or something there like it was just all it's like this like army base almost it's just all fucking german people this looks insane uh yeah that's your next video go down there i was about to say uh where is this go knock on the door let's see what's happening back there thanks for the tip all right you want a commission or i you know i'll just watch the video safely from the confines of my new jersey home how about that sounds good yeah that's i got the coordinates for you right here yeah excellent excellent all right 36 22 15 south 21 35 15 west excellent there you go i hope that doesn't count as doxing i'll be there next week this is public information so all right so when did you do that video by the way uh that was 2021 so like four years pretty early on yeah pretty early yeah so you went back to your roots in argentina you're like let's go find some germans yeah exactly like um i like without covet i probably would have started the channel somewhere like argentina or china but like most of the world was like blocked off at that point right so i was like as soon as these places started opening their borders again i was like yeah i'm going there yeah now did you have before you were starting youtube did you have like some money saved up from the work you were doing to be able to fund yourself for a while because obviously you got to travel places that cost money and like at the beginning as we all know when you're starting a channel you don't make money yeah um that's that's a good point i think that's a good point um i think that's a good that's that's a good question because uh i had actually basically used up like all my money at that point right uh because this was like it was almost like a year before i started doing this from like when i left china and like my businesses uh hadn't been running anymore so um yeah what's funny was like uh they were sending out those like those checks during covid like by stimulus yeah the stimulus checks and uh with literally with that stimulus check i booked my flight to uh tanzania and i was probably on like my last thousand dollars like no joke so this was like i was literally doing like a hail mary was that the second flight to tanzania the second flight to tanzania yeah so you're like it's gotta work i gotta do something viral in tanzania yeah it's a good sign of my insanity or stupidity that i thought this would be a good idea uh because like the chances of it working were pretty minute but uh somehow it did somehow i think it's because uh there was like literally no other videos of africa at that time or at least vlogs like that what happened you get on the ground in tanzania did did you have any idea what kind of content you were doing or you're like i gotta go find something yeah i mean i had like a mild idea but uh what i usually do is i just fly to the country and then i start researching when i'm there because i feel like i could learn more by like talking to locals right and they'll be like yo this is cool you should go here or like this is crazy or uh there's nazis over there so uh yeah um you ever seen tanzanian nazi a fun fact it was a german colony oh god originally god damn it there was a big world one uh excuse me world war one battle okay back in the day all right we'll leave that one to the side but you get there you start talking to people what what stories piqued you that you ended up going after um so at that point uh like those were like early days so you know what i thought people would just be interested in watching me like walk around talk to people and that's basically what i did um zanzibar is actually pretty awesome it's like uh a big like resort destination like the europeans like to go to it yeah yeah billy joel song yeah yeah there you go yeah he's a long island guy i think freddie mercury was born there or something um was he really yeah frederick mercury born in zanzibar yeah because he's like i think iranian indian descent or something no shit yeah so a cool place a very cool place i recommend it it used to be like this like omani keep that keep that mic close by the way i'm not bad it used to be like a an omani colony and they built like these crazy cities there that still stand um it's called stonetown stone can we google that stonetown zanzibar yeah that's also a hard name for a video yeah going into the stone ages yeah zanzibar there you go here we go all right so that fight that's zanzibar right there on the coast we can see that yeah and then is that one right below it what you're talking about if you go up up to the right deep right there yeah is that it yeah that's it so is this like castles old castles so it's got um it almost looks like an old city in the middle east a little bit but um yeah they had some like forts and just the whole city is like yeah architecture from 400 years ago and they got like markets down there too that's really cool bazaars yeah i'm sorry that is the correct term um yeah no it was it's a really awesome place to walk around i heavily recommend it it's a very unique place in africa also i don't know if anywhere else like it so you had videos that did really well of you just talking to the people here at the time yeah yeah um this was the moment when i realized like i could just start filming and i might encounter somebody that would say something so insane that it could be a video so what'd they say that was insane um well my first viral video i don't know if i should be proud of this but like was like in a village uh in rural tanzania and um i'm just like trying to find like this mystical banana liquor that they have there a mystical what a banana liquor that's made banana yeah uh i wanted to try it and that was supposed to be what the video was about but like i stopped at this bar to like find it they don't have it and then like the i think she was like the owner of the bar she's like hey my daughters are here do you want to talk to them and then like it slowly turns into i'm like is she trying to like marry me off to her two daughters so we just like travel around and then we finally find like a shack like serving this liquor it's kind of nasty but i was like you know what uh you know what i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it like for the experience and um i just uploaded that and i was like i was forced into polygamy in tanzania that was the title that's a good title yeah so wait you were forced into polygamy so when the camera stopped some cool things happened uh well that's that's a trade secret but no i actually didn't see it are you married legally in tanzania is that what you're telling me uh i'm actually not sure no i'm not sure i got i think i got married like four times when i was in africa okay you get the benefits of marriage um i don't know if i can say that i don't know if i can put that out there that's uh to protect identity okay that's a good time yeah it was a great uh it was a very uh noteworthy experience excellent and uh for some reason that video has like nine million views you know i'm not surprised can we just i didn't see that title i need to look at the title what was it the polygamy i don't know what it was the polygamy i don't know what it was the polygamy i don't know what it was the polygamy i don't know what it was the polygamy i don't know what it was the polygamy i was forced into polygamy forced into polygamy yeah it's totally against your will it was yeah you were not happy about it i was it was torture have you talked to a therapist it was worse than the russian prison it was worse than a russian prison yeah it was it was rough it's a great title okay yeah let's oh you're still doing the walk and talk with the cam yeah let's roll that yeah roll the beginning beef at harmony bank we believe that better happens together we're a locally owned bank built on relationships and personally committed to your community success our community bankers are ready to make quick decisions no big bank bureaucracy just a custom approach to help you thrive from business loans to mortgages and everyday banking needs harmony bank provides a secure modern experience with a touch of texas hospitality we're harmony bank where better happens together i just want to i want to see where the walk and talk is good morning good morning from the foothills of mount kilimanjaro the challenge is that we're not going to be able to do it on our own we're going to be able to do it of people for a thousand years have lived on the side of the mountain and they still continue to do so today they're known for two things one is being very good at business the second is that they frequently get drunk on bananas today i'm gonna go and investigate both of these things i'd like to marry so if you've never seen a tanzanian bus station let's see where it starts to get all right you are beautiful yeah if you want to say that you have to say it like this okay at what point did the sexual favors begin uh that's around like minute 30. okay all right yeah let's go to the next spike yeah right there i think there's like an only fans link in there got it you work here oh is this the father marrying you off oh they got kids too you're about to they had kids yeah you're about to be the father that stepped up you like the white guy and they said yeah the kids are saying yeah too and she said let's go together i see where this is going so it took like a minute to like some shots or something like that to a shack to a shack yeah as you know which is uh where they serve the actual liquor i don't think it was even like a bar it was just like like a shack where you just you went to the back room in the shack too there was not actually uh a back room but there was a back of the shack that's right yeah um and then uh yeah i can't oh this is where it's yeah so and then you can say i have a new husband that's a great screen grab right there look at her face she's like yeah and then the chick on the other side's like get the cameras up let's go yeah this is like one of those like mormon porn videos but there's no mormons around you know what i mean you got like eight wives and the dude tanzania and mormons yes that's right i can i can see that and i could see your future there yeah yeah so um you never brought them back to the u.s unfortunately not i unfortunately did not see them again after that we were going in different directions but you got a side piece in the country if you need it yeah if i go back to tanzania yeah which i do love tanzania by the way it's a wonderful country it seems like it recommend everyone visit they got safaris also i've heard great things about the safaris in tanzania and some other countries over there is definitely a dream of mine to go do that yeah yeah um did you get to do that i take it over there i did yeah off camera i didn't think it would be like you didn't roll camera for the elephants and what's wrong with you no i did because uh you could actually uh i think this is in uganda actually you can see elephants walking on the side of the road i was just like you know what i think that's more fun just like it's not even a safari yeah elephants on the side of the road did you get video of that i did all right yeah yeah i love elephants yeah they're the best um did you look at any of the poaching culture over there at all because obviously that's a huge problem across a lot of africa yeah i think that might have been in the back of my mind but uh my bad you're good uh i think that was in the back of my mind but uh no one over there gives a so no one brought it up um it wasn't really a thing um that was being talked about so yeah didn't quite explore it yeah it's i was also um i had like barely any money at that point so i had to find like the cheapest safari ever uh normally they're like a thousand two thousand dollars because it's yeah it's like for like these rich uh american european tourists yeah and uh i had like 200 bucks so i found one that was like you know what there's not gonna be any lions on this one hopefully but we'll show you some giraffes and you know so they're like handing you a gun from 1870 dropping you off safari boy yeah yeah uh for this one we don't have a car we're just gonna like throw you out there um and then if you make it that far you're gonna be like to like throw you out there um and then if you make it back it's a good test yeah good test out there it was a fun experience though it's amazing how a lot of these places like you talk about zanzibar which is obviously like a major metropolis and all that but places like this because of where they are geographically you can have that and then like you said on the side of the road there could be elephants and when you walk across the road road just out of the city it's a full-blown open national geographic shoot you know it's it's unbelievable yeah seriously um they do have laws there where like people can't build their houses like in the actual grazing lands um because these safaris are like a major cash go for this country so yeah they go out of their way to protect them but there are towns just close enough where yeah you might have like a lion wander in once in a while uh yeah that's not fun to find in your backyard so you did find a lion in your backyard uh unfortunately i still have never seen a lion in person outside of a zoo so that's for the best yeah you would think so i did uh make a video with this one masai tribe where they have a tradition where you're not a man until you go out and kill a lion with your bare hands supposedly with your bare hands i think that was it yeah like 20 21 000 lions in africa like what the fuck are we doing come on tribe uh they might be responsible for like uh half of the deaths yeah i don't like that i don't like that that's uh yeah um i'm all for tribal you know doing their traditions and stuff but you know there's a few things here and there it's like yeah there's a lot at stake uh if they don't kill that lion they can't form their own village and then they can't have like 10 wives or 50 wives this one guy did so 50 it's a big deal it's a big deal oh no he had 10 wives and 50 kids 10 wives and 50 kids yeah that's a lot of alimony checks they don't have alimony there so he was uh he was busy he wasn't wasting any time the masai tribe of kenya and tanzania is famous for the traditional rite of passage where young men had to kill a lion to become recognized as a warrior however the idea that they did this with their bare hands is a myth they historically used iron spears and shields so they went straight up maximus decimus meridius on these motherfuckers they're like they're like are you not entertained that's nuts man oh so they were trying to show off to me they're like no we actually use our hands where else have you been in africa at this point uh quite a few places um i started off in east africa which um i like all of africa but i would say if you're a beginner that's the best place to you're just getting into it um like because uh kenya tanzania they're a little more used to tourists so and there's people are really friendly though but i've also been to west africa uh those countries were pretty crazy uh nigeria yeah especially um nigeria's popping off nigeria was insane um it's i it's probably the second most corrupt country in the world i only say second because congo was number one which is also in africa yeah but uh i actually went viral on national news in nigeria because again not trying to do this i bring a camera into the airport and it's the most like horrifying airport in existence it's just like you could literally bribe anyone in the airport to do anything so it's just like you want to cut the line okay just give this guy like five bucks you want to bring this through security give this guy maybe 10 bucks uh 10 bucks gutters yeah um yeah they're like there's people like shouting at me for no reason because they see i have a camera i mean you can imagine why yeah um the police they try to like have me delete the footage but um they didn't realize that if you just like delete the footage but not out of like the deleted files folder it's still there that trash can is helpful it's very helpful so uh that footage survived and i uploaded it and um it just went crazy in the country they were like all these nigerians started contacting me they were like thank you for doing this like we've been complaining about this for so long like the government said they're actually going to do something now which i think they actually did they like went in for like a month or two and were like making sure there was no corruption but i mean i kind of yeah i know nigeria more or less and i think they went back to it after that but uh yeah it was wild yeah and like my the nigerian diaspora is unbelievable like every nigerian i know they're like a doctor a lawyer yeah a company they're like fucking geniuses and it's like a lot of them it's because a lot of them are leaving the country too because there's all kinds of issues there yeah well it's kind of like new york it's like if you could make it there you can make it anywhere right it's insane there it's like so as soon as like yeah you want like a better job a better life you know what they're just like yeah we're not going to get that here so let's go over to the u.s let's go to europe yeah so that was what year were you in nigeria um uh 2021 yeah okay because there we just all these things we've been looking at actually happened the same year wow that was a packed year 2021 very busy okay i think i made like something like half my videos actually just that one year in 2021 yeah wow but i think um a lot of travel vloggers like make the same mistake when they start off they're just like i'm just gonna film everything and upload everything and i was kind of in that mentality so i was making like a billion videos and i was like oh my god i'm gonna make like a million videos yeah but again you got to figure out like what's working and what's not and what you're interested in what's not as part of it but yeah because didn't we just wasn't there like trump just like bombed nigeria i can't even keep track of all this shit he bombed them like six seven months ago or some shit um for like yeah that was uh like last year on christmas day perfect celebration all right what do you do thief yeah all right so on december 25th 2025 announced that the u.s launched airstrikes against isis militants in northwestern nigeria the strikes involving tomahawk missiles were conducted in coordination with the nigerian government and targeted militant camps in sokoto state yeah i think it was like they were killing the isis guys were like killing some of the local christians and stuff so he hit him on christmas there you go that's exactly what trump would do yeah do you ever like because you're all over the world all the time and so you hear the news while you're in the middle of the night and you're like oh my god you're in all these other places i imagine it comes up as you've already alluded to with the people around you does it give you like a totally different perspective on like the things that the united states does around the world because you're in these other places while you're hearing about it um i'm glad you asked that because um yeah one of the things i discovered was like living especially living abroad but even just traveling abroad for like a year and a half you can get a different perspective on america like and you can only i feel get that perspective by doing that um there's maybe like half ways to it but and then you go to these countries like uh nigeria iraq whatever and then you meet these people and you you ask them like damn what was it like what was it like uh when the us was here like bomb and and stuff it was like yeah that sucked uh it's over now but you know life goes on and and again yeah the people are not their government you realize they're people just like you uh some of them i mean like in iraq there was a few times where i had guys that were like uh we need to make sure he's not like a jewish spy there was a guy like saying this like right in front of me uh and i was like which forced me to say things like uh i'm not jewish i'm not jewish by the way you're holding up a cross or something yeah free palestine you know what you gotta do in those situations you do what you gotta do yeah when were you in iraq 2021 uh no that's so that came much later that was actually uh last december uh so what was that like being in iraq now um that was a very interesting trip for sure um it was very surprising also because um i basically went from the north all the way to the south so i saw all different parts of the country and i kept meeting people that were like wow you're the first american i ever met i'm so happy about this i want to give you food i want to give you this i want to give you this it's like the most generous country i've ever been to and you would never expect that necessarily before going um but there are some uh like divisions in this i think yes uh americans now there's some divisions in the country and um there's like all these different groups have different opinions on america so their like reactions would vary um so for example the kurds uh they had kind of been like screwed over by the us a few times but they also remember that like we were very supportive of them so we still haven't given them a country though yeah yeah so they were i guess like neutral neutral towards positive uh weirdly like the in my experience the sunnis were pretty positive towards americans because like they disliked the shias who are like in control of the country now um and we also helped get rid of the islamic state which they didn't like so okay that makes sense yeah um and then but the majority of the country in the south is like shia and i i don't think i've ever talked about this anywhere actually like there was this one place um i believe it's like the holiest place in like shia islam they have like this tower there and i see this we'll find it yeah yeah um i actually forgot the name of the city i think it starts with an s but it's like an hour or two hours north of baghdad uh imam al-shreen in najaf housing the tomb of ali ibn al-talib the cousin and son-in-law of muhammad and the first shia imam yeah there was uh one other uh yeah i don't know if you could find it yeah holiest shia sites in iraq i can definitely point it out okay we'll get it and you said you visited this place yeah i went there and um yeah just zoom in a bit okay just like a little north of baghdad you can zoom in your back a little north uh let's see khan ben al-sad tarma yish buka bak ad duaji sorry for that one the uh the s one up there samara yeah that one that's where it is yeah that's it all right so can we google shia holy site in samara that's the tower yeah that's probably yeah is that what you're talking about that's what i was talking about yeah so the very that's fucking cool looking looks like a wedding cake yeah it's uh so that's what i thought i'd be doing if i went there i thought i could like climb the tower and take a picture like that or something they didn't let you do that so um i don't know when they stopped letting people do that but now it's like fenced off you can view it from a distance but the really notable thing that i did not quite uh realize before going there was that this city is actually controlled by shia militants not the iraqi government right so all over iraq you have like checkpoints and they're run by like the iraqi military and they'll like check your passport and they'll be like oh you have a visa okay fine they'll be friendly usually and let you go the militias are a little bit different they're like you're american that's very suspect they had me like get out of the car the taxi like do you have this on film uh no to be honest with you i was really shook at that yeah i can imagine i didn't know if you just still had it in your hand though i still had russia in the back of my head and i was like i don't want to fuck with this i don't want to fuck with this this was supposed to be like a more calm year or something and i was like but um so they pull you out of the car the question in you i do have um footage uh it's in my iraq video actually and like pulled out of the car and just uh having my uh baggage searched in another city remember where don't ever come to iraq or else another great title there you go right there it's the first spike probably earlier yeah it's before i get to like the town it's along the way i go before that i go even earlier yeah somewhere along right there yeah all right let's let's get some volume on this and roll it yeah i have my passport you have your passport yes let's make sure we plug the instagram sabbatical.tommy who's this can we pause that real quick who is that guy so these are just some uh passengers in the taxi in iraq they have uh shared taxis which people usually take instead of buses yeah we have those here too do we yeah we got shared ubers oh shit damn i've been out of america yeah okay so these guys are just randos in there but they should be spies uh i mean theoretically theoretically all right let's keep going they're trying to guide me to like the right place i didn't even know where i was going i'm very curious about where i'm going yeah the right place no lines on the road huh no okay so this is the actual checkpoint oh right so this is the actual checkpoint oh right so you're outside now yeah oh i'd be i left my camera on in the bag let's take it out passport oh they're holding the bag yeah i just got the checkpoint you're like russia part two yeah i didn't actually uh put the police on film because apparently that's very illegal is he moroccan he's american you don't look moroccan i don't know where the hell they got them yeah that was actually a little bit stressful going through those checkpoints sometimes i really feel american here not surprisingly yeah you look at all right that's good right there so that was you got through it they just were like you're good um yeah they were like nothing weird here but the um so the checkpoint in samara that was run by the shia militants they like took me out of the car for like 20 minutes and it was like holding up the entire taxi and i felt like really bad about that and they were being nasty towards me so like by the time they finally let me in and i realized like i'm fully within like a zone control but like shia militants that like still have like a grudge against the us i just got like completely shook i was like i don't want to film here i don't even want to be here like i'm like i'm just going to get out of here and i ended up like just finding another taxi um and like about 20 minutes later i was on the road back to baghdad back to baghdad safe safe yeah there's a safe confines of baghdad yeah when people talk about baghdad in here it's usually you know you know so it's a little different a bit of a different vibe when was the part where they were calling you a jewish spy was that the cops there oh that's actually in that video um i i believe or they say something about israel in there uh what uh yeah so there's uh this is actually really cool this is the part of iraq i wanted the show where it's like this guy with like 15 kids again uh he's like hey you know you haven't had lunch yeah i'll come i'll make lunch for you do you check point uh this is probably no exaggeration they actually asked me are you jewish first of all i'm not jewish i'm definitely not jewish in this country it's a little bit past this nice to meet you what's interesting about this town actually yeah i'll just explain this it's like there's a shrine like a jewish shrine and um it still has like the star of david and stuff inside of it but they i think they converted it into a mosque but they still but they keep the star they keep the star out of respect yeah yeah it was interesting it's the only place in iraq like each other's religions yeah we need more of that in the world exactly you could see that this is a shia household prophet imam hussein up there the most important person in shia islam besides the main man himself most of this region is shia that's not what i was expecting so i've basically been sitting here for like five minutes by myself that would naturally lead me to the conclusion that um i literally at the riverbank just said i'm hungry they brought me to their house and now they're just cooking a meal on the spot how many countries in the world would that happen are you a journalist you say i'm traveling he goes are you a journalist he's just traveling okay these people are super nice except for the guy's brother he's like the uncle he keeps asking stuff like am i a journalist even worse are you israeli because i seem to be saying like that trying to take everything here we go he's eyeing you up yeah are you looking at you like you're a alien he goes let me handle it no don't touch it don't touch it i'm gonna check that for poison bro i'm just gonna bring some water in here you like fish one of the most tense meals i've had in a while oh it's good very good imagine you're like choking it up another brother of yours yes how many brothers do you have seven six three three wow no rubbers in that household that's a lot oh they're going on instagram live now very good facebook friends yeah i'm taking a picture were you here during the war you're asking him america iraq that one oh yeah yes you can keep kenneth how was life well it's war very descriptive oh that was so good it's not like now sitting in peace sitting here war is tanks missiles a family The family gets killed, this one dies, that one gets shelled, car is burning. Governments are governments. That's what you said. People are people. Yes. Shukran. Shukran. Shukran. All right. That's good. Right there. All sweet people. Very nice, dude. Yeah. That was just a funny delivery, bro. Oh, for sure. How was it? Well, it's war. It's all serious. Yeah. It's like I was really nervous about asking that question, but I was like, yeah, there's no other way to ask this, so let's just go for it. Do you think you were, as a foreigner in all these places, obviously there's a lot to build in social anxiety when you go anywhere. Even for you, I'm sure after all these countries, you still go to new places and you're still like, all right, I got to feel this out. Do you think some of that is kind of channeled to be able to actually get good shit? You know what I mean? Like you're on such high alert that you end up asking questions. Yeah. You end up asking questions that get you to a farther place and actually get real information out of people? Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, I think even that day I had in the back of my head, I should probably ask somebody here about the war. Yeah. That would be interesting. I just don't want to offend them and get some shit started, but yeah, no, it's interesting. When I first arrive in a country, I'm actually usually pretty nervous because every single country has different, first of all, laws about filming. They have different rules about filming in public. They have different attitudes towards cameras. There's some countries where the people really hate that you're filming. Others love it. They try to get in front of the camera. And then I'm also just thinking, all right, I mean, this is my travel, but it's got to be interesting. So what can I ask the people here? What would be good? So yeah, it's always different for every country. So. Not wearing a Bush Cheney '04 shirt was a real missed opportunity. That's a real conversation to start with. Unfortunately, yeah. I would have made some real friends with that one. Or maybe like a Halliburton, just wear that shirt in there, be like, "What do you think of this?" Right. Right. Yeah. Halliburton. Yeah. Like throw them in the dungeon. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Talk about. Yeah. Ask where the oil is. Didn't get to ask that, unfortunately. Do you ever get to meet any of the Yazidis or some of the groups that were like, "Oh, I'm going to go to Iraq." I did, actually. You did. That's actually the other video I made in Iraq. Oh, really? Wow. All right. So they were obviously massacred in large numbers, were also sold into slavery when ISIS came in and everything. They are not. Yeah. They have their own religion. It's not Islam. It's their own different thing. And there's what? Like 1.5 million of them or were 1.5 million of them in Iraq? Yeah. They're a very, very interesting group of people. And I knew their story. Before going. So I just became really obsessed with the idea of trying to find them. But they've been displaced from their homeland, which is this mountain that's near the border with Syria. And so a lot of them are still in these refugee camps and stuff spread around the region. They're actually Kurdish. So I don't want to say a lot of people in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East have no sympathy for them, but it definitely doesn't endear them to them. Sure. They have like a different religion, which it's not that they actually like worship the devil or anything, but it's more like, I don't even know how that got started to be honest with you. Like their main God is actually, it looks like a peacock or something. Yeah. And it's like, it protects them from the devil or something like that. Can we Google, just so we get the specifics, Steve, can we Google Yazidi religious beliefs and we'll just literally pull up the CIA PD on that and see what they say? I mean, listen, you know who's editing that. All right. So Yazidi ism is a monotheistic ethnic religion. It developed through a complex historical process involving a pre-Islamic Kurdish religious substratum and the teachings of Sheik Abin Idin Musafir scholars generally regard it as an independent religious tradition with deep roots in ancient Iranian beliefs shaped by later Sufi influences its followers called Yazidis. Our Kurdish speaking community, Yazidi ism is based on the belief in one God who created the world and entrusted its guardianship to seven souls. It is believed that there are seven self-eminated angels, preeminent among these angels is Tuwasi Melek, peacock angel, who is the leader of the angels and has the greatest authorities over the world. There's a girl, Nadia Murad, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, I want to say, in like 2018, who was a young Yazidi girl whose family, many of them were massacred by ISIS and she was actually sold into slavery with ISIS and wrote a book, I believe it's called The Last Girl, about the whole thing, which is a phenomenal book. I highly recommend it. I never want to read it again though. It's one of those, like it's very, very important to read, brilliantly written, tells the whole story, but like, you know, not, obviously not a, not a pleasant story. She's a really, really, really resilient woman who I'd love to have on the podcast sometimes if she ever does that, but you know, I hadn't really known about that part of it until I, you know, learned her story and then saw how many people were in the middle of this. And when I've talked to like a lot of my Navy SEAL guys and stuff, guys who were serving back then, they're like, oh yeah, dude, it was, it was nasty. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, there were like reports of it in the media and stuff and I'm sure they were like hiding like 90% of the details, but even like the 10% that we know, yeah, it was horrific. You know, they were just like straight up sex slaves for ISIS. Just like, I think they would keep them in like cages and then just like take them out and like rape them and stuff. And that was horrible. It was horrible. Yeah. In every way, in every way. But so you did a full video where you went and found some of them, many of them displaced in some of these camps. Where were these camps again? Like some of the ones, did you go to them or? I did. Yeah. And I actually went to the holiest place for the Yazidis and yeah, they were, I was just really struck by like how kind they were. Cause this is like the holiest place in their religion and they're like, yeah, you can go in. Yeah, you go, go ahead. Like, you know, take some pictures, you know, show it off. I made like this faux pas where they have this thing where you're not supposed to step on like the doorstep or something. And I accidentally did that and they came over and they're like, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that. But they were like smiling as they said it. So I mean, I, there's maybe some other regions where they wouldn't be that friendly. So yeah, they were just like very nice, very kind. It was a little bit hard to communicate with them because actually they speak Kurdish, not Arabic. Some of them spoke Arabic. You don't speak any Kurdish? Just the basics of it, like some greetings and stuff. But for the people I found that spoke Arabic or English, there were some people that spoke English. I got to know like their story. Basically they're not getting like any funding or anything for the refugee camps now. So they're just kind of like stuck in their situation. That's horrible, man. Yeah. We went around and we bought a bunch of stuff for like the kids in the town. Got cutest kids ever. They look like they could be like anything. Some of them look like they were Swedish. Some of them look like they're from Saudi Arabia or something. Like every kind of like ethnicity. That's kind of like the Kurds in general. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. There's like 33 million Kurds and they have these provinces where basically they rule, but they don't have on the map lines that show that they have a country. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the more forgotten quests for self-determination in the world, I would say, because like, yeah, they're spread across four countries, including Iran. And Turkey, most notably. And yeah, just because of pure geopolitics, it will probably never happen. I made another video called the country that will never be a country, which I filmed in Southern Turkey, Southeastern Turkey, I should say, which is like the Kurdish region. Yeah. My buddy Eric Zuliger's banned from Turkey for life because he was on a train and they came by and asked him where he was coming from. And he said Kurdistan. No shit. Yeah. No shit. Well, I hope I'm not banned. I haven't checked. They don't like that. They don't like that there. All right. Inside the country that will never be a country. Let's give this some some vol and roll. Yeah. You could skip towards like maybe the middle of it. So this is a Kurdish enclave you're in? Yeah. King of the castle. King of the castle. We're on top of something. I think actually like the later part. It's pretty cool. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. It's pretty cool. parts of the video we go to like this place without a major war with the turkish government yeah over the many years of conflict how's the life here life isn't good everything is so expensive here is not your home town where are you from who's the woman you're with right there um she also has like a small youtube channel i make videos with her once in a while yeah she's uh kind of adventurous also american he's from indonesia indonesia of all places uh in indonesia um just in the capital, we had like a chance encounter. - A chance encounter. uh and um yeah we uh found out she was interested in making videos and then uh went from there hope you told her you're a married man uh yeah yeah i was you want to be the fifth so that was how i worked it up so there were four okay friendly kurdish people yeah here in the neighborhood trying to make sure that uh there's nothing uh inappropriate going on here oh yeah grand mosque of diarbakir i think that was a garbage truck that is a good idea it's just a very narrow street i came up with it myself you all right so this is the grand mosque of diarbakir of ahmed may needs a hijab to go in so could you use it's not supposed for a man though that's supposed to be like a kurdish scarf oh it is yeah this is the bandana that i bought uh back in ismir the head covering is a head cover and you're also showing turkish pride you're showing you're showing kurdish pride by the way so oh that guy turned back to the turkish intern spoke like very basic turkish so they're speaking turkish i didn't know what the hell they're saying and then turkish women are not even wearing hijabs once again even out here turkey is more liberal than you thought so is that like an open so here we have the grand mosque of diarbakir so it's open air the big mosque yeah or i think this is actually one of the oldest cities in the world history going back almost 5 000 years of course there have been many different groups and religions that have passed through this area but has been muslim for the last 1500 years all right may as someone from a muslim country uh how does this work do you wash your feet your hands really yeah you did so much effort yeah that's pretty cool it is cold water was free and they actually bring while you do it how long ago was this one um around the same time i went to iraq so last december no no i'm just kidding yeah where from america yeah you can't be from america uh yeah come here you are from here yeah i'm from europe particularly 100 percent from here nice nice yeah yeah i'm kurdish yeah wow how is life here yeah it's good uh before i was living in ontario istanbul okay after 15 years i came back to my hometown wow you missed home yeah i missed here sometime i wasn't here okay they're here or yeah better life oh yeah we are we are could this they're our family we are very open you do seem to have some nice people here yeah we do have a nice welcome he did say uh thank you thank you he had some more uh controversial takes off camera but uh you want to enlighten us still want to get him in trouble but uh you can imagine right what he thought about the region okay yeah free free the kurds i got you yeah that's like a whole thing now because now you got like some of the hardliners in israel trying to scream that you're not a muslim you're an israelite you're not a muslim you're not a muslim or something i mean you know are we just gonna keep trying to find a war everywhere it gets a little tiring it gets exhausting a little exhausting yeah i mean um i i try to uh if i can stay out of politics in my videos i'm like pretty like even on that i think both sides are up good but uh i my one opinion is i think the middle east is the middle east and i mean if we're not if we don't have like a direct reason to be there then we shouldn't be messing around there so it is uh unfortunate that yeah we keep getting drawn into conflicts there or starting yeah it's when you look at everywhere we've been for the past over you know like basically 25 years it just seems to destabilize a bunch of places and you get to see the human side of it to where the people who are forced to live with the bombs dropping all the time are now you know adjusting to their life and the aftermath of that whole period that still continues in many places obviously but it's like to me especially the more we get involved with things that are completely avoidable i'm not saying like everyone is great and there's not evil out there there is you can't just go bomb everyone you don't like though it to me it just creates more and more generational distrust and dislike towards america and you know i would obviously you've met a lot of these people in person and stuff it's like they're normal people and they may hold some of those beliefs because of the things that have happened to them and their family and you know i wish it wasn't that way and i didn't have anything to do with that myself but i understand why they feel that way yeah that was the really hard thing about traveling through the middle east because you meet all these different groups and they all have like different like hopes and dreams about like what state they should be living in and they all really have like valid claims to what they're saying you know it's like so i'd meet like the kurds i'd meet the palestinians i'd meet uh people in iraq all different kinds of people in iraq uh i met uh i haven't talked about this before i met iranians in oman and dubai afterward after the war started after the war started yeah and um what was really trippy for me was they would be like we want trump to continue bombing iran we want uh we want the netanyahu to keep bombing iran i at least the iranians i met they're all like very pro like war pro trump pro like everything but i mean obviously the i don't know if i should be saying that when i want to go there but uh yeah the the government there is uh maybe not the best and um and it's like yeah you just end up having a lot of sympathy for all these people and i think that's that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's different people you're like yeah i want you guys to have like your ideal government i want you to have freedom um i want the kurds to have freedom i want uh i want the turks to have like the best country possible i love all these different people um right but they all hate each other so it's like i don't know what to do i just know that america can't solve it by itself that's right and i think and it's a good point you make too it's like you know an unfortunate casualty information wise in on going iran war is that people are so pissed off about us being in this whole thing that there's now people who are like well maybe their government's not that bad strictly because they're that pissed off and like that fact doesn't change it's it's it's been obviously they've been living under a totalitarian regime since 1979 covered that over the years on on the show many different times and like that doesn't change it's it's horrible and i i wish they could have a new government the fact of the matter is and i would imagine this is even harder for someone like you who knows these people on the ground and wants the best for them like you were just saying but the fact of the matter is it is on people to change their government sometimes like it's not you can't just have other countries like the united states try to come in and wreak havoc and get a new government because it ends up like i think if we've proved anything we're not very good at rebuilding nations we're not very good at rebuilding nations we're not very good at rebuilding nations like the united states try to come in and wreak havoc and get a new government because it ends up like i think if we've proved anything we're not very good at rebuilding nations at least at this point in time at least at this point in time you know and so in some ways it's like you feel you know and so in some ways it's like you feel you know and so in some ways it's like you feel like you're stuck between a and a like you're stuck between a and a like you're stuck between a and a fart right like you stay out they stay fart right like you stay out they stay fart right like you stay out they stay under the control of the regime you go under the control of the regime you go under the control of the regime you go in you cause massive third fourth in you cause massive third fourth in you cause massive third fourth fifth and tenth order effects and it's fifth and tenth order effects and it's fifth and tenth order effects and it's just not just not just not the world unfortunately is really really the world unfortunately is really really the world unfortunately is really really complicated complicated complicated it is yeah it is yeah it is yeah that's it's like just one of those that's it's like just one of those that's it's like just one of those situations where there's no good answer situations where there's no good answer situations where there's no good answer that's right i would think that's right that's right i would think that's right that's right i would think that's right have you spent any time in in palestine have you spent any time in in palestine have you spent any time in in palestine and israel at all like since the and israel at all like since the and israel at all like since the conflict really popped off there conflict really popped off there obviously it's always been popping off obviously it's always been popping off obviously it's always been popping off but in the last few years but in the last few years but in the last few years yep that was another uh very notable yep that was another uh very notable yep that was another uh very notable experience on my channel you could say experience on my channel you could say experience on my channel you could say uh again i swear i did this uh again i swear i did this uh again i swear i did this unintentionally unintentionally unintentionally uh yeah like uh i ended up being in uh yeah like uh i ended up being in uh yeah like uh i ended up being in israel and palestine just like about israel and palestine just like about israel and palestine just like about three weeks after october 7th uh three three weeks after october 7th uh three years ago you have remarkable timing i years ago you have remarkable timing i years ago you have remarkable timing i really do it's almost like you have good really do it's almost like you have good really do it's almost like you have good intelligence intelligence intelligence yeah i wish i did yeah i wish i did yeah i wish i did but uh but uh but uh it was like i had been planning to go it was like i had been planning to go it was like i had been planning to go there anyway i had the flights booked there anyway i had the flights booked there anyway i had the flights booked and then i was like uh and then i was like uh and then i was like uh i'll still go i'll still go i'll still go but um yeah so that was a very very but um yeah so that was a very very but um yeah so that was a very very interesting experience um interesting experience um interesting experience um i as soon as i got there i had to fly i as soon as i got there i had to fly i as soon as i got there i had to fly into tel aviv into tel aviv into tel aviv um literally as soon as i check into my um literally as soon as i check into my um literally as soon as i check into my airbnb uh there's sirens uh there's airbnb uh there's sirens uh there's airbnb uh there's sirens uh there's like missiles or whatever coming from like missiles or whatever coming from like missiles or whatever coming from gaza gaza gaza so i'm like okay that's how it is here so i'm like okay that's how it is here so i'm like okay that's how it is here um um um i met with all different kinds of people i i met with all different kinds of people i i met with all different kinds of people i met uh like protesters in israel that met uh like protesters in israel that met uh like protesters in israel that are like against like the constant fighting i meant obviously the majority of the israeli population is like super pro everything they're doing um but i would say uh probably the highlight of the trip was going into the west bank and um again doing it like i would do in any other country i just i was like all right i'm gonna try to travel in the west bank in like the most tense time ever so i went to a city called ramallah which i believe is uh the biggest city in the west bank um had like uh i did have one contact there um he was this guy who had he was palestinian he uh he had lived in israel briefly but i guess he was kind of like an illegal immigrant there so they like put him back in the west bank um and he had like a very like normal peaceful view on everything he was just like why can't we just have like an open border and like you know go back and forth and whatnot um he looked kind of like jesus interestingly enough yeah this is on video it is on video yeah he's in there video yeah and um yeah that he's got it okay so um yeah like uh he helped me out and then i had like it turned out this was a crazy idea at the time but i was like i want to go see the dead sea um but there was literally unsurprisingly zero tourists in the west bank at this point so there was like no buses running uh that one yeah it will shoot you at the checkpoint trapped in palestine your titles are hard as yeah all right so the guy that looked like jesus uh it should be like maybe middle uh halfway through it's like yeah at the start of it i'm in jerusalem is romano a place where they have settlements as well uh yeah that guy yeah um they do yeah he actually lived in what was supposed to be a refugee camp but it actually looks like a neighborhood okay all right let's play him okay now i really don't know but usually the scouts they said they train here and here it's a dorm these are dorms for the soccer players okay the soccer players are up here yeah like funerals of people who died with the soccer players are up here okay the soccer players are up here yeah like funerals of people who died with the soccer players are up here the soccer players are up here yeah like funerals of people who died with the soccer players are up here yeah like funerals of people who died who doesn't have money like to pay for the stats so they can't like to pay for the stats so they can't like to pay for the stats so they can't do it do it do it medical staff right here yeah like you medical staff right here yeah like you medical staff right here yeah like you can see it now and then there's an image of the al-aqsa and then there's an image of the al-aqsa and then there's an image of the al-aqsa mosque mosque mosque very important in palestine so all the very important in palestine so all the very important in palestine so all the people here people here they were refugees after the 1948 war they were refugees after the 1948 war they were refugees after the 1948 war yes okay yes okay yes okay yeah they were expecting yeah they were expecting yeah they were expecting they are all from my images around the they are all from my images around the they are all from my images around the hyper hyper hyper led the drum led the drum led the drum this is my house this is my house this is my house that's my grandparents house that's my grandparents house that's my grandparents house that's my that's my grandparents house that's my grandparents house you're hiring a sandwich shop yeah this you're hiring a sandwich shop yeah this you're hiring a sandwich shop yeah this sandwich shop is uh for my uh sandwich sandwich shop is uh for my uh sandwich sandwich shop is uh for my uh sandwich shop that's owned by his sister and shop that's owned by his sister and shop that's owned by his sister and okay some very poor economics some very poor economics some very poor economics in a place like this right yes it's in a place like this right yes it's in a place like this right yes it's pretty striking coming from uh like the pretty striking coming from uh like the pretty striking coming from uh like the israeli part uh where it's that is like israeli part uh where it's that is like israeli part uh where it's that is like fully a first world developed country fully a first world developed country fully a first world developed country like there's parts tell me that look like there's parts tell me that look like there's parts tell me that look like new york basically um like new york basically um like new york basically um and yeah with that said i mean i try and yeah with that said i mean i try and yeah with that said i mean i try to be as honest as possible with my to be as honest as possible with my to be as honest as possible with my videos like videos like videos like in palestine it wasn't as bad as like in palestine it wasn't as bad as like in palestine it wasn't as bad as like some of the other middle eastern some of the other middle eastern some of the other middle eastern countries i've been to countries i've been to countries i've been to it's like it was definitely less it's like it was definitely less it's like it was definitely less developed than israel but developed than israel but developed than israel but not as bad as let's say like what i not as bad as let's say like what i not as bad as let's say like what i saw in iraq or right yeah like lack of saw in iraq or right yeah like lack of saw in iraq or right yeah like lack of running water and stuff like that yeah running water and stuff like that yeah running water and stuff like that yeah okay okay okay so this was a few weeks after october so this was a few weeks after october so this was a few weeks after october 7th literally literally yeah did you go 7th literally literally yeah did you go 7th literally literally yeah did you go to any of the settlements to any of the settlements to any of the settlements um like the israeli settlements in um like the israeli settlements in um like the israeli settlements in there there there uh no i did not have like a contact to uh no i did not have like a contact to uh no i did not have like a contact to do that do that do that and um i don't know if this is still and um i don't know if this is still and um i don't know if this is still going on but at that time going on but at that time going on but at that time what was kind of dangerous about it was what was kind of dangerous about it was what was kind of dangerous about it was uh there weren't really buses running uh there weren't really buses running uh there weren't really buses running between the different cities because the between the different cities because the between the different cities because the israelis had set up like checkpoints i israelis had set up like checkpoints i israelis had set up like checkpoints i think they're always there but like at think they're always there but like at think they're always there but like at this point in time they were super this point in time they were super this point in time they were super severe like literally palestinians would severe like literally palestinians would severe like literally palestinians would need like five to ten hours to like need like five to ten hours to like need like five to ten hours to like pass these checkpoints so you'd have to pass these checkpoints so you'd have to pass these checkpoints so you'd have to spend like an entire day so i get like spend like an entire day so i get like spend like an entire day so i get like get past them get past them get past them and so um and so um and so um the reason i titled the video like that the reason i titled the video like that the reason i titled the video like that like they will shoot you at the like they will shoot you at the like they will shoot you at the checkpoint trapped in palestine is checkpoint trapped in palestine is checkpoint trapped in palestine is because i ended up at this town near the because i ended up at this town near the because i ended up at this town near the dead sea dead sea dead sea and um and um and um this like really friendly guy he had a this like really friendly guy he had a this like really friendly guy he had a hotel it was closed because they had hotel it was closed because they had hotel it was closed because they had zero tourists he reopened the hotel for zero tourists he reopened the hotel for zero tourists he reopened the hotel for me like let me stay there me like let me stay there me like let me stay there um but i actually had uh a flight the um but i actually had uh a flight the um but i actually had uh a flight the next day in my planning uh and i had to next day in my planning uh and i had to next day in my planning uh and i had to get back to tel aviv to take it and i get back to tel aviv to take it and i get back to tel aviv to take it and i was like i'm gonna miss this flight was like i'm gonna miss this flight was like i'm gonna miss this flight so so so they tried to help me like set up a plan they tried to help me like set up a plan they tried to help me like set up a plan so i could pass the checkpoint so i could pass the checkpoint so i could pass the checkpoint without getting shot because like without getting shot because like without getting shot because like apparently palestinians would walk up to apparently palestinians would walk up to apparently palestinians would walk up to these checkpoints and the israelis would these checkpoints and the israelis would these checkpoints and the israelis would just like unload on them just like unload on them just like unload on them so it was kind of like uh so it was kind of like uh so it was kind of like uh kind of a kind of a kind of a intense thing to do intense thing to do intense thing to do but they managed to get like a taxi but they managed to get like a taxi but they managed to get like a taxi driver from jerusalem and the driver from jerusalem and the driver from jerusalem and the palestinians that live in jerusalem are palestinians that live in jerusalem are palestinians that live in jerusalem are the only ones that can go back and forth the only ones that can go back and forth the only ones that can go back and forth between the two places between the two places between the two places so why is that so why is that so why is that it's just a specific rule that they have it's just a specific rule that they have it's just a specific rule that they have um i believe they come from east um i believe they come from east um i believe they come from east jerusalem which i guess is apart from jerusalem which i guess is apart from jerusalem which i guess is apart from like a special jurisdiction like a special jurisdiction like a special jurisdiction um um um and they get like a special license and they get like a special license and they get like a special license plate that allows them to pass between plate that allows them to pass between plate that allows them to pass between the two the two the two israelis are actually not allowed to israelis are actually not allowed to drive into palestine or i think that's drive into palestine or i think that's drive into palestine or i think that's the israeli government tell them they the israeli government tell them they the israeli government tell them they can't do that and then palestinians can't do that and then palestinians can't do that and then palestinians obviously cannot go into obviously cannot go into obviously cannot go into israel proper so israel proper so israel proper so yeah they get that guy he he's like yeah they get that guy he he's like yeah they get that guy he he's like waiting on the other end of the waiting on the other end of the waiting on the other end of the checkpoint and i just like walk across checkpoint and i just like walk across checkpoint and i just like walk across it checkpoint and i just like walk across it i had that thought in the back of my i had that thought in the back of my i had that thought in the back of my head were you yourself head were you yourself head were you yourself i was very nervous like what the i was very nervous like what the i was very nervous like what the interaction was going to be for sure interaction was going to be for sure interaction was going to be for sure the interaction the interaction the interaction jesus christ jesus christ jesus christ yeah yeah yeah do you think that do you think that do you think that do you think that situation is solvable in our do you think that situation is solvable in our do you think that situation is solvable in our lifetime lifetime lifetime uh uh uh my honest opinion is no i agree yeah my honest opinion is no i agree yeah my honest opinion is no i agree yeah because because because the israelis the israelis the israelis their mentality is they have no other their mentality is they have no other their mentality is they have no other home home home and so they consider like any kind of and so they consider like any kind of and so they consider like any kind of antagonism to israel is just like a antagonism to israel is just like a antagonism to israel is just like a fight for survival fight for survival fight for survival and so and so and so there and plus obviously the um the there and plus obviously the um the there and plus obviously the um the hasidic birth rate is like super high hasidic birth rate is like super high hasidic birth rate is like super high and like they're super conservative and like they're super conservative and like they're super conservative super yeah like pro like just off super yeah like pro like just off super yeah like pro like just off palestinians palestinians palestinians and then uh you know the palestinians and then uh you know the palestinians and then uh you know the palestinians rightly also have their claims to the rightly also have their claims to the rightly also have their claims to the land and they're going to continue to land and they're going to continue to land and they're going to continue to want their land back want their land back want their land back and and and yeah the best we could hope for is i yeah the best we could hope for is i yeah the best we could hope for is i don't even know just like no more don't even know just like no more don't even know just like no more fighting fighting yeah i don't think we'll see that i yeah i don't think we'll see that i yeah i don't think we'll see that i think a lot of it's a self-fulfilling think a lot of it's a self-fulfilling think a lot of it's a self-fulfilling prophecy prophecy prophecy i think again like when you see leaders i think again like when you see leaders i think again like when you see leaders of the government openly advocating for of the government openly advocating for of the government openly advocating for war with the nato member war with the nato member war with the nato member because they're already bored of this because they're already bored of this because they're already bored of this war that they're not sending their guys war that they're not sending their guys war that they're not sending their guys to go fight by the way to go fight by the way to go fight by the way you know you're talking about turkey yeah you know you're talking about turkey yeah you know you're talking about turkey yeah and and it's like because they well and and it's like because they well and and it's like because they well they're bored of the iran war and they're bored of the iran war and they're bored of the iran war and they're talking about they're talking about they're talking about turkey now as like an enemy and it's turkey now as like an enemy and it's turkey now as like an enemy and it's like you gotta read the room a little bit man you gotta read the room a little bit man you gotta read the room a little bit man you know you don't have the international you know you don't have the international you know you don't have the international support the support in america support the support in america support the support in america below age 55 is at zero below age 55 is at zero below age 55 is at zero on you know not literally but you know on you know not literally but you know on you know not literally but you know what i mean what i mean what i mean and and and you can't keep asking for these you can't keep asking for these you can't keep asking for these conflicts because at some point conflicts because at some point conflicts because at some point and i think we've crossed that point and i think we've crossed that point and i think we've crossed that point with a lot of generations around the with a lot of generations around the with a lot of generations around the world it's like world it's like world it's like well who really is it asking for the well who really is it asking for the well who really is it asking for the war is it you getting attacked or is it war is it you getting attacked or is it war is it you getting attacked or is it you provoking people to attack or you provoking people to attack or you provoking people to attack or attacking attacking them first i mean attacking attacking them first i mean attacking attacking them first i mean have you spent time in lebanon i did have you spent time in lebanon i did have you spent time in lebanon i did actually actually actually when when when um i actually went for the first time um i actually went for the first time um i actually went for the first time i did another study abroad there when i i did another study abroad there when i i did another study abroad there when i was in college oh no kidding randomly in was in college oh no kidding randomly in was in college oh no kidding randomly in beirut in beirut yeah um beautiful beirut in beirut yeah um beautiful beirut in beirut yeah um beautiful place i've heard oh yeah i loved it place i've heard oh yeah i loved it place i've heard oh yeah i loved it it was really nice it's a very unique it was really nice it's a very unique it was really nice it's a very unique place in the middle east also it's got place in the middle east also it's got place in the middle east also it's got like beach clubs yeah like all this like beach clubs yeah like all this like beach clubs yeah like all this stuff going on stuff going on stuff going on um um um and uh and uh and uh how should i say this i was planning to how should i say this i was planning to how should i say this i was planning to go there this year also uh maybe within go there this year also uh maybe within go there this year also uh maybe within the next few months oh so you're working the next few months oh so you're working the next few months oh so you're working on it on it on it yeah i've been really anxious to get back yeah i've been really anxious to get back yeah i've been really anxious to get back there at some point there at some point there at some point um but yeah it's um but yeah it's um but yeah it's lebanon is lebanon is lebanon is i don't think any country has a more i don't think any country has a more i don't think any country has a more complicated cluster of uh history and complicated cluster of uh history and complicated cluster of uh history and political situation than they do why do political situation than they do why do political situation than they do why do you say that you say that you say that the country was founded as uh basically the country was founded as uh basically the country was founded as uh basically like a christian colony by the french like a christian colony by the french like a christian colony by the french because um it used to be part of syria because um it used to be part of syria because um it used to be part of syria right broader syria which used to be right broader syria which used to be right broader syria which used to be part of the ottoman empire and the part of the ottoman empire and the part of the ottoman empire and the french were like you know what you got french were like you know what you got french were like you know what you got all these christians in the mountains all these christians in the mountains all these christians in the mountains let's let them have like their own land let's let them have like their own land let's let them have like their own land was that the sykes-picot where they did was that the sykes-picot where they did was that the sykes-picot where they did that that that um that's where the british and french um that's where the british and french um that's where the british and french divided right other territories i think divided right other territories i think divided right other territories i think the french the french the french already had lebanon yeah okay already had lebanon yeah okay already had lebanon yeah okay um um um but yeah so like but yeah so like but yeah so like the government that they came up with the government that they came up with the government that they came up with and no other government has this it's and no other government has this it's and no other government has this it's like every position in the government is reserved for like a specific religion so like the president is always christian the speaker of the house is always shia muslim i think uh the prime minister is always sunni and it just leads to a lot of like crazy corruption like all this stuff in the country and and then to make things even like more complicated like a ton of palestinian refugees came over the border um i believe that was in the 40s or 50s or something like that and the palestinian situation was actually what led to their big civil war in the 70s um which uh it was basically like the christians and israel against the palestinians and then later the shia muslims and it was crazy complicated yeah and uh it's still like that today um when i was there um it's i will say like a lot of lebanese people are like really cool they're just like yeah hey do you want to go up to the bar you know like let's go but uh a lot of people there would like meet me and be like you're american okay let me just like voice every grievance i have about your country yeah like yo listen like i'm a college student i probably agree with you just calm down and um so that's even years ago they were doing that yeah yeah that was like 2011. yeah so that was a while ago yeah it's you were saying when you go to a lot of these places you try not to use a fixer and stuff like that if you can avoid it and you're doing a lot of stuff alone so you are literally still traveling just as yourself yeah i mean unless i travel with like another youtube buddy or whatever but i might be able to hook you up with somebody to help in beirut my my friend arab has been on the show he's got a big you know arab you could say he's my friend also actually oh all right so you already know yeah you should talk to him he's from i mean he's from here but his family's lebanese and he goes back there that's true yeah yeah i think he's uh i think he's there right now he definitely was last month i don't know if he still is but yeah yeah that would be pretty cool we could set that up yeah hit him up yeah let's let's hit him up afterwards for sure how do you know him ah at some point i feel like every travel vlogger contacts the other one right yeah we all know each other on instagram who are the other who are some other cool guys you know uh small-brained american small connor yeah yeah i don't know him let's pull that up we did a big trip through uh china together small brand americans small brains americans small-brained okay yeah these are some of my favorite types of creators yeah okay there you go so he travels all over the world too he does yeah he's got probably a slightly different style india sucks don't ever come here yeah i think that's what he's known for at this point just saying countries are kind of up that's funny really funny dude though you know him amanda you've seen his videos i have seen mike okay he's probably the only one i haven't talked to actually um i've talked to uh bald and bankrupt i know him yeah yeah yeah he's probably the one he's very famous um who else uh yeah probably like yeah almost all of them at this point send a message yeah my one buddy brandon buckingham who does a lot more american stuff i've talked about this before but he did a great documentary in lebanon a couple years ago now but what's really sad about it is he was he was supposed to go to india for some thing he was covering for a documentary he has two flights to get there and when he's on the layover flight somewhere in the middle east or europe they realized like his visa didn't come through for no for india so he couldn't go so he's like i'm already halfway around the world let's find a place so he goes to lebanon right before the bombs start dropping so he gets there and the bombs start dropping and he's there like capturing the story of what it is for like a week or two and what's really sad is you see all these young guys in the video that he's talking to who are talking about what a beautiful place this is so nice opening their world to him and within weeks they were all dead oh that's crazy that's crazy yeah that is the trippy things that can happen while traveling have you run into that where people you get really tight with are killed after you do a video um the closest thing i had to that thankfully i don't know anyone that died after i met them but um i went to a country called eritrea if you've heard of that i have heard of that can we pull that up on the map someone else talked about that on the podcast but yeah it's become popularly known as like the north korea of africa because they're like very the government doesn't allow the people to have like wi-fi for the most part um it's very cut off from the rest of the world and um right next to sudan and to the north of ethiopia yes in a real hot spot region um i went there from ethiopia actually and uh so it's unsurprisingly another country where they really don't like you showing anything bad about it and uh which wasn't my mission going there i just wanted to like experience the country what happened was like i was sitting at like this one cafe what's cool about it is like it was an italian colony and the italians like poured all this money into it so they have like these cities that like look vaguely italian and they have like these cafes and stuff and these are pizza and stuff so i was like i want to hit one of those up and i just sit down and then there's frequently like power cuts and there's like no like electricity or anything and this one guy there is just like hey i'll get you a coffee and he tries to do it he's like sorry i couldn't get you coffee because the power was off that's literally all that happened in the video after i leave um i don't know i don't know if you've heard of it but it's like it's like i don't know if you've heard about it but it's like i don't know if you've heard about it but it's like it's like it's like it's like they start sending out these flyers on facebook in the local language which was tigrinya one is just of me saying like i went there to like cause trouble and then another one was like this guy who said there was like no power in the country and the only thing that i can hope is just like these were just like nationalists that are just like being you know like trying to point this out and be like hey these are bad people i really hope nothing happened to that guy and nothing should have happened to that guy because he didn't say anything against the government but i do like worry about that it's like for all this that's up here that we got to take care of which you know obviously interesting times we're living through man there are so many times where i'm so grateful to live here to where you know you can do this and you can say what you want and you know obviously there's been some issues with that with like censorship in the past but there's not people showing up to your door to shoot you or take you away in the middle of the night so to speak that is the single greatest thing about this country yeah it like i don't think there's any other country that has as great a freedom of speech as the united states have you obviously you're spending most of your time on the road now but in doing this now for like six years and then even before that obviously living in china we can come back to that but like do you have a greater appreciation for what we do have that's good in america because of being in so many places that don't even have the most basic things yeah for sure um so i i said earlier like when you uh live abroad you start to view your own country differently but that's like both good and bad yes um there's like you realize all the stuff that you wish you know i wish that uh the u.s uh metros could be more like japan's but at the same time i'm like i kind of enjoy the fact that people are actually have personalities here unlike japan uh there's like good and bad in every single country i would say but um yeah no like the good things about the u.s i usually say is like especially for people coming from like developing nations or just anyone that has like a dream or whatever it's like there's no better place to be you know you can accomplish your dream here um like you can make more money in the u.s if that's your goal it's probably the best place in the world to do that um and also just the amount of like land and stuff you can have at a relatively affordable rate you know like just the houses that we have in middle class neighborhoods in america would be like mansions in most parts of the world you know in hong kong for example like people pay like 10 million dollars to live in like a three-story building that looks like a mini apartment building or whatever yeah um and in most european countries also i think it's very unheard of to have a house like we do here so yeah no it's it's great and we also i i would say like many americans are friendlier i would say than really most of the developed world yeah you say this is a new yorker too that's yeah well i'm kind of uh i'm gonna i'm not gonna lie like i'm imagining like the south when i say this it's like i did some traveling down there but uh i i new york is gonna be nice too you know it's like we're pretty friendly to like tourists and foreigners and stuff i think so yeah i think so there's more of a aggressive letting people know how you feel here which i actually appreciate more than some other places where in this country that i won't name where they smile on your face and the minute you turn around they stab you in the back yeah we're very direct yeah or in this part of the country i like that i do value that and you got to be direct where you go obviously we're seeing it in your videos because you know you're an outsider so you got to make very clear that you're just here to do youtube videos and not spy on people so that probably helps it is true yeah i uh can't uh joke around too much i gotta like be pretty as soon as i usually as soon as i said there's any kind of possible issue with police and i have been like detained like maybe like five times during these travels all right so there's been a bunch of other stories besides russia we saw the one where you were at least talking on the side of the road in iraq where else did you get arrested see i wouldn't even count that one as an arrest but uh thankfully i've only been to prison once um the other uh get a tattoo out of that by the way i i did not no prison i i know we're even in prison it's a good point yeah that's uh something i should all right but you have four other times you were detained let's start with the first one first one uh and i believe this is in a video um it was actually in kenya it's like this is such a weird experience it was like i'm just like walking through mombasa which is another kind of old cool-looking city and uh i filmed this church and then so what happens is the people that like work at the church they call the kenyan police on me for like filming a church and this is wild they think i'm like a muslim terrorist you yeah they think me uh my beard was bigger at that point maybe they thought you were chechen yeah something like that apparently what happened was there was like a girl from like scotland that like went down there and then she this is kind of close to the somalia border she like crossed over and joined al-shabaab afterwards and then they did some attacks there or whatever so they're like all right white people like to come here to do terrorism scottish al-shabaab chick yeah so she was probably like pale like as pale as i am so like it's the weirdest racial profiling like i've ever seen but the way they did it was sue or sketch it was like i'm just on the street and this like kenyan police officer who's not in a uniform gets out of a car and he's just like hey i'm police uh we need to like question you you need to get in this car he's not in uniform yeah and his car is not a police car oh i would have been thinking this is like you know yeah human trafficking yeah i was like i never should have come to africa if this is what happens uh eventually i just like i do get in because there's like no way out of it i just hope i don't have to go to africa i don't want to go to africa i don't know for the best they take me to a police station an actual police station they question me for like four hours or something like that uh they figure out i'm not a muslim terrorist shockingly and then they uh and then they drop me back off of my airbnb and and on on the way there they ask uh oh by the way can you buy us dinner and i was like no not really an option like no you're supposed to like let me off early like you want me to do that you know like isn't how corruption works yes you didn't do corruption right yeah so apparently this was an actually serious thing it's like they uh they do not do corruption for terrorist suspects okay yeah so you were confident enough to say no when they said you got to buy us dinner now even though they had just detained you and questioned you for being a muslim terrorist yeah yeah i was uh bold move i tried to like you know make a joke out of it i would have said what do you want what do you move for italian vietnamese what do we got yeah i was like i still need to uh buy dinner for myself so you know sorry wow i think the restaurants are closed did they ask you while they were questioning you if you spoke arabic uh no no i could totally see you'd be like yeah just start speaking arabic they're like got one yeah yeah and again at times knowing languages uh not the best not the best in these countries all right so there's three other times you get detained though where else right right uh um yeah so straight of hormuz which was very recent uh yeah let's hold off on that one give me the other two we're gonna come back straight to the finale i guess um i believe i was thinking russia for one of them and then the other one and for reasons i can't say everything about this one but uh china actually when um so this was uh right after they reopened to uh taurus and um i was probably i believe like the first travel vlogger to go around like you know like with like just a camera talking to people just winging it and uh me being me i decided to go to wuhan uh yeah because you know why not i mean i was like this is in like 2023 this is 2023 yeah and um i i uh i don't want to say like who stopped me i'll just let you use your own interpretation but i did get stopped um by somebody you don't want to get stopped by in china and uh they take my information um they note everything down and then they let me go but then like a few days later i'm at my hotel these people show up again they take me into a hotel room i get interrogated for like eight hours for eight hours three to eight hours how many people interrogating you three people um they brought somebody that like spoke english for it just the case i didn't like know what they were saying in mandarin oh so you decided still to converse with them in mandarin you feel that good with your mandarin uh especially at that point i honestly like my mandarin probably wasn't good enough to like do a full interrogation but uh i did want to be like guys listen you know like i like your country i lived here do we have to do this i'm a youtuber you know um and what's funny was like there's now like a billion people going to china to like make videos and being like yeah look china's awesome like oh look at this hotel look at how like nice it is look at chongqing look at the lights and stuff this was before any of that so they were just like why were you filming like this is very strange you know like and so i think they were trying to go the russia angle but uh credit to the chinese they did not do what the russians did they were just like this guy is clearly a youtuber and uh they probably shouldn't say the thing probably bugged my phone and then let me go is your phone still bugged i have that was probably like seven phones ago okay i'm just gonna say you're switching that out a lot yeah yeah so when when you switch out a phone do you once you take the sim card out well i don't even know like would would the bug be in the sim card um from what i saw they download i looked this up afterward and uh because it was an iphone and uh you know like you can't just like um upload like malware onto like an iphone because you got like the app store and stuff it has to go through that there's some they have literally like downloaded some kind of like app that allows you to like hack the iphone and then just like do like in like a third party way start uploading onto it they had like left that on the phone when they gave it back to me and i even pointed it out i was like hey what's this there's like oh don't worry about it you can delete it if you want we are listening now they don't that's a country that is not very direct that they're a very indirect uh communication style yeah they keep minders on everyone who comes in yeah yeah yeah um but i do believe they concluded i was not a threat or cia or whatever but yeah they were talking to you for eight hours yeah that's a long time you can watch the whole godfather trilogy in that time really long time yeah uh the nicest thing they did was they showed up with mcdonald's and they were like we wanted to bring something from your country for you to eat like you haven't had lunch yet so you want chicken finger it's like thanks i guess yeah the finest of american cuisine oh my god so how did they interrogate you though is there a lot of like nothing nothing nothing until they try to hit you with something or what's the kind of jab and cross and i want to be very clear for my own situation that this was not the secret police uh it basically what they did was they just asked me a series of questions um and uh i think what they were doing was they would ask you like casual questions and then kind of like veer the conversation into the territory of like oh do you actually like know a guy that might you know be doing anything against our country um stuff like that uh they also needed time apparently to like upload all this to my phone so i think that's the main reason why it took like so long but um yeah how do you keep calm during that whole period yeah that was i was weirdly like very calm during that looking back because i was just like i know i'm just a youtuber i know i'm like not doing anything bad i know i've even like said nice things about this country and i usually say nice things about it so like why are they gonna do anything else so i just waited for them to figure that out and um but afterward i thought about it and i was like pretty angry pretty annoyed about it and just um ended that particular china trip pretty early after it are you afraid to go back to china now i've actually been back multiple times since then i well china it's it's it's it's tough i lived there for six years i had uh a lot of friends there that you you you like all kinds of stuff so like in some ways because i lived there for so long like my social circle social circle excuse me it's about as big as the one i have in like new york or even bigger so it'd be really tough to not go tough to leave it back yeah so i mean i'm not gonna lie like the i think the time i went back after that i was like pretty nervous rocking up the customs but it was over in like five seconds didn't even give like a second glance to the passport do you look for tails in countries like are you looking for people tailing you um in russia that was uh don't tell me you're going back to russia no no no that's uh that's off limits no that's legally off limits too they officially been on me for five years but uh don't get any ideas in 2030 i'm not fucking going back either way okay i'm putting that on the record okay did go to ukraine though but if you want to talk about that you went to ukraine when after you were arrested in russia after i was arrested oh my god all right where'd you go in ukraine um i went from uh lviv to kiev to odessa and i'm just hitting all the hot spots i just yeah well i did go to the front lines at least uh not that insane i guess but i did get bombed while i was there so there's that you got bombed is that on camera uh yeah yeah it's uh pull that up we could pull that up that's uh what's it like getting bombed in the middle of a war zone where 1.8 million casualties have happened over the last four and a half years pretty fucking shitty right pretty fucking shitty yeah so um ukraine was not what i expected what the fuck did you expect yeah well i go with disrespect but i i go into that a bit but uh this is actually me looking at a notification on my phone saying that like 500 drones are coming to the city that's nice yeah okay i'm sure it's valid for a hotel bathroom yeah i was woken up by a loud siren noise and then i got these messages on my phone telling me that a fleet of drones is going across ukraine specifically to lviv right now right and that's where you are stay in a shelter you still go drinking even when there's sirens out sad that would be deep that's what i didn't expect 2024 one year ago while traveling across russia as a slightly naive tourist the local fsb aka the kgb they decided i must be an american spy in order to get time to investigate me i was sentenced to jail for 17 days by a compromised judge for such vague crimes as resisting authority and calling the russian invasion in ukraine an invasion in my youtube video i was interrogated a lot during that time and they would always come back to the same subject who do you know in ukraine when was the last time you were there they went through my phone looking for some hidden ukrainian connection but the truth was i had never been there but i always promised to myself while i was in that jail if i ever got out i would go and visit ukraine i'd go and visit the people struggling for survival against the same ridiculous regime that had put me there well now i'm free and i'm keeping my fucking promise this is my trip to ukraine you're getting better at the intros you can see the progression yeah the progression is there so where you went to all the different places so kiev odessa and then what's this called in the first place you were at levive levive and uh yeah that was really crazy because levive is supposed to be like the safer city because it's closer to didn't look safe yeah so um apparently that attack that i experienced was the largest attack they had ever launched on that city during the war so it was like a huge surprise to like everyone there and uh that was like like second or third day in the country and i was like oh jesus fuck um but i i tried to make the most out of it unsurprisingly um the one political stance i heavily take is i'm very anti-russian government at this point i can understand that yeah uh and so i was like all right at least i can do some good here i'm gonna go to like the places that were hit um which i show in the video um i managed to convince the ukrainian police to like let me in and film it because i was like you know what i'm not a journalist but uh i'm gonna show america what's happening in your country so you don't consider yourself a journalist doing what you do that's a good question uh i feel like i'm like in some ways trending in that direction but no i don't i think i i just try to follow and show what i think is interesting and if i can help some people by doing that yeah i i think that's i don't want to say by definition but i think it's a not the right term to use right here but i can't think of the right word it's like just kind of a consequence of you doing the work you do is that the result is that there is an element of journalism to this from the outside like that's what i see you're showing me places you're not going in there what's great is you know maybe minus like the russia ukraine thing because of your own experience like you're not going into these other places with like an agenda of here's what i want to get out of it which by the way that's good journalism but you are showing people stories of other people that exist around the world and places they exist in and what they think of the places that they exist in in a way that a lot of people don't do and that by definition i think is really giving people an element of journalism so that people can decide for themselves yeah i mean i think i've said in my videos a few times i'm like i don't want to be intentional journalists yeah sometimes like i just end up filming something that maybe a normal journalist wouldn't even get to because it's you know there's some like very unique situations that i get myself into and to say the least that's for sure and um i just end up like revealing stuff i i believe there's been times where like i've made a video and then i see like a news organization making a video about it like a year a few months later or something like that so yeah yeah do you haven't how long were you in ukraine again i think i spent about two weeks there uh in total and um what what is the war for people at home because you were in several different places so you got to see it from multiple different angles obviously we see like the strong attacks and stuff we hear about all the violence and all the continued casualties on both sides but like what for lack of a better way of asking it what are the vibes of the people on the ground with respect to this being a war where it continues to be sometimes you know two weeks a bunch of guys fighting and killing each other over you know 14 yards yeah um it's wild the ukrainians were some of my favorite people in the entire world today like that intro i did with like the the guys at the bar just being like yeah we gotta keep drinking yeah we gotta keep drinking yeah we gotta keep drinking yeah we gotta keep drinking we don't have a choice that's the attitude of most of the people there uh especially the people that are like still living there i met so many people um there's a girl in the second video that i made in ukraine i made two of them in total where this girl could literally like move out move to like europe or wherever and just find like a normal job but she's like intentionally choosing to stay there and like support like the war effort and like the country and everything and there's so many people they're just like you know what like we got to support our country it's up what's happening um if i can't join the military then i'll do something else to like help out and um yeah there was all this crazy what do they say about their government with respect to the leadership in the war and where things are i don't think i met a single person inside ukraine that disliked the government really yeah they were all very supportive of it um i did meet ukrainians outside of ukraine that voiced opposition to the government but they also had other weird opinions like maybe russia should take over ukraine so um yeah did you go so you didn't go to those regions though like the donbass um no it's impossible to go to the donbass yeah that's pretty much like a death wish going there um i did have somebody that invited me to go to ukraine and i was like okay i'm gonna go to ukraine and i was like i'm gonna go to ukraine and i was like i'm gonna go to ukraine and i was like okay i'm gonna go to ukraine and i was like okay i'm gonna go to ukraine and i was like okay i'm gonna go to ukraine and i was like okay i'm gonna go to ukraine and i was like okay i'm gonna go to ukraine and i was like okay i'm gonna go to ukraine and i was like okay i'm gonna go to kiev there's already like sirens uh gonna go to odessa that's like getting bombed like all the time yeah maybe that's enough maybe i'll like limit the danger yeah probably not a bad move yeah you're putting yourself in the middle of the of the shit all over the place you know yeah that's the one thing it's like you get you also get you gotta not fall into that trap of like oh there's amazing content here or whatever when you keep going harder and harder and harder because the fact of the matter is think of all the stories you would leave on the table for the rest of your life if you went somewhere you really it wasn't worth it to be and the worst thing happened you know yeah no yeah i have to uh remind myself of that all the time does your family get worried about you of course yeah yeah they were obviously especially worried when i was in the prison um it was kind of difficult to contact them um you really know like who your true friends are like when you end up in prison go to russian prison learn who's got your back yeah yeah i don't do that sometimes everyone that actually cared about me was like doing everything they could to get me out of there um i try to find a lawyer try to find some kind of aid organization that was used to uh foreigners being in russian jails yeah so um yeah kind of like because of my family i've tried to like maybe tone it down a little bit yeah i mean i guess i do have like adrenaline rushes that like a you know which i can't control but i mean yeah there are like i there are some locations i don't want to name which i was thinking about going to and then i crossed off the list for my friends and family um one of them we're currently at war with uh yeah so i do what i can yeah what before you ever did this stuff though were you like an adrenaline junkie or something like that yeah i was like an adrenaline junkie and did you get that out in other ways um yeah you could say that i've always liked climbing mountains um i've always like just going to places you're not supposed to go to uh trespassing a little bit stuff like that trespassing trespassing yeah into like you know just like train stations or whatever i don't know um perfectly normal yeah yeah you know yeah it's what you do it's always people like you like the quiet dude who's like yeah just you're having a time always got a fucking wild streak to you yeah yeah you know you can't judge a book by its cover that's right that's goddamn right yeah spoken like a true spy exactly now you did go to look at the straight of her moves and you put out a full i think it was like a 50 55 minute documentary on this which you know until february 28th or actually even probably a few days after that most people in the world didn't know what the straight of her moves was but then it became the most important thing because you realize how important it is from an economic standpoint to basically like world trade continuing to happen and it has been the choke point in a lot of ways of the iran conflict that continues to just go back and forth and somehow get worse but you went and looked at it for yourself where we hear about a lot of these attacks and stuff happening first of all where were you like on the actual physical ground um so well at this moment i'm in the uae but so uh where i went was the omani side of the straight of her most um oman is actually like separated into like two pieces there's like one that's um on the other side of the uae which like juts into the straight of her most okay that is straight of her most basically and uh that's where i went i went there i went to i got a lot of people and i was obsessed with like this one village that's on like the very tip of it um like the very tippity tip it's called kumzar yeah that one yeah there it is and there's actually no roads that go there you can only go there by boat and you went on a boat to go there got on a damn boat you weren't worried about the mines and shit are they nowhere near there you wouldn't be anywhere near there yeah that would be probably like if you got closer to iran right so they're not planting it like across the straight that's more on their action yeah i'm crazy but not that crazy all right that's good so you took a boat is are we talking like a dinghy boat or you know we're talking a dinghy boat a dinghy boat are you rowing speed boat i guess are you rowing not rowing no it did have an engine that's good a motor um which it takes like from the place i got the boat it took like an hour through pretty rough waters to like get to that village yeah how is the water there is it like the atlantic ocean the northeast here or is it more clear what's it like uh oh that's a good question uh no you can't really like see into the water god i would say yeah it's uh not really brown but yeah there's a lot of fucking chips coming through there and stuff there's a lot of shit in there yeah yeah okay so you go up to what was the name of that place again kumzar kumzar yeah and um that's a interesting place because if they speak like this weird language that like nobody else speaks because it used to be like this like meeting place for trade between like the persians and arabs and even the portuguese at one point so like their language is a mixture of all these different languages and so i was like you know what uh that sounds interesting let me try talking to the people they were fairly friendly i would say um except there was like a weird thing with the women there like the women did not want to be like talked to by a man or like the men were like very overprotective so i was like okay don't talk to the women right got it um they're like you have enough wives yeah yeah exactly uh i don't have any room for number six no no it was four earlier there's a fifth it's it just keeps increasing you know it's like might have added one like during this conversation i don't know yeah anyway uh like i saw i'm walking through the village and at some point uh this guy is like you know what you should go down like this road there's like this cool like mountain thing like probably like the best part of the village go see that and so i'm like i start walking that way and then i can't even have this on camera like a police car just like starts rocking up on me from behind and they're just like uh get in the car oh no they don't say why they're just like get in the car and so um my boat driver is in there i guess they found him first what do you work for him yeah um and then they uh they put me in the back seat and um the only thing that makes me not panic as much is the fact that they didn't like slap any handcuffs on me anything like that so i'm just like hoping for the best at this point no zip ties even nah nah yeah no bag on my head or anything um when the bag comes out it's a problem yeah yeah for sure so um so the weird thing about this place is like again like you only get there by boat and um there's a lot of people that are like oh my god they're like we need to take you to the big police station so we're going to throw you on this police boat and we're going to just ride you all the way back to like the bigger town of the area so we do that it's i go on the police boat uh it's like an hour ride back and they take me to this police station and they tell me like yeah we want to know why you were filming we don't you know it's probably not a good idea that you're filming because you know there's like a conflict happening and i'm like you know that's a good point that's a good point um like thankfully it wasn't too intense like again they're just they're not you know restraining me or anything they're just asking like what i'm doing and after i would say about 15 20 minutes they're just like okay uh you know it's probably best if you leave oman because we don't really want you to film anything else so but they didn't like the poor me right they didn't deport you yeah so what'd they do just dump you out on the side of the road and say get lost pretty much pretty much they're just like okay yeah you can go we're not going to give you a ride back to your hotel it's not kenya uh you're just less customer service here exactly yeah so just walked back and um i had rented a car which was actually like a pretty complicated thing because i drove it from the uae from dubai and into oman into oman yeah you have to get like special permits to do that okay so i'm like all right i think i'm gonna get in that car and then drive back to dubai and then just go to like a pool party or something you know that was uh that was pretty intense different world now what did you see in the straight of her moves like with your own two eyes what did it look like you know because like we have this picture in our head of like you know a bunch of boats backed up and like people with guns on the ships and stuff like that but the fact of the matter is it's probably more i'm guessing of a situation where it's like a lot of boredom until something happens but what did you actually physically see yeah definitely more the latter but i did see um i believe i showed that in the video you see like just these boats like backed up um some are like clearly like uh shipping container boats ships um some clearly had like petroleum on board and um so like you'll see like uh the traditional Omani fishing boats, and then in the distance, beyond them, you'll just see, like, these tankers that have been, like, stuck there probably for months at that point. Some nice goats right there. Yeah, they were guarding the bus stop there. That's a bus stop? That's a bus stop. It looks like it ain't been used in a while. Oh, never. Oh, okay. Yeah, got it. Well, good thing I ran through the call. I thought you were talking to the goats. I was actually asking them if the buses were still coming. Oh, there they are. Yeah, look. Whose helicopter was that? That's the Omani military. Okay, so we're now in Hasab, which is the closest thing to civilization here in the Osama Peninsula. So right here you got a spot promoting dives and cruise. Two points of land. Unfortunately, it seems to be shut down. Anyway, what I've heard is to get to the furthest north, the northern tip of the Strait of Hormuz, the northern tip of this peninsula, what you have to do is you got to take one of these. You got to take a boat because there's a village up there that speaks a unique language that isolates the rest of the peninsula, the rest of the country. Now, I might be the only person insane enough to want to take a boat tour in the Strait of Hormuz at this point in time. So I don't know if anybody will take me, but let's find out. All right, let's see if I can get a boat tour. I'm not going to take a boat tour. I'm going to take a boat tour. expensive and um you just have to hope for like a miracle that like the power would stay on while you're sleeping because it's cuba and it's like very hot there in the night um but like uh there was other wild stuff like there was like no water in the faucets so like i was just like ah shit all right i guess no showers on this trip um the people of they're understandably very paranoid um which is funny because i've done a lot of uh traveling in latin america and they're some of the most like you know extroverted like oh put me on camera like yo it's all let's go like they're very like relaxed with like being filmed cubans not so much because you know they're i guess worried about saying the wrong thing and then being thrown in a cuban dungeon so i did have even with that said i did have multiple cubans that speaking very honest about what they thought about the government and you got that on camera i did yeah and uh i don't want to name names but there was another travel vlogger that went there who's uh kind of infamous now because he just recorded a ton of cubans talking shit uh doing crimes and stuff and then supposedly they all got thrown in prison after he went so trying to be responsible with this but uh yeah very interestingly the the cuban people what they most often do is they and told me was we think freedom is finally coming or like we think it's like just around the corner but you know we're getting really tired of this like and uh can your like government hurry up and help out um the only people i met that were like supportive of the cuban government as far as i could tell were like government employees like at like you know there was like this cool castle i went to and the lady was just like you should talk to trump and tell him to stop doing this tell him yeah yeah you know i'll get back yeah yeah i'll put that on the uh the agenda got a direct line to him you know how long americans do how long were you there about i think it was like 10 days or something wow yeah you're never worried i was worried flying in uh they have some like for latin america pretty intense security at the airport it's like they like have you empty like your entire bag they go through everything um like i didn't realize this beforehand but apparently like you're not allowed to bring like meta glasses into it which i just bought and then i don't even end up using them on the trip but i was like super paranoid about that going in they didn't they actually like pulled it out like looked at it and i guess didn't realize they were meta glasses but you didn't chance it like after did you use them or no yeah i didn't i just didn't really see like a reason to use it and then i thought if i like you know the one thing that it might be useful for was like rocking up on like the police or something and like talking to them and i was like yeah that's not a good idea let's not do that smart move smart yeah yeah it'd be interesting to see what happens there because again it's like you know awful regime feel bad for the people and all that but like yeah you know what do you get involved in and what don't yeah the one common theme i've noticed in a lot of these countries like cuba venezuela iran is that the people honestly do support like u.s military action into these places they generally hate their own governments and they really want the u.s to intervene they'll be like more pro trump or whatever than like the most republican person in america yeah uh and it's just it leads to like this like weird situation where it's like yeah yeah like i don't know what to think anymore it's like i want to help you but i don't know if like our people should be dying for that it's complicated because it's also what's the success going to be what does success look like what does it take to get there is it even possible to get it it's very different you know going in and abducting one guy in a coordinated microwave weapon military operation in venezuela overnight versus going into a country of 93 million people protected by insane geography with a crazy regime it's just it's it's not the same thing in the dead center of the middle east these are just not the same thing so you know it's like i'm always willing to look at situations on a case-by-case basis for sure it's just you do want to make sure you learn lessons and the mistakes you've made and i feel like we don't do that sometimes here yeah uh i think that's an understanding yeah well listen dude you're living a very interesting life and you're obviously doing some pretty brave things out there in the world and going to get stories that people probably wouldn't see in many cases so it's always amazing to see how far you've come since the earliest video and i really appreciate it when guys like you come in here from literally halfway around the world to to tell these stories it's always amazing so thank you for doing this while you're home i was really happy to be here all right everyone go subscribe to sabbatical if we collab this you'll be able to subscribe on the actual title right there as well you can just see his his channel and check out everything that you've been doing for six years now and we'll have to do this again my friend yeah very nice all right nice meeting you everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace hey guys if you're not following me on spotify please hit that follow button and leave a five star review they're both a huge huge help thank you this episode sponsored by she's birdie you lock the hotel room door then check it again and maybe one more time because even the nicest room can feel unfamiliar at night that's why she's birdie created birdiebox with she's birdie you can bring peace of mind with you birdiebox is a portal to the most comfortable places in the world where you can spend your time and have a great time you'll be able to connect with your loved ones and your loved ones 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