Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1925 - Sonny, from Best Ever Food Review Show
Uploaded: 2023-01-13T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1925 - Sonny, from Best Ever Food Review Show' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1925 - Sonny, from Best Ever Food Review Show' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-13. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1925 - Sonny, from Best Ever Food Review Show

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
What's happening, sonny? How are you?
I'm good. I'm great. I'm happy to be here.
I got to say, to start off, I want to say thank you so much for having me here
in the first place.
By all accounts, I should not be here right now.
Why's that?
And I say that because, not to be too grandiose from the start,
but the way I grew up, I grew up white trash from central Minnesota,
super poor family, one of six, failed college three times,
and now, somehow, years later, I have the most viewed, most followed travel
show,
online or otherwise, and I'm on the motherfucking Joe Rogan Experience.
How did this all happen? You're welcome.
How did you get on this journey of food exploration?
You have a really fun show.
Thank you.
It's really fun to watch.
Yes, I was very stoked.
You know, when you reached out to me for the first time, I was in Egypt with
COVID.
I was going through one of my worst travel experiences ever.
And how did it start?
I mean, everything starts, obviously, where I come from in Minnesota.
Growing up, I was quite directionless.
I didn't know where I wanted to, I didn't know what I wanted to study.
I didn't really have any guidance.
I didn't really have any mentorship.
And so, hence, the reason I failed out of school so many times.
In high school, I was really into filmmaking, because we had, fortunately, we
had a filmmaking course there.
But it's just not something I pursued afterwards.
And so, around the age of 24, I felt like I was pretty rudderless.
I tried doing a couple things.
You know, I did radio for a while.
I was at 104.7 KCLD, I think the 100th market in the country, not bad, doing 11
p.m. to 5 a.m., making minimum wage.
And so, I tried getting...
Minimum wage on the radio?
Yeah.
They really pay you minimum wage?
Yeah, well, if they would have paid less, they probably would have.
Are you surprised?
I mean, radio is kind of infamous for not paying any money.
Yeah, but minimum wage sounds crazy.
I guess they saw it as, like, they're doing me a favor by teaching me a trade
or a skill.
Hmm, okay.
Maybe.
Yeah.
And so, I tried getting a job doing that.
That didn't work out.
And so, I was at a point in my life where I just thought, I need to do
something.
I'm still youngish.
I was 24.
And I want to travel.
I want to see the world.
I want to figure out something before I actually develop a long-term career.
Because at that point, I had nothing.
And so, I had a friend, my brother had a friend who lived in Korea.
And at the age of 24, I moved to Korea to teach English.
And to me, it made sense because I could go there, I could travel, I could see
the world.
I thought it would maybe last an hour, and then I would come back.
But I ended up staying there for eight years.
And so, maybe I'm giving too long of an answer.
No, don't worry about it.
All right, I got to take a deep breath.
Let me reset a little bit.
I got to calm down.
So, I went to Korea.
Korea was really challenging.
Because it was my first time in a different country.
And I'd really only been in central Minnesota at that point.
Oh, wow.
And so, it was something completely different.
And this is Korea in 2008.
Like, there aren't really smartphones.
Maybe the iPhone 1 had just dropped.
YouTube still sucked.
I mean, it existed, but it was barely usable.
It was just cat videos, and Charlie bit me at that point.
And so, there's very little guidance online.
I went there to teach English.
You might be asking, how did you teach English after failing out of university
three times?
Well, you can do some underground, under-the-table English teaching in Korea.
Did you have to learn how to speak Korean?
Eventually, I did, but no.
So, people, Korean, folks in Korea are very desperate to learn English.
And as you may know, people, they study their asses off.
They're very hard workers, and they're very hard studiers, maybe to a detriment.
Like, kids go to school so much.
They study so much.
They get tutors, and things like that.
And so, when I went to Korea, I was going to be a tutor.
And to tutor people, I had to...
Sorry, give me one second.
I'm freaking out a little bit still.
Is this the first podcast you've done?
It's like, you know, I did a couple practice podcasts.
I just feel like it's so...
What's a practice podcast?
I feel like it's so quiet in here.
I'm like, I can hear my voice so well.
In Korea, I wanted to get a gig teaching.
And so, to teach, you would think, like, oh, it's going to be difficult to
teach people
if you don't have any experience or any credentials teaching English.
And that wasn't the case at all.
Because when you speak to people, you know, they'll say something like,
oh, today I go to store.
And you go, oh, I know how to solve that use.
No, today I went to the store.
And so, I'm teaching people conversational English.
And I'm doing that for maybe 40 or 50 bucks an hour.
Which seems pretty good.
Especially in 2008.
Except for, it takes...
Maybe you can do two or three lessons a day.
Because you need to take the subway.
You need to go around the city.
And you need to go where the people are.
You do the lesson.
You come back.
And so, eventually, I learned how to get a full-time job in Korea.
Which was what was really necessary.
I reached out to a school.
And I find out the code word is, can you pay cash?
So, with many schools, you need to have the right kind of visa.
They want to see that you have a proper degree.
Which is understandable.
And so, if you just asked, can you pay cash?
Some would get your point.
They would say no.
Or they would say, oh, yeah.
Cash is fine.
We'll do cash.
And so, eventually, after being there for maybe six months, I finally figured
out how to make a full-time income teaching English in Korea at a kindergarten.
And I know some people might judge that and say that's not okay to do.
Because I don't have a proper degree in teaching English.
But really, to teach English in Korea, all you need is a four-year degree in
anything.
I could have had a four-year degree in interior design and also taught kids
English.
And so, living in Korea was the show I do now.
There's no way I could have done it if I didn't have all that time living
abroad for so long.
And living in Korea was the first taste of living in a society and a culture
completely different from the USA.
In the USA, you know, we have a very individualistic society here.
And Korea is much more of a communal society.
People care a lot more what other people think.
You know, I tried dating a Korean woman one time.
Challenging.
Because she's not just looking at, what do I think about the dynamic of this
relationship?
She's looking at, what are my parents going to think?
What are my friends going to think?
What are my coworkers going to think?
And so on.
That's just one random example.
But being steeped and immersed in this different culture gave me enough
experience to, it gave me perspective.
And it's perspective that if I didn't have that, I couldn't make the show that
I make today.
Because the show would be a much more judgmental show if I wasn't so used to
and accustomed to being among other cultures.
So after a number of years in Korea, I switched to filmmaking, my interest to
filmmaking.
And I started making my own content.
I didn't really have anywhere to publish it.
What kind of content?
What did you start doing?
Back then, I would read all these self-help books.
And I was really obsessed with this idea of just improving myself, getting
better.
I felt really unaccomplished because three of my siblings had four-year degrees.
One had a PhD.
One was in law school.
And for me, I'm the loser in Korea who doesn't have a degree, doesn't have a
job, doesn't have a skill.
And so I wanted to build up a skill in filmmaking.
This is why I was really interested in high school.
I was like, I can do it again now.
Filmmaking, like making movies, documentaries, whatever kind of stuff.
So I guess in the beginning, I wanted to be good at whatever I could be good.
I wanted to be good at everything.
And I didn't have a direction quite yet.
So I read this book called Talent is Overrated.
And in that book, they talk about the 10,000-hour rule.
I'm sure you've heard about it in Malcolm Gladwell's book.
And the 10,000-hour rule is just essentially you need 10,000 hours of practice,
deliberate practice, to become master class at something.
Even people talk about this with comedians, too.
I think Louis C.K. has talked about people needing at least 10 years to get
good or even decent.
And so I broke it down.
I looked at filmmaking systematically.
Like, how can I week by week, day by day, improve at this and get better at
this?
I created something called the Soul Filmmakers Workshop, which was a place
where I could bring my films.
Maybe there were little comedy sketches, short documentaries, stuff I did for
clients, corporate work.
And people could come and tear apart my content, and then that would help me to
improve and get better over time.
And so over a number of years in Korea, I was able to transition from teaching
English to doing filmmaking full-time for clients.
And so at this point, I don't have any really artistic goals in mind.
It's just I want to figure out if I ever get deported from this country, am I
going to be able to go back to the USA and have a skill or a job or a trade I
can fall back on?
And eventually, that answer was yes.
Luckily, I never got deported.
But living in Korea for eight years was one of the most nerve-wracking things I
had ever done because I was there on a tourist visa.
And it's not something I've talked about a lot, but a tourist visa means you
get to stay here for 90 days.
As an American, you don't need any visa ahead of time, but you land on the spot.
They give you a visa for 90 days, and then within 90 days, you need to leave
the country, but you can come back right away.
But I did that for eight years straight.
So you just kept leaving and coming back?
Right.
So where would you go?
So I really got it perfected, and I could do it for the least amount of money
possible.
I went from Seoul in the north of South Korea all the way down to Busan in the
south to an island called Tsushima in Japan.
And so I could wake up at 5 a.m., go all the way to Japan, and come back by
evening.
The nerve-wracking part wasn't the trip itself or the amount of money it cost,
although that was a burden, too, because I didn't make that much money.
But at immigration, on both sides, they would always ask,
Hey, you're teaching.
You're a teacher, right?
You teach.
Even in Japan, going into Japan, they would say, What do you do?
And I would have a whole list of stories and answers lined up in my mind,
because it was so anxiety-inducing, especially coming back to Korea,
because this is the stamp I really need.
I need 90 days more of freedom when I land in Korea.
I shouldn't say land, but when I pull up at the port, because I would take a
ferry.
If I get the stamp, I get 90 more days to figure out my life, to move forward,
and to have freedom.
And standing in line for immigration, I'm looking, okay, there's an older guy
over here.
This lady looks nice.
This young guy looks like he's got something to prove.
And I would rehearse my story.
What are you doing here?
Oh, I love Korea.
I love Korean.
I love Korean food.
Try to get him on my side.
I plan to go to university soon.
In Korea, I hope to study here.
And then eventually, would get through.
But sometimes...
Were you speaking to them in Korean?
No, in English.
So everybody...
I would say in most places you go around the world, at immigration, they're
going to speak English.
And a couple of times, they took me to the side room.
And that's really terrifying.
Especially because it wouldn't be as terrifying now, because now I have
resources.
But back then, I'm completely broke.
And so, one time they took me to the side room.
They go, what are you really doing here?
You're teac