Name: What Jonathan Zimmerman Learned Living in Nepal for 2 Years
Uploaded: 2021-04-30T17:12:31.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What Jonathan Zimmerman Learned Living in Nepal for 2 Years' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-04-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What Jonathan Zimmerman Learned Living in Nepal for 2 Years' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-04-30. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience
In Nepal, the reason that you ate a rat was the rat was considered the
strongest animal.
And you weaned kids on it because you want the kid to grow it to be strong.
Really?
Yeah, and so they would often wean kids and just did a tiny little piece.
Yeah, yeah.
The cow urine, that was the only time I actually took antibiotics prophylactically,
which is something you're not supposed to do.
But I just decided that, you know, it was my second year, I didn't want to get
ill.
Cow urine has some weird pseudo medicinal purposes over there.
I've read that too, yeah.
They're using it for people that are suffering from COVID.
And there was, yeah, there was this like, this guy from, I'm trying to remember
the country.
I don't remember.
But he was criticizing like how ridiculous this practice is of giving cow urine
to these sick people.
And how ignorant it was.
It was.
Well, you know, it's funny you say ignorant because for me really what was so
important about that experience was just learning how weird I was.
And that is, you know, how weird I was to them, you know, and how many
different ways there are to be human.
Right.
And so, you know, I, you know, I participated in marrying off one of our
sisters.
Right.
Because I'm an older brother.
Oh, wow.
A girl's 16, you know, time to get her married.
16.
Oh, yeah.
How old was the dude?
Yeah.
Well, you know, people would come by and ask for a hand.
This is what the process was and often bring gifts.
And I'm there with the other brothers and a guy would come and leave and
somebody would say to me, well, what did you think of him?
And the first time they asked, I said, which means what does little sister
think?
Right.
And people just cracked up.
And I heard about that for two years.
I would walk to other parts of the district and people would say, oh, I heard
about you.
You're the guy who asked what Bohini thinks.
And the point was that wasn't relevant to them.
That wasn't what the experience was.
Right.
That wasn't a relevant variable.
And, you know, I would explain to them that in my country, you actually chose
your own spouse.
And they would say, well, how do you do that?
And I'd say, well, you find somebody that you love.
And then they would say, well, then what if you don't love them?
And then I'd say, well, there's this thing called divorce.
You know, and what I realized was that the way I thought about how all this
should work was just so radically different from theirs and not necessarily
better or worse.
Right.
Their system had its own logic and it was static.
It was stable.
Right.
If you don't marry for love.
Right.
You're not going to get divorced because you're out of love.
Right.
That wasn't the purpose of it.
The purpose was it was social.
It was familial.
It had to do with joining communities, you know.
And again, I didn't grow up there.
So that's not what I do or what I would want to do.
But what I learned was how many different ways there are to do, you know, how
many different ways there are to be human.
And always to resist the automatic assumption that your way is the better way,
you know, because we all do that, too.
And by the way, I did some of that in Nepal.
I mean, you know, one of my other really enduring memories is my best student
was of the so-called commie cast, which is metal worker, which is an untouchable.
It's way down there.
Right.
It's not as low as a shoemaker.
And, you know, they have a cast system.
Right.
And at the bottom, there are people that are called untouchables because you're
literally not supposed to touch them or anything.
What?
Yes.
I mean, that's how, you know, shoemakers especially because they deal with-
With shoes?
With cows.
They deal with leather, right?
Oh.
And, you know, so-
Why does that-
And, well, because the cow is a sacred animal, right?
But you need shoes.
Yes, you do.
Right?
And so, you know, the Hindu system evolved to have a caste that did precisely
that.
Wow.
Right?
I mean, you know-
So, did you communicate with those people at all?
Oh, sure.
What was it like?
Yeah.
They must have felt terrible.
Well, I mean, here's the story.
The metalworking family, I actually went down to their house and I had a meal
there.
And I come back and I tell my Amma, that means mother, of my family.
And we were Chetris, which is way up there.
It's not Brahman, which is the highest.
And that's the priestly caste, but the Chetris are second.
You know, they were historically the military caste.
She's like, Babu, that means baby, which is what she called me.
Babu, you ate rice at a metalworker's house?
Do you know how filthy those people are?
You know, what were you thinking?
And I'm like, listen, Amma, I just don't believe in caste.
You know, I think everyone's the same.
And P.S., you know what's going to happen.
I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm just incredibly ill.
And I just go outside and I'm puking my guts out.
Amma can hear me.
She comes from the other room and she's like, listen, Babu, you can't say I
didn't warn you.
You know, I mean, you know, and again, you know, it was really useful for me.
It's not like I suddenly believe in the caste system because I don't.
Right.
But I think it's really useful just to have all your assumptions challenged,
you know, and that's really what it did for me.
And here I was, I'm this American.
I'm making this great statement about how all people are equal.
Well, you know what?
I mean, 20 years earlier in my own country, they had a caste system, right?
Yeah.
That went back to the 1600s.
Right.
And that was the other formative experience of being in Nepal.
That was actually the first place that I started to think about American
history.
What did you, when they were talking about the arranged marriage.
Yeah.
And when you were saying that in your country people get to choose.
Yeah.
Like, what did you think about, what is their, like, how do they explain it to
you in a way where it made sense?
Did they attempt to?
Yeah.
Or did they just say this is how it's always been?
Well, you know, I would say that the things that are most commonsensical to us
often we don't have to explain, right?
Because they're part of our ether.
Right.
But I think the logic was this, you know, that you have to create families,
right?
And so...
You have to.
Yeah.
You've got to, you know, you have to perpetuate the species.
Right.
Right.
And so, you know, the simplest and the most static way to do that is to have
the girls marry guys who can, who have enough wherewithal to take care of them.
Right.
That can bring you something.
Right.
Because it's a reciprocal arrangement.
Right.
Right.
And this is why in rural Nepal at the time, people wanted to have boys, not
girls.
They used to say, which means the son stays and the girl goes.
Because, of course, the system was also patrilocal, which means that, you know,
you go and live in the house of the guy that you've married.
Right.
So in the house I lived with, the older brothers, they all had wives who lived
there.
Wow.
Right.
But when the girls got married, they had to go somewhere else.
So that was...
How bizarre.
Yeah.
Well, that, again, and it's ironic because, believe it or not, 20 years later,
I went back to my village with my older daughter, who was a junior in high
school at the time.
And the three-day walk had become about a day's walk because they had cut a
tractor road kind of up half into the mountains.
And the first guy that I ran into, he just said, hey, where you been?
Like, I haven't seen you around.
They're like, oh, you brought your daughter.
Great.
Let's drink rice wine.
You know, basically, you know, somebody had died and somebody had gotten
married and, you know, somebody had a kid.
But the one thing that was really different, and this speaks to globalization,
is a lot of the younger men had gone to places like the United Arab Emirates to
work.
Hmm.
You know?
Yeah.
And that was ironic, too, because, you know, the old story was the son stays
and the girl goes, right?
A lot of the sons had gone, but they had gone outside of the country.
Yeah.
And that's the way, you know, so many of these economies work in that part of
the world.
Did you see if the girl's marriage worked out?
Well, again, you know, Joe, it all works out, right?
I mean, you know, it works out because it was designed for social reasons, not
for personal ones.
You know, it's not about what she thinks or about what he thinks.
You know, it's about kind of, you know, bringing together families, creating
communities, bringing up kids.
It wasn't about sentiment.
Although, you know, as I got closer to people in the community, I found out
that after a marriage was arranged, often you did develop feelings for the
person.
Often.
Yeah.
It's just that those feelings weren't the foundation of it, right?
Right.
They weren't what spawned it.
They were an offshoot of it.
They weren't a cause of it.
Did it make you feel uncomfortable that they were doing that?
Not in the least.
Really?
You know?
And in fact, I mean, that was when I started to read history because, of course,
in most parts of the world, including where we are right now, historically
marriage was arranged.
Right.
But I would imagine that, like, if you have this conversation with a feminist,
for instance, they would have a real issue with that.
Absolutely.
And also a real issue with your acceptance of it, right?
Well, again, I'm not saying that I accept it for me.
Right, I understand.
You know?
Yes.
And because that wasn't my expectation, you know?
Right.
But, you know, I think it's worth asking ourselves the degree to which we know
we're right.
Right.
And, you know, I think that at the end of the day, we don't.
All of us have opinions.
All of us have biases.
All of us have learned certain things.
But Learned Hand, who was, you know, a famous jurist and federal court judge,
one of the things he said that's always stuck with me is that the spirit of
liberty, which is really what we're talking about, is the spirit that is not so
sure of itself.
And I've always loved that.
Right?
So I'm a human being.
I have biases, opinions, very strong ones.
But I think that the worst human attribute is self-certainty.
I think it's the most dangerous one, you know?
Mm-hmm.
And for me, the Peace Corps was just a great way to challenge that and just say,
okay, look, I'm not going to have an arranged marriage.
And by the way, I don't.
And I'm not going to marry off my daughters.
But in another part of the world, they do that.
And that's decreasingly the case, by the way, right?
Because these places have modernized.
Remember, I was there a long time.
So they get the internet and they go, what the fuck?
I could just meet a guy I really like.
Exactly.
Right?
And so these, you know, I mean, when we went back to Nepal, my village, it was
in a remote place.
So it was relatively static.
But there had been many other changes.
I mean, just think of all these guys going to the UAE to work on construction
sites.
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