Who You Meet Down America’s Forgotten Backroads - Peter Santenello

Peter Santenello is an independent journalist, YouTuber, & author. Who are the forgotten people of rural America? The country’s political and moral divisions may stem not only from disagreement, but from distance, countless communities and subcultures living entirely separate lives, with little understanding of one another. So what is life really like in these overlooked towns, who still calls them home, and do they represent a version of the “real America” the rest of the country has forgotten? Expect to learn what Peter learned about America from traveling to 85 different countries, what’s actually going on in rural America nobody really sees or has forgotten about, what’s actually going on in the drug crisis in America, Peter’s biggest lessons from the Amish, the most misunderstood community in America and much more… - Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure (now at a lower price) at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com - 0:00 What Inspired Peter to Travel? 4:57 The Isolation of Living Abroad 10:04 The World’s Most Underrated Destinations 14:41 How Ukraine Changed Peter’s Path 23:44 What Americans Don’t Understand About America 26:19 What We Can Learn From Native Americans 30:44 Do Native Communities Still Hold Resentment? 36:53 Is This the Worse Place in America? 46:14 Is Fentanyl America’s Biggest Crisis? 51:20 The Amish Trick Everyone Falls For 59:18 Inside the Intensity of Jewish Life 01:05:14 Are Company Towns Modern-Day Slavery? 01:11:12 The Surprising Diversity of the US Landscape 01:16:39 What Will the World Look Like in 5 Years? 01:26:14 What’s Really Happening at the Mexican Border? 01:43:22 How the UK Really Sees London 01:49:14 Are People Still Speaking Elizabethan English in Maryland? 01:51:43 Why Strong Communities Matter More Than Ever 01:57:27 Where to Find Peter - Check out Peter's resources below: Book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Your-Fellow-Americans/Peter-Santenello/9781668214343 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/petersantenello Website: https://petersantenello.com/ - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spotify.modernwisdom.com or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.modernwisdom.com Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What was your original inspiration? What drove you to do this?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  I was here in Austin. It's so cool because I lived here early 2000s, worked as a waiter at Fleming Steakhouse. And I just had these dreams of traveling the world. Can't wait to see the world one day because I didn't travel growing up. Our family didn't go anywhere. Always wanted to go to Europe. And then my goal was save $20,000 in two years. Go to Europe. Seven months, get a Ducati in Italy, rip that thing through the op, send it home, have my life figured out.

• 0:32Chris Williamson?

  Bro, that's a fucking dream. That is an absolute dream.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  But then I went, I did a winter in Switzerland, snowboarding, doing every job imaginable. And then flew. I'm like, what's this place called the Republic of Georgia? I've never heard of that. I took a one way, Republic of Georgia, landed, all the mafiosa got off the plane, which was the whole plane. The BMWs were waiting for them, sped off on the tarmac. It was me in the airport. It was so corrupt at that time, had to pay a bribe to get into the airport. Like had to pay a bribe if I wanted to enter. He's like $20. I said, what for? He's like, you enter through me, $20. So when you're young and curious.

• 1:14Chris Williamson?

  How old were you?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  I was 26, 25 then, 25, 26. So when you're young and curious and adventurous, there's nothing.

• 1:23Chris Williamson?

  Dangerous combination. That's a fucking dangerous combination, dude.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  So Georgia was like the gateway drug. That would be like.

• 1:30Chris Williamson?

  Where is Georgia?

• 1:31Speaker 01

  The Republic of Georgia. So you're south of Russia, Caucasus Mountains,

• 1:38Speaker 01

  on the Black Sea, Armenia, right below Azerbaijan, sort of near Turkey, borders Turkey, actually.

• 1:45Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  So like on the east side, let's say, where Bulgaria is over here on the western side of Turkey, east side.

• 1:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  But that was the gateway. And then you're like, where can I go from here? And you look on a map and you're like, huh, Tajikistan. What's that like?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  And so instead of going back in seven months with the Ducati, I scrapped the Ducati idea. I'm like, ah, I can always save money, but I'll never be able to travel like this again. Maybe never. So I'm going to go all the way around. And it was 50 countries, two years. Ran out of money in Uzbekistan.

• 2:24Chris Williamson?

  Great place to run out of money, I imagine.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got cash advances on my credit card for like 25% interest. And it was the best debt I ever got in because it was like, here's my moment. And at that age, you sleep anywhere in anything.

• 2:41Chris Williamson?

  Were you filming any of this? Were you making?

• 2:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:43Chris Williamson?

  No. So.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  I did.

• 2:45Chris Williamson?

  Imagine if you'd had the GoPro back then. Holy shit.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  You know, I'm glad I didn't because I got to see the world without thinking about making content.

• 2:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Because you, you know what making content is. It's, it's not all fun and games. It's work. You have to get the story. And I was totally free at that time, just to let my imagination go wild. So that's what kicked off the international interest. But back to Austin, I'm working at Fleming Steakhouse, dreaming of seeing the world. And it was here. I'm looking down from my hotel. I'm like, that's the place I used to work. It's closed down now. And I'm like, wow.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Who, who, I think Steve Jobs said it best. I'm not gonna say it as well as him, but he said, like, you can never, you can never see it going forward, connect the dots of where your life's going, but you can look back and connect the dots.

• 3:37Chris Williamson?

  Only makes sense in reverse.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:38Chris Williamson?

  Life has to be lived forward, but only makes sense in reverse.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Right. And so that was one of these big moments where I'm like, wow, if my younger self at 21, serving the porterhouse steak, which I still remember, the, the tenderness of the flay, no, the flavor of the flay, no, the tenderness of the flay,

• 3:57Speaker 01

  but the flavor of the ribeye, the porterhouse.

• 4:00Chris Williamson?

  That's how you sold it.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  That's what you need. I sold it better, but I can't believe I was still in my brain because my manager was banging.

• 4:05Chris Williamson?

  Over and over and over and over again.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  But as if I could have seen then, waiting tables where I was this morning, well, just a half hour ago, in that hotel and where my life went. Wow. So it was just curiosity, a dream, lot of luck, lot of hard work.

• 4:23Chris Williamson?

  What do you think that young version of you would think if you were able to show him where his life went from there?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  It would be way more than I could ever imagined. Yeah.

• 4:35Chris Williamson?

  Beautiful.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Because the world's an amazing place. And living abroad teaches you as you see you're living abroad. I don't know if you consider this is your home country now?

• 4:50Chris Williamson?

  I'm kind of unsure on that, to be honest. I did, I was telling you, I did a little bit of,

• 4:57Chris Williamson?

  self-work before the meditation retreat a few weeks ago. And as a part of that, one of the questions that came up is where is your home? And I found myself really conflicted when trying to answer it.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:07Chris Williamson?

  Because I kind of don't know. I kind of don't know where home is. It's like, here, this is where my business is. And it's a country that I love. And I certainly feel welcome here in a way that I wasn't in the UK. But I'm definitely not fucking American, right? Like the second that I opened my mouth, I'm evidently not American. I don't have the same cultural landmarks and, and understandings and, and historical context that, that you need to kind of be able to survive. Something that's really interesting, I wonder whether you've noticed this. People who immigrate to other countries that speak the same language that they do natively,

• 5:47Chris Williamson?

  their foreignness or the fact that they're an immigrant gets forgotten and then it resurfaces itself in surprising ways. So if I go to Brazil, even if you're speaking English with someone, their accent is so evidently like perverted that you're always reminded of the fact that you're a foreigner.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 6:06Chris Williamson?

  Always reminded over and over and over again. But you go to a country that speaks your native language and you kind of forget for a little while.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:13Chris Williamson?

  That you're not from there because it's just seamless communication. And then you try to use a reference. I try to talk about Jaffa cakes or Cadbury's milk chocolate or the in-betweens or fucking, you know, Mr. Bean or whatever. And which obviously those are the four horsemen of British culture.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 6:31Chris Williamson?

  And then you go, I can't do that. I can't do that. I forget that I'm a foreigner. You forget that you're a foreigner in a country that speaks your own language. And it's really, it's good because it allows you to integrate very quickly and you don't feel as alienated, I imagine, as you might do if you weren't speaking a language. But then the alienation sort of jump scares you.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:52Chris Williamson?

  It creeps up on you every so often, hits you, and you weren't really expecting it. And that's something that I've noticed since I've been here that I think if you're in a country that didn't speak your native language, you would be very regularly reminded of that. And you would probably give yourself a, a bit more grace of, hey, if you're feeling a little alienated every so often, that makes sense.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:13Chris Williamson?

  But then you come here and you're like, well, what are you whining about? Everyone fucking speaks the same language. You've got your O1 visa. You've got the bank accounts. You've got the health insurance. What are you complaining about? You go, I get that, but you're still culturally displaced.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:25Chris Williamson?

  You are still socially an alien here.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Don't you feel that when you live abroad, you learn more about your home country than being, being at home?

• 7:34Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that's a.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  That's what the world taught me.

• 7:36Chris Williamson?

  That's a George Macklin as well. He says the exact same thing. He moved to Dubai, learned more about being, about the UK, being in Dubai than he'd ever learned being in the UK.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  So I thought my goal was to show the world that, look, most people have an idea of the UK or France or Italy. And when you go, when you get on the ground, things are always more complicated, nuanced and more, more granular. But I wanted to show the Republic of Georgia. I wanted to show Syria, these places that only get negativity in the press. That was the goal. That's how this all started. Show Americans the world they don't know.

• 8:12Chris Williamson?

  You know how many Americans went on a single flight last year? Less than half of Americans got on a plane in 2025. Forty-five percent of Americans got on a plane. Fifty-five percent of Americans didn't. And I think it's some insane number, don't even have a passport.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  I don't know the percentage. So I, I used to be a little, little harsher on that. But what I realize in my work now, most people, two weeks of vacation. That's Christmas. That's Thanksgiving. That's family.

• 8:45Chris Williamson?

  You've got obligations.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Like realistically, we didn't travel growing up in my family. Going to Europe takes time, takes money. So I get it for a lot of people. Me personally, or you, you're curious. You want, you want to see what's out there. And I think it's, it's more possible than most people think, especially when you're younger. Like your choice, my, my dad was in a profession where you're getting two weeks here, he's not seeing the world. So I'm not going to do that profession if I want to see the world. It's pretty easy. You can sort of line things up and be like, if I go that direction, I'm not going to do what I want to do the most. Okay, don't go that direction.

• 9:30Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the lesser known but amazing destinations that you think people should go to if they're looking to travel outside of the US? Like a surprising, great trip. Are you going to tell me that Syria is like a, a, a hotbed for a weekend getaway? Jared, can we go to the, uh, we, we made a special setting. So I know that you sometimes go to some dark and mysterious places on your travels. So we can change the vibe inside of the studio and we've made a setting. You're going to be the first person that we use this new one on.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  You can put some dark music with me?

• 10:02Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I think just the darkness of the stories will probably do enough, but.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Okay. Would I say for anyone to, to pack up and go to Syria, first trip abroad? No, definitely not. When I went was Christmas time. I flew in from Moscow, two in the morning. And it was all the lights, the green lights from above, and those were all the mosques. And I got in the cabbie. And this was during George W. Bush.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  And the cabbie was like, the driver was like, what do you think of George W. Bush? And I was against the Iraqi war. And I just knocked off some pejoratives and he loved it. It was like, I was like F, FGW, blah, blah, blah. Well, I'm in Texas. Am I going to have problems with saying that? He, he was getting excited and all giddy. And then I'm like, what do you think of Bashar al-Assad?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  And his giddiness firmed up, he got tense. And he's like, Bashar al-Assad is a good president. But he didn't feel that way. And that was the first time I really realized how important free speech is. How if you can't speak your mind, then it controls your behavior. I saw him tense up. And I was like, here I am in the Middle East, saying whatever I want. And this guy's at home and is worried even in his own car. That this is going to be a problem. So Damascus, Christmas time, Santa Claus is everywhere. Who would have thought? Christian population there, old Damascus. Met great people, stayed with locals in their homes.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  But for Americans getting abroad, I would say you want something that's culturally very different, but still easy to travel? Istanbul, Turkey.

• 11:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  That's a good middle road. If you want full on user friendly, go to where you're from, right?

• 11:54Chris Williamson?

  Seamless integration.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  It's easy.

• 11:56Chris Williamson?

  Did you see, I saw this news article earlier on, an LGBT cruise

• 12:04Chris Williamson?

  set off from the US trying to land in Turkey. And they wanted to experience Turkey. It's a cruise of like, there's a lot of fruit going on. It's high levels of fruit on this, on the cruise. They look like, all of the guys look like they're having an amazing time. I'm sure it's really great. But they arrive, they arrived at Turkey and what the?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  That's not gonna go.

• 12:33Chris Williamson?

  They were like, you're not coming. Like, you're not, you're not, you're not, you're not, you're not coming here. So I guess there is a little caveat, which is make sure that your sexuality aligns with the local.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:43Chris Williamson?

  Customs.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love, I love the Middle East. Traveling there has been great, very hospitable with people. But hey, culture is different.

• 12:51Chris Williamson?

  Don't fuck a dude while you're there.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wasn't going to, but yeah, definitely.

• 12:56Chris Williamson?

  Very important.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's not gonna go over well.

• 12:58Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  The rainbow flag in downtown Tehran or.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Isn't, isn't happening.

• 13:11Chris Williamson?

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• 13:54Chris Williamson?

  Right now you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. All right, so you do these, this huge trip around the world.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:11Chris Williamson?

  And then realize that America, home country, is this place that you understand maybe the least?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are quite a few trips. That was the big one. Came back at 26 and I just changed my whole perspective on everything. And fast forward quite a bit until 38, what is it? 40, no, 42. Living in Ukraine, lived there for four years. My wife's Ukrainian.

• 14:40Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Pandemic brought us back because I shot roughly 50 videos in Ukraine, pretty much tapped out.

• 14:46Chris Williamson?

  Pre-war?

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Pre-war.

• 14:48Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got some, that's where it all started, actually.

• 14:52Chris Williamson?

  Tell me about that.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  It started in the countryside. I was in.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  I'll give you a little, just a little context to it. I tried to pitch a travel TV show in 2011, 12, to all the networks in LA. I was flying there every six weeks trying to pitch. I made a teaser reel. Hey guys, so I want to show Americans the world. Here's the concept, we're gonna, we're gonna hang out with locals. We're gonna get into their stories. And the response was, wait, who, who are you? And wait, what's the rising action in that? And what? No. Door closed, door closed, door closed for about a half year. So I gave up on the whole travel concept because this was, YouTube was a thing, but to make your life off YouTube. I didn't, very few people were doing it. I didn't see it at that time.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  So I went on different ventures. I had a business that, a small business that pretty much paid my bills, but I was always trying for something more interesting, something I loved. So I developed this app that connected people through common interests. So you're going to Germany, you love running. You date activity connects you with that person at that time. Who doesn't like to hang out with people that have similar interests? Just way over my skis. I was living in San Francisco, I was pitching that, pitching that, wasn't working. So around 38, I'm sitting in Golden Gate Park, trying to figure out what I'm gonna do with my life. No clue. I'm like, I have to do something that's interesting and meaningful. I have my business limping me along.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  It's nothing I really want to be part of, but I have to do it to pay the bills. I'm reading books about philosophy and just business and trying to come up with something. My buddy moves to Ukraine. He had a dev team over there. He had a startup. I went and visited. He's like, dude, why don't you just stay right now? And subletted my apartment in San Francisco and moved over to Ukraine. And so the first story started when I was in Ukraine. I had a Turkish buddy say, hey, man, you want to learn the language? Go to the countryside. And so I went out to the far reaches of Ukraine, which is where I was is de facto Russia now.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  And live with this family, whose apartment got bombed out in the far east of the country. They moved to the countryside, had zero, nothing, nothing materially. Six weeks there, six videos. We even dug a well by hand.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Transformative experience. I mean, I was sleeping on a mattress straight out of the Romanov dynasty, springs going through my back. It was a, do you open the window at night and get the room down to 88 degrees and smell the neighbor's trash burning? Or you close it and have a room at 94 and smell less trash? Okay, so very primitive conditions. But the Ukrainians loved it. They ate it up because I was doing things like selling corn on the beaches in Berdansk. Cause kukaruzha, they say, they call it. People sell corn on the beach. So I was walking around and there's a corn mafia there that controls the beach.

• 18:10Chris Williamson?

  I, I know exactly what, if this podcast thing goes to shit, I'm becoming part of the Ukrainian corn mafia.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  You should. The kukaruzha mafiosa was all over my shtick.

• 18:22Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  And they ran me off that beach.

• 18:24Chris Williamson?

  Just gringo selling.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we made a video of it and the Ukrainians loved it.

• 18:27Chris Williamson?

  Right, cool. So you got big in Ukraine?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Got big in, I got Ukraine famous. I was on all the television.

• 18:33Chris Williamson?

  Ukraine famous, brilliant.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  I was all, all over TV and I was like, no way.

• 18:38Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  This thing can actually work. And then I went to Iran and I had free range in Iran.

• 18:44Chris Williamson?

  Wow, you really managed to front run all of the biggest kinetic flashpoints.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:51Chris Williamson?

  You just got the, you were like the trans, have you considered that you might be the harbinger of like international incidents? That's wherever Peter Santenello has been.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  You're right. They should just lock me down.

• 19:03Chris Williamson?

  You didn't stay in the Gaza Strip for a while, did you?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  I put some time, I didn't go into Gaza, I went to West Bank.

• 19:09Chris Williamson?

  You really, okay, so you go to Iran.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  So I go to Iran, shoot that series. Now I, Americans need a government minded tour. They need to be with someone the whole time. And they're gonna be on that tour with the person. They don't have free range. But Italian, I have an Italian passport. As an Italian, I could go over, I'm not, I don't claim Italian at all. It's just your family. But I could use this document and get free range in the country. So that was novel. An American getting free range of the country and I made a series there and that did well. Then I went to Saudi right after it opened, like right after it opened. But then there were failures. I went back to Ukraine and I had, I had failures because here was the deal. Ukrainians loved Ukrainian content. Ukrainians didn't care about Iranian content.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  So I just lost my whole audience.

• 19:57Chris Williamson?

  You were audience captured by Ukraine.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  And then I was audience captured by Iran and then Saudi.

• 20:03Chris Williamson?

  Right, really? It really is the, the algorithm coming to life here.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Totally. And so I would get all these new audiences in new countries, but there was no thread between them. Right?

• 20:15Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  And I didn't have a big US audience at that time. Anyways, did that for a while, pandemic hits. Where are we gonna go? Where are they gonna move to Italy? But Italy was.

• 20:24Chris Williamson?

  Have you met your missus yet? Your, your wife or?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. We were together like three, three out of my four years there.

• 20:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay, but did you meet her when you were in Ukraine?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:34Chris Williamson?

  When you were part of the fighting with the corn mafia? On one hand chatting up the, the future Mrs. Santenello? And on the other hand, ensuring you don't get killed by the corn mafia?

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Pre kukaruzha mafiosa, I'm like, I'm off to the countryside, living with this family. She thought it was a bit bizarre. And so did the rest of the Ukrainians because it was so fringe.

• 20:54Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  In the cities, they would never live like that. So here's this Yank guy.

• 20:58Chris Williamson?

  Not too dissimilar to the US then, right? You've already set a little bit of that tone of cosmopolitan life, although this country might be weird from the country that I'm from.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:09Chris Williamson?

  In most countries, the modernity cosmopolis thing still looks at going to the countryside as kind of a, what the fuck are you doing? Like this is going backward in time somehow.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he, but the delta is even greater there because I'm going really primitive.

• 21:24Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  And then, but the pandemic brought us back to the US. And then when we got back to the US, I'm like, ah, what are we gonna do here? I know my country from here. What's interesting about the US? Six years later, head still down, going full speed. It took off.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Americans loved it. And I had, I mean, from, from a like career standpoint,

• 21:52Speaker 01

  having American viewers versus Belarusian or Ukrainian? Different game with actually you can make some money on YouTube to actually carry the thing forward.

• 22:00Chris Williamson?

  You telling me that there isn't a burgeoning econ and CPG business in Iran? I can't get my Shopify store to deliver new tonic to Iran?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  No.

• 22:09Chris Williamson?

  Nightmare.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  It's all internal there. They're big enough where they, they have every industry pretty much on its own for the most part.

• 22:15Chris Williamson?

  Apart from the nuclear one, yeah.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  So yeah, then the US content ripped off and I remember being at home. My mom still lives in Vermont. I grew up in Vermont, moved out at 18.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  But I went back to where I grew up and I told my buddy, my good buddy from youth. I'm like, hey, I'm gonna go to New York City, shoot some videos with the Hasidic Jews and then go to the hoods and the projects and show that world. He's like, cool, but what are you gonna do for work? And that was when it was like the money, the money with the runway wasn't that long. My business blew up. Gotta make this in right when I needed it to work, it worked.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  So it's been six years nonstop and all of those videos have, I try to go wide as far as I can from the Amish to the Bloods and Crips and everything in between.

• 23:10Chris Williamson?

  What do you think most Americans don't understand about America?

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't sound really groundbreaking what I'm gonna say, but just the scale and the amount of different lifestyles we have. You, you do have parts of America where they're still hunting a whale, whales every year, reindeer. You can see Russia. I'm talking about St. Lawrence Island, Siberian Yupik people, three times the size of Maui. America's so-

• 23:39Chris Williamson?

  Where is that?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, way up in Alaska. So huge that as someone doing this full time, I'm still discovering places I knew nothing about, didn't know they existed. So I found that with Google Maps late night and I'm like, what's that?

• 23:54Chris Williamson?

  You're fucking kidding me. You geo-gested your way.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  I totally.

• 23:57Chris Williamson?

  Like just zoom it, pinch and zoom.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Zoom in, zoom in. Okay, two towns. There's USPS and a church. There's no street view. What's going on up there? I'll check that out. And then you have Miami's in the same country, capital of Latin America. Two different universes. So we're all in our bubbles. Doesn't matter where you live. We're in our bubbles. My goal is to teach or show Americans about different bubbles that they might not interact with. That could be inner city hoods. That could be the richest hoods. That could be deep with the Amish, native culture. We have 576 federally recognized tribes in this country and they're all different. That's like a whole different parallel universe, a whole different world running on its own.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  You have everything from Navajo Nation in Arizona, size of New Jersey, size of Israel, basically. It's different laws, different rules.

• 24:54Chris Williamson?

  Just like Israel, yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Just like Israel. And then you have Cherokee in North Carolina. You put kids from each one of those, those tribes and swap them. It's like a wild cultural experience for them. Native American world is like European countries. You can't just say you're, you're European, yes, but you're not Italian. You're not Norwegian. You got some Viking in you, maybe. Okay. But you get what I'm saying, right? Every country has, and that's how the native world is. It's like different countries. They're all native. They're all like, just like Europeans are all European. But Ukraine and the UK are two different universes. So that's been surprising.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Just the amount of depth we have here and how granular it goes when you really look at it closely.

• 25:45Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about the native peoples that you've spent time with, cause yeah, coming over here, I, I've really enjoyed immersing myself in going to different places. I've taken a lot of big road trips.

• 25:58Chris Williamson?

  But I've not done anything like what you've done. I've gone from like New Orleans. It's so interesting. The French Quarter downtown. Oh my God, I can get a beignet and spill it everywhere. I'm like, okay, come on dude, like,

• 26:11Chris Williamson?

  what have you learned from the native tribes and the descendants of them that you've spent time with?

• 26:19Speaker 01

  They're all different, but there's a thread that you've, they're all different, but there's a similarity as in you get in, in a native world, the stories get more interesting, the pace slows down. There's, you get a bit away from the capitalistic drum of the Western world.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  That would be my initial feeling. They're, they're wonderful storytellers. They can almost put you like in the Siberian Yupik. I was with this woman, Adora. It's like she put me in a trance. She was like hypnotizing me with her stories. They have an ability to deliver a story and they have a great sense of humor and they all play hoops. Hoops is the basketball. That's what keeps them together. All the tribes play hoops. It's big rivalry.

• 27:06Chris Williamson?

  What's their

• 27:10Chris Williamson?

  relationship or story like with what America is and has become now? Cause you could imagine there's maybe some ancestral resentment in there. Do you ever sense that? Is that something that comes through?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Depends who you talk to. So the highest enrollment in the military per capita is Native American.

• 27:32Chris Williamson?

  No fucking way.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you have true patriots, flags waving. You have some believe that believe in traditional beliefs, other very Christian.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  You have some that are-

• 27:44Chris Williamson?

  Traditional beliefs be more like animal spirits type stuff?

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 27:48Chris Williamson?

  Right, cool.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  In getting really deep into their clans, they have different clans, there's clan culture.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  You have places like in Navajo Nation, you get into the Hogon, into the hut and you gotta walk clockwise in the hut. Never ever go counterclockwise. It's gonna bring so much bad to you. So if you drop your keys here, like for those listening, so-

• 28:12Chris Williamson?

  Better fucking circle and navigate.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  To my right, like, don't just pick them up there, like circle the whole thing and pick them up.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  I find that stuff fascinating, but no, everyone, there's no consensus, I would say. So sometimes people will say, hey, they're not Indians, they're natives or Native Americans or indigenous or First Nations. You know what they say they are? The only consensus is there isn't one. Depends who you talk to. Some say, I'm Indian. Lakota medicine man in South Dakota said, I'm the Native American. Cause he was way before it was called America, his family. I grew up in America.

• 28:54Chris Williamson?

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• 29:35Chris Williamson?

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• 30:08Chris Williamson?

  and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Is there vestigial resentment?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  There's some, I mean, there's some that go back to the, the certain battles like wounded knee. What was it? 300 and something died? I think it was Custer's army took out the Lakota, I believe it was.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  And that really affected the guy I was hanging out with. It was back in the 1800s. And then some people are like Vietnamese, as in they let it go really quickly. You go to Vietnam these days, you'd think they would hate all Americans. They don't. Just watching a war flick with a bunch of Vietnamese dude, American war flick. How crazy was that?

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Just really depends. And then economically, some tribes are really poor. I mean, the de facto is it's worse on the rez materially, economically than off the rez.

• 31:04Chris Williamson?

  Worse on the rez?

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:05Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Just less jobs, remote areas, not, not as much industry. But then some reses. It's wealthy as all could be.

• 31:15Chris Williamson?

  Great gambling.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  You go to the Seminoles in, in South Florida, they own the Hard Rock brand worldwide. I think they paid 800 million for it back in the day.

• 31:26Chris Williamson?

  Hang on.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:27Chris Williamson?

  The Hard Rock brand-

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Worldwide.

• 31:29Chris Williamson?

  Is owned-

• 31:30Speaker 01

  By the Seminoles.

• 31:31Chris Williamson?

  By some indigenous Native American descendant people in?

• 31:36Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And their tribe, I believe, don't quote me on this. It's roughly 4,500 people. They started Indian gaming.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  They have agricultural operations, I believe, gas and oil operations, Hard Rock Cafe.

• 31:56Chris Williamson?

  So these guys are just hardcore entrepreneurs.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Hardcore entrepreneurs. And you know, when I get into these communities, I always want people in my videos to want to be on my videos. Uh, I don't want to just show up on a camera, put a camera in someone's face if they don't want it. A tribal council member, I put up on my Insta, I said, I want to get a Seminole story. I know it was very difficult to get with them. And um, tribal council member reached out, said, I'm a council member. I can show you. She watched my content. So I went there, we're talking gates, we're talking background checks with IDs and everything. I'm in the nerve center, the, the offices.

• 32:36Chris Williamson?

  You went to the Pentagon of the indigenous people.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 32:40Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  And I'm like, this is the most by the book thing I've ever done with video making. I'm like totally official here.

• 32:48Chris Williamson?

  Actually feel like press. Yeah, I've got credentials.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like I'm doing all the right things.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  This woman takes me out, we show the tribe, we show the world. It was, it was very much a North Korean tour, as in everything, just showed the good for the most part. And uh, I got a call from their attorney right after that thing posted. They wanted that down immediately.

• 33:12Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  He said something along the lines of, are you familiar with the case we disclosed with Wells Fargo? Uh, I believe, I forget how much they won. It was another, it was like something like eight hundred million or something. And I'm like, no, but congratulations on that. He's like, well, we're gonna need that video.

• 33:31Chris Williamson?

  That's a little bit of a flex. It's the equivalent of North Korea showing their ballistic missiles on a parade.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Total flex.

• 33:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  And my law team wasn't going to fight with theirs because, you know, I have one person that I can call that's not going to deal with those.

• 33:43Chris Williamson?

  And they've got machetes.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  No, they have.

• 33:45Chris Williamson?

  They've got Tomahawks.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  They have billions of dollars.

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and Tomahawk.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  And those things. So what I'm saying is it's so widely varied. You can go to Pine Ridge. It's the poorest native res in the country, where it looks poor and it looks rough. And then you have on the other end of the spectrum, the Seminoles, who are fantastic capitalists that figured out the game really well. And I believe, and I don't know exactly the number, but it's like a hundred and twenty eight thousand per kid every year.

• 34:17Chris Williamson?

  What? So they all. Revenue that they're distributing?

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they come out of high school all millionaires. Now, I don't know the, I don't want to get myself in trouble on the exact number because it changes hard information to get. But there's that end of the spectrum and then there's the other end of the spectrum. So that's my point about America. The more you go deep, the more you go granular, it's complicated and there's so much rad stuff here. You really don't know what's going on because you're busy in your own life. We all are doing your own thing. And it gives a lifetime of discovery.

• 34:57Chris Williamson?

  It's crazy that, you know, it's easy to, can you chat GPT? How many Americans have got a passport for me, Jared? I'm pretty sure it's like only sixty percent of Americans have got a passport.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Sixty?

• 35:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think so. Um, and it's easy, as you said before, you can be judgmental about that. Think about how big the world is and, and, and by virtue of being unable or unwilling to get the credentials to be able to travel, you can't travel, but without leaving the country. You guys have got more than fifty countries.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:26Chris Williamson?

  Inside of here, but half of Americans have a valid passport. State Department estimated fifty one percent, hundred and seventy million people in late twenty twenty four.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:35Chris Williamson?

  That is fucking insane.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  You gotta think though, half, half the population does not have the money to go anywhere.

• 35:42Chris Williamson?

  All the time, even if you had some of the money, the time that you would need to take off in order to be able to travel without your obligations for Thanksgiving and Christmas and all that, but, but, but. Yeah, it makes total sense. I don't get.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do, I do, I do. I'm a big proponent of travel for sure.

• 35:57Chris Williamson?

  But you don't actually need to leave the country.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  In a way, yes and no. Like you can constantly learn and discover and every state has its own identity. Being in Texas this time, it's like, it's like its own country, for sure. The big states in America, California, New York, Texas, Florida, with big populations, they have their own, their own gravity to them, right?

• 36:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What, what's the poorest place that you visited in America?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Uh, technically, well, I would say two regions really stand out for talking wide regions.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Central Appalachia, so that's like West Virginia area, Eastern Kentucky. It's out there. You gotta check that out. Great people, but poor. Mississippi Delta would be the other big region. Those two sort of left behind. You don't know US cultural context, you're saying. I think it's changing a little, but back in the day, any, any, the butt of any joke would be like the West Virginia hillbilly. Right? Looked out upon, you know, with Hollywood. It's where a lot of the coal, it's where a lot of the industry, the coal came from to build this country. And you have those regions in, in the UK too.

• 37:07Chris Williamson?

  We do. But you don't have the room. The thing that's fascinating, watching your videos, is just how much fucking space there is.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:15Chris Williamson?

  You know, when you talk about forgotten areas, lost towns. I don't know how much can be forgotten in a place that's got ten times the population density of the US, right? We've got um, fifty million people-ish, fifty, sixty million people versus three thirty, three fifty or whatever's over here. But the landmass is so much smaller than the amount of people are small, it's ten times denser. So everyone's on top of each other. You know, you don't drive for that long unless you're really looking for it.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:45Chris Williamson?

  You don't drive for that long without seeing something that looks like a hub. On the road trips that I've done around America, it is fucking barren for a huge periods of time.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:56Chris Williamson?

  And then there's some farm that comes past or just some uh, uh, like caravan park. It's mobile home, we would call it in the UK, um, with shit tons of trucks. Like there's a random tractor there. Some guy's got a bike that's just in parts and then it go, it just leaves and then something else comes up. So yeah, forgotten towns, I think the opportunity for that to happen in America is much higher. Because you don't just have this sort of stumbling effect. You really can be incredibly detached and detachment would lead to alienation.

• 38:32Chris Williamson?

  And then that's going to really start to like, drive down your ability to earn, to be integrated with the rest of the country.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, good point. Out there in Appalachia, I mean, there are coal jobs now, not as many as there were, but a lot of young people don't want to get into that, understandably so. You think about those guys, the inner city kid, like living in the hood, the projects. Has way more, in, okay, in theory, way more chance to tap into an economy. Just because it's literally six subway stops away. Now you're gonna have to pull up your pants, you're gonna have to work hard, you're gonna have to like, like get the skills, but that opportunity is there where the kid out in the middle of Appalachia, there's no real opportunity around to go get.

• 39:29Chris Williamson?

  What are people doing in these places in Appalachia? What do they do for work?

• 39:35Speaker 01

  There's a lot of drugs, unfortunately.

• 39:38Chris Williamson?

  Selling drugs.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Using drugs, selling drugs, the full monty.

• 39:42Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Um, I find it to be really extreme as in people are either working really hard and doing well for themselves, carrying along. Or deep in the poverty in, in the drugs. And so when, do you know of the Sackler family?

• 39:59Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  The pill mills?

• 40:00Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I've watched a million documentaries.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  So OxyContin, that was sort of the testing round. Because all of these coal miners, it's hard work, they'd be in a lot of pain. I met up with a fourth generation coal miner. He said he was one of the first one put on that medication, on that drug. And it's highly addictive. And then when the jobs left town, a lot of them, well, the addiction became that much greater. Because your life's looking terrible and this thing feels great.

• 40:32Chris Williamson?

  It's not just the physical pain, it's the psychic pain you're trying to train as well now.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  So there's still fallout of that. Now it got better with that and then fentanyl hit pretty hard around five, six years ago.

• 40:44Chris Williamson?

  The Chinese OxyContin.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  I like to highlight the problems, problems in this country. We have plenty of them. The good, the bad, the ugly, though. Lot of positive stuff. I don't just go for the heavy. I don't just wanna go for the crime and the drugs. Now, these things need to be brought to the surface, but I want someone to see my YouTube channel. Look at all the videos on it and be like, oh, that's that America place. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's got its issues. I don't wanna be online just being like full dopamine driven rage bait, where they look at it and it's like, that's awful.

• 41:28Chris Williamson?

  There is a kind of tragedy porn that, you know, what's, what's that area in Philly that's got?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Kensington.

• 41:34Chris Williamson?

  Kensington. And, you know, if you wanna do a, a two million play vlog, you just go to Kensington and interview some people about how their legs falling off and no one really cares. And I used this needle five times last week and everything's horrible.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  So Kensington, I wasn't gonna shoot a Kensington story because it's been done so many times.

• 41:54Chris Williamson?

  Too, too trite.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wanna be on the front, front edge of things.

• 41:59Chris Williamson?

  I wanna be able to see Russia. If I can't see Russia, it doesn't count.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, but there's this guy, his name was Buddy. His name's Buddy. He's bringing kids off the street. He's got a, a boxing clinic and religious rehab. And he's doing something good, trying to change it. So, okay, I want that story now because here's a big problem. Here's somewhat of a solution. Let's show that, like, give a little hope in the thing.

• 42:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  So I did that story two years ago. I can honestly say, say, after being in the hoods of Karachi, Pakistan, in the slums of India, there's nowhere more disheartening than Kensington.

• 42:42Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Fact. Because it is the, on the fentanyl, on the trank, face down in the curb, and we're just gonna let this go.

• 42:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so it's more disheartening because of the prevalence of drugs and that's the sort of hopelessness?

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Not necessarily. It's the way we're dealing with it. So for me, compassion would be, hey, that guy's deep in on Fent. He's not looking good. Uh, he's bleeding. There's a wound. Like, we got it. We gotta change it. We gotta get, if I had the power, I'd be like, that guy needs to be brought off the street, even if he doesn't wanna go. The best thing for him would be go into rehab of some sort, a therapy. Nobody gets on Fent because their life is great. Oh, I had a great day today. I'll go do some Fent. Right? It's because things are terrible.

• 43:34Chris Williamson?

  I mean, it is a Friday.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  You wanna do some?

• 43:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fuck it. Let's go to Sixth Street and get some Fent, dude.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  I'm sure it feels great.

• 43:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Um, but it doesn't, but until you're on, and then you're on Kensington and it's not so great.

• 43:48Chris Williamson?

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• 44:33Chris Williamson?

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• 44:43Speaker 01

  Here's the breakdown in the system. In many of these places, Skid Row in LA, the housing is there.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  But I've done videos there too, and a lot of these people, they like the adventure of the streets. They don't wanna go into housing and not be on drugs or play by the rules. So we're at this weird point in different jurisdictions, depending where you're at, where it's like,

• 45:11Speaker 01

  if they can stay on the streets and no one can remove them, then it just, the problem gets worse.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  And so that, that's also with Ameri-, you know, the ACLU, you know, freedom in America, right? I'm free to choose how I wanna live my life and how I wanna be. And the law, when it's not, when it's written up differently in different places or not enforced, doesn't allow for the system to really remedy the problem.

• 45:40Chris Williamson?

  Is fentanyl the biggest drug problem in America in your experience?

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Yes. Trank's pretty ugly too, but I'd say fentanyl and meth are the worst.

• 45:49Chris Williamson?

  But trank will, if the distribution can get there, will maybe be as bad or worse?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Trank is awful because they'll get wounds. I was in Kensington, some guy was on trank, he had wounds and there was just like, there were like flies festering on the wounds.

• 46:03Chris Williamson?

  People are kinda decomposing while they're alive.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's what I mean while

• 46:11Speaker 01

  it's poor in India, for sure. It's poor in Pakistan. Like, we have resources here. But it's just the lack of humanity. Now, there are people like Buddy trying to help. But it's this hiccup where nobody can really solve the problem. Then there's harm reduction, which is bring needles out because the theory behind that is give someone a fresh needle, they're not reusing and spreading disease.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  And I'd say on the, the argument for harm reduction from the people, it's, it's really impossible to get in with them. I've tried.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  The argument is, hey, if we have someone coming into our facility using clean needles, then maybe we can get them into rehab. Maybe we can sell the rehab on them. But there is a homeless industrial complex in the country. There are a lot of people making a lot of money.

• 47:00Chris Williamson?

  Who's making money off homeless people?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Who, okay, so, um, there's a lot of housing involved with building out.

• 47:06Chris Williamson?

  How is the housing involved in homeless people?

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, isn't it wild? They're building.

• 47:10Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean?

• 47:11Speaker 01

  They're building in LA on Skid Row.

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  Is this the fucking Bass Pro Shops selling tents? Like, what is this?

• 47:18Speaker 01

  They give out tents. There's some, there's some grift.

• 47:20Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Okay, there'll be money to give out tents. But there, there is housing, like, that is very expensive housing in Los Angeles, built for homeless people.

• 47:30Chris Williamson?

  Okay. It's a little bit of an oxymoron, but go on.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  It is, yeah. So there's that grift. There's a lot, a lot of NGOs that get money from this, from different organizations, from the state, from the feds, to sort of remedy the problem and the problem's not necessarily being remedied.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  I mean, I saw it living in San Francisco. The Tenderloin has always been bad. Have you ever been there?

• 47:55Speaker 01

  I'm not selling you on America, Chris, am I? We're, we're going on how my channel's not all dark and I just keep going into the drug story.

• 48:02Chris Williamson?

  That's okay. That's okay. I mean, dude, I mean, I've walked through SF. When did we do?

• 48:09Chris Williamson?

  Naval last March, and that was the first time I'd been to SF for Michaela Peterson's wedding. Uh, and then I hadn't seen the city at all. And then I went to go and do the Naval episode and we were walking through the financial district. And this huge fuck off Equinox, Equinox.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:24Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and it's an old bank. You've got these crazy steps up to the front of it. We wanted to get a training session in before we were gonna go and film. And it was closed on a fucking Saturday. It is so driven. The cosmopolis in the middle of SF is so driven by this group of people that do the nine to five or the, you know, nine to nine or whatever, that it's closed on a weekend. And we thought, well, there's another one, uh, two miles away. I'm good to get a walk in. I wanna walk. I wanna see the city. And I, as you walk from one Equinox to another, you just very quickly see the financial district fall away and the human feces begin.

• 49:10Chris Williamson?

  And I, I, it's so, to me, that it's how stark it is. And this seems to be one of the sort of through lines. I know you did this thing in the Hamptons, which I thought was fucking fascinating. It's not just across the country how big the inequality can be.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:27Chris Williamson?

  It's within very small spaces. It's when you walk three blocks difference and it feels like you're in a different city.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. To be fair, San Francisco's gotten better. We left in 21, my wife and I. It's gotten better since there. New, new mayor, new DA. It's cleaned up a bit.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Things are always changing. But yeah, it's, to me, it's unacceptable. And that's why I try to highlight these socioeconomic differences too, like what you're saying, like.

• 49:57Chris Williamson?

  Not to do the tragedy porn thing, but say, hey, like, this is what we can fix.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's not necessarily a solution I'm offering. It's just showing.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  The book, I don't, I don't, can I, can I talk about the book at all?

• 50:09Chris Williamson?

  Dude, where should people go to read this amazing fucking memoir that you put together?

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Okay, your fellow Americans, and I'm gonna put you in that basket, Chris. Is that cool?

• 50:19Chris Williamson?

  Perfectly.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Okay, cuz you, you've embraced the country. The country's embraced you.

• 50:23Chris Williamson?

  Thrive a Camaro.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  You do?

• 50:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Oh, nice. Eighties?

• 50:26Chris Williamson?

  Uh, oh, no, new one. Scumbag. Sorry.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Okay. No, scumbag is eighties.

• 50:31Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay. Fair enough.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Doing burnouts.

• 50:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I'm elevated heck, I think. Yeah.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's a lot of the content from the channel, lot of the backstory. So much happens when the power button's off.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  In Amish country, shooting a series, like everything, it's nuanced, it's complicated. The Amish have the Schwartz and Troubers, which are the most conservative. You'd think of the Schwartz and Troubers when you think of Amish. No phone, no electricity. It has the Beechey, those would be the most liberal. They drive around. Okay?

• 51:05Chris Williamson?

  What makes them Amish?

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't really get a plaque or anything. I guess you just say, I'm Amish and you play the game as in, have you seen how they cut their beards?

• 51:17Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Right?

• 51:19Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Like, you wouldn't be able to be Amish looking like you're looking or me like I'm looking.

• 51:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Be unacceptable.

• 51:24Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  But you, you're part of the church, you're part of the Amish church, you live by their ways and-

• 51:30Chris Williamson?

  But you also have some technology.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Depending on the type of Amish.

• 51:35Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yep.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so in the book, stuff like, I'm in an Airbnb in the countryside, Amish country. Cats are meowing outside. I don't know why there are cats outside, but I go out to feed them. Door closes behind. I'm in my underwear. Sun's coming up. Go to open the door. Oh shoot, my phone's inside. Code is on my phone. I gotta shoot a video. I hear the hooves coming down the road, the steel wheels of the carriages. The Amish are coming, the Amish are coming. And I'm in my underwear, like one of those dudes with a metallic blanket. You know, I'm reflecting pasty white to the world. And so there are two questions in my head. I mean, there's, there's, there's two ways to go about this.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  I walk to the most conservative Amish people's house, the Schwarzentrubers, in my underwear. Bald, naked, pretty much. You know, pass their kids and say, hey, can you help me get into this house? Or I gotta break through the window of the house where I'm staying. And so I throw a big rock through the window.

• 52:44Chris Williamson?

  And- Why?

• 52:45Speaker 01

  You would too.

• 52:46Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 52:46Speaker 01

  You'd have to. Just think, I mean, you're a ripped, good looking guy, but even you showing up to an Amish home. Some of the most conservative people-

• 52:57Chris Williamson?

  You think you'd get shot?

• 52:58Speaker 01

  And you're-

• 52:59Chris Williamson?

  What would happen?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  No, they would shoot you. It would, it would just go wrong, I think. I don't think it would go well.

• 53:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  It'd be so out there.

• 53:05Chris Williamson?

  I imagine the news doesn't travel that fast in the Amish world though.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  It does.

• 53:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  They're like aspen trees. They're all connected.

• 53:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Seriously.

• 53:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the floor and the floor-

• 53:14Speaker 01

  They know what's going on.

• 53:15Chris Williamson?

  Dug into the ground.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  They're more connected than we are.

• 53:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  Faster than the internet. Um, so, call the people, obviously. Hey, sorry I broke your window. Replace it and whatnot. There's a lot of that stuff behind the scenes of video making, which, when the cameras are off, the thoughts that come through, what I've learned on the journey. And also how I started into this after high school, taking a road trip across the country. And a lot of historical context in there. And just an overall pro, got it. We're in difficult times, a lot of doom and gloom. You can get that all day long on the internet or turn on the TV. Here's a, here's a space to go, that being the book or the audiobook.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  You can open up 10 separate chapters, easy to read, they're all separate on their own.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  And smile about America and learn something and connect, connect with your fellow Americans.

• 54:10Chris Williamson?

  Unreal.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  So, the publisher reached out because they saw the channel and they're like, do you want to do something off your channel? They're thinking to zag while everyone is zigging right now. There's a lot of heaviness, a lot of doom and gloom in the country. Just think of the Western world overall, maybe all the world, I don't know.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  They're trying to think frontlines, hey, how can we go the opposite direction here? And that's what my book is.

• 54:34Chris Williamson?

  Nice wholesome.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd like to think so. I get in a little heaviness, but not too bad. It's mostly uplifting, positive.

• 54:42Chris Williamson?

  Give me some more stories about the Amish.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  The, okay, here's one for you. You'll like this, being English. I'm English too, in the Amish world. Everyone here is English.

• 54:55Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Anyone that's not Amish is English?

• 54:57Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 54:58Chris Williamson?

  Including the Japanese?

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Black, Japanese-

• 55:01Chris Williamson?

  Brilliant.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Female, you're English.

• 55:03Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's fantastic.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  You're not them, you're English.

• 55:05Chris Williamson?

  Dude, and they said that the imperial colony had died. No, we're still going strong in the, in the Amish. Go fuck yourself.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  So, you're English, I'm English.

• 55:13Chris Williamson?

  Yes. I'm Italian apparently.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Old order Amish can't drive, but they're out in the countryside. They need rides, really bad. Okay? So I meet this guy, his name's Marcus. I'm like, Marcus, I'm making videos. And he's like, hey, I can bring you into my buddies, my old geezer buddies, playing shuffleboard in an Amish barn, out in the sticks. I'm like, man, that's gonna be cool. I gotta drive an hour to Marcus. It's another 45 minutes to his buddies. I go to Marcus's place, pick him up. Oh, howdy Peter, how you doing?

• 55:49Chris Williamson?

  Oh, hang on. So he's okay to get in a car, but not to drive a car?

• 55:54Speaker 01

  He can't drive. He needs, he needs English to drive.

• 55:56Chris Williamson?

  This, English, English you have to drive. So this is like Shabbat a little bit for Jewish people.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:01Chris Williamson?

  Like, we can't turn on or off the light, but if we got somebody else that can turn the light on or off.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Which I did a video on that too.

• 56:07Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  I got in Shabbat. But, uh, okay, so, pick Marcus up.

• 56:11Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  About halfway through the drive, I'm thinking, great time to start the video. Rolling hills, Holmes County, Ohio, beautiful. Marcus is a character. I bring out the camera. I'm like, he's like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm just gonna start the video. He's like, uh, I don't, no, let's not do that right now. So I'm reading the room. Okay, cool. Go to the event with the shuffleboard. Feeling it out with his guys, characters, great scene, lot of yelling. They're speaking Pennsylvanian Dutch.

• 56:41Chris Williamson?

  What the fuck is that?

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Which is their language. It's Ger- it's like a form of German. Yeah, that's their native language. They call it Dutch, not to do with the Netherlands, but like Deutsch.

• 56:54Chris Williamson?

  Where did that come from?

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Came from the motherland, from Europe.

• 56:57Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  They came to the US to flee religious prosecution, persecution. And William Penn in Pennsylvania said, hey, come on over. You guys are great with the land. You're great with farming. And they could live to their own tune in America. There are a lot of carve outs for them. And that's a part of my book, Neither Here Nor There, people in America, Chicanos, Amish, Siberian Yupik, who are American, but living in their own universes. Okay, so, get the event. I'm not feeling the vibe. I gotta feel the vibe. And ends up, I don't shoot a video. And then I drive, I'm a little bit confused, but whatever, I'm just going with it.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Drive Marcus home, 45 minutes, drive back to my place an hour. I tell an Amish guy a couple of days later, he's like, oh yeah, he totally played you. The Amish bum rides from English. And he just roped you in. He wasn't gonna do a video.

• 57:54Chris Williamson?

  He finessed you.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  He wasn't doing no video with you. And I laughed. I thought it was great.

• 58:00Chris Williamson?

  You thought that it was on you, that you hadn't maybe made everyone feel as comfortable as you should have done, but the video was never on the table?

• 58:06Speaker 01

  It was never there.

• 58:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you see, you look at the Amish and you say, that's primitive technology, but you just got completely schmoozed by him.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Schmoozed.

• 58:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  And before the pandemic, I did these videos, like right around the beginning of the pandemic. I don't know, in the beginning, it was like, everyone was like, oh, the Amish left behind. They're, they're not keeping up. That would suck to be them. Then the pandemic happens. Everyone's like, I want some of that. They're making their own food, hanging out together in the countryside, not worried about a thing. So, the book gets into those, those stories, just like the videos.

• 58:44Chris Williamson?

  What about the intense Jewish communities that you've been to see?

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Hasidics. And again, they're different sects. You have the, the Satmar's would be the most conservative. And then you have the Lubavitch, which I did a Shabbat dinner with. We had to get approval from the rabbis for me to get in there and shoot that video. Um, the wife shops at Gucci. Okay, so you have Gucci to so conservative, it's like the most Spartan living-

• 59:13Chris Williamson?

  Homespun.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, in Brooklyn.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  In like the center of urban America. So that's fascinating. Um, look, I think Shabbat's cool.

• 59:26Chris Williamson?

  I think Shabbat's cool as well.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  I, I totally respect that. I think it's awesome.

• 59:30Chris Williamson?

  We did, uh, the guy that does the ads for my show, Sky, one of my best friends, had, uh, his bachelor party, so a couple of years ago. He decided to do it in Houston. He likes Asian food, Asian culture. And that was it for the theme for the weekend. We did Shabbat on the Friday evening. Cause I want everyone to kind of be here in the moment. I want everyone phones away, we'll do food. So I'm like, I've never done this before. The, I guess it's secular Shabbat, you could call it. It's basically just, don't use your fucking phone for Friday evening and we'll eat some food.

• 1:00:11Chris Williamson?

  Food arrives and he'd got two pounds of crawfish. And I'm like, that definitely doesn't fucking work. Also, there's 25 of us and you got two pounds of crawfish. That's like 100 grams of edible food. So immediately I broke Shabbat, got my phone out and ordered pizza for everybody. I was like, I don't give a fuck about your, about this thing. But we did that and we did a Jeffersonian dinner, where you have a single question and you're sort of circling the room. And I can see the allure of it. I really can. You know, an equivalent of a, a lot of people are doing a digital Sabbath now. On a Sunday where, okay, I'm just no screens for, you know, nine till nine on a Sunday.

• 1:00:53Chris Williamson?

  After coming back from a seven day silent meditation retreat with no screens, having little doses of that, I think, make complete sense. So you can do, regardless of whether you're religious or not, or a part of the culture or not, I think that there's a lot of like, cultural technology, social technology that you can take and, and bring into your own life. Why wouldn't you want to, yeah, maybe the light switch thing might be a little bit much. But okay, a period of the week where you don't think about work.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Chris Williamson?

  A period of the week where you're just being present, a period of the week where you're away from, from screens, like, who thinks that that's a bad idea?

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  No, right.

• 1:01:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  I'd like to get there.

• 1:01:34Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yep. Um, the Appalachia thing, just going back to that, I was watching a video of you speaking to some kid who had the most insane history knowledge.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, right?

• 1:01:46Chris Williamson?

  Who was that kid? Cause he was giving you an entire history lecture about the difference between the Greek, the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans. And how he had beef with the ancient Romans.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:01:57Chris Williamson?

  Because of this slaughter that they'd done in like 404 AD. I'm like, yo, if you're holding on to beef from the fucking like third century?

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Chris Williamson?

  That's very impressive.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  And he was like 16 years old.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I that was, he was on the side of the road. I saw these guys fishing. And that video is actually the best performing video on my channel.

• 1:02:25Chris Williamson?

  And I almost. Thirty four million views is no joke, dude.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I almost, I almost didn't do it. I was like struggling to get it going. But that's one of those videos where I'm like, okay, I got a long road trip. Who I meet up with along the way and what happens with them determines if it's a good video or not. And you have to put your extroverted feeling out. Sensing, so I see these kids off the side of the road, turn over, we get into a conversation. And then he drops that and he starts singing for me too. And he, his main point was he wanted to show the country that we're all not just drugs. And alcoholics and coal miners. That we have, we have something more in us and that kid.

• 1:03:08Chris Williamson?

  Sophistication as well.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you realize like. Labels are simple and stereotypes, they exist for a reason, but. You can't judge, I mean, if this work has taught me one thing is to judge less. Like, that guy was a gem.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  He was just dropping it. I couldn't keep up with him. I'm like, yeah, that sounds good because I didn't, I didn't, I didn't have the historical knowledge.

• 1:03:33Chris Williamson?

  Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co. last night. But they're non-alcoholic.

• 1:03:45Chris Williamson?

  And that's not a problem? Sorry, man, I just kept chugging, waiting for the regret to creep in. Never happened. See, most people like Jared don't want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write-off. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. They make the best NA brews on the planet.

• 1:04:08Chris Williamson?

  You can find Athletic Brewing Co.'s best-selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you. Or, best option, get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door. Right now, get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below. Or heading to athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom at modern wisdom at checkout. Near beer, terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company, fit for all times. Bottoms up.

• 1:04:40Chris Williamson?

  What was that story in the Appalachian company town where some widow lady? Had to, had seven days to remarry or leave or something?

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, in company towns, not that long ago, I don't know if it was like this in the UK, but they were paid in script. Script was company money.

• 1:05:02Chris Williamson?

  It's like a special currency that could only be used in company-run stores?

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:05:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  And for your housing and everything.

• 1:05:11Chris Williamson?

  Horrendous way to control the people that are working.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're not leaving. Or if you want to leave, your money's useless.

• 1:05:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  So if a wife passed. Or sorry, a husband passed in the mines. The wife had to bounce out of town or get her kids in the mines immediately. Or else you're losing everything. Because the company owns all the real estate and they need workers in that real estate.

• 1:05:36Chris Williamson?

  It's getting perilously close to a type of slavery.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Chris Williamson?

  It's like indentured servitude.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Thousands of, of these places. Do you know we still have company towns in America?

• 1:05:48Chris Williamson?

  That use the currency thing?

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  Not the currency, but almost everything else.

• 1:05:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay, what, what is a company town?

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Company town, company owns the real estate, it provides all the employment. Everything revolves around the company. So, uh. Again, one of those nights I'm looking at Google, Baghdad, Arizona. What? Baghdad, Arizona. Who would have thought?

• 1:06:14Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  I looked into it. What's this town? Freeport-McMoRan owns it, copper mining. They own all the real estate there? Everyone there works in the mines or?

• 1:06:26Chris Williamson?

  Still.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Still. Or some ancillary business connected to the mines. And I checked it out and I'm thinking, old company town. What's it like out there? People are all tied into this thing. Well, I get out there. The average wage.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Was above the average in America, ninety, it was ninety grand, I believe.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  Rent, three hundred and fifty bucks, three bedroom, two bath.

• 1:06:54Chris Williamson?

  This is looking up. Everything's good at the moment.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, summer workout facility, pool, daycare for kids, school's great. No crime. Why? If you commit crime in a company town, you're out, company's booting you.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  And so. It's not for me. I don't want to be in that mold necessarily. But I totally get it. In these times where inflation's kicking up, you know.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  More stress, I would say, with like trying to make the bills, childcare, all that.

• 1:07:31Chris Williamson?

  What control is, is in a company town? Other than everybody has to work for the company? I'm trying to think about, you know, there was hard power before with the currency thing.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the other ways that pressure is applied to the people that are working?

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you get fired, you're out, obviously. If you're old, once you retire, you're out of town.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. They're not going to save that, that space for retirees.

• 1:08:02Chris Williamson?

  For somebody that isn't being economically contributive to this project.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:08:07Chris Williamson?

  Right? I suppose that's interesting when you think about the fact that.

• 1:08:11Chris Williamson?

  Being able to own your own home now or rent an apartment. As long as you can make payments, you don't have to have any allegiance to anyone. Right? You don't have to, it doesn't matter whether you move from Google to Procter and Gamble or from Starbucks to, to fucking Pret a Manger. All of that's fine. You just, the house is independent. But for almost all of human history, if you were in some serfdom thing. If you had to have fealty to wherever the, the local baron in the UK, medieval times. You know, if you had lords, if you were playing land registries and shit like that, like. It's kind of a economic engine, even if you're living on a farm.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:55Chris Williamson?

  So, okay, so there's some outhouse on the farm and you look after the pigs, you're the pig guy. And then you stop looking after the pigs. It's like, well, guess what? You're out of the house as well because your. Housing was attached to your economic. Output.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:11Chris Williamson?

  Not just your capacity to pay. That was all part of a single, so I suppose this. You know, historically is not that strange. What feels weird is to now think about having your house and your social structure. Because being kicked out into the house is hard, but losing every friend you've ever had and every person that you've ever known.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Chris Williamson?

  In this probably incredibly insular environment.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:34Chris Williamson?

  Hey, sixty-five, congratulations. Now fuck off. None of your friends are going to be able to go with you.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  And insular also geographically, these are like.

• 1:09:42Chris Williamson?

  Middle of Noah.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Middle, Morenci's another one, two big ones in Arizona. And people are trying to get in.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Because look, the pay is good. They save up money and get real estate out. A lot of the ones that are thinking through it, they, they do their time and they buy real estate outside and retire in that.

• 1:10:01Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  Desert, desert of Arizona.

• 1:10:03Chris Williamson?

  It wouldn't surprise me if. People are innovative and if there is this. Understanding that you work in this place. And then when you retire, you're going to get kicked out, that will begin to be a pathway. Conveyor belt to, well, why don't we make a retirees town that's not too far away? And this has all of the things that we want. And then that begins to be the kind of. Tradition that people go through.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and right now they're doing well because copper's doing well.

• 1:10:36Chris Williamson?

  Right. What about East LA?

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  East LA is great. I love the Chicanos. They're cool. One of those, again, new country in my own country experiences. Didn't know anything about Chicanos, really. Got in with these guys.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  True, hundred percent Chicanos. As in.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  English is the native language. With a Spanish accent.

• 1:11:07Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  It's the culture.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  A lot of them are bilingual, but.

• 1:11:13Chris Williamson?

  Spanish?

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, but a lot have been here generations and they grew up speaking English, but they have a Spanish accent. It's wild.

• 1:11:21Chris Williamson?

  Cool. Okay.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Look, the car culture is awesome.

• 1:11:26Chris Williamson?

  They love their cars.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, the low riders, the taco, it's a culture, it's, it's, it's connected. It really is connected. Well, it's its own universe out there. And again, it's one of those heath or either here nor there. The Chicanos will say, when we go to Mexico, they call us American, but when we're in the US, they call us Mexican.

• 1:11:48Chris Williamson?

  They're in the uncanny valley of Mexicans and Americans.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  Right in between.

• 1:11:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  So I made a few videos out there with them, actually a chapter in the book about the Chicanos. And I, I just, that's what's so rad about America. You have all these different existences coexisting. And my wife says it's a build your own bowl country. As in, pick your protein, pick your vegetables, pick your dressing. So pick your.

• 1:12:19Chris Williamson?

  Pick your addiction.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  Culture, your addiction, fentanyl, picture, pick your geography. What do you want? Mountains? You want oceans?

• 1:12:27Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I mean that.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  You want your culture, you want your politics even, like choose your own adventure.

• 1:12:31Chris Williamson?

  It's fucking cool, you know, for all that there's problems in this place and it's the misogynistic, capitalistic hellscape that's trying to vigorously keep everybody down. I understand. But I flew back from, when I flew back from SF and just the change, that journey from SF to Austin, the change in the landscape, looking out of the window.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Chris Williamson?

  Is fucking unbelievable. This, it is everything. I've seen everything on route to the only thing I haven't seen is snow. In fact, I probably didn't maybe see some snow like San Bernardino Valley, if we went over that way. I don't know.

• 1:13:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you can, there's places that you can snowboard and ski in fucking May.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Chris Williamson?

  And, and it's just, it's so varied and that is what makes it cool. I remember when I first started coming out here, man, mid twenties, I started coming out as part of these author projects that I was doing. And I would get flown out to Norfolk, Virginia. And it was just a like military, it was right on the bay. So I'm seeing all of the huge military ships coming in and out. And there was one weekend where we were staying at the Sheraton downtown in Norfolk, Virginia, right on the water. And there was a powerboat convention going on, like every dude had a mustache.

• 1:13:54Chris Williamson?

  Every woman, no matter how old she was, had bleached blonde hair, platinum, super. I was like, this fucking rules. This is the sickest shit I've ever seen in my life.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Chris Williamson?

  And then the next year I went to Baltimore and it was the fourth of July. And I was in downtown Baltimore, right where the historic ships are, right on that bay. And the motherfuckers are firing cannons, fourth of July, there's all of these fireworks going up. I was on my own. I was like, this is amazing. And I posted a, a photo on Facebook and put my phone away and I was having a beer or whatever, just on my own, walking about, it's like wide eyed, bushy tailed. Ba ding, ba ding, ba ding, ba ding, ba ding. I was like, fucking, all right, fair enough. Get my phone out. It's late. US time. So there's no one awake in the UK and I basically had no friends in the US. All of the people that were running the event were saying, what are you doing downtown in Baltimore? Do not go past 49th street.

• 1:14:47Chris Williamson?

  Do not take a turn down there. It's like, what do you mean? They're like, just don't go to 49th street or whatever. And I was like, well, now I'm fucking going to 48th street. Okay. So go all the way up. And on every single street corner, there was a cop car with two police officers. So on every intersection, you would have one, two, three, four cop cars, like on the corners of every, I'm like, how many fucking cop cars have you guys got? And they were just sat there and I was, even that didn't go to 40, 50th street or whatever. That's fucking fascinating to me. And then did this huge road trip, went to, um, fuck, what's the place just near Dollywood? It's like a ski lodge town, begins with a G. Gatlinburg.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:15:32Chris Williamson?

  I went to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and this is like a Aspen, the like Swiss ski lodge town that happens to be beautiful weather in the middle of summer. I, fourth of July, Nashville, Broadway, like it's, it's fucking awesome, dude. Like for people that, I guess, haven't traveled, haven't been able to get outside of their home state and see just how much stuff there is to do, like this sounds like I'm shilling for the fucking American tourist board or whatever, but it's just, it's fucking cool. It's really good and I'm, I'm glad that I'm here.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  So what do you, where do you think things are going? Where do you see things in, uh, in five years? Are you, are you optimistic about things? Are you thinking something has to come to a head or?

• 1:16:14Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. I, the, America is very divided thing seems less true than America is very isolated. I think people are more isolated and they are divided. And that can cause people to kind of become quite deranged in the way that they see themselves in the world.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Chris Williamson?

  If you don't touch grass that much, I had this question on a Q and A. This guy was asked a question of, um,

• 1:16:38Chris Williamson?

  you say, I say that the bar is very low for most men and that, you know, if you're a well put together guy with a stable job who's nice and takes care of himself, you're in the top like 5% of all men. And like, I think that's true. And he's like, and yet I see all of this stuff online about how a guy needs to be six foot tall and make six figures a year and I'd be emotionally intelligent. He's got to done 10 years of therapy and all of it. And like, I think this is what happens when you spend too much time on the internet.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:06Chris Williamson?

  I think the internet takes the most caricatured, extreme versions. It's like WWE for sociality.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:15Chris Williamson?

  And it turns everything into this kayfabe pantomime and everybody starts performing. And, um, what I think, what I hope is that we can continue to sort of push people into real world experiences, like stuff like your travel blogs. I think it's really great at reminding people there is a fucking world of adventure out there off the screen. Adventure is not a staycation at a local fucking yoga retreat that's 30 minutes from your house.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Chris Williamson?

  Adventure is taking a left down a road that you don't usually go down. I'll never forget, I did, um, as part of this, I want to see the world thing. When I was younger, I did Thailand on my own. I did Bali on my own. The Thailand trip, it was my final full day on Koh Samui.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Chris Williamson?

  Uh, no, Koh Tao, sorry, Koh Tao, Koh Tao, not Koh Samui. And, um, me and my one dollar per day moped, which had one brake on it and was definitely going to kill me. And I was, I was basically just doing Thai boxing the whole time I was there. I was going from gym to gym, just fighting. So I thought that would be fun to do and it would give me a community of people and I'd feel less alone. That worked out great. Final day, I was driving the trip from the smoothie place I like to go to back toward the gym, but I'd already trained. I was like, there's a turning here on the left. I'm just going to see what's down this road. And that took me two and a half hours and nearly ran out of gas. And one point opened out into this elephant sanctuary that I didn't know was there, wasn't sign posted.

• 1:18:48Chris Williamson?

  Saw that pitched up for a bit, just sat and watched things, pulled back off. And then there's a guy with a huge truck with all of these rolls of sort of bark spun up and rolled tied up behind him. I looked like a scene out of Final Destination, like Thailand's final destination. It's all going to fall off and kill someone. And I was like, just watching this person thinking, I wonder what, I wonder what that guy's afternoon is going to look like. I wonder where he's going. I wonder what he does. I wonder where he lives. And there would be, I just, the opportunity to see some fucking real shit.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:25Chris Williamson?

  That is not being fed to you at the velocity that you're used to. I don't know. I mean, I can't tell you basically anything that I watched on the internet last week, but I can tell you a story about Thailand that I remember doing 10 years ago.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:37Chris Williamson?

  Like if that isn't how you make a richer life, I kind of don't know what is. And this doesn't mean that you got to travel all the way to fucking Thailand.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:45Chris Williamson?

  But, you know.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  No, you're fully right. It's, there's the on the ground reality and the online reality right now. And the delta is massive.

• 1:19:56Speaker 01

  And unless you're getting that on the ground reality to balance it out, you know, this thing starts taking over.

• 1:20:01Chris Williamson?

  Everything seems catastrophic. But next five years, what do I think is going to happen? I would like to think that we're going to get some degree of pushback against the level of onlineness.

• 1:20:17Chris Williamson?

  I wouldn't bet against people's ability to actually be able to look after themselves. And I think that people are way more resilient than we give them credit for. I would be worried about what is happening to young people with technology usage. But Australia and the UK have now both got under 16 bans for social media. Even if you can work around it with a VPN or something, I think that's going to be good. And it wouldn't surprise me. America, unfortunately, the freedom thing actually works against you with that. That sometimes maybe you need a bit of dictatorship, maybe you need a little bit of bureaucracy and and some sort of top down telling of what, because people hate the idea of losing freedom.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02Chris Williamson?

  But also along with freedom, the optionality can mean that most people kind of, they gravitate toward the path of least resistance. Sometimes that's something that they want, but they isn't good for them.

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:15Chris Williamson?

  Something they want but don't need.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:17Chris Williamson?

  I think it'll, a lot will depend on what happens internationally over the next couple of years, because that is causing a lot of people to feel quite uncomfortable. One of the biggest niches or most of the biggest trends in finance on YouTube about six years ago were slow investing, 401ks, dollar cost averaging. And if you look at 2026, it's all vibe betting, polymarket, Calci, get rich quick, crypto. And I think that speaks to the sort of short termism that people are feeling.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:49Chris Williamson?

  I, I don't know if the future is promised to me, so I'm going to kind of just make immediate rewards. I hope that that stops because that's a real recipe for fucking disaster.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  That's, that's a great point. I call it the RPT. Do you know what the RPT is?

• 1:22:06Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  Okay, nothing against Russians, but the Russian package tour. So Soviet Union falls in 91. Okay, these people have been behind the wall for decades. All of a sudden, travel opens up to Natalia, Turkey, Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. So you have these flights from, for people that never were able to leave their country. Chalabinsk, Ufa, Novi Sibirsk, flying into these all inclusive package tours. So you go, you get your food, your hotel, everything's included. Well, if you've ever been around an RPT,

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  it's like, take everything off the table, stuff your pockets mentality. Because they've dealt with so much scarcity, you never know what tomorrow brings. And I, I, there's, I'm doing, saying this with some humor too. Okay, so not everyone's participating in the RPT.

• 1:22:59Chris Williamson?

  There is some short termists.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  There's the UPT, Ukrainian package tour, there's the Chinese package tour. It's just sort of a joke of the package tour where it's like, I paid for this, I'm going to get all I can get. And I feel like the RPT has sort of taken over culture even here in the West as in, let me get my thing quick. There's nothing long term here.

• 1:23:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  Get it off. I feel like the whole country is run like the RPT right now. It's like, I'm going to make my mo, here's my meme coin, I'm going to bank, get out, nothing long term. And nothing good really comes from short term thinking. Like you didn't get to where you're at from short term thinking. That's a long grind, same with me.

• 1:23:42Chris Williamson?

  Even to get the visa to, even to come to the country, it's a very long grind.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  If it was short term, you would have given up, gone, done something easier. So I totally agree, like, especially young in this country, you need to realize that it's not all social media, obviously. And social media shows RPT mentality. Anything that's worth something is long game. I mean, it took me until, I mean, I was trying to figure out my life at 38. I was stressing in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, reading everything I could get my hands on, like,

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  WTF am I going to do now?

• 1:24:21Chris Williamson?

  Now you've got a huge YouTube channel and a book deal and.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  Right, but that's, that's from long term thinking, like having hope. And at the very least, I'd be an old man and be like, at least I went for it. If it, if it didn't work out.

• 1:24:35Chris Williamson?

  I upped my entire life and moved countries on my own with two suitcases at 34. I know you, people who say you should have got your life sorted out by now assume that development comes with age and not work.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  And the whole age thing is, it's like, that makes sense if you know the day you're going to die. If I'm dying at 100 and I have kids at 48, who cares? But if I'm going to die at 50, better have them earlier if you want kids. And that's just like this whole, you have to do something by a certain timeline thing. I, I threw that manual out at a young age.

• 1:25:11Chris Williamson?

  So I understand that that seems to be a little bit of a contradictory pattern to some of the stuff that you did when you were younger, which is, I'm not going to be able to travel like this in the same way perhaps in the future.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:22Chris Williamson?

  So it feels like you did have an understanding of part of the timeline. Is that fair to say?

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  With that amount of freedom, like fully untethered, no relationship I was in, no commitments. Yeah, I was sort of foreseeing, maybe I won't get that chance again.

• 1:25:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What are, what's actually happening on the American Mexican border? What's the truth?

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  Right now?

• 1:25:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  I did a follow up video because I've done, I don't know, five, six, seven videos, no, seven, eight videos down there. Right now it's chill, crickets, no one's coming over illegally.

• 1:26:02Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  Nah, nothing. So I started doing border videos when I was moving from California to Florida. And someone reached out and said, you got to come down to the border. And I was in the middle of a move, driving across country. I'm like, nah, I'm not going to do that, too busy. And my wife was like.

• 1:26:20Chris Williamson?

  Detour.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  Do it, go do it. We got to Florida, dropped my bags, dropped her and went right to the border in Texas. So not far from here at McAllen. And so I went in with some preconceptions of, you know, why would you want a border wall? That's,

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't think that's the right way to go about this. And then after spending time there during that trip, I left. Yeah, you want a border wall down there.

• 1:26:48Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  Look, if the wall's 30 feet, migrants are going to get a 32 foot ladder. And they go, and it's not stopping everything, obviously. But for customs and border protection, it pinches everyone and they put their technology on the wall, they can see better, they can manage it better. You have to see these landscapes to understand how vast they are.

• 1:27:12Chris Williamson?

  Do we, do you know how much of the border is covered by protective fencing then?

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  I don't know. California, most of California, um, a lot of Arizona, not all of Arizona, not all of Texas.

• 1:27:29Chris Williamson?

  It's got to be one of the longest conjoining borders in the world, I have to assume, coast to coast.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  Perhaps, but there are a lot of.

• 1:27:37Chris Williamson?

  Canada will be more, actually.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  Oh, that, yeah, that's the longest border, actually, Canada.

• 1:27:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  And I've done a story up there too, which was interesting, but um.

• 1:27:44Chris Williamson?

  Hey, there it is. For the US Mexico border, roughly 700, 750 miles of its nearly 2,000 miles, have some form of primary fence or wall about 35 to 38%. That is not one continuous wall, much of it is replaced, earlier barriers and the remainder is covered by terrain, patrols, sensors, and other enforcement measures. The US Canada border is overwhelmingly unfenced.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  That's nothing up there. Okay, so I went down, I'm like, I left that first trip. Yeah, you should put a wall up there. The second trip, I went to West Texas where the Rio Grande is. And if you put a wall up there, you give Mexico the whole river. It would destroy those places. So I left that trip being like, yeah, you wouldn't want to.

• 1:28:26Chris Williamson?

  No wall.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  You wouldn't want to put a wall there. Then I went to Tijuana and there are two walls between Tijuana and California, two mega walls.

• 1:28:35Chris Williamson?

  Is it one to keep the Mexicans out and one to keep the Americans out?

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  No, double, double.

• 1:28:40Chris Williamson?

  Double Mexicans.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  Double front.

• 1:28:42Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  Because if you didn't have walls there, it'd just be a full on bum rush, right? To the north.

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  Arizona is interesting. So every sector, there are, I think, 20 sectors in the United States where like there's the Yuma sector and the Tucson sector. They're basically different border jurisdictions. Yuma sector, when I went there, 140 nations were coming through. It was wild. Um, we had an OTM policy, other than Mexicans. A lot of people don't know this. Like Mexicans could not come over unless they were really good, but the cartel controlled that whole situation. A lot of Indians, got Indians on my video from Delhi, fly Delhi, Mexico City, Mexico City, Mexicali cartel picks them up at the airport, like EPCOT Center,

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  without the name tags, brings them to the gap in the wall, gives a US phone, get to the US side, dial 911. Our Customs Board of Protection comes on them, and I was there for it in one of my videos. Quarter, half mile down, Sinaloa cartel is running, defend the young girls, all the stuff that's definitely gonna get busted on. But at that time, we had to process. It's, it's a very confusing topic, and unfortunately, both sides have used it as a weapon. But at that time, it was pretty much fair game to claim asylum. Depending what the country you're from, but if you're from India, and you could say, hey, uh, political persecution, I need to leave. It's dangerous for me to be in India.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  We had to process them. Buses would come in, pick them up, bring them into a detention center, and then off into the interior, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, all over the country. With an asylum court hearing, hey, come to this court hearing, and the, the courts are so backed up, not enough judges, some are five years out, some are seven years out. So the, the, the word on the street, or the word in the world was, game on, green light, come on. You just have to pay the cartel the right amount of money. So it was insane.

• 1:30:55Chris Williamson?

  I should have just, I shouldn't have done my fucking O1. I didn't need to do my O1.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, you didn't. And then you'd see the fallout in places like Chicago, where all the police stations, you had Venezuelan migrants just sleeping out on the floor. Like you walk into a police station, it was just sleeping bags, kids, toys, kids playing, and the, all the police officers were just like hating their lives.

• 1:31:16Chris Williamson?

  That was the asylum place they'd been assigned to?

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  Just, we weren't, these cities weren't ready for this influx. These places weren't ready, and it was just a mad influx. And so I don't blame the migrants, because it was green light. I would have done the same.

• 1:31:30Chris Williamson?

  Great system.

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  I'm in Honduras, six grand of the cartel. I'm going up, I'm making 10 times as much money, and living a better life. But the influx was insane, unsustainable. I thought my channel was gonna get demonetized for sure on that topic, and maybe shadow banned. But it wasn't. Thank God. I've never had a problem with YouTube, knock, knocking wood with that. But I thought it was gonna have an issue. And I would get in with the sheriffs, because the sheriffs can, this is a really cool thing about America. We have local law enforcement, you have City of Austin law enforcement, right? What county are we in?

• 1:32:11Chris Williamson?

  Travis.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  Travis, okay. There's the sheriff's department. Both doing law enforcement, operating completely different. The sheriffs are voted in by their constituents. The only people that oversee them, really, are the voters.

• 1:32:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  Where the local police, city council, it's, it's tied into the local governance. So I can never get in with police departments. The only one, Glendale Police, basically Phoenix, shout out to Glendale Police, they let me do my thing. Other than that, nobody. But the sheriffs, if you get a good sheriff, like I got in Yuma County, Sheriff Wilmot, like straight out of the music, uh, straight in the movies, handlebar mustache, got the cowboy hat on.

• 1:32:54Chris Williamson?

  Unreal.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  And he brought me and the camera and the audience into stuff that no one was getting access to. Because Customs and Border Protection had a gag order, no one could speak. And it was insane. So the problem right now, whatever media you're watching, every, everything's got a bias.

• 1:33:14Chris Williamson?

  Real story.

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  Everything's got a bias. And so some people didn't even know there was a situation really going on. Other people think like, America's gonna blow up tomorrow.

• 1:33:24Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  And there's no real place to go where truth is the North Star. At least I haven't found it. In media, I don't know where you go. You have to, you have to read wide. You have to watch wide.

• 1:33:37Chris Williamson?

  So again, a lot of the benefits you have in this country, freedom is one of those amazing, uh, limited restrictions, but also massive optionality and the inability to coordinate, right? Like you can't get top down with that. The same thing where I don't think that this is the case in the UK, right? You have Northumbria Police Constabulary, which will be for Newcastle, the, the city that I was from, Northumbria being the county. And, uh, it's one cohesive unit.

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:34:08Chris Williamson?

  And there'll be divisions and whatever else in that. But this means if you've got the sheriff and his guys, then you've got Austin PD and their guys, and then there's probably some bullshit with like Travis County as well, too. Trying to coordinate that, because you've got these systems that are all trying to interlock, and there'll be a little bit of power struggle, and it doesn't take much. Anybody that's worked in a company that's grown quickly, or anybody that's been a part of a startup, or seen any business that's trying to grow, as soon as you go from founder, plus founder and assistant, plus founder and assistant or something, it doesn't take long before the diseconomies of scale really come online. All the coordination, the communication problems, things get missed. Everybody's doing the fucking Spider-Man meme thing where they're looking at someone else's job it's supposed to be.

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:34:53Chris Williamson?

  That's what you have in a country that's like, and because it's so new, there can be little power grabs. Oh, we'll build this, we'll build that, and before you know it, why, why haven't we pruned this area of this particular bureaucracy? Uh, and the disadvantage that we have in the UK is that because it's been around for so long, we've accumulated loads of pomp and circumstance and bullshit. Like there are all of these, I went, when I graduated from university, both times, there's this insane procession of stuff. There's a mace bearer, the dude carrying a fucking medieval weapon, and everybody dots their caps in different orders to people based on hierarchy. And it's like cool and kitschy

• 1:35:38Chris Williamson?

  and, you know, old and worldly or whatever, this old university thing. But like, that's also the way that the police is run, and that's also the way that people are voted in, and that's also the way that the House of Commons works, and that's also the way the banking system works. So because it's old, you have a lot of the bullshit that's been pruned is good, because things that weren't able to contribute have been gotten rid of. But there's also loads of superfluous like horseshit that's in there, too. So it's just, again, the only two countries that I can speak on with any degree of non-expertise is the UK and the US. And what I see in the US is like a huge coordination problem, because it's so big and so sprawling. And there's been, I don't want to say a power grab, but you guys have had to build quickly.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:21Chris Williamson?

  For 250 years.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, three lifetimes.

• 1:36:24Chris Williamson?

  Dude, it is nothing. There's trees in my garden that are older, in the UK, that are older than this fucking country.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:33Chris Williamson?

  So it's, it's not a surprise that it's a challenge. And then changing technologies, you know, whatever's going on geopolitically, people coming across the border, like it's fucking gnarly.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  It's messy. The good side of that would be, hey, without those sheriffs, there's no way any of us would have seen what I could show. If it was all, it was completely, uh, top down in that sense. Now, in America's founding, the, the Crown, the King didn't want us to move past Appalachia. Too much to manage, too many skirmishes with the natives.

• 1:37:15Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:37:16Speaker 01

  I mean, that's what, it's such a massive thing to manage, where if you don't have some of these autonomous things working, in the spirit of, in the spirit of America's, America's all the crazies, you being one of them.

• 1:37:32Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Right? You came here without like, no guarantee. You had your thing going, so you had some, some footing, some foundation. But think of most that came here, they're like, my family got on a boat.

• 1:37:45Chris Williamson?

  How long was the journey for the original migrants that came to America a few hundred years ago? Like, it would be six weeks on a ship, or something from fucking island, from some port, probably in Ireland or on the west coast of the UK.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, my family came over in 1918, on a boat from Italy, from Naples. No English, 18 years old was my, it was great grandparents, so great grandmother, great grandfather. They all came in Hoboken, New Jersey.

• 1:38:18Chris Williamson?

  I mean, the first European, no, no, more, like a little bit, like a little bit newer than that. It's like 1800s. Try like, because I have to assume that that would have been 1800s, most immigrants from Europe and America spent four to eight weeks at sea by sailing ship. Okay, by the late 1800s, steamships had made it faster. Even one to two weeks on a ship. But that, at the start of the 1800s, hey dude, do you want to go to this place that you have absolutely no idea what it's like? It's basically undeveloped. There isn't much going on. There was a revolution recently. Maybe it's over. I think so. I'm not really too sure. It's gonna take between a month and two months. Survival, yeah, maybe.

• 1:39:01Chris Williamson?

  Um, wanna go? Like, that is why this country is filled with people that are risk takers. Like they're, they're the progeny of people that went, fuck it, let's get on that ship for two months.

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  Let's do it. And then the ones that went west into native lands, like how sketchy would that have been?

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  So it attracts that it always has and you're the latest iteration.

• 1:39:25Chris Williamson?

  That's true. What um, tell me about this thing you did in the Hamptons because you know, when you're thinking about rural off grid.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:32Chris Williamson?

  You know, I don't immediately think of the Hamptons as being in that mix.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  So the Hamptons met up with this guy Jimmy, Jimmy Ding, Ding because he fixes surfboards, the dings on surfboards.

• 1:39:47Chris Williamson?

  Great name.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  Uh, we started at the dumps. So think of the most bougie, one of the most bougie zip codes in the country. We started at the dumps. Cause Jimmy's old school local. And so what I want to show is like, you can label the Hamptons. I always thought of starch, linens, helicopters, big pads, but there's a whole working class that lives there in many of these wealthy places, right? So I just got in his story. Fascinating guy, grew up there, fisherman. And you see a lot of the tension that exists in these places where the real estate shot up so much. How do you hang on? Right? How does a guy like Jimmy?

• 1:40:27Chris Williamson?

  In what, in what period of time did the real estate go vertical?

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  Well, it was always a, it was always a place for New York City's elite to get out of the city.

• 1:40:37Chris Williamson?

  It's been desirable for a while.

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but there was enough land and space back in the, I believe his family got a place back in the 50s or 60s. Dirt cheap to get a, a normal home. And now it's just through the roof and it's everywhere in the country. And I think in the UK too, right?

• 1:40:53Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah.

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  It just seems like it's a worldwide phenomenon.

• 1:40:56Chris Williamson?

  It depends where you want to live. Um, the UK is an interesting one. So I'm from the most northernly town that isn't Scotland. I'm as far north as you can go. Uh, in Game of Thrones, which is loosely based on the War of the Roses from like the 10,000 A.D. Winterfell, which is the fucking freezing cold, dark miserable place that the Starks are from. That's based on Newcastle. So that's Newcastle. And then there's a wall, right? There's the Ice Wall and that's Hadrian's Wall. And that's not far from us. So there is a, there was, there is a wall that's still there that was meant to keep the barbarians out and they were the Scots. And if you were to spend

• 1:41:36Chris Williamson?

  maybe now a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, so $200,000, something like that, maybe 180, you could get a very nice family home, probably semi-detached terraced in a, you know, be a hmm, 1900, early 1900s builds, brick. It'll be really nicely, but it's not going to be super cool, modern, but it'll be kitschy and really, really nice. And there'll be enough space, especially for something in the UK. If you take that amount of money and try go to London, you've got two years of rent.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:10Chris Williamson?

  Right? Or three years of rent, maybe if you're lucky. It is, the UK, I think, is the whatever fifth biggest, 10th biggest economy in the world, something like that. So people look at the UK as a rich country, but the UK is a poor country that surrounds a very rich city. And the city is London and the city is really the city of London.

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:30Chris Williamson?

  And that is the financial hub. And then you've got this sprawl out into Westminster and then London and Greater London. And then the other side of the M25 and it starts to fall off a bit more. And then you get to Birmingham and Manchester and Newcastle. And so it's affordable depending on where you want to be.

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  Is there a lot of tension between the, the London crowd and the rural crowd?

• 1:42:52Chris Williamson?

  Not particularly, at least maybe the rural crowd when it comes to sort of farming and stuff like that. That wasn't something I was integrated in. It certainly felt to me, growing up in Stockton, Onties, which is 50 miles south of Newcastle, famous for having the UK's widest high street and the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK. And then it lost that.

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  You weren't part of that, or were you?

• 1:43:14Chris Williamson?

  I wasn't. I was desperately trying to contribute, but I was a horrendously uncool teenager. And then

• 1:43:22Chris Williamson?

  I never thought of London as being a part of what I was a part of.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:43:28Chris Williamson?

  But I, it didn't feel like a part of the same country. It was, I guess, and I, maybe I went when I was like 17 or 18 a few times. But I, it really is south versus north because the, the shape of the country is so particular, right? It's long and thin. And you talk about south, no one's talking about east versus west. Like there is a difference between people that are from Liverpool and people that are from Newcastle, of people that are from Manchester and people that are from Leeds, right? Going left to right, but no one really gives a fuck. Like it's just people with different silly accents, but north to south, as soon as you get below Birmingham and you start to get toward London, that's when things, there, there is definitely a sense that, oh, these are two different cultures.

• 1:44:11Chris Williamson?

  Don't forget the two kind of different climates. Like it is different to go, it's not that far. It's three hours on a train, a pretty quick train, but it's, you know, 400 miles, something like that.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:24Chris Williamson?

  And that difference is not insignificant when it comes to the weather. Like to go from the northeast where we are to the south coast, because also we're next to the North Sea. That's the coldest sea, I think, in the world. And it's really fucking dangerous. But yeah, um, there is definitely a detachment. If you're not in London, you are not really considered much by the press. Press stories aren't bothered about what's going on in fucking Rotherham, right? They don't care about whether Stoke-on-Trent has got some issue that's occurring locally, socially. It will be on local news, but it's not going to break out into national news. So it is, it is all of the money and all of the attention is just focused on London and that's fine.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  What about Isle of Man? Is that when you have big bucks and you're trying to avoid the taxes?

• 1:45:13Chris Williamson?

  I don't know whether there's a tax haven out there. I know there's a big festival. I've been to, I spent a little bit of time near there and it's a retirement place for a lot of people. I know that's interesting. I mean, dude, if you look at even the UK, the fucking Hebrides, these islands off the northwest of Scotland, I think.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  My map, yeah.

• 1:45:33Chris Williamson?

  The, can you pull up Google Maps? Jared, we can just do it on the big screen. Just search Hebrides for me. And um, it is so fucking cool up there, like, uh,

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  I gotta get out there.

• 1:45:45Chris Williamson?

  Fred again did a tour of Stornaway, I think it was. So Stornaway is one of these islands. And um, yeah, just the, the amount of variety that you do have in, in a place that's got such population density is pretty fucking cool. Yeah, the Hebrides. So look at that, dude. Look at where that is. So zoom in for me, Jared.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  Kirkwall, what's up there?

• 1:46:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So look at this, dude.

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:46:11Chris Williamson?

  That's the Hebrides there. And it's just such a, so this was halfway between what the, um, the fingers, I think were from Game of Thrones. Look, I mean, the only reference I can give you is fucking Game of Thrones things.

• 1:46:26Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, all of that, that's the Isle of Skye that you can see there. S-K-Y-E.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  I bet the accent really changes out there, huh? On some of those islands.

• 1:46:36Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. I'm not Scottish enough to be able to tell you what the difference would be between them and somebody that's maybe from Glasgow. Go across for me, Jared, just pan east. Okay. So Berwick-upon-Tweed, top right.

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:46:49Chris Williamson?

  There, that is the border. So you can see the border sort of cutting through. Then it cuts down to Northumberland National Park. And there's Annick, which is a, a place that I would go and, uh, go to like, there's some national parks, the equivalent of national parks in the UK. The difference between Berwick-upon-Tweed, Annick and Dunbar is Annick completely English accent. Berwick-upon-Tweed is 20 miles away. You're like, there's something going on here. And then by the time that you get to another 20 miles away in Dunbar, it is completely Scottish. So the difference is so fucking stark.

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:25Chris Williamson?

  Remembering that this isn't like driving across the border from France to fucking Switzerland or something. This is you being in the same, the same money, the same everything, but just it's so, and then pan down a bit more for me. And then you can see there's Newcastle. So that's the place that, that I grew up in and then Stockton-on-Tees below it, which is where I actually was born. So yeah, the north of the UK is kind of fascinating, but dude, it's, you keep going down and you keep going down. There's Leeds. People are kind of interested in Leeds. There's Manchester, Liverpool. Okay. There's some ports and shit that are going on there, but no one gives a fuck. Sheffield, no one gives a fuck. Nobody cares at all. Keeping going down. Stoke-on-Trent, definitely no one gives a fuck. Nottingham, nothing. Birmingham, kind of a little bit. I guess Manchester, a little bit. There's some stuff going on.

• 1:48:09Chris Williamson?

  You're still going down. You're still, Peterborough, absolutely nothing. Cambridge, Oxford, Luton, St Albans. Okay. And then you get to London, right? And you've got the M25, which is that ring that goes around the outside of it. And if you're outside that, people kind of don't really care all that much. There's some bits that people will give a shit if there's a big deal in Manchester, maybe Birmingham. But you get away from this and people really don't, don't care.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  They don't even go out to Dover, right?

• 1:48:37Chris Williamson?

  Uh, no, no, not really. I don't think.

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  My time in Dover.

• 1:48:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  Did you know there's an island in the United States in Maryland that some of the old timers still speak a, a form of Elizabethan English?

• 1:48:49Chris Williamson?

  No, but I completely endorse it.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I met this guy, I made a video with him. He's actually in the book too. His name's Jerry. His family's been there 374 years. And he's got, you're gonna love the accent.

• 1:49:02Chris Williamson?

  Is there a video of this guy? Can we get a video of him up? Okay. What do we search?

• 1:49:06Speaker 01

  Smith Island. I would just type in Peter Santenello, Smith Island. A lot of Brits watch my channel too. And they're like, that, that guy sounds straight out of Leeds. I forget where, where.

• 1:49:17Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Oh, this is going to be fucking fascinating. Allow me to diagnose his accent.

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  He's a waterman. That's a British term, right?

• 1:49:24Chris Williamson?

  This one, his family lived on that one?

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that one.

• 1:49:32Chris Williamson?

  I mean, this guy.

• 1:49:33Speaker 01

  He's a Yarney. What's a Yarney?

• 1:49:36Chris Williamson?

  Let me, is that a British word?

• 1:49:37Speaker 02

  Yarney, which means, it's just like an old English word for friend. That means friend.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  Yarney?

• 1:49:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:44Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, is this the guy, is this the guy that you're thinking has got an English accent?

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess not.

• 1:49:49Chris Williamson?

  No, no, I'm sorry.

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  It's southern, southern.

• 1:49:52Chris Williamson?

  It's very fucking southern. There might be a little something going on.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  A few words come through.

• 1:49:56Chris Williamson?

  All right, let me see someone else. Let me hear these guys talk.

• 1:50:00Speaker 02

  Four or five days would be a good soak time for them now.

• 1:50:04Speaker 03

  Guess the kitty fish is eating them all up. They ain't no oysters.

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  I know what he's saying.

• 1:50:08Speaker 02

  They ain't no oyster too?

• 1:50:10Speaker 03

  The man had it on there pictures. He had bananas, oysters, big clams and a load of crabs.

• 1:50:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so I, I mean, they look like lovely gentlemen. Um, I wholeheartedly.

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  You're not hearing it.

• 1:50:24Chris Williamson?

  I wholeheartedly support a like accent driven recolonization of this country from, from England. But that is, that is fucking cultural appropriation. If ever I've heard it, if you think that that guy sounds English. I'm sorry.

• 1:50:39Chris Williamson?

  Not pissing on the parade.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  Jerry, Jerry's a great guy.

• 1:50:41Chris Williamson?

  Oh, let's see, let's see that guy. Let's see that guy in the black t-shirt. Last chance. Scoot back. Press that. Yeah. Or is that the same bloke?

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  Jerry, go. Okay. So maybe it's a bit of a stretch. He, he says some, some old English words.

• 1:50:53Chris Williamson?

  Okay. I don't care about the words. What I care is how they're said.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:56Chris Williamson?

  You know what I mean? It's not what you say, it's how you say it.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  It's got a bit of a Carolina brogue to it.

• 1:51:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, look, me with my smoking pipe, I can.

• 1:51:07Chris Williamson?

  That might help. Um, after all of the different communities that you've spent time with.

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:12Chris Williamson?

  Like Navajo, Amish, you pick, which one could you see yourself most living with full time? Do you think?

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  Man.

• 1:51:23Chris Williamson?

  You have to up six and you have to spend the rest of your days somewhere with a community of people. Where would it be?

• 1:51:31Speaker 01

  I like being a free agent so much. You know what I mean? I, I respect and honor all these groups and I can admire what they're doing and the, the families that, that's been in a place for 10 generations. That's really cool. But I've always had friends from every background and never belonged to a specific group. And that scares me for some reason, like just being in that group dynamic.

• 1:51:52Chris Williamson?

  Do you feel displaced a lot of the time from that?

• 1:51:55Speaker 01

  No, I, I, I, I, it's almost like I belong everywhere and belong nowhere at the same time. Like I like learning and like getting into different groups, but to be one, to be Amish, maybe two years, but then after a year two, you're like.

• 1:52:09Chris Williamson?

  Do you think this would be harder? Obviously you did this before you met your misses, but do you think this would be harder if you didn't have the unit, like the, the you and another person relationship unit thing? Cause it feels to me like.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:23Chris Williamson?

  Quite destabilizing. You, you might feel a little uncertain and grounded.

• 1:52:28Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. So my wife edits. So this is our baby, this whole thing.

• 1:52:33Chris Williamson?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  This channel.

• 1:52:34Chris Williamson?

  It's a family, a family affair.

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  Family affair. We got a mini dog. So that's like, that's the extent of it. So we.

• 1:52:41Chris Williamson?

  So it's you and a GoPro?

• 1:52:43Speaker 01

  It's me and a GoPro. I figure out the story. She edits. Um, but we worked.

• 1:52:48Chris Williamson?

  Common did some Ukrainian workforce.

• 1:52:53Chris Williamson?

  They're hardworking people.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  It wasn't my intention, but it turned out that way, that we're just, it's, we're fully in it together. So we have that bond. But totally, if I had to hire an outside editor and it was just like sending files of video off and working that way, I think you're right. I think it would be.

• 1:53:11Chris Williamson?

  Destabilizing.

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  Destabilizing. But I come, we're very tight. I mean, okay. The only two other people, we have a guy that does translations in Thailand, American guy. Ah, just to do the translations for videos in a, in a virtual assistant in Thailand. That, no Philippines. That takes, takes my emails and puts them in monday.com for organization. That's it.

• 1:53:33Chris Williamson?

  Do you know Ryan Trahan? Do you know him?

• 1:53:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:36Chris Williamson?

  So Ryan got rid of everybody. It's just him, just him and an iPhone.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  Are you, he doesn't, who edits?

• 1:53:42Chris Williamson?

  Him.

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  You serious?

• 1:53:43Chris Williamson?

  Correct. The guy that's doing numbers not far off Mr. Beast.

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:53:48Chris Williamson?

  Is him and iPhone. His wife's there, but just, I think largely hanging and just like kind of a moral support.

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  Good for him.

• 1:53:55Chris Williamson?

  Him, him with an iPhone. And, uh, yeah, he's, he's just.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  Cause here's the deal with this, this works. I got the logistics of it. Got to get to the location. Got to figure out the story first. It's a day of shooting.

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  You can either be more of a creator or more of a manager in, in the video space, I think.

• 1:54:14Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  And I don't want to manage. Like it hurts the quality of the video. I remember I had someone working for me and she was great. She set up a lot of stuff in the channel. But there was drama before going out to a video and my password, Facebook password was given to a marketing company. And I'm like, oh, like dealing with chaos. And then we had a blow up.

• 1:54:35Chris Williamson?

  The video.

• 1:54:36Speaker 01

  And then I wrecked the video because I went out there and I was late and everything got messed up. So I need to be in my own head and space a long time with no interruptions.

• 1:54:44Chris Williamson?

  There's an essay called manager mode versus maker mode by Paul Graham, who is the main guy at Y C.

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:54:51Chris Williamson?

  And it is kind of a fundamental frame that everybody needs to know. You cannot be in maker mode if you're in manager mode.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:02Chris Williamson?

  It's actually impossible. And basically as soon as you get drawn into admin, executive function, planning, logistics, operations, as soon as you do that, no matter what it is.

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:16Chris Williamson?

  Your capacity to get back into blue sky, sort of fluid thinking, just vibing with it, man. World is basically impossible. And this is the trajectory. I'm literally talking to Ryan Long about this today.

• 1:55:31Chris Williamson?

  This is the trajectory where people get things wrong when they try to build a business and it's a temptation. They, they get things wrong. It is a, a hurdle that you need to get, a series of hurdles, an endless series of hurdles. You always need to get over. It's at each one of them that you fall at, it slows things down and it worsens the quality of your output.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 1:55:52Chris Williamson?

  It's dangerous.

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  And some people have the skills that they can flip between both quickly. I, I don't have that.

• 1:55:57Chris Williamson?

  I'm yet to meet anybody that is great at going from manager mode to maker mode. Within the same day, I think you can degrade from starting off making something and then there's a catastrophe and you fall into logistics mode.

• 1:56:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:09Chris Williamson?

  I don't know a single person, I've never met a single person who can start a day off in manager mode and become maker mode after lunch. It, it's straight up is a one-way street.

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:56:20Chris Williamson?

  And this is why if you're going to organize your, you know, if you're a burgeoning executive or a, you know, an online P T or something, and you have calls or you have to do client check-ins or whatever, just pick a day or a bunch of days and have those written off. Start to finish, I just, I'm in pure Adderall and tonic energy, like cranking out all of my productivity. And then I leave myself time that's sacred. Or the alternative, if you can't take entire days, is to have your morning. Because you can go from maker to manager, but you can't go from manager to maker.

• 1:56:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:56:52Chris Williamson?

  That's the way to do it. Peter Santenello, ladies and gentlemen, dude, you absolutely fucking rule.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:56:56Chris Williamson?

  I think your content's amazing. I really applaud you for trying to bring likeness and, you know, levity to stories that people think is a little bit more dark. Uh, where should people go to get everything?

• 1:57:07Speaker 01

  On you, on everything, just Peter Santenello, tough name to spell. So Peter Sant, and I'll usually come up. I got a website with everything. The book tour coming out. I don't know when you're posting this. Got a book tour. I'm all over the country signing books.

• 1:57:19Chris Williamson?

  Unreal.

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  Got the book dropping, got the videos on YouTube. So.

• 1:57:25Chris Williamson?

  You're the man.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  That's where it's at. I really appreciate you and what you do. So thanks for, thanks for the great conversation.

• 1:57:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. All right. Goodbye, my beauties.

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:57:32Chris Williamson?

  See you next time. Dude.

• 1:57:33Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you.

• 1:57:36Speaker 04

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