#68. Matt Galat: Travels & Tribulations
01:46:16 Share

What's up, everybody? Welcome back to The Honest Drink. I'm Justin. You can always reach us at thehonestdrink at gmail.com, Instagram, or WeChat. This episode is hosted by Howie, Eric, and myself. And our guest today is a vlogger, world traveler, and YouTuber. He documents his travels as he rides his trike across the world. A trike is basically a three-wheeled bicycle, except you're sitting down in a reclined position. Just think of it as a hammock with wheels.

Many of you might have already seen his videos on his channel, The Jiayou Nation, or on the Chinese platforms under Jiayou Ma Te. He's accrued quite a following. He is an American living in China and he's been traveling around for many years making travel vlogs, just documenting what he sees, staying open-minded, and expanding his worldview.

We talked to him today about his whole journey, how travel shapes our perspectives on social and political issues, our best efforts to be objective, especially when it comes to issues that hit closer to home. And he's recently come under attack by media outlets like the London Times,

and other YouTubers for his opinions on China. So we get into all of that. We had a blast and we just scratched the surface of all the crazy travel experiences he's been through, like climbing Mount Everest, traveling in North Korea, and we'll probably get into all of that next time he's back. But for now, please give it up for Matt Gallant. ♪ I'm so tired ♪ ♪ She's a living in a piece of wood ♪ ♪ She's a living in a piece of wood ♪

Then what's with this script on the table? Hello, my name is Matt. Please repeat word after word, Matt. You can't mention these talking points. Prompt her, prompt her. These are the talking points for the show. You know, I'm pretty bad at talking just on the fly. I have a real problem with that. 1,400 videos I've made.

1,400 videos. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. There's no clink from my cup. It's just paper. All right. Well, first of all, Matt, I want to say,

I really enjoy your videos and I was going to say this to you earlier before, but I wanted to save it for the show is that your videos actually were the first ones that I came across that actually gave me a lot of hope on YouTube. Because it's really easy to go down a really dark rabbit hole on YouTube, especially if you make the mistake of going into the comment sections and reading comments.

particularly when it comes to issues on China, right? And it's so skewed one way and there's so much misinformation and conspiracy out there. And then a guy like you comes along kind of sharing your videos and your opinions and

And it just gave me a lot of hope in the sense that like there are people that are willing to kind of speak the truth and speak their minds and who are actually here and spend a lot of time in China instead of somewhere else speculating on what's happening here. And that really gave me a lot of hope in that there is a community of people that are

think like I do, that have like share similar opinions as I do, right? And really the basis of all this is that there seems to be a huge disconnect between a lot of kind of what the media says on China and opinion pieces and all this to what's really happening on the ground here. And I just want to say thank you, number one, for sharing the videos that you do.

And how did you get started in all this? Because I don't think... You started as a travel vlog. You never started being political or anything like that, right? I still am a travel vlogger. It's just... There's a pandemic. I appreciate... You know what? Honestly, what you said means a lot because...

There might be some people out there with certain agendas, pro-China or anti-China, or some sort of narrative that they're trying to push because they might want to influence. I literally... These are my thoughts, my opinions. And so when I...

I started traveling and I actually made a video a while back when I first started saying that if you watch this channel, you're not going to get some crazy political thing because like I consider myself progressive left or right. I don't know. I'm progressive. I like I have progressive values and and I thought that through my travels that

by exposing people to the real life around the world, they might be able to see my perspective on the world without having me be able... have to announce it. You know what I mean? Like, I have a lot of right-wingers that like cycling. They like travel. They like these kind of things. And so they watch my videos and I'm like, I would really love to impart on them some of the positives of what I deem are progressive positives. Like, almost like indirectly just through your videos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's sort of just...

just through osmosis, you know, just slowly help them to maybe not change their worldviews, but just grow, evolve, you know, just like I've evolved. I'm going to evolve after our meeting, you know, slightly with our opinions and thoughts from all of you. That's how I feel we all grow is by sharing. And you're not going to grow if

if you're alienating people and like you said i like that you have similar opinions to me is great but it's also good to have people without the same opinions because absolutely like we were talking about before the started you know you start a conference a bubble echo chamber an echo chamber and all your biases are confirmed and i knew that because i only hang out with people that only think you know and i don't think that's good so i was like well maybe i can do these travel videos and people can impart whatever knowledge you want from it but uh

After COVID, when I paused my cycle tour, I'm normally cycling a three-wheeled recumbent trike around the world. My intention is to cycle from China all the way to the United States in like 15 or so years. It started with five years and then it's 10 years. Now it's 15 years. Now with pandemic, who the hell knows now, you know?

But I came back to Ningbo, which is just south of here, south of Shanghai, if you guys don't know. And the pandemic was raging in Wuhan and nobody knew exactly how bad it was going to be. And I knew that if anybody is going to have the toughest time with a pandemic, it's going to be the one where it started first.

Because as soon as you know it exists, from that point on, you can prepare yourself. China was the place where it did not exist, and then suddenly it existed. It was blindsided. It was. And they had to create laws. They had to create systems. They had to create, you know, they had to genome and all of this stuff. They had to figure out what it was. They had to figure out what the hell it was, you know. And so as it was raging around the end of January, my daughter is...

kept in her house. She can't go out and play. You know, we're all under these restrictions. And I'm like,

We had just traveled to America earlier, so they all had their 10-year visas, so there was no paperwork issue. And so I was like, hell, why don't we just get out of here? Let's just go to America. I mean, I'm not a medical professional. There's a lot of people like, you abandoned China in their time of, you are a quitter. There's a lot of people that actually said that, which I thought was crazy. Listen, it's like if there's a tragedy, the people that are taking care of that tragedy are going to say, if you're not involved in a tragedy,

Get away from it so that we can take care of the problem. And I was like, well, let's just leave China and just see how it goes. We'll go to, you know what? You know who's going to take care of this real well? America. So let's go back to America. And so I went to America.

And just before— This is February 2nd, the day Trump had his—I'm literally making quote singles with my finger—travel ban, which was total—can I swear a little bit? You can swear all you want. It was total bullshit, you know? I left China on February 1st.

And with my daughter and my wife, and we flew to O'Hare. O'Hare was the hub for the travel ban. And so I videotaped the whole thing. I was sharing daily videos of, because I thought it was important. It was very pertinent. And so I landed in O'Hare and me and Annie, my wife, we had our masks on on the plane. My wife was like, don't eat any in-flight meals. No, keep that mask on your face.

And so we landed in O'Hare and then when we got out, we were all speculating. Okay, I hope Trump lets us in. You know, we hadn't been to Wuhan, so we've got that. We're ready to answer questions and, you know, we got X and Y. If Y happens to Z and blah, blah, blah. Then we walk in and...

It's like normal. We walked in. There was no hazmat suits. There was barely any masks. The only masks were from us on the plane, other Chinese people who were like, oh, this is going to be serious. And so we walked in. You know when you go through the customs check and you're kind of like you're waiting in line and snaking? There was one of these TV screens that was up hanging from the ceiling. And it had a rolling –

still image, you know, warnings. Don't forget to grab your belongings, you know, blah, blah, blah, just stupid stuff. And one of the screens, one of the five screens that were showing every 10 seconds or show was, um,

was, if you've been to China within the last, or been to Wuhan within the last 15 days, self-quarantine, if you can. If you can. If you want. Honor code. Honor code. And then we went up to the checkout guy, the customs guy, and he was an ABC, American-born Chinese, or ABA, American-born Asian. And he's like, hey, how you doing? And I'm like,

I'm like, we haven't been to Wuhan in 15 days. I'm like, like, like you're ready for like the Spanish position here. Yeah. And he's like, oh, your daughter. Oh, my daughter's the same age. I'm like, cut the bullshit. You're a really nice guy. But you guys don't understand what's like. We flew away because we thought

I was looking forward to some serious consequences. Serious draconian shit. Right. I was ready for it. It's what you need to do in a pandemic. So when we left, we weren't encouraged to quarantine. We weren't encouraged to anything. We literally got an Airbnb for 15 days right adjacent to the airport. And we ordered Amazon food deliveries for the whole 15 days. We did that voluntarily. There was nobody that told us. I didn't want to bring COVID to my family.

I didn't want, it was asymptomatic. We knew that by then. So when I, the long story to tie together, I flew back. We stayed in America for like a month until March 23rd. And we flew back to China because we were like, oh my God, China's treating this with the respect it deserves. And America just doesn't even, doesn't even give a shit. It's going to be horrible. And

tragically, I was confirmed, you know, in a lot of ways. I mean, today's every day is just like a, like a mass, mass casualty event on a huge scale. And so you ask like politics and stuff and these stories that I shared. And I was like, the, uh, the barrier that I had erected around my political opinions and my, my cultural and sociological opinions on the world, it wasn't

It was too thick. And I felt like I wasn't like, I'm like, people need to know the world that I see. Maybe I'm not right. I'll always say, you give me new information, I will concede. But there were so many things that I'm like, oh my God, the world needs to know. The world needs to see China. World needs, you know, oy, oy, oy. So I started opening up and making more political slanted videos and more like, you know, China's doing this right.

I don't say China's doing this right, you know, because China's perfect. I'm saying China's doing this right. Why don't we start to do that China thing that's right? If America was doing something right in a circumstance, I'd say that too, you know? You're not letting your personal opinion... We don't want to let our personal opinions get in the way of understanding China.

how different countries are doing things differently. Like, no country can be 100% right and no country can be 100% wrong. And by, you know, just taking such a personal view of things, we are very closed-minded. Did you feel a need? Was there, like...

Because you start your travel vlog and you go around and at the time before when you're shooting your videos, most of your videos are about China because that's where you live. And you travel around China shooting these videos with really no other agenda than really to just share the beauty and positivity of the places you see or not if you don't see those things. Did you feel like a need to kind of almost defend yourself

your position and your experiences because you were getting attacked online or did that come after? After you started being a little more political? Well,

I didn't start making videos in order to influence anybody. I made video. And this is one of the reasons why I'm happy in like, there's certain people in the YouTube realm that I wonder if they're actually happy with the product they produce because they might be like cornering themselves or painting themselves into a certain position. I made my videos. I didn't say I'm going to get rich off of these videos. I didn't say anything like that. I'm going to be a superstar. I said, I'd like to share my stories.

I'd like to share my stories because I have a horrible memory. And if I look at the past and I try and remember significant moments in my past, I have a really tough time grasping them pre-videoed.

So when I started thinking, well, I want to climb Everest, I'm like, this is going to be probably the most epic thing I will ever do. You know, I decided at one point I'm going to cycle around the world. Along the way, cycling is just a piece of it. I mean, climb Everest. I filled a bucket list. I said, I'm going to do all the most incredible things. And I said, I want to retain this for myself and secondarily for anybody that might be interested in watching.

The way I'm going to finance it, I'll do commercial videos. Like I'll go to a hotel and I'll say, you know, do you want a video of their hotel? I've got a really good radio voice. I can do a video for you. And my objective was going to be doing that. And then I'll just share my life on my YouTube channel for me primarily, for everybody else secondarily. So as the channel started to grow...

I was like, oh my gosh, the channel itself can monetize. So this is pretty incredible. I dropped the commercial video idea and I was like, I'll focus on making more videos in my life because as much as they're important to me, it seems like they're helpful for other people to see the world. And so growing in that way was really, really healthy for

for a guy that's kind of sharing his life. Because if you start a channel because you want to be a big YouTuber and you want to be rich on YouTube, then...

If you're guided by that principle, you might sacrifice yourself in the beginning phases. And also, you'll be very disappointed because YouTube is brutal. I mean, I've produced 1,400 videos. If you really want to make it successful, it's like a 1% of 1% of 1%. Well, you got to be a slave to the algorithm, right? For sure, for sure. And so by me not being... Obviously, I understand the algorithm a lot more now than I used to, but...

I've never enslaved myself to it. I just, if I want to share my opinion, I share my opinion. That was never your compass. That was never my compass. So Matt, like for, for like listeners that aren't so familiar with your work, I'm curious, like, can you share sort of the,

general background of like a little bit more about the travel videos and sort of what that's all about and how you structure them and where you go. Like a little, you know, you have that, what is it called? The trike? Trike, recumbent trike. And then sort of what were you doing before this? I'm kind of curious and why you came to China. Okay. My dad was a hard worker, like 25 hours a day kind of guy. You know, he's a carpenter, electrician, a plumber and a mechanic.

And he ground himself into the ground every day to support me and my two sisters and the family. And he always taught me, build a better mousetrap, follow your dreams. Don't slave away. Do something you love, you know, this kind of things, these really powerful moral guiding principles of life. And I'm very happy that he was able to instill that in me.

He's also an inventor. And he, like, there's stories. He used to work as a bus mechanic on the Detroit transit system where he'd fix buses. And everybody was pretty lazy at...

the warehouse because they were getting paid salary and everything. They'd hated my dad because my dad would be constantly inventing things to do jobs easier and quicker. You know, he'd be like, you know, that transmission you drop out, you know, you need a cradle that's going to take that transmission. It's going to be, you know, a little bit more, you know, a little make the job easier. And so he'd make this like welded cradle to transport to transmission to the repair room and

And everybody's like, yo, man, don't do that shit, man. We don't need that. That's going to make us have to do two transmissions instead of one. And he's like, isn't that a great thing? And he imparted that on me. So I started creating products myself.

fairly early on. I invented a product. It was called an antenna acrobat. It was a plastic character that clipped onto your car antenna and hung on sideways. You might have seen some. They had crazy hair, all sorts of different colors. Those are mine. I sold, I don't know, like a half million or a million of them. They were very, listen, it was education. It was a loss. It was a loss, but it was a school of hard knocks, one of the many bumps along that road. Yeah.

And I learned manufacturing. I learned plastic injection molding. I learned marketing. I learned packaging. I learned... Because I did it all myself when I was like 15, 16 years old. And you grew up in which city? In Detroit. Detroit. Wow, you were only 15, 16 years old. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, my dad was my partner. And so he mortgaged the house and I basically... Wow. ...remortgaged the house and I lost everything. I paid him back over time, but in that time...

You know, I, we, the whole family believed in education. So we had like, if you want to go to university, go to university. And for me, I wanted to be sort of an entrepreneur. And I thought this was, this was where I wanted to go. I was very nervous. Like the way I talk with you guys right now was not the Matt when I was 15, 16 years old. I would say my hands would shake and I would sweaty palms and everything. That was like when we started the podcast. Yeah.

The more you do it, the easier it gets. And so I started creating products. My antenna acrobats were the first one, but I started making products for casinos in Detroit because they were ordering all sorts of crazy stuff. Because when you go to a casino, you instantly buy one of those cards, ID cards to do the machines. That card knows your birthday. Your birthday is probably the most important date per

personally for that casino to know. They want to have you celebrate your birthday at this casino. So your birthday comes around and they'll say, hey, Joe Schmo, we got a free gift for you. Come on into the casino. It's a custom-made coffee mug or wallet or something. And they have hundreds of thousands of people on these lists. So

They want to have creative, interesting things that people will be like, oh, let's go to the casino and we'll get that free $5 wallet. And, you know, well, we're here. Why don't we just put a couple of hundred dollars in the machine? Because, you know, we're a little lucky. Our lucky day. It's our birthday. And then they leave, you know, $200 lost. And it's a win-win for the casino. So I was catering to those casinos and making products for them.

And I was also a valet at the casino. I've had 60 plus jobs in my life, like lots of jobs. And I think it was around the time that the bottom was falling out of the economy, the housing crisis, you know, the big one. And Detroit was getting hit hard. So I decided...

I got to move. And then Vegas was a big casino city. And Vegas is good when the economy is bad and it's good when the economy is good. I mean, people gamble for multiple reasons. To get richer or to get rich.

And so I moved to Vegas and I started catering to those places. And I started building other clients, making different products for different people. I also, along those times, learned that I could make products in China much cheaper, much more cost effective. And, you know, it's funny because we live in a time where they're like China took all of our jobs. China took all of our opportunities.

But I got to tell you what, they gave people opportunities to, people that run those businesses would not be able to run those businesses without being able to be competitive and doing products in China. It's just the way it is. Maybe it's because the government wasn't enforcing these things. That's beyond, that's an anger. The anger shouldn't be directed at China. It should be directed at the systems in place to make it so China was- To the people who are actually buying the products, not the people who are making the products. Yeah, I mean, you go to Walmart, you fill your cart up with mostly China-made stuff and

And then you say China took all of our, well, you're part of the system that made that happen, you know. But anyways, I started learning how to use China as a vehicle to help people in America further their goals. And one of them was this product that was a baseball product, a safety product for baseball.

And we made this product and I was doing business in China through Global Sources, which was like this website like Taobao, Alibaba, way back in the day. And we were doing this project in China. And he said, I'd like to go to China to see this product made. This is a very long story. I'm going along with it. Basically, we went to China, found out that the product was a disaster. The

The whole thing, the factory samples that they sent me were not the production quality samples. And my customer sitting there basically not crying, but he's like red-faced. What am I going to do? He said. Because I'm friends with my customers. They're not just customers. I care about them, you know. And I'm like, oh, my God, I just ruined your whole thing. So we went back to the United States with head in my hands, and I said –

I'm going to pay for whatever you need made here in the United States. We cannot do it in China. That ship has sailed. Let's try and make it right. So we made his products in the United States. I paid for it, lost. I went from hero to zero. And I was thinking to myself, shit, man, I can't keep going like this. If I'm going to continue to do business the way I'm doing it, I got to move to China. I got to understand what I did wrong and make sure that doesn't ever happen again.

So I did. I sold everything and I moved to China. A lot of people move to China on teaching contracts or a business contract as a quality control. But I moved to China... With nothing. With nothing. And when was this? What year is this? 2009. So I found a place... My agent, Vera, was living in Ningbo. So I chose Ningbo. That's why I chose Ningbo.

And so I went to Ningbo trying to make business. That was my goal. I want to be rich. I wasn't like greedy rich, but I was like, money is what I need in order to accomplish goals in life. And it didn't take long for me to realize that wasn't really the case. You don't need so much money. What do you need money for to buy experiences? Because we're all a series of experiences. That's who we are. That's what we're made up of. So I was like,

I need money to buy these experiences. But then I'm in China and I'm traveling, I'm taking train trips. I'm going to Indonesia and New Zealand and all these places. I'm like, this doesn't cost that much money.

What am I waiting for? Let's just figure out a way to just get enough money to continue the experiences coming in. And that should be enough to make me happy. So then I started designing the trip around the world. My friend came to me with the – because I was going to think cycling or hitchhiking. I had all these ideas. And my friend was like, tadpole tricycle. Yeah.

I was like, that sounds like the worst form of transportation. Tadpole because it's wide in the front and narrow at the back. And for our listeners, we know the trike is like the tricycle, like you're sitting down and you're pedaling, right? Yeah. I mean, bicycle is two-wheeled. Tricycle is three-wheeled. You're like on a couch and you're pedaling. Yeah, yeah. Super amazing. It's stable. You can record from it. You can drink a beer if you want. I mean, I fly my drone and I videotape my vlogs and all from...

I even happen to leave the seat and I'm not even having to worry about balance issues. It's a really, and it's so unique. I drive past, 90% of the people I drive past will never and have never seen me on that, a trike like that.

So when you drive past somebody... Well, you're pedaling past. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry. 骑 and 开. In Chinese, there's two words, 骑 and 开. I just learned that for the last eight years I've been cycling, or six years I've been cycling, I've been telling people, 我开自行车, which is like, I drive a bicycle. I'm trying to get my Chinese, and they're like, 开自行车. She's like, 骑...

It's cheats, isn't it? Like, oh, shit. I've been telling everybody confusing things. So, yeah. Yeah. So every time I pass by somebody, it's like you're sharing an experience that they will never have ever again or have never had. And it's so incredible. It's like a smile machine. So I started that travel journey and I filled out a bucket list and

When I did that before I had started, I was like, this bucket list will guide my journey. It's not just like trying to get from Ningbo, China to Los Angeles, which was the original plan, as straight as you want. It was, let's create nodes along the path where I can accomplish certain bucket list items.

the largest cave system in the world in Vietnam, learning an instrument in Indonesia, doing my – and all this wingsuit jumping in New Zealand. That was the objective was what – the objectives guided the trip. The trip was not the objective. You know what I mean? And so I've been kind of –

I got hit by a truck, going to run over by a truck. I've torn meniscus. I had to climb Everest. Annie's dad had cancer. My dad died. My grandma and grandpa died. It was just

pandemic, global pandemic. That was the last one I said. But, you know, I'm just constantly dealt these kind of weird hands that are always kind of pushing me back here to China. And so that's what kind of I'm like, that's kind of the story. Not in a nutshell. That was a big nutshell. The roundabout. The roundabout. But like, okay, if there is one thing, because going back to what Eric was saying, it's like giving people context about like, what are your videos all about? What are you all about? What is your channel, Jiao Yo Nation, all about? Yeah.

If there is one thing that I can take away from, I think, your overall message of your channel, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, it would be travel can profoundly change your perspective and open up your mind. Like the importance of travel. Now, is that accurate to say? Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, I wouldn't say that was the intention. My intention was just to share my life.

The result is that some people, like, can I share a story? Yeah. There's a guy on my, let's see if I can find his email. I'll read it aloud. It's incredible, actually. His name is Edward. Jeez, I wonder if I saved it. Is this like a fan email? Yeah. His name is Edward H. Wodonk. I think he's German.

Gosh, I wish I could find his message. I can't find it. But basically, out of nowhere, he...

people get different things out of your videos, right? Like, you broaden my perspective on the world. You help me overcome my fears of travel. You help me understand a different culture. You know, those are things I always expect. You know, people... And that happens all the time. Like, the people that send me messages... My moniker is J-A-Y-O-E. It's built on the Chinese phrase, which means to add fuel. But fuel is...

whatever you want it to be. Your fuel and my fuel might be different, whatever fuels us. And so I always thought the meaning of Jai was just... I couldn't think of any comparable thing in America. You don't. Like hoorah maybe, but... You don't. Not even... Go for it. Go for it. You'd have to think of... Jai is really... You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. But... So this guy...

sent me a message. I had just gone to the Geely factory, the Lincoln Co. factory, and I saw them manufacturing stuff up in Yuyao. And he was watching that video. Now, this guy had a stroke.

And he lost, like he had a stroke about five years ago and he lost an entire, like a quarter of his life. Like just memory wiped out, had some sort of a blockage in his brain and it was gone forever. And his wife had to readjust. This wasn't my old husband. This is my new husband. And we're going to have to get through this together. And there was heartache and strife and all of this stuff. He was watching my Lincoln Co. video and he

He said, it was really, I wish I could have found the email, but it's okay. He said, when I was watching this video, I instantly thought to myself, I worked in Jaguar. Whoa. I worked in a Jaguar factory. And his wife looked over to him and was like, yeah, you did. He's like, I remember.

I remember. And then I remember. And then I remember. And all of a sudden, all of these memories started coming back. And he said that me and my wife were crying because...

The door unlocked using your video. Now, granted, obviously, I didn't make that video with the intention, but I'm just... Unintended consequences of the things... You guys recording this podcast, this might have unintended consequences you will never even realize. You know what I mean? Somebody might listen and be like, oh, thanks for saying that. And then butterfly effect down the road. Who knows? But this guy had this...

I mean, when I list the things that I could, this channel could do, my YouTube channel could do for someone, I would never say it will unlock the memory closet that, you know, has been padlocked for five years, you know? And he said he went to his doctor and the doctor was said, just keep watching that video on repeat because you never know what else it could unlock. But I mean, like...

It's an incredible opportunity to be able to share and you never know. What the hell was the original question you asked me? Because I don't know. Well, it was about like the takeaway from the overall message. But like more like, that's a beautiful story by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, I'm interested in learning like what have you learned or how have you changed or your perspectives changed personally?

Through doing this channel and making the videos that you do and getting the response, whether it's positive or negative responses from it. Well, I'm always changing. Like I'm always adjusting. Like, like,

I'm not hardwired. You know, one of the things I, I'll issue an apology. Like I say, I'm sorry, probably too many times because I'm constantly aware that nobody's perfect, you know, and the moment you think you're a hundred percent right, the world will come and smack you in the face and tell you you're not, you know? So I've evolved a huge amount through my YouTube channel and being able to share the experiences because it's elicited responses from the YouTube community, uh,

to kind of check me, or to confirm. So you've got the both sides. And I've said this, if I talked to the Matt from 10 years ago, and we sat down and had a conversation, like a podcast, holy shit, he would be floored. He would be unrecognizable. Well, I would recognize him. He certainly wouldn't recognize me. Why is that? Well, because I've...

You know, like we were talking earlier, I grew up in Middle East. Not Middle East. Southeast. Southeast Michigan. And, you know, that's a very...

fairly right wing part of the world. And my, you know, my dad was a hardworking red blooded American. And, and, you know, we have a certain mindset as that, that type. And so as you get traveling around, you start to adopt other mindsets and questioning things. Oh my God. You know, like I made a video recently about war, you know, and I was like,

I remember the whole weapons of mass destruction and the idea that a government is going to try to coax you into what they want you to do. They want to get in and, and, and,

you know, take a little oil here and there. I mean, you know, or whatever the case is, you know, and everybody does it. China's government doesn't, America's government does it. But when you're living in America, you're like, oh, we don't do that. It's everybody else. We've got to go save everybody else. And especially war. It's a positive coalition. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like, I rode through Vietnam. I went to Hanoi Hilton, which is where John McCain was imprisoned. And before him, it's where the Vietnamese were imprisoned by the French. The Vietnamese were imprisoning the French. Before that, the French were imprisoning the Vietnamese. And it was just this like crazy cycle. And I'm looking around Vietnam. I'm like...

Did they benefit from this war? No. Vietnam, they were all trying to change Vietnam. Communism or whatever the... Are these really threats? What are we doing here? Can we all come together? That's why my channel is really...

It's not completely optimistic, but it definitely has an optimistic slant to it. So I want to share that optimistic slant with the people that watch the channel in hopes that they can be a little bit more optimistic instead of pessimistic as well. Well, as it relates to kind of our situation here, and when I watch your videos, I get a feeling of like...

Like you kind of echo a lot of the thoughts and feelings that I've been having. And we've arrived in China because I arrived around '09 as well to China. And so we've been staying and living here through a period where we saw like in real time, the tensions between America and China escalate and escalate and escalate, right?

And when we first arrived, if you were to go on social media and YouTube and look at news media and journalism, there wasn't nearly as much coverage about China being a threat or any of this. It was more focused probably on the Middle East at that time. You know, Russia has always been, you know, a topic discussion in terms of like kind of foreign quote unquote enemies, I guess, or threats.

But through really the last few years, we've really seen like a spike in this coverage and hot topic of China being a threat, especially in Western media. And I'm just thinking like we're staying in this time where like we're realizing a huge disconnect between what we're experiencing in our day-to-day lives living here and the kind of the messages and trends

beliefs and principles we were kind of raised with in the United States. You know, like growing up in the United States, we were, you know, I don't, like brainwash is a strong word, but like it's kind of like we're kind of brainwashed, right? Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States. And you think you're on like the right moral line of every topic, every issue, and even things as like taboo as like communism, socialism. Oh my God. These terms were so extremely taboo that

that like, of course they're evil. Of course, any- And if you say anything otherwise, you are evil. Yes. And you're labeled as a traitor, as a China apologist, which I think you've been labeled by your critics. And it's this complete like craziness because when you actually have spent time in China-

Yes, it's a communist country. But the narrative that we're raised to believe in terms of like the moral lines of everything, like are just really completely untrue once you actually understand what's happening here. So like, how has that affected you at all in terms of, you know, your beliefs? Well, I mean, I think it's more, it's all deflection. You know, I think that what we're in right now is massive amounts of deflection. And you see it a lot in like,

Like, the perfect example is, like, the Mexicans coming over the border, that issue in America. You know, these damn Mexicans, it's all their fault.

But there are jobs for those immigrants. Those people crossing the borders are being hired by people who are not. Why doesn't even – nobody cares about them. Nobody gives a shit about the factories that are making money off of the labor from those people. There's income issues. There's minimum wage issues. There's a whole lot of issues. Those immigrants are not the issue here.

you know, that you need to focus on in order to fix the immigration problem. Similar to China, it's like,

Like you said, that's changed a lot. Well, it's changed a lot because money. Because China used to be everybody's bitch. You know, they'll make all our shit and they'll make everybody happy because the factories will be making all this stuff for super cheap. You know, they're hiring kids and we care about that. But who really cares about that? I mean, I'm saying this facetiously. As long as we get our products. Nike, it was, you know, they had factories that had child labor and stuff. Today, no.

I don't know how many factories might be child, but it is certainly very, very, very small. I don't know, you know, the income for the Chinese laborer has gone up. I know because I'm in... Yeah. You know, there might be some people that might make YouTube videos about knowing China, you know, in many different ways. Well...

I know China as a import-export guy that went into factories. I talked to a lot of people. I've traveled around. I cycled through little villages. I've been to one-star hotels. I've been to 10-star hotels. I've been across the entire gamut. So if somebody says their opinion of China is better than my opinion of China, I would like to challenge them a little bit on that.

Because I have seen the old China, and the new China is much improved, my friends. And when you have an economy that has improved so much, all of the sudden they go from being your slave to being your competitor. Yeah.

And once you become a competitor, the messaging has to change. You know what I mean? There was a certain control that the world had over China for a long period of time, which was the status quo. It's no big deal. As long as they keep making our shit, I don't care. But as soon as it started to shift. They're not a threat. Yeah. Yeah. As soon as they started becoming a threat, instead of reaching out and saying, let's

Because trade policies are important, but not when you throw them at people like a monkey throws his feces. People are like, well, Matt, you think China should just... No, but there's diplomacy.

There's diplomacy and then there's what has been happening over the course of the past five years or even more. It's been going on for about a decade, this kind of anger towards China. And it's so easy to see. I saw it when I was making little doodads and antenna acrobats. I was buying products from China because the systems that America set up to buy stuff from China was easy and good. It was beneficial. And everybody was happy about it back then. Yeah.

And it's also, I think it's also the context of like the concept of like time means different things and moves differently in America and China. So when you talk to Americans and you're taught and you say something like, you know, it's different than it was in the 90s, let alone the 70s. Yeah. But, you know, it's different than it was in the 90s. And in America, things move differently.

and progress and develop relatively slower in their system, in the American system. So when people say, oh, in the 90s, well, that's not that long ago. How much could have possibly changed in 20 years, 30 years? How much could have possibly changed? Nothing's really changed in my city. You go to New York today versus New York back in the 90s, it's relatively pretty much the same exact thing.

So people are kind of like hesitant to believe like all this massive social and cultural and infrastructure and political change can happen so drastically and so well within that short period of time. But when you live in China, you understand that time moves very differently here. A year here and things are almost unrecognizable. You know what I mean? You spend a year away from Shanghai, you come back, you're like, wait, well, this neighborhood's different. That's different. This building wasn't here before. You know what I mean? Yeah.

So, I think it's also, that has a bit to do with it in terms of a lot of Wessner's hesitancy to kind of believe a lot of the message and a lot of the things that you say. What's that Ferris Bueller line at the end where he's like, life's moves pretty fast. If you're not looking, you know, it'll pass you up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's like, what, like...

How do you confront that? Because when I see you and you get labeled a bunch of different things, some really nasty things, whether it's like a traitor or...

You're a China apologist or terrorist. You've been labeled terrorist. You've been labeled... You're bought out. Yeah, well, you're working for the CCP. Oh, yeah. They're funding me. Hey, guys out there, if you're working with China's government, my WeChat's out there because apparently you're funding me. I haven't seen any of those checks, guys. You're a little late on the payments. Please, geez louise. You've been called a white monkey of the CCP. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've been called a bunch of nasty things.

And I would beg to, I would argue that in terms of like, in terms of like your patriotism as an American, like I feel like

you are doing a patriotic duty because it doesn't help America, being an American, to keep continuing living or believing kind of like a conspiracy or dishonest truth and being manipulated and led down a dark path of conflict. And you're not saying like China is better than America. You're just saying, look, it's not what we've been told to believe.

And this is what is reality. Now, take what you want to do with it, but we need to prepare ourselves for the reality of the situation because it doesn't help anyone to kind of believe in the whole conspiracy and American propaganda because that's just going to lead you down a really dark path. And China is going to keep continuing to improve and rise and you're going to be left behind. Well, think about the rot that happens in the example of America right now.

So Donald Trump contested his loss, and he sent Rudy Giuliani out to do all these court cases. I give him a chance. Present me a case. First case, down. Second case, down. 50 cases, down. There's a certain point, you lost. You know, you're done. But the propaganda that America has put out, because hello, everybody, America puts out propaganda too. Propaganda is a broad topic. You

And we were talking about that. You could do a whole podcast about what the definition of propaganda is. Yeah, like the definition of propaganda and the stigma around the word propaganda. Yeah, yeah. This was rotten propaganda, right? So it has encouraged so many people because the President of the United States and all of his people have said, we won this.

legitimately. Now, if you trust the system that you're part of, if you're a right winger, you've always been, your dad, your mom, your uncle, your grandpa, everybody's right wing, you're going to say, well, you know what? What the president said must be true. It must be the world is against him. Now I look at the data and he's lost so many of those cases. Any credence that he had that he won is not there anymore.

But what happens, it's the same thing with China. You can't win. If you go up to those people and you say, Donald Trump lost, they'll say, you're not looking at the right information. It doesn't matter if that information you're looking at is a lie. They believe it wholeheartedly and there's no way to break them from it. It's the same thing with China. Because people will say, I did a poll on my channel recently and I asked people,

How many people watch my channel who are Asian inside China? How many people watch my channel who are Asian outside China? How many people watch my channel who are Western inside China, outside China? Those four options. And I wanted to do that because I wanted to see like most people that watch my channel like my channel. I mean, the hate watchers are a percentage, but they're much less. And you know what they are? They're mostly Asian.

They're mostly people who have a connection to Asia. Now, this is a very rough poll that I'm using, but most of the haters, most of the angry people, the people who say they're defending China and communism, they're Westerners. So...

It's like there's no way to change any minds because the people have been infected with this idea of what they think China is. You're inside. You know what China is. The Asians know what China is. And I'm not saying, listen, China's not perfect. No country is perfect. There are some things going on here that I don't think are quite right. I bring them up in my videos. People think that I don't talk negative about China, but I talk overwhelmingly positive about everything.

It just so happens that 4,000 people dying a day of a pandemic in America is something, sorry, I can't keep quiet about. I bring that up because it pisses me off. It's frustrating to me. But I don't know enough about certain issues. I'm American, so I know a lot about the issues going on there. There are some issues in China. I know what's in front of my face. The streets are clean. The people are nice.

What people are saying about China in many aspects is crazy. If you want to talk about certain issues, I'm like, I don't even mind if people bring up stuff that is negative. I like it. Go ahead. I don't like to shed the dark. I don't like to look at the darkness. I look at the light. If you want to look at the darkness, but you have a legitimate position, that's great. That's great. We need people to illuminate the shadows. Yeah.

I'm the guy that's drawing attention to the light, you know? So there's a place for all of us. But the propaganda is so crazy, I don't even remember what the original question was. I just get trailed off. No, no, no, just keep going. No, because I'm fascinated. It boggles my mind that when I look at your videos, and not so much the political ones, but just kind of your core bread and butter videos, which is about travel and culture, right? Yeah.

And you're going around different cities and you're taking, you're vlogging, taking your camera and documenting what your experiences are and saying. No green screen. And showing, yeah, no green screen. Like you're on site there throughout. There's no like, you know, like doctoring of any images. I after effect smiles on everybody. They're all very depressed. So you go around vlogging and.

And just like the one you went to the farm and they were growing vegetables in that one city. And people can take that

And then take that like really innocent like video and just extrapolate all these other connotations of like evil intent. You know, recently you've been attacked by the London Times. You've been attacked by other YouTubers like SerpentZA and Y86 who are kind of, you know, they have quite a big following as well. And they're very agenda-based in terms of very anti-China. But it just boggles my mind how they can take

which has like really no political like lean really. It's just like you're just in the city and you're looking at farmers and you're looking at vegetables and that's it, right? And then people can be like, that is propaganda. He is a

a white monkey working for the Chinese Communist Party. Useful idiot. Useful idiot. Useful idiot. You're a terrorist. Yeah. Like, I just don't understand the connect there. And it just feels like people are, have so strong of an agenda to smear and paint a certain narrative that they just are desperate to look for anything, especially someone who is saying relatively positive things.

and just, and it's fabricating this whole narrative around it. It's mind boggling to me. So I'm going to cut in here. First of all, the audience base is a really important thing, right? So Matt, you primarily, your audience is on YouTube, right? Is that-

It's crazy. I worked for eight years to build up my channel to 110,000 views or 110,000 subscribers. I started my Douyin, which is TikTok China. I started that three months ago. It's at 650,000 subscribers. Oh, wow.

It's sort of a slap to my face. I'm like, what am I doing wrong? Your Billy Billy is a lot too, right? My Billy Billy is over 100,000 now too, which is great. So my audience is split between, but all video platforms, yeah. Yeah. So you're on different platforms and then the audience base is very different. And what you were sharing a little bit earlier about like Asian Western composition, to understand your audience is very different. And so I think Justin is talking about a lot of the...

I guess, the small amount of negativity on... Is it your YouTube channel? It's not on the Dough Inheritability... No, no, no. You don't get the hate on the other platforms, do you? I can't read a lot of it, so... Even if you did... Maybe it might be a bunch of hate. Yeah, I think it's really interesting. And then I think our show, I mean, we don't... I think we're quite...

you know, just regular guys or whatever. And then Justin, I think has a lot more understanding of round who our audience is. But, um, I know on Shimalaya, we have a bit of a, um, kind of a base, right. And we have like a little WeChat group and it's mostly like locals, right. So what's really interesting is that like most of the people probably listening right now would find it even inconceivable to think about, you know, a group of people wherever they are watching YouTube and then attacking you for so

certain things right yeah um and i think this is not just you this is sort of like i mean it's it's a symptom of society where you get to a point where there's so much polarization and people are arguing and stuff like that i'm curious based on your knowledge right um travel seems to be an antidote for it right because you grew up in this place and had you never left michigan huge you might be holding on to those values um but i'm curious like what what do you think the root cause is

for people to get so furious and have so much negativity when it seems like being positive is a much better way of living. I think it's gotta be your upbringing, your parents, your friends. I mean, I have, my social circle is huge. And I,

I guess if you have your social circle is huge, full of angry people, you're going to be an angry person. You're going to be, yeah. My dad was a pretty open-minded, happy guy. He...

He was quite, he was like a reborn Christian. There's a whole story with my dad with regards, I'm not a very religious person, which is very helpful to travel around the world and be, you know, I don't even know agnostic or whatever, but I don't have anything against anybody's religion as long as it doesn't hurt anybody. Just don't hurt anybody. Come on, guys. That's a good rule. You know, Buddhism is pretty damn cool, except for some of the monks out there like to bloat. So, you know, there's anger and you can find it anywhere, you know.

But I think the root cause of it is the people you surround yourself with. I was actually lucky enough when I was younger to be – I was really anti-social. I was a nerd.

There was a girl, Diana, in elementary school. She used to beat me up. I used to dread walking home from school because if Diana caught a glimpse of me, I'd have to run through the yard. What was her issue with you? I don't remember. She just didn't like me. It's like, Matt, here you are. Here you are. Just like in the movies. Just like in the movies. Paladin herpins.

But you know what that did is it never had me clinging to popularity, and I feel like that's... Not everybody. I mean, there's definitely popular people that go on. Like, for example, 90210. Do you remember 90210? Jason Priestley was my favorite guy. He was like... He wasn't super popular. He got along with all of the groups, and he always had the moral compass where... It wasn't Dylan, where he had to wear the leather jacket. I don't remember. I don't remember this movie. All I remember is Jason Priestley. So...

I think that like when people are pursuing image and pursuing fame or whatever, it can pollute. And my dad was a very humble man, always very humble. In fact, I dated a bunch of girls when I was younger and he was always like –

He's like, oh, Matt, that's – I had never been able to do that. And he was kind of proud of his son because I was certainly not a playboy, but my dad was certainly not on the extreme. So I think that a lot of it has to do with that. And me –

Getting out of Michigan and me traveling, even before I moved to China, so important. Because every time you leap out, your circle grows and your circle grows and you start seeing. But there's so many people in everywhere, in China too, that never leave their village or never leave their city. And so their ideology is insane.

is ingrained in there do you guys go home i don't know how long how long have you been um i mean i was actually i was gonna say i went back to new york in january as well end of january and i was i got stuck there for like a little over a month um but yeah my family's all in china okay and so when i go back to the states it's always just to visit friends or just to hang out do you do you find when you go home that like you have like uh hey guys uh

How's it going? They look at you and they go, I don't know, Matt. What's China like? I have a total disconnect from the people that I used to be best friends with. And that goes a lot to what you were saying is that you have to evolve. And sometimes you evolve away from the old ideas you used to have. And sometimes you evolve stronger into those. And travel is so important for that. Yeah.

It's funny though, but facetiously what you're saying is that a lot of these people, the haters, they just have daddy issues. Well, a lot of these haters, like let's say, let's say the, you know, because I keep bringing up these YouTubers that, that hate on you because only because they do actually have quite large followings. So yeah. So some of them do. So it's not like no one's listening to them, you know? Um,

But do you feel like they actually believe, like honestly believe what they're saying? Or do you think that they've found a niche and they know how to play that YouTube algorithm? They know there's a market and audience for it and it drives those views, it drives those clicks. And so they just purposely play into that.

You know, only speculate. A person is their own person. I cannot speak for, you're talking about Winston, you know, who is Serpens today. I can't speak for him. He needs to, he's obviously doing something, you know, whether he believes in it or not, he's doing it. I think what he's doing right now is extremely toxic. I think that he is driving a wedge when he should be bringing people together.

I used to... I was friends with him. And he's still in his video where he, you know, he loves to say, you know, I'd never call you out by name. You know? He's like, I'm better because I don't call you out by name when I attack you. And they say like, oh, I don't like to attack people. I don't like to attack people. But all they do is attack. But I'm about to attack people, you know, for the next 20 minutes. And, you know, I...

I never agreed with him on everything. I don't agree. I like not to. I like like we're talking. I like to hang out with people I don't agree with.

As a matter of fact, in my Patreon, there's a guy in my Patreon named Gus. And Gus and I disagree a lot of things. Like he gets shit on in my Patreon because a lot of my Patreons are patriotic, you know, very patriotic. And so they dogpile on him a lot. I'm like, no, no, no, no, don't dogpile on Gus. Let him say what he wants to say. And he's got like somewhat of a right-wing perspective. But he lives in China. It's an objective right-wing perspective.

And when I, a lot of YouTubers in China leaned, loved that Winston showed the potential of somebody telling stories in China. And Winston and I, we have, I mean, we were never like best buddies. You know, I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to upsell our friendship, but we were friends. At least I think so. And I think he thinks so as well.

And I met him in Shenzhen a couple of times when he lived here in China. And he was, he told me about his history and he told me about what influences his, like my opinion is influenced, like I said, by my dad and my family and the friends and the people I've met. And pretty much everybody has been this kind of gung-ho positive, you can do it to aid to my existing optimistic attitude. Even you guys seem like pretty optimistic guys. I'm going to leave a little bit more optimistic attitude.

Whereas other people might have been informed by different life experiences. And, you know, Winston grew up in South Africa. It was a rough, rough place. I'm not going to tell his stories that he told me personally, but he's had some really rough things that happened in his life early on. And they might have informed his ideology, his perspective on the world. He might be wearing a different color glasses than I wear.

And we got to appreciate the different colored glasses that everybody wears. So when he made videos, you know, about his life, I don't know. I had some of them I wouldn't watch because I'm not too interested in them. Some of them I would because I was. And some of it I wouldn't agree with. Some of it I would. But then he left China.

And he just felt really... Now, I know that he really wanted to move to America. It was one of the things he talked about a lot. And I'm not sharing in a secret. He knows it too, you know. And he was very happy to be able to get to America. And I don't know...

with what reasons he moved to America. I saw Matt and Winston's video about their escape. I saw that too. I escaped from China. I'll tell you what. If you're going to escape China and you're being tracked, you better swim across the freaking water to get to Vietnam. You're not going to walk through the customs check at Hong Kong. You know what that's called? Leaving China. So I'm sorry, guys. I know. And that's part of the...

That's part of the thing I think that they're caught up in is that they've got to sensationalize a lot of stuff. And I don't deny that the Chinese government was probably looking at them. They were doing certain things in China that would attract attention. All of us are kind of doing things that attract attention when we're doing web, you know, promoting China. Creating content. Creating content just in general.

So do I deny that they got a whiff from somebody that there was probably some questions that needed to be asked of them? No, I don't deny that. I don't think so. But them escaping China and them leaving China, I think they left China. They left China. And I think that after that leave of China, it seemed like they just –

I don't know, evolved into a different level of... It seems like they ramped up the hate and demonizing. There's no denying that hating and demonizing are in vogue right now. In vogue? In vogue, yeah. In vogue, is that a good thing? They're in vogue right now. In fashion right now. In fashion. They're definitely in fashion.

I'm on an opposite side of that. Like I'm like that pro-China. I don't even like saying pro-China, but I'm like objective China. Objective China is getting a certain amount of audience. But the anger and the vitriol and the labeling, and especially with regards to COVID, COVID has changed the game because America fucked up so bad. There's no denying it. There is no denying it.

So if your house is on fire and it's your fault, you lit the match. Granted, okay, China, you got to always, you know, okay, it started in China, right? Or it was birthed, it was found in China first. But, you know, there was reports that it was everywhere in November, right?

It was in France. It was in Italy. It was in... You're talking about November of 2018. Oh, no, 2019. Yeah, it was found in antibodies of blood that was taken from people in the west coast of America. It was...

before it was found publicly in China, it was all other places. I'm not saying that it couldn't have, that the preponderance, I actually made a video that said that it could have started other places. Since that video, I talked to some virologists. My daughter's school teacher, her brother, his brother is a virologist, went to Harvard, like a really smart cookie. And I sent him a message. I said, I made a video recently bringing up the potential that it couldn't have been in China. And he's like,

Honestly, the epidemiology traces of the virus are centered around China. So I'm just saying that if it would have started in China and the preponderance of evidence show that it did,

It wasn't in China for long. It was everywhere right away because this was an asymptomatic spreading virus, you know? Yeah, yeah. And so... It's going to spread no matter where it starts. It's going to spread. Right. Especially in today's day and age. And so with America saying, doing such a horrible job...

That's why, oh, thank God. You know, sometimes I'll lose the thread of a conversation. Yeah, I get that. I was really close to losing that thread. I was like, just grabbed it. But, you know, the fact is that America's

America's did such a horrible job. It's undeniable, undeniable. Their own fault. No matter where the virus came from, you could have followed certain policies. You could have told people about masks. The fact that people don't want to wear masks. It's not like we're asking people to shoot themselves in the foot. It's just wear a damn mask. Even if you don't think it does anything, wear that stupid mask. But whatever. You've got to cast blame. That's what I'm saying. And so right now,

People don't want to say that my house is on fire. They want to say your house is on fire. No, you are. No, you are. Well, no, they want to say my house might be on fire, but you lit the match. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're the one with the flamethrower. Well, they're playing the victim mentality, right? Oh, my God. Instead of taking ownership. They want to cast blame to somewhere outside. Well, I like the analogy you did in one of your videos about, because people were like, this is a small subtopic. It's not like a main issue or anything like that. But there were a lot of people...

people criticizing China for in the beginning because they were buying up all the masks. Right? And because the virus hit in China first and there was a lot of blame on China, like they're hogging all the resources and what about the rest of us kind of thing. And I like your analogy about how you related it to the house fire and the extinguisher. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Shit, that was a video I made a long time ago. What did I say? Can you tell me? Yeah.

oh god now you're testing me no it was about a really good story i have really loved that story i don't remember it i was hoping you'd be like yes justin here i go take it from now you're throwing it right back in my face um no you were saying okay so it's like about like like if you're a house like okay china got hit by the virus first yeah yeah yeah and it was really bad here yeah and so it's like you know if your house is on fire and your neighbor's house isn't

Yeah. And you walk in while your house is on fire. Oh, yeah. Can I take your fire extinguisher? Yeah. Yeah. I don't need it. You know, like, and so you give up your fire extinguisher. I mean, like, it would have been so easy for those governments in Australia and in America to say, everybody that has stock of masks, stop selling it.

China did not steal those masks. China bought those masks. And you know what those stores, they were happy to sell those masks because their government was saying, eh, there's a virus in China. This is a great, this is a seller's market. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Inventory's gotta go. And they're buying those masks because their house was on fire. Their house was on fire.

And then, you know, and of course, China is returning the favor huge. They're manufacturing all the masks that are going out. Now, there is some, you know, like China is doing, China was doing what other countries should have been doing. At a certain point, China was like, okay, we got to stop giving away these masks as we are in trouble here. Other countries, and that goes to the beginning too. You know, America's stockpile of masks was severely depleted.

Their manufacturing of masks was all off-site. These are not China's fault. Yeah, you don't blame. These are not China's fault. You know, plan accordingly.

You know, we don't live in the old world anymore. We are all into the world is flat. There's a book that was written that was called The World is Flat, something Maxwell or something. It's a very interesting book about how the world is now sort of ubiquitous. We're all on the same level. You know, it used to be we were all separated.

But now it's so easy to connect and be interconnected that I think we've gone complacent. And so America was like, shit, we can get a discount on these masks if we make them all in China. So let's just do it. What's going to happen? Well, what's going to happen is this.

America should have had half of its production in America poised and ready to go in case of any emergency. They should have ventilators companies ready to go in case of any emergency. They have all these things. Just because they didn't, it's not China's fault. China bought all the masks that you were selling. Yeah.

You were very happy to sell those masks. Yeah, I think that was the analogy. You know, your neighbor's house is on fire, and there's embers flying off the roof of your neighbor's house on everybody else's house, and your neighbor comes out, hey, hey, hey, anybody's got a fire extinguisher? My house is on fire. And you're like, drinking your beer? Yeah, yeah, I got three of them. You can have all three. You're like, finally. Yeah. Take them. Yeah, yeah, shit. They've been sitting in my closet. Yeah.

Yeah, go ahead. Use them up. And then the fire, your house is on fire. And they're like, you bastard. You know, when the embers were clearly flying everywhere.

Well, exactly. It's like, you bastard, how dare you buy my fire extinguisher? How dare you give me money? Right, right. It's not even like, can I borrow your fire extinguisher? There was like, yeah, I'm going to buy it. Thanks for reminding me about my video analogy. I appreciate that. I'm your number one fan, bro. I was going to be really pissed off if I didn't remember that. I watched it recently in preparation for this podcast. And a lot of things you say, I think...

You paint some really good analogies. You did it with the manufacturing and the IE. This is a lot of parallels to draw on here, I guess. Analogies, I think, are probably one of the best forms of getting other people to understand your point of view, especially when it's different. You can't tell people about what life is in China...

without them living here. So if you can make it an analogy about something they might relate to in their home country, it's much better, especially when you're a white guy vlogging from China because you're trying to get people to understand things. In case you haven't lived in China for so long, you just don't – you can't empathize. You can't understand. Well, one thing you were mentioning before, I mean, coming from Michigan –

never really leaving your hometown until coming to China, right? Before that. I mean, living anywhere else abroad. I lived outside of America. I lived in Fort Lauderdale on a yacht in the Caribbean, and then I was in Vegas for five years, and then in China. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But China was your first foreign country, right? China was my first country, right? Getting out of Dodge. Yeah, and one thing we've also discussed in the past is coming up

with an American background, talking about brainwashing and stuff like that. We've all discussed previously in our podcast how we felt when we first arrived in China, the differences in culture, the differences in way of thinking, way of doing things.

the difficulties we faced, you know, in terms of, wait, you guys are doing it wrong. Like, you know, we're American. Like, we have our way of doing things. The colonial mindset. Very much so. And so I'm just curious, like, how did you feel? I mean, you dropped off right into Ningbo, which is like right into the cut, right? It's not like you went to Shanghai, which was a little bit more metropolitan. Ningbo is less metropolitan.

at that time especially. So yeah, did you have any difficulties or what are some of the culture shocks that you had? You know, when I moved to China, I had listened to a Pimsleur Mandarin course, you know?

And it taught me how to say one thing, 我说的不好。 And I love the way that it sounds, 我说的不好。 You cannot get that sound to come out of your mouth in English in any way. 我说的不好。 And so I really thought I perfected my, I don't speak, for those of you that don't mean that, that means I don't speak China well, 我说的不好。 And that was all I spoke. Mm-hmm.

I was there for business. I was there to interact with factory customer service representatives and quality control people, most of whom had a pretty good English skill. I moved in. My first apartment was like a 30-square-meter apartment, about the size of this studio. Yeah.

And, uh, geez, the first few weeks, somebody broke into my, uh, broken in my apartment, stole my laptop. Really? Yeah. I had, uh, I think I left the door open. I pretty much invited him in and basically, but I was living in a pretty seedy part of town. I, I went to a gym that was in an alleyway in high shoe district and the gym, um, uh,

There was guys that would, on the treadmill with dress shoes, smoking a cigarette and a blazer. Classic. I would swim. They had a pool and the people would sit next to the pool and ash into the pool. And the smoke would come down and it would create a layer so when I'd breathe, like swimming, I'd inhale like a swig. And next to it was a massage place where they did hand jobs and the whole... Happy endings. Like the whole happy ending thing. I mean, it was...

Culture shock. It was an introduction into China. But it was a challenge, but it was also exciting. And I was so focused on my business that I was pretty... I just wanted to make that work. And I was interested in networking and I was trying to find people to make things. And I wasn't necessarily so interested in the culture. I was focused on

And I was kind of like that. And I wasn't greedy, but maybe a little not arrogant. What's the word? Where you're not like ignorant, maybe? I was just being ignorant, voluntarily ignorant to the culture and just focused on my mission. Because I had this mission. I'm going to be in China for five years. You were oblivious to the culture. Oblivious, oblivious. It wasn't until I moved into another apartment and I met a guy named Ryan Freeman. Ryan Freeman was a teacher.

And Ryan was like a hippie. He didn't need business. He didn't need money.

He was teaching just enough to put money in his pocket in order to live a comfortable life. Super schweige. I mean, really good looking California dude with long hair. And he liked to flick it. You know, he was like, this is like opposite to me, you know? And so he's like, man, let's do running. And so we'd run together every morning. And when we run, we'd talk. And then he'd say, you know, I could sleep on that park bench. I'd be happy as long as I had the experiences.

That's when my life changed and I started fundamentally understanding that experiences don't need to be bought. Experiences can be had in many different ways. And so I started like shifting my idea. If I hadn't met Ryan...

My whole life would be very dangerous. Sounds like an important catalyst. Yeah. Oh, extremely. Life-changing. Yeah, that's why I say we're all soup. Everybody's a spice. You're all different spices to my soup. And some of them are stronger and some of them are weaker. And some of them make the taste better and some of them make the taste worse. And Ryan was a very influential person. He was the guy that actually gave me the idea for trike. He's the guy that said tadpole, tricycle. And...

And so we were going to do the tour around the world together. Me and Ryan, that's a whole story. We've got a lot of stories. That's another story. Where's Ryan now? Ryan's in LA, married to a Japanese girl. I can actually say this. Ryan was...

Ryan was locked up in Japan for... He'd bought some... What was that? Silk Road? Silk Road? Remember Silk Road? You could buy drugs off of Silk Road. Like a Bitcoin kind of thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the dark web, you know? Yeah, dark web. And he was in Japan, had a bunch of buddies there teaching English, and they all did MDMA, MD... MDMA. MDMA, whatever, you know? And he was doing it because he was...

He's like a shaman. He wasn't doing it like a guy that's getting high and stabbing. He was just trying to experience different perception levels. And anyways, the Japanese police caught him and locked him up for a little while. How long? Yeah, just a few months.

But he had no English. He didn't speak any Japanese. He had the food they fed him. They actually drugged him. They gave him downers. They give all inmates in jails in Japan downers so that they don't act up. Wow. So he went there for drugs. He got the drugs. Yeah. He got the drugs. Now, I'm not letting a cat out of the bag. He has since started a YouTube channel where he shared this whole story in depth. He has a 20-video, two-hour-per-video series where he talks-

at length without his shirt on about his life. Of course. He's a very interesting guy. I love the guy. Love, hate him, because that's how you do with good friends. But yeah, so me and Ryan have influenced, I think we've influenced each other quite a bit. That's a good relationship, a good friendship is you get as much out as you're giving. It's a two-way street.

And so, yeah, without Ryan in my life, I don't think I would have realized that I didn't need – I was losing my hair. I mean, I used to have nice hair, you know, like before business and in that sort of entrepreneurial problems and all of those kind of things. And now I look back – no, I wouldn't trade those for the world because –

I use all of those failures in everyday life and making my videos and everything, understanding people and understanding, you know, I understand a lot of my, like, I want to make a video about how I understand why people hate China. Like you're like, I'm trying not to hate people who hate China because I understand you're being informed by this crazy monstrosity, this foundation of, of, of propaganda. That's that's wrong.

It's wrong, but so is the fact that Trump won the election is wrong. Those people that stormed the Capitol in January 6th, a lot of them were motivated by belief systems that they 100% wholeheartedly believe. It is so hard to empathize with people that you are so diametrically biased.

But I can't say diametrically opposed because they're as enthusiastic for the truth as you are. It's just their idea of the truth. I'm sorry, it's wrong. It's just wrong. Well, their idea of the truth is every bit as realistic and the truth to them as it is your truth is to you. Yeah. So like you put yourself in those shoes and you feel about your own truths and you're like, no one could ever change my mind about that. Yeah. Well, that's how they feel. Yeah. Right.

And, but it's also like kind of this like double standard, right? This double, there's this, well, what we were just talking about was like a foundation, like your foundational beliefs, right?

And no matter what side or what position you have, you have your foundational beliefs. And oftentimes that foundation wasn't built in a day. Oh, yeah. It was accrued, like you were saying, through your life experiences over years, decades. Yeah. And so that's like so solid that it's very rare that you ever really flip anyone fundamentally about their foundation of truth. So that's one aspect. Another aspect is about like,

you know, believing like cherry picking your information as well. Right. And that's very prevalent on YouTube because YouTube, the way the algorithm works is,

is that it feeds you things that you have watched and that it knows that you like to watch. So it creates this mega ultra, like roided up like echo chamber for you, right? And it's very hard for you to break out of that algorithm. You have to really try hard to break out of that algorithm. That algorithm was designed and created by some of the smartest people in the world, right? Yeah.

- It makes you feel good. - So, but it's also about this, going back to this double standard, it's about cherry picking information and choosing what you want to believe versus what you don't want to believe. So like in the context of China, again, it's just like, you know, so often in the West, you are so easily, you are so quickly to believe any negative news that comes out of China. So if it's something negative, of course, that's, of course that's gonna happen. That's what China is.

Negative news, you are so quick to believe. But when it comes to positive news, because there are positive things. There are negative things about China, but then there are plenty of positive things too. But positive things, it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's lies. That's what the government wants you to believe. That's propaganda. You can't believe that. You can only believe the negative things. And it's this kind of subconscious cherry picking of information that leads us astray. I will stew on a negative comment on my YouTube channel for a day.

But I'll have tons of positive comments. You know what I mean? But that one negative one just gets under your skin and you're like, what the hell are you thinking? You know, why are you calling me that? Or why are you saying that thing is so wrong? It's so blah, blah, blah. And there's this, you know, like if Winston, and I'm just saying that if Winston is playing a part, right? If he is truly exaggerating his point of view in order to attract an audience, I understand it.

Because I am kind of being caught up in that as well. And it's intoxicating. It's intoxicating to say something very strongly, very authoritatively, and have everybody agree, love you or hate you. It gets you kind of excited. It's like Trump does. It's explainable. It is so understandable. There was a point where I've been delivering some of my old videos recently of travel, my cycle travel, and they are getting horrible views.

They're getting horrible views. And I'm like, all I have to do is say something angry or hateful, and those views will come back instantly. And there's that desire. There's that devil on my shoulder. There's that temptation. And I'm like, hmm.

I can really understand how people fall into this hole that they can't get out of. Winston, for example, has a channel. Now, I know Winston. He talked to me about this. He told me. He's like, man, I'm not really a big fan of this kind of opinionative content that I do. I'd much rather just fix cars and drink beers or hang out with my friends. And so he started up this channel called Worthless Whips where he's fixing up cars in America. And I am so hopeful that this channel succeeds, but it's not. Like...

When I say not succeeding, I mean, he has a million subscribers that eat his hate all the time. So if he's going to go to a channel that has to do with fixing up cars, those people are, there's a very, you got to start at zero again. You know, you got to build from maybe not zero, but you got to start at two instead of, you know, instead of 10, where he's at now. So I would love for him to focus on that because I, first, I know he enjoys it. Second, it would be nice for that, that,

soapbox to disappear because I think it's dangerous. Matt, you made... There's so much I want to comment on. Sorry, sorry. No, there's limited time. Of course, we can always get you on the show again and have other conversations. Maybe I'll just zero in on a couple, but you guys both talked about this notion of negativity having this magnetism towards people, right? You said that stewing on negative comments...

like even one for a whole day, even though you might have a thousand positive ones. Right. And, um,

It's interesting. There's a 1983 study, and it's in Harvard Business Review. I'll read you the abstract, right? But basically it says, and it's related to book reviews, right? And it's using book reviews as a lens. But it was shared by Adam Grant. Adam Grant's a really great organizational, he's a quite well-known author and podcaster, et cetera, professor. But anyways, he shared this study conducted by someone else.

And it said that using edited excerpts of actual negative and positive book reviews, the research that these professors did supported the hypothesis that negative evaluators of products would be perceived as more intelligent than positive evaluators, right? And negative reviewers were perceived as more intelligent, competent, blah, blah, blah, etc., right? Mm-hmm.

And when you think about sort of our attraction and our gravitation to negativity, there's so much science behind that. We had, you know, a guest last week, also Matt, right? Matt. Matt Beadle. Matt Beadle. And, you know, his message was very much the same as like focus on the strengths, not the weaknesses, focus on the positivity, all that kind of stuff. But I think we're hardwired because imagine that, you know, like we –

our DNA is tightly associated with people that lived 100,000 years ago in a totally different environment. It's changed very little probably in that short amount of time. And so you're in a world where anything that's positive, if you have food, that's not a signal to action. But anything- - That lion's outside. - Yep, any kind of negativity, sort of any kind of conflict tension, and you're gonna immediately react. And over millions of years or thousands of years, we've honed our ability to zoom in

and be captured by negativity because that's a sign that improves our survival. It's fight or flight, not fall in love. It's fight or flight.

And then going back sort of to the positive message that you're sharing on the travel and all that stuff, that's the stuff that's truly nutritious, right? That's the stuff that people really need long-term to be healthy and to have great wellness. But the stuff that people crave for instinctively on a day-to-day basis is that negativity. And maybe some people fall victim to it. It's very tempting. And then you get into a mode where, okay, you spend your life, let's say,

like this former friend or whatever this guy, where he spends all of his life or the predominant amount of his life creating negativity.

And so he's made a little money, but then he's living a life maybe that isn't what he envisioned of drinking beers and fixing cars. So I would say highly encourage you to continue to innovate and find ways to monetize the positive message because that's what people need and not succumb to that sort of short-term urge to do something negative. It's intoxicating. And I'm not...

I'm speaking from my opinions. So, like, I don't know what his motivations are. I don't, you know, I want to make sure that, like, a lot of people are like, you should hit him hard and, you know, you should attack back or, you know, all these things. Listen, Winston does what Winston does. And people will listen to what he says.

I just want to be another voice out there that might be able to go up against him. And I don't know what his motivations are. I don't know what. I just know that we were friends once. And from that, I make the... Didn't he also create like a fake email? Like this whole Ai Chongqing thing, right? And they basically created a fake email. Listen, I'm not going to say whether they created that fake email or not, but they got an email that was not sent. This is what I know. They...

promoted an email that they did not receive from I Chongqing. I mean, I literally know the owner of I Chongqing and I immediately called that person and

and said, hey, did you send these guys an email? Because they're using it as a prop. Well, just very quickly, to give the listeners a background, you recently went on a trip to Chongqing. Yeah. Right? And you did it through a tourism company called iChongqing, which is owned by this girl who just really loves Chongqing. Yeah. And you went there, and then there was no like,

agenda. You just went there and just vlogged and just went wherever you wanted to go. Companies all over the world bring in creators to show their place, their business, their tourism departments bring people. It happens...

It's a gig, okay? It's not a government conspiracy. It's a gig. Well, it's not even connected to the government. It's just a private tourism. I, Chong Shing, is connected to the Tourism Authority of China. Okay. If you are going to do... It's just like anywhere else. You've got to register your business with the LLC, with the local government. I mean, if you're going to be in the business of promoting certain places, you're going to have to be connected to the Government Authority of Tourism in that place. Okay.

So that was something that I – it's not like, okay, first of all, these people, they don't go out – it's not like, hi, my name is Joe and I am a member of the CCP, of the authority of this bureau, and this is what I'm – no, no, nobody does that. It's like that vegetable guy who – I dance with his vegetables. It's like saying I dance with his daughter. I dance with his vegetables.

But, you know, this guy turned out to be a local representative of the village. Connected the government in a very... Well, these people are... The thing is, these people are human beings, right? They're all human beings. But what happens is, and you mentioned earlier, people learn through anecdotes and storytelling. We're not really analytical. Most people just listen to a story and that shapes their worldview. And so when you don't know something, or when you're...

viewing something that's far away, people like to create a character in their mind, like in a book and they become very, you know, you can make them very sinister or you can make them very nice. And so like growing up in the U S to me, the rest of the world was always very sinister and,

I mean, like the Russians or China, it was outside. And so like, you know, the European countries were very, you know, nice. And then China and Russia and the communists, they're very sinister, but these are human beings. And so we create these sort of, you know, myths in our head to some extent. Well, I mean,

just to make sure to tie that off because the, the, I've gone on a number of trips. I've been in China. COVID has me sort of locked down inside the country and I make travel videos. So I'm becoming more and more popular and my voice is, is, is being used a little bit by certain people. They, you know, China's got some really interesting places and really interesting cultures and we all know that. And,

And so these local authorities are saying, hey, Matt, can you come out here? We'll show you around. If you want to make some videos about it, they don't say what videos I need to make. They're like, we know the videos that you make. Come on out, make some videos here. We'll take care of your expenses and send you home. And then you'll have some content for your channel. So I've been doing these trips and Chongqing was one of them. Chongqing's a really amazing city. I had a lot of good times there. The people that had me promote there, they really...

care of me and made sure that I could see the places that were interesting in Chongqing. And the outside narrative, the narrative of these kind of individuals that are hating on me are saying that

There was flooding around the time that I went to Chongqing and Chongqing was trying to make positive stories along the time that there was flooding. Like there was something they were trying to cover up. Like a weird sinister narrative, you know, like there was an emperor Palpatine that was, you know, ha ha ha, you know, let's send the YouTubers out to Chongqing and get the, you know, get this kind of ulterior storyline going. And as we had had this plan for a year to go to Chongqing before flooding and before all of that, I,

covered the flooding i actually did a live stream of the flooding you know uh effects of the flooding in in chongqing and you know what's funny winston took credit for that he's like you know i know that you've uh recently been talking about the flooding in uh chongqing i i'm glad i'm glad that i was able to encourage you to show the truth of what's i'm like dude it was flooding i wanted to talk about the flooding you don't you don't have to be part of every decision in my life like

Calm down, buddy. You know? But there's this kind of thing that's just... And then going back to the emails. It's just crazy. Going back to the email. They created... Well, who knows where the email came from. I won't say they created it. But it was a false email that was never sent by Ed Song Ching. Yeah. And they were showing it as if like, aha, here's the email that Matt must have gotten and all the other YouTubers who went there must have gotten. And it was like this email, like just painting this narrative that like you were all like...

like sponsored to be there and it was like a direct propaganda thing for like the communist government. Don't say this, do say this, you know? And so you never received any email from Ma Zoujing? Newsflash, zero emails. We talked through WeChat. That's what people do these days, you know? And there was no restrictions. I never received an email from Zoujing. And there was no restrictions on what you could and could not say. Can I just say something right now?

The biggest red flag right now is that email system is still a very Western way of working. And a lot of big corporations, Western corporations, international corporations use email. But if you work in China and if you work with local agencies, local institutions, they don't use email. No one uses email. That's a good point. That's a really good point. It came from that Yahoo mailbox, right? Yeah, yeah, right, right, right.

I mean, maybe they were duped. Maybe they were duped by somebody that sent them an email ghosted from I Chong Ching so that they could create a seed for them to create a video. There was somebody that said that

one of my friends sent him that email so that he would make a video against me so that I could retaliate. Like, there's crazy theories. This thing gets so twisted. It gets so twisted. There's crazy theories. But they, so they did sponsor your trip though, right? Yeah, they covered the expenses. It's called a media trip. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Media trip. So what kind of expenses are covered? Uh,

We had the cost of the food. We were transported. Air travel there and back were covered. And we had a food stipend of 300 RMB a day. So it would be like boilerplate shit. That's where we boil a plate, right? It's media. Yep, yep, yep. It's pretty standard. I went on other trips. We didn't have the stipend, 300 RMB a day. Zero. It was just covering the daily costs. But I Chongqing let us go off on our merry way in the evenings. And they're like, here's some food money or whatever, you know.

It's not a big deal. We were not being like the video. Okay, this is a thing I want to make sure to notate. The trips are sponsored. The videos are not. You know what I mean? The trip is sponsored. We're going to take you a place. If you're a photographer, or let's say you're not a photographer, but somebody takes you on a sponsored trip and you're like taking pictures, are they sponsoring those pictures? No, they're sponsoring the trip.

The trip is taking you interesting places. They hope that you have a positive view of those things. In other words, you do not need their approval to release the video that you shot, which makes it not their... No! Listen, I've done sponsored videos. Those are a pain in the ass because you produce the content, then you've got to give it to them, and then you've got to say, take this part off, do this part, make it a little shorter, make it a little longer. I literally had a TV show in Ningbo called the Ningbo Focus Show. I produced for Ningbo's government authority in Zhejiang Province.

So if people really want to attack me, listen, there's a hell of a lot of stuff. I have a video where I go, hi, I'm Matt, and this is the Ningbo Focus. And I would take them around all these places. A lot of people moved to Ningbo because they saw my videos in the Ningbo Focus show. That was an actual paid-for gig. I had control over the content, but it was still a paid-for gig. And they had all the editorial control to say, take this out, put this in. It's like if you're going to dig...

Yeah. Get some real shit out. Add some better fertile ground for you to dig in if you want to hate on me. Your YouTube travel vlogs are so far from that. It's milk toast. It's milk toast. Yeah. Is there anything... In your channel, the Jio Nation, is it just you? Do you have a team or is there anything? No, it's just me. When I travel around, I carry...

10 terabytes of video with me. I'm on my laptop. I got my drone. I got my computers and cameras. And my objective is,

It's like Casey Neistat fused with a world traveler is what I would like to do. You know, tell engaging stories. They don't have to be all about food. They don't have to all be about cycling. They don't have, they're just a life. There was a guy that did a, there was a lot of inspirations for the tour, but there was one guy who did cycling. The Globe was his Facebook page and Thomas Anderson. And he just posted a picture with a story, like two paragraphs every day.

Today I went to so-and-so, it was hot weather, blah, blah, blah. And I always closed my eyes and looked at his picture and closed my eyes and envisioned his life that day. And I was like, oh my God, if he did that in video, that would be so neat. So when I design my tour, I'm like, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to tell the daily story of a guy's life as he's traveling around the world.

And so I made that entire, so I don't have a studio. I'm a mobile studio. I literally, every night I would try to make the video and, you know, and, you know, that's what I found passion for. I don't necessarily have as much passion for this life sitting here in China doing what I'm doing today as I do on the road. I'm editing the old videos of me in China and I'm looking at the sparkle in my eyes. I'm like, oh, Matt. Yeah.

Old Matt. I remember that. That's the Matt I know. That's the Matt I want to get to again, you know? But, I mean, we're all having to do what we want to. I mean, shit, I realize we're running low on time, but I have a CCTV series of videos that are coming up that are just going to be phenomenal as soon as those are going to be started to be edited and delivered out. So that's like...

I'm biding my time right now because... So you say CCTV videos in a sense that they're going to be released on CCTV? I started my Douyin Touqiao Hongshu and Billy Billy about three months ago. Anybody listening, it's Jiayou Ma Te. We'll put the links in the description. From that, I've become pretty popular right away.

And that popularity has encouraged people like with media organizations to say, hey, would Matt be interested in doing this? Would Matt be interested in doing this? Because they see my personality and they say, oh, that guy would be good for this project or that project. CCTV online. So it's the online platform of CCTV. CCTV is like the biggest news media entity in China. So they came up to me and they said, we're doing a TV show, a travel show.

And we like it personally. We like to be the chief character in the show. And it's ancient cities from over a thousand years old. And you know what's awesome? I've done a lot of media. I've done my own TV show. Very rarely did they tell you to give them input. But they said, where would you like to go? Wow.

Wow. So cool, right? So I was like, Zhangjiajie. And I was like, you know, all these cool places. And they're like, well, Zhangjiajie. They were even thinking about having the mountain villages in Zhangjiajie. Zhangjiajie is like the Avatar Mountains, you know? So they were thinking about the mountain villages. And those are ancient. Some of those are pretty ancient. And then I was going to be rappelling down the sides of those mountains, picking herbs and stuff. Really, really neat stuff.

That ended up falling off. So I gave them like five ideas for cities. They had five ideas for places. We ended up compromising. Chow Chow, Lijiang, Chengdu, and Dunhuang. Dunhuang is that city in the deserts up north near Mongolia where there's like a little oasis. It's on the Silk Road. It's like this really crazy thing. And so they put together this show. The show concept was...

So they gave me the opportunity to choose the places or at least have some input. Then they chose the four locations. Then the show itself was, we are going to videotape Matt vlogging in these places.

The episodes, we're going to stay three days in every location. So three days in Chaozhou, three days in Lijiang, Chengdu. Vlogging for Jiao Nation. Vlogging for Jiao Mata. So you're still doing your own content. So it's like a third-person perspective. Yeah. That's amazing. Dude. It's kind of a mindfuck. Dude. So they're like, and it was, I've got 1,400 videos on my YouTube channel. Each one's about 10 minutes long. You do the math. And I've been in front of a computer for about four hours each for every episode. You do the math.

I know how to edit. I know what my personality is like. I know how to, I'm like the best actor they could ever ask for because so he's asking me, he's like, this street sells dumplings or whatever. Could you go talk to that shop owner and vlog it? Like me personally. And then we'll walk around you and we will videotape you doing your thing.

And I'm like, sure. Yeah. I did a million times. It's like asking me to walk. Yeah. Yeah. Breathe. Go breathe. Could you breathe over there for us? Okay. You know? So I started like, oh, it's so amazing. Now, the other thing is that each city for this project is going to be encapsulated into a seven minute episode. So we recorded in each city hours and hours of footage.

hours and hours and hours. And he's going to have to take all of that and trim it down to seven minutes in every location. He's going to have so much stuff on the cutting room floor. And he told me, hey, Matt, you can have it. So he's got to finish his edit. But as soon as he's finished with it, I'm going to get... Just tell you...

In Dunhuang, they have these sand dunes that are like 200 meters tall. It's beautiful, beautiful sand dunes. It just turns out that the days that we went there, they were cloud seeding, because they, you know, cloud seeding where they make it rain artificially? So it snowed there, which is very rare. So there's this snow powder covering over these huge dunes. It looks like something out of like this weird- Snow in the desert. Snow in the desert. Wow.

And the Oasis is covered in snow, all of this stuff. The day we started, we went to this school. This school was popularized by a TikTok video that the morning routine, you know the morning routines in these Chinese schools, all the kids pile out and they do their morning Tai Chi or whatever their exercise is.

Well, this teacher wanted to do something cool, so she infused this like Kung Fu kind of like dance style into the morning routines. It was recorded by a couple of the students. It became super popular, millions of views on Douyin. So that was my first objective for the day is to detaught that routine. So it was this kind of funny little dance. The evening...

I spent the night on the dunes in Dunhuang in negative 14 degrees. It was so cold. Camel ride up to the dunes. Then we did dune buggies up and down the dunes. And then just before the sunset, the drone went up. They said, walk up as high as you can to that dune. We're going to...

film you doing the exercise as the sun goes down and the drone's going to be around you. I mean, I would never be able to get this kind of content myself. I got to believe that he's only going to be able to use a certain few seconds of that scene. And then I'm going to be able to bring that into my vlog. Yeah.

As soon as he's done. I'm so geeked out. When's it coming out? I think about February or March, the show will come out. He's on episode three of four right now. And then as soon as he's finished, he's going to give me the content. I'm going to start chugging through it. Which CCTV channel is it? It's online. So it'll be easily to be shareable. That's awesome. But you know what? The haters are going to say. Oh my God.

There is no denying that I'm working with the government organization. The attacks are coming. Be prepared for that. Already done. They've already been launched. The attacks are coming for this for sure. Game time. And you're a robot and all they have to do is give you free video footage and you just fall in line. You're the white monkey. Yeah, what should I do? Useful idiot. So I look forward to that. I don't give a shit what people think. I'm very geeked out. That sounds amazing. Personally for me, it's like...

Anytime I could travel to those kind of natural places and shoot is amazing. He had this slider, like a one meter slider. And he has... Because I looked over his shoulder at the content he was shooting. He's got some of me where I'm like looking off into the distance and the sun is like glinting off my head as the slider goes. I'm like...

oh my God, that's like Hollywood. Like cinematography. Like cinematic stuff. I'm like, I don't have any of that stuff. You got to give me some of that stuff. Nice. Well, listen, Matt, it was a pleasure talking to you and meeting you. We got to do this again sometime. There's so many more things that we can get into. They're really honestly. Especially in this day and age, I think the topics are going to be never ending. There's almost going to be some new events to kind of cover.

So first of all, thank you again for coming on and just some parting words from you. If you could kind of based off of all your crazy unique experiences traveling and your, a lot of your kind of shifts in perspective throughout the years, if you could kind of leave some parting words or some words of wisdom that you would say to the citizens of the world out there who maybe aren't traveling as much as you are, you know, what would you say?

The greatest joys in life are on the opposite side of risk. So not opposite side, on the far side of risk, right? So I have failed more times than most people have, and I am thankful for every one of them. I think that people's fears of people and culture and

and so much, and politics, and all of these kind of crazy socialism, communism, and all of these kind of buzzwords that they're... You are trained to hate those things. You are trained. You don't have to. Being objective requires opening your mind. And so travel. Travel, but don't do it like in a five-star hotel. Get out there. Get your hands dirty.

meet somebody that, you know, smile to everybody. Like one of my biggest things is smiling. You smile at as many people as you can and you are going to make a difference in this world. So go out there, take risks and spread the joy. Jio. That is beautiful. And, you know, what I'm getting out of it is like try to, whatever way you can, try to seek true objectivity. Yeah. That can't even be attained. Challenge yourself. Challenge yourself. Even if you don't believe, you know, like there's a lot of people out there that are so hardwired

Let's just soften those wires a little bit. Rearrange those wires a little bit. Yeah, rearrange, you know. All right, Matt. Thanks again. Cheers. Cheers. Clinky clinky. Clinky clinky. All right, guys. That was Matt. Thank you guys for all listening. Be good. Be well. I'm Justin. I'm Eric. I'm Howie. I'm Matt. All right, guys. Peace. See you. Bye. Bye.

is