Joe Rogan Experience #1925 - Sonny, from Best Ever Food Review Show
Joe Rogan (host), Narrator, Sonny Side (guest), Joe Rogan (host), Narrator, Narrator, Narrator
In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, featuring Joe Rogan and Narrator, Joe Rogan Experience #1925 - Sonny, from Best Ever Food Review Show explores from Illegal Teacher To Global Food Explorer: Sonny’s Wild Journey Sonny, host of Best Ever Food Review Show, recounts his trajectory from a poor, directionless kid in Minnesota who failed college three times to building one of the internet’s biggest travel food channels. He describes eight precarious years living in South Korea on tourist visas, teaching English under the table and self‑training as a filmmaker before moving to Vietnam to go all‑in on YouTube.
From Illegal Teacher To Global Food Explorer: Sonny’s Wild Journey
Sonny, host of Best Ever Food Review Show, recounts his trajectory from a poor, directionless kid in Minnesota who failed college three times to building one of the internet’s biggest travel food channels. He describes eight precarious years living in South Korea on tourist visas, teaching English under the table and self‑training as a filmmaker before moving to Vietnam to go all‑in on YouTube.
The conversation dives into extreme food and culture experiences: underground life in Seoul, eating fermented tofu and bile‑dipped raw liver, sharing monkey with hunter‑gatherers, zebra and buffalo hunts in Africa, and controversial whale and dolphin consumption in the Faroe Islands. Sonny explains how he approaches “bizarre” foods with empathy and curiosity rather than shock value.
They also explore uncomfortable ethical terrain: trophy hunting as conservation, traditional whaling, eating primates and dogs, and organ‑first meat cultures, constantly interrogating where personal moral lines come from. Sonny details his disastrous shoot in Egypt, where bureaucracy and paranoia led to gear seizures and censorship, and how his critical series helped push legal reform.
Throughout, Rogan and Sonny reflect on cultural arrogance, lost ancient civilizations, and how travel shows can preserve disappearing traditions, while sharing practical stories about content creation, risk, and building a team in Vietnam to produce TV‑level documentaries entirely for YouTube.
Key Takeaways
Immersive cultural experience makes for less judgmental storytelling.
Sonny argues his years living in Korea and Vietnam gave him the empathy and perspective needed to portray unfamiliar foods and customs without mocking them, focusing instead on “why do people do this? ...
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Deliberate practice and feedback loops can substitute for formal education.
He systematically self‑taught filmmaking via projects and a peer workshop (Seoul Filmmakers Workshop), using constant critique to improve—illustrating how structured practice can replace film school for building real‑world skills.
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Many cultures prize organs and blood over muscle meat.
From Maasai and Datoga in Tanzania to African villages eating buffalo and zebra, liver, heart, entrails, blood, and bile are treated as delicacies or first rights food, suggesting deep cultural and possibly nutritional logic behind nose‑to‑tail eating.
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Conservation and hunting can be counterintuitively linked.
Game reserves in South Africa fund land management and anti‑poaching through high‑priced hunts, and some previously vulnerable species like certain zebras are now abundant there precisely because they have economic value to hunters.
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“Extreme” foods often emerge from necessity and ecology, not novelty.
Whale in the Faroe Islands, mad honey in Nepal, bile‑seasoned meats in Southeast Asia, and monkey among Hadzabe hunter‑gatherers all stem from local constraints, available species, and long traditions rather than simple thrill‑seeking.
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Authoritarian control can cripple tourism and media but can be pressured.
Sonny’s Egypt series, documenting confiscations, interrogations, and forced deletions despite permits, sparked widespread online testimony and was followed by Egypt changing its law to allow tourists to film in public without permits.
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Globalization is eroding distinct food cultures, raising stakes for documentation.
Sonny notes many tribal and regional practices—from click‑language hunters in Tanzania to Hadzabe arrow‑crafting—are under pressure from modern infrastructure and aid programs, making filmed records and nuanced storytelling increasingly important.
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Notable Quotes
“By all accounts, I should not be here right now.”
— Sonny
“In the U.S., we’re extreme with everything—except food from other cultures.”
— Sonny
“My show isn’t about ‘ew, look at this icky weird food.’ It’s about understanding why people eat this way.”
— Sonny
“You’re not in the best place if your hotel has as much security as an airport.”
— Sonny
“We like to think of advanced technology as only internal combustion and silicon chips, but what if an ancient civilization went down a completely different path?”
— Joe Rogan
Questions Answered in This Episode
Where do you personally draw the ethical line on which animals are acceptable to eat, and how has traveling shifted that line?
Sonny, host of Best Ever Food Review Show, recounts his trajectory from a poor, directionless kid in Minnesota who failed college three times to building one of the internet’s biggest travel food channels. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should we balance respecting long‑standing cultural food traditions (like whaling or monkey hunting) with modern conservation and animal‑welfare values?
The conversation dives into extreme food and culture experiences: underground life in Seoul, eating fermented tofu and bile‑dipped raw liver, sharing monkey with hunter‑gatherers, zebra and buffalo hunts in Africa, and controversial whale and dolphin consumption in the Faroe Islands. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What responsibilities do travel content creators have when portraying controversial practices so they inform rather than inflame?
They also explore uncomfortable ethical terrain: trophy hunting as conservation, traditional whaling, eating primates and dogs, and organ‑first meat cultures, constantly interrogating where personal moral lines come from. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
If ancient civilizations had advanced but different technologies that were largely erased, what modern assumptions about “progress” might be completely wrong?
Throughout, Rogan and Sonny reflect on cultural arrogance, lost ancient civilizations, and how travel shows can preserve disappearing traditions, while sharing practical stories about content creation, risk, and building a team in Vietnam to produce TV‑level documentaries entirely for YouTube.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How can countries like Egypt modernize their approach to media and security without losing control, and what role should public criticism from creators play in that process?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
(drumming) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience. (metal music)
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (metal music) What's happening, Sonny? How are you?
I'm good. I'm great. Um, I'm happy to be here. I gotta say, to start off, I wanna say thank you so much for having me here, uh, in the first place. By all accounts, I should not be here right now.
Why is that?
And I say that because, not to be too grand- grandiose from the start, but the way I grew up, I grew up white trash from central Minnesota, super poor family, one of six, failed college three times, and now, somehow years later, I have the most viewed, most followed travel show online or otherwise, and I'm on the motherfucking Joe Rogan Experience. So-
How did this all happen?
... thank you.
How did ... Y- you're welcome. How did you get on this, uh, journey of food exploration?
Um, gosh.
You have a really fun show.
Thank you.
It's really fun to watch.
I, yes, I was very stoked. You know, when you reached out to me for the first time, I was in Egypt with COVID. I was going through one of my worst travel experiences ever. And, uh, God, how did it start? (sighs) I mean, everything starts, obviously, where I come from in Minnesota. Growing up, um, I, I was quite directionless. I didn't know where I wanted to ... I didn't know what I wanted to study. Uh, I didn't really have any guidance. I didn't really have any mentorship. And so, hence the reason I failed outta school so many times. Um, in high school, I was really into filmmaking because we had a- fortunately, we had a filmmaking course there. But it's just not something I, I pursued afterwards. And so around the age of 24, I felt like I was pretty rudderless. I tried doing a couple things. You know, I did radio for a while. I was at 104.7 KCLD, the, I think the hundredth market in the country, not bad, doing 11:00 PM to 5:00 AM, uh, making minimum wage. And so I tried getting-
Minimum wage on the radio?
Yeah.
They really pay you minimum wage?
(laughs) Yeah, well, if they would've paid less, they probably would've.
(laughs) They could've.
Are you surprised? I, I mean, radio's kinda infamous for not paying any money.
Yeah, but minimum wage sounds crazy.
I, I guess they saw it as like they're doing me a favor by teaching me a, a trade or a skill.
Hm, okay. Maybe.
Yeah. And so, um, I, I, I tried to get a j- uh, getting a job doing that. That didn't work out. And so I was at a point in my life where I, I just thought, "I need to do something." I'm still youngish. I was 24, and, uh, I, I wanna travel. I wanna see the world. I wanna figure out something before I actually develop a long-term career, uh, 'cause at that point I had nothing. And so I had a friend. My, my brother had a friend who lived in Korea. And at the age of 24, I moved to Korea to teach English. And to me, it made sense because, uh, I could go there. I could travel. I could, I could see the world. I thought it would maybe last an hour and then I would come back. But I ended up staying there for eight years. And so I ... Maybe I'm giving too long of an answer.
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