#1925 - Sonny, from Best Ever Food Review Show

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience. What's happening, Sonny, how are you?

Sonny Side (0:14)

I'm good, I'm great, I'm happy to be here. I gotta say, to start off, I wanna say thank you so much for having me here in the first place. By all accounts, I should not be here right now.

Joe Rogan (0:23)

Why's that?

Sonny Side (0:24)

And I say that because, not to be too grandiose from the start, but the way I grew up, I grew up white trash from central Minnesota, super poor family, one of six, failed college three times, and now, somehow years later, I have the most viewed, most followed travel show online or otherwise, and I'm on the motherfucking Joe Rogan Experience. Thank you.

Joe Rogan (0:43)

How did this all happen? You're welcome. How did you get on this journey of food exploration? You have a really fun show.

Sonny Side (0:50)

Thank you.

Joe Rogan (0:51)

It's really fun to watch.

Sonny Side (0:52)

Yes, I was very stoked. When you reached out to me for the first time, I was in Egypt with COVID. I was going through one of my worst travel experiences ever. And how did it start? I mean, everything starts obviously where I come from in Minnesota.

Growing up, I was quite directionless. I didn't know where I wanted to, I didn't know what I wanted to study. I didn't really have any guidance. I didn't really have any mentorship. And so hence the reason I failed on a school so many times.

In high school, I was really into filmmaking because fortunately we had a filmmaking course there, but it's just not something I pursued afterwards. And so around the age of 24, I felt like I was pretty rudderless. I tried doing a couple things. I did radio for a while. I was at 104.7 KCLD, I think the 100th market in the country, not bad, doing 11 p.m. to 5 a.m.

making minimum wage. And so I tried getting-

Joe Rogan (1:49)

Minimum wage on the radio?

Sonny Side (1:50)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:51)

They really pay you minimum wage?

Sonny Side (1:52)

Yeah, well if they would have paid less, they probably would have.

Are you surprised? I mean, radio's kind of infamous for not paying any money.

Joe Rogan (1:59)

Yeah, but minimum wage sounds crazy.

Sonny Side (2:02)

I guess they saw it as like they're doing me a favor by teaching me a trade or a skill.

Joe Rogan (2:06)

Okay, maybe.

Sonny Side (2:09)

Yeah, and so I tried getting a job doing that. That didn't work out, and so I was at a point in my life where I just thought I need to do something. I'm still youngish, I was 24, and I wanna travel, I wanna see the world. I wanna figure out something before I actually develop a long-term career, because at that point, I had nothing. And so I had a friend, my brother had a friend who lived in Korea, and at the age of 24, I moved to Korea to teach English. And to me, it made sense because I could go there, I could travel, I could see the world, I thought it would maybe last an hour, and then I would come back. But I ended up staying there for eight years. And so, maybe I'm giving too long of an answer.

All right, I gotta take a deep breath.

Let me reset a little bit. I gotta calm down. So, I went to Korea. Korea was really challenging, because it was my first time in a different country, and I'd really only been in central Minnesota at that point.

Joe Rogan (3:09)

Oh, wow.

Sonny Side (3:10)

And so it was something completely different. And this is Korea in 2008 Like, there aren't really smartphones. Maybe the iPhone 1 had just dropped. YouTube still sucked. I mean, it existed, but it was barely usable. It was just cat videos and Charlie Bitme at that point. And so there's very little guidance online. I went there to teach English. You might be asking, how did you teach English after failing out of university three times? Well, you can do some underground, under-the-table English teaching in Korea. Did you have to learn how to speak Korean?

Folks in Korea are very desperate to learn English. And as you may know, people there study their asses off. They're very hard workers, and they're very hard studiers, maybe to a detriment.

Kids go to school so much, they study so much, they get tutors and things like that. And so when I went to Korea, I was going to be a tutor. And to tutor people, I had to... Sorry, give me one second.