Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1jlt0nTHbY
the jurgen experience in nepal the reason that you ate a wrath was the round was considered the strongest animal and and uh you weaned kids on it um because you want the kid to grow to be strong really yeah and so they would often wean kids and get a tiny little piece yeah yeah uh the cow urine that was the only time i actually took antibiotics prophylactically which is something you're not you're not supposed to do but i just decided that you know i it was my second year i didn't want to get ill cow urine has some weird uh pseudo medicinal purposes over there too yeah they're using it for people that are that are suffering from covid and there was uh yeah there was this like uh this guy from i'm trying to remember the country i don't remember but he was criticizing like how ridiculous this practice is of uh giving cow urine to these sick people how ignorant it was well you know it's it's funny you say ignorant because for me really what was so important about that experience was just learning how weird i was and that is you know um how weird i was to them you know and how many different ways there are to be human right and so you know um uh i um uh you know i participated in marrying off one of our sisters right because i'm an older brother a girl 16 you know time to get her married 16. oh yeah how old was the dude yeah well you know people would come by and ask for a hand this is what the process was and often bring gifts and i'm there with the other brothers and a guy would come and leave and somebody would say to me well what did you think of him and the first time they asked i said boeing which means what does little sister think and people just cracked up and i heard about that for two years i would walk to other parts of the district and people would say oh i heard about you you're the guy who asked what boheny thinks
and the point was that wasn't relevant to them that wasn't what the experience was right that wasn't a relevant variable and you know i i would explain to them that in my country you actually chose your own spouse and they would say well how do you do that and i say well you find somebody that you love and then they would say well then what if you don't love them and then i say well there's this thing called divorce you know and what i realized was that the way i thought about how all this should work was just so radically different from theirs and not necessarily better or worse right their system had its own logic and it was static it was stable right if you don't marry for love right you're not going to get divorced because you're out of love right that wasn't the purpose of it the purpose was it was social it was familial it had to do with joining communities you know and again i didn't grow up there so that's not what i do or what i would want to do but what i learned was how many different ways there are to do you know how many different ways there are to to be human and always to resist the automatic assumption that that your way is the better way you know because we all do that too and by the way i did some of that in nepal i mean you know one of my other really enduring memories is my best student was of the the um the so-called commie cast which is metalworker which is an untouchable um it's way down there right it's not as low as a shoemaker and you know they have a cast system right and at the bottom there are people that are called untouchables because you're literally not supposed to touch them or anything yes i mean that's how you know shoemakers especially because they deal with shoes with cows they deal with they deal with leather right and and you know um so why why and and well because the cow is a sacred animal right but you need shins
yes you do right and so in the you know in the the hindu system evolved to have a cast that did precisely that wow right i mean did you communicate with those people at all oh sure what was it like yeah they must have felt terrible well i mean here's the story the metal working family i actually went down to their house and i had a meal there and i come back and i tell my amma that means mother of my family and we were chatris which is way up there it's not brahman which is the highest and that's the priestly cast but the the chatris are second you know they're they were historically the military cast he's like babu that means baby which is what he called me babu you you you ate rice at a metal workers house do you know how filthy those people are you know what were you thinking and i'm like listen amma i just don't believe in cast you know i think everyone's the same and p.s you know what's going to happen i wake up in the middle of the night and i'm just incredibly ill and i just go outside and i'm puking my guts out amma can hear me he comes from the other room and she's like listen baboo you can't say i didn't warn you you know i mean you know uh and again you know it was really useful for me it's not like i suddenly believe in the caste system because i don't right but i think it's really useful just to have all your assumptions challenged you know and that's really what it did for me and here i was i'm this american i'm making this great statement about how all people are equal well you know what i mean 20 years earlier in my own country they had a caste system right that went back to the 1600s right and that was the other formative experience of being in nepal that was actually the first place that i started to think about american history what did you when they were talking about the arranged marriage
yeah and when you were saying that in your country people get to choose yeah like what did you think about what what is their like how do they explain it to you in a way where it made sense did they attempt to yeah or did they just say this is how it's always been well you know i would say that the things that are most common sensical to us often we don't have to explain right because they're part of our ether right but i think the logic was this you know that um uh you you you have to create families right and so you have to yeah yeah because you've got a you know you you have to perpetuate the species right right and so you know the the simplest and the most static way to do that is to have the girls um uh marry guys who can who have enough wherewithal to take care of them right that can bring you something right because it's a reciprocal arrangement right um and this is one why in rural nepal at the time people wanted to have boys not girls they used to say chorobastia chorizo which means the sun stays and the girl goes because of course the system was also patrilocal which means that you know you go and live in the house of the guy that you've married right so in the house i live with the older brothers they all had wives who live there wow right but when the girls got married they had to go somewhere else um so that was yeah well that again and it's it's ironic because believe it or not 20 years later i went back to my village with with my older daughter who was a junior in high school at the time and the three-day walk had become about a day's walk because they had they had cut a tractor road kind of up half half into the mountains and the first guy that i ran into he just said uh hey where you been like i haven't seen you around they're like oh you brought your daughter great let's drink rice one you know and basically you know somebody
had died and somebody got married and you know somebody had a kid but the one thing that was really different and this speaks to globalization is a lot of the younger men had gone to places like the united arab emirates to work you know and that was ironic too because you know the old story was the sun stays and the girl goes right a lot of the suns had gone but they had gone outside of the country and that's the way you know so many of these economies work in in that part of the world did you see if the girl's marriage worked out well again you know joe it all works out right i mean you know it works out because it was designed for social reasons not for personal ones you know it's not about what she thinks or about what he thinks uh you know it's about kind of you know bringing together families creating communities bringing up kids it wasn't about sentiment although you know i i as i got closer to people in the community i found out that after a marriage was arranged often you did develop feelings for the person often yeah it's just that those feelings weren't the foundation of it right they weren't what spawned it they were an offshoot of it they weren't a cause of it did it make you feel uncomfortable that they were doing that not in the least you know and in fact i mean that was when i started to read history because of course in most parts of the world including where we are right now historically marriage was arranged but i would imagine that like if you have this conversation with a feminist for instance they would have a real issue with that and also a real issue with your acceptance of it right well again i'm not saying that i accept it for me right i understand you know and and uh because that wasn't my expectation you know um but you know i i think it's it's worth asking ourselves the degree to which
we know we're right right and you know i think that at the end of the day we don't all of us have opinions all of us have biases all of us have learned certain things but learn in hand who was uh you know a famous jurist and a federal court judge um he one of one of the things he said that's always stuck with me is that um the spirit of liberty which is really what we're talking about is the spirit that is not so sure of itself and i've always loved that right so i'm a human being i have biases opinions very strong ones but i think that the worst human attribute is self-certainty i think it's the most dangerous one you know and uh for me the peace corps was just a great way to challenge that and to say okay look i'm not going to have an arranged marriage and by the way i don't and i'm not going to marry off my daughters um but in another part of the world they do that um and that's decreasingly the case by the way right because these places are modernized what the [ __ ] i can just meet a guy i really like right and so these you know i mean when we went back to nepal it in my village it was in a remote place so it was relatively static but there have been many other changes i mean just think of all these guys going to the uae to work on construction sites catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on spotify you can listen to the jre in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data cost all for free spotify is absolutely free you don't have to have a premium account to watch new jre episodes you just need to search for the jre on your spotify app go to spotify now to get this full episode
of the joe rogan experience