Guest Bio
Aydın Kudu is the Manager of Turkishmoon, a company specializing in travel design and documentary filmmaking in Turkey. With a passion for exploration and storytelling, Aydın has dedicated his career to showcasing the rich cultural and natural heritage of his native country. His work combines adventure travel with visual storytelling, offering unique perspectives on Turkey’s diverse landscapes and traditions.
Show Summary
In this episode, Aydın Kudu shares his journey from traveling across Turkey by bike and hitchhiking in the 1980s to becoming a renowned travel designer and documentary filmmaker. He discusses the evolution of adventure travel in Turkey, the art of capturing authentic stories through film, and the importance of preserving cultural heritage. Aydın also reflects on his experiences navigating the challenges of the travel industry and his commitment to promoting sustainable tourism. Listeners will gain insight into the fusion of travel and filmmaking and the impact of storytelling on cultural preservation.
Key Takeaways
- ✓ Adventure Travel Evolution – The transformation of travel experiences in Turkey from the 1980s to today.
- ✓ Documentary Filmmaking – Techniques for capturing authentic stories and visuals in diverse environments.
- ✓ Cultural Preservation – The role of storytelling in maintaining and honoring cultural heritage.
- ✓ Sustainable Tourism – Implementing practices that benefit local communities and the environment.
- ✓ Entrepreneurial Journey – Building a career that blends passion with purpose in the travel industry.
What You’ll Find on Turkishmoon’s Platform
- ✓ Documentary Films – A collection of Aydın’s work showcasing Turkey’s landscapes and cultures.
- ✓ Travel Design Services – Customized adventure travel experiences curated by Aydın.
- ✓ Photography Portfolio – Visual stories capturing the essence of Turkish life and nature.
- ✓ Blog Articles – Insights and narratives from Aydın’s travels and filmmaking projects.
- ✓ Contact Information – Channels to connect with Aydın for collaborations or inquiries.
👉 Visit Turkishmoon’s Official Website to explore their offerings and learn more about Aydın Kudu’s contributions to adventure travel and documentary filmmaking.
Learn more about Turkishmoon and connect with Aydin at:
https://www.turkishmoon.com/
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Podcast Transcript
This transcript is auto-generated on recording, and has not been edited by a human. It may contain lots of mistakes, crazy words, and stuff that makes no sense. The host and the guest are not responsible for the accuracy of the transcript.
Jason Elkins (04:10.307)
Welcome everybody to another episode of the Big World Made Small Adventure Travel Podcast. Today we’ve got Aydin Kudu here from Turkish Moon. He is a travel designer and documentary filmmaker. So happy to have you here. Aydin, welcome.
aydın kudu (04:27.626)
Nice to have you. Thank you.
Jason Elkins (04:28.987)
Yeah, so where are you actually located right now, Aydin?
aydın kudu (04:33.15)
Right now I’m in Los Angeles, California.
Jason Elkins (04:35.759)
You are, okay. So, and where do you typically spend most of your time? What’s your travel schedule look like?
aydın kudu (04:43.146)
greatest city in the world, Istanbul.
Jason Elkins (04:45.239)
Yeah, I have not been and I suspect you’re going to share a lot of insights about Turkey today and that part of the world. I’m super excited to hear about it. And first, I want to jump in and kind of learn a little bit about you. How did you get to kind of where you are from wherever you began? So how far back would you like to go? Do you want to go to childhood or is there a better place to pick up this conversation?
aydın kudu (05:12.118)
Well, I was born and raised in a hazelnut farm. About 100 acre land along the Black Sea coast in Northeastern Turkey, very close to Georgia. It is the Switzerland of Turkey, or Europe, and of Turkey actually, because all the… Ha ha ha. Yes, Switzerland of Turkey actually, with the wild rivers. You know, in about 50 miles, you reach 2,000 meters from the sea level.
Jason Elkins (05:27.419)
Well, the Switzerland of Europe, I think the Swiss people might argue that one.
Jason Elkins (05:42.005)
Okay, and you said what kind of farm?
aydın kudu (05:45.186)
Hazelnut farm. Yes, Turkey produces about 70% of the world hazelnut and our family is a small family. We make about five to 10 tons of hazelnut a year. So that’s where all the good chocolate comes, is made from the hazelnut imported from Turkey to Italy.
Jason Elkins (05:46.179)
A hazelnut farm, okay.
Jason Elkins (06:04.523)
Ah, okay. All right. Very cool. And so how long were you living there before you kind of started your adventures?
aydın kudu (06:11.406)
Well, I lived there until I finished high school when I was 18. And then most of the year was spent at the farm right by the water, on the hillside looking at the Black Sea. And in the summer, we would go up to our high pastures above the timber line, which is about 7,000 feet. So this went on until I was 18. And I chose to study linguistics, general linguistics in English at the University in Ankara.
where the curriculum was English. So I spent five years in Ankara, capital of Turkey, where the Republic of Turkey was born in 1920s. So it’s a special city.
Jason Elkins (06:47.043)
Okay, I’m curious, why did you go up into the highlands above the timberline every summer?
aydın kudu (06:56.534)
Well, the summers get hot and humid, and there are mosquitoes, flies, and then our families just have cows, you know, two or three cows per family. The Black Sea coastal area is very ragged, so you don’t have the big meadows there. So you have to make sure that the cows have grazing land. So it’s about 50 miles, about, you know, 75 kilometers.
Jason Elkins (07:17.904)
Okay.
aydın kudu (07:26.53)
distance from the sea all the way up to the, but you change the flora constantly as you are going up the valley from the seaside all the way to the above timber line and it’s beautiful life there. You know, well, my, my wife said life up in the high meadows of Black Sea, a lot of fun for a man. Let’s work for women.
Jason Elkins (07:52.458)
Okay, so I envision you and your family kind of herding the livestock up the side of the mountain up into these highlands. Is that accurate?
aydın kudu (08:02.67)
We would not call it herding, we just have about two or three cows and it’s only for our own consumption. So we always have our milk, our butter, our yogurt, our cheese, everything from the animals.
Jason Elkins (08:13.003)
Okay. So the whole family would just end the cows would move up to the cooler, cooler areas where the cows had things to eat. All right.
aydın kudu (08:21.494)
Yes. Yeah, but it actually it’s we like to store every night because the temperature may go down to five to ten every night in July Because of the that there are so many uh special environmentally sensitive zones in the world, but there are few areas three climatic zones merge that is actually northeastern, turkey northern iran and caucasia that area is very sensitive so the
Jason Elkins (08:30.076)
Okay.
Jason Elkins (08:49.456)
Okay.
aydın kudu (08:50.846)
weather pattern is very subject to quick changes. So it’s just like the temper of the Black Sea people, we change a lot, you know? Ha ha ha.
Jason Elkins (08:54.908)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (08:59.291)
Okay, that’s a good warning. And okay, so was it very typical? Would most of the families that lived around you kind of do the same seasonal migration?
aydın kudu (09:11.294)
Yes, yes actually our neighbors in the village which is our permanent location down by the water up the valleys the same neighbors we have up on the mountain
Jason Elkins (09:18.406)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (09:24.259)
Okay. And I’m curious, can you describe kind of life up in the mountains for you each summer? Other than it got cold at night.
aydın kudu (09:34.87)
Well, on the hillside you have homes, typical, two floor facing the valley, one floor facing the hill. So on the upper side you have the kitchen and the daily area. Down there you have the bedrooms, two bedrooms actually, one for the parents, one for the kids. So you would actually, it’s like in a magic life as well, you would actually put down all the mattresses on the floor and all the kids were, I was one of six. Out of
Jason Elkins (09:46.905)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (10:01.043)
Okay.
aydın kudu (10:02.778)
one father. I mean, I mean, I know my father was one child, so no uncle, no aunt. So we would sleep like carrots, telling all the stories to each other and then my parents would be next door. And down underneath is the cows. So the, so morning would start with my grandma churning the butter and then the some hot air coming up from the cows down underneath. Plus the smell.
Jason Elkins (10:09.691)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (10:16.226)
Okay.
Jason Elkins (10:27.684)
Okay. All right. And.
aydın kudu (10:30.322)
Blast the smell, you know, urges you to get out of bed. Ha ha ha.
Jason Elkins (10:34.259)
I was kind of imagining that I wasn’t going to ask specifically about the smells, but I can. Yeah. Okay. And for the kids, the six of you, what was your job and responsibility?
aydın kudu (10:46.17)
One child has to go and fetch the water from the fountain. It’s about two, 300 meters away. One or two child has to take the cows to the meadows right across. We would walk the cows for about 15, 20 minutes and leave them there. The cows would spend the whole day there grazing and then come back themselves. Except when the fog closes in, sometime the young cows may get lost. So then we would have to go and actually look, you know.
keep an eye on them in that case. And then we come home, the mother has prepared a breakfast. You have the breakfast, whatever we have there. And then you are free to go play with the kids, you know, in the neighborhood. And then we would fight to get a part of the team because there are so many, we had about 25 homes. If there are about five to 10 population per family, you’re talking about quite a population. And then once a week or sometimes twice a week, we have to walk down to the…
forest, and they cut down the dry trees, these are the oriental pine, and they carry them all the way back home, that’s the firewood. And every Friday there’s a weekly market that all the high pasture people would gather, exchange news with the others, and then shop for the whole week, and then it’s a wonderful
Jason Elkins (11:52.851)
Okay.
aydın kudu (12:14.678)
That was something weakly for us. And this still goes on today.
Jason Elkins (12:16.679)
Okay.
Jason Elkins (12:20.059)
That’s very cool. And what was your favorite part of growing up?
aydın kudu (12:25.102)
What you mean?
Jason Elkins (12:25.915)
Well, what was your favorite? I don’t know if it’s a specific memory or just kind of a favorite thing that you enjoyed most about that point in your life when you were younger, spending your summers up in the mountains.
aydın kudu (12:38.354)
I think the thin air, the concept of living above the clouds, and our, we call it YAYLA, Y-A-Y-L-A, is a specific word that refers to above timberline lifestyle, or location, or the houses or communities. We call them YAYLA. Actually, we wrote an article featuring this in National Geographic 2001, The Crucible of the Gods, featuring ethnic groups in northeastern Turkey into Georgia.
And then the word YAYLA entered the database, geographic database for the first time, Y-A-Y-L-A. So I think that thin air, our location was the highest, so we’d always sit down and look at all the other hills, especially, I still take my kids to a spot there about 10 minutes walk from my home, watch the sun goes down behind all these cascade of mountains.
And if it is very cold, we drive there. If not, we walk there, say goodbye to the sun, see you next morning and walk back home. I think being above all the rest of the geography, that thin air is wonderful.
Jason Elkins (13:46.811)
That’s very cool. You know, one of the things that you and I discussed before we, we jumped on this call or kind of this concept of, you know, people are, I can’t remember exactly how you said it, but something about elevation has more of an impact on culture than, uh, than geographic area. So I’m curious to hear a little bit about that. It seems related to what we’re discussing right now.
aydın kudu (14:02.83)
Oh. Ha ha ha.
aydın kudu (14:12.03)
I think what separates or brings people together is not what nationality, what country they are born in, it is what elevation they grew up in.
Jason Elkins (14:22.963)
Okay.
aydın kudu (14:24.626)
And I got this confirmed after having spent two years at a shared home with my other university friends at the university. So people from the north in Turkey are very different from the people in the south or the central part of Turkey. Elevation because of temperature is hot and then the Black Sea people have come up with very kind of clever, sometimes cunning, sometimes silly, sometimes very…
Jason Elkins (14:39.3)
And it’s because of elevation.
aydın kudu (14:54.246)
logical ways to cope with the nature. So the rest tend to be a little bit lazy. For example, our folk dances are very fast. And there’s a joke that when a Black Sea man, most of the jokes in Turkey are about the Black Sea people, right? And a Black Sea man sees the dances of Central and Western Turkey, he says, ah, so easy, even my grandfather can dance that, it’s so slow.
Jason Elkins (14:56.42)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (15:09.805)
Okay.
Jason Elkins (15:20.407)
Oh, all right. Okay. So do you feel kind of a kinship as you travel the world? Cause I know you’ve been to quite a few places as you travel the world. If you’re around other people that, you know, live in the mountains, the higher elevations, do you just automatically feel a kinship with them? Then I take it.
aydın kudu (15:39.294)
Yes, yes, I think I have a lot to do with the Colorado people from high deserts of Oregon than Kansas or Texas or Alabama.
Jason Elkins (15:48.983)
Okay, that’s an interesting insight. And okay, so I appreciate you, go ahead.
aydın kudu (15:57.642)
I thought of making a documentary in Turkey featuring three different zones from the highlands of the Kurdish speaking area, southeast, and the Black Sea people in the northeast and the people in the west actually. But it’s never been materialized, but still up in my head one day probably.
Jason Elkins (16:15.919)
Well, we’ll, we’ll keep our eyes open for that. And speaking of that, that’s cause that’s one of the things that you do that I think is very fascinating. And I’m not sure I’ll let you figure out which one to go first, or maybe it’s all combined, but I’m curious how you got from that lifestyle of, you know, living on the coast and the winters up in the mountains in the summers, you mentioned you went to school for linguistics for English and how did that all translate into you having this career as a
as a travel experience creator, a filmmaker, and all that stuff.
aydın kudu (16:50.192)
Uh, what up?
towards the end of my high school career, I wanted to go away. It doesn’t matter where, but away from my hometown. I was always curious about… I was just curious about, you know, and our hometown is not a touristy town. I would actually maybe run into a young European traveler coming to our town to change buses. And I…
Jason Elkins (17:02.128)
That’s normal that time of year or time of age, time of life.
Jason Elkins (17:18.809)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (17:21.258)
and I started taking the English lessons at the school at sixth grade. First year we had one teacher, second year we had no teacher. It was vacant. There was just not enough English teacher. Third month we had a teacher and I said to myself, there must be a way to learn this and I remember the very moment right now, I was about eleven, twelve something, I saw this ad in the newspaper that correspondence
I ran to my grandpa, look. He said, OK. So I asked for membership and everything. So I was getting these two volumes every two weeks. In one year, I had four tens that I learned. And I was practicing whatever I was learning with whoever I grabbed in the town. And then I would invite them home. They would come and stay with us for a few days. So that’s how my curiosity actually got aground.
by trying to talk to these people come from God knows where. So at the university, let’s say I was on the, I was on the, I was second grade student at the university in Ankara, and I was visiting my family for the winter break. I again remember it was on cold snowy day, I was sitting inside, my father chopping woods outside. This is 1984. He said, there’s a tourist here, you know, asking for you.
Jason Elkins (18:22.265)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (18:49.698)
Oh, I’m gonna say a tall guy with beard. It turns out that my elder brother, who lives in Geneva, is one of his friends, a Swiss guy, who decided to bike from Geneva all the way to Kathmandu, Nepal, on a bicycle. After three months, he was in trouble. So my brother told him, oh, if you go through the Black Sea, and I have my younger brother, and then this, this. And he had no idea that I was…
Jason Elkins (19:05.554)
Wow.
aydın kudu (19:17.814)
45 kilometers away from the town he was going through. He left his bike there, he came to meet me. I said, well, you know what? I have to return to Ankara to start my studies tomorrow. Come with me. Spend about a week with us. He then said, Aydin, you know what? This has been difficult, more difficult than I thought it would be. I’m taking what I need, my personal things, from this bicycle. That bicycle had 70 kilograms on it.
Jason Elkins (19:45.468)
Wow.
aydın kudu (19:46.934)
It was not the most practical cross-country cycles I’ve ever seen. At that time, I had learned to ride a bike just one year before at a youth camp in Germany, right? Because our hometown is ragged, there are no asphalt roads at the time, and you don’t ride a bike there. To make a long story short, he said, I’m leaving this bike to you, right? And then I’m going to go settle and live in Kathmandu. If I come back, I’ll take it. If not, it’s yours. That’s how I said to myself, look.
Jason Elkins (19:48.827)
Hmm. Heh heh.
Jason Elkins (19:56.848)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (20:15.19)
We didn’t have much money and our money would run out at the end of the third week every month. So we had to find a way to pass that last final week in eating bread and onion. So I said, where is the good man? This guy came from. I can travel without needing much money and I have a slum bag. I didn’t have money to pay for the hotels but I can sleep outside. And that’s how every summer I was training every day of course.
Jason Elkins (20:25.275)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (20:45.746)
Oh, by the way, I was sent off at the dormitory. I was staying at the university for locking my bike inside the dormitory without permission. So the manager of the dormitory said, why did you take your bike inside? I said, I didn’t see anyone. I didn’t know that I had to have permission. It’s my bicycle in here. So anyways, I was training every day.
Jason Elkins (21:00.312)
Okay?
Jason Elkins (21:10.371)
Yeah. It’s not like it’s a motorcycle or a car.
aydın kudu (21:14.942)
Yeah, I still had that bike actually. So I would finish my university studies that year by the end of the third week of June. But August I had to be home because my family’s harvesting hazelnut. I had to have them, right? So I only have about four to five weeks to travel. If I try to make money, there’s no time to travel. I said, I’m gonna travel. And my daily allowance was, Billy, Lauren, and Jason, one dollar a day.
Jason Elkins (21:42.672)
Yeah, wow.
aydın kudu (21:44.714)
and I was scavenging every single fruit tree by the road. And it, okay, to your question, I traveled first year, I cycled along the entire coast of Western Turkey, then took a bus back home. The next year I cycled upper Western Turkey all along the Black Sea back home. Third year I did the same thing for Eastern Turkey, I joined a French bicyclist who were going throughout the whole Europe for two and a half years.
So that, and many times I did not say I was a Turk.
Jason Elkins (22:19.62)
Okay, why’s that?
aydın kudu (22:21.866)
Because when you say you’re a Turk, first Turks are very curious.
And then let’s say you’re this 1980s, we did not have many highways in Turkey, all, you know, two lane, you know, roads. So there were lots of coffee houses by the road. So and I, by the way, I did not have any money as I told you. And I had no, you know, no bags, nothing that I could carry on the bar. My I, I saw the pillowcases at my dormitory.
Jason Elkins (22:35.943)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (22:55.362)
to turn them into a bag and I attach those on my bike. So imagine you’re going by the road, there’s a coffee house with lots of 20, 30 people sitting in front, hey stop, they stop me. So if you start speaking Turkish, okay they know a lot about you because you are the same country, everything, but curiosity is about the bicycle. But if you don’t say anything like that, so you know.
Jason Elkins (22:59.495)
Ha!
aydın kudu (23:20.51)
Every time there’s someone who speaks a little bit of English or maybe German, I could speak a little bit of German at the time, and then they say, ah, look, I was Irish sometimes, sometimes Portuguese, something. And a nationality that none of the German, Turkish workers who work in European countries, they speak the language, they can easily tell that I’m not from there, but you know, and then so they would actually for the first 20 minutes or half an hour, you know, tea coming going and what I say, they translate.
amazing people, look they come from such a long distance on a bike and then they came to see our culture. Wow, wow, something great to do, you know, that flattering words. And then sometimes I would actually shift to Turkish all of a sudden, right? And the reaction would change, you know, say, hey, are you stupid to travel like this? What are you doing? We’re going to pay for your bus ticket and send you there.
Jason Elkins (24:00.376)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jason Elkins (24:17.61)
Oh.
aydın kudu (24:19.286)
Because Turks, they finish the school, they get engaged, they go to army, they come back, marry, get a job, and you know, a decent job. But foreigners, they can do all those weird things. So, so and oh, by the way, another point would be, where do you stay? They ask you, okay, where do you stay? I say, well, I just, I don’t have a tent, I have my sleeping bag, I sleep sometimes, you know, in camps, by the road. Yo, come on, come on, be our guest. So when you are a guest in their home, if you are a Turkish,
Jason Elkins (24:29.981)
Uh huh.
Jason Elkins (24:44.91)
Oh.
aydın kudu (24:48.93)
the daughters of the family, girls, would feel shy sitting next to you, getting close to you, okay? Because you are subject to certain ethics, right? You wouldn’t wear those tight, biting shorts and then, but foreigners, you are free to do anything you want, right? You are a guest of honor. So then, is it?
Jason Elkins (25:07.475)
Ah, I get it. I get it now. Yeah, okay. So you were pretty much everywhere you went. You were welcomed as a guest and entertained and
aydın kudu (25:16.254)
And also, I can find out how they really treat the travelers. I think years later when I said, why did I become a guide? I said to myself, I haven’t said this in social media, by the way. I said to myself, I think that interaction with the locals, not being one of them, OK, visit them, and they, it’s not once, not twice, tens of times throughout the whole country. And then it’s…
These people are worth putting in touch with the rest of the world.
Jason Elkins (25:49.955)
Interesting. So you almost were able to experience your country through the eyes of a tourist, almost without necessarily being a tourist, but through those. Yeah, that makes sense. I love that.
aydın kudu (25:51.582)
and
aydın kudu (25:56.107)
Absolutely.
aydın kudu (26:00.754)
And then also, people actually would sit around the table and eat together. And then the boys of the family would say, I don’t know, okay, or let’s say whatever my name is. Okay, come with us to the coffee house or tea house, right? So that’s where only man goes. They play card games, dominoes, ramey tiles and things, you know, everything in there. And backgammon, right? Occasionally chess something. Of course, I’m not supposed to know any of those games.
Jason Elkins (26:23.495)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (26:28.86)
No.
aydın kudu (26:31.534)
But half an hour later I hear them talking, says, these foreigners are very clever. How can they learn our game so fast? And even kicks our butt. Ha ha ha.
Jason Elkins (26:43.815)
There’s, what do they call that? A pool shark or somebody like a, not a scammer per se, but you know, you sit down and you’re like, I don’t know this game, teach me the game. If there’s, you know, if there’s money exchange going on, you know, teach me the game. And then all of a sudden you’re winning and you walk away with a bunch of cash in your pocket. Did that ever happen?
aydın kudu (27:03.934)
No, no, I’m not a gambler. Actually, I was actually, I was riding down my, by the way, I had no camera at the time, so there’s no picture of what I did, except a few shots, shot by other bikers from rest of the, you know, the Europe actually, and then that’s how they, if you, it’s all written down and I want to drive down the same path.
Jason Elkins (27:05.519)
You weren’t playing for money, okay.
aydın kudu (27:31.078)
and then find the locations that I slept, I saw incidents, you know, and then I’ve seen quirky experiences as well, but you know, there’s another subject. So that could be a film actually.
Jason Elkins (27:41.859)
Yeah, okay.
Jason Elkins (27:45.391)
Yeah, I just what you’re describing sounds fascinating. I mean, I can I’ve not had the honor of visiting Turkey, but just listening to you describe it just I mean, honestly, that would be a pretty cool video or good film. So.
aydın kudu (27:58.666)
You know, but the problem right now actually, because of this multiple highways and airports everywhere and the people have less time, yeah, less time to people actually have for touring, actually as they fly among the, so now you have to show an effort to get people interact with the locals.
Jason Elkins (28:07.835)
Yeah, things have changed.
Jason Elkins (28:19.575)
Yeah. So how do you do that? How do you do that?
aydın kudu (28:21.354)
So that’s one thing I can say.
I get out of the main road. You know, and then, so I don’t have any fear of the, common fear, especially among the Americans, invading someone’s privacy. I know they don’t mind. I know that’s something, a bonus for them in their monotonous daily life. This person, I remember I was with my girlfriend, I was hiking the, an apron trail.
Jason Elkins (28:27.813)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (28:55.222)
in Nepal in 1999 and then she was, she’s from upstate New York and then the, and every, okay, all these people they make money by renting one of the rooms in their house. If the business get bigger, they build another house right next to houses and that becomes the dormitory. That’s where we stay. But all the people come in and go in, you know what you do, you just, you check in, you get your room, they buy a drink and you give them food, you pay them, they go. Same thing on and on.
Jason Elkins (29:13.361)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (29:23.03)
the usual Anglo-Saxon interaction with locals. I would go to the kitchen, I would talk to them, I would ask them some questions. She was driving nuts, now why do you go? It made their privacy, I said, it’s not privacy. Imagine these people will remember someone came here, he got curious of how we cook this, you know, and then it’s something different, imagine, thousands of people. But right now, I have to teach the same thing to my own kids.
six years having lived in the United States. And then I’m not pushing them, hey, if there are other kids out in the garden, it’s okay to play with them. So they think, yeah, it’s easy. What I was trying to teach the whole world, now I have to teach my own kids.
Jason Elkins (30:03.015)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (30:06.323)
Do you?
Right. And do you think that that’s something uniquely, I don’t know, American? How do you, where do you draw the lines like between people that have this real sense of personal space and privacy and, and are reluctant to engage with strangers?
aydın kudu (30:28.894)
I think it’s not the American, I think it’s the coming from a background from an urban area or rural area.
Jason Elkins (30:37.069)
Ah, yeah. Yep.
aydın kudu (30:38.922)
I had a friend of mine actually, we used to work for this American company and then on parallel tours, so there were two busload of people. I’m taking care of one bus. He was, he said to my husband, stop stopping in the middle of nowhere and striking up a conversation in a coffee house with a family. I don’t know how to deal with that. Just stay with me, it’s fun. And actually there was another travel company I remember, they made a very detailed posttrip
evaluation of what was the most interesting thing you did on the tour that was amazing. On another one, the same thing was actually what was the thing that you thought the missing thing. Interaction with local comes number one. As the weakest point, as the strongest point of a tour. Yes, I mean people rate the tour bad.
Jason Elkins (31:27.439)
Yeah, yeah.
It’s both.
aydın kudu (31:36.374)
because there was no interaction with the locals. Another group I rated that tour great. Why? Because there was a lot of opportunity for interaction with local people. So if you do it, it becomes the strongest part of the trip. If you don’t care and it becomes something that people think they missed during the whole trip.
Jason Elkins (31:37.976)
Okay, gotcha.
Jason Elkins (31:45.991)
Okay, so which.
Jason Elkins (31:56.775)
So basically, just said it’s the most important part of the trip.
aydın kudu (32:01.662)
Yes, I think so. That’s what they remember.
Jason Elkins (32:03.303)
Yeah, I agree. I’ve always been that way and it’s interesting. I grew up in a small town in the Rocky Mountains, you know, Western US as well. So in Sheridan, Wyoming.
aydın kudu (32:12.783)
Oh, did you? Where?
aydın kudu (32:17.599)
AHHH
Jason Elkins (32:18.243)
So Wyoming’s pretty small. Well, it’s a large state and a small state as far as population, but it’s, you know, we would, if you were on a dirt road, typically, and there were a lot of dirt roads out in the country, if you’re going up in the mountains, you’re on dirt roads, and when you pass somebody on a dirt road, you waved. That was very normal. And when you pass somebody out, if you’re out in the mountains and you see somebody, you stop and have a conversation, you know?
aydın kudu (32:44.514)
That’s why you and I, this is our second conversation, we hit it off. Because you see, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, right? Ha ha
Jason Elkins (32:47.575)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it completely. And when I’m, you know, spending time with someone else that doesn’t come up, come from the same background, they’re constantly like, Jason, you gotta, you know, you don’t have to talk to everybody. I’m living in Columbia now, or I’m spending a lot of time in Columbia, and here the people are very, very friendly. Yeah, yeah, yep. So Columbia, South America, in South America. And the people are quite friendly.
aydın kudu (33:07.862)
I’m in Colombia, South America. Ah.
Jason Elkins (33:15.099)
But I’ve had a few Colombians with me that actually think the Colombians aren’t that friendly, Jason, it’s just you. Because you initiate conversations with everybody.
And the fact that they speak back to you, you think that everybody is just really friendly. And they are friendly, but the tip, you know, so I’ve started watching other Colombians that don’t know each other, aren’t necessarily paying a lot of attention to each other. But I’m walking down the street and I feel like everybody, you know, is, you know, Buenos Ties, Como Esta, you know, I walk into a tienda. Yeah, I don’t know if I would say well, but I’m learning.
aydın kudu (33:46.582)
So you speak Spanish well? You speak Spanish well?
I’m going to come and see Colombia sometime this winter. Are you there the whole winter?
Jason Elkins (33:55.843)
I will most likely be here. Yeah. Off and on all winter. All right. You’re you’re welcome. Anytime. It’s it’s my favorite place on earth. I, I don’t live here per se. When I started my travels a couple of years ago, I thought I would spend one month here and I just keep coming back and staying. And I’ve been probably out of the last two years. I’ve spent 12 months off and on here in Columbia. So yeah, it’s, it’s great. And, and
aydın kudu (33:59.242)
Okay, we’ll talk about it. I only went to Peru years ago.
Jason Elkins (34:21.915)
Interestingly, I’m in Medellin, which is kind of a mountain town. We’re in the Andes. So there, that probably helps with the connection as well. So, but anyway, so I’d love to know how you got the bike journeys that you just described were fascinating. Your kind of views and insights into tourism is fascinating. How did you get from spending your summers doing these really cool bike
aydın kudu (34:26.965)
Uh huh. Good. Okay. There we go.
Absolutely.
Jason Elkins (34:50.511)
helping other people experience turkey.
aydın kudu (34:54.502)
I remember that moment as well. I was, you know, what do you do? You just try to finish your university education and then something will happen because studying linguistics doesn’t make you engineer a teacher, you know, a mechanic right away. It is like a wild card. It can be channeled into a lot of things. So I was actually in my hometown in one of those breaks and my hometown is about 11 hour bus ride from Ankara, right?
Jason Elkins (35:22.337)
Okay.
aydın kudu (35:23.326)
Again, I saw on an ad, Minister of Culture and Tourism, professional tour guiding course, application. It was a Tuesday and the deadline is Friday 5 p.m. Wait a second, professional tour guiding. I’d never heard anything like this. Oh, there’s something. I run around that day and I put all my papers, think, and I ship them.
Jason Elkins (35:32.268)
Ah.
Jason Elkins (35:39.77)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (35:53.006)
to my friend in Ankara, I said, you have to take them to this address. And you got there 10 minutes before 5 PM that Friday. Then, so that was August, actually, about a month later. And I was to take four exams. First one is just the interview. They come and look at you, what kind of person you are, how do you express yourself, this. Second one was a.
aydın kudu (36:23.927)
multi-choice, you know, world matters, you know, they’re trying to see if we are following the world and paper and everything, and then, and the second month. Third one was a kind of oral English examination, whatever language you think you’d like to guide, and the fourth one is a translation, right? So you have to pass all those tests, then you are accepted to attend the course for about six months, right? So I remember the moment actually,
Jason Elkins (36:26.652)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (36:41.017)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (36:47.139)
Wow, that’s pretty stringent, yeah.
aydın kudu (36:51.946)
It was the day they were going to announce to those who passed those four exams, and I was one of them. I was one of 84 among about a thousand applications. But I was now senior at the university, last year, fourth year. But the courses turned out to be in the evenings, so even the students at the university can attend. So I was at the university daytime, and I was coming back home, changing and running to the…
Jason Elkins (36:59.283)
Mm.
Jason Elkins (37:18.578)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (37:22.486)
tour guiding courses and they taught us about 13 different subjects. And I studied for the tour guiding course a lot heavier than the linguistics. Okay, so I was supposed to graduate in the middle of June from both university and the guiding course, but there was a problem. So in our system you take two midterm exams, if the average of those is above 50 out of 100,
Jason Elkins (37:31.281)
Okay.
aydın kudu (37:50.026)
you are entitled to take the final exam to pass the course, right? But as part of this six month tour guide education, a training course, one month is a travel in Turkey nonstop. So they put us on a bus. We tour all around the whole country for 30 days. But that means I would be missing the first midterm exam. So, so I went to the professor. I said, this is what’s happening. And then the
Jason Elkins (37:53.862)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (38:03.542)
Oh.
Jason Elkins (38:11.673)
Yeah.
aydın kudu (38:20.731)
uh… and then how do we do this? they said we appreciate your willingness and then you know excitement about this thing okay what we can do is actually
You take the second exam, second midterm exam directly. If you get over 80, we will let you take the final exam.
Jason Elkins (38:48.115)
It’s a lot of pressure.
aydın kudu (38:48.278)
So I came back, I’ll score about 80, and I took the final exam. And when I was there, my classmates told me years later that, so towards the end of the five year training and everything, so one of the professors and then my classmates were chatting in the room. One of the teachers asked the professor, who is your favorite student? OK. He says, I didn’t kutu. I was away. I was on tour at the time.
Jason Elkins (39:17.689)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (39:18.126)
He said, why, how come? His grades are not the greatest. You know, he’s scoring about 7, 8 out of 10 something. He said, yeah, but he was telling me something different. He was not repeating what I told you. You were just returning to me what you took down. No, you memorized them. You were telling me what I already know. He was not afraid of making mistakes. And this was a professor that I had a big fight in the middle of the class with everybody looking at us. And I left the class.
Jason Elkins (39:29.642)
Oh.
Jason Elkins (39:38.383)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (39:47.367)
Well, he probably respected that you were willing to kind of make your points, stand your ground. And, and I suspect, do you think that there is, I mean, sometimes people are afraid to take chances and go do things like become a tour guide. Um, and I was actually, I think where I want to go with this is a couple of things. One is, I don’t know how education works in Turkey. You’re, you’d mentioned that your family wasn’t always, didn’t always have a lot of cash around.
aydın kudu (39:53.154)
Yes.
aydın kudu (40:03.28)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (40:17.383)
Did you have, did your family have to pay it?
aydın kudu (40:18.014)
No, actually I had to pay for this 30 day touring, you know, on a bus. We had no money. We had only about one fourth of what was necessary. Me and my friend, we went to the manager of the course. We said, this is our situation. This, this, this can, can the amount be waived for us? He said, okay, guys, this is something between you and us. Promise me you won’t tell this to anyone. You too.
Jason Elkins (40:26.619)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (40:47.543)
And here we are right now on this podcast.
aydın kudu (40:52.079)
How much can you pay? Let’s say you’re talking about $1,000. We all need about $200. Okay, you pay that one. I’m doing this because I believe that you too will become great guides for the country. And that guy, I went to see him years later. He died a few years ago, actually. I thank him without his actually taking the initiative and I would not have made it, actually. By the way,
When I said university, okay, that was the university graduation. We still have to take a test for every one of those 13 subjects in the guiding course. So June 18th, 1987, I was graduate from both. Then I run straight to university Istanbul. I’d not attend the graduation ceremony. I said, I want to start working right away. So how do you find job? You go to one street, but most of the travel agencies in Istanbul used to be.
no telephone, no cell, nothing actually. You just go introduce yourself, you know, with some English and then, but no experience. And then usually they let you start working with the experience tour guide on one tour. I never did that. I started myself actually on city tours and then it got bigger and bigger. Then I, yeah, gone.
Jason Elkins (42:03.975)
Did you, at that time, did you need to have the guide certification program that you’d gone through in order to get a job as a guide?
aydın kudu (42:11.083)
Yes, yes.
You have to still so. Yes. Is it, you cannot. Yes.
Jason Elkins (42:15.507)
Okay. I was just curious if that was a read. So that’s just the minimum requirement is you got to get the certification, which sounds like it was quite an in-depth course program.
aydın kudu (42:26.591)
which has to be renewed every year. Still, every year you have to renew it.
Jason Elkins (42:30.46)
Oh, wow.
Do you have to go back and take a continuing education type of class or you just have to submit your documentation or what does that look like?
aydın kudu (42:40.366)
There are some seminars you have to follow and then your chamber of guides or guild of guides actually they have to authorize you and there should be no criminal case against you.
Jason Elkins (42:50.827)
Okay. All right. That’s, uh, that’s cool. It actually sounds quite a bit more stringent than a lot of countries.
aydın kudu (42:58.15)
Actually, Israel, Egypt, Greece, and Turkey are serious. You cannot have a commercial operation without going through a travel agency and accompanied by a professional tour guide.
Jason Elkins (43:10.767)
Okay. All right. That’s fascinating. I appreciate you sharing that. So tell us about your first job. You said you were doing city tours, stuff like that, right?
aydın kudu (43:20.822)
I was a family of one person, you know, on a city tour, simple things, you know. When I look at myself right now, you know, I say to myself, how come those guys did not complain about my, you know, you know, inefficient English at the time, and then, you know, not doing everything like this, even though we’re trying, I think they must have felt that this guy is ambitious about what he’s doing. You don’t have to be perfect. Now after so many years.
Jason Elkins (43:45.253)
Yeah!
aydın kudu (43:49.782)
Do we tell more? No, we just talk much less, but maybe more efficient. We learned to work with less burden, with less labor, but more effectively. I think they could see that. That’s why they were very tolerant to us.
Jason Elkins (43:54.651)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (44:01.563)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (44:05.411)
Yeah, yeah. Well.
Jason Elkins (44:10.703)
Yeah, I’ve always believed that and I’ve had the fortune to be with a lot of guides doing a lot of different things in a lot of different places. And pretty much if the guide is enjoying the experience, I’m going to enjoy the experience. I can’t think, I can, I cannot come up with any examples where I was with a guide that was having a lot of fun and I thought it was a bad guide trip. If they’re, if they’re having a lot of fun, I’m most likely going to have a lot of fun. I don’t know if they…
Maybe half the stuff they told me was factually inaccurate. Maybe they didn’t show me the stuff they should have showed me. Maybe they were just making stuff up. I don’t know. But if they were having fun, I was gonna have fun. And I’ve always believed that even when I was guiding. If I’m having fun, my clients would have fun.
aydın kudu (44:56.918)
But there’s one detail actually, we were always actually made to think that leading large tour groups like 30, 40 people, because we also had a higher ego at the time, right? Hey, I’m speaking to a large group, you know, and that was a big thing. But later on, I can still do some of those, but I’m now interested in small groups. When you do small groups, individuals or families, there’s a lot of interaction right now. There’s a lot of dialogues.
Jason Elkins (45:09.212)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (45:26.666)
instead of one person talking the whole thing. Now we’ve learned in time, it’s not that what you want to tell them, how much they want to know. I just met an ex-client of mine in Santa Monica, he’s a lawyer, it might have been for lunch, I took him around for 10 days in the spring. On the first day, he’s coming from a very high end, you know, custom made travel agency in New York, and then we’re at a palace,
I’m not interested in those 15th century swords and weapons and this one, this one. What else can you show me? I said, what are you interested in? He said, I’m interested in records. Records vinyl? Okay, let’s take a boat. We went right across. We found this warehouse where the amazing repertoire of the records are sold and then he bought a lot of them and then he said, you know what? And he says, you know, he says, that’s what I wanted. I said, thank you for telling me. Sometimes people cannot tell. You know, thinking that.
That would make me feel… Some guys have very high ego. Oh, you are not here to learn what I’m going to teach you? You know, I would have felt bad if somebody asked me, forget the museum, take me to your street. I was, oh, really? But now who cares? You can still teach them everything, but everybody has different perspective. We have come a long way to find out, to find a good balance.
Jason Elkins (46:33.52)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (46:42.747)
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Elkins (46:53.183)
Yeah, I agree. And I think having the smaller group, the more personalized, you know, a small family, a couple, a single person, it gives you that ability to really go a bunch of different directions where when you’ve got 40 people, people aren’t going to, you know, that’s, it’s almost impossible to do that. Um, I think you can still provide a good experience, but it’s a totally different experience. So I get that. And I mean, and a lot of my travels. I’d be happy just.
aydın kudu (47:15.629)
Yes.
Jason Elkins (47:21.955)
a guide to take me to the market.
you know, to a fresh market or wet market or something in Asia and just walk through there. Like they don’t have to be an expert on the market, but they live in that culture. They live there. They can explain what are things and or just walking down the street sometimes. It doesn’t have to be like the historic part of town, just any part of town and walk into a tienda with me and show me some stuff, have conversations. It’s a good guide. I think can be a pretty good asset.
aydın kudu (47:34.187)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (47:54.025)
even if you pick them up and I think some people could guide in places they’ve never been. But I don’t think I think that flexibility and ability to change subjects and go look at different things like you said with the records is pretty cool. So
All right. So then you went from doing a lot of that to, I want to make sure we touch on while we saw a few minutes, I want to make sure we touch on kind of what you’re doing now as you know, as a travel designer, um, and also as filmmakers. So bring everybody up to speed. What’s, what’s your life looking like now?
aydın kudu (48:31.566)
From 1987 to 1995, and I was just doing guiding, you know, mostly tour buses all over the country and then working for about six, seven months a year, you know, spent about the winter months traveling, you know, here and there. And I’m a great solo traveler and then the, then with the big earthquake in Istanbul,
Jason Elkins (48:49.508)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (49:01.722)
and then I had someone who was working for National Geographic.
So they contacted me, they said, we have a photographer in Istanbul, we happened to be with his family, Reza, and then we also have a writer who would like this. Do you have time to take them around? I said, to travel with a photographer? Okay, what is it? I had no idea. So that thing turned into a kind of photography hobby, into a kind of more professional thing. And then film crews followed, whether documentary or kind of feature films. And then, so I was spent about,
three, four periods of every year doing the fixer work. You know, the guide in film industry is called fixer. So then I became involved with those. And then I said to my wife, wait a second, Noah, you know, we have a lot of ethnic groups in this country. And then, so we can actually make something.
Jason Elkins (49:48.781)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (50:03.142)
an intimate story because we are a part of that one. It doesn’t matter how much technically they are perfect, these guys, they didn’t get the subject sometimes, so they wouldn’t tell the way they want. So that pushed me and I bought my first camcorder and I shot, lived with the people in our next valley and then after about two months with them, I had about maybe 50 hours of footage. But then I said, okay, now we have the footage, what do we make out of this?
Jason Elkins (50:12.275)
Hmm?
Jason Elkins (50:32.605)
Uh-huh.
aydın kudu (50:33.43)
I mean, it’s like going to the market, buying all the whatever the market is selling, you bring it to your kitchen. Okay, so what are you going to cook with this? You know, soup or kebab? Baklava? What? So I said, okay, how do you tell a story? Oh, there’s documentary. What is documentary? Is it something that boring and lion is eating a cheetah? I mean, oh, the zebra, whatever. So I had to go to your course for two months and it turned out to be by another professor
Jason Elkins (50:43.769)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (51:02.134)
Makers Association founder, he’s teaching us the theory of documentary, which is summarized. You take a fact, you cut that fact into fragments, then you put those fragments together in a different reality.
Jason Elkins (51:04.656)
Uh-huh.
Jason Elkins (51:21.07)
Okay. All right.
aydın kudu (51:22.662)
And then he’s a kind of heartliner, actually. That was about two months. So then, wait a second, so, tourism has become a kind of, not a repetitive thing, it’s something that gives me funds to do something that I equally enjoy doing. So from being a freelance guide only, so me and my girlfriend then became my wife and then now still my business partner, we founded our own company. So Turkish Moon was a,
Jason Elkins (51:37.767)
Okay.
aydın kudu (51:52.214)
documentary filmmaking company, it became a travel agency as well.
Jason Elkins (51:56.887)
It seems like a perfect fit.
aydın kudu (51:58.206)
19 2010 yes.
Jason Elkins (52:00.719)
Yeah, I mean, it seems like the filmmaking, the documentary part of it even, and guiding and tourism, it all just seems to fit together well. I can imagine it would attract the same type of person like yourself, curious.
I’m not afraid to invade people’s privacy if we’re to circle back to the beginning of the conversation because I don’t think you could be a good documentary filmmaker if you were reluctant to get in people’s faces and get in their space and ask them questions that maybe might make some people feel uncomfortable. I don’t know. What do you think?
aydın kudu (52:19.058)
Yeah, yes, yes. Yeah.
aydın kudu (52:36.618)
I remember for the National Geographic Expeditions tours, they used to come about five or six times to Turkey and then, so if the number is between 15 and 24, we would go two persons. So my then wife is also a tour guide and then, so I asked her to come along. So we were doing the tour guiding and the lecturing things, you know, and then one of the trip evaluations, one man wrote…
Jason Elkins (52:53.777)
Mm-hmm.
aydın kudu (53:05.49)
I would get all of them, especially the worst and the best ones. One said, Heaven, Rhea and Aiden on tour was a perfect combination of Rhea’s low-key, quiet profile with Aiden’s exuberance. I said, exuberance? What is this word? I run to my dictionary, oh, okay, something good. So wait. My social skills.
Jason Elkins (53:08.973)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (53:19.793)
Yep.
Jason Elkins (53:27.372)
Uh-huh. Oh, that’s…
aydın kudu (53:33.438)
interest in interacting with lots of people, continuing the communication and then and her well educated and then the kind of the systematic knowledge create the synergy we made those films. Without her creativity and my interest and you know exuberance you know we would not have made any of one of those seven films today.
Jason Elkins (53:57.297)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (54:01.879)
I think that’s a huge key to success in many areas of business life relationships is to you know have a mix of skill sets. Sometimes it’s really hard to accomplish something when you have two people that are really exuberant outgoing and passionate that don’t necessarily have some of the other skills to actually make things you know complete projects finish things I am not speaking about you maybe a little bit myself but yeah I get that. That’s a that’s pretty cool.
aydın kudu (54:20.735)
Yeah.
aydın kudu (54:31.35)
So you want to know the verdict of all so many years and creativity? From a, I’m now a wonderful father and horrible husband.
Jason Elkins (54:36.538)
Yes.
Jason Elkins (54:42.091)
A wonderful father and what? Horrible. Yeah, well, I.
aydın kudu (54:44.766)
and a horrible, horrible husband. And then comes, OK, sign this paper. OK, what can I do?
Jason Elkins (54:51.563)
I think that if, yeah, I think that if you were to ask my ex-wife and my son, their view of me, I think my son would say he’s a great father and my ex-wife would say he was a horrible husband. So yeah, I get it. We, we.
aydın kudu (55:03.554)
Just another point that makes us common, you see? Apart from, we’re dressed the same color today. It wasn’t planned. Ha ha ha.
Jason Elkins (55:08.983)
Yeah, for anybody that can’t see this, we’re dressed alike. Aiden has a little bit more hair than I do on the top of his head, and I’ve got a little bit more hair on the bottom of my face, I should say. So anyway, Aiden, this has been a lot of fun. We’ve covered a lot of things. I have a feeling like we could probably do a bunch of episodes, and I wanna be respectful of your time, but I’m curious. What have I forgot to ask you? What should I have asked you? Or what do you think that the audience, our listeners need to hear before we wrap this up?
aydın kudu (55:15.986)
I was just going…
I pushed it forward actually.
aydın kudu (55:39.294)
about myself, what I do or…
Jason Elkins (55:41.331)
About anything, is there anything that you just feel like, man, I really, really wished we had discussed this. We didn’t get there, Jason didn’t ask me. Just kind of any final parting thoughts that you’d like to share.
aydın kudu (55:53.202)
You know the tourists always wrote to us letters and things that, oh you’re the greatest guy, this, this is. I would tell myself, he’s just been nice. Okay, I mean this guy traveled all over the world and then they must have seen, you know. After having, I had been coming to United States almost every year and then once or twice a year for meetings, for personal visits and then spending about half a year here the past six months and living in a sleeping community.
on the edge of LA County. Now I know why. We provided that interaction with the locals. That must be the thing, triggering these people, overrating our time with them or their time with us. It’s obvious. I’m telling my kids and trying to make that, not that this is perfect or that is perfect. It’s different. But something they could not buy by pain, we were providing that for free.
Jason Elkins (56:46.225)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (56:52.112)
Yeah.
aydın kudu (56:52.562)
And we did not know that was the fact that behind all that, you know, having a good time in there. I think so.
Jason Elkins (56:58.243)
Yeah, I agree. I think that’s a beautiful way to leave the conversation. Just it’s connection.
aydın kudu (57:06.117)
Actually, I was doing it maybe so not to get bored myself.
Jason Elkins (57:11.279)
Well, I guess that’s what we were saying before, is if the guide is having fun, you’re gonna have fun. And for most guides, I think the guiding naturally selects people that are interested in human connection. I mean, I can’t imagine why anybody would wanna be a guide if they didn’t like people.
aydın kudu (57:29.834)
I also have friends that say, I’m not involved, I’m not interested in people’s individual stupid stories. Okay, I want to say what I want to say, I want to go home. That’s why they’re not going out of Istanbul, they’re staying in Istanbul working with the cruise companies.
Jason Elkins (57:42.639)
Well, yeah, that’s a, I mean, there are certain places where there is an economic incentive to be a guide. It might be better paying than other jobs. If you look at tips in dollars, and there’s reasons that you might find somebody that’s attracted to the financial part of it. But the good guides, the ones that, you know, create.
aydın kudu (57:56.598)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (58:05.735)
a kind of a an ecosystem for themselves like you have and other people I’ve been interviewing on the show uh… it’s different we’re doing it for totally different reason and i and i
aydın kudu (58:14.478)
But you know, on tours, on tours in the land, you still make money, but you don’t talk about money. That’s the difference.
Jason Elkins (58:20.207)
Yeah, exactly. I get it. I hope that when I’m out with a group of clients, I’m getting paid. It’s nice when I get a great tip, but honestly, when I get home and I have a conversation with my family and they’re there, how was your day? I don’t mention the tip.
That’s not what I’m excited about. I’m like, oh my gosh, we, we saw this or we had a conversation. My client opened up about losing a child and, and the boat today. And we had this long, deep connection and conversation. And.
And that’s what it all comes down to for me. That’s why we’re having this conversation is I wanted to start a podcast to connect with people, both myself, selfishly. I guess I’m a guide in a sense that, I wanna have this conversation with you because I think it’s interesting and I’m gonna share it with the world and hopefully everybody else, not everybody, but somebody else will as well. And if they don’t, that’s okay too. And anybody that’s listening, thanks for being here. Aydin, thanks for being here.
Couldn’t do it without you. Appreciate you very much and look forward to seeing you in Columbia. All right. Yeah. It’s, we got it. We got it on tape and you know what? When you come down here, we’ll go find a coffee shop and we’ll record a conversation there as well. So that’ll be fun. All right, we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks Aiden. Aiden, all right, bye.
aydın kudu (59:24.322)
Thank you, Jason, for inviting me. Yes. Likewise. Thank you. Thank you. Absolutely. I will think about it. Don’t forget this is recorded.
aydın kudu (59:42.067)
Okay, alright.
aydın kudu (59:45.646)
Bye bye. Thank you. Bye bye.
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