Guest Bio
Karl Wilder is a chef, storyteller, and food tour visionary who has spent decades reimagining how people experience culture through cuisine. From his early days in New Orleans’ vibrant food scene to founding The Chef Tours, Karl has blended culinary excellence with travel, creating immersive journeys through cities like Paris, Berlin, Seville, and Istanbul.
His work with renowned companies like Eating Europe and Secret Food Tours set the stage for what would become his most personal project yet — small, intimate tours that bring guests face-to-face with local chefs, hidden kitchens, and rich food histories. Now based in Berlin, Karl crafts each tour to be more than a meal — they’re opportunities for deep cultural connection.
Beyond leading food adventures, Karl is also an author and food equity advocate. His writing includes two recent novels published by Vintage Pulp Press, and his advocacy work includes a well-documented challenge living on a food stamp budget to spotlight food insecurity. His approach to travel is personal, ethical, and full of flavor — just like his tours.
Show Summary
In this episode of the Big World Made Small Adventure Travel Podcast, host Jason Elkins speaks with Karl about how The Chef Tours creates unforgettable travel experiences through food. Karl shares his philosophy on culinary tourism, emphasizing the role of storytelling, connection, and intimacy in his small-group tours.
They explore Karl’s unconventional journey from chef to tour designer, how food can be a cultural equalizer, and why he believes travel can foster peace through human connection. Karl also offers a preview of new secret tours launching in Mexico City, promising rare access to local kitchens and culinary secrets most travelers never get to see.
Key Takeaways
- ✓ The Chef Tours are capped at six guests to ensure intimacy and meaningful connections.
- ✓ Each tour is built around stories — of chefs, dishes, and the cities themselves.
- ✓ Karl’s background as a chef shapes his deep respect for ingredients and local food traditions.
- ✓ Culinary travel can break down cultural barriers and foster mutual understanding.
- ✓ The tours go beyond food — they’re about memory-making and cultural immersion.
- ✓ Karl believes travel can play a role in peace-building by fostering human empathy.
- ✓ Guests often return feeling like they’ve made friends, not just taken a tour.
- ✓ Mexico City’s upcoming “confidential tours” will offer hidden culinary gems off the tourist radar.
- ✓ The Chef Tours differ from commercial food tours by focusing on depth, not quantity.
- ✓ Karl’s mission is to make food travel more personal, more ethical, and more transformative.
What You’ll Find on The Chef Tours
- Chef-led food tours in cities like Berlin, Seville, Istanbul, Paris, and more
- Deep cultural immersion through food and storytelling
- Small group sizes (max 6) for intimate experiences
- Exclusive access to local kitchens and hidden culinary stops
- Ethically designed tours that prioritize connection over consumption
- Special “confidential” tours including new routes in Mexico City
Learn more about The Chef Tours and connect with Karl at:
https://thecheftours.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 (00:01.338)
Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Big World Made Small podcast for the adventure traveler. Super excited to have everybody back today and super excited. I’m going to say to have my guest back. My guest today is Karl Wilder. Karl is the founder and director of The Chef Tours. Karl, I’m going to say welcome back and then I’m going to explain why I’m saying it that way. Welcome back to the show.
Karl Wilder (00:12.896)
Thank you.
Karl Wilder (00:23.406)
Well, I mean I can tell them we my my Wi-Fi was really really bad the day we tried to record this so I’m currently at a friend’s house where they’ve got fast Wi-Fi and Two dogs are playing in the background. It’s a wonderful energy
Jason Elkins (00:27.224)
you
Jason Elkins (00:40.338)
Well, wonderful. I’m so happy to do this again. We had a pretty nice conversation until we realized that the Wi-Fi wasn’t going to help us get through the end of the conversation. And unfortunately, what we captured wasn’t that great. So we’re going to start over from scratch a little bit. Obviously, we’re going to reference back to some of the things I already learned about you. Let’s start with, you said you’re at a friend’s house. Where’s your friend’s house? What country are you in?
Karl Wilder (01:04.974)
I am at the moment in Berlin, Germany, and I’m only about two and a half blocks from where I live. So just down the street on Rivala Strasse.
Jason Elkins (01:16.178)
All right, very cool. And you said you’ve only got a little bit time left in Berlin and then you’re getting ready to head to Mexico City, is that right?
Karl Wilder (01:22.284)
Two weeks from today, I will be on a train to Paris and then from Paris, Milou, the company mascot and I will be flying to Mexico City.
Jason Elkins (01:31.396)
Milou tell me Milou is a dog?
Karl Wilder (01:35.042)
Milou is a Boston Terrier and no tour goes on sale without his approval. He actually, he joins me on all the tours in Berlin, he’s joined me on tours in Seville when I was doing the wine tour there. He will be joining me on all the tours in Mexico City. And there are people who book just to meet Milou and I’m happy about that.
Jason Elkins (01:41.382)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (01:56.346)
All right, what is the name Milou? Where did that come from?
Karl Wilder (02:00.61)
Milou means snowy and it was the name of Tin Tin’s dog in the Adventures of Tin Tin .
Jason Elkins (02:05.636)
Okay, I am not familiar with TinTan other than I’ve heard of TinTan, but I don’t know this. All right, very, very cool.
Karl Wilder (02:11.48)
French comic. And he actually came to me named. I got amused.
Jason Elkins (02:17.318)
You got it. Okay. You got it used, but you said Boston Bull Terrier.
Karl Wilder (02:19.458)
I gotta use… they don’t use the term bull, it’s Boston Terrier. Yeah.
Jason Elkins (02:25.244)
Just a Boston Terrier, okay, very cool. All right, so Karl, you had told me a little bit about what the Chef Tours is all about, but most of our audience didn’t, none of our audience heard that, just you and I. let’s do that again. Let’s give our listeners kind of an idea of what the Chef Tours is.
Karl Wilder (02:37.356)
Nobody heard it.
Karl Wilder (02:43.458)
Well, I worked for pretty much every food tour company, Eating Europe, Secret Food Tours, et cetera. I designed food tours in more cities than I can count. And PJ and I, he’s my partner in Paris, worked together in all of those companies and we’re very good friends. He left Eating Europe and he called me and said, start the company. I want to go on my own. And that’s how the Chef Tours was born. He was the first one to do a tour. A few months later, I opened up in Seville.
And then we opened up in Istanbul and then I opened up in Berlin and next Mexico city. It’s different than taking a tour with a guide. We don’t have scripts. Each chef is giving you their experience, their story, their food. You’re meeting their friends, learning from other chefs in their city. So it’s very personal, very, very different. We also max out at six guests for most of our tours. So it’s a little bit of a premium experience. We’re not doing 15 guests and
You know, wearing the earpieces and wandering along, eating bites on napkins in an alley. They’re very personalized tours.
Jason Elkins (03:49.33)
How long is the average? I don’t know if there is an average, but I mean, are we talking two hour tours, four hour tours, 12 hour tours? What do your tours look like?
Karl Wilder (03:56.695)
No.
Karl Wilder (04:00.098)
It depends on the city. In Istanbul, it’s three and a half to four hours. In Spain, both of those tours are three and a half to four hours. Although I’m going to plug my favorite, the Nuevo Tapa tour. Chef Cristani has a lot of friends who are working in Seville who are reinventing tapa and coming up with new, bold, interesting flavors. So we’re not giving you a piece of omelet and potatoes brava. It’s just the food is incredible on that tour. That’s about four hours. In Berlin, it depends on the guests.
I’m shocked at how fast some Americans will eat. I take them on a 90 minute cultural tour and then serve a four to six course tasting menu paired with wine. And that I prepare all of it. I bake the bread. I literally do every step of the way by hand. If there’s pasta, I make it by hand. Rolling pin and knife. I’m like a either Martha Stewart or someone’s grandma or a little bit of both. And
Jason Elkins (04:33.234)
I’m not. They’re fast, aren’t they?
Karl Wilder (04:57.804)
That can be anywhere from three and a half hours to seven hours. Depending on the guests and how relaxed they are and how fast they eat. I had one group that was just so much fun from Australia and we were up until two in the morning. You know, we weren’t doing the tour anymore. We were just having wine and drinking and having a great time. So totally depends. That tour has been three hours and it has been seven hours. In Paris, there are two different tours.
PJ’s grand daytime two tour, which is typically a six hour experience. It’s breakfast, then a walk through Montmartre learning how to shop like a French chef. Then he prepares a multi-course dinner at his restaurant. Cheese plate. Then they break out the bubbles and they go on a dessert tour. But sometimes if he’s got a group that wants to, they go back to the restaurant and have a little more wine. It just depends. We treat them like our friends. We don’t treat them like tourists.
Jason Elkins (05:50.263)
All right,
Well, that’s what I was going to say is it sounds like kind of a go hang out with a chef for half a day, sometimes maybe shorter, longer, but it’s just hang out, hang out with a chef.
Karl Wilder (06:02.552)
Maybe your whole day.
My favorite review that I got in Berlin was our evening with Chef Karl felt like we were meeting an old friend we’d gone to college with who happened to know everything about East Berlin and be a five-star chef. That’s the feeling I want people to have. I want them to feel like they’re at an old friend’s house and I want them to have that level of comfort.
Jason Elkins (06:26.512)
Are these, you mentioned a maximum of about six. Yep. Are these generally six people that know each other? Are these a mix of three couples or what does it generally look like?
Karl Wilder (06:29.294)
Six,
Karl Wilder (06:38.936)
Totally depends. We’ve had groups of five and then a single person booked. We’ve had groups of four, two couples. We’ve had a group of six that booked privately. This Thursday, I didn’t schedule a tour tonight on purpose because I have a lot going on. But on Thursday, we have three couples. Totally depends. The makeup varies. And we love our single guests. We invite single people to. You see there’s two bookings on a tour. Join us!
Don’t ever be afraid to join us as a single. We will make you feel at home.
Jason Elkins (07:13.074)
Do you have some groups that just end up being all singles?
Karl Wilder (07:17.92)
Only in Paris has that happened.
Jason Elkins (07:20.242)
Okay. And the reason I ask is like, I’m a single guy traveling the world. And I often think, you know, I’m a really, I’m a foodie. I like that stuff. I would love to go on a singles, singles afternoon with a chef or whatever, and meet other people that are interested in the same type of thing. I don’t know if that’s, you market that as a separate product if you’d have to, or what that looks like.
Karl Wilder (07:43.682)
We’d have to do it as a separate product and it would take a lot of effort. But what we do instead is we just invite singles to come. We make single tickets available and we do our best to make them feel like part of the family.
Jason Elkins (07:47.666)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (07:55.89)
All right, very cool. Are most of your guests self-labeled as foodies or how would you describe your typical guest if that’s possible?
Karl Wilder (08:05.228)
You know, the more tours I do, the less typical I guess become.
Jason Elkins (08:08.634)
Yeah, I knew you were going to say that, but…
Karl Wilder (08:10.484)
It’s it’s all right. If I had to go with the typical our typical demographic, let’s say is from the US Canada or Australia 50 to 60 years old loves food has taken a lot of tours and doesn’t want the same old thing. They want something new exciting and different
Jason Elkins (08:29.042)
I seems like this is an overgeneralization based especially on what you just said. I imagine two types of people that go on food tours. One is the type that maybe would sign up for cooking classes and that’s a very hands-on and wants to understand it. And the other one is like, I just like to eat good food and drink wine and socialize. Do you find that oversimplified?
Karl Wilder (08:43.35)
Yes.
Karl Wilder (08:52.482)
We get both. That’s true. No, it’s actually very true. Both of those are true. As a matter of fact, I had a guest last week and I said, you know, I was going to do this tonight, but I was running a little late. So how this instead and one of the guests said, come on, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Make it a class. And so I went into the kitchen and we filled sausage casings and twisted them off and then threw them in the oven and did some sausage for them.
because they really wanted that to be part of their experience. And that’s the great thing about a small group and being a chef. You can change it if you need to. That’s what she wanted, that’s what she got.
Jason Elkins (09:27.73)
And I suspect that you can mix those two types of food tour people because I’m imagining just growing up and just being a human that eats and just also likes to cook. One of my favorite things to do is to cook with somebody. And I’ve realized that cooking with somebody…
can mean different things. One is like they’re like all in like, hey, what can I chop? What can I do? What can you know that really wants hands on? And then there’s the other type that just likes to sit and drink a glass of wine and watch and have a conversation and doesn’t necessarily need to get their hands dirty, but enjoys being in the kitchen just as much. I suspect you see that as well, right?
Karl Wilder (10:06.892)
That’s what happened with this group. She came in the kitchen and she’s loading the grinder with the meat that had been seasoned for the sausage and she’s doing the twisting. She’s doing all of that and I helped her a little bit and the other guests are standing around with wine and watching her and just enjoying the process. They watched their sausage being made and it isn’t a tragedy as you might imagine.
Jason Elkins (10:15.1)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (10:23.152)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (10:28.024)
It’s because actually I think of making sausage is something that some people are really into and some people don’t want to have anything to do with making sausage or even watching sausage being made. But I guess people decide for a food tour probably more likely to at least enjoy watching it if not actually doing it.
Karl Wilder (10:46.134)
Yeah, they do enjoy watching it and some people enjoy doing it. I’ve also had guests that just want to help serve.
Jason Elkins (10:53.725)
Okay.
Karl Wilder (10:55.554)
They just say, let me help, let me help, let me come in the kitchen, let me help, let me help. And that’s fine, usually mothers.
Jason Elkins (10:59.334)
All right, yeah, that’s very cool. You… That rings a bell, I get that. And speaking of mothers and kind of sharing time in the kitchen, one of the things we discussed last time was about, know, kind of where did you get your passion from? Where did you, how did you get into cooking?
Karl Wilder (11:07.95)
Yes sir.
Karl Wilder (11:11.959)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Wilder (11:23.072)
Okay, my mother swears and has a Polaroid to prove it. Then I started when I was two years old. My grandparents cooked and I was around good food, but my mother didn’t like to cook. She was a baker. She could turn anything into the most amazing cookie pastry or pie you can imagine. But when it came to, you know, making dinner, she opened cans. It was not her thing. She didn’t enjoy it. It wasn’t fun. You can see one of the dogs in the background. So she…
Jason Elkins (11:45.724)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Wilder (11:52.738)
did, she kind of let me do my thing in the kitchen. She helped me. She showed me how to turn things on and off, how to use a knife. And that was kind of where it ended with her. And I learned a lot from my grandmother, but I started cooking very young. By the time I was 10, I was cooking the meals for the family for the most part. I liked good food and I liked the way others prepared it. And I didn’t like canned asparagus. So I learned to cook out of self-defense.
Jason Elkins (12:17.266)
I would say I’m the same. My mom was going to school when my brother and I were younger and there were lot of evenings when it was just my brother and I. I really enjoy cooking for other people. My brother did not. So everything he made, he would dump a ton of Tabasco into it because he wanted to make sure that I didn’t eat it.
He was kind of protective of his food. So he would make it in a way that he knew I wasn’t going to eat it. um, which I was an older brother. was probably, there’s a reason he did that because I would sit back, let him cook it and then I’d eat it all. And, he got annoyed with that. So when he started doing that, then I had to figure out my own, you know, uh, kind of, kind of like you, I had to figure something else out. Cause I wasn’t.
interested in his food anymore. It was just too much effort. So had to learn how to cook on my own. Do you remember kind of some of those first meals and those first things that you started to make?
Karl Wilder (13:16.482)
Yeah, I think I told you this the first time we were recording and it’s kind of a funny story. My mother knew that I was interested and she got me the Betty Crocker Children’s Cookbook and it had a recipe for mocha brownies and the recipe said one cup coffee. And so I being I think five or six at the time took a cup of coffee grounds and put them in the brownies which were then completely inedible. No one could eat them, not even me. They were disgusting. And my mother said, well honey, I think they meant brewed coffee.
Jason Elkins (13:41.298)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Wilder (13:46.618)
I wrote a letter to the editor and I showed him how much my mother had spent on the ingredients a dollar 83 and if not now it’d be 20 in the US but this is how much we spent on this and your recipe is wrong it says coffee it does not say brewed coffee we’re kids you have to be specific and I got a letter back with two singles taped to the letter two dollar bills saying you are absolutely right
All future editions will have that corrected and I have a young boy going over the entire cookbook making sure we are clear about every recipe and we will never release another kid’s cookbook without having a kid editor and I thought that was really kind of him. I was always writing letters to people when I was a kid because when you’re a kid you have no fear and you expect a response, But your parents always give you that. The first time I made baguettes
Jason Elkins (14:24.134)
Yeah
Jason Elkins (14:41.34)
Yeah.
Karl Wilder (14:45.47)
they didn’t come out right. They were awful. And I wrote Julia Child a letter and I said, Julia, I’m following your recipe. These are not good. It does not have the same taste as in Paris. And I got a letter back from Julia with an ad from Cook’s magazine for French hard red wheat flour hand milled. And she said, order this flour. And I think you’ll get the results you’re looking for.
Jason Elkins (15:06.642)
you
Karl Wilder (15:11.214)
You know, I’m so sorry. We tried to make it for US audiences. So we did all purpose flour, but it will never be what you’ve tasted in Paris. And so she said, let me know how they turn out. So again, my mother wrote a check to this company. We sent it off back of a magazine, envelopes and stamps. Remember those people and the flour came. made the baguettes. They were perfect. lot of work, but beautiful. I wrote Julia and she sent a postcard back. Bravo chef.
Julia Child with her big straw. And I never meet them again, they’re too much work.
Jason Elkins (15:45.114)
I can imagine the challenges of creating a cookbook full of recipes maybe that are popular in France and work well with local ingredients in France, but then trying to market that cookbook in the US knowing that if you say you need this particular type of flour,
Nobody’s going to buy the cookbook or they’re just not going to use it or they’re going to whatever complain that, well, it’s full of ingredients we can’t get. But they probably didn’t count on a young man who’s had baguettes in Paris or in France to even know the difference. So yeah.
Karl Wilder (16:25.196)
Yeah, so that would be why I suppose I mean it was good bread, but it just didn’t taste like a baguette This is our company mascot. By the way, this is me do
Jason Elkins (16:30.962)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (16:34.874)
All right, very cool. Big boy.
Karl Wilder (16:37.89)
He’s big for a Boston Terrier. He’s 11 kilograms. Yes. Thank you very much for all the kisses.
Jason Elkins (16:42.482)
Yeah. So for those of you that are listening, Karl’s got Milou right there on his lap and joining us here on the show. So do you still at this point, when you, well, actually I guess I want to ask, do you even use cookbooks anymore? What is your, do do? Okay. Because I know some people kind of act like, oh, well, when I get to the point, I know how to cook. I don’t need a cookbook.
Karl Wilder (17:01.839)
yeah.
Jason Elkins (17:09.552)
I don’t need to measure anything. I don’t need to do anything other than… Okay.
Karl Wilder (17:11.714)
don’t measure anything unless I’m doing something that specifically requires that, that I’ll wait.
Jason Elkins (17:16.742)
Like baking, right? Is that the difference between baking and cooking?
Karl Wilder (17:20.29)
That’s what everybody says and I don’t find that to be true. I’m sort of the Nora Ephron School of Baking. If you take flour, yeast, water, salt, what’s going to keep it from becoming bread? So I just kind of make up bread recipes right and left and they’ve all been good. But for some things, yes, I would like for Mrs. Fortner’s brownies, she was someone who taught me how to make brownies properly in Omaha, Nebraska. I would follow Mrs. Fortner’s recipe, exactly.
And for other things I will follow a recipe exactly but what I love about cookbooks is inspiration. I Never thought of that. I never thought of that. Let me try that Let me try that and so that’s where cookbooks are for me right now It may be something I didn’t think of or something. I forgot, you know, and you go For instance, there is a do you know pasta grannies?
Jason Elkins (17:53.529)
inspiration. Yep.
Jason Elkins (18:11.377)
No.
Karl Wilder (18:12.462)
Pasta Granny’s is a web series and they show grannies making specific pastas in specific towns of Italy. And they’re all pretty much in their 90s, some over 100. And there’s a wonderful recipe that I had made for me when I was in Italy, more years than I would admit to have been being alive ago. And it’s a lasagne roulade.
And I never made it, but I had it and I remembered how good and beautiful it was. So I saw that on pasta grannies and decided to make it.
Jason Elkins (18:44.082)
All right. Have you had the experience of being, I don’t know, either in a close friendship, romantic relationship, live in relationship with somebody who always uses the recipes and always follows everything to the minute details and then gets frustrated when things don’t work out the way they expect? I’m thinking of my mom. I don’t know if she’s gonna be listening to this, but my mom is always…
she gets the recipe and she’s got to buy everything exactly the way she’s told and she measures everything and she puts a lot of time and effort into everything she cooks and then is never happy with the results. Have you been in relationship with someone like that? that ring a bell?
Karl Wilder (19:29.804)
No, when I was married to Eugenia, she didn’t cook at all. So she could make toast and salad. That was it.
Jason Elkins (19:38.002)
Okay. But she was probably, was she happy with that? She didn’t care, right? Yeah.
Karl Wilder (19:42.094)
Yeah, she was an architect. She’s a brilliant woman, she let me do all the cooking. She could make toast and salad. But no, I’ve never been with someone who tried and got frustrated. Usually they just turn it over to me. You cook. I don’t I don’t bother.
Jason Elkins (19:56.686)
I’ve just, always found it interesting because I’m just much more of a, I like the recipes for the inspiration, kind of like you’re saying, and you take it to a whole nother layer or a whole nother level, of course. But I very, very rarely measure anything. I just kind of look at it and think, oh, that’s kind of an interesting combination of things. And then I pretty much set the book aside and put things on the counter and just start working.
and I just find it so relaxing and enjoyable and I don’t even taste things and this is probably not a good thing and probably why I’m not a chef is I don’t taste things until the end because I love the surprise. Like you know and I see people taste things as they go to decide if they need to add more of this and more of that and I’d rather just spend an hour and a half and make something and then eat it and think man that’s really salty.
Karl Wilder (20:25.44)
Okay.
Karl Wilder (20:49.422)
You know how comfortable I’m so confident at this point that I don’t taste things when I’m serving to guests. I just know what I’m doing. I just don’t. know what it is. What did you just remind me of something and now I’m blanking. All right. Go on.
Jason Elkins (20:50.812)
than actually to test as I go. I don’t know.
Jason Elkins (20:58.15)
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Elkins (21:05.97)
Do you, let’s discuss kind of your upbringing a little bit more. We talked about food, I understand your mom didn’t enjoy cooking, was more into baking, but you kind of bounced around a little bit. You’ve lived in a few different places. You mentioned that to me last time. So where did things start for you and how did you get to where you are?
Karl Wilder (21:21.262)
My mother was married to a man in the Navy. And we lived for a little bit of time in, I think Arlington, Virginia, but we were always in Bethesda, Maryland with my uncle. We lived for a little bit of time in San Diego, but I have no memory of that. And we lived in New Orleans, which is where my…
That’s where I was formed. I’m in the wall of the board baby. You can meet back there. like, never left the place. And I, my friend’s mother’s all cooked and they cooked like nobody’s business. I mean, the best fried chicken you ever had pickled fried chicken. You know, you, yeah.
Jason Elkins (21:57.931)
Mm, mm, that’s interesting.
Karl Wilder (22:00.34)
Seriously, pickled fried chicken. would, because we, where we lived, didn’t, the electricity was not always stable, just like my wi-fi the other day. So, they would put the chicken or the pork whatever in a pickle brine and then they would fry the chicken pickled and one of my favorite preparations I ended up doing in my restaurant in New York, that was pickled fried chicken dipped in crushed potato chips on a po’ boy.
Jason Elkins (22:24.122)
Nice. So let me get this straight. So when they pickle it, that’s for preservation. So they’ll keep it in the pickling brine for how long? this like that’s how they…
Karl Wilder (22:32.685)
Well, say they’re going to make chicken that evening, they’ll put it in the brine in the morning, put it in the refrigerator, hope the power stays on. Power doesn’t stay on, they know it’s not going to spoil. So about six hours maybe in the brine. So it’s not super pickly, but it’s got a real nice tang to it. And it’s very chickeny. Well, back then chicken was chickeny in the US. Now it’s all agronized tofu.
Jason Elkins (22:38.981)
Okay, all right.
Jason Elkins (22:58.876)
You know, I remember my grandparents, probably my great grandparents, and I remember even my dad talking a little bit about canning meat. Obviously they can’t meet, you can go to the grocery store and you can see a can of meat or some, you know, everything from spam to different meats, I guess, that are in a can, but they used to actually do that. Maybe you go shoot a deer and you cut it up and you…
Karl Wilder (23:11.33)
Right.
Jason Elkins (23:26.13)
can it, I guess the same way you do vegetables and stuff. Is that something you ever got involved in?
Karl Wilder (23:30.318)
Oh, God, yes. My friend Jason used to hunt in New York and he would bring me a whole elk or a whole deer and I would get out the bone saw and start breaking it apart and we would wrap it and freeze what we could. But I canned a lot of it. So what I would do with the canned stuff is I would take some pork fat, maybe for chili, would grind up the deer. So, you know, there are only certain preparations you can use it because when you can, you put it in a hot water bath. So.
Jason Elkins (23:52.793)
Karl Wilder (23:59.438)
it’s cooked. But then I would top the ground elk with pork fat and put the broth in there and then seal it up in the bell jar and put it in the water bath until it was processed and jar and the seals were tight. That would keep for two, three years.
Jason Elkins (24:17.508)
Okay. Did you, so how did you go from a child who was kind of left on your own devices to figure out how to eat good food that you were interested in as opposed to canned asparagus? How did you go from that to becoming a chef? I’m just kind of curious about how your career progression, like when did you decide that you wanted to be a chef?
Karl Wilder (24:39.338)
sure you want this well it wasn’t so much a decision as a calling i’ll tell you what i was doing is your audience mostly adults
Jason Elkins (24:50.034)
I think we, when I upload these, I don’t put explicit, I don’t check the little box for explicit content. So you share what you want to share.
Karl Wilder (24:55.122)
It’s not ex- was dubbing movies for what might have been the mafia and a lot of those movies were of an adult nature in San Francisco. It was also the time of 976 recording so I was making a lot of those. Do you know what those were?
Jason Elkins (25:13.796)
Is that, I.
Karl Wilder (25:14.754)
There were one minute recordings that were intended to stimulate someone on the other end of the line.
Jason Elkins (25:21.69)
Okay, well put. think I’m picking up what you’re throwing down. All right. So you’re doing voice work for this.
Karl Wilder (25:26.058)
Okay, you know, so I had a lot of a whole bunch of voices, mister, you know, et cetera. And so I was hired to do all of these movies. Every piece of crap ever made was being put onto video cassette for the U S market. So I was doing the horror movies for blockbuster, et cetera. And because I was doing all that, I had time and I had time and I went to culinary school. And then from culinary school, I went on vacation.
Jason Elkins (25:32.846)
You
Karl Wilder (25:52.987)
for two weeks in Venice and I had my first risotto. It had shaved white truffle and a duck egg.
It was the most glorious thing ever. So I asked the chef if he would teach me how to make it. My Italian was almost non-existent. My primary word was, scene. I said yes to everything. And I was invited to come to his kitchen at 10 a.m. the next morning. I went in and he gave me onions to peel and chop. And I’m doing all these onions. And then he’s asking me if I had familia, familia. And I said.
Jason Elkins (26:11.164)
you
Karl Wilder (26:26.894)
No, no, familia. Oh, and then he just put his arm around me and walked me to his house. We were taking our three hour lunch break. His son spoke some English and I said, I was going to learn to make risotto. This is my last day. He goes, no, it’s not your last day. You are working for my father. You want him to teach? He teach, but you are working for him. You are working through carnival. And I said, I don’t have a place to, I mean, I’m leaving tomorrow. He said, no, not going leave tomorrow. You changed your ticket back then. You could actually change your ticket.
Jason Elkins (26:32.828)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Wilder (26:56.552)
So I called the airline, I changed my ticket, I moved in with Tomas’s sister because her son was away at college and she had one of those gorgeous villas in Venice and I worked for a month in Venice thinking I was going then home again and I was not. No, you know, now you go to Verona because this person’s brother is having a baby and they are taking a month and you are working here.
Jason Elkins (27:22.886)
You
Karl Wilder (27:23.554)
So I called the airline and then I called Joe and I said, Joe, I know you have a lot of movies to dub. know I’ve been gone for a month, but I’m staying in Italy, think for a while. They’re telling me they want me to go to different places and learn more. goes, no problem, kid. I got people all over Italy. We’ll find you.
Jason Elkins (27:44.496)
Hehehehehe
Karl Wilder (27:46.038)
And it was literally that simple. He, I had recording studios and closets and garages and spare rooms all over Italy set up. I got a bunch of people involved. you know, people who were traveling with the opera, et cetera, doing other voices for whatever. would be the Bella Lugosi fake. And then someone else would play the screaming woman with an operatic scream. I was writing scripts. I was directing and I was cooking. And this, I spent three years in Italy just being sent from place to place.
It so that is how I became a chef really cooking school was great. It helped me with knife skills and herbs But living in italy and being passed from kitchen to kitchen is how I really learned
Jason Elkins (28:26.076)
Did you, I don’t know if I should ask this, but maybe the statute of limitations is over, but did you overstay your visa? Things were different back then, huh?
Karl Wilder (28:32.654)
Visa? Who had a visa? Yeah, it was actually the, I was not thrown out of the country, but when I was making pizza on the streets of Rome and I had no papers, it was suggested very nicely that I leave. But I begged, at this point I spoke, you know, Italian, I begged them to let me stay one more month because I never got my vacation and I was going to the chef’s grandmother’s place in Sicily for a month. see, you must have your vacation.
When you leave you check in with the airport. When I checked in at the airport with this person I was supposed to check in with, he came out and he goes, my god, I just lost, I forgot how many lira, you know, they had no value. So many lira on a bet, I bet you no come and you no check in with me and they say you are here, you are making me lose money. And then I got caught by security because the little beagle came around and snipped my luggage and I had an entire prosciutto, I had
Jason Elkins (29:22.546)
you
Karl Wilder (29:30.648)
garlic, had blood oranges, I had all these things in my suitcase. And they said, it’s not permitted. And he walks away with my suitcase. Just walks away. And I’m standing there going, what is going on? And then he comes back and he goes, so I got for you all of the right permits and stamps so you can, we know you love the foods too much. You can’t leave behind. So I had got an agricultural permit and all the right stamps showing it had been inspected, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was able to get it back into San Francisco.
Jason Elkins (30:01.586)
For a shootout smuggler, huh?
Karl Wilder (30:03.993)
prosciutto garlic blood oranges I had a whole Yeah, I was packed with food mostly, you know, I was young 20s who needs clothes Most of them had worn out while I was there anyway
Jason Elkins (30:18.93)
So you go back to the States and you’re continuing to do your voiceover work, the dubbing, all this stuff, or what happened then?
Karl Wilder (30:29.214)
Soon after that, yeah, I continued some of that work, but I’ve done 7,000 films at that point. So there wasn’t a lot more for me to do. I’ve done some recently. A recording engineer says, oh, he can do that. You know, if they need it, or if they can’t, or something like this, they can call on me and I can do her. So, yeah, I will occasionally get a call to do something now or to hit the low notes for a singer who can’t hit low notes, only high notes, and they’ll morph us.
I’ve done a few of those even since I’ve lived in Germany. go, I know a guy and they’ll Google me and find me. So I still do that occasionally, but I moved to New York. I got a job working the breakfast shift at the Hotel Majestic and was soon fired for being late chronically because, you know, I couldn’t get up at five. And then they moved me to pre-theater where I ended up working for several years.
Jason Elkins (31:17.458)
Breakfast shift is pretty tough for some people.
Jason Elkins (31:26.834)
Okay, so what is pre-theater?
Karl Wilder (31:28.312)
Pre-theater in New York is a super busy shift where you have to put out massive quantities of food in a short period of time. Everyone comes in at 630 has an 8 o’clock curtain.
Jason Elkins (31:38.83)
Okay, gotcha, gotcha. Did you like living in New York?
Karl Wilder (31:44.856)
For a long time, yes. I’m not upset not to be there anymore, but I did love it while I was there. It’s changed a lot, but in the, dare I say, 80s, it was a rollicking good time.
Jason Elkins (31:52.412)
What did you?
Jason Elkins (31:59.644)
I’ve heard it’s changed. I mean, I’ve spent a little bit of time in New York, probably not too much in the 80s, but enough to know that things were a little different back in the 80s. What did you, I’m gonna, I don’t know why, but I’m gonna ask you, what did you like most about New York that you can share with us? And what did you like least?
Karl Wilder (32:20.258)
What I liked most about New York was the arts and the culture and the theater. What I liked least were the filthy subways and the, in my later years living there, I left 10 years ago, the massive quantities of homeless people. The U.S. doesn’t have any social safety net to speak of and…
People are just living everywhere on the streets and it’s so sad. And I would try to feed people, take food, make sandwiches, this, but you can’t. The problem was so enormous, I felt like I was dropping a pebble into the ocean, the difference I made. And it just kind of destroyed my soul a little bit to see this level of poverty and uncaringness. And people don’t realize that most of those old men begging for money on the streets are veterans who couldn’t get a break or were really damaged by their
quote, service. People love to say thank you for your service, but they don’t realize the devastating psychological toll it takes on people to become a killing machine. And they often aren’t able to function. And I think we need not, know, asylum is like we used to have, but we need a place for all of these damaged people to go where they’re cared for and maybe loved a little bit.
Jason Elkins (33:35.334)
Yeah, yeah. And that seems to be the case in many places in the US now. I think for a while it was kind of, we maybe thought of New York or maybe even LA, but you see that and you go to a place like Portland, Oregon or Kansas City or just about any place it seems like, so don’t know if it seems like the problem’s getting worse or if I’m just more aware of it. It seems to be, right?
Karl Wilder (33:57.164)
It’s getting worse. The official figures post lockdown were 600,000 new homeless.
because they stayed, I mean, they shut down the country, didn’t give people what, 600 US dollars and said, well, moratorium on eviction, well, the moment the lockdown were over, people who had lost their job due to this were evicted and they had no savings because they’d spent it living during those lockdowns. And so they claim it was 600,000. I think it was three or four times that. I don’t believe that figure at all. I think that’s one of those many fictitious.
U.S. figures.
Jason Elkins (34:38.482)
Yeah, there’s a lot of fictitious figures. When you left New York, did you stay in the States or where did you go from New York? Okay, all right. So you haven’t really lived in the States then for, you said about 10 years.
Karl Wilder (34:45.368)
Berlin.
Karl Wilder (34:51.022)
10 years, 10 years, yeah, was 10 years in March.
Jason Elkins (34:57.542)
What took you to Berlin?
Karl Wilder (35:01.652)
You know, it was a lot of things. I have relatives here because, you know, Karl Wieder, my dear father, I have a lot of German relatives, but they’re not the sole reason, although I have had been in contact with some with Facebook. Berlin, here’s what I thought. I thought that the world was going to some pretty dark places and we know that it is. And I thought that Germany would never be stupid enough to get involved in another war. I was wrong about that.
But that’s what I thought. I thought this is probably the safest place on earth because they will never get involved in another war. They’ve learned from this. Well, we’re finding out that maybe they haven’t and they’re upping their military and Ursula von Linden, who’s the head of the EU, desperately wants a world war.
So it is, who knows what will happen here. I hope it does not happen. I’m very anti-war, period, end of story. Doesn’t matter where, doesn’t matter why. Sit down at a table and work it out. Because how do you end war? With a treaty. Start with a treaty. Start with the treaty. Say, all right, we are having this big conflict. Let’s sit down and work it out. We’ll do the treaty now before we have a lot of young men murder a lot of other young men. There’s no point to war. It’s the stupidest thing ever created by man.
Jason Elkins (36:20.454)
What do you think the answer, that’s one answer that you pose. What do you think the role tourism has in avoiding those types of conflicts?
Karl Wilder (36:30.368)
Economic. When you get into those kinds of conflicts, your economy dies. We’ve seen that in Israel. They, you know, other than their paid PR trips, their tourism is dead as a doornail. Everybody that that was doing tours there shut companies shut down. It’s horrible. And if Europe gets involved in a war, these economies rely on tourism a lot, especially in a place like Paris.
It’s going to be devastating for the local economy and the local culture. And I think that is one of the ways and tourism also, it opens you up to the fact that we’re all humans. We all want the same things. We don’t want to hate each other. We don’t want to kill each other. We want to sit down and have a meal together. You know, when I was with Secret Food Tours, I had a very challenging guest on the tour.
And she began the tour by spinning on the shoes of another guest. The other guest, I asked people your name and where you’re from. And she said, my name is Moira and I’m from Palestine. And the woman next door spin on her shoes and she goes, Palestine does not exist. She was from Tel Aviv. And that is how the tour began. And I was new to it. And I thought.
I should have just maybe sent one of them away, but I didn’t. said, ladies, you’re both on this tour together. I suggest you try to get along. If you spit at a person again, I will not only throw you off the tour, I’ll throw you in front of a bus because that’s unacceptable behavior. You know, I didn’t really mean it. I wouldn’t throw her in front of a bus, but I have a voice where everything sounds serious, you know? And so she straightened up a little bit and only Moira, the woman from Palestine was willing to talk to her and engage with her. The others just
Jason Elkins (38:08.56)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Wilder (38:19.082)
shut her off and so this nice woman from Palestine kept engaging with this woman and talking to her and passing her food and kind of killing her with kindness and at the end of the tour she said I’m sorry you exist and if you are from Palestine then it must exist that was a nice way to say goodbye
Jason Elkins (38:20.7)
Yeah.
Karl Wilder (38:42.808)
That really touched me because that was so hard for her. I could see she had been ingrained with this political ideology and to admit the humanity of another person like that, whom she didn’t want to admit the humanity of, really touched me.
Jason Elkins (38:44.358)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (38:58.0)
Yeah. People, I don’t mean this in any disparaging way, but in my experience, the people that have not traveled tend to have the most deeply ingrained stereotypes and attitudes about other places. And I’ll admit even people in my family have had conversations with people in my family. I travel full time.
Karl Wilder (39:13.347)
Yes.
Karl Wilder (39:22.062)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (39:22.77)
It’s important to me. I have a podcast called Big World Made Small. It’s all about creating connections across this world to make it feel smaller. And that’s just part of who I am. Yet I have family members and friends that don’t travel that when I say I’m going to Georgia, I’m in the country of Georgia right now. Wow, that’s…
Karl Wilder (39:43.71)
love Georgia. Tbilisi is amazing. Tbilisi is amazing. I love that city.
Jason Elkins (39:47.942)
What’s that?
Yeah, and what I hear when I say I’m going to Georgia, after I explain to them where it is, they say, you mean it’s close to Russia. You shouldn’t go there. Those people are crazy. Or it’s close to Iran. And my gosh, Iran, those people are crazy. Please don’t anybody take this out of context, but it’s what people think when they haven’t met somebody from Iran. When they haven’t.
Karl Wilder (40:18.25)
I have been to Iran, I have been to Russia. I love Russia. I love St. Petersburg especially, but Moscow, just the subways is a spiritual experience in Moscow. They’re so, have you been to Moscow?
Jason Elkins (40:30.037)
I’m sure.
I have not the closest I’ve been is where I’m at now is in Georgia. And I remember in Tbilisi, they’ve got the old Soviet era subway right there in Tbilisi. So that’s the closest I can imagine to maybe being on a subway in Moscow. I don’t know.
Karl Wilder (40:36.866)
Wow.
Karl Wilder (40:47.864)
They’re beautiful. They’re just so beautiful. They’re all museums. Moscow is one of the cleanest, nicest, most beautiful, friendly, loving cities I’ve been to. And I wasn’t sure how they’d take me as an American. And I was not only welcomed with open arms, I was invited into homes, come to my house for dinner. You’ve never had stroganoff until you’ve tried my stroganoff. You’ve never had pelmini until you’ve tried my pelmini. It was the most wonderful experience for me.
Jason Elkins (41:09.276)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Wilder (41:15.714)
And what I realized was that the United States and Russia are twin brothers. They’re in this constant rivalry and they shouldn’t be, they should be friends because they are so much alike when you get down to it. And they both love Levi’s.
Jason Elkins (41:31.814)
Right. That’s the thing is we as people have way more in common than we have differences. And you can say, know, Russia and the US are very similar, you know, step brothers. But even if you look at, well, actually, I mean, I started this podcast when I was in Southeast Asia. It was my first trip to Asia. I’d been to a bunch of places and I’d always really wanted to go to Asia. So I was in Thailand and Malaysia and Bali and
Karl Wilder (41:49.934)
Thank
Jason Elkins (42:00.676)
what I realized was, especially in Malaysia, because it’s an Islamic country, and there were, you you go to the mall and there’s women walking around with the hijabs and sometimes even burqas, and they’re holding their kids’ hands and the kids are climbing all over their dad and these are, they’re no different, they’re just people, you know.
Karl Wilder (42:05.432)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Wilder (42:26.19)
They’re just people in different costumes.
Jason Elkins (42:27.388)
They love their kids. They love their wives and we can say they treat women poorly. And I’m not saying that there aren’t issues. Absolutely. There are issues. don’t want anybody thinking. Discounting anything. But, and in places people can be happy, you know, and they can be loving and, and a man in Malaysia can love his wife just as much as a man in the U S can love his wife and kids. And, and we’re all just people. And I thought.
That’s a big world because it seemed so far away that when I got there, I realized, yeah, it’s a long plane flight, but it’s really not that far away. And by me physically being there, my world got smaller. The plane flight’s still the same length of time, but my world got smaller. So that’s…
Karl Wilder (43:00.013)
Yeah.
Karl Wilder (43:07.17)
No.
Karl Wilder (43:11.842)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Wilder (43:17.826)
What we have to remember is, yeah, there’s issues and there’s women’s rights issues in many wisdom country, but they’re not our issues. They’re issues for those countries to deal with and evolve from. It’s not up to us to bomb their cities and destroy everything in order to say, all right, we’re bringing you democracy. Well, the US is not a democracy anyway, but let them work on their issues. If you go to Tehran now, you won’t see Burka or Hijab really much at all anymore because the women said, no, we’re done.
Jason Elkins (43:47.186)
even though it’s I think even though the law says they’re supposed to but they have yeah.
Karl Wilder (43:47.726)
It was it.
Yeah, but they’re done. They had a Velvet Revolution. They realized that it wasn’t the case in the 70s. They were allowed on the beach in bikinis. And they said, OK, we’re done. And they just stopped. And when they stopped, the leaders couldn’t do anything. If you’ve got 10 women, you can arrest them. If you have 1,000 women, you can’t do much.
It’s, know, if you’ve got 10,000 women, well, forget about it. So they change the culture one female at a time. And that they’re the ones that are responsible for changing their own lives and their own culture. We don’t need to come in there with bombs to try to change it. Have you been to Saudi Arabia?
Jason Elkins (44:31.142)
I have not. That’s a…
Karl Wilder (44:33.366)
I did a job in Saudi Arabia for a hotel. They wanted an American style diner and they, but they, don’t have pork, right?
Jason Elkins (44:41.276)
Hmm?
Karl Wilder (44:41.486)
They have lamb and they read an article in the New York Post about me perfecting lamb ham and lamb bacon when I had a restaurant in New York. And I said I’d love to take this to the Middle East. Well, they found it through, I don’t know, AI. I don’t know how they searched or how they found it, but they found me and I get a message on LinkedIn and we leads to a video call which leads to a month in Saudi Arabia. And
I was in shock. expected only slits for eyes because that’s what I saw in the airport on the airport staff. But when I got out into the country itself, most of the women looked like Barbara Eaton and I dream of Jeannie. There were not.
Jason Elkins (45:11.73)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (45:19.004)
Great, yeah.
Karl Wilder (45:21.716)
not a lot covered, there was hair and makeup and beautiful eyes and loads of color and it was very, very different than what I’d imagined it to be. And I did a great job for the hotel. One of the directors asked me if I would go to his place in the Philippines and teach his staff how to make the lamb bacon. And I said, sure, I’ll do another.
I’ll charge you for another week and I’ll go.” And he said, wonderful, wonderful. I will arrange my plane. I rode in a private jet from Saudi Arabia to the Philippines. I will sell my grandkids future for a private jet. I’m happy to do it. I completely understand now. It was amazing. And I had a great time in the Philippines. I love the Philippines. I stayed in a private resort. The guest house of the private resort to me was like a palace.
It was a five-bedroom guest house and I was the only one staying there but I had my own staff of three people. I mean it was ridiculous but it was a great time. I did a good job for them. They paid me well and I went to a culture that I never would have gone to and everything about it was not what I expected it to be.
Jason Elkins (46:34.738)
And that’s the thing, it usually isn’t what you expect. Which is the big eye-opener for me. I remember when I first started traveling full-time, I had worked in the tourism industry, I had been to a lot of places. But when I finally sold all my stuff and said, I’m just gonna go travel, the first ticket I bought was a one-way ticket to Columbia. And I remember, I grew up in the…
the 80s and the 90s and the stuff we saw on television in the US about Columbia was not like a travel brochure. It wasn’t like, this looks like a good place to go. But when I went, I had all these ideas of what it might be like. And then shortly after I got there, I realized, wow, my expectations were really completely wrong. just every day, I I spent a lot of time there.
And every day it was like, wow, this is so different than what I expected. And I came to love the country. I came to love the people. And had I never gone there, whatever stories I had would have never changed. So that’s just an example of when you go to these places, that’s when the stories can change. And that’s when our connections and our stories about other people can change. okay, yeah, tell us about that.
Karl Wilder (47:38.478)
Yeah.
Karl Wilder (47:49.314)
I’ve been to North Korea.
Karl Wilder (47:54.432)
Well, some things that you hear about North Korea are true. It is totalitarian. No question. It’s a dictatorship. It’s not communist, but it is a dictatorship. Kim Jong-un is a dictator. That is absolutely true. When you get there, you are given your own personal tour guide. And your tour guide, pretty much, when you go to bed at night, you are locked. You lock your hotel room. They also lock it. You’re locked in and locked out. So you can’t travel on your own.
but I had an offline language translator. I had to give them my cell phone when I arrived in the country. They hold that. They let me keep my passport and I had an offline language translator in a place they would never look. Don’t ask for details.
Jason Elkins (48:37.298)
Well, just tell me what an offline language translator is. I won’t ask you where you get it.
Karl Wilder (48:41.422)
It’s, well, can get them on, you can get them from Amazon at this point. They are, it downloads the languages you need and it can only hold a couple. And then it will translate them both written and verbal forms. So can have a conversation. And I thought there’s only one way to get rid of my tour guide and the tour guide was showing me a lot of things and it was interesting and it wasn’t what I expected. And people who don’t speak English were coming up to hold my hand.
Jason Elkins (48:47.575)
Okay, so it’s just a translator device.
Karl Wilder (49:11.234)
just like this and some young women would come up and kiss me on both cheeks and I thought these people are really lovely. They don’t see a lot of American faces or German faces in my case and they just want to make contact. So my experience of the people was really positive everywhere I was shown and I wasn’t seeing starving on the streets or anyone eating their dogs or cats or things like that but I wanted to ditch my guide.
So I asked if I could go to a Korean bath. I had a female guide. She’s not allowed in a Korean bath. Well, her assumption was they had my phone. I spoke no Korean that it was absolutely fine. I had my little offline translator and I took it in and started talking to everybody. And there’s so much propaganda around Korea. It’s North Korea. It’s unreal. And you know, I’m asking about all the people starving and they said, no.
Jason Elkins (49:43.762)
yep, yep.
Karl Wilder (50:06.786)
When food is scarce and sometimes it is because we are not we don’t have the same farmland as South Korea We get eight from China and it’s distributed by the government, but we’ve never had to go hungry China will send us rice and we have preserved vegetables. We preserve cabbage They do a lot of everyone does home preservation of food just like we talked about including meats and vegetables They all can it they’ve all got pantries set aside. So in February when food is running short
Jason Elkins (50:13.116)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Wilder (50:34.754)
They’ve got their supplies and then the food aid from China, is usually rice and maybe some onions, potatoes, other things like this that are easy to travel. So nobody’s starving to death. They don’t much care for Kim Jong-un, but they’re forced to respect him in public, but they say horrible things about him in private.
Jason Elkins (50:50.418)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Wilder (50:53.922)
They think he’s just crazy. And I said, would you like America to come in and sort of, no, no, we don’t want this. No. When America brings democracy, trouble follows. No, we would rather the system we have, even if it’s a little bit crazy, then have America involved in any way. And I said, is this because you have read propaganda about America? Maybe. I said, tell me what your feeling is and I’ll tell you if it’s true.
Jason Elkins (50:54.034)
you
Karl Wilder (51:23.202)
And they started going over, you know, governments the US has toppled with wars, you know, calling people dictators, everything, you know, and I said, okay, everything you’ve said is true. You’re right. I can see why you don’t want the US involvement. And they said, if we get involved with any government, we want it to be China.
Jason Elkins (51:30.982)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (51:42.854)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Wilder (51:43.928)
Things are good in China and they many of them have black market cell phones and they go near the border to use them and to communicate with relatives in other countries.
Jason Elkins (51:56.208)
You can’t knock them for seeing things that way. mean, it’s their perspective. You can’t knock anybody for seeing things, I guess, for their perspective.
Karl Wilder (52:02.39)
You can’t knock them through their perspective. You can’t knock them through their life. They know that they are, they have jobs, they have houses, they are fed. And they are content with what they have. They would rather have this than American style. Is it true you have people living on the street? We don’t have this. No one is allowed to live on streets. It’s very cold. They would die. Is it true that this happens? Is it true that they have a social safety net? They have good healthcare. Really good healthcare. I dropped a
Jason Elkins (52:10.343)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (52:19.878)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Karl Wilder (52:31.31)
cleaver on my foot when I was allowed to go in the kitchen and I had to get stitches right away and boy howdy was I seen immediately.
Jason Elkins (52:41.07)
It’s, we all just, it’s perspectives are such an interesting thing. It’s one thing that I became aware of here in Georgia was, you know, former Soviet Union member of the Soviet Union member country. not sure if member is the right word, but anyway, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, there were an awful lot of people here that were very hungry.
Karl Wilder (53:04.012)
Yes, I were.
Jason Elkins (53:04.386)
It disrupted a lot of things. And not just here, from Latvia to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and all these different countries that really disrupted their way of life. it went from, okay, we’re not really happy. We don’t want to be part of mother Russia or whatever. But when all that went away, there were some really tough times and there are an awful lot of people were thinking, man, I really wish the Soviet Union would come back into existence.
Karl Wilder (53:07.105)
all over Eastern Europe.
Karl Wilder (53:15.33)
Or
Karl Wilder (53:32.416)
In Berlin there are people who wish that.
Jason Elkins (53:33.906)
of miss that. Yeah, in Berlin even. Yeah, exactly. it takes a while for things to, yeah, know, it takes a while for things to like, okay, maybe things are starting to get better now. So then perspectives change. But I’m sure there’s still people here in Georgia that still reminisce about the good old days because their personal situation, you know, maybe the country kind of recovered from the fall of Soviet Union, but their particular
Karl Wilder (53:40.046)
Five years.
Jason Elkins (54:03.762)
situation didn’t necessarily recover, you know, you know, so it’s, so we all have, but the point is we’re all humans. We all want the same things. We all want security and comfort and, and love and, connection and all these things, regardless of where you’re from. And that’s where people just sometimes miss it when they don’t travel. So someone sitting in Des Moines, Iowa, that’s never left Des Moines, Iowa.
Karl Wilder (54:06.655)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Elkins (54:29.01)
You ask them about North Koreans and they’re going to think, oh no, I don’t trust those North Koreans. I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them. If I saw one of them, I’d walk the other way.
Karl Wilder (54:38.926)
Well, you know, I had something like that happen to me when I had the country club in New Orleans, where they were, someone was coming in and talking about, I think we should just blow them all up. And I said, you know, have relatives, I have relatives there. Well, except where you got relatives, we don’t want to those people. They’re probably nice. know, they just, there’s an attitude among some people that we should blow up the rest of the world because America is the best and anybody who has a different political system or a different perspective deserves to die for it.
Jason Elkins (54:48.646)
Yeah.
Karl Wilder (55:07.478)
And that’s something I’ve never understood. How does it harm us if another country is communist? How does it harm us if another country has a different system? It doesn’t. We are in no way harmed by this. Allow them to be them, then we can be us. And that’s, getting back to food, the fascinating thing about food. For instance, when you go to Spain, you see the Ottoman influence everywhere. When you go to Greece,
Jason Elkins (55:16.252)
Hmm.
Karl Wilder (55:33.422)
Greek food is Ottoman food. The food of Greece and the food of Istanbul is, they’re like brothers. When some of these bad things have happened, they have changed the population in good ways too. Sure, the Ottomans have occupied, you know, that’s such old history. I don’t know the details about that. But my guess is probably not. No one needs to be an occupying force, in my opinion. But they did and…
Jason Elkins (55:38.642)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (55:46.46)
Mm.
Karl Wilder (55:59.342)
Some of the culture was enhanced by it. So if we can get rid of the idea of war and occupation, but instead travel to enhance each other. Let me show you how I learned to make pasta in Sardinia with the rolling pin and the knife. Let me show you how to do that. Then you have that and you pass it on to someone. Let me show you how I learned to make focaccia in Firenze. this kind of focaccia. that’s the big puffy one. I like this one with the olives and the olive oil. You know,
Jason Elkins (56:18.642)
Yeah.
Karl Wilder (56:28.546)
The more we share, the less divided we are.
Jason Elkins (56:32.014)
And food, like you said, food is such a perfect example of that because how do you sit down and prepare a meal, a multicultural meal with people from different places and share the food and the techniques and the stories that go along with it and then still walk away at the end of it, upset with each other, use the perfect example, the woman from Palestine and the woman from Tel Aviv. know, it’s those two women.
Karl Wilder (56:34.881)
it unifies.
Karl Wilder (56:55.192)
Ready?
Jason Elkins (57:01.938)
probably never would have had a better opportunity to at least be civil to each other and to acknowledge each other as human beings than on a food tour. I mean, what other kind of tour would they have, you you could have walked, you could have walked through the streets and pointed out monuments and talked about the history of the city and da da da da da. And at the end of it, they still would have been just the same way they were at the beginning of it. But when you.
Karl Wilder (57:15.608)
Evermo-
Karl Wilder (57:25.886)
There would have been two people just following the leader, yeah, but they got a chance to interact and connect on a level and I could see it happen. I could see it in the angry older woman’s eyes that she had seen Moira as a human being at that point and valued the fact that she was the only person to speak to her on the entire tour. Everyone else shut her off. They were done with her after she spit and
Jason Elkins (57:29.361)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (57:42.652)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (57:48.081)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (57:52.198)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Karl Wilder (57:54.316)
You know, it’s it’s food is a connector and I think it’s a great way. I’ve had I had one group. They were from the UAE. So I made I got halal chicken. Just they didn’t ask for it. I got it because I thought maybe not everyone from the UAE is. And when when the tour began, they go, we want to be eating the meat.
We will just eat the other courses and I said don’t worry I got some halal beef tongue and I smoked that for the charcuterie and I have halal chicken for the fried chicken. You know halal? said of course I know halal. I said I can even show you the receipt from the butcher if you don’t trust me and they said no and they you know they took my hands and thanked me profusely for just looking at the reservation knowing where they were from and acknowledging them.
Was anyone else hurt on that tour, the two Australians, by the fact that the chicken was halal? No, of course not. It doesn’t matter. You know, it doesn’t matter to them. So you can do things to include people and make them feel special that don’t take anything away from your other guests. And that’s what I love about what I do now, because I’m not tied to a script. I’m not tied to a menu. I can dream up five courses that I want to make.
Jason Elkins (58:50.34)
Of course not. Yeah, yeah, it’s…
Karl Wilder (59:12.291)
And I just look at where everybody’s from and try to take that into account.
Jason Elkins (59:17.796)
One of the things that we had discussed last time that our listeners weren’t able to hear yet, but they’re getting ready to, is you had mentioned something about, you know, these are not food tours. We don’t have guides. We’ve got chefs. And we talked a little bit about the difference between a guide and a chef. And I actually posed the question, well, how do you get a chef that’s used to working in a kitchen or in a restaurant?
Karl Wilder (59:25.953)
Okay.
Karl Wilder (59:33.517)
Yes.
Jason Elkins (59:47.058)
to want to spend time with guests or how do you find people with the right personality? You had a really, really good response to that. So tell us, you know, how chefs are such a natural fit for this type of work.
Karl Wilder (59:59.214)
Well, when you’re in a kitchen, you’re always communicating to the people that you’re teaching. So you’re already a teacher. If you’re the head chef in a restaurant, you are teaching maybe an international group and maybe in a couple of different languages. Every chef I know from New York has kitchen Spanish at the very least. And you are naturally a teacher. You are naturally a storyteller. Additionally, if you’re an executive chef and you go out and you talk to guests, you
you’re not it’s just an easy thing you have to have the personality to relate and when you work in a kitchen you’re on your feet for anywhere from eight to 14 hours a day and it’s a really hard gig so it’s a nice way for people to get off their feet. Basak in Istanbul ended up going from the kitchen to becoming a teacher and now she does tours in addition to that.
because she’s a natural teacher and she teaches people as she guides them and they love learning that and they love learning from the other chefs that she knows, some of whom she’s taught, how they do this, why they do this, where this custom comes from. This comes from the Black Sea region, this comes from here, this is this and this is why this is this. They love that, the guests love it and the chefs love it. We love people, we love our customers.
I hadn’t been professionally cooking for years because I’ve been involved in food tourism since I moved here. I was working for Omni Media and some other publications, Huffington Post, and I was writing about food when I got involved with food tourism. And for me, initially, for the first couple of months, it was just a chance to get out of the house for three hours a day. I’ll lead some tours in Berlin with this company. But I thought, wow, this is such a good idea that I went to one of the partners and said, we need to expand. Give me
Jason Elkins (01:01:35.762)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Wilder (01:01:45.934)
$9,000 and I’ll open San Francisco, New York and New Orleans. We are talking about it. I said, 9,000, that’s all I need. I won’t even spend it all, but just to be safe. He hemmed in hard and then finally he put, said, if you don’t, I quit. Okay, let me do it. And so I became their expansion director and then I designed food tours in almost 50 cities. Istanbul, Hong Kong.
All over the world I was traveling. was, I remember being in Northern Australia when I had to fly from there to Boston because we lost a city manager and I had to go and deal with that. So I had some brutal flights in that period. When the lockdowns came, I think I slept for a week, but it was enormous fun for me to not be on my feet all day, to be telling the stories. know, when was the, how did I learn to make cured meats?
Jason Elkins (01:02:33.094)
All right.
Karl Wilder (01:02:42.286)
You know, how did I learn to make fried chicken from my grandfather? How did I learn this? How did I learn that? And I relate all that to people. They love it and I love it. I think it is the most natural pairing. And when you’ve got a guide and I don’t want to put guides down because I have worked with some excellent guides. Hello, Bridget. Some of them were really, really exquisite. Bridget, who I just mentioned, was a former history teacher and her tour in New York was on point.
Jason Elkins (01:02:59.41)
you
Karl Wilder (01:03:08.522)
And she treated it like a teacher. She again was a natural storyteller, loved teaching, loved sharing, and was probably the best tour guide I’ve ever worked with in my life. Seriously, she was brilliant at it. But with chefs, it’s just a different thing. We don’t have a script. We don’t remember talking points. you know, you can ask us a question. When did you first taste Camembert cheese? Do you remember this? Do you know that? And we have something to relate. So every time we do the tour, it’s new, it’s fresh.
It’s for those people, those six on my tour. That’s who I’m doing it for. So I don’t repeat anything.
Jason Elkins (01:03:44.307)
You know, the difference I hear when I listen to you is the guide is somebody that kind of is on the periphery that takes people and says, okay, here’s what these people are doing. Here’s what’s going on over here. They’ve got the script. Whereas the chef or any number of professions are, they live that life.
So a good, I don’t know if it’s a great example, but I was a fly fishing guide. But a fly fishing guide is interesting because a good fly fishing guide is also a fly fisherman. They live that lifestyle. If they don’t have clients, they’re going fishing. If they have clients, they’re going fishing with their clients. So it’s kind of their life. It’s like they live on the river and they live in that environment and the animals and the river and the trees and the nature.
Karl Wilder (01:04:30.914)
Right?
Jason Elkins (01:04:40.58)
It’s just their environment. So you’re just going into the environment with them as opposed maybe to, you know, compared to just, I don’t know. I don’t know if what I’m saying is making sense, but that’s what.
Karl Wilder (01:04:51.98)
No, it makes absolute sense because a lot of guides are gig workers. They’re doing something else. They want to be an actor. They want to be whatever. So they follow another guide for two or three tours leading part of the tour. That’s their training. Then they’re given the script. Remember the rest of it. Go do a tour. You know, not now know the stops, but for me, for instance, when I walk into our last stop here in Berlin, which is a restaurant that’s 150 years old and hasn’t changed in 150 years. First place I ever ate at when I moved here, Blick Bilderbar.
Jason Elkins (01:04:57.007)
Exactly.
Karl Wilder (01:05:20.876)
I go in, everybody calls my name. They welcome me. I go into the kitchen. I introduce the chef to the guests. I show them on the menu what it is they should eat if they want to order there. And it’s the only German restaurant left in my neighborhood in Berlin. And it’s, it hasn’t, there’s still the old heat pipes on the walls. The walls are made out of brick. Even the restrooms haven’t changed. It’s a metal trough from 1920. You know, it’s, it’s really wonderful for guests to experience that.
Jason Elkins (01:05:34.053)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (01:05:50.395)
And there’s kind of a, the restaurant culture, the food culture, which you know way better than I do, but my understanding is, you know, so for example, the restaurant staff after they close the doors, often their evening continues, right? They go out together, they party together, they maybe go to an after hours place, they spend time together. It’s kind of a culture that they’re part of.
or as opposed to sometimes guides are like, okay, I dropped them off at the hotel, I’m going home. I’m done.
Karl Wilder (01:06:25.854)
We don’t drop them off at the hotel. We don’t pick up or no food tour does that. It’s a central meeting point. Yeah, they just go home. Sometimes my meeting continues. So for instance, talking about the restaurant culture, I’ve got friends, actually the ones who are subletting my apartment when I’m in Mexico, who work at a restaurant around the corner. I get a text at the tour that looks like it’s coming to an end about 1030 at night, quarter of 11 saying, we are finished. You want to come for wine.
Jason Elkins (01:06:31.898)
Well, the, but just in general with guides, it’s like, okay, I’m done.
Karl Wilder (01:06:55.054)
And I said, can I bring my friends? Yes, of course. So I said to the guests, said, do you want to go out and have another glass of wine? We’re going here. Yeah. That’s the difference. They become a part of my world and I welcome them to my world. So, you know, just harking back on my best review, it felt like an old friend. That’s the experience we want to give every guest. It feels like an old friend who just happens to know what they’re talking about. It doesn’t feel like a tour.
Jason Elkins (01:07:03.014)
Yeah, that’s the difference, right? That’s the difference.
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (01:07:21.766)
Yeah. Right. I love that. And we’ve got a lot of great tour operators that have participated in this podcast, listened to this podcast. It’s probably a little different than what we’re talking about. What do we talk about? Never want to say negative about guides because there’s amazing guides, but the amazing guides are the ones that share their lives with their clients, not just show up. I mean, I went on a tour here in Georgia, a friend of mine.
Karl Wilder (01:07:38.542)
are amazing. I love them.
Jason Elkins (01:07:50.931)
said, oh, we booked this tour. We’re going to go do a wine country tour. Would you like to go with us? And it was like $12 for a day. And I’m like, okay, this is going to be a good tour. So I go and there’s 16 people on a bus and they drive us from gift shop to gift shop. And at the end of the tour, like I was sitting there thinking, it feels really weird for me not to tip a guide. Cause I’ve been with so many amazing guides. was a guide and
I was like going through this whole thing in my head as like, really wasn’t very good and just did not do anything that I expected from a guide. And then the bus full of a stopped on side road. She got out cause apparently her house was close by. She got out wave goodbye everybody and just closed the door and walked home and the driver took, she was done. Yeah, she was done. And
Karl Wilder (01:08:39.512)
she was probably getting kickbacks of chops.
Jason Elkins (01:08:45.414)
The driver drove us another 10 minutes to the meeting point and dropped us off. And I was like, I didn’t even have to come up with any thoughts about the tipping because she was so checked out that she wasn’t even going to say goodbye. Like in any personal way, you know, I can never imagine saying goodbye to my clients like that. Just like, okay, I’m done. I live here. Goodbye. See ya. Good luck. The driver will take. yeah. And if they, if they don’t, feel like something like.
Karl Wilder (01:09:05.474)
Most of my tours end in hugs.
Jason Elkins (01:09:14.448)
I don’t know. just even, you know.
Karl Wilder (01:09:16.214)
Yeah, you if you can’t I want to connect with them. I you know, I’ve already got several people I give my card they’ve sent me emails they say let me know when you’re coming to when you’re going to be in and I absolutely will because When you have a small group you remember who they are. I remember their names. I remember where they’re from I remember who didn’t eat their vegetables
Jason Elkins (01:09:39.719)
Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s so great to have those small groups. And that was one thing that was nice about fly fishing guiding was you had a maximum of three people, but usually it was two people. You’re with them all day. They share stuff with you that they’ve never shared with anybody sometimes, especially when it’s just you and some guy who can’t talk to his brother, his father, his friends at work, his wife, his sister.
and he gets in a boat and you’re on the Yellowstone River and he’ll just start sharing stuff with you that he’s never shared with anybody and it’s great and it’s more it’s not about the fishing it’s about the connection and yeah and
Karl Wilder (01:10:17.941)
It’s about the connection and that just nailed it. That’s exactly what we try to give people. A connection to not only to us as the chefs, but a connection to the history and the culture of a city through its food. That’s what we want to give them.
Jason Elkins (01:10:32.774)
Yeah. Sounds like a great place to end it. And I want to, I do want to, I do want to ask you this though, Karl, cause we could just keep going and going. We’ve discussed a bunch of things. I’m sure I missed some things that would have been great. We’ll have to come back and cover those. But is there anything that I forgot to ask you or you wish that I’d asked you or anything that you want our listeners to know about you about upcoming exciting things in Mexico city, maybe for example, or anything like that before we wrap up?
Karl Wilder (01:10:38.028)
Thank
Karl Wilder (01:10:47.202)
Yeah.
Karl Wilder (01:10:59.916)
Well, yeah, we have one type of tour that we call our confidential tours. So we have a Walmart confidential. We have a Istanbul confidential and we’ve got Mexico city confidential. Well, no, can tell you, I can tell you in the locations that we go to on those confidential tours, don’t have websites, can’t be found through AI.
Jason Elkins (01:11:13.234)
but you can’t tell us about them because they’re confidential. So why did you start this? What are you talking about?
Karl Wilder (01:11:24.3)
They’re the places that you have to live in a city or be very familiar with the city to know they even exist. So that’s what I mean, I’ve got a, I won’t say what it is, but the back of a laundromat with a secret knock in Mexico City, which is where I’m going to be taking people on the confidential tour. The confidential tours are very special because they are, you will never get that anywhere else because other people don’t know it.
If I hadn’t spent more than a month in Mexico City working for a hotel and training some staff blah blah blah blah blah they all took me to the places I would never find on my own. That’s my tour. That’s my tour. I’m taking people to the places they would never find and that for me is the joy of it because I know they can’t get this anywhere else. I know it.
Jason Elkins (01:12:12.838)
Yeah. And those are the things. Yeah. Those are the things because, and you just feel good because you know that they know, like, man, we never would have had this experience if we hadn’t connected with Karl. And those just feel good just so they know. And you don’t even have to tell them. You don’t have to say, you never would have found this on your own. It’s obvious. It’s so freaking obvious.
Karl Wilder (01:12:28.172)
Yeah.
Karl Wilder (01:12:35.274)
No, no, you don’t have to know it. Yeah, they know it because the daytime tour is the same. don’t, it’s not the confidential tour like the evening because there’s less alcohol, confidential has a good amount of alcohol, but we it’s in Bella Vista. No other food tour or tour of any type is in the Bella Vista neighborhood in Mexico city because it’s a Mexican neighborhood. It’s not a tourist neighborhood. So we don’t need.
Jason Elkins (01:12:48.132)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (01:13:02.128)
Mm-hmm. Which is where I’d want to go. I don’t want to go to the tourist neighborhood.
Karl Wilder (01:13:06.656)
Right, so we’re not looking at the tourist monuments. We’re not going to the typical places. We’re going, you know, I’m studying my Spanish night and day to, because I, there will be no English spoken with the vendors. And I know that. It took several months of lessons in Sevilla and I’m studying it now. And I’ll have a tutor when I get to Mexico city, one hour a day to just keep my conversational skills up, et cetera. But that tour is very unique because
Jason Elkins (01:13:20.443)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jason Elkins (01:13:33.554)
Mm-hmm.
Karl Wilder (01:13:36.206)
They’re not going to see other tourists. They’re not going to see any other gringos.
Jason Elkins (01:13:40.211)
Do you have, maybe you don’t want to discuss this, maybe you’ll ask me to add this out later, but do you have like a non-disclosure agreement that is part of the booking process or how do you keep another tour operator from booking into your tour? I mean, cause those are concerns. I hate to say it, but they are. What are your thoughts on that?
Karl Wilder (01:13:59.672)
They’re pretty easy to spot because yes, we’ve had that happen and they’re usually people who are doing want to do an Airbnb tour and they want to copy it and they’re easy to spot. so what I say to them is I’m so sorry to have you on this tour because we’re not going to our usual places tonight. And I say this privately.
We’re going to different because there was a plumbing problem here. So everything I show you is going to be different from our regular tour. I can tell you’re in the business and you’d want to know this. So I basically destroyed the tour for them.
They’re so easy to spot with their questions that I make them think that what they’re getting is not the right experience and often times they drift off after one or two stops because their goal was
Jason Elkins (01:14:42.578)
Okay, and hopefully they’re not listening to this conversation.
Karl Wilder (01:14:45.587)
I didn’t matter if they are because I’ll still do it to them. You know, it’s.
Jason Elkins (01:14:49.614)
Yep. And in Mexico, you’ve got contacts. You can make sure that if they ever show up there again, yeah, uh-huh. There you go. Very cool. Karl, fascinating conversation. I actually expect to be in Mexico at some point here in the next several months. So I’d love to, love to connect with you and have a tequila or Michelada or practice our Spanish together or whatever, whatever comes out of it. But.
Karl Wilder (01:14:54.208)
I have enough contacts and if somebody steals my tour, I got a new one next week.
Karl Wilder (01:15:08.625)
Absolutely.
Karl Wilder (01:15:17.09)
And you’ll get to meet my little mascot here. He goes on every tour with me.
Jason Elkins (01:15:20.058)
Yes, very, very, very excited for that. He looks like he’s excited. He’s going to love Mexico. Has he been to Mexico?
Karl Wilder (01:15:27.182)
He has not been to Mexico yet. He’s been to San Francisco, he’s been to Istanbul, he’s been to Spain, he’s been to Hungary. I’ve only had him a year or so, you know.
Jason Elkins (01:15:37.958)
Maybe he’ll enjoy some of those little cute chihuahuas that they have down there in Mexico. Very, very cool. Karl, thank you so much for taking time out of your day, especially twice now to come back. This conversation was much better than the first one was starting out, especially with the internet connections and all that. We were able to freely discuss without pausing and restarting and pausing and restarting. I appreciate your patience in coming back.
Karl Wilder (01:15:42.494)
He loves other dogs. The whole time we’ve been talking, he’s been playing with his best friend.
Karl Wilder (01:15:51.31)
Absolutely.
Karl Wilder (01:16:01.004)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (01:16:07.92)
sharing your story and look forward to collaborating with you on some projects in the future. Thanks Karl.
Karl Wilder (01:16:11.976)
All right, Jason. Bye bye, virtual handshake. Bye bye.
Jason Elkins (01:16:15.154)
All right, talk to you soon, bye.
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