Jeff Johns World Exploration in 48 Hours: A 'What Doesn't Suck' Guide To Adventure Travel

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Jeff Johns once landed at an airport and genuinely had no idea what country he was in until the pilot announced it. That was deliberate. It's the philosophy behind everything he and his wife Anne have built with What Doesn't Suck — one of the most quietly brilliant adventure travel platforms on the internet.

Over a decade of 48-hour escapes from their Dubai base, Jeff and Anne filmed 25 episodes across the world on nothing but iPhone 7s — no tripods, no lights, no microphones. Just two people showing up somewhere new and figuring it out. The result was 15 million views and a blueprint for honest, high-quality travel storytelling. In this episode, Jeff reflects on what it truly takes to turn a life of wandering into meaningful content — and how to know when to put the
camera down and just be there.

From being held at gunpoint in a Malaysian gambling den to getting detained by military police in Tajikistan, Jeff has navigated the kind of situations most travel bloggers carefully avoid mentioning. His advice on brand partnerships, audience trust, and the slow art of building something that actually lasts is as practical as it is refreshing.

What You'll Learn:
• How Jeff and Anne built 15 million views on What Doesn't Suck using only iPhone 7s — and why they never outsourced the editing
• The 48-hour weekend travel system they developed from Dubai: how to be at the Pyramids one  week and in Tajikistan's Fan Mountains the next
• What it actually feels like to be held at gunpoint in a Malaysian gambling den — and what  Jeff learned from it
• Why most sponsored content deals are a trap — and the Eastpak relationship that offset 50% of  their six-month world trip
• The single most important question any new content creator should ask themselves before posting  anything
• Why Jeff's memoir — Jet Lag Junkie — took over four years to write, and what two decades of unintentional expat life looks like when you finally put it on the page

JEFF JOHNS | Travel Filmmaker, Content Creator & Author
Website: whatdoesntsuck.com
YouTube: youtube.com/@WhatDoesntSuck
Instagram: @whatdoesntsuck
Facebook: facebook.com/whatdoesntsuck
Book: Jet Lag Junkie: Unfiltered Tales of a Compulsive Wanderer (available now)
Pay It Forward: All Hands and Hearts — disaster volunteer organisation operating worldwide allhandsandhearts.org

ABOUT JEFF JOHNS
Jeff Johns is a travel filmmaker, documentary producer, and one half of the adventure travel
platform What Doesn't Suck, which he built with his wife Anne Mugnier. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he spent a decade in Los Angeles studying visual journalism before living two years in Thailand, four years in Dubai, and eventually settling in the Netherlands with his family. He has produced content for the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and the BBC. His memoir, Jet Lag Junkie: Unfiltered Tales of a Compulsive Wanderer, chronicles two decades of
unintentional expat life and global adventure.

Chapters
00:00 Jeff Johns & What Doesn't Suck — introduction
01:15 How it began: Dubai, a pinky promise & a trip to Thailand
02:33 Background: Washington DC, LA, Southeast Asia & life in Dubai
04:24 The 48-hour guide format & filming on iPhone 7s
08:38 Inspiration: Anthony Bourdain, The Layover & cultural perspective
12:55 Dicey moments: Malaysia gunpoint & Tajikistan military detention
15:36 TV career, life in the Netherlands & work-life balance
18:50 Bucket-list trips before settling down: Everest, Bolivia & Greenland
26:44 Pausing What Doesn't Suck — strategy, COVID & content quality
30:08 Advice for new adventure content creators
35:59 Brand partnerships: Eastpak, Hertz & what makes a good deal
40:19 The book: Jet Lag Junkie — two decades of travel on the page
43:28 Call to Adventure: go somewhere you know absolutely nothing about
45:22 Pay It Forward: All Hands and Hearts disaster volunteering

For full show notes and links, visit: adventurediaries.com/go

Transcript

[CHAPTER: Jeff Johns & What Doesn't Suck — Introduction — 00:00]

[00:03] CHRIS: Jeff Johns, welcome to the Adventure Diaries. How are you?

[00:10] JEFF: I'm doing great. Thanks very much. Excited to be here — and I'm sorry that I am the lesser half of What Doesn't Suck.

[00:18] CHRIS: Oh, not at all. As a way of a short introduction: you are one half of the duo behind What Doesn't Suck, and the other half being…

[00:26] JEFF: Indeed — my wife Anne.

[00:29] CHRIS: Yeah, excellent. So where's Anne? Looking after the kids, I assume? Where are you today — Amsterdam, Netherlands?

[00:34] JEFF: After the little ones, indeed. It's bedtime around here.

[00:41] JEFF: I'm in Haarlem, close to Amsterdam.

[00:56] JEFF: Just a bit, just a bit.

[00:59] CHRIS: About half the countries in the world, by the looks of it — 93 countries or so? Is that right?

[01:05] JEFF: Yeah, about that. It's been a wild ride.

[01:10] CHRIS: So when did What Doesn't Suck start — about a decade or so ago?

[CHAPTER: How What Doesn't Suck Began — Dubai, a Pinky Promise & Thailand — 01:15]

[01:15] JEFF: Yeah, it started in early 2015. Anne and I met in Dubai, randomly, just after I had moved there for a job. She had just finished her master's and randomly started at the same small company I was working at. We met, hit it off, had a sort of secret romance in the office, and in our spare time started travelling together. We actually pinky-promised each other on our first date — which was technically a business meeting that turned into a date. When we'd only known each other a few weeks, I promised to take her to Thailand. You know that Bill Murray quote about getting on a plane with someone and seeing the world — if you still love them when you land back at JFK, propose? I thought: there's nothing that puts a relationship to the test like travel. So that's really where the love affair — personal and for travel — started. When we got back, we were so excited to keep going. We thought, let's channel this into something. What Doesn't Suck was an idea that came around somewhat naturally. After seeing all the negative comments that fill the internet about everything, we said: well, what doesn't suck out there? Let's try to feature that.

[CHAPTER: Jeff's Background — Washington DC, LA, Dubai & Southeast Asia — 02:33]

[02:33] CHRIS: How long were you in Dubai? You're from the States, aren't you?

[02:40] JEFF: Yeah — born and raised in Washington, DC. Spent a decade in Los Angeles getting my degree in visual journalism and photography, working in documentary film production and television production. I lived two years in Southeast Asia, in Thailand, after that — and then moved to Dubai for a web TV start-up I was working at. So my whole background is in television production and travel photography to begin with. I ended up in Dubai for four years. Anne had been there two years before me, so she was there for six.

[03:15] CHRIS: Was it a big decision to give up the job in Dubai and go for the travel lifestyle and blogging?

[03:26] JEFF: Dubai is an absolutely fascinating city — a very exciting chapter in our lives. It's also a very transient city; lots of young, unattached people live there for a short while on tax-free salaries and then often go back home. But we found it an amazing place to travel from. Something like two-thirds of the world's population lives within an eight-hour flight of Dubai. We could be in Beirut one weekend, at the Pyramids the next, and at the Taj Mahal the weekend after that — all just a two- or three-hour flight away. With the budget airlines in the region, places that had always been on the other side of the world for me were suddenly right on our doorstep.

[CHAPTER: The 48-Hour Guide Format & Filming with iPhones — 04:24]

[04:24] CHRIS: That was going to be one of my questions — how accessible those places were. Dubai was your hub. You've been to some phenomenal destinations. Tajikistan stood out to me because I'd actually had a guest on talking about a hiking trail there.

[04:50] JEFF: Yes — in the Fan Mountains. Exactly.

[04:53] CHRIS: What was that like?

[04:55] JEFF: It was really amazing. I became increasingly interested in finding places that were a little off the beaten path, a little less known. That's how we ended up in Sudan, how we ended up in Tajikistan. We would wait for airlines to release new fare schedules, look at all these cities and countries we'd heard nothing about, and that was the approach with What Doesn't Suck: let's put a French girl and a, let's say, curious American guy on a plane, drop them in the middle of a country they know nothing about, and if they can figure it out — maybe we can inspire others to do the same.

[05:55] CHRIS: Did you have a theme, or did you spin the wheel on the map? Was it all about cheap airfare?

[06:14] JEFF: A combination of cheap airfare and flight times. In Dubai, the working week was Sunday to Thursday, so Friday and Saturday were the days off. We'd ask: if we leave work Thursday at five, can we fly overnight and land somewhere Friday morning? And land back a couple of hours before work on Sunday? That's how we planned many of our adventures.

[06:53] CHRIS: You've got a whole section on 48-hour guides, haven't you?

[06:59] JEFF: Exactly — that's how our 48-hour guides came to be. We landed one weekend in Beirut and started filming a little bit. With my background in documentary production and our iPhone 7s in our pockets, we thought: let's just film 48 Hours in Beirut. Over the next few years, we filmed 25 different 24-hour [CHECK: some sources say 48-hour] episodes all over the world — all with two battered iPhone 7s. No microphones, no lights, nothing fancy.

[07:35] CHRIS: Did you have a storytelling approach, given your background?

[07:44] JEFF: Having a background in television production really helped me understand what to capture in order to tell a story properly. There needs to be a beginning, middle, and end. You need to hint at things early. You need to keep people engaged — we were shooting for Facebook and YouTube. Over time we got much, much better. Our first video in Beirut in 2016 is a bit rough around the edges, but by the time we got to Greenland and Albania a few years later, we'd added a drone and some GoPros and really figured out how to tell a more compelling story.

[CHAPTER: Inspiration, Anthony Bourdain & Cultural Perspective — 08:38]

[08:38] CHRIS: Are there any shows or travel writers you've tried to emulate or that influenced your work?

[08:48] JEFF: The easy cliché answer is Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations — that's the gold standard.

[08:55] CHRIS: The Layover as well — the 48-hour format always reminded me of that.

[09:02] JEFF: Yes, that as well. But Anthony Bourdain was a huge inspiration — someone who really just embraced a new culture, embraced strangers, showed up and saw what a place was truly about, and got off the beaten path. That's the kind of travel we love.

[09:22] CHRIS: He's a phenomenal human being. It's sad he's no longer with us. Some of his quotes about sitting down with someone you disagree with, having a drink or two and getting immersed in the culture — it's a shame he's gone.

[09:42] JEFF: Absolutely.

[09:44] CHRIS: Is there any culture or location that resonates with you particularly? And has anything taken you outside your comfort zone — made you think, "I shouldn't be here"?

[10:02] JEFF: Coming from an American perspective, I grew up in the 1990s believing America was number one. Travel slowly peels that away. Spending time in Southeast Asia — especially Thailand after the tsunami in 2004, which was my first real solo travel — completely broke up my whole perception of the world. Then moving to the Middle East, a culture I knew nothing about, was another opportunity to push those boundaries. Every place gives you little pebbles of perspective that broaden your view of the world.

[11:44] CHRIS: Is there anywhere you've revisited — somewhere that left such a lasting impression you've been back?

[11:56] JEFF: I'd have to say Thailand. It had such a huge effect on me. A big part of my heart is in Phuket — that's where I spent that time. I ended up living there again in 2013–14, and Anne and I have been back multiple times.

[CHAPTER: Dicey Moments — Malaysia Gunpoint & Tajikistan Detention — 12:55]

[12:55] CHRIS: Is there anywhere, or any situation, that took you completely out of your comfort zone — where you thought, "This has been a bit dicey"?

[13:09] JEFF: I've definitely ended up in some very dicey situations. I was held at gunpoint in a Malaysian gambling den on a layover — a harrowing experience. And in Tajikistan, I was detained by military police at the airport when we left, which got pretty intense as well. But there hasn't been any culture in and of itself that's made me feel uncomfortable. There are good and bad people everywhere, and people who'll take advantage if they can. I often say I've felt more uncomfortable in Los Angeles than I ever did travelling around the world.

[14:22] CHRIS: Were you filming when you were detained? I've had guests mention strange situations because of a camera.

[14:34] JEFF: From all my filming experience, I've had some dicey situations with large crews in the Middle East — working on shows for National Geographic Abu Dhabi and Discovery Channel Arabia in places like Morocco and Saudi Arabia, where we really had to watch what we were doing. Those early lessons taught me what to do and not to do. One of the reasons Anne and I embraced filming only with our phones is that it doesn't look obvious — no tripods, no big equipment, no lights or microphones. We just looked like innocent tourists who didn't know any better.

[CHAPTER: TV Career, Life in the Netherlands & Work-Life Balance — 15:36]

[15:36] CHRIS: Your TV life sounds like it took you to fantastic places. Do you miss that? Are you fulfilling that itch through what you're doing now?

[15:50] JEFF: I work for a large e-commerce travel company here in the Netherlands, so I still work in the broader travel field. We've now got two little ones running around, so jumping on a plane to the other side of the world for a weekend needs a bit more planning. I had a lot of fun in TV, but I did that for nearly 20 years. There will be another chapter for adventure, but right now isn't that time.

[16:32] CHRIS: Swapping Dubai for the Netherlands — you've got Schiphol Airport nearby, which gives great accessibility. In the US you could fly five or six hours and still be in the same country. In Europe, that same journey gives you different languages, different cultures, a completely different experience.

[16:55] JEFF: It's fantastic. My daughter and I are flying to Copenhagen this weekend, just the two of us — she's only three and a half, so she won't remember much of it, but it'll be wonderful. My wife's family is in France, easily accessible. My parents actually live in Ecuador, and there's a direct flight to Schiphol from Ecuador. When we were looking at where to settle after Dubai, Amsterdam ticked a lot of boxes.

[17:53] JEFF: We never say never — we have no idea what comes next. It's very strange to imagine a forever home, especially in a country that's neither mine nor my wife's. But with young children, you do what's right for them.

[CHAPTER: Bucket-List Trips Before Settling Down — Everest, Bolivia & Greenland — 18:50]

[18:50] JEFF: Anne and I were very aware, as it became clear we were going to get married and start a family, that our life was going to shift. So we really looked hard at the experiences we truly wanted to have before settling down — the ones we didn't want to regret missing. Being close to so many places from Dubai, we flew to India and did the Golden Triangle. The next weekend, we flew to the Great Pyramids and I proposed out in the desert. We just kept going — where are the places we really want to see before we settle down? When we left Dubai, we saved aggressively for a year and then travelled for six months, filming as we went. We did a month-long road trip in the US, went to the salt flats in Bolivia and Machu Picchu, visited Greenland to see the nature there, spent a month in Indonesia, and the grand finale was trekking to Everest Base Camp in Nepal. That cleansed the immediate need to tick off the experiences we'd always dreamed of.

[20:43] CHRIS: That's quite a lot to cram in. Did you feel burnt out or just fulfilled?

[20:52] JEFF: Six months is a lot of time, so we weren't rushing. We spent a month in South America, a month in the US, six weeks in Indonesia. After years of 48-hour trips, having six weeks somewhere felt extraordinary — we could rent an apartment, rent a motorbike, really take our time. And a lot of those 48-hour trips were little investigations: where do we want to live? Are there other countries we might fall in love with? Every traveller does it — you walk down the street and immediately wonder what an apartment costs here. During those travels we spent time in Amsterdam and thought, wow, this ticks a lot of boxes.

[CHAPTER: What Doesn't Suck Strategy — Pausing, Purpose & Content Quality — 26:44]

[26:44] CHRIS: What are the plans for What Doesn't Suck? Are you getting a chance to work on it alongside the day job?

[27:11] JEFF: What Doesn't Suck had a really popular period, and then our time in the Netherlands coincided with COVID, lockdowns, and the arrival of our daughter — all at the same time. It went on the back burner for a bit, but also gave us time to pause, which felt long overdue. There is an enormous amount of travel content being created every minute on every platform. Something important to us is feeling like we're inspiring people to travel and creating unique content — not just churning out material for the sake of it. So we took a step back and asked: how can we continue to provide real value? The 48-hour concept was fantastic, but we'd done about 25 of those episodes, and it was taking increasingly longer and longer to film and edit them. When we moved to the Netherlands, I spent about nine months with editing as my full-time job — just working through months of footage that hadn't been touched. It was a lot of work.

[29:01] CHRIS: Did you not consider outsourcing the editing?

[29:09] JEFF: Everybody asked that, because of course it wasn't sustainable. If the two of us were going to be the face of the brand, we had to do the travelling ourselves. When we're filming, we already know in our heads exactly how it should be edited — how all the little pieces will splice together. Downloading that into someone else's brain felt like it would lose some of the magic.

[CHAPTER: Creating Good Adventure Content — Advice for Aspiring Creators — 30:08]

[30:08] CHRIS: Did you ever struggle with wanting to experience a location versus capturing it on camera — that balance between experiencing and recording?

[30:35] JEFF: Absolutely, and there are real parallels with having a young child — wanting to capture every moment but also wanting to be in the moment. Anne and I remember many trips because we've seen the videos so many times. But for roughly every trip we filmed, there's one we didn't film. Hiking to Machu Picchu, the salt flats in Bolivia — lots of trips where we said, this time, we're just not filming. We'd also go somewhere for a week, film for 48 hours, then stop and spend the rest of the time just enjoying. Because it really does have an impact when you're constantly angling for the establishing shot of the sunset and your partner is saying, "Can we just sit down and have a drink?"

[32:00] CHRIS: For anyone inspired by your locations and adventures, maybe wanting to get into content creation themselves — what advice would you give?

[32:17] JEFF: Figure out what your voice is. What are you trying to say? Who are you trying to say it to? What value is somebody going to get from following you? Stay away from chasing trends. Make sure your content is high quality, unique, and serves a purpose. If you're on different platforms, find ways to vary the content and incentivise your audience to follow you across platforms — create something specifically for each one, not just the same post everywhere. Ultimately, it's a sea of content. If you're doing what everybody else does on all the same channels, you'll just get lost.

[34:10] CHRIS: I love the idea of diversifying content per platform. You see creators posting the exact same thing on Instagram, Threads, and X — it doesn't add anything; it just fractures attention.

[34:40] JEFF: Test different platforms and let your audience tell you what they value. There may be people following you on one platform who don't follow you on the others, and they're there for a specific reason. We did a lot of polls — we'd put one up on Instagram and have people vote on where they wanted us to go next, or we'd show up somewhere and ask: do you want us to film here? Yes or no. If people said no, we didn't do it. It's a two-way relationship, and engaging your audience is critical.

[CHAPTER: Brand Partnerships — Eastpak, Hertz & Tourism Boards — 35:59]

[35:33] CHRIS: Yeah — invite them in, make them feel part of it. So did you do any collaborations or brand partnerships on your travels?

[36:03] JEFF: Yes, and something many travel content creators learn when they start growing an audience is that brands will reach out. You'll build your media kits, put together your social numbers, start creating sponsored packages — and then you'll get pitched things that seem absolutely insane and have nothing to do with your brand. You'll be tempted to think, "They're going to give me £300 — should I peddle these sunglasses to my audience?" But that goes back to building trust with your audience. It's a very intimate relationship, and you need to be very careful about the sponsored content you create and the brands you associate with. Over time, we built some really strong relationships. We had a long-standing partnership with Eastpak — the backpack company — because we travelled with only backpacks. They found us through the hashtag #TeamBackpack in our content. That was a very natural fit. We worked closely with Hertz for a long time, too, because we did lots of road trip content. And we worked with a number of tourism boards to feature their destinations. Those were genuine win-win situations. Those brand relationships ultimately offset the cost of our six-month travel period after Dubai by about 50% — which was huge.

[38:38] CHRIS: You just have to look at Instagram to see the weird stuff some influencers push. You can tell immediately they're chasing money rather than building a brand or doing something for their audience.

[39:03] JEFF: A huge signal of a good brand partnership is when they don't tell you how to do anything. If they say, "We love your content — if you can figure out how to integrate our product, go for it; if it's a forced fit, don't" — that's the right brand. For Eastpak especially, we had such a great relationship because they never told us a single thing. Nobody from the brand saw our content before we published it. They just said, "We love what you're doing." Building those relationships allowed us to offset our travel costs significantly.

[CHAPTER: The Book — Jet Lag Junkie — 40:19]

[39:57] CHRIS: So what does the future hold for you and Anne? Any plans for more content, a book, documentaries — what does the future hold for What Doesn't Suck?

[40:19] JEFF: Right now, the big project is a book — a massive labour of love I've been working on for over four years and one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do. It's sort of all of the behind-the-scenes of my travel journey: before I met Anne, meeting Anne, and everything since — all those travels and experiences. There's a lot that happens when you travel for 20 years and find yourself an expat for 10 years, unintentionally, ending up living in a country you weren't born in, married to a woman from another country, with children speaking multiple languages. Our goal with What Doesn't Suck was always to keep our content light, engaging, funny, and enthusiastic. There's a sea of emotions that go into two decades of travel. This book is really a love letter to all those travels — getting into some of the details, like being held at gunpoint in Malaysia, being detained by military police in Tajikistan, and everything in between.

[42:06] CHRIS: Are you self-publishing or do you have a deal?

[42:06] JEFF: I'm working on multiple options. I can't say anything now, but hopefully the book will be out next year. [CHECK: book subsequently published as "Jet Lag Junkie: Unfiltered Tales of a Compulsive Wanderer"]

[42:47] CHRIS: Has that always been a dream, or did it come out of the COVID period?

[42:53] JEFF: It's always been something I've wanted to do. I actually wrote most of it before COVID. But it comes back to that question of how you create something of value in a sea of travel memoirs and life-advice books. I've sat on it for four years, working through how to make it truly unique and valuable. We're getting there.

[CHAPTER: Call to Adventure — Go Somewhere Unknown — 43:28]

[43:28] CHRIS: We're coming up on time. We have two closing traditions on the show. The first is the Call to Adventure — a place, an activity, something to get listeners inspired. What would yours be?

[44:05] JEFF: The best thing I can say from everything Anne and I have done is to go somewhere you know absolutely nothing about, and take no preconceived notions, stereotypes, or objectives into it. One of the last big trips we did before COVID was to Albania, and I had no idea where we were until the plane landed and they announced it. The ability to discover a place completely in real time, bringing nothing to the table — that to me is the most adventurous thing possible. You're immediately open to absolutely everything the place gives you. That is one of the most beautiful things about travel. So go to places you've seen on Instagram, yes — but if you ever have the chance to go somewhere completely unfiltered, absolutely do it.

[CHAPTER: Pay It Forward — All Hands Volunteering — 45:22]

[45:22] CHRIS: Excellent — somewhere unfiltered. And for the final segment, the Pay It Forward: a suggestion for a good cause or something worth raising awareness of.

[45:40] JEFF: The thing that had the biggest impact on my early travelling was volunteering. I mentioned going to Thailand after the tsunami in 2004 — I didn't even know where Thailand was on a map when I got on that plane. But interacting with a culture through volunteering and acts of service is something I became deeply drawn to. I did the same in the Philippines and Bangladesh, and back in the US during natural disasters. The organisation I worked with is called All Hands and Hearts — they're still very active today. They really do fantastic work on the ground after natural disasters. Any opportunity to interact with a local culture through volunteering is a way to have an experience that's even a level deeper. I'd recommend it to absolutely anyone.

[46:50] CHRIS: Excellent — thank you. We'll get that listed in the show notes. So finally, where can people find more about you and all things What Doesn't Suck?

[47:10] JEFF: Find us on all the socials under What Doesn't Suck. Follow our Facebook and our YouTube — that's where most of our content lives. And whatdoesntsuck.com as well. Stay tuned for some exciting things coming up.

[47:28] CHRIS: Including the book. Excellent — thank you, Jeff.

[47:32] JEFF: Exactly. Yeah, enjoyed talking to you, Chris.