I’ve previously blogged about how one of the perks of overseeing the creative content for our upcoming YOMYOMF Network on YouTube (click here if you don’t know what this is) is getting to meet interesting people I might otherwise not get a chance to. And one of the most interesting has got to be Chris Jeon.

You may remember Chris from the news as the Korean American UCLA student who decided last summer to spend his vacation fighting alongside Libyan rebels to overthrow the Gaddafi regime. Not speaking a word of Arabic or knowing anyone in that region, Chris bought a one-way plane ticket to Egypt, hitch-hiked from there to Libya, found his way to the aforementioned rebels, somehow convinced them to let him join the movement and then spent a month living and fighting with them until he was “outed” by a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor and became a media sensation. Here’s the first image of Chris in Libya that the world saw:

Chris had only told a few friends what he was doing so most of the people who knew him found out the same way everyone else did—when they saw the video above. And that included his parents who thought Chris was simply spending the summer in Egypt. So contrary to some news reports that claimed the rebels kicked Chris out after he was “outed,” he actually came back to the U.S. in September because his parents, well, made him. He immediately became a top news story and made the rounds of the media to discuss his experiences.

Of course, while Chris was on his very unusual adventure, we were in the early stages of forming what would become the YOMYOMF Network. Even though YouTube had not made the public announcement about the channels yet, we were hard at work trying to find and develop interesting ideas for shows. Offender Justin, who is heading our channel, has always been a huge fan of Anderson Cooper and, dare I say, even has a man-crush on the CNN journalist. One of the ideas Justin wanted to explore was to see if we could find the Asian American equivalent of a young Anderson Cooper. In the early days of his career, the ambitious Cooper would simply pick up a camera and travel to the world’s hotspots on his own and produce his own segments. Could we find someone like that from our community—someone who would be willing to take a camera, go into some hotspot and come back with interesting footage that could provide the basis for a show?

Enter Chris Jeon.

Shortly before the Christmas holidays, I arranged to have Chris come down to our Westside office where Abdul, who is overseeing the business side of our network, and I would have a simple meet-and-greet with him. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had exchanged a few emails with Chris, but had never met or talked to him so all I knew of him was what I saw in the media. So the big question on my mind was—what sort of person just decides one day to go to Libya and fight alongside the rebels? I was fully prepared to meet a kid who was either crazy and/or an arrogant prick.

But luckily Chris was neither of those things. He was just a humble young man who had a passion for both adventure and justice. He had an internship at a company last summer where one of his jobs was to monitor the news and seeing what was going on everyday in Libya started to have an impact on him. Concepts like “freedom” and “liberty” may have been what the U.S. was founded on, but they seemed abstract and distant in our modern society. But here were people his age and even younger, in this foreign land thousands of miles away, who were living and dying for those concepts. Chris decided he wanted to experience that world firsthand.

The more I got to know Chris, the more his actions made sense. Once I learned about his background, the decision to go to Libya seemed consistent with how he had already been living his life. In the three years since his 18th birthday, he has spent a summer volunteering at an orphanage in Cambodia, another summer living with a family in the Amazon jungle, he went to Seattle and Las Vegas with just $1 dollar in his pocket to see if he could survive and he’s participated in events like the Tough Mudder, which is a 10-mile/23 obstacle course:

It also turned out that Chris had a camera with him during his time in Libya and he had shot some footage. Although a few seconds of it has been shown in news reports, most of it remains unseen by the public. Chris explained that he wasn’t particularly interested in sharing this footage with others—it was more of a personal record of a special time in his life. But he said he’d be happy to show us what he had.

So this past Saturday, Chris swung by the office with his laptop. We had just finished a meeting with our friends/colleagues Kevin Wu (a.k.a. KevJumba) and veteran TV director Henry Chan for a show they’re developing for our channel, but when they heard about Chris and who he was, they were curious and stayed afterwards to meet him.

Chris and Kevin.

Chris played his footage and talked us through what we were watching. It was riveting because we were seeing things the media rarely covers—with the news, it’s usually scenes of battle and combat. Here, we were seeing Chris and his new friends eating together, singing and dancing together, swimming, entertaining themselves with boxing matches, going on raids and, through it all, there was no doubt that these men had accepted Chris into their fold. He really was one of them. Chris told us who the people in the video were. He shared details and anecdotes about them. He explained how all of them had lost loved ones to the Gaddafi regime so this revolution was very personal for them. He pointed out the friends who have since died in the fighting. He’s still in touch with many of them and has tentative plans to return to Libya next month. Chris spoke of his Libyan colleagues as if they were family. And through his footage, we experienced their humanity through Chris’ eyes—it was both moving and inspiring.

Chris starts classes at UCLA for the new quarter today so I’ll meet up with him later this week where we’ll brainstorm specific ideas for shows he might want to develop for our network. He’s already told me how excited he is and that he’s the type of person who finds ideas for potential projects around every corner. It should be interesting.

And if the old saying is true that you can accurately measure your future success by looking at the people you’ve chosen to surround yourself with, I think we’re in a pretty good place with people like Chris and the other folks we’ve been meeting as we put our little network together. And in the coming weeks, you’ll definitely be hearing about some of these other people and projects we’re developing. Can’t wait to share.

And the journey continues…