Harald Baldr: The Viking Who Tips Barbers

Who Is Harald Baldr?

Harald Baldr is a travel YouTuber from Oslo, Norway, and a former university lecturer. He has been filming his trips since 2015. He travels alone with one camera and points it at ordinary life: pavement barbers in India, market stalls in Sri Lanka, capsule hotels in Vietnam, tea houses in the Himalayas and a Maasai village in Tanzania.

Almost every title has a price in it. The $25 capsule hotel. The $400 haircut. The $1,000 cup of tea. Scrolling his channel is like reading a menu where everything is either suspiciously cheap or wildly expensive, and you have to click to find out which.

He calls himself the Northman. That's a lot of name for a guy who mostly films haircuts. I respect it.

Here's what makes him interesting. He will walk away from a five dollar taxi on principle, like a man defending his family's honour. Then he'll sit down with a street barber who charged him 20 rupees, about 30 cents, and hand him a stack of notes worth $400. It's the most confusing relationship with money since your uncle who drives twenty minutes to save two cents on gas and then buys a jet ski.

He's also the man who had Bald and Bankrupt filming him in India before most of the world had heard of either of them. So he's the guy who knew the band before they got famous, except he was also in the band.

Before the camera there was a blog, and some of what he wrote on it has aged like milk on a radiator. He has since deleted it. I come back to it briefly further down.

What Is Harald Baldr's Real Name?

His real name is Jens Fredrik Aamodt Jørstad. He gave it away himself in an old video of a flight from Oslo to Istanbul, where the camera lingers on his Turkish Airlines boarding pass. A Webster University catalogue lists a Jens Jorstad teaching at its campus in Thailand, and the Estonian company he runs, more on that below, is registered under the full name. I get the stage name. Jens Jørstad sounds like a man who sells car insurance in Drammen. Harald Baldr sounds like a man who sacks monasteries.

He picked the pen name for his blog: Harald after Harald Sigurdsson, the Viking king who sacked his way around the Mediterranean, and Baldr after a god in Norse mythology. Naming yourself after a king and a god is a bold move for a man whose main skill is sitting still during haircuts. I named my first email address after a Pokémon, so I don't get a vote. The blog is gone. The name stuck.

Where Is Harald Baldr From?

Oslo, Norway. He was born in 1981 and grew up in the city, and he tells almost everyone he meets that he's Norwegian. Some of his viewers still didn't believe him, so at a hotel desk in Hanoi he held his passport up to the camera like a hostage holding up today's newspaper.

It doesn't always work. In a bazaar in Kathmandu nobody had heard of Norway, so after a few tries he gave up and said he was from Germany. Imagine being so Norwegian that you have to pretend to be German just to be understood. It's like a Canadian giving up and saying he's from “near America”. His viewers have never let it go.

Norway shows up in small ways. A haircut back home costs at least 40 pounds, so a 20 rupee haircut in India makes him happier than a dog at a barbecue. He calls himself a potato man, and he takes ice baths in frozen rivers for fun. Norwegians don't have hobbies. They have survival training they forgot to stop doing. On a trek in Nepal, at 40, he told the camera that his mother still hates watching him stand on cliff edges, the same as when he was ten. A grown man with a beard and his own YouTube channel, and his mum still watches every video through her fingers.

What Did Harald Baldr Do Before YouTube?

He taught. For about four years he lectured at two universities in Thailand, in politics, economics and history. Somewhere in Thailand there are grown adults who learned economics from a man who would later walk away from a $5 taxi out of spite.

He left Norway at about 18 to study in Australia, on a loan from Lånekassen, the Norwegian student loan fund. He later called that loan one of the biggest mistakes of his life. Anyone who has a student loan knows the feeling. It follows you around for decades like a seagull that has seen your chips. One of his degrees is in journalism, which explains why he can't buy a cup of tea without interviewing the person who made it. Leave him alone with a vending machine and he'll come back with its life story.

After Australia he lived in Indonesia for a while, traveled around the world through the US, Japan and China, and settled in Thailand, which he saw as one of the freest countries a Westerner can live in. He stayed for years and learned to read Thai, which he says took about a week. It took me a week to learn which bin the pizza box goes in, and I still get it wrong. Speaking Thai was much harder, he admits, which is the first comforting thing he has ever said.

By 2015 he was living in Kyiv, after trying seven or eight other countries in Eastern Europe. That year he went on a small Norwegian podcast to talk about freedom and money. He had found his politics through Ron Paul, read hundreds of history books and picked stocks against the crowd. His advice for normal people was simple: buy an index fund and leave it alone. It's like “drink water” and “don't text your ex”. Everybody knows it, and nobody does it.

The internet wasn't paying him yet. He had run a web design company, his blog made nothing, and he lived off his investments. He had also just written a book about his years as a lecturer in Thailand. His YouTube channel already existed, but he didn't mention it once in the whole hour. It just sat there like a gym membership in February. He only started making videos properly the year after.

How Did Harald Baldr Get Famous?

Slowly at first, then very fast in 2019. His early videos were long motorbike rides in northern Thailand. One of them covers the road from Mae Hong Son to Pai, which has 1,860 curves, and it's still one of his most watched videos. My stomach filed a complaint just from typing that number.

Then he went to India. In late 2018 he spent part of the trip with Benjamin Rich, better known as Bald and Bankrupt, who filmed him with a small Sony action camera. Harald had the bigger channel at the time, and Benjamin has called him an early inspiration. On camera they bicker like two divorced dads on a fishing trip. In one Mumbai video Harald complains that Benjamin has tricked him, yet again, into visiting one of the worst areas of the city.

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In 2019 he posted well over a hundred videos. In Sri Lanka he promised his viewers two a day, and when he missed one, he posted three to catch up. I once promised myself one push-up a day and made it to Wednesday. He edited at night in cheap hotel rooms, and the street barbers, the slum walks in Mumbai and Ahmedabad and the market videos in Sri Lanka all came from that year.

So did his most watched video: one night in a $25 capsule hotel in Saigon, a little sleeping pod with a TV and a control panel built into the wall. It's basically a coffin with Wi-Fi, and millions of people have watched a grown man go to bed in it. I'm one of them, and I'd watch it again.

Why Is There a Price in Every Title?

Because the price is the story. Harald asks what everything costs, turns it into dollars and lets you compare it with home. Once you've seen a 30 cent haircut, your own barber starts to look like an armed robber with a comb.

He haggles for fun more than for need. Outside the airport in Saigon he turned down a five dollar motorbike ride and said on camera that he could afford it, he was just in the mood to bargain. That isn't saving money. That's a sport, like golf, but with more shouting. When a price is fair from the start, though, he pays it and says so. He doesn't waste half an hour fighting when there's nothing to fight about.

His hotel rule is never to spend more than $30 a night unless he has to. He only breaks it for comparison videos, and he usually regrets it. In Varanasi he paid $600 for a palace room on the Ganges and called it his worst hotel purchase ever, because he hadn't come to Varanasi to sit in a palace. It's like flying to Italy and eating at McDonald's, except the McDonald's costs $600 and has a butler.

Why Does Harald Baldr Give His Money Away?

Because he decided his viewers shouldn't be paying him. For his first two years on YouTube, Patreon was his main income. When the channel grew, he said he could no longer justify asking his viewers for money. So he kept the Patreon open and started giving all of it away, every month, to someone he met on the road. Somewhere an accountant clutched their chest and didn't know why.

The first was a street barber in Ahmedabad. His price was 20 rupees, and he could easily have charged a foreigner with a camera 100. He charged 20. Harald gave him 30,000 rupees, about $400, to buy new equipment. That's 1,500 times the price of the haircut, all for being honest. My barber is honest too, and all he gets from me is a small tip and a long silence about my hairline.

The February money, over $600, went to a family in Ahmedabad. In the Philippines he gave 40,000 pesos, about $770, to a father of five he trusted not to spend it on gambling or alcohol.

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Some of the money comes out of his own pocket. On the road to Ella in Sri Lanka he stopped at a tea stall that had been open for two months. The owner, a former bartender, had borrowed about $1,100 from the bank to build it and sold maybe twenty cups of tea on a good day. Harald paid off the whole loan in cash and made him promise to change the dollars at a bank, not in the village. That's the $1,000 cup of tea from the title. My biggest act of charity this year was letting a man with two items go ahead of me at the supermarket, and I'm still a little proud of it.

There's a rule behind all of it. Honest, hard working people get rewarded. Touts and pushy beggars don't, because he doesn't want to reward needy behaviour. He has thought about beggars before. In 2015 his blog ran a post called “7 Reasons Why Being a Beggar is the Worst Job in the World”.

Here's the part that isn't in the thumbnail. The gifts are the videos. The $400 haircut and the $1,000 cup of tea are titles, and the titles bring in the views that YouTube pays him for. The monthly Patreon money he hands out was his viewers' money to begin with. None of that makes the barber any less happy with his $400, and he should be. It just means the most generous man on your feed is also running a very good business, with the poorest people in the video as the cast.

My favourite example is a small one. In Hanoi he tipped an old street barber what he thought was $90. Later he worked out it was closer to $9, so he went back to fix it, because the man was retiring soon. Vietnamese money has so many zeros that I would have made the same mistake. I just wouldn't have gone back. I'd have called it a cultural misunderstanding and gone for ice cream.

His viewers give too. In Nepal they fund the Leo Shrestha Foundation, run by his friend Sunil, which paid for a young man named Pradeep Lama to get through cancer treatment. Harald visited him by bicycle and on foot, and carried a rescued puppy up the mountain for six hours as a wedding present. He's open about why he filmed it as an adventure. People skip a video about cancer, but they'll watch an adventure to meet someone who beat it. The puppy helped too.

What Is Harald Baldr's Net Worth?

Nobody outside his bank knows his net worth, and the sites that print one are guessing. One slice of his money is public, though. In February 2020 he set up Araltes OÜ, a company in Estonia. Today he is its only owner and its only board member. Estonia lets anyone in the world run a company there online, which suits a man whose home address is mostly an airport. It's registered as software publishing. His software is a camera and a haircut.

Estonian companies have to publish their accounts, so here is what Araltes booked: about €34,000 in 2020, €495,000 in 2021, €133,000 in 2022, €142,000 in 2023, €37,000 in 2024 and €191,000 in 2025. That's a bigger swing than his hotel budget, and his hotel budget goes from $25 capsules to $600 palaces.

Where it goes changed last year. Up to 2024 the money mostly stayed in the company, untouched. In 2025 the company had one full-time employee and spent €191,972 on wages and payroll tax, about €900 more than it earned. With one owner and one board member, it's not hard to guess who that employee is. The year ended with €1,851 of profit and no dividend, and the profit from earlier years, about €240,000, is still sitting in the company's bank account. In Estonia a company pays no tax on profit until it pays it out, so that's legal and ordinary, just very Norwegian. It also shouldn't surprise anyone who read his old blog, where the sidebar in 2015 linked to a post called “How I pay zero taxes”.

One more thing. These are only the numbers that went through Araltes. If YouTube, sponsors or channel members pay him through anything else, it doesn't show up here, so treat them as the floor, not the ceiling. And there are channel members. Since March 2024 he has posted more than a hundred videos that only paying members can watch, next to the free ones.

Who Is Kumar?

Kumar Gautam is a taxi driver in Kathmandu and the closest thing Harald's channel has to a co-star. He spent 20 years in the Nepal Police, retired, and now drives thirteen hour days. That's not retirement, that's a second career with worse traffic. Harald calls him his favourite taxi driver and admits he understands maybe ten percent of Kumar's stories. Neither of them seems to mind. I have the same deal with my mechanic, except I'm the one paying for it.

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Kumar is famous with the viewers in his own right. On a Himalayan trail a stranger stopped Harald just to say he knew Harald was friends with Kumar, and passengers on a mountain bus asked about Kumar all the way up. That's like being recognized at a concert as the drummer's cousin. Their Pizza Hut video ends with Harald giving Kumar 1,000 rupees to spend on his kids.

A few other friends show up now and then: Tim, an American friend in the Philippines, and the travel vlogger Gabriel Traveler, whom Harald calls High Roller and blames for a wrong turn on a Himalayan trail. Getting lost with a man called High Roller is the least surprising thing in this whole article.

Does Harald Baldr Speak Spanish?

No. Not even a little. If Spanish grammar mistakes were a misdemeanour, he would rack up several life sentences in a single video. His whole vocabulary is smaller than the guest list at my last birthday party, and nobody came to that one.

He calls himself dumb with languages, which is a strange thing to hear from a man who reads Thai. It's like a surgeon saying he's bad with knives. When a landslide wiped out his trail in Nepal he said “Okay, Houston, tenemos un problema”. That is a NASA joke, in Spanish, in the Himalayas, to nobody. In Mexico City he had to ask how to say “la mejor comida”, which is like going to Paris and asking how to say “croissant”.

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None of this has stopped him. These days he spends a lot more time in the Spanish speaking world, with recent trips to mezcal makers in Oaxaca, a market in Guatemala and an old Inca town in the Andes. He is surrounded by Spanish now, the way a man who can't swim is surrounded by the ocean. If those videos make you want to understand what the people around him are saying, start with my guide to Mexican slang and my ranking of the best Spanish apps.

Is Harald Baldr Married?

No. When a woman in a Himalayan tea hut asked, he told her “No wife. No married. No. Single.” That's four answers to one question, just to be safe. Lawyers wish they could be that clear. He has no children either.

A few more things you wouldn't guess. He has never had a driving licence for a car and has always ridden motorbikes, mostly Kawasakis. He doesn't wear a watch, because he'd rather spend the money on travel, and he turned down a watch company that wanted to fly him to Dubai, because watches have nothing to do with his channel. If a watch company offered me a free trip to Dubai, I'd be wearing three of them before the plane landed, two on my wrists and one round my neck like a rapper. He has trained in martial arts for years, calls himself a cat man and is allergic to seafood, which in Sri Lanka is like being allergic to air. One day he wants to live stream a whole trek, once Starlink makes it possible.

Is Harald Baldr Rude?

Sometimes, on purpose. He acts cocky with market sellers to get a bit of attitude back, and he says he misses the countries where people call him fat to his face. Most people pay a therapist to stop hearing that. Harald flies across the world to hear it. He also has a running joke where everything from a backpack to a coconut is “progressive”, and a lot of his comments poke at modern politics. Some viewers love that. Some click away, and I get both.

His home visits are called Harald Invades, which he calls the most misnamed show on YouTube, because he gets invited into people's homes, or at least tries to. That's the pattern with him. The title sounds rude, and the video is a polite guy asking permission, sitting on the floor, eating whatever he's given and leaving more than he took. His Viking ancestors would be ashamed of him. They showed up uninvited and left with everything. Harald shows up invited and leaves money.

What Was on Harald Baldr's Old Blog?

From about 2012 to 2016 he ran a blog, first on Blogspot and then at haraldbaldr.com, which he called Harald Baldr Men's Expat Magazine. His About page described a Norwegian classical liberal interested in freedom, politics, economics, women, travel and investing. All of those made it onto the page. Not all of them made it out looking good.

The dating posts ranked the women of whole countries, mostly in Asia and Eastern Europe, in ways I won't repeat here, under titles like “Top 10 Easiest Countries to Bang Hot Girls”. One was a guide to dating Thai go-go dancers without paying. The politics posts went hard at Islam, which he told Europe to call “a violent warrior religion”. The same blog also defended Burmese migrants working illegally in Thailand, calling a ban on their work “clearly immoral”, so it wasn't all one note.

The blog is gone now, and he has blocked it from the Wayback Machine. I couldn't find him talking about it anywhere. People change, and the polite man sitting on floors in Nepal today doesn't sound much like the guy who wrote those posts at 34.

Should You Watch Harald Baldr?

Yes, if you like your travel slow. He films the whole day, the SIM card that takes until sunset and the three hours waiting for a father to come home from work, and that slow, sweaty kind of video shows what travel feels like better than most channels do. The places are real and the barbers are real.

Just watch him as a man, not a saint. The envelopes are generous and they are also good television, and the blog is part of his story whether he talks about it or not. If you found him through his India videos, my piece on Benjamin Rich, aka Bald and Bankrupt tells the story of the friend behind the camera.