Jan. 14, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:36:32
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Do you think a salt lamp's real? | ||
| Do you think that thing does anything? | ||
| I don't know how much you'd need, hey? | ||
| Well, it's got a hat on it, so it's not being taken too seriously. | ||
| And that's actually a big one. | ||
| You get a lot smaller than that, don't you? | ||
| Yeah, I saw that one. | ||
| That was the biggest one you could find on Amazon, so I got that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I'm a glutton. | ||
| I like big things, big salt rocks. | ||
| Why the hell not? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, why not? | |
| I'm like, I want a big one. | ||
| Do it. | ||
| It's very flashy. | ||
| Do you think that does anything, though? | ||
| I don't know, good question. | ||
| It just lets the air off you just breathing and the natural salts on you. | ||
| Helps with the sleep as well. | ||
| But how is it doing that? | ||
| It's just by being in the room? | ||
| Maybe I should have them everywhere. | ||
| Well isn't it the light underneath as well? | ||
| So the light, the heat from the light? | ||
| The heat sets off the air, I believe so. | ||
| Sounds like horseshit, right? | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Could be a little bit. | ||
| It looks good though, right? | ||
| So you asked me before if you were the first Welshman? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think you are. | ||
| Is that the case, Jamie? | ||
| Do you know if that's the case? | ||
| Somebody might have snuck in and didn't tell us. | ||
| There we go, yeah. | ||
| What is this thing that you brought? | ||
| So I thought if I'm the first Welsh person, I've got to bring... | ||
| Try to keep this like a fifth from your face. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| There we go. | ||
| I've got to bring a Welsh dragon for you. | ||
| A Welsh dragon? | ||
| A Welsh dragon. | ||
| So this is on our flag in Wales. | ||
| It goes back a long time ago since we were protecting ourselves. | ||
| Pride. | ||
| Wow, it's cool. | ||
| Don't really know the history, but there we go. | ||
| So this is a classic Welsh dragon? | ||
| Welsh dragon, yeah. | ||
| I think it was named like one of the coolest flags in the world. | ||
| You just got this big, big raging dragon on a flag. | ||
| That is pretty cool. | ||
| So I thought if I'm the first Welsh player, I gotta bring you the red dragon. | ||
| Look at it right there. | ||
| There's some images of it. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you been to Wales before? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| How badass is it? | ||
| Should I go? | ||
| Yeah, beautiful. | ||
| It is a good place. | ||
| Lots of mountains around the coast there as well, of course. | ||
| Forests, lakes. | ||
| Good for training. | ||
| That's where I do all my training, actually. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Hardcore elements. | ||
| Speaking of training, Ash, tell everybody what you've done. | ||
| So I've recently, only five months ago now, five and a half months, came back from achieving my third world first record in walking the entire length of the Yangtze River in China. | ||
| So it's the third longest river in the world, the longest to run through a single nation. | ||
| It's 4,000 miles, it took 352 days, and it's from the Tibetan Plateau in the west of China. | ||
| So you're talking 5,100 meters above sea level, which is equivalent to Everest Base Camp. | ||
| And yeah, 4,000 miles later, 352 days, you end up near Shanghai, where it pours out into the East China Sea. | ||
| You know, when I heard that you did this, I thought two things. | ||
| One, I thought, this guy's insane. | ||
| What kind of willpower does it take to walk and hike 4,000 plus miles? | ||
| But the other thing I thought is this kind of validates a lot of the ideas that people have always had about human beings migrating from Africa and through Siberia and through the Bering Strait. | ||
| If you can do that, what you did, what you did is not dissimilar. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've got trails all over the world. | ||
| And you're just doing it for a world record. | ||
| Imagine if you're doing it because you're trying to stay alive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| You're trying to keep your family alive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll tell you what. | ||
| Yeah, we would have had... | ||
| Oh, there's so much, so much history in journeys that mankind kind of taken on since... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wow. | ||
| I'm reading Sapien at the minute. | ||
| Oh, it's great. | ||
| I only just started. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But that's just mind-boggling with the numbers, you know? | ||
| It takes you right back and it's like, whoa. | ||
| Yeah, so the source of the Yangtze, it was actually only discovered in 2009, the true and scientific source. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, that gives us, we had to do over two years of planning. | ||
| So it was a case of working heavily in China. | ||
| Finding out whether this had ever been done before. | ||
| We had to get different teams involved globally. | ||
| I was always preparing to go from the traditional source, which is most famous for the source of the Yangtze River being there, But then we only discovered about a year into the planning that actually there's a true and scientific source found by the same guy who mapped the traditional source, yet he partnered up with NASA, used all the satellite technology, was able to correct his wrong. | ||
| It's slightly longer than the traditional source, and that was it. | ||
| We're like, right, it's got to be the true and scientific source. | ||
| How much longer is it? | ||
| It's probably only a distance of 20 to 30 miles, which that's only really a day's trek, but it was more close to Tibet. | ||
| It was more southwest of China, so it was closer to the Tibetan border, which means it's a little bit more sensitive. | ||
| So it was tougher to go from the true and scientific source for sure, but it's the longer one. | ||
| If you're going to walk that distance, you've got to do it the proper way. | ||
| Yeah, I agree with you. | ||
| I'm glad you think that way. | ||
| But obviously a person that's willing to walk 4,000 miles would think that way. | ||
| You wouldn't skip on 20 miles. | ||
| Can you imagine if you skipped on 20 miles and everybody's like, well, you did a pretty good job, but actually Mike over here just did the whole thing. | ||
| The actual scientific one. | ||
| He's the real one. | ||
| Well, that happened towards the end as well. | ||
| So coming up near Shanghai, there's an official point of where the Yangtze pulls into the East China Sea. | ||
| And they're like, you know, you only have to go to this point. | ||
| I'm like, no, I'm walking to where the land ends. | ||
| So that took me an extra, only an extra couple of days. | ||
| But can you imagine finishing? | ||
| It's like, oh, you didn't quite make it, did you? | ||
| You were close. | ||
| We didn't quite make it. | ||
| What is the feeling like when you know you only have two days left? | ||
| Well, we were hit by storm Rekima. | ||
| So it was one of the biggest storms they've had in the past 30 years. | ||
| And that put me into hiding, you know, to shelter up after everything that I faced over 350 days, you know. | ||
| And that stopped me only a couple of days before I crossed into the East China Sea before the finish. | ||
| But at that point... | ||
| It's almost I visualized the completion over and over again in my head. | ||
| I played it so many times of what it would be like, what it would feel like, everything to cross the finish line. | ||
| Almost when that day happened and I did cross the finish line, I almost over visualized. | ||
| I didn't feel anything. | ||
| It's just like, well, it's about damn time. | ||
| You know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And I believe, you know, the law of attraction, visualization, I've always been a big believer in that. | ||
| And same with Mongolia and Madagascar, which were my previous expeditions. | ||
| I almost lost my life on both of those trips. | ||
| At the time that I'm suffering, I'm just constantly visualizing. | ||
| You know, I was focusing on recovering, getting better, visualizing the finish, keep getting up, keep pushing on. | ||
| I want to get to that. | ||
| I want to get to those. | ||
| But I want to ask you, when you decide to plan this trip, how much had you learned from the first two crazy trips that you had? | ||
| And how did you calculate how much food you're going to need, where you're going to need pit stops? | ||
| How did you do it? | ||
| So with that, we're always looking for communities on a long route. | ||
| If there's a community, there's food. | ||
| And actually, that brings me back to the traditional and the true scientific source. | ||
| If we went from the traditional, we'd go maybe one week or one and a half weeks without coming across any locals. | ||
| So we'd have to carry a week and a half worth of ration packs in our backpack. | ||
| But the true and scientific source sent us back. | ||
| I think it was two or three weeks we couldn't find any community along the way via satellite and via the people that we were, my logistics managers. | ||
| That is the craziest way to try to visit people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Find them through satellite as you're trekking through a forest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then try to get food. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And we're always maximizing it as well. | ||
| So we're saying, okay, that's three weeks. | ||
| So let's carry food for three and a half or four weeks. | ||
| Because if that community is now empty or abandoned, Then we're out of food. | ||
| What are you carrying for food? | ||
| I would carry ration packs. | ||
| And the ration packs were pretty good. | ||
| We had like chicken tikka masala, spaghetti bolognese, carbonara, and each ration pack was around 800 kilocalories. | ||
| And are you using, are these dehydrated? | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| So you just boil the water. | ||
| And you pour it in there? | ||
| You wait about 15 minutes. | ||
| It's like a mountain house, like that kind of a deal? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, similar. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Wow, you must be so looking forward to regular food by the time that's over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Big time, yeah. | |
| What's the first thing you ate? | ||
| You know, the one that I was craving was just protein. | ||
| So I was thinking of peanut butter, thinking of cheese on toast. | ||
| Because you had just mostly carbohydrates? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So I was like chicken as well was a big thing. | ||
| I was just craving all of this big time. | ||
| But I don't know what the first thing I ate was. | ||
| It's funny how your body knows what you need. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, you've got to listen to your body, haven't you? | ||
| You've got to listen. | ||
| It's hard to listen. | ||
| I mean, it's hard to know. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I'm not really sure what I hear. | ||
| You know, you had an odd craving. | ||
| Sometimes I'm craving ice cream. | ||
| Is that what I'm supposed to listen? | ||
| Just have ice cream? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It seems weird. | ||
| It seems weird just listening to your cravings. | ||
| That seems ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, and I think you've got to be stripped of all of the protein and whatnot running for your body currently, haven't you? | ||
| I think if you're full, You're craving ice cream. | ||
| You know, if you feel you want a dessert, but I think if you're now at the point of not starvation, but if you're really hungry and you know what's good, what's not good, I think your body gives a good tail sign of what you can. | ||
| At the last month of Mission Yangtze, I was really bad. | ||
| I was coming across cities every day because you can imagine like towards Shanghai. | ||
| You're coming across cities, you're coming across towns, communities. | ||
| And so I was just craving protein. | ||
| I was craving fats. | ||
| And a lot of the time, for that last month, I was just eating really unhealthily. | ||
| Just getting in stodgy foods, stodgy fats, protein. | ||
| You know, there was fast food chains along the way, KFC, you know, that sort of month of it. | ||
| Yes, I was out of the wild. | ||
| The wilderness was like six months worth. | ||
| Once I'd finished the first half, it was gradual for then another two or three months. | ||
| But the last three months, you're going through city after city, all really built up, high population there. | ||
| And I found that my body was... | ||
| So I was listening to my body, craving fats, craving protein. | ||
| And yeah, you're right, it did get ridiculous. | ||
| I was going to these, you know, fast food... | ||
| The translation. | ||
| I could speak Chinese a little bit. | ||
| I was just going to ask you that. | ||
| I could get by. | ||
| When you say Chinese, like which dialect? | ||
| Oh, there's over a hundred dialects, yeah. | ||
| So that's where it got difficult. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Yeah, it was nails. | ||
| It was nails. | ||
| Really difficult. | ||
| Do you speak Mandarin? | ||
| What do you speak? | ||
| Basic Mandarin. | ||
| Basic Mandarin. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Enough to just about get by. | ||
| But I skipped all of the basics and went straight into the sentences. | ||
| Where are there bears here? | ||
| Are there bears here? | ||
| Where are the wolves? | ||
| Where are the wolves? | ||
| Water, food, and shelter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| So yeah, skipped a lot of the basics, went straight into the... | ||
| Dude, those are two questions I don't ever want to hear. | ||
| Are there bears here? | ||
| And where are the wolves? | ||
| Not, are there wolves here? | ||
| Where are they? | ||
| Where are they? | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| And you're out there walking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For a year. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| And for the first six months especially. | ||
| So the first six months is mostly hiking in the woods? | ||
| It's hiking in the wilderness on the Tibetan plateau. | ||
| Are you carrying your camp on your back? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you have a bivy sack? | ||
| Like what are you sleeping in? | ||
| That's a tent. | ||
| So we have this really lightweight sort of kailash tent to get it up storm proof. | ||
| It's amazing how light they can get those damn things to now. | ||
| Oh, it was great. | ||
| We needed it. | ||
| Because I had to carry all of the... | ||
| We were filming for a documentary, so I had to carry electronics and it got too heavy. | ||
| Now, when you're in this tent, do you go with a double-layer tent so it provides more insulation and it's a little heavier? | ||
| Or do you have a really lightweight tent and just try to tough it out in the cold? | ||
| I had a double-layer tent. | ||
| But that's because the double layer was just so small and so light. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was a case of, yeah, you know, that's your comfort, that's your shelter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| And I'm gonna be facing some big storms. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I was thinking. | ||
| I was like, you'd sacrifice probably the weight For just something that's going to keep you insulated in there. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Do you have a pad that protects you from the ground? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then a mattress pad on top of that? | ||
| Yeah, we've got the pad, like the waterproof pad, on the ground from the tent. | ||
| And then we've got a sleeping mat, maybe about this thick, about a half an inch to an inch thickness. | ||
| And then I had a minus 25 or minus 30 degree mat. | ||
| What is the issue with the ground though? | ||
| Do you have to have an insulated pad to make sure that the ground cold doesn't get to you? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| That's what the sleeping mud is. | ||
| So it's sort of, you can roll it down. | ||
| It's really small, really tight, really lightweight as well. | ||
| But once you roll it out, it's got like memory foam almost inside, something similar. | ||
| And you have to blow in it, pump it up a little bit more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I see. | |
| Only takes 10, 20 breaths. | ||
| Easy to pack away as well. | ||
| It protects you from the core of the ground. | ||
| And it protects from there, because that's what you need, you know. | ||
| The ground just... | ||
| Dude, I've never been comfortable camping. | ||
| It's always just like... | ||
| It's always like you wake up like popping. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| You're awake. | ||
| You made it. | ||
| But still, you feel weird. | ||
| Yeah, you can do. | ||
| You do get used to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But especially after the trekking, we were covering 50 kilometers some days. | ||
| We were covering about 20, 25 miles, especially in the Tibetan Plateau. | ||
| So after that day's trek, only two ration packs per day. | ||
| So you're taking 1,600 calories. | ||
| That's not a lot. | ||
| It's not a lot. | ||
| And we were carrying 30. How much weight did you lose? | ||
| I probably, and I've still lost weight now at about 13, 12 to 13 kilograms, I would say, in weight, which over the year was, I lost the same amount in Mongolia. | ||
| Is that like 32 pounds or something like that? | ||
| It's about 32, is it? | ||
| 32 pounds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow, that's a lot of weight to lose. | ||
| You're not a big guy. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| You must have been really drawn out at the end. | ||
| Big time. | ||
| Although it kind of worked itself out because towards the end I was coming across more food. | ||
| Didn't need my ration packs, of course. | ||
| So I was coming across more... | ||
| Restaurants, I can collect food as I go. | ||
| It's not a solo and unsupported journey. | ||
| So I was just utilising that. | ||
| I was eating with the locals and I was taking as much calories down as I possibly could whilst I was trekking. | ||
| Did you pick like the type of meals based on calories? | ||
| Did you like when I'm talking about like the mountain house type deals or I don't know what company you used? | ||
| What kind of? | ||
| Yeah, Expedition Foods I think it was that I used. | ||
| So they have different ones that are more nutrient rich and more calorie rich? | ||
| Yeah, they have the smaller light ones as well which you get about 600 calories. | ||
| They are smaller, they are lighter, easier to pack, but I need it as much as I could possibly get. | ||
| Yeah, they have a bunch of healthy options now, because a lot of CrossFitters are out there camping these days. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, that's it. | ||
| They want to get that healthy paleo food while they're out there in the mountain. | ||
| But what's undeniable has got to be, for you, is that once you've made those steps, the first steps for the first day, you have this monumental thing in front of you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was that like knowing when you started? | ||
| Like, here, ready? | ||
| Alright, bye Ash! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye! | |
| See you in the air! | ||
| Oh man! | ||
| Yeah, it was exactly that. | ||
| It was exactly that. | ||
| It was daunting. | ||
| So before we got to the source of the Yangtze River, we lost, I think, four members. | ||
| When I say lost, they survived, but they got altitude sickness. | ||
| They were fearing for their lives because of the bears, because of the wolves. | ||
| So before we reached day number one, before we reached the start line, we've already got four members of the film crew, of guides, evacuated, taken off the mountains, which brought me off the mountains as well because I needed to regroup with a different team. | ||
| So everyone was scared and people also got altitude sickness. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| How high are you up there? | ||
| We are just over 5,000 meters. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Yeah, so it's equivalent to Everest Base Camp, I'd say. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Which you can get altitude sickness from. | ||
| That's really fucking high. | ||
| That's 15,000 feet, right? | ||
| It's about that, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's wolves up there? | ||
| There's wolves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's bears. | |
| You can't even run. | ||
| You got no air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How helpless would you feel at 15,000 feet when you see a pack of wolves? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they're looking at you like, hey, you don't look too good, buddy. | ||
| It's the bears that scared me the most. | ||
| Oh, they should scare you the most. | ||
| You can't do anything against a bear, can you? | ||
| You can't do anything against a wolf. | ||
| Yeah, you can't do anything against a wall. | ||
| Especially at 15,000 feet, we can barely tie your shoes. | ||
| And a pack of them as well. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we can't carry any weaponry, so leave it there. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| Oh, sitting duck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| You can't carry any weaponry? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You can't even have a knife? | ||
| I tried. | ||
| I took a knife out. | ||
| Did I say? | ||
| Yeah, I took a knife out, but it was taken from me in security, flying out to the west. | ||
| So I bought another one in Yushu. | ||
| Yeah, I did have a knife for the first month or two. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But again, a pack of wolves. | ||
| Yeah, you ain't gonna do shit with a little baby-ass knife. | ||
| They're gonna rip your ankles apart. | ||
| That's it, that's it. | ||
| They tear your legs apart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wolves are the nastiest hunters. | ||
| Big time. | ||
| And we had a close encounter as well with a pack. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, there was a Tibetan. | ||
| He was trying to warn us. | ||
| He was trying to say... | ||
| Well, this is my angle. | ||
| We were just talking to him. | ||
| He looked a little bit worried. | ||
| He looked a little bit stressed. | ||
| We're high on the mountains. | ||
| He keeps pointing down at a valley, talking to us in Tibetan. | ||
| We didn't understand. | ||
| We just sort of waved. | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| Big smile. | ||
| Off we go. | ||
| I say it was me and my friend, also videographer Kyle. | ||
| We cracked on but Kyle filmed all of that conversation and four months later we found out from a girl from my editor team in Beijing who could speak Tibetan that he was saying right ahead, right down that valley is a pack of wolves and only yesterday they had killed a local lady. | ||
| They were trying to get us not to go down there, saying don't go. | ||
| But we didn't know, so we were like, oh yeah, all the best, thanks, see ya. | ||
| And we cracked on, and for the next two days, we were followed. | ||
| We believe we were stalked by a pack of wolves. | ||
| We could hear howling. | ||
| And they cover bigger distance than humans cover. | ||
| For two days, they were just howling in the same proximity, same distance away. | ||
| Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. | ||
| How do you go to sleep at night? | ||
| What's that like? | ||
| Yeah, luckily it was windy. | ||
| The wind would pick up at night time, so it would rattle your tent so you couldn't hear the howling. | ||
| You could only hear it during the day. | ||
| But yeah, you still stood there, your knives there, your torches there, you're constantly shouting over to your buddy. | ||
| Aren't you worried that you're just going to become a burrito in the middle of the night? | ||
| A tent burrito? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was scary. | ||
| I felt vulnerable. | ||
| Really vulnerable up there. | ||
| Fuck, bro. | ||
| How many days were you doing this with the wolves? | ||
| So it was two days that they were following us, but we were in sort of Wolf County, if you like, for the best part of two or three months, I would say. | ||
| With the bears as well. | ||
| And the bears became an issue because I sort of went out there with a healthy mindset. | ||
| As long as I leave the bears alone, the bears are going to leave me alone, right? | ||
| But the locals were telling me otherwise. | ||
| And they would start showing me photos, start showing me videos. | ||
| And sending me clips saying this happened only one or two kilometers away from where you are now. | ||
| People were killed by bears. | ||
| People were killed, just running into huts, killing families. | ||
| And they were trying to say that they're coming off the mountains because it's too cold. | ||
| They're looking for calories before they go into hibernation. | ||
| So we were there in the wrong season. | ||
| And it's that terrified us the most. | ||
| It was the stories of the locals. | ||
| If the locals panic, then you should definitely be panicking. | ||
| There's a lot of parts of the world where you have to be really worried about wild animals all the time. | ||
| We here in America, for whatever reason, we've forgotten that. | ||
| I think everybody that lives in a big city has basically kind of forgotten that. | ||
| But when you make that trek, you realize, oh, there's no rules out here. | ||
| They'll eat you. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| They'll eat everything. | ||
| They'll eat a caribou, they'll eat a moose. | ||
| Why wouldn't they eat you? | ||
| What, do they think you're special? | ||
| They don't even know what the fuck you are. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's probably the only thing that keeps you alive, is they haven't eaten a person lately. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they take, like you said, caribou. | ||
| They can take the bears big enough to just, and caribou, like moose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Moose are huge as well. | ||
| My friend watched a moose kill, or excuse me, watched a bear kill a moose On a spotting scope. | ||
| He was looking through a spotting scope and he saw a bear swat down the back of a moose and just break its back. | ||
| He said the grizzly hit the moose so hard it snapped its back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jeez. | |
| I'm like, what? | ||
| The power, the sheer strength in a bear. | ||
| And they are big on the moose. | ||
| Moose are huge! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This bear swatted that thing and broke its back. | ||
| And he watched it go down. | ||
| He watched this chase. | ||
| There's like this altercation between this bear and the moose. | ||
| And he stayed on it. | ||
| And the bear gets a hold of the moose and just fucking swats it. | ||
| The moose is like, I gotta get the fuck out of here. | ||
| And the bear's like, bitch, you're going nowhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, those animals are up there in China, too. | ||
| They're a very similar type of bear, right? | ||
| It's a type of brown bear, isn't it? | ||
| That's a type of brown bear, yeah. | ||
| You've got the big ones here, haven't you? | ||
| They're probably grizzlies in Alaska. | ||
| They're the biggest, aren't they? | ||
| They killed them all in California. | ||
| Everything that they had that was here in California, it's on our flag. | ||
| It's our state flag. | ||
| If you look at the California state flag, there's a giant grizzly bear in the middle of the California state flag. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Yeah, because it used to be an issue here. | ||
| They killed so many people that we just killed all the bears. | ||
| Not we, I wasn't here. | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| So they're further north now, are they? | ||
| That's it right there. | ||
| They're nowhere near here. | ||
| You've got to go up into Vancouver. | ||
| British Columbia has them. | ||
| British Columbia has a lot of bears. | ||
| Montana has them. | ||
| Montana has grizzlies. | ||
| Wyoming has grizzlies. | ||
| Colorado may or may not. | ||
| My friend Adam saw them there. | ||
| But they're not in California anymore. | ||
| It's just because they killed them. | ||
| There's actually a town named after the last guy who died. | ||
| Levesque, California. | ||
| The last guy who got killed by a grizzly bear. | ||
| Just out hunting, was it? | ||
| Just probably being a dude that was alive back then. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Terrifying. | ||
| So you experienced this in China. | ||
| What are your precautions? | ||
| Are you allowed to bring bear spray? | ||
| So we had an air horn. | ||
| We had a whistle. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| A whistle? | ||
| A whistle, yeah. | ||
| So they say that the biggest attacks happen from where Tibetans are out farming, doing their business in the mountains. | ||
| They... | ||
| They're in the forest and they're surprised. | ||
| They come up the top of the hill, there's a bear there, and obviously the bear's shocked, it's scared, and it just attacks. | ||
| Yeah, that does happen with bears in America as well. | ||
| That's it, yeah. | ||
| So they were saying pretty much, take a whistle, take an hour horn, make yourself aware, well, make the bear aware that you're present, you're approaching. | ||
| And normally they would scare off, they'd run away. | ||
| But there was a local that told me that, so they have these big Tibetan mastiffs. | ||
| Have you seen the Tibetan mastiffs? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The dogs that guard the two hives. | ||
| 200 plus pounds are huge. | ||
| Terrifying. | ||
| More of a problem than the wolves they were for me. | ||
| Because they can scare away the wolves, they scare away snow leopards, the bears. | ||
| But this one local was telling me that he wasn't living in this gyr, which is like a white felt tent, like a yurt. | ||
| He was living in a concrete hut. | ||
| And he had a courtyard with a fence. | ||
| The fence was open, but just outside the fence is a Tibetan mastiff chained up. | ||
| And he said that this bear wasn't phased about the Tibetan mastiff. | ||
| It walked straight past it into the courtyard. | ||
| And was scratching at a steel door whilst he was hiding in one of his empty cupboards. | ||
| And it lasted about 30-40 minutes when he was telling me this story. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm in a tent. | ||
| I'm scratching against a steel door while I'm just in a tent in the wilderness. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| They're monsters. | ||
| If they weren't a real thing... | ||
| If grizzly bears or brown bears weren't real, and then they were in a movie, you'd be like, what? | ||
| Imagine that poor guy! | ||
| And imagine someone would ask someone like you, like, why in the world, if you know they're there, would you want to walk for that long in bear country? | ||
| Yeah, well, that's it. | ||
| How many people were with you? | ||
| Towards the start, so it was myself, it was two guides that I had, Tibetan guides, so we couldn't even communicate. | ||
| But it was safety in numbers. | ||
| And we took a horse for the film crew, but the film crew got altitude sickness and left us with the horse, which I named Kasta Choy. | ||
| Have you ever seen the movie Face Off? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The badass Caster Choy. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| I've got this thing where I name like my bicycles or like carried a chicken. | ||
| We'll get to that. | ||
| I carried a chicken in Madagascar. | ||
| I've been giving them old, crazy, ridiculous granny names. | ||
| And I was like, this horse is the last one standing whilst my crew, my guides are suffering with altitude sickness and being taken off the mountains. | ||
| You've got this horse still suffering with altitude sickness. | ||
| Never knew that, but apparently animals can suffer with altitude sickness. | ||
| But he's there like a badass still going. | ||
| So it's just me and him. | ||
| And I'm like, I can't give you a granny's name like Elder or Dot or Gertrude. | ||
| I'm giving you Caster Troy. | ||
| From Face Off. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| From Face Off, yeah. | ||
| We've made fun of that movie multiple times. | ||
| Like the preposterous nature of switching faces. | ||
| You look exactly like Nicolas Cage now. | ||
| So the people come with you in the beginning, and then do they stay with you the entire trip? | ||
| Yeah, we hoped so. | ||
| No, sorry. | ||
| So the first two guides that I had got altitude sickness as well as the film crew. | ||
| I came off the mountains. | ||
| I found two new guides who were willing to join me. | ||
| About 50% now of the UK team and the China team were saying, you know, abandon the expedition, start again next year. | ||
| Start again? | ||
| Yeah, try again next year because it was getting too close to winter season. | ||
| How many days had you already walked? | ||
| We hadn't reached the start point yet. | ||
| I think it was four days it took for us to get to the start point. | ||
| But just before we reached the start point, that's when the film crew got altitude sickness. | ||
| We sent them home. | ||
| And the next day, my guide, he was vomiting. | ||
| He had nosebleed. | ||
| We had to get him off the mountains too. | ||
| So we left the horse with some local nomads, got him off the mountains, regrouped with a different team, and tried again. | ||
| So our first attempt towards the source was a fail. | ||
| We regrouped, it was myself, it was two guides, it was the horse, and we eventually, finally made it to the source. | ||
| It was on that gap in a nearby city of regrouping with a new team, with new guides that my team in the UK and China were saying, I think it's best if you hold back and we try again next year, because you'll be in the Tibetan Plateau during the depths of winter, which drops to about minus 30, minus 40 degrees Celsius. | ||
| Which was a worry. | ||
| But I believed that we could get off the mountains. | ||
| It was the altitude that was the problem. | ||
| Down into lower altitude before the depths of winter. | ||
| And for people who don't know the conversion, I think that's where it meets in the middle. | ||
| Negative 40 is where Celsius and Fahrenheit is the same. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So people in this country use Fahrenheit. | ||
| A lot of us, you say Celsius. | ||
| Yeah, minus 40 degrees Celsius. | ||
| I think minus 40 and minus 40 Fahrenheit are the same. | ||
| Oh, yeah, really? | ||
| I think that's where it hits the button. | ||
| Got you. | ||
| What does it say there, Jamie? | ||
| Minus Celsius is minus 22 Fahrenheit? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Go to minus 40. I think minus 40 is right where it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, minus 40. Yeah, see? | |
| That's where it's exactly the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit. | ||
| There we are. | ||
| It's a weird thing, right? | ||
| It's like, how the fuck does that happen? | ||
| How is it the same thing? | ||
| Like, you're never the same thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, how do you become the same thing? | ||
| Like, who's got the wonky system? | ||
| If that minus 40, it becomes the same. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Very weird. | ||
| Minus 40 Fahrenheit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right, because it showed, like, 40 Celsius. | ||
| It's very hot, right? | ||
| It's like 100 plus degrees. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| 40 plus 45, you're melting, that's a struggle. | ||
| But minus 40 is the same. | ||
| What the fuck is going on here? | ||
| Who's got the wacky... | ||
| What's 40 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit, then? | ||
| Um, 40 degrees Celsius is probably 100. Because we will come to that. | ||
| 104. What is it, 104? | ||
| 104. 104. Oh, yeah, 104 Fahrenheit. | ||
| Yeah, it's hot! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Melting. | ||
| Now, what kind of gear are you guys taking with you? | ||
| In terms of like, are you taking a jet boil? | ||
| Are you taking just matches? | ||
| Are you hoping to find wood? | ||
| Are you trying to stay light? | ||
| Do you have a lightweight stove? | ||
| So we took a lightweight stove along with us. | ||
| We took flint with us as well. | ||
| Matches and a lighter. | ||
| No jet boil or anything like that, because you wouldn't be able to refill them probably. | ||
| Yeah, what we had actually, we had a bottle that connects to the stove, and with that bottle you can either fill it up with gasoline, but you can also use vodka, whiskey, and you can run off the vapors. | ||
| You get pumping up, pump the bottle, the vapors leak out, sparks a flame, and you're good to go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, so that's what I talk, especially in Mongolia. | ||
| Oh, because you just get hammered everywhere. | ||
| The nomads get Russian vodka. | ||
| Oh, that's wild. | ||
| So you're drinking vodka just to, like, people think you're a drunk. | ||
| You're really just trying to stay alive out there in the wilderness. | ||
| Yeah, you're not drinking it. | ||
| You're using it to fuel. | ||
| How much does it, like, is it efficient? | ||
| Like, the use of vodka? | ||
| Like, how much vodka does it take to cook your meal? | ||
| Luckily, I didn't need to try it. | ||
| That was just a precaution that we took. | ||
| I always carried enough gasoline with me. | ||
| Because by using the vodka or the whiskey, it does ruin the stove. | ||
| Oh, I see, I see. | ||
| It like blocks the small hole that sparks the flame. | ||
| And you don't want that when you're in the middle of the wilderness. | ||
| Isn't that funny? | ||
| You would think that, like, if anything, gasoline would be more fucked up. | ||
| Yeah, you would, yeah. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's probably because it's not all alcohol, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a bunch of other shit in there. | ||
| It's got to be. | ||
| It's got to be. | ||
| But if you had rubbing alcohol, like pure rubbing alcohol, it would probably burn even better, right? | ||
| Yeah, potentially. | ||
| Hey, you would have thought so. | ||
| This whole idea that you had to do this, how much encouragement did you get from people that you told the story to? | ||
| And how many people were like, you can't do this, you're going to die up there? | ||
| I'd say a healthy mix. | ||
| For those who had seen the previous adventures that I had done, they had hope. | ||
| They had faith in you. | ||
| Yeah, they had faith. | ||
| Come on, surely he's got this. | ||
| They knew you'd already accomplished two amazing things. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And it was never done recklessly. | ||
| First, it was never really done for the record. | ||
| There was always environmental angle, sustainability, awareness, etc. | ||
| But it's also the planning. | ||
| I used to do really reckless stuff. | ||
| We'll get to that. | ||
| But now it's meticulous planning. | ||
| It's the details. | ||
| Looking at what can go wrong. | ||
| But also learning how you can possibly overcome it to make it back home. | ||
| I love a good cliffhanger. | ||
| I'm glad we're going to get to that. | ||
| Let that sit for a second. | ||
| But when you're walking... | ||
| What kind of equipment are you using? | ||
| Are you using a GPS? And if so, do you have solar panels that you're using to gather electricity? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Is that what you're doing? | ||
| Yeah, we would take solar panels. | ||
| So we had solar panels. | ||
| We had a couple of power banks. | ||
| So we'd use the solar panel to charge the power bank, and then that will charge the GPS. Can I ask you how you do that? | ||
| Are you putting it on the back of your backpack as you walk? | ||
| That's it, yeah. | ||
| We would strap it to the top of the rucksack. | ||
| Mongolia, especially, is known as the eternal land of blue sky. | ||
| Where I was wasn't too far, so we did have a lot of blue sky, decent sun rays. | ||
| I was able to charge the power bank, and that power bank could last up to about a week and a half of charging, depending on how I use it. | ||
| So it was really, really useful. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| So when you're walking, how much does it take? | ||
| What is the milliamp hour? | ||
| So what is it? | ||
| I think I studied it by how many chargers I can get from the iPhone. | ||
| So I think it was seven or eight chargers from 0% on the iPhone to 100%, seven to eight straight chargers. | ||
| And that sometimes requires quite a bit. | ||
| Sometimes I was just charging the GoPro or the little satellite phone. | ||
| And you're able to get that full charge just from that solar panel in how long? | ||
| Just from the power bank, yeah. | ||
| The solar panel would take a good while to charge up the power bank. | ||
| So what I did is I took... | ||
| Like a good while? | ||
| A couple days? | ||
| I'd say a couple of days to get to 100%. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| 25 to 30% per day, I think it was. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So it seems like you could almost get everything you need just while you're walking every day. | ||
| That's it, yeah. | ||
| Like you're right there. | ||
| If the days are good, you know, if we've got access to blue sky. | ||
| But I took... | ||
| Does it work at all when it's cloudy? | ||
| It does, but painfully slow. | ||
| Like maybe after an hour you've bumped up a percent. | ||
| How crazy is the idea though? | ||
| They're stealing energy out of the sky. | ||
| Amazing, yeah. | ||
| It's the sun. | ||
| The energy of the sun is powering your phone. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I don't want to do it that way just to do it that way. | ||
| It just sounds so badass. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's the way the world's moving as well, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, the energy of the sun powering your phone. | ||
| I mean, the world just needs more efficient ways to use solar, and they're going to get better at it for sure. | ||
| Yeah, big time. | ||
| It's far better than it used to be. | ||
| I was shocked to see it all over China as well, actually. | ||
| So I would imagine, right? | ||
| There's a lot of rural places in particular that don't really have too much access to the grid. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So when you're traveling around, are you using the phone as your GPS or do you have a standalone GPS unit? | ||
| So with China, I was using the GPS and that would keep me... | ||
| Like a Garmin or something? | ||
| Yeah, I got an inReach Denorme. | ||
| That's the one you can communicate with people, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| With that one, you can send text only. | ||
| But I did. | ||
| I took a Navarino sat phone and that would allow for calls. | ||
| And that got me out of a lot of difficult situations. | ||
| Were you ever in a situation where you're like, I think these people are going to rob us? | ||
| I was robbed in Mongolia, but in China, no. | ||
| You got robbed in Mongolia? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| They stole my solar panel. | ||
| Really? | ||
| They did it so politely, so nicely. | ||
| They just came over, they were visiting, I was chilling with them, eating my ration pack. | ||
| They brought some food and some tea over. | ||
| We all sat out in the sun and at one point they would have slid my solar panel under my tent and I didn't see it. | ||
| So when it came for me to pack everything back into my tent, which I did, put my head down, fell asleep and then I all of a sudden felt like nudging on the tent and something was yanked from underneath it. | ||
| And I just thought, hello. | ||
| And then someone was just running away. | ||
| And I thought, oh, maybe he came to say hi. | ||
| And I've just scared him off, not realizing. | ||
| But then the next morning, I realized the solar panel's missing. | ||
| And then whilst I was tracking, I clicked and thought, OK, very clever. | ||
| Came back a few hours later at dark, took it from underneath and ran. | ||
| So now what do you do without a fucking solar panel? | ||
| Yeah, I had a spare. | ||
| Because at that point, I took a trailer, and the trailer weighed about 120 kilograms of everything that I had in it, which is about 260 pounds. | ||
| And so yeah, with that journey, I made sure I had backups. | ||
| How are you moving the trailer? | ||
| So yeah, so with Mongolia, it's just strapped with me. | ||
| It's like a four-point harness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| On wheels. | ||
| So you're not just walking 4,000 miles. | ||
| You're walking 4,000 miles or 260 pounds behind you? | ||
| No, so this is a whole different expedition. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah, so this takes... | ||
| When it came to Robin, there was nothing in China, so I went to Mongolia. | ||
| Okay, that's right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So that's there. | ||
| But in China... | ||
| No, I had difficult situations with the authorities, with the police. | ||
| Were they trying to get bribes? | ||
| No, they were just... | ||
| I was in a sensitive area, you know, to get to the source. | ||
| The planning, it took over two years. | ||
| So I needed government support. | ||
| I needed national park access. | ||
| I needed... | ||
| And a Green Development Foundation, which is like an organisation to make me ambassador, to make me doctor for a year, to be able to get all of this access. | ||
| When I went through the motions of getting these different organisations on board, that would give me access to the authorities and allow me to get to the source. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| It blows my mind now. | ||
| It was really, really difficult to get off the ground. | ||
| But we did that. | ||
| But still, we were so close to Tibet that the Tibetan police would come over and threaten to get rid of us and deport us and whatnot. | ||
| So that came as a worry. | ||
| But again, I carried 13 different documents or stamped or official or signed. | ||
| So I had to show them that. | ||
| I had to use the satellite phone, call into the Beijing team, use as translation. | ||
| I think that one time they made me delete all of the information, all of the tracked information I needed for Guinness World Record. | ||
| They made me delete that, but luckily it was backed up because they didn't want to have me seen walk in this region. | ||
| It was quite sensitive there, but I was definitely in China and definitely in Qinghai province. | ||
| Sensitive how so? | ||
| Just because you've got Tibet and you've got China and they're very close to each other. | ||
| So I needed to make sure that I was always in China. | ||
| Sometimes you'd get the police come over too. | ||
| Did they think that you were a spy or something? | ||
| Yeah, no idea what they thought, but it came as a shock to them. | ||
| They were also very worried for my safety. | ||
| So there was that angle as well, that they were saying once they found out it was official, it was legit and they'd apologize. | ||
| They'd actually follow me on the Chinese social media, you know, follow the journey. | ||
| So that was great. | ||
| But after that, they did say, we are just, you know, bringing you in for your protection. | ||
| There's bears, there's wolves. | ||
| We've not seen a westerner out here in I don't know how long. | ||
| So that got tricky, and there was one stage where they said, you need to be on the other side of the river. | ||
| So they drove us 40 miles back on ourself to a bridge, dropped us off on the other side, and we had to do those 40 miles all over again. | ||
| That was day six into the journey, and we were desperately trying to get off the mountains, and now we just dropped back 40. We had to walk those 40 miles again. | ||
| No way around it. | ||
| Nightmare. | ||
| Fuck, dude. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| So yeah, it was really tricky. | ||
| The source around that area, really sensitive. | ||
| And then we found that the locals would call the police as well. | ||
| They would radio to the next girl, to the next girl, to the next girl, until eventually there was a phone signal and they would call the police. | ||
| And the police would often rock up at 2, 3 o'clock in the morning, just at our tent. | ||
| They had the location bang on. | ||
| They rocked up, like, what are you doing here? | ||
| So we found out that the locals were amazing, very hospitable, but they were worried and they didn't know if they'd seen a Westerner. | ||
| Do they report it? | ||
| Will they be in trouble if they don't report it? | ||
| So they did. | ||
| So it came, it pretty much went from Mission Yangtze to almost Mission Escape and Evade. | ||
| We had to escape the sensitive region that we were in, but we had to evade the locals because we realized that it was them calling the police. | ||
| That went on for about three weeks. | ||
| I would think they would maybe think that you were an escaped fugitive. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because if you think of a fugitive from America or the UK is trying to get away, what better way to just jump into the middle of nowhere in China and walk? | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| Yeah, potentially. | ||
| Or just, again, a threat from... | ||
| You look like you could be a fugitive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe some sort of bank robber type character. | ||
| I'd say it. | ||
| From a Guy Ritchie movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There we go. | |
| So, you are avoiding this sensitive area, so this is a sensitive area that's close to Tibet and the Chinese border. | ||
| Did you anticipate any of these things beforehand? | ||
| Like, did you guys sit down with the team, like when you were, and did you say, okay, this could go wrong, this could go wrong? | ||
| How many things did you figure could go wrong that didn't? | ||
| So many things that could have gone wrong that luckily didn't. | ||
| This was really sketchy. | ||
| Just the Yangtze is just known. | ||
| It cuts through a lot of diversity. | ||
| It's a beautiful, stunning park. | ||
| One of the beautiful places that I've been. | ||
| But there are all sensitivities. | ||
| There's the elevation. | ||
| There is the wildlife. | ||
| There's the temperatures as well. | ||
| Did you ever see that video of, I don't know if the girl's from China or from Japan. | ||
| It turned out to be fake. | ||
| But she's snowboarding and behind her you see a bear running. | ||
| Yeah, I did see that video. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Is that possible? | ||
| The video's fake. | ||
| Where is that? | ||
| In Japan? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I think it's Japan, isn't it? | ||
| It might be China. | ||
| I did see that. | ||
| They exist in Japan as well, right? | ||
| They do. | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| Can you, Jamie, I'm sorry, I'm double Google asking you. | ||
| Yeah, bring that up if you can. | ||
| Yeah, it's a fun video to watch. | ||
| After that I want to see a picture of that Yangtze river. | ||
| So she was oblivious. | ||
| I don't think it's real. | ||
| I don't think it's real. | ||
| I think someone just did some cool shit with CGI, but it looks pretty good. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It looks like if it was in a movie, you'd be like, oh fuck, oh fuck, because the girl's got headphones on, she's fucking rocking out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a tiger as well recently. | ||
| It was in India. | ||
| Just sprints across the road and how fast it was going. | ||
| See, here it is. | ||
| So it's really well made, whoever did it. | ||
| It's like she's got a GoPro. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's on the ground. | ||
| And then as she's going down the hill and her snowboard at a certain point in time, you look and see a fucking bear and she has no idea. | ||
| She's laughing and everything's cool. | ||
| And then watch it turn to the side again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think you see the bear more than once. | ||
| Oh, terrifying. | ||
| There it is, yeah. | ||
| The second one is where I'm skeptical because it seems like this... | ||
| Oh, fuck, it looks pretty goddamn realistic. | ||
| It looks pretty damn good, doesn't it? | ||
| That would be hard to do. | ||
| Yeah, like the bear just gave up at that point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Damn, that chick is flying. | ||
| I have never snowboarded. | ||
| From what I've heard from my friends, when you snowboard, it's easier to break your head. | ||
| You see your feet go up in the air and your head goes down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's easy to break your head. | ||
| It's difficult actually. | ||
| It's supposed to be Japan. | ||
| It's supposed to be Japan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've got that Tiger one. | ||
| Tiger one. | ||
| There's one recent. | ||
| Did you ever see the one where the dude's... | ||
| I think he's in India and they're on a bike. | ||
| Like a motorbike. | ||
| That's the one I'm talking about. | ||
| Tiger's chasing behind him. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Have you seen that? | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| The speed. | ||
| It almost gets him. | ||
| It almost gets him. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| That's definitely not edited. | ||
| It's chasing him, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, that's... | ||
| Petrifying. | ||
| That is fucking horrific. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| So these guys are on... | ||
| Look at this tiger. | ||
| Just going for it. | ||
| Almost got him. | ||
| Almost got him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No way. | |
| Oh, man. | ||
| Imagine the adrenaline right there. | ||
| That dude is wishing he had the cash for a bigger engine. | ||
| Right there is when you... | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| What a killing machine. | ||
| So beautiful. | ||
| What a fucked up way to die from the most beautiful thing nature has ever created. | ||
| If a tiger wasn't a murderous, horrific predator that definitely eats people, you would look at it and go, was it a movie like Avatar or something like that? | ||
| A tiger doesn't even look like a real creature. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's so beautiful. | ||
| Oh, stunning. | ||
| They're all beautiful creatures, aren't they? | ||
| Beautiful and spectacular and murderous. | ||
| And terrifying at the same time. | ||
| Chasing you on a moped. | ||
| Oh, the speed as well. | ||
| Same with a bear. | ||
| You think they're going to be slow, but they can run. | ||
| Oh, they run way faster than people. | ||
| They run faster than Usain Bolt. | ||
| He can't even get away from a bear. | ||
| And if he touches you, all they need is one little ankle pick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One little, just kick that ankle. | ||
| Woo! | ||
| You go flying through the air. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Head first. | ||
| They tear you apart. | ||
| We came across bare footprints and we believed that the bare footprints were fairly fresh. | ||
| Maybe past our exact track that we were on in West China. | ||
| Show me with your hand how big it was. | ||
| Maybe about this big. | ||
| Oh, fuck that. | ||
| You got a picture, actually, on the Instagram. | ||
| That's big, dude. | ||
| You got a video, actually, of Tibetan Mastiffs as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, dude. | |
| You got a Tibetan Mastiff running up to me, trying to attack me. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, the guy just steps in, throws the stone. | ||
| You don't see that bit, but the Tibetan Mastiff... | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| That's a pretty good size. | ||
| That's not as big as I was thinking, but that's pretty big. | ||
| So that's its front paw, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, I think. | ||
| I'm not a bear tracker. | ||
| And then it's like the back paw is almost like a human footprint, isn't it? | ||
| Well, the big brown bears, there's a photograph, a famous photograph of a woman who is a wildlife biologist and they had tagged this grizzly to put a collar on it or find its location or something like that or maybe do a test on it. | ||
| And she's holding its foot up. | ||
| And it is literally like a huge dinner plate. | ||
| See if you can find that picture of a biologist holds up grizzly's paw. | ||
| Yeah, it is fucking huge. | ||
| And the claws on it. | ||
| Yeah, it's like as wide as my chest. | ||
| That's what the bear's foot looks like. | ||
| Look at that! | ||
| Look at that! | ||
| Look at the fucking size of that bar! | ||
| You don't stand a chance, do you? | ||
| That's so crazy! | ||
| It's so crazy that nature created that. | ||
| Just a clean-up system for the fucking woods. | ||
| Anything with a limp. | ||
| Anything that's fucking around places it shouldn't be. | ||
| You're having too many babies. | ||
| Ooh, I smell them. | ||
| Coming to get them. | ||
| Done. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| So here you are, and you're out there with these things, and you just have a little tent, and no weapons. | ||
| A little tent, yeah, and no weapons. | ||
| And there's three of you? | ||
| Three of you or four of you? | ||
| There was three for the first three weeks, and then there was two of us for four days. | ||
| Then from then on, it was pretty much solo, most of the way, for the first sort of half of the expedition. | ||
| And then the second half was super interactive, opened it up, people were joining. | ||
| Oh, so people knew about it. | ||
| Yeah, it went pretty big in China. | ||
| We'd have journalists, we'd have Chinese celebrities. | ||
| And they'd walk with you? | ||
| And they would trek with us, yeah. | ||
| Ooh, that's weird. | ||
| We'd sometimes organize events where it'd be rock climbing, we'd be teaching them how to belay off the cliff. | ||
| Where, like, do they have Instagram in China? | ||
| No, so I had to get all of the different social media platforms. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| That's pig's liver. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| So they marinate it in vodka and chili. | ||
| And you're drinking it? | ||
| No, you're blowing it up? | ||
| Blowing it up. | ||
| That's Pasha Worm. | ||
| So that's like a rare delicacy. | ||
| You can eat it raw, straight from the Yangtze River. | ||
| How sick did you get? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You had to have some serious stomach bugs. | ||
| Yeah, over the past decade, I've eaten all sorts. | ||
| The lot. | ||
| So there's like towards the east. | ||
| So it was super interactive as well. | ||
| It was... | ||
| So these kids all knew that you were doing this? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, there's a news channel there as well, and we were creating a documentary. | ||
| Oh, that's pretty cool. | ||
| At one point... | ||
| Good hospitality? | ||
| Yeah, amazing hospitality. | ||
| They were so friendly. | ||
| At one point, Adidas got wind of it, and they invited me out to launch... | ||
| Do you know Jet Li? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He had a co-branded range between himself and Adidas, so it was like a photoshoot GQ, Adidas, and Jackie Huang, who's like a big movie star. | ||
| And I just jumped at the chance. | ||
| It was one day off, one day in, in Shanghai, straight back into the wilderness. | ||
| And that was crazy contrast. | ||
| One minute in the wilderness, next minute, flying out to Shanghai, got all of these stylists, makeup artists, like, whoa, photo shoot, boof, straight back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was because they wanted, like, a face of the East to represent the brand, but also a face from the West, so it came from nowhere. | ||
| So it was great. | ||
| You know, lots of people started getting wind on it. | ||
| Again, I had to start, I think, eight to nine different social media channels in China because they have their own platforms. | ||
| They don't have Google, Instagram's banned, YouTube, etc. | ||
| So yeah, I had a great team, Mandarin Films and Beijing, who really helped support, set all of this up and we were translating. | ||
| Was there a certain point in time that when these people were going with you, they were like, hey, bro, I'm done. | ||
| You're on your own. | ||
| And was that kind of weird? | ||
| Like when the crowds... | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Now you're back to being yourself again? | ||
| By yourself again? | ||
| The second half of the expedition, it was okay. | ||
| So it was coming across many people. | ||
| But the first half... | ||
| Oh man, the first half, it got quite difficult. | ||
| Yeah, it was lonely at times, it was boring. | ||
| Like the hiking, I don't really, it sounds funny, I don't really particularly enjoy the hiking, the trekking, the walking. | ||
| But that's what you chose to do for a whole year. | ||
| I know, I know, right? | ||
| I can get pretty boring. | ||
| Well, if you eat porridge every day, you're like, I don't really like porridge. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's actually, it's the survival, it's the challenges, and it's the people you meet along the way. | ||
| So did you ever have a point where you had large groups of people but then not? | ||
| Yeah, quite often. | ||
| I think the largest we had was about 35 or 40 people. | ||
| And then afterwards they went away? | ||
| Afterwards they went away. | ||
| Back on the grind. | ||
| That must be the weird part. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A bunch of people join in with you, and then they're gone. | |
| That's it. | ||
| And then you're still trudging. | ||
| Yeah, and you've got to keep going. | ||
| Get some Joe Rogan podcast on the earphones as an aircracker. | ||
| You're like, there's only 290 days to go. | ||
| Look on the bright side. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| And the first part was more so, because the second half, there was lots of people. | ||
| It was very interactive. | ||
| The first half, like I had a UK photographer fly out, Martin Lyons, and he joined me. | ||
| He was supposed to join me for two weeks, but there was a terrifying landslide, pretty much. | ||
| It just blocked the way, and there was only two options to cross. | ||
| And again, you know, this isn't his profession. | ||
| That's not what he does. | ||
| He's a photographer, so he's coming to my world, and he's... | ||
| We've seen these two options. | ||
| Either one could go terribly wrong. | ||
| You're dropping a hell of a distance and you're straight into the Yangtze River. | ||
| So he was supposed to join me for two weeks, but he ended up going back on day number one after six hours just because of the danger of trying to cross it. | ||
| And so that for my mindset, having company for two weeks, I have a good friend of mine as well from the UK. I can speak, I can converse and communicate with. | ||
| To then having no one back to my own. | ||
| It's still in the wild side of China. | ||
| Still bears, still wolves, and I'm solo. | ||
| So that hit me hard. | ||
| I was like, damn. | ||
| Are you keeping a journal in your tent at night? | ||
| Yeah, I would actually stick to... | ||
| I did on the previous expeditions. | ||
| With this one, I stuck to voice memos because it would capture my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions. | ||
| And so I was... | ||
| Especially for the book, I was capturing as much as... | ||
| And you're doing this with your phone? | ||
| Doing this with the phone, yeah. | ||
| Were you worried about dropping your phone and losing everything? | ||
| I was. | ||
| I was. | ||
| Each city I came across, I just tried to back everything up. | ||
| With Wi-Fi? | ||
| Yeah, Wi-Fi. | ||
| What are you allowed to use over there? | ||
| Do you have to use an Android phone on their system, a Chinese system? | ||
| No, we were okay. | ||
| I just took my iPhone. | ||
| I was connected to all of their social media, of course. | ||
| I had my own bank account transactions, all of that with China. | ||
| So I was very much on the system. | ||
| You can't use Twitter or Instagram over there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, you can't. | |
| You've got to get a VPN. What is that? | ||
| Oh, Virtual Private Network. | ||
| That's it, yes. | ||
| I thought it was like one of their apps. | ||
| So what are their apps that you're allowed to use? | ||
| What's their social media apps? | ||
| So they have like Weibo, which is kind of like an Instagram. | ||
| They have a WeChat, which is kind of like a WhatsApp merged into Facebook. | ||
| So are you having to translate all of their comments, like when they write things? | ||
| Oh, when they write? | ||
| Yeah, I can, but sometimes it's too many. | ||
| You've got to open it up, go on the VPN, open up the Google, translate it. | ||
| I would just send it to the team. | ||
| The team would actually do most of the posting for me. | ||
| I'd send it to the UK team to post on the international social media website. | ||
| Oh, so you could send them that post and they could put it on Instagram or Twitter? | ||
| That's it, yeah. | ||
| I would send them like a voice memo or a message of text what to say. | ||
| Was there ever an issue with the Chinese government that you were doing that through a third party, that you were somehow or another getting the information out into the real internet? | ||
| Not so much, no, because even the satellite that we had to carry, I carried like a Navarino satellite beacon system, if you like, and that we had to register with the government and he had to sign off so they knew what I had with me. | ||
| And it was with that satellite that I was able to send to the Beijing team. | ||
| They would forward on to the UK team and from there we were able to make it one of the world's most interactive firsts. | ||
| Did they have any concern at all about you using the regular internet? | ||
| Like instead of just using the Chinese approved social media sites that you were also using the other ones that were international? | ||
| That's it, using international and the in-China, in-house ones. | ||
| Do they have an issue with that at all, the Chinese people? | ||
| No, not that I'm aware of, no. | ||
| A lot of the Chinese are also on Instagram as well. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do they do that? | ||
| VPN. Of course. | ||
| Yeah, so a lot of them still try to... | ||
| So the Chinese government tolerates that? | ||
| Yeah, I think there's only a certain amount of lockdown that they can have. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| There's a lot of Chinese travelers as well, so they go to these foreign countries, they get the Instagram, the Twitter, the Facebook... | ||
| They get woke when they go to foreign countries. | ||
| So that's got to be weird, using their government-approved social media. | ||
| Did it feel weird while you were using it? | ||
| Yeah, I got so used to it. | ||
| I think there was 10 or 11 different social networks that I was on. | ||
| It was mainly my team. | ||
| There was just too much. | ||
| Do they have more over there than we do over here? | ||
| Yeah, I'd say so. | ||
| Oh, and they're well connected. | ||
| Their phone is just like an extension. | ||
| Is it different? | ||
| In what way? | ||
| In terms of, like, do they have different apps that they use more often or different things in their phones? | ||
| Yeah, they have their own app, so they have everything that we have, but converted, just different. | ||
| Go on. | ||
| We have an issue in this country with Huawei and a lot of these Chinese companies. | ||
| You can't even buy a Huawei phone anymore over in America. | ||
| But the ones that they sell over in China are super sophisticated. | ||
| They're like the top of the food chain phones right now. | ||
| Big time. | ||
| And the cameras as well. | ||
| Because that's what all of the Chinese love as well. | ||
| To be able to take good photos, good videos. | ||
| And that is just an instant sell with the camera that's come with that phone. | ||
| Yeah, they've blocked them from Google, though. | ||
| This is where it gets really interesting. | ||
| That's why I'm asking. | ||
| Google no longer lets them use Google Apps, so you can't use the Google Play Store. | ||
| So you have to either sideload apps, you could sideload some apps, or you have to get the Huawei version of these apps. | ||
| So I'm like, I wonder if... | ||
| From the United States trying to stop them from taking over. | ||
| And they're worried that it's a branch of the government and they're going to get their hands in all these different enterprises and businesses. | ||
| And they'll be able to spy on everything and extract information because they can do that with their Huawei devices. | ||
| But it's interesting that I wonder if... | ||
| Leaving them out of the system will make them create a system that's better, and they don't even need our system anymore. | ||
| It's almost better to like... | ||
| Yeah, you know, I think that's the way it's going. | ||
| They don't have Google, but they have Baidu. | ||
| Baidu's just like Google. | ||
| But they can control it more. | ||
| They'll have whatever their version is of Wikipedia. | ||
| But it's all government-controlled information now. | ||
| They got so many good at it. | ||
| I think they've got an app as well, like a delivery app, where if the guy is like one minute late, you can throw a complaint in and then it's free delivery. | ||
| Costs pennies as it is anyway. | ||
| One minute? | ||
| Yeah, so sometimes they'll call, I'm going to be a minute late, is it okay? | ||
| Can you not phone in? | ||
| Because he won't get paid then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| It's a deadline. | ||
| Yeah, and like even the bullet trains, they're so advanced. | ||
| The bullet trains are leaving on the second, let alone the minute. | ||
| A couple of seconds before the minute, if anything, they're just so sufficient. | ||
| And you see that there, everything's in-house. | ||
| They've got things cogging over there. | ||
| It's made in China. | ||
| It's almost like they don't need the rest of the world. | ||
| That's the scary thing, you know? | ||
| But it's, again, a pleasant place to be. | ||
| I had my friend, Martin Barrington, who's here as well, say that, because he joined me on Mission Yangtze, and he had this idea that maybe it might be a little bit more suppressed, and when he joined me, he was like, wow, everyone's happy, everyone's doing their tai chi, dancing, everyone's active. | ||
| There's a strong sense of community. | ||
| What part of China was this? | ||
| All over. | ||
| Yeah, all over. | ||
| So do you think that we in America have a misconception of what it's like to be Chinese? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Not just in the US, UK as well. | ||
| I think most countries, yeah. | ||
| Do you think it's because we don't communicate or because their language is so different, they seem so different because they're all the way over there? | ||
| Like, what is it? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's just because it's so locked off, isn't it? | ||
| You know, they're locked off the grid. | ||
| They don't really shout about what they're doing. | ||
| Like right now, as we were saying before, the amount of solar panels, wind farms, they sent, I think, 19,000 soldiers out to plant trees. | ||
| But all of that, they're not shouting to get attention. | ||
| They're just doing it. | ||
| And so I sometimes see that, oh, China aren't doing enough. | ||
| But on the inside, when I'm over in China, I see it all. | ||
| You know, like, whoa, we didn't know about this. | ||
| So, you know, I'm to blame as well. | ||
| Before I went to China, I thought maybe it's going to be the same. | ||
| But that's why I go to these places, you know, get out there, explore its interior, meet the people of the country. | ||
| Yeah, it's a pleasant place to be, for sure. | ||
| That's pretty badass, man, to get a totally different view of a country than what most people do, and to do it for a full year. | ||
| Do you think that's going to be a place you go back and visit now? | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| I think it took off so well. | ||
| I had such immense support there that it'd be a shame not to continue it. | ||
| So I will be going back. | ||
| Me and the teams out there are already Looking at next ideas. | ||
| I'm sure you are. | ||
| So is that how it works? | ||
| How much time do you take when you're done walking for a year? | ||
| How much time do you take before you go, okay, now what? | ||
| You barely know. | ||
| So as soon as I got back from Mission Yangtze, I had an Asia tour. | ||
| So I was straight back out there, Korea, Singapore. | ||
| I'm back out to China doing lectures. | ||
| I've been out there four times already. | ||
| It's going to be aired on CCTV, the documentary, and TEDx talks as well. | ||
| I've been back four or five times already since I finished, only four or five months ago. | ||
| Every month I'm pretty much back out there. | ||
| When did you do the first one? | ||
| Was the first one Mongolia? | ||
| So the first year was Mongolia. | ||
| That was 2013. And how long did that take? | ||
| That took 78 days. | ||
| So it all pretty much started living in Wales there. | ||
| I went from high school, I went on to college to do an outdoor education course. | ||
| I was working various different, so my first job, what was it, 14, 15, fish and chip shop, $4 an hour, you know, grinding away, and then I went into waiting on, then I went into lifeguarding, because I heard that the lifeguarding money for a young teenager, well, 16, 17, is pretty well paid. | ||
| And then it was from there that I started to save up as much money as I can, got rid of my little jalopy of a car, bought myself a little bicycle, cycled to and from work, just saving the pennies, and eventually left at age 19. And the first place I went was China. | ||
| Great Wall. | ||
| I was only there for two weeks. | ||
| I left China. | ||
| When I looked back on the map, I thought, China's a big place. | ||
| I barely even touched the surface, you know, I need to get myself back there. | ||
| But after that, it was just various reckless, extremely low-budget adventures held around Southeast Asia. | ||
| When I say low-budget, it's like buying a bicycle for $10, finding string on the side of the road that we would use to strap the rucksack onto the back with. | ||
| No pump, no puncture repair kit. | ||
| We're about to cycle over Cambodia, Vietnam, over 1,100 miles. | ||
| Why wouldn't you get a puncture repair kit? | ||
| Just saving the pennies. | ||
| We actually got a tent that was about... | ||
| I know, man. | ||
| We got a tent that was $5. | ||
| Found out the hard way it wasn't waterproof. | ||
| Just silly things. | ||
| You made it on the bike, though? | ||
| Made it. | ||
| The bike broke 17 times until I was with my friend, Matt Norman. | ||
| I named mine Little Elder. | ||
| A ridiculous name. | ||
| I think the bike's maybe on my Instagram. | ||
| Ridiculous little bicycle, basket on the front, a little pink bell. | ||
| Off we went, both of us. | ||
| Bikes broke 17 times in total. | ||
| How'd you get them fixed? | ||
| We would rock up at the locals and rock up, see if they can help, and they would fix it. | ||
| Really hospitable. | ||
| Did somebody have to translate to you? | ||
| Did you have a translator with you? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| So we were just out there. | ||
| We were just, you know, rock up with a smile. | ||
| I think smiling is the biggest thing. | ||
| Communication sign, isn't it? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They don't see you as a threat. | ||
| The barriers are down. | ||
| I'd point at the problem and then they would help me fix it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you walk in like a dick with a flat tire, that's not good. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So we just rock up. | ||
| We sort us out. | ||
| We're chased by dogs, hit by mopeds, dodged by lorries. | ||
| So that was the first away-from-home adventure. | ||
| I'd say that that was the catalyst. | ||
| You said dodged by lorries? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| That the roads were extremely sketchy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Enough only to translate that. | ||
| And they would be coming straight down the mountain pass. | ||
| Almost like the brakes were working properly. | ||
| We're squeezing in. | ||
| It's going past us. | ||
| We're like, we need to get off this road, man. | ||
| We're panicking, trying to cycle faster. | ||
| But after that, we just found my niche, found my passion. | ||
| Thought, wow, this is great. | ||
| It's cheap. | ||
| It's reckless. | ||
| But... | ||
| After that, we were in Thailand. | ||
| We hooked up with a local guy that said we can cross the border into Myanmar to a community. | ||
| It's like a Burmese hill tribe and we can learn jungle survival. | ||
| So we did. | ||
| We went there and this group living out there in the mountainous jungle region of the border of Tibet and Myanmar. | ||
| They were teaching us berries, like there's a mosquito repellent, like you can pop them, rope them in your skin, it'll repel the mosquitoes. | ||
| Teaching us how to hunt, how to gather, what berries or what leaves were edible, what plants weren't edible, how to build rafts and shelters using natural resources, you know, normally bamboo, banana leaves as a bed. | ||
| It was a slanted shelter for the rainwater to run off. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| We just continued these sort of adventures around Southeast Asia. | ||
| I hopped over to Australia, found some workers in Australia powering gas. | ||
| I think it was knocking on people's doors. | ||
| I thought, this isn't me. | ||
| This is not what I'm traveling for. | ||
| I'm in a suit now. | ||
| I remember I was shadowing my boss. | ||
| We walked up to this drive and there was this guy at the end of the drive doing all of these pull-ups. | ||
| At that point, I'd become quite unhealthy, put a bit more weight on. | ||
| It wasn't sticking to the trainer, it wasn't sticking to a good diet. | ||
| And he jumped down, he wasn't interested in the Australian pound on gas, but he mentioned something like, yeah, I respect you guys out here, 40 plus degrees Celsius, 108 Fahrenheit, knocking on people's doors in their suits, trying to sell them a good deal. | ||
| And my boss replied something cringeworthy. | ||
| He said something like, yeah, but we get paid a lot of this. | ||
| You know, I drive a Skyline. | ||
| So unnecessary. | ||
| And the guy replied, the guy who was doing the pull-ups, it's not all about the money, it's the lifestyle too. | ||
| And all of a sudden, that was a slap in the face for me. | ||
| That's why I started to travel. | ||
| So the next day, I quit the job, got myself a little bike with my friend again, and we just carried on, cycled to Southern Australia. | ||
| So you think by your boss saying something douchey that sort of leaned you in the right direction... | ||
| Yeah, I was thinking for a while, this isn't me. | ||
| It's foolish. | ||
| Yeah, I was doing something that wasn't... | ||
| But his behavior is foolish. | ||
| Yeah, I know his behavior. | ||
| I was looking at this guy and I was like, I'm not stood on his side. | ||
| I'm stood. | ||
| This is the way that I'm going. | ||
| This is my boss. | ||
| He would eat fast food every single morning, KFC. I was just like, this isn't how I am. | ||
| Sometimes you just need someone to say something like that, right? | ||
| Yeah, little nudges. | ||
| And I've had a lot of those little nudges along the way that if it wasn't for that nudge, I don't know, maybe I would have just continued and no idea. | ||
| Yeah, I think we all encounter those. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| So you said you got robbed that one time where they stole your solar panel. | ||
| That's it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It seems like you would get robbed a lot. | |
| Madagascar. | ||
| Madagascar was more sketchy, I would say. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| We'll come to Madagascar, but yeah, so just before, after that Australia cycle and before Mongolia, it's like this links us into the Mongolia. | ||
| It's actually then working in Thailand. | ||
| Because the money was so low, I had to find work as a master scuba diving instructor, but I was also doing the Muay Thai out in Thailand, which was awesome to see their discipline, you know, their ankle beating their shins. | ||
| Had you ever done it before? | ||
| No, I come from a boxing background, so I was doing boxing in Wales. | ||
| Did you know how to kick at all? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| So I learned the hard way. | ||
| I learned such the hard way, actually, that I had the boxing stance, left foot in front, And the Muay Thai stance is more square on. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| And they just jacked my leg up instantly. | ||
| Jacked it up. | ||
| Just kicked. | ||
| They didn't need to get into no fists with me. | ||
| It was just jacked my leg up. | ||
| The next day I had to cancel work. | ||
| I couldn't climb out of the ladder with all of my scuba diving kicks because I couldn't bend my leg. | ||
| And from there I just corrected. | ||
| I was training five, six times a day, killing my nerve endings on the shin. | ||
| I just loved it. | ||
| I had a stadium fight. | ||
| Did you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Which stadium? | ||
| It was in Kotao, a little island in Kotao. | ||
| So a guy sailed from mainland over to Kotao, and the winner, the loser, you can make money, of course, you know, so that was kind of my way of paying the rent. | ||
| If I won, you leave with money. | ||
| If you lose, you leave with nothing. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, and you've got the locals around the ringside sort of banging down on the canvas, holding money up. | ||
| They're either pointing at you or they're pointing at your opponent. | ||
| How do you know when you take a fight like this that it's well-matched? | ||
| Yeah, well you don't really. | ||
| So that was my first stadium fight and apparently this guy in my opponent, that was his sixth. | ||
| But we looked similar height. | ||
| He looked to be maybe more experienced because of the fighting, but hadn't been fighting since a young age like a lot of the tyres have. | ||
| You know, they start from such a young age, as you know. | ||
| So yeah, it was a little bit, my heart, I was just like, right, I've done my training. | ||
| It was about, what, how many, five, six months in. | ||
| So that's pretty fast, you know, straight to the... | ||
| And you said you had boxed before that? | ||
| I'd boxed before that. | ||
| Had you competed? | ||
| No, not competed, so it was just amateur fighting. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was in, yeah, that was Madagascar. | ||
| That's actually just playing around with my guide. | ||
| But, oh, I love it, yeah. | ||
| So... | ||
| How many fights did you have over there? | ||
| It was probably about eight club fights, but only one stadium fight. | ||
| The one stadium fight was the big one, you know. | ||
| You won that, paid for about two, three months worth of accommodation. | ||
| I was good, I needed it. | ||
| You don't earn much money as a scuba diver in Thailand. | ||
| So you won your stadium fight? | ||
| Won the stadium fight, yeah. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| What made you stop? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mongolia. | |
| So I love this lifestyle. | ||
| I was doing it for like two years, like living in Thailand for two years. | ||
| But I was like, I missed trekking the Himalayas. | ||
| I missed my time with the community, the hill tribe in Myanmar, cycling Vietnam. | ||
| So I was like, I need to do something, you know, big, something That'll take me to a country that I'm very unfamiliar with, and that brings in Mongolia. | ||
| So that was the first world, first record. | ||
| Not the first to attempt, though. | ||
| A guy from Britain had attempted on three occasions. | ||
| Unfortunately, evacuated just before the halfway point. | ||
| Tell people what the record is. | ||
| So it was the first to walk solo and unsupported across Mongolia's length. | ||
| So it's from west to east. | ||
| And when you say unsupported, does that mean there's no one monitoring you at all? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So you're on your own. | ||
| You're tracking by, apart from the people that you see along the way, the communities. | ||
| Unsupported meaning everything that I needed to make the journey from start to end point was in the trailer that I was pulling. | ||
| And it was a bog-standard trailer built in a family friend's back garden. | ||
| So you said this trailer weighed 200 and what pounds? | ||
| Yeah, 120 kilograms, which I think is 260 pounds. | ||
| So here you are pulling this thing with a four-part harness. | ||
| First of all, that's hard. | ||
| That's hard to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is it a flat road like that? | ||
| So this is entering the Gobi Desert. | ||
| So it's three weeks over the Altai Mountains, five weeks across the Gobi Desert, and a further three weeks up through the Mongolian steppe. | ||
| So the Altai Mountains were excruciating, you know. | ||
| It's no suspension, of course, on the trailer. | ||
| Even one little pebble or stone gets in the way and you're struggling to... | ||
| There's a sandstorm that I came across. | ||
| It's actually one of the smaller ones. | ||
| What? | ||
| That's a small one? | ||
| That's the small one, yeah. | ||
| It's so painful as well. | ||
| Have you ever been in a sandstorm? | ||
| No, I can only imagine. | ||
| It picks up the stones and grits, a whipping effect. | ||
| Well, I could imagine it could be deadly. | ||
| You can't see anything, right? | ||
| I've seen some of them that roll into Iraq. | ||
| There's soldiers that have taken videos of them and put them up on social media. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It looks like something out of a biblical music. | ||
| A movie, rather. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Scary. | ||
| Yeah, there's giant clouds of dirt hitting your way. | ||
| Have you ever seen those, Jamie? | ||
| Sandstorm. | ||
| Pull up Sandstorm in Iraq. | ||
| Some of them are so insane. | ||
| With a big war in the distance. | ||
| Yeah, you see it coming. | ||
| You're like, what the fuck, man? | ||
| And everybody's just got to hunker down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| You just got to ride it out. | ||
| Yeah, like I was able to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at that. | |
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| That video is fucking bananas. | ||
| Al-Assad Air Force Base. | ||
| And as soon as it hits the wind, the disorientation is darkness inside and you can't hear anything. | ||
| And you're going to get in your tent and you're going to have to breathe through that. | ||
| Yeah, there wasn't one big enough, I would say, that I had to hide. | ||
| It was still big, but I carried on walking. | ||
| Because sometimes it would just come out of nowhere, so I didn't... | ||
| It was more like this. | ||
| Without the wall that you can see and the distance coming towards you. | ||
| Like that video? | ||
| Go back on that, Jamie. | ||
| This is how you see the storm overtakes them and it literally kills the day and turns it into night. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it blocks out the sun. | ||
| This is where it's really crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you see this guy standing there. | ||
| And the storm starts to overtake them, and everything starts to get dim. | ||
| And then after... | ||
| Look at the difference in the color. | ||
| So fast-changing as well, isn't it? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| And now they're in the middle of it, and now it literally blocks out the sun. | ||
| They're in the center of that fucking horrific storm. | ||
| That guy's just walking around breathing. | ||
| Yeah, so that looks more like a dust storm, where it's... | ||
| Kind of similar, but the sand, it moves. | ||
| It depends on the speed of the wind. | ||
| But with a sandstorm, you've literally got to cover up. | ||
| So you saw me with a mask, I had to wear gloves, I had to wear a fleece. | ||
| It's just pounding your skin, almost like sandpaper, you know? | ||
| So it is... | ||
| How long did that last? | ||
| They would last about 15, 20 minutes. | ||
| Do you keep walking or do you stand still? | ||
| I carried on walking. | ||
| Yeah, I did carry on walking. | ||
| You can see where you're going? | ||
| Yeah, as long as you've got the heading on the compass, just keep going, keep going east. | ||
| Yeah, but you're also following a track. | ||
| So this was the... | ||
| So I almost actually lost my life in the Gobi Desert because I was trying to follow a track. | ||
| And the track is like your lifeline. | ||
| If you're not following, if you're off the track, it could be hundreds of miles. | ||
| The track is where there's a water source. | ||
| There's a well always alongside. | ||
| But the Gobi took me five weeks to get across. | ||
| So week after week I was suffering slowly with dehydration, heat exhaustion, slipping into heat stroke, which is usually fatal. | ||
| I had this big 20-litre water container, sort of remembering just rationing my last remaining dribbles of water, if you like. | ||
| I was hallucinating, got to a bad state. | ||
| One of the water wells was dry, and now I had to push on to the next one to hope that it had water. | ||
| It was a mix of hard sand or gravel and soft sand. | ||
| So now you can imagine pulling the wheels through soft sand. | ||
| They were just digging. | ||
| It was like pulling a concrete block through hell. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Yeah, and I was just... | ||
| I got really skinny. | ||
| I got really weak. | ||
| The weeks went by. | ||
| I was disorientated. | ||
| I was hallucinating. | ||
| I was... | ||
| Sort of could feel my organs drying up, if you like. | ||
| It was at the point I just continued to rest under my shelter. | ||
| It was 40, 45 degrees Celsius. | ||
| No breeze, no natural shelter. | ||
| The only shelter I could find here was underneath the trailer. | ||
| I remember just lying there on my back for about 45 minutes to an hour, thinking, what have I done? | ||
| You know, I didn't have the evacuations the previous guy had. | ||
| No helicopters going to come and rescue me, you know. | ||
| The only backup that I had was... | ||
| My logistics manager, my fixer in the capital city, needed to allow at least three to four days for him to get to me and at least another day or two for him to get me out to safety. | ||
| Or I knew that there was a community which 100% had water. | ||
| It was about three or four days trek away. | ||
| And I continued and I pretty much passed the option of pickup at that stage. | ||
| The only way to make it was pushing on those extra few days to the community. | ||
| But again, four days, it was just too much for me. | ||
| I was in agony, man. | ||
| Absolute agony. | ||
| All of the thoughts, all of the feelings. | ||
| But that's when I've always been a big believer in breaking my goals down. | ||
| I couldn't visualise the three or four days, of course, but what I could visualise is 100 metres. | ||
| I could see 100 metres. | ||
| So I was just, if I can rest for five minutes, not an hour, and walk for 100 metres and then rest, because that's all I could manage before I was just in a mess, hide under my trailer again for another five minutes, if I can continue to do this. | ||
| Maybe by breaking my goals down, after four days of 100 meters, I can make it to the community. | ||
| And I did just about, it was off the radars. | ||
| My urine was almost black. | ||
| You know, I was in a bad way. | ||
| Your what was black? | ||
| My urine. | ||
| Urine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh my god, so you probably had severe dehydration. | ||
| Yeah, I was in an awful way. | ||
| I was lucky to make it. | ||
| If that community wasn't there, if it had been abandoned, if the locals weren't there, I definitely wouldn't have made it. | ||
| Now, when you walk into a community like this, how many people are talking? | ||
| How big is the community? | ||
| Talking probably five, six huts, maybe 20, 30 people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Just in the desert, yeah. | ||
| And you just show up, some weird white dude, pulling a sled. | ||
| Pulling a big trailer behind. | ||
| And then you're like, yeah, I've been doing this. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| So that's it. | ||
| So with this, this is before I started feeling bad. | ||
| So with that, I had to run ahead of myself, set up my camera on a tripod, put it on a video or either a timer. | ||
| And with this one, it was a video because I was trying to show how difficult it was to pull the trailer through the sand. | ||
| So it was leaning forward. | ||
| It was 90 degrees and each step was... | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Agonizing. | ||
| How many miles in the soft sand did you do? | ||
| So it was five weeks in the Gobi Desert, but not five weeks worth of soft sand. | ||
| I'd say maybe a week solid, but scattered over the five weeks. | ||
| Folks, if you want to... | ||
| We're looking at a photo on Instagram of Ash pulling this sled, leaning into it like, dude, you must kick ass at tug-of-war. | ||
| All you have to do is just go backwards. | ||
| Just think about how much... | ||
| Time you spent dragging a fucking sled. | ||
| Your legs must be made out of steel. | ||
| It was painful. | ||
| It was painful. | ||
| You probably never got a chance to recover, right? | ||
| Because you're basically lifting a little bit of weights every day. | ||
| And you feel each step, it's just a run of lactic acids, you know? | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| So this is why I was just resting an awful... | ||
| Did you worry about rhabdomyelosis? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I was... | ||
| Look, you see, I was still training in the Gobi Desert. | ||
| I was trying to keep my mindset, you know? | ||
| What were you doing there? | ||
| Oh, you're doing sit-ups? | ||
| Yeah, I would try to stay regimented. | ||
| You know, I have no military background, of course, but, you know, the mindset, I was trying to stay focused. | ||
| I would do my push-ups, my sit-ups, always been keen into the fitness. | ||
| It's funny, actually, even when I came back from Thailand to attempt this, I moved back in with my parents. | ||
| I had no money, of course. | ||
| They allowed me back in with them, which was great. | ||
| And I didn't even have money for a gym membership. | ||
| So I had my uncle drop me off a tractor tyre, I wore a local sledgehammer, worked on like a barb, bit of calisthenics, and that's what I was doing out in the rain, hardcore conditions of Wales. | ||
| Flipping the tractor tire, beating it with a sledgehammer, trying to prepare myself, not physically, but mentally. | ||
| You know, when you're in your, as you know, your quilt cover, five o'clock in the morning, you can hear us howling with wind, rain outside. | ||
| The last thing you want to do is go out and train, but I wouldn't have that option in Mongolia. | ||
| So again, you know, that's saying, by putting yourself in more uncomfortable scenarios, the more comfortable you become. | ||
| I was just trying to do that. | ||
| So did you develop some sort of a workout program? | ||
| I did. | ||
| Like you have to stick to a specific routine? | ||
| What was your routine? | ||
| My routine was just full-on calisthenics. | ||
| With the Mongolia, I was training for two, three hours a day, five days a week. | ||
| I think actually on the Instagram, the highlights, there's a section fitness with a few different clips. | ||
| And it's, yeah, push-ups, sit-ups, pull-up, flipping the tractor tire, sledgehammer work. | ||
| I was working on ticking off all components like flexibility, agility, balance, speed, reaction time, coordination. | ||
| And I knew that my inner core was going to be crucial because pulling the trailer, if you come over a stone, literally your hips are being pulled left and right. | ||
| So you need to be agile enough to be able to, you know, push on through that. | ||
| That's interesting about the core. | ||
| I didn't think of it that way. | ||
| Yeah, the core was vital. | ||
| All of these sort of pull-ups really helped as well. | ||
| Did you have someone coordinating this with you? | ||
| Did you get some advice from a physiologist or a personal trainer? | ||
| I didn't know. | ||
| I'm sort of just self-taught. | ||
| I watched some clips on YouTube. | ||
| A lot of it through trial and error. | ||
| I was training since 13, 14. It based a lot around calisthenics. | ||
| And the martial arts help as well. | ||
| I took a lot from the Muay Thai and still implemented that into the training regime. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Body movement. | ||
| It fascinates me. | ||
| I love the training. | ||
| I get super ratty as well if I don't train. | ||
| Even training today in LA went over to the pier. | ||
| Got some rings there. | ||
| I was straight there. | ||
| Lost a lot of weight, so I'm trying to put some weight back on me as well. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| And the fitness is a crucial part. | ||
| Without the fitness, there's no way I would have made these expeditions. | ||
| I can only imagine. | ||
| Just seeing you pull that sled, I'm like, God, that looks like hell. | ||
| And the fact that you're doing it 100 yards, rest for 5 minutes, 100 yards. | ||
| I mean, just amazing that your body didn't break down just from overexertion. | ||
| Amazing what the human body's capable of in general, isn't it? | ||
| And I had huge fears and massive doubts before this expedition. | ||
| And that's sort of my message out to everyone is, you know, you're far more capable than you think. | ||
| You always see little doubts into your mind, don't you? | ||
| And that's what I was doing until Mongolia. | ||
| I was like, you know, don't have your fear. | ||
| I think fear is healthy. | ||
| But doubt can be toxic, can't it? | ||
| Did you get tested for rhabdo? | ||
| If your piss is that color... | ||
| I think I did when I got back I was slightly worried Just my organ the what I was feeling with my organs almost like they were drying up Just needed to check that everything was still functioning fine and everything was good The body recovers fast and I was only 24 I guess then 23 what what how much weight did you lose by the end of that? | ||
| So that was 78 days and I lost 13 kilograms in 78 days That's what we were talking about earlier, so it's like 30-ish pounds. | ||
| Yeah, so I lost 13 kilograms as well with Mission Yangtze, but that spread over a year. | ||
| So that was like very concentrated, lost a lot. | ||
| I was having a ration pack at 5.30 in the morning. | ||
| This was two weeks of the Gobi Desert, or a week and a half, where I'd wake up at 5, and have a ration pack at 5.30, and I'd go a whole 14 hours before I had my next ration pack at about 7.30. | ||
| No food. | ||
| And burning insane amount of calories. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How many calories do you need a day just sitting? | ||
| Depends upon your body weight. | ||
| If you're doing nothing, if you're just in it, you know? | ||
| Yeah, probably close to 2,000. | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| It depends, though, on your body weight. | ||
| If you're just sitting around, obviously it'd be less than someone who's moving around, but everybody's varies. | ||
| That's a crazy thing to do, to slowly starve yourself while you're pulling a sled. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Peanut butter, cheese on toast was in my mind the whole time. | ||
| I'm sure anything, just get it in there, man. | ||
| Yeah, but you know the guys when I rocked up to that community, super friendly, really looked after me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's nice. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And you didn't speak their language? | ||
| I didn't speak their language. | ||
| You know, one funny story actually, in the Altai mountains, it was a Kazakh family, so I'd always try to eat and rest up with them where I could. | ||
| It was a Kazakh family in their sort of hut in the middle of the Altai, rocked up 45 minutes inside, sipping on their chai, their tea. | ||
| Eating whatever they gave me. | ||
| Towards the end, I was like, right, it's been 40, 45 minutes, I need to make a move now. | ||
| And just as I was about to say that, I looked at the guy, the man of the heart. | ||
| It was a man and his wife, a girl. | ||
| He was looking at me very weird. | ||
| Eyes slightly squinted, slightly closed, like he's thinking of something. | ||
| He looks over to his wife or his girlfriend, and he looks back to me, looks back at his wife, and then all of a sudden, right there and then, in hand gestures, offered me. | ||
| Offered me his wife. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Right there, like that sort of ancient. | ||
| Does he do this? | ||
| No, he just pointed. | ||
| When you say hand gestures, just point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| He pointed to the bed and then pointed at us and then, I didn't know what to do, you know. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| I was like, whoa, you know. | ||
| Shot? | ||
| No, not really, no. | ||
| I was trying to get rid of her. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| She's yours now, bro. | ||
| It was awkward silence for about 10, 15 seconds. | ||
| We were all exchanging looks. | ||
| She was looking at me. | ||
| I was looking. | ||
| I just put on a fake laugh. | ||
| A couple of seconds later, he laughed with me and I made a swift exit. | ||
| She continued breastfeeding a child. | ||
| So she was breastfeeding while he wanted you to take a piece? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| And I was like, is it one of those things that this actually happened or will I leave and they're having a big joke right now and they're laughing away at the fact that, you know, you just never know, do you? | ||
| I'm going to guess if they live in tents in the middle of nowhere and there's five tents and it takes forever to get there, those people are probably freaks. | ||
| They're probably doing some weird freak shit. | ||
| They probably have no attachment whatsoever to sexuality. | ||
| Or maybe it's like, you're here, don't you? | ||
| To be really hospitable. | ||
| That's super hospitable, you know? | ||
| But you do hear old school exploration. | ||
| I've heard it before, but I didn't think in this generation, this day and age, that'd still be going on. | ||
| Well, they probably live in like old school Mongolians did. | ||
| They're just a little wild sexually. | ||
| Yeah, in the far west. | ||
| So that was a Kazakh family. | ||
| So they would have come over the border, which is like... | ||
| So this was in Kazakhstan? | ||
| This was West Mongolia, but there's a heavy population of Kazakh. | ||
| They're the ones that actually hunt, you know, the eagles, riding their horse. | ||
| They've got the eagle perched on their hands, foxes, wolves. | ||
| So how different do they look? | ||
| Kazakh is more of an area that's closer to what? | ||
| So Kazakh is right on the border. | ||
| So you've got Mongolia sandwiched between Russia up north, China down south. | ||
| Because just the name Kazakh sounds Russian. | ||
| Yeah, and then directly on the west, you've got Kazakhstan. | ||
| Ah, okay. | ||
| But yeah, I think that's the first largest landlocked country in the world. | ||
| Mongolia is the second largest landlocked country in the world. | ||
| Dude, and you're walking through this. | ||
| Yeah, walking. | ||
| That is so gangster. | ||
| And that was my first trip there as well, so I didn't have the money to do a recce like I did with China and Madagascar. | ||
| I'd never been to the country. | ||
| I'd rock up with the trailer. | ||
| When you show up at someone's tent, do you offer them something for food? | ||
| Like, how do you work that out? | ||
| I had a piece of paper translated. | ||
| It described who I was, what I was doing, why I'm here. | ||
| And you're hoping they can read? | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| And some, you're right, some couldn't. | ||
| But again, you know, you see a guy looking a mess, you know, big beard down, looking in pain, looking hungry, looking skinny. | ||
| You pretty much know straight away you need shelter, food, water. | ||
| So they did every time and they were so friendly. | ||
| So you were counting on people being nice to you. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, and that's all I've ever done, you know. | ||
| At the human rate, I love it. | ||
| I love people. | ||
| They're just so, so friendly, so hospitable. | ||
| Even the UK. Cycling the UK is when I was 20. I was raising funds for the NSPCC. It was illegal sometimes to camp in a city. | ||
| So I'd go on knocking someone's door. | ||
| Knock, knock, knock. | ||
| Do you mind if I set up my tent in your front garden or back garden, please? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Only had the door slammed on me once. | ||
| He was an old guy, probably for a friend. | ||
| He just looked at me. | ||
| Slam. | ||
| Went back inside. | ||
| Archie Bunker. | ||
| For some families, yeah, they were fine. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| But did you have any funds? | ||
| Could you give them money for food if they weren't willing to give it to you for free? | ||
| Yeah, what did I take? | ||
| So I took paper and pens for education purposes. | ||
| If you can give their child paper, pens, the kids would just be playing with that. | ||
| So you had a barter thing going on? | ||
| Yeah, almost, but sometimes they just wouldn't accept it. | ||
| They just plainly, simply, like, no. | ||
| I had that a lot in China as well. | ||
| But you didn't have any money. | ||
| Did I have cash? | ||
| Yeah, I had cash with me. | ||
| But you never offered anybody any money for food? | ||
| No, did I? No. | ||
| Yeah, no, maybe I did. | ||
| Maybe I did. | ||
| Yeah, but they would just, again, they wouldn't accept it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Especially if I was sleeping the night, I would 100% I'd take it and they'd be like, no, no, they'd stuff it down my trailer. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then I learned, that was it. | ||
| Then I learned that it was offensive to offer them money. | ||
| Because you're in their environment and they know for themselves. | ||
| If they see, I had a guy once run me down on a horseback from the distance coming at me at speed and it was all just to give me a bottle to take away with tea inside. | ||
| So I'd try again, try not off that. | ||
| It's like, you came at distance, I've been watching you for 10 minutes. | ||
| Coming from a distance, from a distance, little girl, just to give me hot water tea. | ||
| So yes, I learned that it was offensive to give them money. | ||
| It's almost saying that I'm better than you, I have money, you don't, but they're rich in life. | ||
| They've got all of the livestock, the products they want to be given, and you're in their harsh environment. | ||
| So I was like, wow, that's cool. | ||
| So that's why I stuck to the paper and pens. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| What a life-changing experience that must have been. | ||
| Walking through a place where you don't know any language at all, meeting these people and having them take you in and feed you. | ||
| It was incredible. | ||
| Did it renew your faith in people at all? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Did it renew your faith in people? | ||
| It did, you know, I've never... | ||
| Or enhanced, I should say. | ||
| Yeah, enhanced, I would say. | ||
| It enhanced, yeah. | ||
| Everywhere I've... | ||
| All of the different countries and the travels that I've done, the people have just been absolutely amazing. | ||
| And I'm always trying to give back in return. | ||
| Sometimes they'll take it, which makes me happy. | ||
| Sometimes they're just not interested and they're like, no, I don't want any money. | ||
| In China, there was one that gave me loads of food. | ||
| They gave me accommodation. | ||
| They then gave me breakfast. | ||
| They gave me three days' worth of food to take away with me along the Yangtze. | ||
| And they just wouldn't accept my money, wouldn't accept anything. | ||
| Then I'm like, no, you know, all the best. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| Madagascar was a little bit different. | ||
| Madagascar was a beautiful country, but down south it's very impoverished. | ||
| People suffering with malnutrition. | ||
| Malaria is big out there because I caught malaria, almost died from it. | ||
| You caught malaria? | ||
| I caught malaria, yeah. | ||
| So you weren't on malaria medication either? | ||
| Yeah, I was on malaria medication. | ||
| I came across a community that had the suffering with bubonic plague, such an ancient disease. | ||
| And they pretty much said, I had two guides with me at this time, so they were able to translate. | ||
| They pretty much said, stay in your tent. | ||
| You know, we've had relatives die. | ||
| We've got the suffering with the plague here. | ||
| That instantly made me feel unnerving, on edge, you know. | ||
| There's rats and dogs running around. | ||
| You're like, go away, go away. | ||
| Zipped in. | ||
| So they would do the cooking and they bought me this eel. | ||
| Smelled a little bit funky, but we were hungry. | ||
| Me and my two guys, we eat the eel. | ||
| And for the next few days, we were suffering with diarrhea. | ||
| And I believe that the anti-malarial pills, they only cover you up to 80% anyway. | ||
| It was going in one way, out of the other. | ||
| And I didn't have the full 80% protecting me from the strain of malaria. | ||
| I caught malaria. | ||
| And it threw me back to the Gobi Desert, to the symptoms and signs I was suffering with. | ||
| I felt like I was just Suffering with dehydration. | ||
| And I was getting weaker and weaker. | ||
| I was losing a lot of weight. | ||
| I was vomiting. | ||
| And it got to a point where days went by that I was like, this isn't dehydration. | ||
| This is a disease. | ||
| I'm suffering with something bad. | ||
| I pushed on, made it to a community that I knew had, Overland Transport. | ||
| How far did you walk with malaria? | ||
| I think I probably walked four days or so with malaria. | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| Yeah, it was brutal. | ||
| But at that time, I had no idea, right? | ||
| So I'm like, I'm dehydrated. | ||
| So I was just drinking, drinking, thinking I'm going to get better soon. | ||
| Made it to the community, arrived at one of the nearest hospitals, and she said you potentially made it in time, potentially a few hours before you slipped into a coma. | ||
| And that's when I realised, and then it was the deadliest strain of malaria. | ||
| So you've got four different strains of malaria. | ||
| You've got the deadliest and it usually kills you within 24 hours. | ||
| But I believe I lasted five days because I was taking the anti-malarials. | ||
| And then that one you can eradicate fully out of your system. | ||
| Now, when you're on the anti-malaria medication and you're shitting yourself so it doesn't stay in your system, are you taking more of it when you think you have it? | ||
| No, I wasn't. | ||
| I was scared to as well overdose because you don't know how much is still in your system. | ||
| So you can't just be taking it. | ||
| How much are you allowed to take of it? | ||
| One pill a day, it was. | ||
| See, that's what Justin Wren was saying, that he experienced toxicity because he was taking five pills a day. | ||
| Remember when Justin was talking about that? | ||
| Yeah, we actually researched that there's been problems with some troops that get on that anti-malaria medication and they get really sick from it. | ||
| Doesn't it do something to your brain? | ||
| Yeah, I think that's the malarone that you're talking about. | ||
| That's like a strong dose, isn't it? | ||
| What stuff were you on? | ||
| I was on Doxycycline. | ||
| It says 80%. | ||
| I think the Marilone. | ||
| How do I say it? | ||
| Marilone. | ||
| Covers you about 100%, I think. | ||
| My dad was on that one. | ||
| Did I say it? | ||
| Mephloquin. | ||
| Mephloquin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| Oh, so that's a different one there. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So what's this? | ||
| A stronger strain? | ||
| I don't know, but he was on it and he's gotten it. | ||
| Justin, he runs a charity called Fight for the Forgotten. | ||
| They build wells for the pygmies. | ||
| He's gotten it three times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| And what strain is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe it wasn't the one. | |
| Yeah, that was it, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Was it? | |
| Yeah, that was it. | ||
| Yeah, I remember him talking about it. | ||
| Because the three lower strains, you can actually remain dormant in your system. | ||
| That's what they said with him. | ||
| He got it again after he had it. | ||
| Malaria drug causes brain damage that mimics PTSD. Fucking A. Malaria drug. | ||
| The drug. | ||
| The drug! | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Not even just the malaria, which will fucking kill you. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard of that before. | ||
| Yeah, I have heard of that before. | ||
| So I pointed up with Malaria No More UK after that. | ||
| Because once I'd contracted it, I was the lucky one to survive. | ||
| And then as I pushed on, I still had four months to go. | ||
| I got it in month one of a five-month journey to walk. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| To walk south to north of Madagascar, somewhere to the eight highest mountains along the way. | ||
| So it took 155 days, this journey did. | ||
| And it was 1,600 miles, slightly bigger than the Mongolia journey. | ||
| And a lot of it was just machete in hand, hacking through the jungle. | ||
| Leeches dropping down, spider bites, hunting, gathering. | ||
| You were hunting and gathering out there too? | ||
| Yeah, in the jungle, yeah. | ||
| How do you know what you can gather? | ||
| The local. | ||
| So, I have no military background at all doing this, which is usually strange. | ||
| It's normally a military background to come in to do the survival, but everything that I've learned, I've tried to... | ||
| I get as much knowledge as I possibly can from the locals. | ||
| So like the Myanmar Hill community, Mongolia, how they survive, Madagascar, what's edible, what isn't edible, how to build rafts, etc. | ||
| So I always try to take a small percent. | ||
| And that's what you can ever take because they're so knowledgeable when it comes to what they can eat, what they can gather, what they can't. | ||
| You know, it's a lifetime, isn't it? | ||
| So I just had to try to pick up as much as I could in a short space of time. | ||
| But again, I was learning as we went. | ||
| We were, yeah, doing some hunting, doing some gathering, but we were losing weight. | ||
| There was three or four weeks of jungle territory further up north of the island, and we had a photographer join us for that one. | ||
| And it got to a point where they just hated it. | ||
| I did too. | ||
| It was the cyclone season. | ||
| We were covering. | ||
| We were walking about 14 hours a day and we would cover maybe three miles if we were lucky. | ||
| Just hacking through a sheer dense jungle up and down mountains. | ||
| One day we had to turn around and do a U-turn and walk three days back on ourself to find a different way up the mountain. | ||
| No! | ||
| It puts it into perspective now when you do a U-turn in a car. | ||
| I'm like, right, it's just a U-turn. | ||
| Yeah, three days. | ||
| Now when you say gathering, you mean like stuff to eat? | ||
| Stuff to eat. | ||
| So how do you know what you can eat and what's not going to kill you? | ||
| Again, we had the local guides there. | ||
| So I had a local guide, Max, who was nails proper, Bushman. | ||
| We were collecting chilies. | ||
| That's such a great English statement, nails proper. | ||
| Snails proper Bushmen. | ||
| You said that in America. | ||
| What the fuck did you just say, man? | ||
| Nails proper Bushmen? | ||
| What the fuck does that even mean? | ||
| Nails proper Bushmen. | ||
| What kind of stuff did you guys gather? | ||
| What did you eat? | ||
| A lot of fruit. | ||
| A lot of plant-based coconuts. | ||
| Mangoes. | ||
| Oh, we got excited. | ||
| Oh, so you see wild mango trees. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wild. | |
| Yeah, we just scramble on up there, throw them down. | ||
| Tenrec, the little rodents, kind of like hedgehogs without the spikes. | ||
| They burrow underneath trees. | ||
| I see it. | ||
| Took a shelter with us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you. | |
| Look at that. | ||
| And there's Max there. | ||
| That's wild, man. | ||
| Making this little campfire. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cooking under the shelter. | ||
| So that was the shelter that you used most of the time? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you slashed it down the trees? | ||
| We did have a tent as well, but yeah, depending on the weather, we just get this one out. | ||
| You're sleeping with a lot of creepy coolies and whatnot, but nothing really venomous in Madagascar. | ||
| Are you sure? | ||
| Got the boa constricted, a snake, but again... | ||
| You have a machete, right? | ||
| Did you keep that bitch gripped in your hand? | ||
| Got a machete everywhere that I went. | ||
| Yeah, we got lost a lot of the time. | ||
| There's a photo of me and Max trying to find our way. | ||
| The team just got demotivated. | ||
| They just didn't have it in them. | ||
| I was the same. | ||
| There's me all broken there with blood. | ||
| Got the leech bite. | ||
| But again, like with anything, you know, I think no matter what you do, you can't always be motivated in life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But you can be disciplined. | ||
| And that was the difference. | ||
| We stayed disciplined and we focused on the little steps. | ||
| 50 meters, rest. | ||
| 50 meters and rest. | ||
| I bet nobody appreciates a comfortable bed like you. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| There are. | ||
| And everything's so convenient. | ||
| I get back home, I switch the kettle on, I can take a shower, I can do whatever. | ||
| It's going to toast, push it down, it's going to pop up when it's done. | ||
| When you're out there, you've got to stay alert, you've got to stay focused. | ||
| Attention to the smaller details, but back at home, everything's just so... | ||
| And you do appreciate it more. | ||
| You get back and it's like, whoa, we don't know how comfortable we actually have it. | ||
| Your gratitude for that stuff must be off the charts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just from those experiences. | ||
| Yeah, but I do suffer as well sometimes. | ||
| I take it for granted. | ||
| After a few months of being back. | ||
| You get used to it? | ||
| Yeah, I have to throw myself back to the Malagasy jungle and be like, look, look. | ||
| Yeah, you get soft. | ||
| It could be worse. | ||
| So how many all told of these crazy journeys have you been on? | ||
| Whoa, over the past decade now. | ||
| So the three big ones, of course, the Mongolia, Madagascar, and the biggest one, the most ambitious, was Mission Yangtze. | ||
| I wanted to see a photo of the Yangtze River. | ||
| You were talking about how beautiful it is. | ||
| Yeah, I think on the Insta highlights, you've got 2019, it starts with. | ||
| But you can see it goes right from west, goes down south, curls back up, and ends near Shanghai. | ||
| So there's these three big giant ones, but then there's some other ones? | ||
| Yeah, so there's the Vietnam-Cambodia cycle. | ||
| There's trekking the Himalayas, which was a scary one because we wanted to trek the Himalayas. | ||
| They said that we needed to buy a permit, but we didn't believe that we did. | ||
| It was like a way to get money out of it. | ||
| We were shoestring budget travellers. | ||
| And we were like, nah, we can do this. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| It got worse. | ||
| It got to a point where it was like, you know, you can't go. | ||
| The Pakistan army roamed the border of Indian Himalayas and Pakistan Himalayas. | ||
| He said, go on your knees if you come across the Pakistan army, put your thumbs behind your ears and say Allah Harigbe repeatedly. | ||
| And that sort of means Allah have mercy on me. | ||
| So it was at that point we were like, should we trek the Himalayas? | ||
| So we almost failed with that one. | ||
| Yeah, it was insane. | ||
| So they taught you how to beg for mercy? | ||
| If we came across the military. | ||
| It's that much of an issue. | ||
| I thought that was his way of trying to scare us, to get us to pay for a permit that we didn't need. | ||
| How much was a permit? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I should know this. | ||
| If it was reasonable, I would say. | ||
| Probably, yeah. | ||
| We were such budget. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| You've got little hammock shops in Vietnam as we were cycling. | ||
| Sometimes we'd sleep in the hammock shop. | ||
| It would cost you about 20 cents for the night. | ||
| In a hammock shop. | ||
| In a hammock shop. | ||
| So that you test the hammocks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a good deal. | ||
| Great that. | ||
| Hey, yeah. | ||
| Good sleep. | ||
| It's not a hotel. | ||
| You don't have your toilets. | ||
| You don't have any of that. | ||
| So hammocks, if you're in a real woody area, that seems like not a bad option, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you get one? | ||
| No, we were only stuck to the hammock shops because we were on a bicycle. | ||
| So we were on roads. | ||
| So that wasn't necessarily... | ||
| How much does a hammock weigh? | ||
| Oh, you can get super light ones. | ||
| No, you can probably get one for a kilogram, maybe even... | ||
| Yeah, around a kilogram, I'd say. | ||
| Maybe even lighter. | ||
| Goddamn, that would be a great way. | ||
| As long as there's enough trees. | ||
| What a great way. | ||
| Yeah, you're screwed in the Gobi Desert, aren't you? | ||
| You're taken away off the ground with all the creepy crawlies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Did you get stung by any creepy crawlies? | ||
| I did. | ||
| Spiders? | ||
| Spiders. | ||
| So when you're hacking through the jungle, you've got the jungle canopy. | ||
| And the leeches, believe it or not. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's a spider bite. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| How do you know that that's okay? | ||
| When it's happening, are you worried? | ||
| I didn't feel it, you know, when it happened, because as you're hacking through the jungle, you've got loads of bamboo shorts, and they all razor sharp, and they're stabbing you. | ||
| You've got leeches at the nighttime. | ||
| You take your top off, and you've got to apply six, seven leeches off your body, flick them at the tent. | ||
| You've got this bite which infected. | ||
| There's a lot of aloe vera plants around that area, though, so you can just rip off the aloe vera. | ||
| Yeah, that looks really infected. | ||
| It looks like you got lit up. | ||
| If you click on that photo with me standing on the rock... | ||
| With the dragon? | ||
| Can you notice anything weird about that image? | ||
| You got a bird on your back? | ||
| Gertrude. | ||
| Who's Gertrude? | ||
| Gertrude the chicken. | ||
| So in order to summit the highest mountain in Madagascar... | ||
| You gotta bring a chicken? | ||
| It's tradition. | ||
| You must take yourself a white cockerel, protect it, keep it alive, and it protects you from the bad spirits and witches of the rainforests, the locals say. | ||
| So I'm all about respecting the local culture, of course. | ||
| So you have to bring a chicken? | ||
| I took a chicken. | ||
| How long are you carrying this chicken around? | ||
| How many days? | ||
| Two and a half weeks. | ||
| Two and a half weeks. | ||
| Oh my god, that's so crazy. | ||
| So you have to feed the chicken? | ||
| You have to let it shit? | ||
| Yeah, shat all in my bag, shat all over my tent. | ||
| It would sleep on top of my tent. | ||
| It wouldn't leave me. | ||
| It became domesticated like a little dog. | ||
| He became your buddy. | ||
| Yeah, just followed me around everywhere. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Two and a half weeks, chirping in my ear, praying for a little bit of rain, because when it started raining, he would tuck himself inside the bag. | ||
| He wouldn't make noises. | ||
| But can you imagine, 14 hours, you've got this chirping chicken on your shoulder. | ||
| Now, is he just perched on your shoulder, or do you have him strapped down? | ||
| He's in the top compartment on the bag. | ||
| So you have him strapped in. | ||
| So he can't get away. | ||
| Yeah, he can't really get away. | ||
| Oh, so he's like, what in the fuck is going on? | ||
| Yeah, going through the jungle. | ||
| So that's why we let him out a lot of the time. | ||
| He'd just be running, trailing behind us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It was great. | ||
| And you've got to leave him on top of that mountain. | ||
| So that was his freedom day. | ||
| That is so ridiculous. | ||
| He's just hanging around with you. | ||
| Yeah, that was a couple of days in. | ||
| Did you have video of this chicken hanging around with you? | ||
| Do I? I don't. | ||
| Like I do, but I don't know if it's on my Instagram. | ||
| That is hilarious. | ||
| But yeah, I got lots of footage. | ||
| You and your boy are just chilling with a chicken. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| By the way, that guy has like woman's dress shoes from the 1950s on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What are those shoes? | ||
| Man, sometimes he'd walk barefoot and it was only when I said you've literally missed a scorpion by a foot. | ||
| Those sandals look like a five-year-old girl would wear. | ||
| Yeah, they are. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| And that was the Nails Bushman. | ||
| Look, he doesn't give a fuck what those things look like. | ||
| He's just there to hike. | ||
| That is a crazy fucking chicken, man. | ||
| That whole thing, that's so strange. | ||
| At the end of it, did you eat it? | ||
| No, so we have to set him free on top of it. | ||
| We can't even take him back down, so I was hoping he'd follow us down, you know, built a bit of a bond with a flaming chicken, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But we couldn't eat him either, because they say that the bad spirits then go outside. | ||
| Yeah, it seems like a bad idea if you eat him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's your pet. | ||
| No barbecue sauce either, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's your pet. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Unless you were starving, right? | ||
| What would you do if you were stuck and you were starving? | ||
| We would have no choice, would we? | ||
| Yeah, we'd have no choice. | ||
| Survival first. | ||
| But then you would be worried about the spirits. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| And if we took him down to a community, that community would apparently flip on us, you know? | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Because we'd be introducing the witches and the bad spirits. | ||
| Witches? | ||
| Yeah, they believe in witches. | ||
| Chickens carry witches with them? | ||
| No, witches are scared of white chickens. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So that's why we needed Gertrude. | ||
| That is hilarious. | ||
| They believe in witches. | ||
| Witches, yeah, yeah. | ||
| What do they think witches are? | ||
| They got some mad stories as well. | ||
| So Max, my guide, he said, so my take on it is we were in the middle of this community, deep in the jungle, high up in the mountains, in the middle of Madagascar, you know, the fourth largest island in the world. | ||
| And we came across a community, and they allowed us to stay in their little wooden shack sort of hut. | ||
| And I woke up about two o'clock in the morning, let's say, I don't know what time, two o'clock in the morning, and it's Max coming in. | ||
| He should have been sleeping right next to us. | ||
| It was Max, my photographer, me, and Lever, and the chicken next to Max, Gertrude. | ||
| And he came in with this machete. | ||
| I was like, you all right? | ||
| He's like, yeah, yeah, good. | ||
| Anyway, his story is that me, Lever, and Suzanne were all convulsing in our sleep, all shaking. | ||
| And then he looks up to the door and the silhouette of this lady was stood on the outside from the moon, stood on the outside of the door, peering in. | ||
| And he shouted like, Oi! | ||
| You know, get away in Malagasy. | ||
| Anyway, he was freaked out. | ||
| We were all three still cursed. | ||
| I have no, I don't remember any of this. | ||
| And I was thinking, no, come on, you've got to be lying. | ||
| He takes the machete and then he chases this witch-like figure into the jungle, runs about 100 metres. | ||
| When she enters the jungle, boom, she disappears. | ||
| And then when he walks back to the hut, he said, you'd stopped convulsing. | ||
| You woke up, Ash, and asked if I was all right. | ||
| And I was like, no. | ||
| And I was like the only one that I felt, I was the only sane one there, saying, come on, that's got to be a load of rubbish, surely. | ||
| Like, weren't you sleepwalking? | ||
| Suffered with a night terror, maybe? | ||
| And he said, no, and the only reason that I wasn't convulsing is Gertrude was sleeping next to me. | ||
| So I was like, whoa. | ||
| Susanna, our photographer from Belgium, was just absolutely bricking herself then, you know. | ||
| She was like, what is going on? | ||
| Where are we? | ||
| So I said, we've got the Blair Witch Project on. | ||
| Yeah, so you're stuck in this tent now with people that are crazy. | ||
| You think the witches are peering into the... | ||
| You've got to be weirded out. | ||
| And they're all telling me their individual stories of their witch experiences as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, great. | |
| But they were very... | ||
| You know, there was a time with my two guides. | ||
| We had many crocodile rivers to cross. | ||
| Madagascar is full of crocodiles. | ||
| And sometimes they would ask the local community whether it's safe to cross. | ||
| And I would say, how do they know it's safe to cross? | ||
| And he replied once, well, they've made a deal with the crocodile. | ||
| I said, what do you mean they've made a deal with the crocodile? | ||
| It's like, yeah, you know, the crocodiles have promised that they won't eat the locals if the locals let them be and leave them alone. | ||
| So you're all going to cross that crocodile-infested river on the hope that some contract has been signed or some handshake, give me photo proof, you know? | ||
| They're like, yeah, I'm doing it. | ||
| I'm not doing it. | ||
| I'm building a raft. | ||
| I'm finding a different way, you know? | ||
| It's not even a raft. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, and we did it. | ||
| It took us four hours to construct the raft. | ||
| Yeah, just to get to the other side. | ||
| I never knew what I was in. | ||
| You must have been shit in your pants just looking down at that water. | ||
| Crocodiles, they target people. | ||
| They do. | ||
| There's always three ways to cross a river. | ||
| Cross where the locals suggest. | ||
| If there's no locals, cross where there's white water or rapids. | ||
| If there's not that either, then yeah, a raft is the final option. | ||
| There's a terrifying story about these explorers that were, I think they were on the Congo. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And they were in kayaks, and the guy in front of them got attacked by a crocodile. | ||
| And the guy watched the crocodile come up, grab the guy, flip the kayak under, and then pull, pull, and then pop. | ||
| The kayak pops up without the dude in it. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| And then the guy's gone. | ||
| Scary, scary story. | ||
| So I reached up, snatched him out of the kayak, and then yanked him. | ||
| Ripped him off the rope. | ||
| Popped him out of the kayak, and the kayak pops up, and the guy's like, what in the fuck? | ||
| He's right behind him while this thing happened. | ||
| His boy just got eaten by a dinosaur. | ||
| You know, in a crazy muddy river right in the bottom. | ||
| I was like, fuck! | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Get to shore, get the heck out of there. | ||
| Did you see them? | ||
| No, we were, again, super vigilant. | ||
| We crossed at the right places where there was white water. | ||
| And where, you know, rafts, yeah, maybe they could have been below, but luckily we didn't see them. | ||
| And you didn't see them there at all? | ||
| Didn't see, no. | ||
| No crocodiles at all? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| And it's all murky water, so you can never tell what lies beneath. | ||
| 1961 David Attenborough in Madagascar with the crocodiles where they're worshipping them. | ||
| This guy's going to feed it? | ||
| What's he bringing over to feed them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So they were just cutting it up here. | |
| So this is the people that think they have a deal with the crocodiles? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, this is long history. | |
| Oh yeah, Madagascar. | ||
| So they've been feeding these crocodiles for a long time? | ||
| That's probably the move. | ||
| Feed the crocodiles so the crocodiles don't get into hunting. | ||
| I mean, they want to preserve energy. | ||
| If they think they could just show up to the shore and every day you toss them some food. | ||
| Look how... | ||
| And the crocs know normally where the people cross and they'll just try to stay away from human activity normally. | ||
| But there are stories of people being taken, of course. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Look how evil that goddamn thing looks. | ||
| That doesn't give a fuck about you. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| You're not making a deal with a croc, are you? | ||
| No. | ||
| And they were laughing at me, saying, yeah, of course we've made a deal. | ||
| I'm like, don't be silly. | ||
| And they're laughing, thinking I'm weird. | ||
| It's like, come on. | ||
| But they also believe in witches, too. | ||
| But it's interesting, without the real outside world, right? | ||
| We take away the internet, take away access to education, take away all the things that we think of in the Western world, and then in their world, even if witches aren't real, if they operate that witches are real, they're going to set these very specific patterns of things they're allowed to do and things they're not allowed to do, and it at least gives them this idea that carrying that chicken around is protecting them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, that a chicken's gonna protect you from the bad witches. | ||
| Like, and they just keep living that, like, you can't take a chance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But are you gonna take a chance and abandon the chicken? | ||
| What if you get killed by a witch? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When are you gonna feel like an asshole? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right? | ||
| So, they get stuck in these patterns because life is so sketchy there as it is. | ||
| You're surrounded by dinosaurs and you're, Hacking your way through fucking terrible forests. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's almost to protect them as well, isn't it, by creating these stories. | ||
| There was another one that if a leaf falls, if you're resting in the shade, it gets hot in Madagascar underneath the tree. | ||
| If a leaf drops, it means there's a snake in the tree warning you to get out from underneath. | ||
| If the second leaf drops, it's warning, it's about to spiral down and spear through your skull. | ||
| And again, I'm like... | ||
| That's impossible. | ||
| I'm like, no, no. | ||
| So I'd just wind them up, you know, a second leaf dropped and they would scatter and I'd still be there like another tree. | ||
| But I do love that, you know, that's why I travel to amazing stories, isn't it? | ||
| People living in so many different ways. | ||
| Big, beautiful world, lots to see, lots to do. | ||
| And that's why, you know, so with Madagascar, I pointed up with the Lima Network Conservation. | ||
| They've got 60 organisations on the ground helping to protect and preserve the unique biodiversity. | ||
| So with these expeditions, the record is like the enticement, the motivation. | ||
| But if I can do something worthwhile and highlight certain issues, so with Mongolia, I was actually raising awareness about climate change and the effects that it has on the nomadic way of life. | ||
| It gets so cold out there now that the livestock struggle to survive, which means that the nomads are out of work, so they move to the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, to find work. | ||
| But there's now like a Gur district or a Yurt district, you know, they're white felt tents surrounding the capital city and it gets free. | ||
| It's one of the coldest capital cities in the world. | ||
| It gets cold. | ||
| They burn what they can. | ||
| A lot of it is dirty coal because the clean coal gets sent to China and plastics. | ||
| So there's now a smog that covers the capital city. | ||
| It's a difficult place to live in the winter only. | ||
| And babies are lasting three, four days after birth before they're suffocating. | ||
| Oh my god, just from the burning plastic? | ||
| Yeah, just difficult to breathe and the doctor just says, evacuate the city, get yourself out. | ||
| So I was just trying my best to raise funds for the Red Cross, raise awareness of actually Mongolia you don't hear. | ||
| Go to that picture again. | ||
| Make that picture larger, Jamie. | ||
| Look how crazy that way of life is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's all these tents everywhere. | ||
| In the background, you see, it looks like some wall tents, but maybe some hard structures. | ||
| It looks like there's a few hard roofs there. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There'll be different huts. | ||
| But most of them are just tents. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's one building back there, a multi-story building. | ||
| Scroll back, go back to the... | ||
| So this is... | ||
| There, see that one? | ||
| Yeah, so this is in the capital, Ulaanbaatar. | ||
| So you have a lot, even in the center, you know, it's pretty nicely developed in there. | ||
| But it's crazy, right? | ||
| All dirt roads. | ||
| What do they do with sanitation and sewage? | ||
| Yeah, again. | ||
| I don't like hearing that noise. | ||
| It says, though they lack access to drinking water, proper sewage, or internal heating, many are reluctant to leave behind their unique millennia-old way of living. | ||
| Yeah, just shitting a hole in the ground. | ||
| Whatever, whatever. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| Yeah, so it's... | ||
| Imagine not wanting to leave that. | ||
| Imagine being like, this is the way to go. | ||
| Yeah, these were all out in the wilderness, in the Mongolian wilderness. | ||
| It's absolutely stunning, but they've been forced pretty much to move here. | ||
| So in the camp... | ||
| Stop that, please. | ||
| Go back up and make that larger again. | ||
| What is that background city? | ||
| What is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's the outside... | |
| Yeah, that's the capital city of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And so all that stuff on the outside is how most of the people live. | ||
| It's like a good district, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So it drops to like minus 40 Fahrenheit. | ||
| Fucking A, man. | ||
| And so they just need to stay alive, so they burn whatever they can find to stay warm. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| So there's always, you know, always environmental at my heart first and foremost, especially seeing the world. | ||
| You see it in its rarity, you know, you're out Madagascar trekking its wilderness. | ||
| And 80% of all plant life and wildlife found in Madagascar alone, it's found nowhere else in the world. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Literally walking past stuff on a daily basis thinking you're not found anywhere else, only native to Madagascar. | ||
| Giant comet moths this big, bright yellow, to lemurs over a hundred different species. | ||
| So I'd do my best to try to meet up with as many organisations as I possibly could who were helping to protect and expand national parks, who were helping to educate the locals, supply different means of work, protect the species living within, and highlight the press. | ||
| We're interested in the journey, but I would direct and highlight the real unsung heroes, I call them, the people volunteering, doing this day in, day out. | ||
| And often there's just a lot of, you switch on the TV and it's just all negative, isn't it? | ||
| But I believe positivity spreads more positivity. | ||
| So highlight these issues, all of the amazing workers doing their utmost to protect the environment. | ||
| And yeah, that makes you want to do more as well, doesn't it, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, it seems like it's got to change your frame of reference shifts. | ||
| You've seen so many things that most people haven't seen. | ||
| Just haven't been to that place and knowing that there's massive groups of people that are living like that that are burning plastic in the wintertime to try to stay alive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It just shifts how you view things. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you know, once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's one of those where you just want to try to keep helping where you can. | ||
| How many people are living like that? | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| So there's four million people in Mongolia, but probably about three million are in the capital city. | ||
| Probably half of that are Gur districts, nomads. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Almost half, maybe. | ||
| So, more than a million people in tents. | ||
| Potentially. | ||
| It's getting that way anyway, yeah. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| And the air quality, just again, so poor. | ||
| Can you imagine that? | ||
| Just giving birth to doctors. | ||
| Get out of the city. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Otherwise, there's a high chance that you're going to lose your child. | ||
| And the people that do stay, the older people, they must be taking years off their life. | ||
| Yeah, most likely. | ||
| And then in the summer, so I didn't experience it in the winter, but in the summer, you still got the Gur district, but it's warm, so you can see the sky. | ||
| What do these people do for a living? | ||
| A lot of it is livestock, so they raise their yak, dairy, you know, meats that they'll transport over to the capital city. | ||
| But they're just out there living the purest way of life. | ||
| I remember walking through a pot of Mongolia, actually, I went over eight days without seeing a single person, over eight days. | ||
| I was like, wow, if you want to know what the world was like, I don't know, a million, two million years ago, Mongolia is the place that you'll get to experience a bit of that, you know? | ||
| Just wilderness, just out there. | ||
| Did you encounter any wolves or anything there? | ||
| Wolves. | ||
| They were the bigger wolves as well. | ||
| They were gray wolves. | ||
| I didn't, luckily. | ||
| Saw footprints, but you couldn't see whether that was wild dogs or wolves. | ||
| I had a wild dog approach my tent, like two, three in the morning. | ||
| Just heard heavy breathing and footsteps outside my tent. | ||
| I'm in the middle of the Gobi Desert alone. | ||
| Hadn't seen a human in days. | ||
| And I'm there in the middle of a tent, a knife in one hand, a torch in the other, shaking, adrenaline, thinking this is a person outside. | ||
| I'm shouting and they're not replying. | ||
| I unzipped it. | ||
| It was like a wild dog. | ||
| But it was fine. | ||
| It wasn't aggressive. | ||
| But yeah, it was just so... | ||
| I remember my logistics manager, my Ulaanbaatar-based, my Mongolia-based logistics manager. | ||
| I said to him, can you imagine how quiet, how silent it's going to be in the Gobi Desert? | ||
| And he replied, he just said, there's no such thing as silence. | ||
| I said, what do you mean there's no such thing as silence? | ||
| They have like silence rooms, you know, torture, panic rooms, silence rooms with the headphones and whatnot. | ||
| And he was like, I'm not going to tell you, you know, you'll get out there and if you've hit the right spot of the Gobi Desert, you'll know what I mean. | ||
| And I did. | ||
| I remember I was just, again, in the middle of the Gobi Desert. | ||
| I hadn't seen anyone in days. | ||
| And there was no breeze. | ||
| There was no flies. | ||
| There was no people. | ||
| There was just no noise pollution whatsoever. | ||
| And I was just looking around. | ||
| I could just hear this faint noise, almost like a high-pitched humming noise. | ||
| Very faint though. | ||
| And I thought it could be like air leaking from my water container. | ||
| It could be my trailer. | ||
| So I walked a few hundred meters away from my trailer. | ||
| And I could still hear it. | ||
| It took me five to ten minutes to figure it out. | ||
| But I was like, I'm at such the point of silence now, it's so quiet, I can hear my own body functioning. | ||
| And that's what he meant, that there's no such thing as silence. | ||
| Because when you're at the point of silence, you can finally hear your own body ticking over. | ||
| Never heard it before, never heard it since. | ||
| What are you hearing? | ||
| Just the faintest humming noise. | ||
| Almost like coming from the inside. | ||
| But you can't not hear it. | ||
| As long as you're living, as long as you're breathing, you're hearing that noise. | ||
| I went everywhere and I was just like, yeah, nothing. | ||
| It's my body. | ||
| It's ticking over. | ||
| So how long are you walking through the Gobi Desert hearing your body? | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| When you're walking, you can't really hear it. | ||
| Because when you stop. | ||
| Yeah, and it's got to be no wind. | ||
| A lot of the time it was very breezy. | ||
| Sometimes there were storms, you know. | ||
| So you're essentially walking through a dead area, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's lifeless. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How much water do you have on you when you're doing this? | ||
| With that, so my container was 20 liters, 20 kilograms, but it was never always full. | ||
| That's a lot of weight. | ||
| That's a lot of weight, yeah. | ||
| A hell of a lot of weight. | ||
| Plus you have all the other stuff. | ||
| Yeah, that's why it mounted, really. | ||
| I think the trailer on its own was 40 kilograms, I don't know what that was, a pound, 60, 70 pounds, maybe, on an empty load, because it was mild steel, just built in my family friends, backguarding, you know. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, just puncture-proof tyres, full rubber. | ||
| So it was heavy, but it was robust. | ||
| And then the water container here, 20 litres, 20 kilograms, that I needed at a maximum load. | ||
| Yeah, so when I was, you know, effectively I went through the water when I was really suffering with the dehydration. | ||
| So at that point the trailer was a lot lighter. | ||
| It was under 100 kilograms at that point, but I'm low on water, you know? | ||
| I'm sort of rationing the last remaining dribbles up to where I make it to the community. | ||
| So on maximum load, yeah, 120 kilograms. | ||
| Water was the biggest issue and always was the biggest issue. | ||
| That's why the previous guy was evacuated on three occasions, which terrified me as well. | ||
| He was a Navy soldier, desert explorer. | ||
| I was just a scuba diving, Muay Thai, living on a beach in Thailand, you know? | ||
| So I did have my worries. | ||
| I did stop planning Mongolia as well because of that. | ||
| I started to doubt myself. | ||
| At the same time, I realized, you know, just because no one's found a way to do something, it doesn't mean it can't be done. | ||
| What made you feel like Mongolia was the wildest place? | ||
| Probably because it was really close, like I'm living in Thailand, my initial idea was get a cheap bike, $10, cycle up to Mongolia, cycle across Mongolia and walk back the other way, or cycle to the start point in the east and then walk to the west. | ||
| And I thought, if I did that I would have died, I wouldn't have made it, that was lack of preparation. | ||
| So that's why I went back home, back to the UK for the right preparation, the right training. | ||
| And again, as I say, now it's not like Vietnam, the cycle when it was all very reckless. | ||
| It was all meticulous planning, detailed planning. | ||
| And Mongolia for me just struck me as that. | ||
| I was on the travel route for two years at this point, and I'd come across people, they say they plan to go here next, they plan to go there next, what they've come from, Cambodia, Vietnam, but no one had ever said Mongolia really, so I was just fascinated. | ||
| Home to the Altai Mountains, the Gobi Desert, you've got your reindeer tribal community up north, you've got your eagle hunters in the west, your camels down south of the Gobi. | ||
| It was just like, this country is fascinating. | ||
| And from that point on, I was just like, I wonder... | ||
| Maybe 100 miles, let's walk. | ||
| Maybe 200. I was like, heck, why not go for the length? | ||
| And then I started to look for people who had done it before. | ||
| It wasn't for any record, it was just for the fascination. | ||
| That's when I realised I couldn't find any evidence to suggest that anyone had completed the solo and unsupported walk. | ||
| But I did find the guy who previously attempted. | ||
| And he was a nice guy who responded. | ||
| I asked him what the dangers are. | ||
| It's a big list. | ||
| The grey wolves, the drunken nomadic drifters, the stagnant wolves in the dry wells. | ||
| Drug nomadic drifters? | ||
| They can sometimes be a problem, yeah. | ||
| Drunk, they'll get on their holes, they'll roam, and they're big. | ||
| They're big, the Mongolians. | ||
| Wrestling's their sport, so they're stocky. | ||
| It's in their history as well, isn't it, with Chinggis Khan, or Genghis Khan as we know him. | ||
| But yeah, they could be an issue. | ||
| And he just sent this huge list, and I was like... | ||
| Yeah, maybe I'll look for a different country. | ||
| Maybe I'll walk across a European country or something. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| I didn't know much about it until I listened to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History piece on Genghis Khan. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| I think it's five episodes, and it's insane. | ||
| You just realize, like, how do I not know all this? | ||
| Like how many people they killed. | ||
| The Mongols killed everybody. | ||
| They conquer half the world almost. | ||
| Half the world. | ||
| And they would rock up in the dead of winter, rock up at Russia's border, and they wouldn't, they just slit the jugular up their horse. | ||
| Yeah, and drink some of the blood and mix it with milk. | ||
| That would heal. | ||
| Yeah, they would use that to stay alive. | ||
| They apparently killed so many people that they altered the carbon footprint of human beings on Earth during King is cons lifetime I think that during his lifetime. | ||
| They killed 10% of the population of the planet As many as they don't know the real number it they think is the low number I think they were saying like 50 million and The high number was over 100 million people were killed by Genghis Khan during his lifetime by his Mongols. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And he fucked so much. | ||
| He left so much DNA out there. | ||
| Some crazy percentage of people have Genghis Khan's DNA to this day. | ||
| That's insane, isn't it? | ||
| It's nuts, man. | ||
| Nuts. | ||
| Terrifying as well. | ||
| It's nuts, too, that it went away. | ||
| It's like you had this military genius that came along at the right time, you know, with... | ||
| They had... | ||
| Massive skill with archery, and bows and arrows, and catapults, and just strategy. | ||
| They were just really good at figuring out how to take over cities. | ||
| They invented the bulletproof vest as well, didn't they? | ||
| Did they invent that? | ||
| Yeah, they realized that the biggest concern to losing soldiers, it was from the arrow. | ||
| The arrow kept taking his men out, so he came up with an idea, how can we possibly... | ||
| Chainmail or something? | ||
| Yeah, and it was, yeah, chainmail, straight over a vest. | ||
| I thought they had had that before. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I was shocked to see the... | ||
| I went to a museum and there was the Schwarz sticker, the Nazi symbol. | ||
| Yeah, Okinawa had that as well. | ||
| So did India. | ||
| It was a different thing. | ||
| It goes way back, you know, a few years ago. | ||
| Hitler just ruined a cool design. | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| Hitler ruined a cool design. | ||
| I mean, you can never bring that back. | ||
| Oh, hey man, I'm just really into Okinawan karate. | ||
| Because I went to a martial arts supply store in the 90s. | ||
| And they had a swastika. | ||
| And I was like, what in the fuck is this? | ||
| And then apparently it was just a part of Okinawa and Okinawa karate. | ||
| That symbol was a very common symbol. | ||
| Pre-World War II. Nobody knew what it was. | ||
| Obviously back then it was a different thing. | ||
| In the 1200s it was, wasn't it? | ||
| The Chinggis dynasty. | ||
| There's a place, I think it's in West Hills, there's an Indian temple. | ||
| And this Indian temple is covered with swastikas. | ||
| And they had to explain that the construction of the temple and the designs on it predate the Nazi adoption of this symbol. | ||
| I mean, imagine! | ||
| Look what Hitler did to that fucking mustache! | ||
| No one can have that mustache! | ||
| All the people in the world! | ||
| It's crazy! | ||
| He ruined a mustache! | ||
| Like, not to say that anybody should have it, but I don't remember ever a time where someone was such a piece of shit that they ruined a hairstyle. | ||
| Like, you can never... | ||
| So many years on as well, isn't it? | ||
| I mean, think of... | ||
| I mean, there's no other mustache. | ||
| No other hairstyle, no other facial thing. | ||
| He ruined the whole thing. | ||
| See if you can find that Indian temple. | ||
| I think it's in West Hills. | ||
| What's the date? | ||
| How long? | ||
| There's a big one in Chino Hills. | ||
| Where's Chino Hills? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does it look like this? | |
| No, that's beautiful. | ||
| Where's that? | ||
| No, this one doesn't look that cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's one in Calabasas. | |
| Maybe. | ||
| Let me see. | ||
| Nope, that's different too. | ||
| I think it's an Indian temple. | ||
| I don't necessarily think it's Hindu. | ||
| I think it's an Indian... | ||
| And it's just got the signs all over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's why I searched initially and this is what we're talking about. | |
| God, that's so pretty. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Anyway, the use of the swastika for whatever reason... | ||
| The Nazis just decided to look cool and fucked everything up. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Did he take inspiration as well from Genghis Khan? | ||
| That's why he used it. | ||
| Because he conquered almost half the world and he wanted to go in that direction, didn't he? | ||
| I think that's what someone told me. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| It would make sense as well, wouldn't it? | ||
| It would. | ||
| He was trying to do exactly what Genghis Khan did. | ||
| But it's interesting that there are these people in history that sort of shift of The civilization in a certain way where they just become incredibly dominant and conquer everything. | ||
| There's a few of these people that throughout history, they pop up and then everything changes because of them. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And he's a big one. | ||
| Massive. | ||
| So you're in this area knowing the kind of history that's involved in this place. | ||
| What did it feel like knowing how many battles took place on that land? | ||
| Yeah, you can... | ||
| And fairly recently, right? | ||
| I mean, relatively speaking, it was the 1200s. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you can see how the fields are massive. | ||
| Actually, going back to that guy who ran after me on his horseback who came to deliver me the bottle of tea. | ||
| Imagine that in the thousands, the noise it would make. | ||
| I could see him. | ||
| He was a dot in the distance. | ||
| It took him about 10, maybe 15 minutes to get to me. | ||
| Imagine a whole line of them soldiers, warriors, Chinggis empire. | ||
| Running toward the noise. | ||
| Oh, you'd be terrified, wouldn't you? | ||
| And this mass land as well. | ||
| The steppe just goes on, just rolling fields of grass. | ||
| Forever, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd see a girl in the distance. | ||
| It would be like a little dot in the distance. | ||
| I'd wake up in the morning and I'd know it's going to take me a full day to get there. | ||
| That's camp for tonight, effectively, you know. | ||
| It'd take me a whole difficult day just to get there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dude, you're a ballsy man to take that on. | |
| That is a courageous journey and one of many that you've done. | ||
| It's got to be a weird feeling to be walking around regular people that have never experienced all the crazy shit. | ||
| If you're around privileged people... | ||
| That are like really kind of soft and civilized. | ||
| Do you almost want to take them with you? | ||
| Like, hey, this will help you. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And I think for the younger generation, it's great, isn't it? | ||
| I'd love to... | ||
| And it's also the mental health side, the mindset. | ||
| You know, take someone out there to Mongolia or the jungles of Madagascar or towards the source of the Yangtzean. | ||
| I don't know, you just appreciate it. | ||
| You have more faith in humanity. | ||
| You think, what a Beautiful world we live in. | ||
| They do things like that with troubled kids. | ||
| My friend Dan Doty used to do it. | ||
| They would take kids that were all fucked up and all sorts of problems in school, and he would take them camping. | ||
| Just reconnect them to nature. | ||
| Take them up there for a long period of time, months at a time. | ||
| They'd live off the land, they would fish, and they would live in tents. | ||
| You'd come back with a reset mindset, wouldn't you? | ||
| You'd start appreciating the little things, like the kettle of the toaster I told you about. | ||
| You know that old expression, you can't really appreciate the sun unless you've experienced the rain. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| It's an old expression, but it really, it seems to be true. | ||
| You know who had that? | ||
| I think Dylan Danis had that on his fucking Instagram post today. | ||
| Oh yeah, really? | ||
| When he was sparring with Conor McGregor, obviously meaning Conor's raining on him. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He's beefed up, hasn't he, McGregor? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Conor's fighting this weekend. | ||
| Who do you reckon's got it? | ||
| I had to ask you that. | ||
| There it is right there. | ||
| You can't appreciate the sun if you never stood in the rain. | ||
| Bam. | ||
| So true. | ||
| So true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ancient saying that is 100% accurate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's fighting Cerrone, isn't he? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, he is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Couple days. | ||
| Today's Monday. | ||
| Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday's here! | ||
| Who do you think? | ||
| I do not know, my friend. | ||
| I never predict fights because I think it might feel disrespectful if we were alone. | ||
| I would tell you my thoughts. | ||
| No, but not in this one. | ||
| In this one, I feel like this is a legitimate 50-50 proposition. | ||
| Yeah, same. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a warrior. | |
| Both warriors could go either way. | ||
| Well, also skill-wise, I look at a bunch of different things. | ||
| I look at damage, age, skill, motivation, and then past results. | ||
| All these things. | ||
| So when you look at all those things, you give Conor a slight advantage with stand-up, like with his speed. | ||
| He's very explosive, and he tends to knock guys out. | ||
| That left hand, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, the left hand's a piss. | ||
| He's so explosive. | ||
| He tends to catch guys with a lot of explosive punches. | ||
| He's very fast. | ||
| Whereas Cowboy is more of a steady pace, wears on you, but can also finish head kicks. | ||
| He has the most finishes in UFC history, most submissions. | ||
| I believe he has the most submissions. | ||
| He holds a lot of records, doesn't he? | ||
| A lot of records. | ||
| A lot of records. | ||
| He's fought nothing but tough guys for a long fucking time. | ||
| He's been head-kicking and strangling tough guys. | ||
| How old is he now? | ||
| Cowboy, I think, is 36. 36, yeah. | ||
| And Conor, I think, is 31. 31, is he? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Does it say? | ||
| I think 31 makes sense. | ||
| Conor has less miles on him, for sure. | ||
| But Cowboy's never looked better than he's had over the last few years. | ||
| And you give him a fight where he can really get up. | ||
| And this is a fight where it's like a really... | ||
| I mean, this is the red panties night. | ||
| Conor always talks about red panties night. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| Everybody's going to tune into that fight. | ||
| Majorly. | ||
| It's a giant fight. | ||
| It's a giant... | ||
| And it's also an interesting fight because even though both guys are not title holders... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's still a five-round fight that has the same super fight feel that any other world title fight would have. | ||
| You want to see that fight. | ||
| The world title, I've been arguing this forever, is very important. | ||
| It's always good to know. | ||
| Kamaru Usman is the best 170-pound fighter in the world, and it's proven because he has the world title. | ||
| Yeah, beat Woodley. | ||
| Beat Woodley, and then he beat Colby. | ||
| Colby, that was a good one. | ||
| I agree that that's important, but I also agree that that's not required for a great fight. | ||
| What's required is a great matchup, and this is a great matchup. | ||
| This, to me, is a pay-per-view matchup. | ||
| That could genuinely go either way as well, isn't it? | ||
| And I'm working the event, but if I wasn't working the event, I'd be like, what is happening here? | ||
| How's that go down? | ||
| How's that go down? | ||
| I don't know how it goes down. | ||
| It might be Connor tries to catch him real quick with a straight left. | ||
| It might be Cowboy takes him down. | ||
| It might be Cowboy tries to kick his legs on the outside. | ||
| It might be... | ||
| Connor takes a slower approach because he thinks that Cowboy's strategy is for him to wear himself out in the first round. | ||
| So maybe Connor fights light and easy in the first round. | ||
| Maybe he looks to prove a point. | ||
| To go the long run just in case. | ||
| Well, not just that. | ||
| Because he's gone heavier and he's bulked up more. | ||
| So in third, fourth, fifth round, it's going to be a struggle endurance-wise. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I don't think he's bulked up as much as he's not cutting weight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, he's starving himself to like 145. 155 is more comfortable for him. | ||
| 175 is no weight cutting. | ||
| So I think he's probably going to be walking around just a little bit over that. | ||
| I know Donald is. | ||
| Donald, I think Donald in a video said he was walking around somewhere around 177, 178. So that's nothing. | ||
| That's nothing. | ||
| That's a day in the sauna and Don's on weight. | ||
| And then Cowboy just rehydrates and he's good to go. | ||
| And he's done it a hundred times. | ||
| Oh yeah, he's well experienced in that. | ||
| I think he's better physically without the drain. | ||
| And I think size-wise, he's better as a 55er because those big giant guys like Darren Till at 170 are just a little bit too much, a little bit too powerful. | ||
| But I think that at 170, with Conor at 170, they're both guys who are 55 pounders who are just not cutting weight. | ||
| So I don't think there's an advantage for either one of them. | ||
| I think it's great, and I think I would love to see that trend where guys just fight at their natural weight. | ||
| Because I think it's terrible for your kidneys. | ||
| It's terrible for your system. | ||
| You know as much as anybody did it involuntarily. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's basically when you're dying like that and you're dehydrated, that's how those guys are the day of the weigh-in. | ||
| And then they have to have a goddamn cage fight 24 hours later. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's it. | ||
| I'll pull all the way back on. | ||
| Everything's forgotten about then, isn't it? | ||
| Maybe 30, 40, maybe 35 hours later at the most, right? | ||
| Because they're weighing in in the morning, and then there's probably another 12 or so. | ||
| I mean, shit. | ||
| It's not that much. | ||
| And that's after the fight. | ||
| Can they just go straight back to hydrating and eating as much as they want? | ||
| Or have they got to be broken into that gently? | ||
| Yeah, you got to bring it into it gently. | ||
| You got to You had to do it carefully, depending upon how much you lost, of course. | ||
| But some guys, there's some guys that were enormous, and they would go through radical weight cuts. | ||
| And then, for them, it was very important that they didn't shock their system. | ||
| And some guys did shock their system, and then they had to pull out of fights. | ||
| Their body was like, fuck, and what are you doing? | ||
| There's an overfeeding thing that can happen to you when you just eat too much, and your body doesn't know what the fuck to do. | ||
| It goes into a state of shock when you've been starving yourself for so long. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| They start storing the fat. | ||
| I found after the expeditions, if I weren't really skinny and started eating a lot, I'd put on loads of weight super fast. | ||
| Your body's probably like, this asshole might just start again. | ||
| It's storing the fat. | ||
| Yeah, because it thinks you're going to do it again. | ||
| Body's amazing. | ||
| It thinks you're crazy. | ||
| Well, that's the thing they think about knockouts, too. | ||
| When fighters get knocked out, it's easier for them to get knocked out afterwards. | ||
| Yeah, really? | ||
| Yeah, it's not just about damage. | ||
| It's about the body recognizing what's going on and trying to prevent further damage by shutting itself off. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, because it thinks you're going to just take the punishment, and it's easy. | ||
| It thinks it's easy. | ||
| If it just shuts off, it'll be better. | ||
| Yeah, your body just goes, fuck this. | ||
| Check, please. | ||
| Shuts itself down. | ||
| Old fighters, you know, they lose their ability to take a shot. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So I would imagine that was the same with all the methods of the body. | ||
| Like, if you dehydrate yourself, it's probably easier for your body to go into kidney shock later. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Your body's like, hey, asshole, you've got to stop doing this. | ||
| You put me through. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| It's probably harder for you. | ||
| Mm. | ||
| Like, when you think about these things, do you worry that you've done these gigantic ones in Mongolia and Madagascar and now in China? | ||
| Do you worry that you're going to have to outdo the China one? | ||
| Because the China one was a whole fucking year, man. | ||
| Yeah, a whole year. | ||
| Ridiculous, really, isn't it? | ||
| Do you worry that, okay, now I'm going to walk across the whole world? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| If I said that to you... | ||
| No. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| You know, the business has taken off. | ||
| You've got the expeditions, but then you've got the books, the promotions, the endorsements, everything. | ||
| As you know, the tours that go on the outside of that. | ||
| So you don't feel obligated to try to kill yourself? | ||
| No. | ||
| I want to get them shorter. | ||
| Definitely shorter. | ||
| Shorter trips? | ||
| But people are not going to want that, man. | ||
| You already fucked up. | ||
| It's like if you meet a girl and she's your favorite girl ever and you're like, oh my god, she's the one and you show up at her house with a dozen roses and then you don't have a dozen roses the next day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She's like, this motherfucker doesn't even appreciate me. | |
| Right? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I think if we can make it just as extreme, just as ambitious, even more so interactive. | ||
| I loved the interactivity, man. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| And do it with a good... | ||
| So I partnered up with WWF in China. | ||
| So I want to work with them again. | ||
| Okay, that's not wrestling. | ||
| You're not talking about wrestling. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| They used to be over here. | ||
| Yeah, they did. | ||
| How the fuck did they use WWF when WWF was wrestling for so long? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They did sue them, didn't they? | ||
| I think World Wildlife Fund had to... | ||
|
unidentified
|
They won, so... | |
| Who, World Wildlife Fund won? | ||
| Oh, that's why it became WWE? That's it, yeah. | ||
| Oh, I didn't know that. | ||
| I thought it was... | ||
| I heard that only recently. | ||
| I was like, whoa! | ||
| I thought that it was because they had to admit that they were... | ||
| So they called it entertainment rather than Federation World Wrestling Entertainment. | ||
| I think there was conflict with the World Wildlife Fund, wasn't it? | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| No? | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| So they were first. | ||
| They were before pro wrestling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe even if they were after. | ||
| I think that just the power. | ||
| It's global, isn't it? | ||
| World Wildlife Fund. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All over. | ||
| All over. | ||
| So potentially just because of the sheer size of them, you know? | ||
| What excites you when you start thinking about your options for potential future trips? | ||
| Do you have anything that seems like really bonkers that excites you? | ||
| What about walking all the way across Africa? | ||
| Yeah, you know, something that is always fascinating. | ||
| I'm not ruling it out as always potentially an option, but I've always been drawn to the Congo. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Always been drawn to the Congo. | ||
| Talk to my friend Justin. | ||
| Talk to my friend Justin. | ||
| Yeah, hook us up. | ||
| Yeah, no, for sure. | ||
| Because he's currently got a new parasite that they don't... | ||
| Yeah, he's had it for more than seven, I think more than eight months. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they don't know what it is. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They think he might even be the first person that they've ever diagnosed with it because he caught it so deep in the Congo. | ||
| And a lot of these people that are catching parasites and could be an evolving parasite too. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| The Congo's a... | ||
| Oh, there's all sorts there. | ||
| There's all sorts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Vibrant, crazy ecosystem of all kinds of different things. | |
| So what's he suffering with? | ||
| What's his symptoms? | ||
| He's got all kinds of problems. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| He's on all sorts of anti-parasitic medication, but he was saying that after he worked out, he had to get into the shower because he was shivering. | ||
| He had to turn on the hot water. | ||
| Yeah, he looked pale and he was shivering. | ||
| Terrifying. | ||
| They think it might be in his brain. | ||
| They don't know what's going on. | ||
| That's even worse, isn't it? | ||
| The fact that they don't know what's going on. | ||
| They don't know how to help him. | ||
| And he's got brilliant doctors that have been working with him for months. | ||
| They're trying to run these batteries of tests. | ||
| He detailed it on the show. | ||
| He's such a nice guy. | ||
| He's one of the most selfless people I've ever met. | ||
| While he's talking about it, he wants to start praising the doctor and telling me I should get the doctor on the podcast. | ||
| I'm like, let's What's going on with you, man? | ||
| Even in describing his own life-threatening illness, he's trying to promote people and help them out. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| That's the way forward, isn't it? | ||
| Kind of like him, man. | ||
| It's a wonderful story. | ||
| I don't know if you ever heard it, but I don't use that word wonderful that often, but with him, I do. | ||
| It's like he was bullied when he was a kid, and then got into fighting, and then became depressed and was a UFC top heavyweight. | ||
| He didn't win the Ultimate Fighter, but he was one of the top guys in the Ultimate Fighter. | ||
| And then he left the UFC and just started to do all this work in the Congo and started to build wells to the Pygmies. | ||
| And then decided to come back to fighting just to sort of raise awareness for the Congo and to start this foundation. | ||
| So he starts this fight for the Forgotten Foundation, starts his fighting career off again. | ||
| Becomes one of the top heavyweights for Bellator, catches malaria three times, three times, and keeps going back and forth to the Congo to spend these long trips out there. | ||
| But in the process, he's gotten really sick, the last one. | ||
| He looks great still, but it's still fucking with him. | ||
| Yeah, what now? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They've just got to find what it is. | ||
| They've got to figure out what it is. | ||
| And hoping that these anti-parasitic medications are putting them on and have an effect on whatever it is. | ||
| Maybe it goes away. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| The worry for me is when someone says it might have gotten into his brain. | ||
| I'm like, what does that mean? | ||
| What happens then, when something's in your fucking brain? | ||
| Like, what's going on in there? | ||
| Terrific, yeah. | ||
| Have you seen the disease? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| What is it? | ||
| The worm? | ||
| Yes, behind the eyeballs? | ||
| Yeah, you can actually see it. | ||
| Yeah, we played that on the podcast. | ||
| We played the video of it. | ||
| It was frogs, right? | ||
| And people, too. | ||
| Can't people get it? | ||
| People can get it, too. | ||
| There's lots of parasites in the eyes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dude, then you're going to go in there. | |
| Not so much anymore. | ||
| You've just put me off. | ||
| No, I was planning to walk. | ||
| I was looking into walking the Congo before the Yangtze. | ||
| The Yangtze made more sense. | ||
| But now after that, I'm like, no, if I'm going to the Congo, it wouldn't be the duration of... | ||
| Hiking a river that would take probably over the years. | ||
| Shorter, so much more dangerous, you know? | ||
| Got everything there. | ||
| So maybe we'll just stick to a two-week holiday in the Congo and plan my journeys elsewhere. | ||
| If you go to the Congo, you've got to go walk through the stretch that has that giant chimp living in it. | ||
| Do you know about that giant chimp? | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| The Bondo ape. | ||
| The Bondo. | ||
| Yeah, it's a larger version of the chimpanzee. | ||
| It's like six feet tall. | ||
| Huge, 200-plus pound chimps. | ||
| The locals call them lion killers. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, they nest on the ground. | ||
| Have we got an image of one of those? | ||
| Yeah, they nest on the ground like gorillas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, this one is not... | ||
| There's images of dead ones. | ||
| See if you can go to... | ||
| If you just Google Bondo ape... | ||
| There's some really good... | ||
| See that one in the upper left-hand corner, Jamie? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that picture I don't think is real. | ||
| I want to say that's fake. | ||
| Congo's giant Bondo... | ||
| See, that one's real. | ||
| That one's real. | ||
| Those people with the dead one? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Make that larger, please. | ||
| Can you just make the... | ||
| There you go. | ||
| That is... | ||
| That's the first evidence of one that they ever found. | ||
| And then they shot this thing, and they took pictures of it, but I believe that was in the 1930s. | ||
| And then they got another one that they shot at an airport. | ||
| And these guys are posing with this thing. | ||
| See if you can find the one... | ||
| That's it, at the bottom. | ||
| The very bottom. | ||
| That right there. | ||
| Bang. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Go full screen, the one below it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Make that larger. | ||
| Look at the size of that fucking chimp. | ||
| So that is this thing that they call the Bondo ape. | ||
| And it has a crest on its skull like a gorilla. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The skull is not shaped like a chimpanzee skull. | ||
| And so, go back to the picture please. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| That's big enough. | ||
| Because it's not a very clear picture anyway. | ||
| So these guys shot this at an airport. | ||
| And look at the hog on them, too. | ||
| But the size of that thing, I mean, look at the men behind it. | ||
| I don't know how big they are, but let's assume they're tiny. | ||
| And they're 5'5". | ||
| That thing is 5'10", 5'11", and probably well north of 200 pounds. | ||
| And it's a chimp. | ||
| Oh my god, I've ripped you to pieces. | ||
| Yeah, easy. | ||
| But the cool thing is, this is a weird subspecies that's only in this, I think it's called Bili, in the Congo. | ||
| And they either call it the Bili ape, or they call it the Bondo ape. | ||
| But it's an enormous... | ||
| Yeah, but I'm sure I've seen that picture there where the guys are either side holding it up. | ||
| I'm sure I've seen that so much. | ||
| Google Bondo ape camera trap photo. | ||
| There's a camera trap photo of one of them walking... | ||
| Upright. | ||
| And it's about six feet tall, upper left hand corner. | ||
| That one. | ||
| Six feet tall. | ||
| They said by measuring the stuff around it, they think that that is a six-foot-tall chimpanzee walking through the fucking jungle. | ||
| And that's this guy. | ||
| There's a guy named Carl Amann. | ||
| I think he's from Switzerland. | ||
| He's a wildlife photographer. | ||
| And he spent a considerable amount of time trying to find these things and take photos of them because of all the descriptions that the natives have of these enormous chimpanzees. | ||
| They got video of one of them eating a jaguar. | ||
| They don't know if it killed it or if it found it dead. | ||
| But the locals... | ||
| Whereabouts in the Congo is that? | ||
| In Bili. | ||
| I think it's called B-I-L-I. It's not a large place, but it's an incredibly dense jungle. | ||
| So it's very hard to get to. | ||
| But for a long time, it was just legend. | ||
| But now they have actual video of them. | ||
| They have photographs. | ||
| They have scat samples, DNA. And then they have the skulls. | ||
| The skulls that are not quite gorilla and not quite chimpanzee. | ||
| Got you. | ||
| When they first got it, I'm pretty sure they thought it was a hybrid. | ||
| They thought, like, a gorilla fucked a chimp. | ||
| Like, come here, bro. | ||
| And then now they think it's a totally different subspecies of chimpanzee. | ||
| So there it is. | ||
| Ah, there you go, yeah. | ||
| Biliuli Forest. | ||
| So that's where you gotta go, bro. | ||
| Yeah, that's not far from the... | ||
| Is that the source? | ||
| That looks like the source there. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| The source of the Congo. | ||
| Could you go through there? | ||
| So that area looks small, but it's probably bigger than Florida. | ||
| Oh, it's massive, yeah. | ||
| The area where these things... | ||
| I mean, the Congo is so big. | ||
| It's like the heart, isn't it? | ||
| The Congo is just always... | ||
| From a young age, you hear all sorts of stories about the Congo, don't you? | ||
| Isn't it wider than the contiguous United States? | ||
| I think the Congo itself is wider than the United States. | ||
| I think there's more land mass in the Congo. | ||
| There's an amazing BBC documentary on the Congo from many years ago. | ||
| I think it was like from the 90s. | ||
| But they spent a... | ||
| The United States is 29 times bigger than the Congo. | ||
| Okay, hold on. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| 342,000 square kilometers. | ||
| But the width of it, I think it's the width. | ||
| Only 5 million people, even the size of it. | ||
| Oh, that's it. | ||
| Okay, no, it's not. | ||
| Okay, it's not as wide. | ||
| It's not even as close. | ||
| Maybe Texas or something. | ||
| Yeah, it's like... | ||
| It's bigger than Texas for sure. | ||
| It's like Texas and California and maybe like one other state smushed in there. | ||
| It looks like it's like 30% of the United States. | ||
| Still a lot of wilderness that though, isn't it? | ||
| Oh yeah, man. | ||
| And if there's a fucking giant chimp living in there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And all kinds of other shit in there. | ||
| Oh, all sorts. | ||
| All sorts. | ||
| Have you seen that shoebill bird that lives there? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It's a five foot tall dinosaur of a bird with an enormous face. | ||
| His face is like this big and it looks like, it doesn't look real. | ||
| Like you see it walking around. | ||
| The way that you're describing it, maybe photos, videos. | ||
| Oh, the face that they have. | ||
| There's some great high resolution photos of the shoebill where you look at them in the eye and you're like, what the fuck is that? | ||
| Is that real? | ||
| They're like the most ferocious looking bird. | ||
| It looked like that, right there. | ||
| Yeah, I have seen that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on, bro. | |
| That's badass, isn't it? | ||
| Look at that face. | ||
| Imagine walking through the jungle. | ||
| Waking up and seeing that looking down at you. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Or walking through the jungle and you part some leaves and that fucking thing is staring at your face. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| We came across, you know, have you had elephant birds? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think David Attenborough. | ||
| Elephant birds. | ||
| Elephant birds. | ||
| I think David Attenborough first discovered it or went to Madagascar because he was fascinated by the elephant bird. | ||
| It went extinct, I don't know how long ago, but their eggs were about half a foot. | ||
| Like a football? | ||
| Yeah, almost like a rugby ball, football. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In size. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| There we go. | ||
| Oh my god, look at the size of that egg! | ||
| That'd be painful. | ||
| That's so big! | ||
| Look at the size of that fucker. | ||
| There you go, look at that comparison with an ostrich. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| There you go, yeah. | ||
| Holy fuck! | ||
| And these were big, but I came across the elephant bird eggshells. | ||
| They're about this thick as well, maybe a quarter, half a centimeter in thickness. | ||
| And they're just scattered across the southern beaches of Madagascar, and they're thousands still there. | ||
| So this thing is still alive? | ||
| No, this is gone extinct. | ||
| It's just the eggs. | ||
| But the eggs are still there. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| There's David Attebra. | ||
| I think he bought one back. | ||
| It's in Cardiff, which is the capital city of Wales. | ||
| There's that many of them? | ||
| You can just go get one? | ||
| There's thousands. | ||
| Yeah, just crushed. | ||
| Because they're so thick. | ||
| Oh, look at that compared to my leg. | ||
| They just last forever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| Holy shit, they're huge! | ||
| I forget how many years ago they went extinct. | ||
| A couple of thousand. | ||
| How many of these things have been collected? | ||
| I'm not too sure. | ||
| I don't know how many eggs. | ||
| Why did the elephant bird disappear? | ||
| What does it say? | ||
| Human people what? | ||
| Yeah, I believe it was the humans, wasn't it? | ||
| Swirl down? | ||
| Humans may not be to blame. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh? | |
| Goddamn pop-ups. | ||
| Get us every time. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Immense. | ||
| That's huge, though, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, but did you ever see the ones they had in North America, the terror birds? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, fuck. | ||
| They had seven feet tall, murderous, carnivorous birds that couldn't fly running around North America. | ||
| Jeez. | ||
| Yeah, pull up, terror birds. | ||
| Jamie's, he's searching overtime on this episode. | ||
| I'm just trying to scare you with all the shit that you've seen your whole life. | ||
| These were enormous birds. | ||
| There's one that shows... | ||
| Look at the size of that thing. | ||
| There's one that shows... | ||
| Go back to that National Geographic thing that you just had right there, Jamie, in the middle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that was like a CGI documentary that they had done on one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It says versus wolves. | |
| I don't even want to click on it. | ||
| It would be awful. | ||
| Well, I think they're so much bigger than the wolves, they probably hunted them down and killed them. | ||
| There's a size comparison there, isn't there? | ||
| See, next to a human. | ||
| Yes, it's far left. | ||
| Well built as well. | ||
| Chasing horses and shit. | ||
| Can you imagine, like, exploration back then? | ||
| Oh, it'd be a whole different ballgame, wouldn't it? | ||
| Oh, you had no idea. | ||
| So much more exciting but dangerous as well, you know? | ||
| Well, when you're talking about people that believe in witches and people that believe in witchcraft, like back then, you almost had to have some belief system to keep you going because you... | ||
| I had no idea what was around the next corner. | ||
| So these terror birds were alive, I believe, when human beings were alive, right? | ||
| When were these things alive? | ||
| If I had to guess, I'm going to guess they died out a million years ago? | ||
| Half a million years ago? | ||
| 62 to 1.8 million years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| 62 million to 1.8 million? | ||
| It says the temporal range covers from 62 to 1.8 million years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I think that's 62 million, not 62 years ago. | |
| Okay, so no people. | ||
| 62 million, yeah. | ||
| So definitely no people. | ||
| Dinosaur. | ||
| Dinosaur age. | ||
| Cenozoic era. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cenozoic. | |
| So just some kind of monkey-chimp type thing was all we had back then. | ||
| I think that was like Australopithecus or something like that. | ||
| What year was that? | ||
| Okay, I'm over-googling you. | ||
| Still stuff living with us though, isn't it? | ||
| That's terrifying. | ||
| Have you heard of the camel spider? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Where it injects you with like an anesthetic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's like stories of soldiers waking up half an ear missing because they've been injected in the middle of the night by this big ass camel spider size of a dinner plate, isn't it? | ||
| What is this, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mammals of the Mycocene, which are, I guess, the same era. | |
| So it looks like giant sloth time period, that North American bear time period. | ||
| Look how small the horses are. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Compared to those giant sloth things. | ||
| It's like Avatar, isn't it? | ||
| Oh, that's a short-faced bear. | ||
| That's what that is. | ||
| That's that enormous bear. | ||
| You've seen that thing, right? | ||
| Short-faced bear? | ||
| Short-faced bear? | ||
| Have I seen it? | ||
| You don't even know, bro. | ||
| The short-faced bear was the most terrifying bear in all of history. | ||
| Short-faced bear was way bigger than a polar bear and super carnivorous, and they think it might have been the thing that kept human beings from successfully navigating the trek through the Bering landmass until they went extinct. | ||
| They're huge. | ||
| There's a picture of a guy standing next to a recreation of a short-faced bear. | ||
| It's so big. | ||
| They think people are probably hunting them off to extinction. | ||
| They don't really know. | ||
| Do you get an image of a short-faced bear? | ||
| Yeah, it's a ridiculous animal that I didn't even know existed until a few years ago. | ||
| Oh, there's probably so much. | ||
| That's why that's sapien. | ||
| I don't know if it goes into the details. | ||
| Sapien. | ||
| Does it go into the details of this? | ||
| Go with the one in the far right corner. | ||
| Upper right. | ||
| Oh, yeah, look at that. | ||
| Yeah, that's what it looks like. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| You just would not venture outside, would you? | ||
| Fucking imagine how big that is! | ||
| That's a big... | ||
| Brute, isn't it? | ||
| It's like a cartoon comic book version of a bear. | ||
| Like, you can't believe. | ||
| We're looking at this thing where literally this thing is standing up. | ||
| These gentlemen, let's just assume they're somewhere in the neighborhood of six feet tall. | ||
| This thing is their entire height plus a couple of feet. | ||
| So double their entire height, I should say, plus a couple of feet. | ||
| That's ridiculous, isn't it? | ||
| Their head, this thing standing up, and their heads are right around where his hip bone is. | ||
| Although he is on a little bit of a mound. | ||
| I'm counting that. | ||
| It's pretty close to 14, 15 feet, maybe, standing on side legs. | ||
| Yeah, but why do they have him on a mound? | ||
| Listen, bitch, we know he's tall. | ||
| You're exaggerating. | ||
| You're making it look more ridiculous. | ||
| It's ridiculous as it is, without him being on a mound. | ||
| Why do you have him... | ||
| You're trying to make it even crazier. | ||
| It's crazy enough. | ||
| But super predatory. | ||
| Short-faced bear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Between that and saber-toothed tigers, there was an African lion that used to live here. | ||
| Look at that fucking monster. | ||
| Because we were just the bottom of the food chain, weren't we? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| As soon as we invented the fire, wasn't it? | ||
| As soon as we discovered the fire, boom. | ||
| Yeah, control of fire probably helped. | ||
| Weapons, flint. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| I wonder what came first. | ||
| We were just after scraps, weren't we? | ||
| Leftovers from lions. | ||
| Do you feel when you're doing these treks and you're going on these journeys and you're walking through places like Mongolia that are incredibly wild, do you try to envision what it must have been like to be an early person without all these amazing resources that you have at your disposal to help you get to this area that you're going to? | ||
| Oh, it would be a whole different kit and everything. | ||
| Like, so in Mongolia, I didn't actually even use that GPS because that failed me. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, all communities were in different places. | ||
| It just didn't work. | ||
| I went back to bog standards, map and compass. | ||
| Can you imagine even before then as well? | ||
| Map and compass? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So a fold-up map? | ||
| Yeah, fold-up map. | ||
| Let's get out, yeah. | ||
| Did we use Google Earth? | ||
| No, none of that. | ||
| Again, bog-standard, low-budget journey, the Mongolia one was. | ||
| So if you lost your map, you'd be fucked. | ||
| Yeah, that, but also the track that I was on. | ||
| As I said, you could be following goat track or camel track, and that is your lifeline. | ||
| That leads you to the next water source. | ||
| So if you're in a desert storm, for example, it'd make more sense to try to... | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Well, no, just try to camp down, hide under your shelter if you lose sight of the track. | ||
| But if you don't, you can keep going, yeah. | ||
| So if you did do that... | ||
| That's why I didn't walk at night as well. | ||
| A lot of people say, well, it's hot during the day and you're suffering with dehydration. | ||
| Why didn't you walk at night time? | ||
| And you've got the Amur pit vipers, the snakes. | ||
| You stand on the back end of them because you don't see it. | ||
| You're pretty screwed. | ||
| But you've also got the tracks. | ||
| You need to be able to see in the distance the tracks splitting off because you'll come across... | ||
| Almost like a junction of four to five different tracks that are splitting off. | ||
| That's when you need your map and compass to be like, oh, which one, which track should I go down, you know? | ||
| Terrifying. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| I can't even imagine. | ||
| And you can't communicate if you come across, if you're lucky to come across locals as well, they'll just point you in the wrong direction. | ||
| They'll normally point you in their community, which is down south, up north, and you're trying to go east. | ||
| They're trying to say, no, I want to go that way. | ||
| They're like, no, no, no, next community is this way. | ||
| I don't want the next community. | ||
| I want to walk to the most eastern, you know, so it gets difficult. | ||
| But yeah, that was always a threat. | ||
| The dehydration in Mongolia really terrified me. | ||
| Now what happens if a standstorm covers the track up? | ||
| Yeah, back to your map and compass and just hoping that you can be aware of the people around you, hoping you've got enough water, hoping you make it to another community or settlement. | ||
| Fun. | ||
| Whereas the jungle, harsh environment, spiders-wise, snake-wise, etc. | ||
| But at the same time, you've always got water. | ||
| You can hack in the bamboo and it just leaks out water. | ||
| You've always got food. | ||
| Does anybody know where you are? | ||
| Yeah, I had a tracking device, especially for Mission Yangtze because it was Guinness World Record. | ||
| We set off a tracker and every five minutes it'd come up with my speed. | ||
| So even if I jumped in a car or on a bicycle, boom, every five minutes it's my speed, it's my altitude, my longitude, latitude, coordinates, distance covered. | ||
| Whether I'm active and you'll zoom in and you can see my current location within five meters and that was part of the interactivity so I wanted to make this expedition as interactive as possible for the full year of like sharing blogs, videos, live streams, photos, getting people to join. | ||
| Again, presenting in schools, getting the kids out litter-picking along the Yangtze River, filming for the documentary, which we're securing, international documentary, The Mission Yangtze Will Go Out. | ||
| So that's exciting. | ||
| So all of this was very exciting. | ||
| Very well planned, very well in terms of the interactivity. | ||
| It's like six months of survival, six months of interacting with all the locals and just sharing it, getting out there as best as we possibly could. | ||
| So I was heavily on the radar with the GPS systems, the trackers, the lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Well, listen, man, you got an infectious sort of way of talking about this that makes me almost want to do something like this. | ||
| Yeah, come join me! | ||
| No way! | ||
| But it does make me appreciate what you've done in a unique way, because I can see how it's affected you. | ||
| And what we were saying earlier about things being, when you do something incredibly difficult like that, it sort of enhances you as a person, enhances your view of the world. | ||
| You have just more things you've seen. | ||
| Like, how old are you? | ||
| 29. Yeah, for the average 29-year-old person, there's no comparison. | ||
| The things that you see and the way you've experienced them in a very difficult way. | ||
| It's a very courageous way, too. | ||
| The way you're just asking people for food. | ||
| Like, it's kind of nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| I appreciate it, man. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| But again, you know, normal upbringing, normal background. | ||
| So again, I do all of these school talks, corporate talks, and that's the main message that I want to portray. | ||
| There's no financial background. | ||
| There's no even university degree, no military background. | ||
| Sort of just working through hard work, you know. | ||
| If I can do it, you can do it type of message. | ||
| You know, it's out there. | ||
| Just got to hold your vision, hold your dream, protect it. | ||
| It doesn't matter what else anyone says and it doesn't matter if they don't see it for you. | ||
| What's important is if you can see it for yourself. | ||
| Also, you have to be a special person to be able to do this. | ||
| All you knuckleheads out there that are thinking, I'm going to go walk across Africa now. | ||
| Don't! | ||
| Discourage people. | ||
| Preparation. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| And do it the way you've done it, the right way. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Well, listen, thank you for coming here, man. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| I really enjoyed talking to you. | ||
| It was really cool. | ||
| And like I said, your story is... | ||
| It's very, very inspirational, man. | ||
| But it's also, it's exciting. | ||
| I like to know there's people like you out there. | ||
| Oh, that's great. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| Thanks, buddy. | ||
| Oh, tell people how to follow you on Instagram. | ||
| Yeah, on the Instagram, it's just ash underscore dykes. | ||
| Is everything ash underscore dykes? | ||
| Yeah, everything's ash dykes. | ||
| Twitter as well? | ||
| Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. | ||
| And that's D-Y-K-E-S? D-Y-K-E-S. Yes. | ||
| Okay, beautiful. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
Export Selection