Speaker | Time | Text |
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day And we're up Alright Charlie, first of all, thanks for being here My pleasure. | |
Very nice to meet you. | ||
unidentified
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Why do you do the things that you do? | |
First question is the hardest one. | ||
I guess over the years have formed a whole bunch of different answers to that. | ||
Some of them flippant and sarcastic. | ||
Without rambling on for ages and ages, I suppose it comes down to... | ||
I'm just really curious. | ||
I want to get to these places, see people living lives differently to mine. | ||
I grew up in a tiny little village where it's nice, but nothing happened. | ||
unidentified
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Where'd you grow up? | |
Just close to Salisbury in the southwest of England. | ||
About 10 miles from Stonehenge, down there. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
And yeah, I suppose I started traveling when I was about 18, took a year out between school and university, and just got more and more curious and slowly realized that I enjoyed traveling more if I was getting to places by, I suppose, physically difficult means. | ||
And that particularly helps, I suppose, if you turn up in some remote community in a, not that I've been doing this, but in a helicopter or a 4x4 or whatever, There's instantly a distance, a sort of divide. | ||
I spend most of my time travelling in the developing world where that's just building a barrier. | ||
Whereas if you turn up on foot or in a little kayak or on a horse or whatever, then I think people kind of take to that a little bit more. | ||
What was your first trip that you did like this? | ||
Besides backpacking around Africa, the first time I did anything sort of particularly physically challenging was I flew to Beijing and I had a flight out of Mongolia and kind of quite last minute I thought, oh, well, you know, there's a thousand miles between the two. | ||
I'll take a bike, a bicycle. | ||
LAUGHTER Didn't get off to the best start. | ||
I went to a friend's 21st birthday party about 10 days before leaving, and I don't really remember the party, but when I wake up in the morning, one of my quadriceps had snapped. | ||
Not torn, but snapped. | ||
The doctor said that the two ends would kind of flap around like fishtails and eventually graft onto the rest. | ||
I don't know how scientific that was. | ||
And then on my first night in Beijing, I fell over and broke my wrist a bit drunk. | ||
Oh, Jesus. | ||
Two weeks later, when I sort of cut my cast off and I sort of, you know, strapped my knee up a bit and pedaled out. | ||
I wasn't in the best shape. | ||
And frankly, the following two... | ||
So you just went with a torn calf, quadriceps muscle, fucked up wrist, just went anywhere? | ||
Yeah, I mean, I started slow. | ||
I'm not a, like, I'm not a sportsman. | ||
You know, I'm not an athlete. | ||
I've always just liked to, I've never really particularly trained for anything. | ||
I tend to try and keep fit, but that's kind of it. | ||
So I've always sort of thought, start slow and build up. | ||
And it only took two weeks to cross up to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. | ||
And once I crossed the border into Mongolia, there was just no road. | ||
It was, you know, it's just desert. | ||
And there's kind of tire tracks all over the place. | ||
And you just got to... | ||
You know, take a northeast bearing and sort of stick with it. | ||
And frankly, those two weeks were kind of shitty. | ||
I didn't particularly enjoy them. | ||
But, I mean, you're probably aware of the concept of type two fun. | ||
You know, you've done something and it's crap. | ||
But then once you've finished, you start to rose tint it. | ||
Right. | ||
And before I'd even left Mongolia, I was already thinking, yeah, there could be something in this. | ||
And I saw the potential of... | ||
Bicycle travel. | ||
You can travel a fair distance. | ||
If you want, you can go 100 miles a day. | ||
You can go 60 miles very comfortably. | ||
You still have a lot of the day there. | ||
You can travel very cheaply. | ||
You can travel for ages. | ||
And you get to see all those places in between that you wouldn't really go near if you're on a bus or a train or a car, whatever it is. | ||
Did you have any idea of where food would be? | ||
How you would get through these areas? | ||
Did you understand what towns were available? | ||
For that first ride I had a map and I knew that besides a 250 mile gap in the Gobi, there'd be enough towns to get resupplies. | ||
So you just had to go 250 miles through the Gobi Desert on a bike with a torn quad and a fucked up wrist. | ||
Yeah, yeah, in short. | ||
But you can carry quite a lot on a bike. | ||
You can carry, if necessary, in later years, you can carry two, three, four weeks of food pretty easily. | ||
It's not going to be very exciting. | ||
It's going to be just a lot of rice and noodles and stuff like that. | ||
But you can sort of stack it up. | ||
Did you plan ahead for that? | ||
Did you understand what your requirements were going to be? | ||
Did you sit down and write it all out? | ||
I'm going to be there for X amount of hours. | ||
I'm going to need Y amount of calories. | ||
No, I've never been good at planning. | ||
Well, no, that's not true. | ||
That's not fair. | ||
I've never loved getting granular with planning. | ||
I, you know, when I'm planning food for, you know, earlier this year, I had to plan food for about a month. | ||
And I kind of look, that's about a breakfast and just times that a bunch of times. | ||
That's about a lunch. | ||
And then just pack an extra, you know, 10-20% and it should be all right. | ||
Which is perhaps a slightly scattergun, irresponsible approach. | ||
But I've slowly got a bit better at knowing what's needed. | ||
I've never got into calories and counting the numbers of it. | ||
I totally see the value in that, and a lot of people who do similar sorts of things do. | ||
But I've generally thought I don't need to work out that I've got precisely enough Protein for any given day or fat or carbohydrate, whatever it is, because usually these aren't hugely long endeavours. | ||
You know, a few months you can go with a slightly impalanced diet, maybe take some multivitamins. | ||
I would imagine that you're burning a lot of calories, though, riding that bike through the desert for 250 miles. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, I look back at that trip there, and I think that was quite straightforward, really. | ||
And I do think that... | ||
I'm not one of these people who says, hey, anybody can do anything. | ||
But I don't think that particular ride across to Mongolia was... | ||
Especially difficult. | ||
But it was, for me, it was revelatory because I just got this idea of what bike travel could be. | ||
And it was only a couple of weeks less, probably 10 days after I finished, that I got a bit drunk and made on a Genghis Khan vodka and made quite a rash decision to cycle for what ended up being about four years. | ||
Genghis Khan Booker? | ||
What are you saying? | ||
Vodka. | ||
Oh, Genghis Khan Vodka. | ||
Sorry, yeah. | ||
Okay, no worries. | ||
I've got a plummy accent. | ||
No worries. | ||
Yeah, and I made this decision to cycle from the UK back to the UK via the furthest away point in each of Europe, Asia and Africa. | ||
And that ended up taking about four years. | ||
So, you do this first trip and you decide after it's completed that, you know, you get this... | ||
Interesting feeling, you know, it was fun, it was exciting, it was adventurous, and that this is something you're gonna do often. | ||
Are you writing about these things? | ||
Are you making videos? | ||
Like, what are you doing once you're done? | ||
I write, basically. | ||
I'm not a videographer. | ||
I take photos. | ||
I didn't, for the four-year trip that followed, I didn't have social media at that time. | ||
So I very much focused on writing. | ||
And every day, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how sweaty and uncomfortable I might be in a tent or cold or whatever, I will write down what happened that day and just get it all down and later you can then kind of get yourself back into that frame of mind and all these other details will suddenly start springing back in. | ||
It's quite a helpful sort of key to unlocking other memories. | ||
Yeah, but writing is my main focus. | ||
How do you fund these trips? | ||
Initially, I was saving, scrimping and saving. | ||
And that first long journey, I lived for four and a half years, as it turned out, on about £12,000, which back then would have been, I guess, $16,000. | ||
For four years? | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
So I lived in a tent. | ||
I ate very cheaply. | ||
Occasionally, I'll get a night in a hostel or something. | ||
You can live for a really small amount of money if you're just out in the wild. | ||
More recently, I get sponsorship or grants that sort of help and cover expenses. | ||
But I've always done things in quite a lo-fi way. | ||
I've never done hugely complicated or expensive journeys. | ||
I've always quite enjoyed the accessibility of doing stuff that anyone logistically probably could do if they put a bit of thought to it. | ||
The four-year one. | ||
How does one go about deciding that you're going to do something that's going to take four years out of your life? | ||
Did you recognize that it was going to take that long? | ||
I reckon it would take about that. | ||
And rashly is the answer. | ||
I came up with the idea before I really gave it a lot of thought. | ||
The first thing I did is told a bunch of people, you know, family included, hey, I'm going to, in a year's time, I'm going to head off on a bike for about four years. | ||
And once I told a bunch of people, then it became almost a certainty to me because, you know, I think I would have been embarrassed to then back down. | ||
And so I guess, I mean, I've always found that quite handy with any project, you know, just let people know, set yourself a start date, and then the wheels are already in motion. | ||
And out of sort of shame or embarrassment, you'll probably end up going through with it. | ||
Whew! | ||
I can't think that anybody would fault you for quitting. | ||
I mean, I don't think anybody would say, oh, Charlie, you only did three years. | ||
I came close a bunch of times. | ||
By the time I got three years, then it's like, well, I might as well finish it off. | ||
And when you get to the end of that, did you write a book? | ||
Oh, I have something for you. | ||
Oh, there you go. | ||
Actually, I've got something else as well. | ||
Bear with me. | ||
Let's see what we've got here. | ||
unidentified
|
These are, I believe, for you, Joe. | |
Oh, thank you. | ||
Those two books are about that four-year bike ride. | ||
There you go. | ||
And I've got a couple for Jamie. | ||
And now, once you do this, so you get back, and I would imagine, like, writing down everything at the end of the day, I'm sure, helps. | ||
But it's got to be difficult to sort of capture the nuances of each experiment. | ||
If you're writing for four years, I would imagine there's a lot of very notable experiences you're having during this time. | ||
Like, how are you remembering all these and documenting them? | ||
I mean, photos help as well. | ||
Over the course of four years, I've probably had something like 15,000 photographs, and that helps furnish a picture. | ||
But it's really just what I said. | ||
About 1,600 days, I kept a journal every single day. | ||
Sometimes they're very brief. | ||
You mean just writing it down, hand to paper? | ||
Yeah, in a bunch of tatty old notebooks that I've got, kind of falling apart on a shelf somewhere. | ||
And what was the path? | ||
So I started near Salisbury, where I grew up, headed across the channel up Western Europe through Scandinavia to Nordkapp, which is the northernmost point of Europe. | ||
It's up in the Norwegian Arctic. | ||
That's quite a dramatic place. | ||
The sort of monument at Nordkapp is at the top of a 300-yard high cliff. | ||
You go and look over the railing and you've got the Arctic Ocean sort of crashing against it. | ||
The North Pole is another 1,200 miles on. | ||
Then I took a sort of very long wiggly path across Eurasia to Singapore, which took, you know, nine, ten months or so. | ||
Jesus Christ! | ||
But I didn't know what route I was going to be taking for that. | ||
Again, I didn't allow myself to get too bogged down with details. | ||
And also, over the course of nearly half a decade, so much changes. | ||
The Arab Spring happened after I started. | ||
So the Middle East, the geography and the geopolitics of the Middle East totally changed after I started before I got back around to that part of the world. | ||
Is this your bike? | ||
That is the second of two bikes. | ||
Did one of them break? | ||
The other one, the one I started with, I got off eBay for £100 second hand. | ||
Not a great bike, you know, basic. | ||
And that one got me all the way about 34,000 miles to Cape Town. | ||
And then that bike was sadly stolen. | ||
It was locked up on the street. | ||
Oh, Jesus. | ||
And coincidentally, that afternoon, I'd been invited on a radio show to talk about my trip, and the DJ asked me about his bike, you know, and Capetonians, you know, they're into cycling, mountain biking. | ||
And I think he was expecting some specs or, you know, what I was riding. | ||
And all I could really say is, actually, it got stolen this morning. | ||
unidentified
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And he... | |
I'm about to murder an accident, and you'll get angry emails. | ||
But he said, oh, no, that's absolutely terrible. | ||
Like, let's get this boy a bicycle. | ||
We can get him back home. | ||
And he said, any of you listeners out there, you've got a bicycle. | ||
You send us a message. | ||
We'll get it to this boy. | ||
And about six or seven bikes were sort of presented to me the next day. | ||
Well, I had to go around the city and collect them all up. | ||
But a couple of kids' bikes. | ||
One was an antique. | ||
One had been found in a canal area. | ||
The frame of which I ended up using. | ||
So I took them all apart and I made one bike from all the different parts. | ||
And just the bottom bracket, the kind of part between the pedals in that sort of hub, that was the only part I got from a shop. | ||
And the rest was just these decimated bikes, kind of bastardized into this one Frankenstein frame. | ||
Well, that's a cool story. | ||
And so then this bike you rode for the remainder of the journey. | ||
Yeah, that got me 10,000 miles in one year back home. | ||
And then was stolen a few weeks later in London. | ||
Was it really? | ||
Yeah, it was basically unrideable by that point. | ||
I can't tell which one. | ||
Yeah, that's the first one. | ||
That's up in Tibet. | ||
How long do bike tires last? | ||
Because I know you change car tires. | ||
I don't think I've ever changed a bike tire, but I can imagine the rubber. | ||
Oh, they definitely wear out. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think... | ||
I kept a tally of all this stuff. | ||
I think I got through something like 20 tires. | ||
But, I mean, they last a little longer if you don't buy a pair for $3 in an African village that are made in China. | ||
Is that what you did? | ||
No, I could, you know, just got whatever I could. | ||
And I think 256 punctures, 20 or so chains. | ||
Like, you know, there's a phrase in the UK, Trigger's Broom. | ||
There was an old TV show called Only Fools and Horses where some not-too-bright character gets an award from the council. | ||
He's a street sweeper. | ||
For having the same broom for 17 years. | ||
And after he's given this medal, he says, no, it takes a lot of dedication to care for a broom. | ||
This broom's had 17 new handles and 25 new heads over the years. | ||
And that's kind of what the bike was like. | ||
Besides the frame, just about every other part was slowly swapped out as I went around. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
And when you're traveling through all these places, what kind of language barriers are there? | ||
Do you understand other languages besides English? | ||
I'm not a natural linguist. | ||
I can get by in French. | ||
That was handy in sort of Central and West Africa. | ||
I picked up and sort of worked quite hard at Russian. | ||
I've got some Russian, which in the Stan, Central Asia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, etc. | ||
That was handy. | ||
When you say picked up, did you pick up on the fly or did you prepare? | ||
Probably a few months before I got to that part of the world, I picked up some audio lessons and just sort of listened to them while I was on the road. | ||
And then I got quite good at just sort of, I guess, charades. | ||
China was always linguistically the hardest place. | ||
But even after I learned how to ask for an egg in a village shop in some rural area, I still preferred to do it the way I'd done for weeks up to that point, which was go into a shop and start flapping, clucking your wings and clucking slightly more and more manically. | ||
And then putting out from behind me an egg and pointing at it. | ||
They go, oh, the foreigner wants an egg. | ||
Yeah, we'll get him some eggs. | ||
Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
So you can make a bit of a game of it. | ||
And of course, in lots of parts of the world, there are plenty of people who do speak good English. | ||
So... | ||
I wasn't washing a great deal at this time in my life, you know, living in a tent, getting the odd splash wash in a puddle or a river or whatever. | ||
And so my hands, which were in front of me on the bike's handlebars most of the day, when I arrived in a new country, I'd find the first English speaker I could and ask them how to... | ||
Count to ten in their language. | ||
And then I'd write on my knuckles, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten on each hand. | ||
And then, you know, on the palm, hot, cold, yes, no, good, bad, up, down, left, right. | ||
Just a whole bunch of vocabulary. | ||
And that, you know, you pick it up pretty quick when it's in front of you for maybe six, eight hours in a day. | ||
And when that was done, I'd wash them off and maybe learn some new words and sort of carry on. | ||
So even though I was passing through regions and didn't have all that long to get to grips with many languages, I got a bit of a head start with that. | ||
Oh wow. | ||
What is it like when you're alone for that long? | ||
That's probably the biggest challenge and I've definitely got better at that over the years but when I was off on that bike trip you know there were There were times, particularly up in Tibet, where that picture was, that the road I was following in Tibet is the western sort of approach to Tibet. | ||
And on a good day, I was there in winter, which is not ideal. | ||
It's cold. | ||
But on a good day, there'd be maybe one vehicle going in either direction. | ||
But often there'd be several days at a time with no vehicles and there were no settlements along the way. | ||
And later on, to get into Tibet, I didn't have permission. | ||
So I had to, in the night, I cut a hole in the fence of the military base and snuck into Tibet. | ||
So beyond that point, I was having to kind of hide. | ||
To get into Tibet. | ||
So it's difficult to get into Tibet? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So Tibet used to be an independent country. | ||
A lot of protests. | ||
Most ethnic Tibetan people don't want to be part of China. | ||
But in the 50s, the People's Liberation Army. | ||
Marched in. | ||
And this was only a couple of years after the Beijing Olympics. | ||
And in the lead up to those, there were in Lhasa, the capital, I think it was around three dozen self-immolations. | ||
You're aware of that phrase? | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Yeah. | ||
And for the listeners who might not know. | ||
Well, they probably know from the Rage Against the Machine cover. | ||
Yeah, exactly that. | ||
So people marching out in front of the soldiers or the police, pouring a tin of petrol over themselves or gasoline, lighting themselves on fire and burning to death in protest at what they see as the occupation of their country. | ||
And of course, the Chinese government doesn't want people seeing these sorts of scenes. | ||
So they made the whole area off limits to foreigners. | ||
And basically, well, it still is really. | ||
You can visit limited little pockets in Lhasa, the capital, and a couple of other kind of temples in towns nearby. | ||
But to do that, you've got to be in a group with a guide and a vehicle and permits and, you know, it's expensive and you're just not allowed to travel by yourself with a bike. | ||
So that was the only way I could get in was to sort of sneak in. | ||
But after that point, I was then having to hide the whole time and to bring it back to your question, the loneliness there, I really, really struggled. | ||
You know, I was up there for about six weeks and... | ||
I probably had two conversations in that time. | ||
It was really hard. | ||
But now I've got a lot better at it. | ||
I keep meaning to look this up. | ||
It's one of those people that's always quoted. | ||
It'll be Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain, someone like that, once said that loneliness is the paucity of one's own company. | ||
And solitude is the richness of it. | ||
And it's two sides of the same coin. | ||
So being by yourself can totally suck, but if you just kind of try and flip the perspective a bit, and it's not always possible, and it's certainly not easy, you can then enjoy the space, the peace, the freedom, particularly if you've got a busy life when you go back home. | ||
It is an interesting thing about human beings that we seem to have a requirement for other people's company. | ||
I mean, we really do. | ||
We do enjoy moments of solitude, like sitting on a dock, looking out at an ocean, just relaxing maybe, having a cup of coffee by yourself. | ||
If that goes on for too long, we have like a deep feeling of longing and a sorrow comes over us. | ||
Well, we're pack animals. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And, you know, I guess this is my cod evolutionary sort of take on it. | ||
But I suppose anyone over the millions of years of our evolution who had that instinct to always be by themselves probably wouldn't have been passing their genes on so much. | ||
And so, you know, probably would have been bred out. | ||
You know, we've selected for people who live in communities. | ||
Yeah, it makes sense. | ||
It only makes sense. | ||
But it's so strange how intense it is when you are alone for long periods of time. | ||
And for people that have never experienced that, what you've done in doing that is really extraordinary. | ||
And I would imagine it gives you some very unique insight into how your own mind works. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think I've always been relatively good in my own company. | ||
I suppose... | ||
Years ago, I might have referred to myself as a loner in the positive sense of that word. | ||
I guess it's probably a bit of an insult as well. | ||
But I do like my own company. | ||
I'm happy in my own company. | ||
But I have got... | ||
I suppose over long periods, I would realize later that I'd essentially de-socialized. | ||
And suddenly being back in a community or around people where I can have a conversation, it just takes a bit of time to kind of equalize after being by yourself for a long time. | ||
Because you've got no one else to answer to. | ||
It's total freedom and that can be an indulgence, a self-indulgence. | ||
I mean, I've never spent that kind of time alone, but I've spent time in the woods. | ||
And when you're by yourself for a day or two, one of the things that always hits me is you start evaluating your own life, evaluating relationships, evaluating friendships, evaluating work, various things that you don't normally think about in such great depth. | ||
When you're alone and you don't have anyone to talk to, it's like those are the things that the mind wants to dig up and maybe examine. | ||
Did you find that? | ||
Definitely. | ||
And it's definitely a positive thing to do. | ||
The more time you've got to chew things over, the more to grips you're going to get with any problems in your life or whatever it might be. | ||
And then there's always the temptation, which I... I'm quite regimented with myself about how long I allow myself to listen to music or podcasts or whatever in any given day when I'm off doing some trip like this. | ||
I mean, I first came across your podcast when I was in the Congo, I think. | ||
And, you know, podcasts are great, but suddenly you've got company all day and that's a way to... | ||
Thinking about and learning about whatever's been spoken about, but you're not exploring things by yourself in the way that you can if you just have silence and peace. | ||
And I'm quite strict with myself. | ||
Like on my latest trip, I'd allow myself in the morning an hour of listening to something, and then in the afternoon maybe another hour at some point, and then while cooking dinner I could listen to something like that. | ||
How did you decide that amount of time? | ||
It was arbitrary, essentially. | ||
It just needed to ensure that I wasn't doing that all the time. | ||
It wouldn't always be exactly an hour, but maybe a podcast. | ||
One of yours is the whole morning, of course. | ||
Something short like that. | ||
You went through the Congo on a bike? | ||
I started on a bike. | ||
I was actually with someone else for this part. | ||
This is the bike journey. | ||
So this was 2014. A guy from Scotland who I'd met, he was motorbiking down the east coast of Africa with a couple of friends. | ||
I think about seven times. | ||
We kept bumping into each other. | ||
They were covering a lot more ground. | ||
They were taking a more circuitous route than me. | ||
But in Cape Town, him and I spent a bit of time together and he said, hey, when you go to Congo, I'll fly up and I'll join you. | ||
And so in the capital of Zambia, Lusaka, he flew up, he bought a bike for I think about 90 pounds, like a sort of three-gear, shitty, heavy, sort of strong bike. | ||
And we cycled into Congo DRC. There's two Congos, the big one, the fucked up one, I guess. | ||
We cycled across the border in the south in the Copper Belt and then followed the border all the way across the south of the country until eventually the road we were following just kind of ran out. | ||
But there was a river there and we had been aware that this was going to happen. | ||
The Lulua is the name of the river. | ||
And so we bought a dugout canoe, or a pirog, they call it there, which is essentially just a tree trunk with the inside scooped out. | ||
You know, it's a sort of typical, I suppose you'd say, tribal canoe that you'd see right across the world in South America, in sub-Saharan Africa, in Papua New Guinea, the same sort of thing. | ||
We bought one that was about five and a half meters long, I think. | ||
And for the next month, we kind of battled this thing down a river. | ||
But as we say, it was not in great shape. | ||
And we had to get in all our gear and two bicycles and these things sit really low in the water. | ||
Maybe two inches of clearance, you know, any small rapids, the water's coming in and you're going down. | ||
But as we, after we bought it, we pulled it up onto the riverbank and we turned it upside down and we were patching some little leaks and cracks and trying to kind of brace it. | ||
And the whole village just gathered around us in this big excited but concerned crowd and they were tutting and shaking their heads. | ||
And a sort of spokesperson essentially stepped forward and said, really, I don't think you should go on the river. | ||
There are rapids and waterfalls. | ||
And we're like, yeah, you'll be right. | ||
And there are hippos and crocodiles. | ||
And, you know, if you guys don't drown, you'll be eaten and you'll be dead in a day either way. | ||
And we took it with a pinch of salt. | ||
And that month was probably the most fraught of my life. | ||
It was... | ||
It was ridiculous. | ||
Every day we'd be struggling down rapids. | ||
The smallest little rapid would be enough to sink us. | ||
And the boat wouldn't sink. | ||
It would just go, you know, down. | ||
It would sit, you know, two or three inches under the water. | ||
But unless we had them all strapped down, all our bags would start floating off in different directions. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, Jesus. | |
And we'd sort of splashing around in the water trying to gather everything. | ||
Oh, that one's got the money and the cameras. | ||
Oh, get that bag. | ||
That's got all of our food. | ||
Passports over there. | ||
And all the while you're wondering when is a crocodile just going to come and sort of grab your ankle. | ||
Did you see them? | ||
We only saw one. | ||
Really? | ||
I mean, they're around. | ||
Everyone kept saying they're around. | ||
Lots of people said they do see them. | ||
I think they've been hunted quite a lot over the years. | ||
And although these are on the Congo—this is a tributary of the Congo River—they're Nile crocodiles. | ||
That's the species. | ||
And they grow up to—they get really big. | ||
They're 20 feet long. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
I think that's about the max. | ||
Yeah, they're huge. | ||
That's a dangerous animal. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We were in a really remote area. | ||
There were no roads. | ||
There were just footpaths connecting villages. | ||
And no one else was stupid enough to travel up and down the river. | ||
People had canoes, pirogs, but they would just use them for fishing. | ||
So they would just sit on the water, play some nets, come back out. | ||
And we, one afternoon, were paddling along, and there was this group of maybe 50 men on the riverbank, all just waving and singing and dancing around, shaking machetes about their heads. | ||
And so we didn't pull over. | ||
We thought, we'll pass by. | ||
But a few hundred yards on, there were just two men on the bank, and we pulled up to them and said, you know, what's going on there? | ||
And they said, oh, they just killed a crocodile, a big one. | ||
And I said, how big? | ||
And they said, five metres. | ||
So that's about 15, 16 feet. | ||
Yeah, so big. | ||
One night, a hippo. | ||
Well, we'd hear the hippos sort of honking out. | ||
Yeah, they make that very particular noise. | ||
We'd hear them out on the water. | ||
What does a hippo noise sound like? | ||
Sort of a... | ||
unidentified
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As best I can do. | |
But, yeah, we'd hear those quite a lot at night, and... | ||
We had to camp on the riverbank, but the hippos go out for walks around at night, and sometimes there'd be shoulder-high elephant grass, and the only places that we could really pitch a camp would be in these channels that the hippos would tread through it. | ||
So, yeah, it was a difficult time. | ||
After a month, we finally reached a road, sort of sand tracks, I guess. | ||
And a couple days later just managed to get to a town in time for me to collapse into bed with a pretty severe case of malaria. | ||
Oh wow. | ||
But I had typhoid fever at the same time, so it was like double trouble. | ||
Oh boy. | ||
So I couldn't really walk for about a week. | ||
So yeah, that was a... | ||
What did they give you to get over the malaria? | ||
Was really lucky I managed to get, we managed to get to a town and I went to the Catholic mission where they had a nurse and said like, Please treat me. | ||
Archie is my friend. | ||
He'll buy the drugs. | ||
And so this nurse, a guy, actually whose name I shouldn't say, he gave me drips of ciprofloxacin and I'm trying to remember. | ||
Metanidazole, I think. | ||
Two different antibiotics. | ||
Just a lot of drips. | ||
But the drips were the most frightening thing, because he didn't use clean needles each time. | ||
So he would sort of do the drip in the morning, yank it out my arm, and then just kind of hang it over the mosquito net, come back in the afternoon, kind of blow it off, and then plug it straight up into my arm. | ||
Great. | ||
So if you don't die of malaria, you'd die of infection. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know, it was a worrying time. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Jesus Christ. | ||
So how long did it take you to recover from the malaria? | ||
Well, I didn't have long because we had to get, you know, our visas were only three months and we'd already been going for over two months. | ||
So we had to get out of the country within a certain amount of time. | ||
So after, I think it was probably about eight days, we then, you know, I was able to walk here. | ||
I was still super weak. | ||
We then had to go and sort of get passage on a bus, as they call it there. | ||
But this is just a truck with a metal shipping container in the back of it. | ||
And we spent about five days on these trucks kind of bouncing around. | ||
You either cling to the top. | ||
There's no roads. | ||
It's all just mud tracks. | ||
In the rainy season, which was kind of not far off, it would take a month to do that five-day drive to the capital that we... | ||
Because there's been so much mud... | ||
Well, yeah, the roads just churn up. | ||
The roads, the tracks that we were on were sometimes these sort of channels carved five, six yards deep into the mud. | ||
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Wow. | |
And so as soon as it starts raining, they're all completely gone. | ||
I came across the... | ||
So the monsoon arrived six weeks or so later, by which time I was up in the other Congo, way up in the north, kind of near the border of Cameroon and Central African Republic on these mud tracks. | ||
And suddenly I just saw all these trucks that had kind of, you know, run off the tracks into the trees. | ||
And there were people who had been stuck there for days and days and days. | ||
I mean, I couldn't even push my bike. | ||
I had to carry it for... | ||
About a day and a half, take everything off, carry it for a mile, hide it in a bush, walk back. | ||
It was five miles for every one mile forward, just portaging it back and forth. | ||
Holy shit, man. | ||
How much crime did you encounter? | ||
Not a huge amount. | ||
I mean, my pocket got picked in Malaysia, which is one of the safest places in the world. | ||
My horse got stolen in Mongolia. | ||
That happens. | ||
You had a horse? | ||
Yeah, they're not expensive. | ||
How much is a horse? | ||
I bought a horse for about £120, so I guess £150 or so. | ||
You get a horse for £150? | ||
It depends how many... | ||
Every few years Mongolia has... | ||
They call it a... | ||
Snow on ice event. | ||
So essentially, Mongolia winter is really cold. | ||
It gets down to about minus 40 Fahrenheit or Celsius. | ||
And if it snows and then thaws and then freezes, you get this crust of ice over the ground. | ||
The horses, which are kind of left to their own devices over winter, they're kind of semi-feral, it's called. | ||
They're kind of half-wild. | ||
They can't break through that crust of ice as they would with snow with their hooves to get to the grass. | ||
So come spring, actually last time I was in Mongolia, the whole countryside was just littered with corpses of sheep and horses and goats. | ||
So if they've had a bad winter before, sometimes they lose up to about a third of their kind of national livestock, then horses cost quite a lot. | ||
But it wasn't too bad when I was there. | ||
The horse I would, at night, so I spent about two months hiking across Mongolia with this horse. | ||
I tried to ride it, but it was so small, a tiny little pony. | ||
I'd gone to quite a lot of effort to find a horse that was up to the challenge. | ||
I went out into this village outside the capital city, asked around. | ||
And, you know, you can't do anything there without having to drink copious amounts of vodka. | ||
It's a real pain in the ass, to be honest. | ||
You have to? | ||
Yeah, I mean, that's just the way everything is done. | ||
How so? | ||
Well, hey, you want to come and look at a horse? | ||
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Great. | |
Well, let's first drink some vodka and we'll pour a little offering to the gods and we'll flick a little bit into the sky as an offering to the sky god. | ||
You know, it'd be rude to refuse because, you know, it's an offering. | ||
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Right. | |
And then, I mean, to be fair, I was in my mid-twenties, so I was, you know, I was quite happy just to drink the stuff. | ||
But, you know, this kind of quite unpleasant paint-stripping vodka and just bottles and bottles and bottles. | ||
So I spent this long day going from person to person to person out, you know, in the sticks, you know, driving across, you know, grasslands, you know, off-road. | ||
And finally, we met these people who had a, this guy had a horse to sell. | ||
And he said, yeah, here's the horse. | ||
Do you want to check it out? | ||
And I was like, all right. | ||
I had never ridden a horse before. | ||
I didn't know what I was looking for. | ||
But I thought, I'll check out the hooves. | ||
I was about to try and check the back hooves. | ||
And they're like, no, no, no, don't do that. | ||
You'll get your face kicked off. | ||
But I checked the front hooves. | ||
I checked its teeth. | ||
She was a female horse. | ||
Didn't look too old. | ||
Decent, strong. | ||
Coat was in good condition. | ||
I thought, yeah, this is fine. | ||
And we agreed a price. | ||
And about two days later, I had to go back to the capital to get my stuff, buy a saddle. | ||
About two days later, I came back, met the guy, and he presented me with this horse. | ||
I was like, well, that's a different colour and it's got testicles. | ||
So that's a different horse altogether, but there wasn't really much I could do about it. | ||
So this horse didn't really take to being ridden. | ||
I don't think it was too small. | ||
I don't think he could really cope with me and my not very heavy bags. | ||
So you just used it sort of as a pack horse? | ||
Pack horse, yeah. | ||
So we walked, and at night I would make a fire. | ||
You'd hear wolves howling often. | ||
I'd make a fire and sort of tether the horse 10 yards away, and that's kind of the first line of defense. | ||
And one morning the horse had been, you know, the tether had been cut and someone had been in the night. | ||
But I pretty much got to where I was going. | ||
Oh, before I forget, this is a Mongolian wolf tooth for you, which an old hunter gave me. | ||
He claimed that he shot the wolf, but I was not 100% sure about that. | ||
Why is that? | ||
Well, there's a kind of braggadocio element to it. | ||
It's kind of a macho thing to have shot wolves. | ||
And I met a lot of people who said, yeah, I've killed many wolves. | ||
But back in Soviet times, Mongolia was kind of a satellite. | ||
It wasn't technically part of the Soviet empire, but it was sort of a protectorate. | ||
There used to be a quota. | ||
Every Mongolian man had to kill two wolves each year to sort of keep their numbers down. | ||
Otherwise, they would decimate the livestock. | ||
Anyway, that's from a wolf that he got hold of somehow. | ||
Maybe he shot it. | ||
You're skeptical though. | ||
Well, I'm kind of a skeptic generally, I think. | ||
And the way he told me, it didn't give me necessarily the impression that he had shot it. | ||
Do you know the story about the World War I Russian-German standoff with wolves? | ||
They took like a two-day truce, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
They took a truce. | ||
They stopped fighting to kill the wolves because there were so many soldiers who were getting killed by wolves. | ||
They were losing like one or two soldiers a day or something. | ||
It was something insane. | ||
Well, the problem was, you know, they were fighting trench warfare, right? | ||
And so they would get shot and they would be crying and screaming out in these trenches. | ||
And then you would hear... | ||
People would be eaten alive by wolves. | ||
The wolves would find these wounded soldiers and tear them apart. | ||
And then people would go out on scouting missions and they wouldn't find anything but boots and pieces of their clothes covered in blood. | ||
And then they realized, like, Jesus Christ, we're losing more people to wolves than we are to the Germans or the Russians. | ||
Actually, just earlier this year, I came across a memorial to Finnish POWs who had been sent up to this distant part of Siberia from that war, people who had been captured. | ||
It was crazy to think they'd been captured way out there in Europe, and they'd been sent to this desolate spot at the end of the continent and just told to fish to supply the Russian Navy, I think it was. | ||
But there were all these... | ||
The cliffs at the north of Asia, facing out, you can't imagine a more barren, isolated, brutal spot. | ||
I saw one, I was told there was another somewhere nearby that I didn't spot. | ||
Just a crucifix set up for the dead Finns. | ||
I don't know how many were sent out there. | ||
So if the wolves don't get you, and the Russians do, then the cold will get you eventually. | ||
What was the terrain like in Mongolia when you're making your way through this? | ||
Mostly steppe grassland, but I went through some sort of low mountains. | ||
It's an incredible country, Mongolia. | ||
It's just so ripe for adventure. | ||
It's about the same size as Spain, France, and Germany put together, but the population's just over three million. | ||
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Oh, wow. | |
It's the most sparsely populated country on Earth. | ||
Really? | ||
It's kind of a person per square kilometer. | ||
But more than half the population live in the capital, and there are a handful of other, not big, but towns. | ||
And so the countryside is just open. | ||
What is the capital like? | ||
It's changed a lot since I first went. | ||
It was all just kind of grim Soviet apartment blocks. | ||
And it's set in this kind of valley. | ||
In winter, I've not been there in winter, but in winter it's the most polluted city on earth. | ||
Because everyone, there's kind of increasingly people are being drawn into the capital from outside and they come in and set up their yurts or gurs as they call them, these kind of circular felt tents which you can survive the harshest conditions in. | ||
But to heat them, they're just using coal or yak shit or horse shit or cow shit. | ||
And so just all of the particulate matter. | ||
So it's the most polluted by a particular count on the PM10, I think, the size of particle, which I think if you breathe in, they can get quite deep into your lungs, but not all the way to the tips like that tiny ones in Beijing, for instance. | ||
But, yeah, there's just this kind of pool of pollution that hangs over this narrow, long valley that the capital stretched along. | ||
But recently, you know, they've got, I think there's like a Shangri-La there now and some high glass buildings, and it's changing quite a lot. | ||
They had in about 2012, they opened a huge mine, I think Tokdokoy, I think the name, I forget. | ||
But in 2012, The Economist magazine found Mongolia to have the world's fastest growing economy. | ||
Because they opened this one mine and overnight the economy grew by 40% that month. | ||
It's all relative, right? | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
It was a very, very low base start line. | ||
But yeah, I think that's largely gold and copper. | ||
And since then there's been a lot of wrangling over how much, what percentage of the profits is kept channeled into Mongolia and what percentage goes outside. | ||
But I think that's turned the country around quite a lot. | ||
But there's no fences. | ||
The whole countryside is just... | ||
There's the Gobi Desert. | ||
There's... | ||
There's sort of taiga, like Siberian forest across the north. | ||
There are the Altai mountains in the west. | ||
The rest is grasslands and there's lakes and rivers everywhere. | ||
And there's just no fences. | ||
It's all common land. | ||
And you can just head wherever you want. | ||
It's awesome. | ||
It's really great. | ||
It's wild that they still use those felt tents, because that was literally what Genghis Khan... | ||
Yeah, exactly the same. | ||
And nowadays they'll have maybe a car battery to run. | ||
They'll have a satellite dish and a TV, and it's changing quite a lot. | ||
I mean, there's only one or two homes that still looked... | ||
Really quite similar internally, how they would have 800 years ago when Chinggis Khan was charging across the continent. | ||
Wow. | ||
And so this trek through Mongolia took you how long? | ||
I was there for three months in total. | ||
So I did two months on the horse, and then once the horse was pinched, I got to more or less where I wanted to go. | ||
And so then I got the bike back and carried on cycling through to Central Asia. | ||
And then once you get to Central Asia, then how long before you get back to where you wanted to go? | ||
Well, this was all part of that same long bike ride. | ||
So, you know, there was probably still two years to go to get down three. | ||
unidentified
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Probably. | |
That's so crazy. | ||
Two and a half, perhaps, to get down three. | ||
That is so crazy. | ||
Through, like, Central Asia, the Middle East, and down the whole east side of Africa. | ||
Now, are you corresponding with anyone back home while this is happening? | ||
Do people know you're safe? | ||
Like, how are you... | ||
I emailed as and when I could. | ||
When I took the ferry from Britain to France at the beginning of the trip, phones were different back then. | ||
It wasn't a Nokia 3310, but it was something along those lines. | ||
This is 2010. I think the first iPhone might have just come out, but it was a long time ago. | ||
I'm thinking that was 2007, if I remember correctly. | ||
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Oh, right. | |
Okay. | ||
Wasn't it? | ||
Something like that. | ||
I think the first iPhone, somewhere around then. | ||
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I didn't want a phone. | |
I wanted freedom from all that. | ||
My plan had been, I arranged my phone contract or company that the contract would run out around about that time. | ||
I planned when crossing the channel to go up to the top of the ferry and just hurl it into the sea. | ||
The ferry company kindly gave me a free crossing in their club class and the bar was quite open. | ||
So I didn't get around to that. | ||
And a few weeks later, I just sort of tossed it in a lake in Sweden, which with hindsight, I don't feel good about. | ||
Yeah, that's plastic. | ||
I shouldn't have done that. | ||
But it's symbolic. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So I didn't, you know, I kept in touch with family through email as best as often as I could. | ||
Just use like internet cafes? | ||
Exactly. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Or if, you know, if I couldn't find that, I'd just, I mean, I got quite good at just like going into a You know, some random office and say, hey, can I use your computer? | ||
Really? | ||
People were surprisingly receptive. | ||
You know, you're in the middle of, you know, Iraqi Kurdistan. | ||
Can I use your computer? | ||
Yeah, yeah, sure. | ||
Just turn it off when you're done. | ||
Oh, thanks. | ||
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Wow. | |
People are very friendly wherever you go, broadly speaking. | ||
That's really fascinating because you probably have a different perspective of just running into strangers in other countries than most people do. | ||
Most people would think that people would be very hesitant. | ||
You know, some weird Englishman shows up and wants to use your computer. | ||
Wherever I go, I tend to be a bit of a novelty, so people are interested initially. | ||
Did you anticipate that? | ||
What did you think you were going to be able to do, or did you just figure it out along the way? | ||
Yeah, I just figured it out as I went. | ||
So you didn't have any plan, like, this is how I'll make sure that everyone knows I'm okay? | ||
No, no. | ||
You know, back then I probably wasn't great at sort of keeping my parents in the loop exactly as to where I was. | ||
And when I went to Afghanistan, I didn't tell them about it. | ||
I told one friend and said, if you don't hear from me in six weeks, then perhaps call the government. | ||
And so I, you know, I tried to keep them sort of as unworried as possible. | ||
Which, I mean, I've got three siblings, so there's spares. | ||
It's alright. | ||
Spares. | ||
So, when you get done with this trip, I mean, this is a four-year trip. | ||
What do you do? | ||
Do you have a home at this point in time, or did you not have an apartment anymore? | ||
No, I had nowhere to... | ||
I mean, I went back to my parents' place for a few weeks, and I had £30 to my name when I came back. | ||
What is the first day back like? | ||
Like when you show up at your parents' house, what is that like? | ||
Weird. | ||
About two months before I finished, I think I was still somewhere in southern Morocco or Mauritania, my dad said via email, you know, let's have a party when you get back. | ||
Let's have sort of a homecoming. | ||
And so we arranged, we picked a time and a date and arranged a place in London. | ||
A street where friends and family could come and gather and we had a little sort of welcome home party. | ||
So I was told, yeah, at the stroke of seven o'clock, you've got to be here on this street. | ||
And I, you know, turned up and there were, you know, 120, 150 people, some of whom I hadn't seen for years and years and years. | ||
It was totally surreal. | ||
unidentified
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Wow. | |
I was still quite, the six months following, this was about six months on from when I was ill in Congo, my health hadn't been good throughout that. | ||
So I'd been on my ride up through France, for instance, winter was coming and I was getting these incredible like stomach cramps every now and then. | ||
I'd have to, I remember one particular day when I basically just kind of veered off the road in a village and fell into someone's woodshed. | ||
And then about 10 minutes later, I kind of came round and there was just this elderly French couple standing over me, not wondering what to do with me. | ||
So I wasn't particularly well. | ||
But I turned up at this homecoming party with a beard down to my tits and hair down to my shoulders. | ||
I looked at a right state, to be honest. | ||
And it was strange how quickly I felt normal back among people again, initially at least. | ||
It was over the coming days that the weird itch of wanting to move came back. | ||
So you got wanderlust almost immediately afterwards. | ||
Yeah, I guess a couple of weeks on, the novelty of having a comfy bed each night wore off pretty quick. | ||
And I needed to find a job to earn some money, so I picked up the first job I could find. | ||
And it was not the sort of job that I think I was going to do long term, but it was just enough to get me back on my feet. | ||
What did you do? | ||
I sold luxury tours to China for a travel company. | ||
And so I'd talk to clients saying, oh, you know, you've got to go to this place. | ||
It's great. | ||
And they say, what was your experience like then? | ||
I said, well, the ground's good and firm. | ||
You can put a tent wherever you want. | ||
But, you know, the Hyatt will probably be comfortable. | ||
You'll be fine. | ||
Yeah, that was not necessarily the best fit for me as a job. | ||
But soon after that, I started planning the next trip and started writing these books. | ||
And sort of since then, I've kind of turned that into a career. | ||
So immediately you sort of understood when you returned, like, this is not a one-off. | ||
This is something you're just going to continue to do. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
Well, people started asking me to give presentations about the trip I'd been on, you know, sort of photo slideshows, I guess. | ||
And I started doing more and more of those at, you know, to village halls and clubs and festivals and schools and businesses. | ||
And that slowly became, like, about half of my living. | ||
And I realized, no, I could do this for a job. | ||
You know, this could be a living and enable me to carry on, you know, taking on challenges. | ||
So since then, you know, there's always something in the pipeline. | ||
Do some sort of journey, come back, relate the story, write about it, repeat. | ||
Now, when you start up again, is there any hesitation about the length of the trip? | ||
That four-year thing, even though I'm sure it must have been a fascinating and wonderful experience, there had to be a little bit of a hesitation of committing to that much of your life again. | ||
I mean, the longest I've done since then is eight months, so it's a lot different. | ||
And the last couple have been two or three months. | ||
But was it because of that four-year one where you're like, that's a little much? | ||
Well, you just, you know, you get a bit more settled. | ||
Also, now I've started to kind of build a career. | ||
You don't want to totally put everything on pause for a huge amount of time again. | ||
You mean by build a career, the writing? | ||
Yeah, the writing and the speaking. | ||
And, you know, it's not like I have, you know, a monthly paycheck or, you know, a salary, a pension, anything like that. | ||
So you kind of got to keep feeding the beast. | ||
And so for the speeches, like, what are you doing? | ||
Are you, like, posting up at a theater and people come to see you talk? | ||
I do some at theatres, a lot at schools, ones for businesses will be at conferences or they just want someone to come in for the afternoon to kind of, you know, spark up their team or, you know, a real variety, all sorts of different events. | ||
You would be the last person I would want to have come to talk. | ||
Because I was like, these people are going to quit and they're going to go wander the world. | ||
I'm going to have no workforce. | ||
I've spoken to a handful of CEOs about that. | ||
And one, maybe charitably, but I think he was right. | ||
He said, you know, I kind of said what you said as a joke. | ||
And he said, well, you know what, if I've got a member of staff, if I've got an employee who wants to go away for that huge amount of time, then they probably shouldn't be working for me. | ||
That's not going to be the most motivated person. | ||
But I'm not there to say, hey, quit your job and fuck off for years on a bicycle. | ||
I'm there to try and... | ||
With businesses, it's different talks, different events, it's all different. | ||
But with businesses, I'm there to... | ||
To take some of the lessons about resilience, ambition, etc. | ||
from what I've been doing and try and apply that to their lives, to their setting. | ||
But aren't those lessons only learned through the experiences? | ||
I mean, I would imagine... | ||
They're definitely best learned through experiences. | ||
But I think you can, in the same way that... | ||
I mean, one of the biggest genres of literature is self-help, right? | ||
And that's just reading about it. | ||
I think most of that is nonsense, though. | ||
I think, like, literally, when I look at, like, self-help books and self-help people and mentors and stuff, there's a large percentage, more than half, that's nonsense. | ||
At the risk of insulting a few people I know, I totally agree with you. | ||
But then again, I haven't read those books, and also... | ||
I haven't read all of them, clearly, but I've read enough bullshit where I'm like, God... | ||
Yeah, well, there's a huge tendency out there for people to kind of take on the persona of a guru, essentially. | ||
And there's so many charlatans out there. | ||
There are so many... | ||
You know, it's like with a lot of esoteric pursuits and alternative things. | ||
You know, there's things that are rooted in fact or that are kind of, you know, veering that way. | ||
And there are things that are... | ||
I mean, like mediums, for instance. | ||
I mean, I've got... | ||
I don't mind saying it. | ||
I don't care how many people are listening. | ||
I've got no time for that because... | ||
As far as I'm concerned, I think the two ways they describe it are they're either open eye, which means they know they're conning everyone, or they're shut eye, which means that they genuinely believe what they're doing. | ||
And that's a different thing. | ||
I'm kind of fine with that. | ||
It's just I don't think they're right. | ||
Yeah, I have a friend who went to a medium, and it's kind of a hilarious story because he goes, he knew everything about my grandmother, knew everything about this. | ||
I go, don't you know everything about your grandmother? | ||
What the fuck is the point of someone telling you some things you already know? | ||
Yeah, that are on our Facebook page. | ||
Do you think that it's possible that these were leading questions and that through these leading questions, they sort of talked you into giving them the answers? | ||
And you can see the look on his face when he was kind of... | ||
Resisting but realizing that I might be right, but didn't want to admit that he got hosed. | ||
I think a lot of people just want to believe it. | ||
And that's also totally understandable. | ||
It's the same from my perspective with belief in afterlife. | ||
People want to believe that because it's comforting and it totally makes sense to want to believe it. | ||
I personally don't. | ||
You don't believe in any sort of afterlife? | ||
I don't, no. | ||
But do you disbelieve? | ||
Meaning? | ||
I don't believe in it either, but I don't disbelieve in it. | ||
Well, I can never know that it's not. | ||
Right. | ||
But I guess the burden of proof is on people who have come up with this idea because there's nothing to substantiate it. | ||
But there's a long history of human understanding that there's something else besides what we experience in this realm. | ||
And I think a lot of that has to do, most likely, through either the consumption of psychedelic compounds or through ritual practices like holotropic breathing or something, where it gives them the sense that maybe what you see is only part of the picture. | ||
And then there's this feeling when someone dies, like they're not there anymore. | ||
Like, have you ever been around a dead body? | ||
I have, yeah. | ||
It's a weird feeling, right? | ||
It's like, it's not just that they're dead. | ||
It's not just that they're not breathing anymore. | ||
It's an emptiness. | ||
They're not there. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's hard to explain, but the first time I ever saw a dead body was my grandfather. | ||
It was an open casket. | ||
And I remember immediately thinking like, oh... | ||
That's not him. | ||
He's not there. | ||
Like, he's not there. | ||
It's not as simple as... | ||
Well, it's also weird because they had him made up and shit. | ||
You know, they put makeup on you, which is very odd. | ||
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Yeah. | |
But it's this very clear feeling that he's gone. | ||
And so there's this thought, well, where did he go? | ||
Did he go somewhere else? | ||
Is there a place where you go? | ||
And that's a totally understandable thing to think. | ||
And to... | ||
You know, to kind of experiment with the idea of. | ||
But I suppose it can never be proven. | ||
So it's kind of a moot point anyway, I guess. | ||
I guess. | ||
I mean, it's interesting. | ||
It's interesting to discuss. | ||
I don't disbelieve, but I don't believe. | ||
But I also think that's a slightly different thing to mediums. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
And I'm a huge fan of, sadly, he died last year, I think, the amazing Randy. | ||
Yes. | ||
Yeah, James Randi. | ||
Darren Brown, various people who sort of, you know, unlock or rather give away some of the secrets of cold reading and show you just how easy it is to manipulate people's belief. | ||
Yes. | ||
Yeah, Darren is very open about that. | ||
And there's a guy named Banachek who I've had on the podcast before as well as Darren. | ||
And Banachek is the first guy that I ever met that openly talked about the techniques that he used. | ||
He's like, I'm not gonna tell you the techniques, but I'm gonna tell you this is bullshit. | ||
I am tricking these people into thinking that I can read into them and find out about their past and find out about their life. | ||
It's just bullshit. | ||
Randy went to the big evangelical churches where they have faith healers and people contacting the other side. | ||
He went there and I think I'm remembering this right. | ||
One of his accomplices essentially just went there with a little shortwave radio and just scanned through the settings until he found the feed to the pastor's ear, feeding the information that someone else was researching online for these unsuspecting Audience members, unwitting audience members, which is, you know, it's hilarious and it's also deeply disturbing. | ||
It's deeply disturbing. | ||
People get, you know, taken for thousands and, you know, they can... | ||
It's just taking advantage of the most vulnerable people and I've got no time for that. | ||
And there's only one step removed from that to a lot of these motivational people. | ||
Because my feeling on these motivational people is that a lot of them are taking advantage of the fact that some people have this longing for discipline and structure. | ||
They've experienced moments in their life where things are going well and then things fall apart or they self-sabotage or they start drinking or gambling or whatever their problem is. | ||
But these people that are motivating these people, these people that they're charging exorbitant amounts of money for some structure that they put together they want these folks to follow. | ||
But then when you look into their lives, the people that are the motivational people, most of them haven't done shit. | ||
Like all they're doing is motivating people, which doesn't – if you want to have a conversation about how to invest with Warren Buffett, well, that makes sense to me. | ||
Like here's a man who's spent his life investing successfully in businesses. | ||
He's very well-versed in that, and he can give you some understanding of the practices that he uses. | ||
But if you're going to talk to someone who's trying to motivate you for success and his only success is to tricking people into coming to see him motivate people for success and charging them exorbitant amounts of money for it, well, then I don't like that. | ||
Well, it's the same as the irony of Trump having written the art of the deal, or rather having had someone ghostwrite it for him. | ||
You know, Trump, who was just born into a huge amount of money and by all accounts just slowly lost it over years and years and years. | ||
You know, I think it's far too easy for people to abuse other people's sort of good faith. | ||
We're generally credulous creatures. | ||
You know, we want to believe stuff. | ||
We want things to believe in. | ||
Well, there's so much uncertainty about the future, and so there's this longing for someone to hold our hand. | ||
Someone please show me. | ||
Someone please give me a guide. | ||
Tell me the steps to follow. | ||
And when people see that people have this longing, they take advantage of it, and they try to get these people to pay money for these secrets. | ||
If you sign up now, I will give you the secrets of how you can become successful. | ||
And you're sitting there in your shitty apartment and you're like, fuck, I want to be successful. | ||
It's Scientology, isn't it? | ||
It's similar. | ||
Same thing. | ||
Well, I think that's more in, like, how to organize your life. | ||
But it's similar. | ||
It's the secrets that you unlock to success. | ||
I mean, written by one of the worst science fiction writers ever. | ||
Have you ever read some of his stuff? | ||
I don't plan to. | ||
Oh, my God. | ||
Well, I've had the guy who's the head guy of Scientology. | ||
The fuck's his name again? | ||
Yeah, I had his dad, Ron Miscavige, on, and he explained to me how he got his son into it and the whole deal behind it. | ||
It's fucking fascinating because it deals with those very questions. | ||
It deals with psychology. | ||
It deals with the longing for answers in this purely uncertain, open-ended life that we exist in. | ||
And so many people have that desire for structure and for someone to come along and tell them that everything is going to be okay if you follow these rules, which is obviously not true. | ||
Yeah, I mean, I don't, you know, when I'm billed as a quote-unquote motivational speaker, I actually don't like that phrasing. | ||
I would prefer, you know, inspirational. | ||
I tend to, you know, it's almost an entertaining storytelling exercise, but with, you know, certain themes that people can, you know, take away if they want to. | ||
But I've never liked the idea of ramming down people's throats a bullet-pointed step-by-step of, you know, how to be better or... | ||
More proactive or more motivated or anything like that because I think, as you're saying, it's quite often disingenuous. | ||
Most of the time. | ||
I know a guy who does it who used to be a terrible comedian, and then he became a motivational guy, and now he's much more successful at that. | ||
But it's just so strange and sad to watch these people buy into his nonsense. | ||
He's not successful, except at taking people and getting them to pay a lot of money to teach them how to be successful, which is fucking strange. | ||
Yeah, it's like a shitty pyramid scheme. | ||
It is in a way, but it's a confidence game. | ||
You're playing upon people's desire for answers that don't exist. | ||
I mean, you can motivate people. | ||
There's a lot of people, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of people out there that are super successful that can tell you how they did it. | ||
And there's a lot of benefit in that. | ||
There's great benefit in that. | ||
But most of those people are not charging you for that. | ||
I mean, they might write a book about it, or maybe they do a podcast on how to succeed a business or something like that. | ||
They're good at it. | ||
They actually have experience. | ||
But there's a fucking whole industry. | ||
And online, because of social media, the barrier for entry is so small that you see so many people with these... | ||
Everything is motivational. | ||
All their posts are motivational. | ||
Like, surely you have to have other shit to say other than motivating people. | ||
It's weird. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, I try to focus on telling stories. | ||
You know, like if you read those, for instance, you might find some inspiration within them, but hopefully it's just going to be interesting. | ||
Well, what you're doing is, I mean, obviously you have these super unusual life experiences that you can relay. | ||
And what the, I mean, that's my thing about it is like, God, if I heard those, I would be very tempted to go and want some of those experiences for myself. | ||
A lot of my experiences have been sort of how not to. | ||
Right. | ||
Well, that's how you learn, right? | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
Learn from my mistakes. | ||
Actually, I think that's always valid as well. | ||
It's a lot easier, I think, to take something on board from someone who says, this is what I did, and it went horribly wrong, and this is why I wouldn't do it again like that, than to say, I did this, and I'm fantastic, and it went really well, and you're a different person, and it might be the same for you. | ||
Well, speaking of horribly wrong, let's talk about your most recent one, because this is what led you here. | ||
And this is a wild experience that you just returned from. | ||
And just tell people what you've done. | ||
Sure. | ||
So I've been planning for almost a year to go to A region of Siberia called Yakutia, which is the largest administrative area in the world. | ||
So it's one region of Russia. | ||
It's almost the same size as India. | ||
I think it's about 96% the size of India, but only 1 million people. | ||
So it's massive and empty, and it's far north. | ||
About half of it is north of the Arctic Circle. | ||
And there's one large city, but outside that there are scattered some remote and very remote communities. | ||
And there, for the most part, there are plenty of sort of crumbling, near-abandoned industrial towns from the Soviet era as well. | ||
But there are lots of scattered small villages of indigenous Siberian peoples, particularly the Sakha, who are the largest ethnicity in the region. | ||
And then there are smaller peoples like the Iveni, the Ivenki, who traditionally herded reindeer. | ||
There's all sorts of people scattered across this massive area. | ||
And I wanted to head out there. | ||
It's also the coldest inhabited place on Earth. | ||
So the record recorded low. | ||
and Jamie might be able to confirm this, but a place called Vrhojansk. | ||
I can't remember the exact temperature, and it's in Celsius anyway, but about minus 67.3, something like that. | ||
And that's inhabited. | ||
People live there. | ||
And so every winter it's super cold, and people survive in that. | ||
And they used to survive, many of them in a sort of nomadic sense, living in sort of skin tents. | ||
Reindeer, you know, hide, teepees, essentially. | ||
So I wanted to get out there, experience some elements, not in the total depths of winter, but in sort of February, March, April, of that extreme cold. | ||
Isn't February the total depths of winter? | ||
I think January's their coldest time. | ||
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What is February? | |
Well, I mean, I was prepared for minus 50 Celsius, which is sort of minus... | ||
I guess it's about minus 60 Fahrenheit. | ||
They hit the same at minus 40. 40, yeah. | ||
But because each degree is different, it gets confusing straight away. | ||
So I wanted to get out there, experience this cold, and just meet some of these people scattered around and just kind of see what their lives are like and also see if they're changing with the... | ||
Traditional ways of life are being threatened by the climate changing. | ||
Last summer, you might remember, it was all over the news for a while, perhaps less than America, because you guys got your own wildfires here, but an island in Greece, Evia, was on fire, the whole island essentially, really bad wildfires. | ||
But at the same time, an area the size of Belgium in Yakutia was burning, or collectively, all the different wildfires at the same time. | ||
So they have crazy bad wildfires out there. | ||
Also just close to Verkhoyansk, that town with the record cold, they had a record Arctic high of 39 point something degrees Celsius. | ||
Again, that's about 100 and... | ||
Yeah, that's high. | ||
It's about the same as it is here today, I think. | ||
Yeah. | ||
All the way up there. | ||
Yeah, in the Arctic Circle. | ||
That's insane. | ||
Yeah, I just wanted to go and check it out, see what it was like. | ||
So I planned to hike a few hundred miles along frozen rivers, which in winter for about three months get sort of ploughed and turned into ice roads. | ||
Zimnik or Zimniki, as they call them there. | ||
A bit like your sort of ice road truckers, I guess. | ||
But as you're on the river, the river's frozen perhaps two metres thick and towards the top on the frozen sea ice. | ||
And to hike up to this town called Tixie up on the north coast. | ||
It's a port town. | ||
But I arrived, I flew in on the 21st of February. | ||
And the world changed a lot in the sort of three or four days after that. | ||
The day after I arrived. | ||
Russian forces marched across the border where they've been massing, you know, up to I think about 140,000 troops by the time I flew out. | ||
And when I flew out, you know, with hindsight, it all seems kind of stupid to have gone, maybe foolhardy. | ||
But at the time, basically the entire world, except for presumably Putin, the US intelligence and UK intelligence, which both seem to think something's going to happen. | ||
But all the world's media, all commentators, all pundits were saying this is just a bluff. | ||
You know, this is just Putin. | ||
Trying to, you know, scare NATO into concessions, you know, to get more promises that NATO won't spread, you know, that Ukraine won't join NATO, whatever else. | ||
But they marched across the border, and two days later, a formal invasion. | ||
They launched their full-scale nationwide invasion, marched into Kiev, bombed everything. | ||
And I was so far away from all this. | ||
Batagai, the small town where I started hiking up in the Arctic, that is geographically the same distance from Vancouver as it is from Kiev. | ||
So it's just really, really far away. | ||
I was closer to the North Pole. | ||
I was east of Pyongyang. | ||
I was on the same time zone as Central Australia, just really, really far away. | ||
And I kind of thought about it and I thought, well... | ||
A, I'm here and it's going to be interesting. | ||
You know, I'm possibly one of, if not the last tourists in Russia, certainly out in the East. | ||
And I've got this almost unique but accidental opportunity to see this country and the lives of normal people, ordinary citizens as what seems to be a horrific, you know, potentially the brink, the precipice of World War Three starts to unfold. | ||
And so I thought, right, I'm going to carry on with this trek, but I'll just try and keep across information. | ||
But as soon as I got to Batagai, it's a short flight from the capital of the region up to Batagai on an old Antonov twin prop, sort of Soviet plane. | ||
And from there onwards, I couldn't get any phone signal. | ||
Basically, the only real information I could get was local state media. | ||
I passed a village perhaps once a week. | ||
And you turn on, I mean, the most insane thing was turning on the, and I mean, you'll be aware of this, I'm sure, but you turn on the local news out there, and they're talking about Ukraine on their news segments, and every second or third sentence will have the word fascism or Nazism. | ||
And they were slowly just drip-feeding, drip-feeding is the wrong word, they were just gushing this false information out into their public space. | ||
And loads of people believed everything they heard, totally believed everything. | ||
You know, I remember while I was still in the capital, just the day after I arrived, the troops had gone into the Donbass, this disputed territory in the east that they're sort of annexing. | ||
And that evening I was in some guy's sort of cabin just outside town. | ||
We'd met and went for drinks with some other people, and he said, hey, let's go back to ours for some drinks. | ||
And this guy, I'll call him Anatole, I don't want to say his name, but... | ||
He started dicing up some horse ribs to cook us some sort of, you know, peppering them and everything. | ||
And he asked me what I thought about Ukraine. | ||
This is really early days. | ||
And I said, well, you know, I don't... | ||
I have to be careful with what I was saying. | ||
I don't know that much about it. | ||
But, you know, it seems like this is going to get really serious. | ||
And I'm also aware that when I turn on my phone and look at the news apps, the information I get from the BBC or The Guardian or whatever else is totally different from what I see here. | ||
Of course, I knew all this, but I was sort of couching it in terms that gave him the chance to kind of, you know, I didn't want to preach. | ||
And he said, yeah, well, you know, it's great because, you know, Vladimir Putin is making Russia great again. | ||
And this is Russian land and it belongs to Russia. | ||
And those Ukrainians are all Nazis anyway. | ||
And, you know, we're going to, they're performing genocide on Russian peoples. | ||
And the thing I found, like, craziest about all this, not just the fact that he was so precisely parroting Putin's propaganda, you know, which I had assumed beforehand people would be taking with a pinch of salt. | ||
But the fact that, I mean, this guy was Sakha. | ||
He's not a Slav. | ||
He's not a white Russian. | ||
This guy is from a people who about 400 years ago were brutally, aggressively colonized by a sort of Militaristic, expansionist, czarist Russia who spread into the area and just took over. | ||
And I just thought somehow, with hindsight naively, that these people that were from an ethnically different background, heritage, might not be quite so sold on the cause of Russian nationalism, which is essentially what Putin used to sell the invasion in the first place. | ||
But no, he was totally sold on it. | ||
And then just as the following kind of weeks unfolded, as I started hiking, the war ramped up. | ||
I only got little snippets of information. | ||
It was very hard to know what was actually going on. | ||
I just met more and more people with, to be frank, a complete gamut of opinions. | ||
I met lots of people who, like him, were just bullish and quite hawkish. | ||
Yeah, we'll take back Ukraine. | ||
It belongs to Russia. | ||
They're all fascists. | ||
And then I met people who quietly, I'm not going to say any names, but people who one-on-one would quietly confide, I'm not quite sure about this. | ||
I don't quite believe everything I'm being told. | ||
Or even some people who said, I'm ashamed to be Russian. | ||
I'm embarrassed about this. | ||
I don't feel like I'm part of this country now. | ||
What was your feeling going through? | ||
So you're going through this trip. | ||
You have no idea that this is going to happen. | ||
It starts happening while you're there. | ||
And then you find yourself accidentally involved in a sense that you're a foreign observer trapped in this land where all this crazy shit is going down. | ||
Are you thinking You have to get out of there? | ||
Are you thinking you are a part of this now? | ||
You're going to document what you're seeing and this will add to whatever you're writing in the future? | ||
A bit of both, really. | ||
It occurred to me a bunch of times, should I be leaving? | ||
Should I be getting out of here? | ||
Just days after the invasion, Russian flights to Europe were all... | ||
The airlines were sanctioned. | ||
They couldn't fly into European airports. | ||
So my flight hadn't yet been formally cancelled, but it wasn't going to happen. | ||
I knew that much. | ||
So getting out was already going to be complicated. | ||
But I didn't feel... | ||
I didn't feel personally threatened. | ||
And perhaps I should have. | ||
You know, I suppose I felt like, you know, I'm essentially a neutral observer. | ||
But of course I wasn't, because I'm British. | ||
And Britain very quickly took a stance along with the EU and America, you know, pro-Ukraine stance. | ||
And it's great, you know, here, wandering around Austin, you see Ukrainian flags everywhere. | ||
After finally getting home, I went to little villages in the countryside and the church has a Ukrainian flag hoisted on top of the flagpole. | ||
The West, for want of a better term, really took up the cause of Ukraine very, very quickly. | ||
And I suppose that made me not a neutral observer, but a representative of the opposition, if not the enemy. | ||
But I've been... | ||
I've been in trouble with the authorities in Russia before, on previous occasions. | ||
I've been through the Russian court system a couple of times. | ||
How so? | ||
In 2017, I was skiing through the Ural Mountains, which is, they kind of divide European Russia from Siberia, and came into a town for a resupply after a couple of months out in the mountains, and the police Arrested me and my friend. | ||
So we were on business visas because the longest tourist visa you could get back then was only 30 days. | ||
We needed three months plus. | ||
So we got business visas and they said you're committing tourism while traveling on a business visa. | ||
So we were taken to court for committing tourism, for sort of abusing the grounds. | ||
Did you explain that that is your business? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Did that work? | ||
They didn't go for it. | ||
But, I mean, the fine was, you know, 20 pounds or something. | ||
But you have books, though. | ||
I would imagine. | ||
Well, I didn't yet have them. | ||
Oh, okay. | ||
But, I mean, I had a website. | ||
But then, you know, later we got a border infraction. | ||
We were kayaking down a river on the border of Russia and Kazakhstan. | ||
And it turns out where the river is the border, you're not allowed to be. | ||
And then months later in Georgia, we were up in the mountains of Georgia. | ||
And I mean, it's dumb, really. | ||
We used Google Maps to tell us how to get to this town, Gori, which incidentally is where Stalin was born. | ||
And Google Maps said, yeah, you come down... | ||
Out of this valley, out of the mountains into this valley, go up river, there's a river through the valley, go up river for about a mile, cross the bridge and then carry on on the road and you'll be there, you know, this evening. | ||
I thought, great, easy. | ||
We went down and then at the bridge there were Georgian soldiers, or police, police I think, and they said, no, it's close. | ||
And they wouldn't explain why. | ||
And I, you know, I had some Russian by this point, so, you know, I could have understood if they explained, but they didn't. | ||
They just said, no, it's close, just go away. | ||
And so I kind of put it into Google again and it said, yeah, it's going to be, you know, like a day and a half. | ||
It's like a long, longer way around. | ||
And we were sort of after it, you know, keen for a rest. | ||
And I thought, well, the river doesn't look that deep. | ||
So we went, you know, a few hundred meters downstream and just pushed our bikes across. | ||
It was like ankle deep. | ||
Got to the other side, scrambled up a bank, got on the road, started cycling and thought, yeah, you know, finally we've got one over on the authorities. | ||
It's always been a bit of a headache. | ||
And about 30 seconds later, a military jeep sped up behind us and sort of pulled over in front of us, and a soldier climbed out. | ||
And the first thing I noticed was he had the Russian tricolor, the flag, on his arm. | ||
And I thought, well, that's strange, because the border is about 50 miles north of here. | ||
And he said, what are you doing here? | ||
And I said, what are you doing here? | ||
Which isn't the right thing to say when a Russian soldier arrests you. | ||
He said, this is South Ossetia, which is that there was a short five-day war in 2008, and Russia just sort of invaded an annexed part of Georgia. | ||
And it turned out the river was the border, and we had unwittingly just crossed into it. | ||
It's part of Russia, essentially, but it's set up like the Donbass is already being, as a kind of a little puppet state. | ||
And when they were interrogating us under the frowning portrait of Putin, they were saying, why did you do this? | ||
It's a border. | ||
Why have you violated our sovereign territory? | ||
And I said, you know, it was just the maps on our phone. | ||
And the guy from the FSB, formerly the KGB, said, ah, Google Maps, right? | ||
And I said, yeah. | ||
And he goes, ah, it's an American company. | ||
I said, yeah. | ||
And he said, well, America doesn't recognize South Ossetia. | ||
So Google Maps has just told me to go through this disputed territory. | ||
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Jesus, Google. | |
Later I looked at it and there was a tiny little dotted line, but the route, it just said go through there. | ||
But I said, who does recognize it? | ||
And he said, well, you know, the South Ossetians do, and Russia does. | ||
I was like, sure, that's kind of a given. | ||
And I said, anyone else? | ||
He said, yeah, Venezuela and Nicaragua. | ||
I was like, it's good company. | ||
And he said, also, have you heard of Nauru? | ||
It's a tiny little Pacific Island nation of about 10,000 people. | ||
They're the only other people who back then at least formally recognized South Ossetia. | ||
I guess Belarus might do now. | ||
Anyway, so, you know, I was familiar with Russian, you know, I know that being arrested in Russia for some minor sort of administrative infraction isn't, you know, isn't necessarily a huge deal. | ||
At both of those times, I was given a small fine and sent on my way. | ||
But this time, you know, this winter, after about three weeks of hiking, I arrived at this town. | ||
It was the first, the only town on the route. | ||
So did they let you go? | ||
In South Ossetia? | ||
Yeah, once they pulled you over, like, how do you get out of this? | ||
So, well, we were in a cell for a night and then in the court where the judge said, is there anything you want to say? | ||
And I said, well, I'm really hungry. | ||
They haven't really fed us. | ||
And the judge started screaming at the police and said, get them some food straight away. | ||
So, you know, it was all friendly and fine. | ||
They then, at sunset, marched us through all this kind of, you know, razor wire and concrete defenses and unexploded ordnance signs and handed us over to the Georgian authorities. | ||
Do you have to explain what you're doing? | ||
The Georgians were across it because it had been put out on the FSB communications. | ||
So they knew that two tourists had got in trouble. | ||
And sure enough, on the other side of the border, there were people from the British Embassy, the Georgian police, the tourism industry, the Ministry of the Interior. | ||
So we had this long debrief. | ||
But you're not supposed to be there, right? | ||
We crossed the border, not knowing it was a border, so it was totally innocent, but we crossed the border illegally, because it is a border. | ||
How would you be able to cross it legally? | ||
Well, only from Russia. | ||
Only from Russia. | ||
So that area where you crossed, it's just illegal to cross in that area? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Did you explain what you do? | ||
And how did they respond to that? | ||
I explained. | ||
I think they very quickly understood that we weren't spies. | ||
This is five years ago. | ||
They very quickly understood that we weren't spies. | ||
It wasn't, obviously, quite such a time of heightened tensions like now. | ||
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Right. | |
But now, when you got in trouble with the Russian authorities, it was a much more serious issue. | ||
Yeah, well this time I didn't, and I stand by this, I didn't do anything wrong, but they were, it seemed quite quickly, looking for a way to get me out of there. | ||
So it was known where I was at all times. | ||
Although there was only one settlement every week, this river, the road, the Zimnik on the river I was hiking along, saw perhaps 15 trucks a day hauling coal from a port at the river mouth, like hundreds of kilometers away. | ||
All the way down to Batagai, the town where I started hiking to fuel the region with a little power station. | ||
And so people were clearly, as I found out later, reporting to the authorities where I was at any given time. | ||
The two villages I passed through before reaching the first town, it was quickly by the village elders, I think. | ||
Because there's no presence of authorities in these villages. | ||
They're tiny, three, four hundred people. | ||
You know, it was passed on where I was. | ||
So when I approached Ustkviga, this town, which used to have 5,000 or 6,000 residents, now there's like 500 or 600, so basically there's not many people just living scattered among the ruins of this kind of town. | ||
On the north side of the town, there's a cement factory that was built and completed just before the Soviet Union fell apart, so it never produced a single sack of cement because there was no longer any reason to live in this desolate, throwaway town in the middle of nowhere. | ||
The Soviets were really keen to evenly populate this huge expanse of land that they owned, so they built industrial settlements all over the place. | ||
Anyway, as I approached Isquiga, a police jeep was waiting for me a few miles outside town. | ||
And they said, get into the jeep for a chat. | ||
And I said, no, that's fine. | ||
And actually, that morning had been my coldest morning. | ||
It was minus 48 or 49 degrees Celsius that morning, which I think is about 55 Fahrenheit. | ||
And so my feet were still numb. | ||
And I was only too happy to get in the car and have a chat with them in the warmth. | ||
And they asked me all these questions for about an hour. | ||
You know, what are you doing here? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So this was in my very pigeon Russian. | ||
These guys didn't speak a word of English. | ||
What are you doing here? | ||
You know, why are you visiting? | ||
And I just said, I'm here. | ||
I'm interested in the culture, the traditions, the backgrounds, the winter, the wildlife. | ||
You know, I'm a tourist. | ||
And they made me sign a document promising to obey the rules of the country while I was in it, which fair enough. | ||
But then they drove off. | ||
Well, they took selfies with me and then drove off. | ||
And then I continued into the town. | ||
They took selfies with you? | ||
Oh, everyone takes selfies in Russia. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
In fact, they even refer to any picture with a person in it as a selfie. | ||
It doesn't need to be taken by oneself. | ||
That's an English word that's just bled through into Russian for a picture. | ||
Interesting. | ||
And again, selfies, I found out later that people were taking selfies with me, you know, truckers along the way, and then these were popping up on various kind of Instagram accounts in the area that lots of people followed. | ||
So, you know, people were totally aware of where I was, what I was doing. | ||
And again, I had nothing to hide. | ||
Sort of. | ||
We'll come to that in a minute. | ||
But in Ustkviga, they came and found me. | ||
They came and knocked on the door in the place that I was staying. | ||
I was there for three nights. | ||
And they said, come to the police station for registration. | ||
I said, that's fine. | ||
Again, no problem. | ||
And in the police station, slowly it became clear that they were giving me a fine. | ||
And when I asked, what's the fine for? | ||
I wasn't initially concerned. | ||
What's the fine for? | ||
And they said, oh, you're conducting journalism while traveling on a tourist visa. | ||
You can now get, well, briefly, I guess you can't now, get a 90-day tourist visa to Russia as of recently. | ||
So this time I was on the correct visa, a tourist visa. | ||
But they said, you're conducting journalism. | ||
I said, I'm not. | ||
And they said, no, you're a journalist. | ||
We've seen on your website, you've written for the BBC, which is true, but travel pieces. | ||
You've written for these newspapers, again, travel articles based on essentially tourism. | ||
And they said, well, that's journalism here. | ||
And we also hear you've been talking to people. | ||
And I said, well, yeah, that's not illegal. | ||
And you've been taking photographs. | ||
Again, no problem. | ||
But they then suddenly claimed that I've been asking provocative questions about the, as they call it, the special operation. | ||
Because the war, within Russia, the war is not a war. | ||
It's illegal to call it a war. | ||
It's a special operation. | ||
It's part of this kind of strange, kind of, you know, Nothing is true. | ||
So are people reporting you along the way? | ||
I mean, did you ascertain how this got to these soldiers? | ||
Well, they knew I was, you know, the route I was following was, you know, along this river over some hills to another river and then up to this town on the coast. | ||
And so there was no secret that I was going to come through Ustquiga. | ||
And they knew what day it was going to be because someone had probably reported seeing my tent, you know, 20 miles down the road the previous night where I'd camped. | ||
And I think, I mean, it became quite clear that they had... | ||
We spoke for a while and eventually when they started making these accusations, I said, look, right, I don't really understand exactly what you're saying. | ||
I need you to find a translator. | ||
And so they found some guy who spoke a bit of English and he translated as best he could. | ||
And they basically come up with, they sort of fabricated witnesses who said, yeah, he was asking about the war in Ukraine. | ||
He called it a war. | ||
You know, he was trying to sort of provoke, you know, difficult conversations. | ||
And it really wasn't the case. | ||
And frankly, wherever I went, almost one of the One of the first questions people would ask about me is, what do you think of the situation in Ukraine? | ||
Because whether or not they believe what they're being told by their news, they are aware because the news talks about, quote unquote, the fake news that the West is putting out. | ||
They're aware that I might have access to that, so they want to know what I think. | ||
So they kind of came up with these witnesses and said, right, you've got to pay this fine and then you can go. | ||
And I thought, right, well, it's a £20 fine, $30, and then I can go. | ||
There's no point staying here all day. | ||
I might as well just sign the papers and go. | ||
And so I did that. | ||
But the guy who they got to translate for me, he walked out with me when we were all done. | ||
And as we were walking down the street, he said, so when they were on the phone to HQ back in Yakutsk, the capital, I overheard the people on the other end of the phone saying that these guys should pin two administrative offenses on me so that I can be deported. | ||
And I'd resisted. | ||
I'd pushed back quite hard saying, you know, this is not what I'm doing. | ||
I'm not doing journalism. | ||
This is not true or whatever. | ||
And I'm glad I did. | ||
Had I not, then they possibly would have deported me then and there. | ||
But I was free to carry on. | ||
So I carried on about another four weeks, you know, got up onto the tundra, visited some reindeer herders, you know, got to some very remote settlements and spent the final sort of 10 days hiking on the frozen Arctic Ocean, you know, camping out, you know, under some of the most incredible starscapes and northern lights. | ||
It was beautiful, a really good time. | ||
I arrived in Tixie, this port town at the end, which used to have, I think, like 15,000 people. | ||
Now it has about 5,000 people. | ||
It's another one of these, the Russians have a phrase for this, like a dying town, a town more dead than alive. | ||
And on arrival in Tixie, someone who I'd met on the road weeks earlier, who I got in touch with on arrival, he said, you know, get in touch, we'll catch up. | ||
He told me that the FSB, the KGB, wanted to talk to me. | ||
And I thought, right, we'll just take the bull by the horns, I'll just go to their building, and I'll say, I hear you want to talk to me, I'm here. | ||
And they were a bit taken aback by that. | ||
And they said, can you come back at this time tomorrow? | ||
So I did. | ||
And it felt like an interrogation, but it eventually turned out it was just this standard procedure. | ||
They asked me these questions, who I was, Name of my family members, the history of my family, did any of my ancestors ever, were they ever in the British forces? | ||
Do I have any political beliefs? | ||
Was I in the army? | ||
Just all these kind of standard suspicious questions. | ||
And it went on about two, three hours. | ||
And when we were finally done, the guy said, okay, well, that's it. | ||
You're free to go. | ||
I was like, oh, great. | ||
He said, make sure you visit the museum. | ||
There's a mammoth skeleton. | ||
You know, have a good time. | ||
Good luck to you. | ||
I went back to where I was staying, and I was recording... | ||
So I took with me a little Zoom, like a little dictaphone. | ||
You know, a lot of people use them for podcasts, I think. | ||
And for another podcast with a friend that'll surface in a month or so, I've been recording my experiences in my own voice along the way of the cold, the people I met, the odd conversation with other people. | ||
But naturally, with what was going on and people telling me of their opinions about Ukraine... | ||
In my own little recordings, in my tent at night, sometimes I get a little sort of political, I guess. | ||
And after that encounter in Oosterkwieger, when they came to my door, these policemen the first time, sorry, four weeks back, I know we're jumping around. | ||
When they came to my door, I was recording on my dictaphone. | ||
And I went to answer the door and just slipped it in my pocket. | ||
And they said, right, come to the police station now. | ||
And so I went, but it was still recording. | ||
So I had a live mic throughout this whole police process. | ||
And the first thing they did in the police station was take my phone, turn it off so I wasn't recording. | ||
And so little did they know there was this hot mic in my pocket. | ||
So after that was done, I got back to where I was staying. | ||
I kind of, in my own words, said what had happened. | ||
Took the little micro SD card out and then unscrewed a plug adapter, you know, from like a British plug to a Russian plug. | ||
Unscrewed that, wrapped the SD card up in a little scrap of white paper, slotted it in there, screwed it back up. | ||
It's like, you know, I don't want to lose this. | ||
It's not really a huge problem, but best just to hide it and have it safe. | ||
Up in Tixie, I sort of recorded my final thoughts again and I had this little SD card. | ||
It was just on the table. | ||
And another one, I was worried, you know, my journal, my diary that I've been writing each day, I was worried that that might get taken. | ||
With the villages I passed through towards the end, you know, it was made very clear that the authorities were waiting for me in Tixie. | ||
I thought, well, you know, that might get seized. | ||
Not the end of the world if it does. | ||
If I, with my GoPro, take a picture of every single page and I can hide that little SD card in the same plug socket. | ||
But when the knock came on my door in Tixie, I'd been asleep. | ||
I'd actually fallen asleep reading Kafka, the trial, this guy getting arrested and not knowing what it's all about. | ||
They came to the door and everything was just kind of out. | ||
And they said, it was the police again, they said, can you come to the station for registration? | ||
I said, again, well, this is a little ominous, but registration, fine. | ||
I'd already, you know, the day before spoken to the FSB. I knew everything was fine. | ||
And in the station, it quickly became clear. | ||
Well, after about an hour of just this long, asking lots of questions, I said, well, can I go now? | ||
And they said, no, no, you can't go. | ||
And that's when I understood I'm under arrest, and this is maybe a little bit more serious. | ||
And once again, they said, who have you spoken to? | ||
Who have you met in Tixie? | ||
And I said, well, I met this guy who I'd met on the road who... | ||
It's a small town, so I didn't want to lie to them. | ||
I thought best just to say who I'd met. | ||
So I met this guy, and I've met this other bloke, and they didn't know who either of these people were, and they were asking questions about who they were. | ||
And without leaving the room, without making a call, without doing any texting, me having just explained to them who these people were, and they didn't know who they were, they quickly said, right, well both those people are providing witness to say that you have been conducting journalism and asking questions about Ukraine. | ||
So they essentially got me to provide them with false witnesses. | ||
And this process went on for hours. | ||
They got an English teacher to translate for us. | ||
And as the hours passed, the English teacher became more and more fed up. | ||
She was meant to be, I think, someone with a disease in the town. | ||
There was a bake sale to raise money for him, and she was meant to be cooking cupcakes with her daughter that evening. | ||
And, you know, I'd ruined this because it was already, you know, they took me at about 4.30. | ||
Anyway, at 9.30 after a lot of waiting around they finally said, right, you're going to court now. | ||
I thought, well, it's 9.30. | ||
How's that going to work? | ||
And they took me to another building, an old Soviet-looking apartment block-type building. | ||
But on the third floor, there was a courtroom. | ||
And in the courtroom, they got this judge who just seemed pissed off. | ||
You know, he'd been dragged out of his home at 9.30 at night to deal with something. | ||
And the teacher was so pissed off by this point that she wasn't really translating in full anymore. | ||
So, you know, the judge would speak a whole, you know, paragraph, and she would give me a half sentence in translation. | ||
And so the trial unfolded. | ||
I had been supposedly conducting journalism again. | ||
They had these witnesses who said I'd said this, that and the other. | ||
And they also said, most worryingly, that I'd been photographing restricted military sites or sensitive military sites. | ||
And the judge found me guilty and he said, you'll pay a fine. | ||
Again, not much, like 70 bucks, something like that. | ||
And you are banned from Russia for five years and you have to leave. | ||
You'll be deported. | ||
And I thought, right, it's not the end of the world. | ||
It looks like Russia's not particularly a place to go back to for five years. | ||
It's fine. | ||
And so at that point, as far as I was aware, I would fly back to Yakutsk Get my own flight back to England via some other third country and then fly home. | ||
Done. | ||
And I was taken back to the sort of apartment I'd rented in this town. | ||
And probably 20 minutes later, there was a knock at the door and it was the police guy and they said, oh, actually, you have to be in the cell tonight. | ||
Pack everything you have up. | ||
And we're going now. | ||
And so with them in front of me, I had to pack everything up. | ||
Among the stuff that was all kind of laid out was one of these little SD cards with the second half of all the recordings from this Zoom on it. | ||
And all I could do was I had a head torch next to it on the table because they were watching me pack. | ||
You know head torches have that little sort of hinge so it can sort of angle down on your forehead. | ||
I bent the hinge down, put the SD card in that bit and just snapped it shut and put a rubber band around the whole thing. | ||
But that just felt really precarious. | ||
You know, that's not well hidden. | ||
And that's the last time I was, you know, just before that point was the last time I was unattended with all my stuff for weeks to come, as it turned out. | ||
I packed everything up. | ||
We were taken to the cell, fingerprinting. | ||
I was eventually about 1.30, put it into this little cell. | ||
And I was thankfully tired enough. | ||
I got some sleep, woke up in the morning. | ||
And from that point on, I was accompanied or escorted by bailiffs, technically, although they said, we're Russia's U.S. Marshals. | ||
They were quite keen to sort of compare themselves to U.S. Marshals. | ||
And I'd already changed my flight that I had booked a week away to the following day to get me back to the capital. | ||
And so I was deported on, well, sent down to Yakutsk on the flight that I'd booked, but with a man as an escort. | ||
And at this point, I still thought, like, I'm free when I get to Yakutsk. | ||
I'll go home. | ||
On arrival in Yakutsk, there was another bailiff waiting for me. | ||
And he said, right, well, you have to now go and stay in this kind of hotel for foreigners until you fly home. | ||
And I thought, well, that's not ideal. | ||
But again, it's not the end of the world. | ||
And then on the drive in this minibus to the detention center, it turned out, yeah, it was a detention center for foreigners, and it was just a prison. | ||
And, you know, my shoelaces were taken away, my belt was taken off, all my goods were locked up in a locker. | ||
And, you know, after being processed and checked in, the door slammed, or the cell door slammed shut behind me. | ||
And then there I am. | ||
And I don't know how long for. | ||
You know, that's one of the sort of bleakest moments where I just, I didn't know what exactly is going to happen after that point. | ||
I still, I suppose, was thinking a few days and I'll probably be out. | ||
And they were sort of saying maybe 10 days. | ||
You've got to wait for the paperwork to come down from the coast or whatever. | ||
But after a few days, you know, time had come and gone. | ||
I was in the cell. | ||
I mean, you're in the cell around the clock, 24 hours a day, not allowed outside. | ||
Food's handed through a little hatch in the cell. | ||
I shared it with two other men. | ||
And after a few days, they said, right, you know, you should be getting a lawyer. | ||
And I was allowed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 15 minutes of access to my phone. | ||
So back home via these frantic, hurried phone calls, my uncle and my girlfriend were kind of, you know, arranging, trying to help out. | ||
And so we arranged for a lawyer to come in and he said, right, well, we'll appeal the decision. | ||
But that appeal wasn't heard for two weeks. | ||
And that appeal was dismissed out of hand. | ||
I was taken to the court. | ||
And this is after two weeks, you know, by this point I was You know, I was not a happy guy. | ||
I mean, it was almost comical going to the court for the appeal. | ||
You know, I was so desperate to get outside. | ||
I hadn't been outdoors for two weeks. | ||
And they said, right, you're going to the court. | ||
And I knew that meant I'd get to be outdoors for a few minutes, you know, as I walked from the door into the minibus and from the minibus into the court at the other end. | ||
But they put me in cuffs and then they, with another pair of handcuffs, cuffed me to one of the guards who had a taser and there was another guard on the other side with a taser and they wouldn't let me have my shoelaces or my belt back. | ||
And I'd lost quite a lot of weight during this trek. | ||
So my trousers are falling down, my hiking shoes had these massive sort of, you know, tongues lolling out the front. | ||
And walking down the courthouse corridors, I was doing this kind of weird, you know, John Wayne wide-kneed shuffle to try and stop my trousers from falling down. | ||
Meanwhile, my hands are pinned to this guy to my right. | ||
But the judge looked at the papers for, you know, like two minutes and said, yeah, no, your crimes are too serious. | ||
There's a political element and, you know, you're going back into the detention centre. | ||
And this was probably the time when I felt most low. | ||
About a week earlier, I had suddenly, unexpectedly been dragged in front of a TV camera and interviewed. | ||
And that was a bit concerning. | ||
That felt like being tried by the Court of Public Opinion. | ||
Eventually the news bit aired, I think the day before my appeal. | ||
But they had gone up to Tixie and they got witness statements from one bloke who I never even met saying, yeah, you know, he was talking about Ukraine and he was photographing these military sites. | ||
Again, no photos were ever provided that, you know, backed up that story. | ||
And all the while, you know, those first two weeks... | ||
All of my belongings are in their possession. | ||
And the police have come and searched. | ||
They've made me turn on their phone, my phone, unlock it for them. | ||
I had a GPS device, which really freaks them out. | ||
My GoPro to them looked like a spy camera. | ||
But when they first laid out all my belongings, as some policeman, you know, I was taking cuffed out my cell to be, you know, to turn everything on for him and sort of... | ||
On the table laid out in this neat little row was all my items and among them was this plug socket and that head torch with the hidden little SD card in it. | ||
And although technically those things weren't really incriminating, the fact that they had been hidden didn't look good. | ||
And I probably should have said earlier, back in March, two months earlier, they had introduced a new law with a maximum sentence of up to 15 years for journalists providing or sort of spreading fake news about the military, i.e. | ||
anyone really speaking the truth about the military. | ||
After the invasion? | ||
After the invasion. | ||
And, you know, these recordings had lots of me talking about the invasion, the atrocities in Bucha, and, you know, all sorts. | ||
And my whole diary, which up to this point I'd kept hidden because when I was checked into the cell while they were going through all my stuff, I just slipped it in my trousers because I thought this diary doesn't look good. | ||
I slipped it in my trousers, which again, freaked me out a little bit. | ||
Are they going to frisk me? | ||
Are they not? | ||
I got it into the cell and then I just hid it in plain sight among my belongings. | ||
And it was all the stuff in the locker that the police went and looked through. | ||
So there's just a lot of things going on. | ||
I'm constantly on edge that I'm just about to become a political bargaining chip. | ||
Did they find the SD cards? | ||
No, thankfully. | ||
This is actually the first time I've spoken about those SD cards. | ||
And, you know, those would have qualified me for at least, you know, you're a journalist, if not espionage. | ||
And the guards in the prison who were, I mean, I think they were probably nice, normal guys, but they treated, they were wankers to us. | ||
I mean, they kept on saying to me, are you a spy? | ||
And don't fight my country. | ||
You know, they would also, on their phones, look up phrases in English and then kind of chant them back at me, you are a spy walker. | ||
And so it was a scary time. | ||
And after the appeal was rejected, I then thought, well, this could be a really long time. | ||
I could be here for months, and the longer I'm here, the more chance there is that either they'll find some of these SD cards or Or my diary. | ||
Or that they will, you know, some ambitious cop, some ambitious policeman or bureaucrat will decide to pick up my case again to retry me under the criminal offence. | ||
I mean, given they'd made up most of their evidence anyway, it's no stretch to think that they could pin on me the fake news journalist thing and put me away for 15 years. | ||
I mean, I didn't even know of her at the time, but since getting out, I've learned about, and I'm going to get her name wrong, but Brittany Grinner, the basketball player, who, I mean, we don't really even know where she is. | ||
I think a bit of news came out about her the other day. | ||
But, I mean, she's clearly being, in my opinion, I mean, it's totally outrageous, but she, I think, is being held as a prisoner swap fodder. | ||
They will use her when convenient. | ||
Yeah, they're trying to get... | ||
There's an arms dealer that we have, and they're trying to get the arms dealer swapped for the basketball player. | ||
Because she had a CBD vape. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And they arrested her like a week before the invasion even happened. | ||
They knew what was going to happen, it seems, and they just held on to her. | ||
Yeah, she's valuable, I guess. | ||
And I mean, I hope that she's out as soon as possible, but I really worry about... | ||
Held in jail for another 18 days. | ||
Yeah, but what does that mean? | ||
Well, she's been there for over 100 days already, and I mean, I was inside for not very long, but 18 days feels like an eternity. | ||
Yeah, it says, drug smuggling charges until July 2nd, pushing her jail stint past the four-month mark, according to the official state news agency, TASS. How do you say that word? | ||
Kimke? | ||
Chimki. | ||
Chimki Court of Moscow region granted the 18-day extension at the request of investigators. | ||
The agency quoted the court's press service as saying, it is typical of Russian courts to extend detention repeatedly until trial. | ||
Ms. Greiner's lawyer, Alexander Boykov, could not immediately be reached for comment. | ||
Could you scroll down a little bit further? | ||
What it says that American basketball players... | ||
Starr was arrested four months ago after the Russian official said they found a vape cartridge bearing traces of hash oil in her luggage while she was passing through the... | ||
Sherman Tyevo. | ||
Sherman Tyevo Airport, Moscow's main international airport. | ||
The charge carries a jail sentence of up to 10 years. | ||
Fuck. | ||
Yeah, I mean, they... | ||
I really hope this proves to be correct that it's only 18 more days. | ||
You never know with Russia. | ||
I mean, just this morning I saw on the news Navalny has essentially disappeared. | ||
They moved him to an undisclosed location. | ||
Oh, boy. | ||
His lawyer went to visit him this morning. | ||
And when he said, you know, where's Alexei? | ||
The prison just said, we have no convict of such a name. | ||
And that's it. | ||
That's all this. | ||
Can you explain who that is to people? | ||
Sorry, yeah. | ||
Alexei Navalny is the sort of Russian opposition politician who, he's been a very vocal critic and opponent of Putin for years. | ||
He, I mean, Boris Nemtsov was a close ally of him. | ||
He was killed by the regime. | ||
Navalny was locked up under fraud charges, I think, with a two-year sentence. | ||
About two weeks ago, they added another nine years and said that he was inciting I mean, they've gone full autocrat now. | ||
There's no longer any pretense. | ||
But Navalny is the guy who was in Europe for a while, and then he flew from Germany back to Russia incredibly bravely. | ||
Many would say foolishly, but he's very dedicated to trying to liberate the Russian people from the tyranny that they're living under. | ||
He flew back knowing full well what that would mean. | ||
And that was after they had already tried to kill him with Novichok. | ||
They put Novichok in his pants in a hotel room in Berlin or something. | ||
And now he's disappeared. | ||
I mean, I think I was very lucky to be... | ||
You know, the fact that I'm out now at all, I think probably stems from the fact that I was all the way out there in the East, where people are a little sort of out of the loop. | ||
Had I been in Moscow, like Brittany Greiner, then I think things might have been very different. | ||
Are you worried now about talking about this openly, that they might target you? | ||
A little bit. | ||
But... | ||
Yes and no. | ||
I mean, the thing that I'm most... | ||
I'm most mindful of is, and that's why I've probably sounded quite vague about some of the people I've essentially cited in this chat, is I need to be very careful because being associated with me for various people in Russia could be a real problem for them. | ||
There's one guy who I believe he was one of the witnesses used against me in one of the two places. | ||
He's not a Russian citizen. | ||
He's from another country. | ||
And he's got in touch with me saying he's now being deported. | ||
He's lived there for 10 years. | ||
And that's... | ||
I mean, it's not my fault, but it's on my head. | ||
I am not... | ||
I mean, maybe they're going to try and fuck with me. | ||
I don't plan to go back. | ||
I'm banned for five years anyway, but unless there's a total change of regime, not just Putin falls or is strung up from a lamppost or something and is replaced by his next mate... | ||
But like an actual perestroika again. | ||
Then I won't go back. | ||
I wouldn't feel safe and probably wouldn't be safe. | ||
But equally me being outside Russia now talking about What's happened and also what, you know, referencing what has been happening in Ukraine. | ||
I'm the last person they care about, you know, because there are actual journalists doing actual journalism, spreading actual news and facts about the incredible atrocities. | ||
I mean, when we flew from Tixie down to Yakutsk on the flight, firstly, they were like in the airport, there were banners with the letters Z everywhere. | ||
And there were a bunch of soldiers. | ||
I should say, so Tixie It used to be a restricted zone. | ||
And then in January 2021, they declassified it. | ||
And that's how my trip became viable. | ||
And I thought, okay, great. | ||
It's safe to go there now. | ||
What's the significance of the letter Z? So that's the, I mean, it stands for Za Pobedi, like for victory. | ||
And that's what the Russians have on their tanks, Z and V. So they, you know, the tanks that have driven across into Ukraine, they've all got the letter Z marked out on them in paint or tape. | ||
But all over Russia, you'll see now cars or trucks or buses with the Z on them. | ||
It's this like Z. Mark of, like, Russian pride in the special operation that's being undertaken in Ukraine, the invasion. | ||
But all these, you know, soldiers on this flight, you know, they were sort of in their 40s. | ||
They looked, you know, judging by their age and sort of epaulettes and stars all over them, they looked like they were probably relatively senior personnel. | ||
And sitting on that flight was weird. | ||
I was thinking if they're flying from here, maybe some of them will be deployed to Ukraine. | ||
And if they're deployed to Ukraine, maybe some of these guys will be sanctioning or at least turning a blind eye to rape and murder and torture in the weeks to come. | ||
Even as they were declassifying it, they installed a bunch of missile silos, surface air missile silos outside the town, which I wasn't aware of. | ||
So it's Russia's huge Arctic coast. | ||
It's like 12,000 miles of sort of frontier. | ||
And they've got three points ranged along it that are the kind of hubs of their, they call it the ice curtain, their Arctic defense strategy. | ||
And Tixie is one of those. | ||
So they've, in the last few years, massively ramped up their military personnel there, their military hardware. | ||
So, you know, that's to defend against any attacks from the north by sea or air or whatever. | ||
And so that, you know, was, I guess, why they were particularly on edge about me being there and this idea of, you know, photographing the military, which, again, I hadn't been, but that was why they sort of summoned that. | ||
So how did they eventually let you go and why? | ||
So when they've got foreigners in this detention center to deport you, they've got to take you to Moscow first because there's no international airport in Yakutsk. | ||
And to do that, you know, being taken to Moscow involves handcuffs and guards. | ||
And it's like this whole big rigmarole. | ||
They do it on the state budget. | ||
You have no say over when it happens. | ||
So you just have to wait. | ||
And for the other, I think there were no more than about 12 people in this detention center. | ||
There were only five cells. | ||
For the other people there, that's just a case of just waiting. | ||
And they were basically all undocumented workers. | ||
So people who had either outstayed their work visa or never had one. | ||
And, you know, most of them seem fairly stoical about it, although some of them had been there for... | ||
I didn't get to talk to many because I was in a cell with two for two weeks and then by myself for two weeks after that. | ||
But I think the longest any of them were there were probably about six weeks, except one Ukrainian guy who had been given a six-month sentence there. | ||
He had been in a prison for two and a half years beforehand for some criminal offense that he wouldn't tell me what. | ||
I don't really know what his story was. | ||
But they deport you when the next sort of deportation run happens to be booked up. | ||
And very last minute on the 16th, I think, of May, when I'd been inside nearly four weeks, They said, right, on Wednesday, two days from now, if you can book flights to coincide with this deportation that we're doing of three other people, then you can go with it. | ||
And so, you know, hurriedly I got my wonderful girlfriend to arrange flights so that I could fly with them on this flight to Moscow. | ||
And from there I would then, as they told me, I would go through customs and immigration and then I'd be in the departures lounge and I'm sort of essentially out of Russia and then free to go. | ||
So we arranged this flight, and I was taken with them. | ||
And that was a huge relief. | ||
Finally, I'm moving, I'm getting out of here. | ||
Had it not worked out that time, they gave me a COVID test. | ||
Had I been positive for COVID, had we managed to not get the flight, had there been no seats left on the plane, then I would have had to wait for the next one, which they told me was going to be sort of late July. | ||
So yeah, another two months or so. | ||
So thankfully we got tickets. | ||
I got on that flight, you know, marched on in your handcuffs again. | ||
Five bailiffs escorting the four of us, sort of prisoners. | ||
They took us to Moscow, to Sheremetyevo Airport, the same airport where Brittany Greiner was arrested. | ||
And we were then put into a small room to wait for our respective check-in times for our different flights. | ||
Me to London via Dubai with Emirates. | ||
A guy to Armenia, a guy to Uzbekistan, and another fella to Kyrgyzstan. | ||
And finally they said, right, it's your time for check-in. | ||
I went and got my bag checked in, was taken through security and immigration by a SWAT team, a two-person SWAT team with a bunch of police. | ||
There was a whole gang of people. | ||
Finally got through and they gave me my passport back and my phone back and said, right now. | ||
And I was like, great, this is it. | ||
I'm free. | ||
And they said, right, just wait here a minute. | ||
And then suddenly I was taken through this extra layer of security that I hadn't expected. | ||
And there were about six cops who didn't know who I was. | ||
They'd been given, I guess, a one sheet or a little stack of papers saying about my case. | ||
And they basically were just given me and all my bags and just... | ||
Well, my backpack. | ||
Again, I haven't been left unsupervised with all my stuff at any point. | ||
And so suddenly they had all my possessions, including that head torch, including the plug socket, including my diary, which they got their hands on. | ||
And for an hour and a half, they just went over everything. | ||
They went through all the phone conversations. | ||
They went back on my phone through photos for years. | ||
Eventually they came across a picture of me from 10 years earlier. | ||
In Afghanistan with a big beard and a sort of headscarf and an AK-47 in the desert, which really didn't help. | ||
And it was a totally innocent picture. | ||
I'd been cycling along. | ||
One of the Afghan National Army soldiers, you know, the good guys at a road checkpoint, invited me for tea, and their hobbies are kind of drinking tea and taking pictures with guns in the desert. | ||
And, you know, they kept pulling up things on my phone saying, you know, what's this? | ||
What's this for? | ||
They found my diary. | ||
This is the first time someone got their hands on my diary and they start reading through. | ||
One of them could speak decent English, reading through stuff. | ||
And I, thankfully, in the prison, had censored a bunch of stuff. | ||
I'd gone through and I'd scrubbed things out. | ||
Big black marks all over the place. | ||
For instance, you know, it's a diary day by day, you know, given the date. | ||
The third day, in big block capitals, it said at the top, Russia invades Ukraine. | ||
I was like, scrub that out. | ||
It was a wealth of stuff. | ||
Had they really looked closely, that would probably still be visible. | ||
Or you turn it over on the back, you can see where the pen mark is pressed, the impressions. | ||
There was just a wealth of stuff there that they could have locked me up for. | ||
And this is now in Moscow, where it just felt more serious. | ||
And this process went on for ages. | ||
They were asking me loads of questions. | ||
And I started to realize, in my mind, I was realizing, that's it. | ||
Like, this is, you know, it's just got, like, we're back to square one, but worse. | ||
And my flight time was sort of ticking slowly closer. | ||
And they showed no sign of letting me go. | ||
And I was like, no, I've got to get on my flight soon. | ||
And they started looking through just all the pictures on my camera. | ||
And I mean, they're also going to like personal conversations on WhatsApp on my phone. | ||
And it was it was a really my girlfriend who I just texted when I got my phone back saying, you know, I've got my phone. | ||
It's all done. | ||
It's all over. | ||
She then was trying to reply and call me and the messages were marked as read. | ||
The calls were just getting hung up each time. | ||
So she was freaking out because suddenly, like I say, I'm free. | ||
And suddenly it seems I don't have access to my phone. | ||
And I'm in Moscow. | ||
So this went on for an hour and a half, during which, like, in Russia, everyone shits on whoever's below them. | ||
So all these people were trying to intimidate the shit out of me. | ||
And they were saying, okay, well, you know, you've got to wipe your phone, you've got to wipe every photo that you have on your camera. | ||
And like, you know, if it came to it, I'd be willing to do that. | ||
But I didn't want to, because I also want to have some record of this journey I've been on, which was great until I was arrested. | ||
And it starts to feel like I'm about to get locked up. | ||
This is it. | ||
And it's either going to be espionage or journalism, fake news journalism, and I'm going to be here for years. | ||
There's a British woman who got locked up for basically the same thing in Iran and was behind bars for six years. | ||
And it wasn't helped by the fact that Boris Johnson, now the Prime Minister, was Foreign Secretary at the time. | ||
And he said publicly, oh, she's just teaching people journalism. | ||
It's fine. | ||
She was there. | ||
She's an Iranian-British dual national. | ||
She was there visiting her family. | ||
So that didn't help. | ||
And she became a bargaining chip. | ||
With the British government, basically the British had a sort of £240 million unpaid debt. | ||
Before the Shah was deposed, they had sold, they had taken money, £240 million worth of money for some tanks. | ||
But after the Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Revolution, the British just didn't deliver the tanks and held the money. | ||
So it was actually like a fair grievance, to be honest. | ||
But she was held until eventually that was agreed to be paid. | ||
So it was a very naked bargaining chip thing. | ||
And that was totally forefront of my mind. | ||
The amount of sanctions, the amount of things that Britain is doing at the moment to sort of hinder Russia and to aid Ukraine, I could be pretty useful. | ||
And then just as my flight was about to take off, they suddenly said, right, pack everything up. | ||
And they ran me through the departures lounge at a run to the gate where they were clearly waiting for me. | ||
So I got on the plane. | ||
The last soldier was gone behind me. | ||
The doors shut. | ||
The plane took off, and the minute those wheels took off, I just broke down, like floods of tears. | ||
It was the first time in the whole long month. | ||
Dude, I'm freaking out, you're here. | ||
I know. | ||
So this morning, I thought having this chat with you, I should probably read through my diary, because in prison I was allowed pen and paper. | ||
So on little scraps of paper, keeping them all sort of separate. | ||
I wrote what was happening day to day and this morning I was reading through it and it got me on edge again. | ||
I was like freaking out because it just brought back that sense of insecurity. | ||
Being in this cell writing stuff, there are cameras in the ceiling, you're always watched, you never know who's watching. | ||
You never know who's going to next go and look through your stuff. | ||
It just scared the shit out of me. | ||
Jesus Christ, man. | ||
Sorry, I think I relayed all that quite scatterly. | ||
No, it was amazing. | ||
unidentified
|
It was great. | |
It's hard to kind of tell it chronologically, I guess. | ||
It's kind of interesting. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
If you ever find yourself in prison and you need some dice, you can make them with bread and toothpaste for the dots. | ||
Oh, this is bread? | ||
Yeah, this is bread. | ||
If you take the crust off and just kind of knead the flesh of the bread kind of back into dough, add a bit of water, it becomes quite sort of versatile. | ||
Although the one that we're looking at now with the six, it turns out that's kind of a bent die. | ||
That rolls a six pretty much every time. | ||
But the other ones were pretty equal. | ||
And I had time to, like, with each of them, I rolled them like 300 times to, like, Tally what they came up with. | ||
You know, it's just anything to kill time. | ||
So one of those dice was almost perfectly fair. | ||
One of them was alright. | ||
The one with that six was not good. | ||
And were you gambling with people? | ||
No, not gambling. | ||
I mean, we had... | ||
So I was the only one who didn't smoke. | ||
I'm a non-smoker and two other guys in the cell smoking. | ||
It wasn't ideal, but they quit. | ||
This is the first two weeks when I had cellmates. | ||
They quickly ran out of cigarettes and started smoking tea. | ||
You know, they would, like, tear open tea bags and sprinkle the tea into a page ripped out of a Russian sort of pulp fiction novel, which, you know, was kind of desperate times for them. | ||
How bizarre. | ||
No, we didn't gamble, but we made a drafts or checkers board using, you know, the kind of the paper toggle that you hold when you're dipping a tea bag? | ||
There were two different colors of those. | ||
You know, tea and bread was about half the diet. | ||
So, you know, we got a bunch of those that we could use as drafts or checkers. | ||
And those guys, I don't actually know how to play backgammon, but they set up a backgammon board for themselves using dice. | ||
And, you know, you find ways to kill time, but mostly it was books, fiction. | ||
Thankfully a local friend and the lawyer that I hired were allowed to deliver me some English language books I mean, I didn't get them immediately. | ||
So in the course of probably about 23 days, I tallied up. | ||
I read 7,000 pages plus of books, just reading whatever I could get hold of, some of which wasn't great, some was fantastic. | ||
I did a lot of sit-ups and push-ups. | ||
My last day I did 700 sit-ups, which... | ||
I mean, it's all gone now. | ||
I've been back and I've been living well slash badly since I got home. | ||
But yeah, just anything to kill time. | ||
Well, no one can fault you for that. | ||
God damn, man. | ||
That must have been a harrowing experience. | ||
Do you still have nightmares about it? | ||
I've never had nightmares about it, but I have had once or twice since I got back when I've woken up sort of thinking that I'm still there. | ||
Which, I mean, when I was inside for the first week or so, I'd wake up every morning thinking I was elsewhere. | ||
And almost the most depressing thing was the first morning when I woke up and I wasn't at all surprised to be in this prison. | ||
You know, that was a bit shitty. | ||
But actually, I don't really dream. | ||
I very rarely remember any dreams slash nightmares. | ||
So thankfully, that hasn't been a problem. | ||
I think I'm more or less all right. | ||
Maybe I'm... | ||
I mean, I'm very British. | ||
I'm probably just, like, compacting all my trauma and burying it. | ||
I also spent 10 years at boarding school, which was quite good training for prison. | ||
I guess. | ||
And had just been living outdoors in super cold temperatures for a while, so I guess the novelty of being inside with running water and food bought to you, even though it wasn't great food. | ||
I think I was quite good at trying to see the bright side, and I put myself through quite a lot of stressors in the past, and so I'm probably fairly resilient to things like this, but it's definitely left a mark, and I'm sure I'll be I mean, it's recent. | ||
I got out like three weeks ago and I'm still, I guess, sort of picking over it in my mind. | ||
Have you started to write about it? | ||
I wrote an article for the Sunday Times that went out about a week ago. | ||
And that was a really good sort of cathartic process, like going through it all, reading over stuff and just trying to... | ||
I'm trying to process it formally as opposed to just vague thoughts drifting about. | ||
But I will start shortly, work on a book about it, about the whole trip, not just about this time in prison. | ||
Because, frankly, the prison time, you know, it's quite dramatic. | ||
But it was largely just very boring, frightening and frustrating. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Was it disturbing seeing the effectiveness of the propaganda on the populace? | ||
I mean, that seems to be... | ||
The most disturbing thing. | ||
After about 10 days, a TV was put into our cell, which for about 30 seconds I thought, this is great, you know, something to distract. | ||
And then I immediately realized this is going to be blaring, loud, crap Russian TV shows around the clock. | ||
And it very quickly started to drive me mad. | ||
I was very glad to then, a few days later, be put in a cell by myself. | ||
But that meant that I had daily access to the propaganda when the war was three months in. | ||
And I mean, it's insane. | ||
They're obsessed with this idea that the government has sold this idea, the Kremlin, that it's liberating people from Nazism. | ||
And I think that's because throughout the whole Soviet era, the Soviet state's founding myth was the Bolshevik Revolution. | ||
And that slowly changed because, I mean, I think Putin is slowly kind of removing or sort of diminishing Lenin's reputation. | ||
He's actually starting to try and sort of rehabilitate Stalin's reputation, which is astounding, frankly. | ||
But the founding myth, essentially, myth's not fair. | ||
The founding story of the Russian Federation now is basically the Second World War or the Great Patriotic War, as they call it. | ||
In which so many millions of Russians died. | ||
How is he trying to rehabilitate Stalin's image? | ||
I mean, in Russia you can rewrite the history books. | ||
It's that simple. | ||
And they don't have general access to the internet, right? | ||
The internet is heavily sort of censored. | ||
And more and more. | ||
You know, when I arrived, there was still Instagram and Twitter and whatever. | ||
And as soon as the invasion happened, they cut Twitter. | ||
They cut or just severely restricted the bandwidth to, I think, Instagram. | ||
But lots of people have VPNs. | ||
They find ways around it. | ||
Are VPNs effective in that regard? | ||
Can you use them? | ||
I didn't use them, but I saw loads of people using them. | ||
I think, I mean, they're always effective. | ||
For people who don't know what we're talking about, virtual private network, you can use them to pretend you're in a different country, you can use them to access different parts of the internet that might be restricted. | ||
Exactly. | ||
So the Second World War is this kind of foundational story. | ||
So many millions of people died, and it's the great triumph of Russia to have been... | ||
So instrumental in defeating the Nazis. | ||
And Russia was incredibly instrumental. | ||
The Eastern Front, the war back then for Ukraine in particular, Stalingrad, you know, this was like untold numbers of deaths, you know, way outnumbers the Western Front, even with the Dunkirk, the D-Day landings and stuff. | ||
And so Russia sees its noble defeat of Nazism and oppression and fascism as its kind of almost its national raison d'etre, its reason to be. | ||
And the news was just covered in grainy old footage from the Second World War. | ||
And they had got a few little clips from... | ||
Are you aware of the Azov Battalion? | ||
Those are the Nazis. | ||
The concept of Nazism is different, right? | ||
It's more of a nationalism than it is an anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic Nazism. | ||
Yeah, and I mean, I'm definitely not an expert on this. | ||
Am I right about that? | ||
Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much it. | ||
But I mean, that was the Azov Battalion's roots, at least. | ||
And I guess it's sort of white nationalism. | ||
Are they using swastikas? | ||
They've got their own sort of take on a slightly swastika-esque symbol, I guess. | ||
What is it? | ||
Can we see what that looks like? | ||
It's kind of a yellow and black type symbol, I think. | ||
But how is it correlated with Nazism? | ||
So, well, the Azov Battalion's roots, and you'll probably be able to pull up better information than I'm able to sort of summon from my slightly sketchy memory, but their roots were a while ago, and they did have this kind of line of extremism, I guess. | ||
But that's changed a lot. | ||
So there it is. | ||
I mean, there's definitely a swastika inspiration to that. | ||
Yeah, similar. | ||
But it also looks like when they find utilities, you know, like when they draw that thing on the street. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
You know what I'm talking about? | ||
Gasworks. | ||
Yeah, when they spray paint lines on the street where the lines are. | ||
Also, you flip it on its side and it's a Z. Yeah, right. | ||
But I think I'm right in saying that with the invasion, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Azov battalion sort of broadened and other people joined and that kind of element was constricted and had a diminishing role. | ||
However, there is out there online from a long time ago, sort of plenty of Azor Battalion propaganda, people marching, there's the odd sort of Sieg Heil, Hitler saluting. | ||
And that stuff has all been dredged up and it's just put all over the place, as well as other footage, kind of grainy, you know, video phone film footage that claims to be, but I'm pretty sure wasn't, members of the Azor Battalion just beating up strangers on the street, kind of, you know, just random violent attacks. | ||
But they just ram all this down the throats of the public. | ||
And it does seem like the vast... | ||
I mean, after Putin invaded, his popularity within Russia soared. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think there's been some changes there. | ||
There have been a few brief, high-profile people speaking out, but they quickly get suppressed or arrested or whatever. | ||
And there were initially protests across the country, but in the first two or three days of the war, something like 15,000 people were arrested. | ||
And so quickly dissent got kind of quashed. | ||
And in my admittedly limited experience of an admittedly niche, far remote part of Russia, it seemed like plenty of people, and I had to be very careful about generalizations here, but it seemed like plenty of people either realized that it's just bullshit and they're being lied to, or had their doubts. | ||
It's just... | ||
But understandably, no one's putting their head above the parapet and saying this, because there's nothing to gain. | ||
If you speak out, you're going to get in trouble, or your family are going to get in trouble, and trouble can mean years in prison, or in basically the gulag. | ||
They've still got labor camps, labor prisons, penal colonies, they call them, dotted around the country. | ||
And so people understandably are just keeping their heads down and getting on with life. | ||
And it's been weird since coming back because, you know, I had I had and to some extent still have this massive hole in my knowledge of what's going on with the with the war. | ||
Because I didn't have phone service while I was out in the wild. | ||
And then very quickly I was even in Tixie, there was no Wi-Fi anywhere. | ||
And very quickly I was suddenly banged up in a prison without access, you know, brief phone calls to try and manage my, you know, my appeal or logistics, whatever. | ||
But never any looking at the news. | ||
And getting out, it's been very interesting seeing this kind of firstly, the incredible and totally worthwhile, noble support of Ukraine. | ||
And it's been great to see that at a public level, at a state level, and long may that continue. | ||
And maybe we'll talk a bit about the future in a minute. | ||
Also, there's this slightly worrying kind of general Russophobia that has me a little bit uncomfortable because at the beginning of the war, it was very much billed in Western media, at least as one man's mad war. | ||
You know, Putin's crazy sort of, you know, crusade to try and write himself in the history books and claim back what he saw as Russian lands. | ||
And slowly that narrative seems to have changed to the point where with some of the I mean, there's there's companies who I mean, I think McDonald's, for instance, leaving Russia, I think that's the right thing to do. | ||
And just two days ago, all the McDonald's restaurants were reopened under the new branding, which is tasty, and that's it. | ||
That's the new name? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So they just basically took their McDonald's stores? | ||
Yeah, they're selling all the same shit. | ||
Share the same thing. | ||
The secret ingredients won't be there. | ||
But then there's also just Russian people or companies that have no connection to the state. | ||
Of course. | ||
It seems have been experiencing quite a lot of hardship as well. | ||
Russian athletes. | ||
Yeah, particularly. | ||
I mean, Wimbledon's a very good example. | ||
I totally disagree with the idea of Russian tennis players being banned from playing at Wimbledon. | ||
And I think it's right that Wimbledon is not counting as a tennis rankings tournament this year. | ||
There was criticism of Canelo Alvarez boxing against Bivali. | ||
Right. | ||
These are athletes. | ||
The Olympics are slightly different when you're representing your country and there's a sort of state-sponsored doping program that's been going on for years. | ||
But like tennis players who are individuals, you don't play tennis for your country. | ||
You play tennis for yourself. | ||
You don't box for your country unless it's Rocky IV. You box for yourself. | ||
And I don't feel good about some of these sort of things that are happening. | ||
Yeah, I share that concern. | ||
It's actually made its way into billiards. | ||
There's a man named Fedor Gorst who's a top-level pool player, and there's people that want him banned from tournaments. | ||
I mean, that just seems vindictive, frankly. | ||
It just seems ignorant. | ||
If you're just a Russian sports person who's keeping their head down, that's not fair. | ||
If you're someone who's up the regime, this is great, let's go good old Putin. | ||
Male Russian gymnast recently, I think, who used a podium place to, you know, to perform a letter Z or something. | ||
I'm not entirely sure. | ||
Yeah, that's a bit different. | ||
People sharing sort of public support and essentially, you know, repeating propaganda. | ||
That's a different thing. | ||
But if you're just a sports person, then I think it's not really right. | ||
Well, it's fascinating how many athletes come out of Ukraine, how many great boxers have come out of Ukraine. | ||
The Klitschko brothers, of course, one of them is the mayor, which is really insane. | ||
And also, you know, Lomachenko. | ||
There's quite a few, like, elite boxers. | ||
It's a massive country as well. | ||
It's like 45 million people or something. | ||
I think for a long time we kind of chose to forget just how large and important Ukraine is, particularly with grain and all the exports, chemical exports, nuclear power, all these things that they produce and farm and whatever there, as well as human exports. | ||
I think we're suddenly realizing how much of a powerhouse Ukraine is in its own right. | ||
So for the three weeks since you've been out, have you been playing catch-up, trying to absorb as much media as possible and get a sort of an objective understanding of what's happening over there? | ||
Yeah, I've been trying my best to. | ||
It is difficult with just checking the news because you tend to just get the latest developments. | ||
And I'm... | ||
I'm sure there'll be things that, you know, over the coming months that come out that I had no idea about that was massive news for a day or two. | ||
You know, if I'd been in over the period that these two British and one Moroccan citizens were recently sentenced to death in Donetsk for having fought with the... | ||
I mean, they were all in the Ukrainian forces before the invasion anyway, but they've been tried and found guilty and given the death sentence for being mercenaries. | ||
If something like that happened briefly while I was inside, then that news pops up and then disappears again quite quickly. | ||
And that's the stuff I might not know. | ||
But actually, the best solution to that I found is by trawling through podcasts from the period that I was in, podcasts from news outlets and various political discussion, whatever. | ||
And that's been quite a good way to sort of stop the gap. | ||
It seems like in your recovery from prison and dealing with just the psychological stress and then absorbing all this information, I mean, that has to be taking up a gigantic portion of your life. | ||
Is it difficult to get back on track and to try to have a semblance of normalcy? | ||
Yeah, I mean it's been a really flat out time since I got back. | ||
Also a bunch of friends are all getting married this summer so I'm sort of darting around all over the place. | ||
I mean this month I've literally got four weddings and a funeral. | ||
It's a busy time just socially as well. | ||
It's summer and it's nice to be out and to be normal again. | ||
God, it must be nice. | ||
But I also feel I have to point out that although what happened to me was psychologically quite frightening, firstly, I was never beaten or abused or starved or anything like that. | ||
The soldiers were sometimes pricks, but that's not a big deal. | ||
Secondly, what's happened to me is, in the grand scheme of things, totally insignificant and irrelevant, and I've still got a home. | ||
I haven't been bombed. | ||
I haven't lost a family member. | ||
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
I think, if anything, I would like my experience is to highlight the extent to which Russia is gone as a functioning state. | ||
And we knew it wasn't a functioning democracy, but it's post-truth. | ||
It's a state where it doesn't matter if something is a totally blatant lie. | ||
You can be – I mean, Russian – I'm going to get this stat wrong. | ||
Jamie might be able to pull it up. | ||
But of cases that go to court in Russia, I think the latest statistic is 99.97 or 99.7 perhaps percent of cases end in a guilty verdict, you know. | ||
If you're accused of something in Russia, you are guilty. | ||
That's it. | ||
There's no dispute. | ||
I would advise no one to go there. | ||
It's not safe to be a foreigner, particularly if you're from one of the NATO or Western or EU countries. | ||
That is wild. | ||
It's lost. | ||
As a country, it's lost. | ||
We're back to the bad old days. | ||
I was, there was discussion about fights taking place in Russia and I think we might have done a UFC in Moscow. | ||
I think we did. | ||
I think there was a UFC in Moscow. | ||
See if that's the case. | ||
UFC is huge. | ||
Yeah, well they had one of the greatest heavyweight champions ever in Fyodor Emelianenko. | ||
Yeah, Fight Night 163. Yeah, Zabit. | ||
Yeah, Zabit Magomed Shapirov, who's one of the top flight guys. | ||
Sharapov, excuse me. | ||
I always fuck his name up. | ||
Magomed Sharapov versus Calvin Kader, which is a great fight that took place in Russia. | ||
So this was, when was this? | ||
2019, yeah. | ||
Did you go over for that? | ||
I did not. | ||
I don't do the fight nights, but there was discussion of doing a major event over there, and whenever there's a major event, I get tempted to going just to see. | ||
There's a few places I've never experienced. | ||
I've never experienced Moscow, and I think the architecture is spectacular, and I'd be interested in just seeing what it's like over there, and Unfortunately, you'd be an absolute gift to the authorities. | ||
To arrest me? | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
Particularly, I suppose you're publicly an advocate of substances that are very much banned in Russia. | ||
Oh yeah, all of them. | ||
And they will swab every inch of you. | ||
They'll find some stuff, I'm sure. | ||
Well, just testing me. | ||
Or they'll just say they found some stuff. | ||
That's the thing. | ||
It doesn't have to be true. | ||
That's what I've heard about this basketball player woman, Brittany Griner, that they believe that they might have even planted these things or lied about what's in there. | ||
I don't have any desire to go over there now, but back then I was tempted because I'm just curious about the experience of going to these places. | ||
It is a fascinating place. | ||
It's got an incredible history and I think the history is what has drawn me there a lot. | ||
I've been a few times in the last few years. | ||
It's basically a morbid curiosity. | ||
Russia's history is just a relentless parade of shit. | ||
The deaths are counted by the vague estimated millions as opposed to precise numbers. | ||
It's scored more own goals in history than any other country, surely. | ||
They really have What is that expression? | ||
What are you saying? | ||
scored more what? | ||
Own goals. | ||
Oh, so in football, in soccer. | ||
You know, if you kick the ball in, you're going to go by mistake. | ||
Right. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And they, I mean, I think this is part of what I've historically admired about Russian people that I've met as well, is that they are just incredibly stoical. | ||
It's like they're almost born to suffer and just put up with crap in a very staunch, almost admirable way. | ||
And I do find that admirable. | ||
And I can somewhat relate to it because I've, over the years, put myself through a lot of, you know, unnecessarily put myself through a lot of, like, difficult times. | ||
But I guess the feeling of kinship has faded somewhat. | ||
Yeah, I just, I wonder if at all, if this is going to relax to the point where travel is going to be possible again. | ||
Well, that's the next thing, you know, like how long does this go on? | ||
I think years. | ||
You think years? | ||
Well, so the big question at the moment, Zelensky is, unfortunately, and in fact, I would like to say this now, because for months on the inside, I could never say it, Slava, Ukraine, you know, victory to the Ukrainian people. | ||
You know, I'm totally behind them. | ||
But Zelensky is in this impossible situation where it's going to be very, very hard to completely defeat and repel the Russian forces beyond, you know, out of the Donbas, for instance, this bit in the east that they've seized and even the Crimea. | ||
But he has to politically say, I'm not giving up. | ||
I'm not making any concessions of land. | ||
You know, we fight until we restore our sort of sovereign borders of Ukraine. | ||
And if he were to make some peace deal with the Russians that conceded territory, he'd possibly be out of office straight away. | ||
And that gives the chance for Moscow to try and insert a puppet candidate. | ||
That's a problem. | ||
15 years now. | ||
If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. | ||
If the pushback isn't hard enough and they are allowed to occupy and set up their two puppet states in the Donbass, then they've got that and next it'll be more of Ukraine or Estonia or Latvia or even Finland. | ||
Who knows? | ||
And it's, you know, where does it stop? | ||
And it has to stop somewhere. | ||
You know, making peace and allowing them to have some of the territory of Ukraine is pausing rather than solving the problem. | ||
And I feel like it's better off just fixing this problem now, but it's going to be a long... | ||
It's a grinding, unpleasant solution and who knows how long it will take or what the outcome will be. | ||
I'm not farsighted. | ||
I'm not clairvoyant. | ||
Nobody seems to have a real clear understanding of how this could ever possibly play out in a positive way. | ||
Yeah. | ||
There are people who, and I don't know entirely if I agree with this, but there are certain commentators who are saying that The war in Ukraine grinding on for a long time is from the kind of NATO perspective, sort of the ideal scenario because Russia just gets weakened. | ||
I mean, there are tens of thousands of troops they've lost. | ||
No one knows. | ||
It's an official secret. | ||
No one in Russia knows. | ||
But, you know, they are losing so many people, so much hardware. | ||
I mean, their economy is actually doing fine because, you know, all the price of export of natural... | ||
You know, fossil fuels is shot up and they're still exporting just as much as they ever have. | ||
So they're actually not feeling economically that much strain yet, but that's to come, I think. | ||
But, you know, the longer it goes on, the more weakened Russia becomes. | ||
And that's sort of, you know, ideal from the view, the standpoint of the opponents of Russia. | ||
But I mean, it's just horrific for the Ukrainian people who essentially are the sort of cannon fodder to, you know, to that end. | ||
And there's always the looming threat that he uses a nuke. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, that's the thing. | ||
I mean, that's the fault with nuclear weapons in the first place. | ||
It doesn't make sense. | ||
But he probably just about is mad enough. | ||
And everyone thought that he was, like, bluffing this whole time. | ||
But it does seem like he's genuinely mad. | ||
And if he... | ||
I mean, a lot of people... | ||
There's a lot of sort of conspiracy theory around, I suppose, about his health. | ||
Perhaps he's got... | ||
Bone cancer? | ||
Well, Oliver Stone said that he was being treated for cancer when he went to visit him and have interviews with him, which was a few years ago. | ||
Right. | ||
Oliver was over there, and did you ever see that? | ||
He showed him Dr. Strangelove? | ||
Yeah, which is wild, right? | ||
Because Dr. Strangelove is all about a bunch of mad people deciding to use the bomb and conceding that we'll lose a couple million here or there, but it's no big deal. | ||
And essentially was about real discussions that were being had during the 1950s and 60s. | ||
By several generals who thought it would be a good idea to preemptively attack Russia and preemptively attack China with nuclear weapons. | ||
What was Putin's take on this film? | ||
Do we know? | ||
Oliver Stone was on here and he talked about it. | ||
We looked at photographs of him and videos of him showing the Dr. Strangelove film to Putin. | ||
I think he... | ||
It was probably paying lip service to the dangers of nuclear weapons and this and that. | ||
But, you know, he's already used hypersonic weapons. | ||
And I think in many ways that... | ||
And those hyperbaric ones that suck all the oxygen out of the city. | ||
I mean, it's horrific. | ||
Yeah, it's horrific. | ||
But I mean, if he was mad enough to begin this invasion, which, I mean, there's no logic to it. | ||
Right. | ||
And there's no, whatever outcome, he still loses. | ||
Right. | ||
Like Russia has massively isolated itself. | ||
And for the prosperity of Russia as a whole and its kind of integration, I know that China is still kind of there on the fence. | ||
Right. | ||
You know, if you put together the kind of the European bloc and America and Canada and all these other countries who, you know, who are on the sort of the liberal side, you know, that's much more important, you know, economically. | ||
Russia has totally shot itself in the foot. | ||
And so he is clearly mad enough to make a move that stupid. | ||
So potentially he is mad enough to launch a nuclear missile. | ||
Well, particularly if he's really fatally sick. | ||
I mean, if that really is happening and he really doesn't have anything to lose. | ||
You know, my friend Lex Friedman, who is Russian, he does not think that's going to happen because he thinks that Putin wants to have a legacy of benefiting Russia, and that if he does die, and if he is dying, That he wants to have something in his legacy that shows that he was of benefit to Russia, that he's very committed to this idea of his legacy. | ||
I think he probably only sees that in territorial terms. | ||
So, four or five days ago was the 350th birthday of Peter the Great, who was a Romanov Tsar who massively expanded Russia's territory. | ||
And Putin said in a sort of public celebration and speech, he said, you know, I see myself as picking up where Peter left off in reclaiming Russian territory. | ||
I mean, Peter conquered Finland from the Swedes, so the Finns must be terrified. | ||
But I genuinely think he sees it as... | ||
Restoring Russia to its greatest extent, which was the Soviet Empire. | ||
And lots of people within Russia, normal people, think that, you know, the Ukrainians, the Latvians, the Uzbeks, all these people are their kind of national brethren and that they belong under the mantle of Russia. | ||
That's what's terrifying, right? | ||
That there's a precedent, that there's some sort of a rationalization for him acquiring these countries again. | ||
But I mean, Russia is in itself a massive imperial project. | ||
It's an empire. | ||
It's still an empire today. | ||
Where I was has no right being ruled by Moscow. | ||
It doesn't really make any sense. | ||
And, I mean, he's picked his time, you know, the greatest extent of Russian Empire. | ||
That's where it should be again. | ||
But, I mean, one of the, I think possibly the Kenyan Prime Minister or Foreign Minister, or no, I think it was Kenya's ambassador to the UN a few weeks ago said, look, you know, we can't all just hark back to some colonial era. | ||
And, you know, Kenya could dispute borders with Tanzania or Britain could suddenly go mad again and say, we want to paint the map pink and, you know, reconquer all the world. | ||
And that's totally, you know, it's just a failed project. | ||
But, you know, he's not going to listen to that. | ||
Yeah, and also there's a fear that China is watching this and contemplating whether or not to invade Taiwan. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, we've already seen Hong Kong lost in the last couple of years. | ||
I mean, as far as I'm concerned. | ||
Completely lost. | ||
Gone from being European-ruled in the 1990s to kind of mostly maintaining that sort of tradition and now recently gone full totalitarianism. | ||
Well, the deal on the handover in 1997 was that the laws and the autonomy of Hong Kong remains inviolate for 50 years after the handover. | ||
So that would be 2047, but it's already gone. | ||
They've upped the timetable. | ||
And with China and Taiwan, I fear, it's not a case of if, it's a case of when. | ||
But thankfully, the West's reaction to, you know, they haven't just turned a blind eye to Ukraine. | ||
And so China probably will be thinking, you know, this is not going to be easy. | ||
The world's not just going to roll over and let us conquer Taiwan, which is, you know, one of the world's most sort of healthy functioning democracies. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, I've read there was some speculation about China economically divesting in the West and that they're going to liquidate assets and they're doing this to mitigate the amount of impact it would have if they're sanctioned for invading Taiwan. | ||
I hadn't heard that. | ||
That's very worrying. | ||
Yes. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, that's what I was reading about that, but I don't understand economics enough to really speculate whether or not it's accurate or whether or not this person has a valid point. | ||
It's just the whole thing is so tense and it didn't... | ||
Five years ago, there was no fear at all. | ||
Five years ago, it was like everything was... | ||
Like, look at this 2019 event that they were having in Moscow. | ||
Where I was like, ooh, maybe I'd like to go there. | ||
Maybe that'd be interesting. | ||
You know, I'm just fascinated in the architecture. | ||
You know, when you look in Moscow... | ||
And the metro in particular. | ||
Each metro station is like an artwork. | ||
It's like a, you know, sort of a totally different architecture in each one. | ||
They're really, really impressive. | ||
It's also so unique. | ||
Their architecture is so uniquely Russian. | ||
When you look at just the colors and the beautiful buildings in Moscow. | ||
And sort of 19th century, I know now we build bigger buildings, but from a 19th century perspective, monumental architecture, huge buildings, big, long, organized projects, streets that are... | ||
Yeah, I mean, look at this. | ||
It's incredible. | ||
Look at that. | ||
That's incredible. | ||
And each station is totally different. | ||
They are really, really impressive. | ||
Well, they're such impressive people. | ||
I mean, what they've done with chess, what they've done with literature, what they've done particularly with martial arts. | ||
I mean, they have some of the most dominant fighters in the history of the sport have come out of Russia, particularly in MMA, but in boxing as well. | ||
And wrestling. | ||
I mean, there's just so many incredible athletes that have come out of that system. | ||
And obviously, there's an intense amount of corruption and cheating involved, too. | ||
Have you ever seen the documentary Icarus? | ||
Yeah. | ||
It was just a great documentary just to understand the extent of their cheating in international competition. | ||
Yeah, I mean, it's also a massive population. | ||
I think about 144 million people. | ||
And although it's, I mean, their national average income is pretty woeful. | ||
You know, it's, I think, you know, the now outmoded terms, first world and third world. | ||
The second world was the Soviet Union. | ||
I didn't know that till recently. | ||
So they're kind of, they're neither here nor there. | ||
And that's still sort of the case. | ||
And of course, you've got the incredible wealth of kind of oligarchs and the kind of kleptocracy in Moscow. | ||
But I mean, the vast majority of Russian people don't have a great deal. | ||
They really aren't very wealthy, but they are very literate. | ||
They're relatively well educated, even if some of the history they're taught is total cobblers. | ||
And so they have an incredibly large population from which to excel at all sorts of things, science as well. | ||
I wanted to talk to you about the oligarchs, because one of the things that I found fascinating about this, and I have all sorts of questions, is once they started taking yachts and real estate away from the... | ||
I didn't totally understand why, A, they were able to do that, or B, why everybody was in support of that. | ||
Is there a direct connection between these oligarchs and either supporting Putin or financing Putin? | ||
I think, and again, I'm not totally across this, but my understanding is that you basically can't be an oligarch in Russia unless you have Putin's blessing. | ||
There have been various... | ||
As Putin came to power and then slowly became more powerful, there are various oligarchs who sort of... | ||
Try to rival him for power. | ||
Berezovsky, there's Media Modal. | ||
There were a few and they were slowly just kind of removed or defeated. | ||
And so the idea is that if you're an oligarch, you probably have the blessing of Putin and therefore potentially your wealth might be at his disposal or you're in his pocket. | ||
I mean, also, frankly, people who are multi-billionaires in Russia It's a corrupt state. | ||
No one's making that money completely legitimately. | ||
And there's that element. | ||
But with seizing it and who's having their assets seized, it does seem quite complicated. | ||
And it does seem like they just spread quite a wide net to start off with. | ||
But again, this was happening while I was kind of out of the loop, so I'm not all that keyed in. | ||
I'm quickly going to run to the toilet, if that's right. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah, go ahead. | |
The restroom. | ||
We could wrap this up unless you want to keep going. | ||
You want to keep going? | ||
Up to you. | ||
I'm easy. | ||
Do you have more to talk about? | ||
I bet you do. | ||
unidentified
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Go take a leak. | |
All right. | ||
All right. | ||
We'll see you in a couple of minutes. | ||
I guess the one thing that we haven't spoken about that we could is Papua New Guinea, where probably the most bizarre country I've ever been to. | ||
Did you experience any cannibalism? | ||
I met people who remembered those times, but cannibalism, it seems, is gone now. | ||
Sort of since the 70s, really. | ||
What about the semen warriors? | ||
The semen warriors? | ||
You don't know about that? | ||
I'd like to hear about that. | ||
Oh my goodness. | ||
One of the most bizarre practices that I've read about from New Guinea is the ritual abuse of young boys they get at an early age taken in by older men and they're told That in order to grow strong, they need the semen of older men, and they ingest it orally and anally. | ||
See if you can find this. | ||
And this has been going on for, I mean, I don't know how long, but it's one of the most bizarre practices because it's like a ritualistic abuse and sexual abuse of young boys. | ||
Sambian tribes write a passage that requires young boys to drink semen if they want to transition to adulthood. | ||
um and it's not just semen drinking it's like they they call the father like they call them anal fathers it's very strange stuff according to demands of this custom semen is thought to have some sort of a masculine spirit and young boys can only possess the spirit by drinking it it's a custom believed to be a huge proof of masculinity and strength over the years Different meanings have been ascribed to the semen ritual. | ||
Some people have even tagged it as a form of ritualized homosexuality. | ||
Usually the young lads are not allowed to make a voluntary decision, but are simply threatened by the older men to partake in various activities in an effort to prove their masculinity. | ||
Surprisingly, the Sambia tribe considers the ingestion of semen to be a compulsory ritual for male development. | ||
For them, it is preferable for young boys to be seen as warriors than to be judged weaklings. | ||
I mean, a lot of cultures do some weird shit for rites of passage. | ||
That's out there. | ||
This is fucking out there. | ||
And they take them in very young. | ||
I mean, they take them in when they're like six years old. | ||
There's also, I mean, they used to have the, and this thankfully is gone now, but they used to have the custom, you know, just sort of headhunters, and your basically rite of passage is to kill another man, which I think is, I mean, as bizarre as this is, I think that's kind of even weirder, because this is pretty fucked up. | ||
It's relatively low stakes, although I guess there's quite a lot of psychological harm potentially. | ||
But I mean, this doesn't, I mean, it shocks me, but it doesn't usually surprise me. | ||
Stop scrolling. | ||
Scroll back. | ||
Read this here. | ||
After the boys are removed from their mothers, they're then flogged with long sticks during a bloodletting ceremony. | ||
The elders kickstart the blood purification ritual by inserting two canes in the nostrils of the new initiates until they vomit blood. | ||
Each boy is held against a tree and sticks and sharp grasses are shoved up his nose. | ||
During the process, the elders continuously poke the throats of the boys with an arrow like objects till they vomit any contaminating influence within them. | ||
Once the nose poking is done, the blood starts flowing from the nose, falling from the nose. | ||
The elders make a collective war cry. | ||
This is then followed by more beatings with the aim of toughening the boys so they can be powerful warriors. | ||
While a lot of the people would view the nose-poking as an extremely painful and intrusive exercise, the Sambias see it as a display of endurance and strength. | ||
Once the bloodletting ceremony is over, the young boys are made to perform fellatio on the older boys. | ||
After ingesting the semen, also known as male milk, it is expected that it will help the boys grow stronger due to the presence of a substance called jirungdu within it. | ||
Apart from taking in semen, the new initiates are forced to observe a strict diet that will give them strength. | ||
If you scroll back where we were before, though, it talks about the mothers. | ||
Until the blowjobs, this kind of sounded like a Spartan take on an ayahuasca ceremony. | ||
Right. | ||
But it's also like they're removed from their mothers because they've... | ||
Okay, scroll up. | ||
Keep going up there. | ||
Yeah, the reason for detaching the boys is because the tribe considers the blood of women to be unclean. | ||
That's really common, like worldwide. | ||
unidentified
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Whew. | |
Hence, the lads are separated from their mothers and any other females so their blood won't be contaminated as they mature into adulthood. | ||
The semen drinking custom is in different stages. | ||
The initial stage, as soon as the young Sambia boys turn age seven or nine, they're instantly taken from their mothers as a form of detachment. | ||
This is fucking wild shit. | ||
I mean, there's a lot of crazy shit out there. | ||
I mean, they still have, sort of as a mark of mourning, if a family member dies, people cut off the tip of a finger. | ||
And so you get up into some of the more remote parts of the Highlands and you meet someone and you shake their hand and they might have only sort of one full finger left. | ||
But it's also hard to tell because everyone's got these sort of 18-inch machete blades that they use for everything. | ||
I think some just get lost sort of by mistake. | ||
It's just the most... | ||
I mean, the country is so geographically broken, you know, like the terrain is so inhospitable, so hard to travel through, that they've developed all these very, very quirky customs because all the tribes are in such isolation. | ||
I mean, their country has something like 750 languages. | ||
They nowadays communicate largely just with Pidgin English or Tok Pidgin, as they call it. | ||
Which is a sort of a broken English, kind of bastardized, simple English. | ||
But before that, you know, the tribes, you might have one tribe that's living in one valley and two miles away in another valley for hundreds of years, there's another tribe and they've never had any contacts with each other. | ||
So they develop different languages, different customs, different faith, religions, everything. | ||
And it's like that across the country, particularly up in the highlands. | ||
The river deltas are a bit different. | ||
But, I mean, the highlands were thought to be uninhabited until the 1930s. | ||
And then these Australian brothers, these gold prospectors, flew over the interior in a light aircraft for the first time. | ||
And they looked down and they saw valleys with clear signs of habitation. | ||
So they mounted an expedition and over weeks marched up into the interior with dozens of porters. | ||
And they found about a million people living there. | ||
These just kind of lost Stone Age peoples. | ||
But most of them didn't know they were on an island with a coast on which people lived, let alone a huge world beyond that with, you know, all sorts of other people. | ||
There were three Australian brothers. | ||
Two of them ended up staying and living in PNG. One of them married three, I think maybe sisters, but three women who were Tribal princesses. | ||
And this is a sort of, let me get this right, an Irish emigre Australian gold prospector in the 30s, who's from this massive outside interconnected world, suddenly going up and marrying people from a civilization that had no smelting, they just had stone tools, no writing, no literature. | ||
And one of those marriages had several children. | ||
I met one of those guys, this guy who's The product of the sun of these two totally disparate worlds, this kind of clash of civilizations, which I found so interesting. | ||
What was he like? | ||
He was great. | ||
Bernie, a really nice guy. | ||
He manages a coffee plantation in a town called Hagen up in the Highlands. | ||
Really sound dude. | ||
I got to hang out with him a bit, got to know him well, and he's just a nice sort of normal guy. | ||
I suppose because his mother was a princess, he's sort of kind of a senior within the tribe, but at the same time kind of half foreigner and half outsider, so he's sort of between the two worlds as well. | ||
Do you still have contact with his father? | ||
His father passed away. | ||
There's a really good documentary called First Contact, an 80s documentary. | ||
It's on YouTube. | ||
It's part of a trilogy, the Black Harvest trilogy. | ||
But First Contact is interviews with these three brothers, by which point they're already quite old. | ||
But on their first encounter, getting up into the highlands, these people they met, there's footage, there's photos from this unique encounter in the 1930s. | ||
Really, really interesting. | ||
This is not the same place where... | ||
There's a tribe there where they have these... | ||
They've made models of airplanes that they worship. | ||
The cargo cults. | ||
unidentified
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Those, I believe... | |
I mean, it's that part of the world. | ||
I don't think it's Papua New Guinea. | ||
It could be potentially part of some of the Solomon Islands. | ||
It might be some small Filipino islands. | ||
I'm not entirely sure. | ||
I know what you mean. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, they would see these planes and think that they were gods. | ||
So they've recreated them. | ||
They've recreated them out of, like, sticks. | ||
Yeah, they had, like, bamboo radio control towers and, like, bamboo radios that obviously don't work. | ||
They're just bamboos. | ||
But I've read about that a long time ago. | ||
I can't remember the details that well. | ||
But yeah, that was pretty cool. | ||
How fascinating that in the 1930s they were able to find these Stone Age tribes there. | ||
Well, it makes you think. | ||
I mean, there are still rumors that in Papua New Guinea there might still be uncontacted tribes. | ||
Like in the Amazon, there's still a few dozen uncontacted tribes. | ||
But I believe most of them sort of know there's a world out there. | ||
The Brazilian, largely government, sort of protects them and keeps them in isolation as much as anything because they're just vulnerable to disease, perhaps. | ||
But then the one, I think, the most astounding kind of lost tribe is the North Sentinelese. | ||
Yeah, sure. | ||
And every now and again someone marches out with the Bible. | ||
That's where the missionary... | ||
Do you know who Commander Maurice Vidal Portman is? | ||
No. | ||
He's a famous British explorer slash pervert who went to visit those people. | ||
And he's probably responsible for their hostility towards outsiders in a lot of ways. | ||
Because this guy would go there and dress them up in weird outfits and measure their dicks and shit. | ||
That was North Cincinnati? | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
Are there pictures of him? | ||
He was on neighboring islands, but I think they got wind of this character. | ||
Yeah, there's pictures of him, and there's pictures of natives dressed up like Roman soldiers and stuff. | ||
He would do weird shit with them, and he would comment on the size of their penises and testicles, so he was like measuring them and stuff, and he was clearly some fucking weirdo who was involved in some very strange shit, and he was doing, you know, the awesomeness of science and exploration. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think he's one of the reasons why I think that the most recent missionary got murdered. | ||
Right. | ||
Because they probably have... | ||
They don't have a written language. | ||
So they probably have these oral stories and these legends of these white dudes who show up and start measuring dicks and give everybody the flu. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, I think there's only a few dozen of them. | ||
And after the big... | ||
Tsunami back in 2003, 2002, 2003. After that, it was years before there were any signs of them seen again. | ||
So potentially they, you know, came close to destruction. | ||
Yeah, there's been a few boats that have been stranded nearby and have barely gotten away before these people murdered them. | ||
Arrows and spears. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, there's only 39 of them that they've documented. | ||
They don't know how many there are there. | ||
They don't even think they have fire. | ||
They've got to have fire. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I think there's some dispute as to whether or not they have fire. | ||
How wet is their climate? | ||
I don't know. | ||
They do know that they have metal now. | ||
They seem to have fashioned knives and swords from the wreckage of one of the ships. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Well, that'd be interesting. | ||
I mean, I have no intentions of marching in there. | ||
Well, it's just crazy. | ||
It's wild. | ||
Uncontacted people in this day and age is very strange. | ||
I mean, there's semi-contacted people in the Amazon, and it's so interesting because you get essentially a window into 60,000 years ago with the people in North Sentinel Island. | ||
The people that live there, the direct descendants of people who left Africa 60,000 years ago and landed on that island. | ||
Yeah, and there's interesting sort of, because of the sort of, exodus is the wrong word, I guess, but the migrations out of Africa came in waves. | ||
And some of the early people seem to have, you know, with their wave of migration, headed all the way up, over, around, down, and into Melanesia. | ||
The Aborigines and the New Guineans are from like a very, very ancient wave of migration. | ||
And everyone else came a lot later. | ||
But these people had already inhabited these... | ||
Well, I guess the two islands were one continent at that time. | ||
The sea levels were lower. | ||
But they had already sort of started existing in total isolation. | ||
I mean, people... | ||
The numbers get disputed because they keep finding more things that pushes back the timeline. | ||
But now they're looking... | ||
It was for ages, 40,000 years. | ||
Now they're looking at sort of 60,000 to 80,000 years just living, you know, totally isolated while, you know, the rest of the world was, I suppose, a more interconnected, you know, human trade networks very quickly bought corners of the world into connection. | ||
I mean, it's only about... | ||
Is it 12, 15,000 years ago that people crossed the Bering Strait to the Americas and the Americas were populated? | ||
I mean, that's kind of a blink of an eye compared to 80,000. | ||
Well, I think people were here before that then now. | ||
Now they're pushing the timeline back of human beings in North America, which is really interesting. | ||
They're finding a lot of pre-Clovis evidence of civilizations, stone tools and all sorts of other things. | ||
fossilized remains. | ||
I read a book by someone who you had on this podcast a while ago whose name I'm going to forget, but you had him on with Randall Carson one time and he's got... | ||
Graham Hancock? | ||
Graham Hancock, exactly. | ||
And I mean, some of his theories seemed a little tenuous, but some of them are fascinating, like evidence of civilizations being in places, you know, tens of thousands of years before and I mean, it was through that podcast record that I was first introduced to Gobekli Tepe and it's just, it's incredible how, it was through that podcast record that I was first introduced to Gobekli Tepe and it's just, it's incredible how, I guess, with new archaeological techniques, new scanning, new LiDAR, just the books | ||
Yeah, well, they're all a proponent now of the... | ||
The two of those guys together is a really fascinating combination because they're proponents of the Younger Dryas impact theory, and there's a lot of physical evidence that points to that. | ||
And what that Younger Dryas impact theory is is that there was a certain time somewhere between... | ||
There's multiple times, but it started around 12,000 years ago. | ||
There was impacts, and the impacts from asteroid impacts... | ||
Reversed an ice age or paused an ice age? | ||
Yes, it stopped the ice age. | ||
It killed the ice age and probably did it very quickly. | ||
Randall Carlson has some really fascinating physical evidence that points to it. | ||
First of all, core samples. | ||
When they go to core samples and they go to 12,000 years ago, there's a direct evidence of iridium, large amounts of iridium, which is very common in space and very rare on Earth. | ||
Also, nuclear glass. | ||
Trinitite, I think it's called, and it's named after the Trinity, the first nuclear bomb experiments. | ||
And that they detect this glass that happens when they detonate a nuclear bomb, but also happens on impacts of comets and asteroids. | ||
And that this stuff is all over the place. | ||
Sort of like obsidian, that kind of. | ||
Yes, yes. | ||
And this stuff is all, it's sort of like that, but it's directly caused by impacts. | ||
But this stuff all exists in this time period of 12,000 years ago. | ||
And then again, somewhere, they believe somewhere 11 or 10,000 years ago. | ||
So, most likely, what they're supposing, what the theory is, is that there was probably a very advanced civilization that created things like Gobekli Tepe, and there's even some theories about the Old Kingdom of Egypt. | ||
That there was some very sophisticated architecture and construction methods that date back far beyond what we think of. | ||
When we think of the Great Pyramid of Giza, they believe is 2,500 years old, but he thinks that it's very possible that it was even earlier than that. | ||
And there's also some physical evidence that was uncovered by geologist Robert Schock, rather, from Boston University, where he points to the water erosion around the Temple of the Sphinx that shows signs of thousands of years of rainfall. | ||
I remember that. | ||
Yeah, and the problem with that is the last time there was real rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9,000 years ago, and that the whole area back then used to be a rainforest. | ||
So he's like, you have to go at least that far back, but probably thousands of years before that, because you need thousands of years of rainfall to develop these deep fissures on the stone structure. | ||
They don't indicate erosion by sand and wind. | ||
The problem is archaeologists and people who have been teaching in universities and writing books about the history of these people are very reluctant to accept this new information, even though it's like When you're talking about geology, when you're talking about clear evidence of water erosion, this is rock-solid stuff. | ||
There's a knock-on effect as well, I suppose. | ||
If you admit that one thing is significantly older or it's formed in a different way or in a different place to something else, then that just knocks everything else out of whack and you've basically got to start your entire archaeological process again, which I guess is why you get Yeah, wrongly, because that's not the scientific method, but you get resistance to these new ideas. | ||
It's very unfortunate when you see the resistance, too, because it's so clearly ego-based. | ||
I've seen people argue against it, and they get really angry, and they start insulting, and ad hominems, and it's really weird. | ||
Because the one that you can't fuck with is Gobekli Tepe. | ||
Because Gobekli Tepe was purposely covered somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 years ago. | ||
And they know that for a fact. | ||
They've tested all the soil around it, and they're in the middle of excavating that site. | ||
And it's an immense site. | ||
With these enormous stone columns and 3D animals carved on the columns, which indicate that they weren't carved into the columns. | ||
The columns were carved around to create these 3D animals, which is really sophisticated stuff. | ||
And it's more than 12,000 years old. | ||
It was covered up. | ||
And so they think it was like a deliberate time capsule to preserve... | ||
They don't know. | ||
I think that was Graham's theory. | ||
Yeah, it's his theory. | ||
To preserve the whole antediluvian, the flood myth or story, at least, that seems to be in so many different cultures. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think that ties in with Randall's idea of a huge wave of floods and the Ice Age. | ||
Yes. | ||
Well, that ending of the Ice Age, one of the things that they point to is the geographical or geological evidence, rather, all over North America that seemed to indicate massive amounts of water moving through areas radically and quickly changing the landscape. | ||
And Randall has some really incredible evidence of that that he shows in the form of slides and As you zoom out and you see the water evidence, it's really interesting stuff because we have this inclination to look at history. | ||
Okay, we've got that down. | ||
We've got it. | ||
This is it. | ||
And then upon new evidence, instead of like going, oh, maybe we were wrong, they just dig their heels in and they say, no, I wrote a book on this. | ||
I made my thesis about this. | ||
This is fact. | ||
I think that's exactly the same. | ||
Even with modern human history, we're really resistant to kind of think that the way we, I mean, there's the last few years, a lot in Britain, I don't know how much about in the US, but there's been a big discussion about how we view and teach our needs. | ||
You know, of the British Empire, for example, of colonialism. | ||
Because when I was growing up, we were taught that Britain conquered the world and brought civilization to all the noble savages. | ||
And it was totally insane. | ||
And it's only just about now, and particularly summer two years ago, with the debate about statues and should we really learn our history from statues or should we learn it from books and reassessing facts? | ||
You know, should we have statues, you know, commemorating people who maybe did horrific things? | ||
But all these, you know, these sort of arguments, debates and essentially culture war has brought to the fore this idea of, you know, we definitely need to sometimes reassess history. | ||
And that can work both ways as well. | ||
But, you know, history isn't fact, whether it's the history of a landscape over tens of thousands of years or the history of a people over a century. | ||
And I think that's, you know, tying it neatly back in. | ||
That's what I find interesting with Russia because Russia is able to recreate as convenient its history every 10 years or so in a cynical way, admittedly. | ||
It shows that history is not a fixed, determinate thing. | ||
Well, it's unfortunate we don't have like a real rock-solid history of the world. | ||
We have some really amazing evidence and some incredible work has been done by archaeologists and geologists and all these people that are trying to get a sense of it. | ||
But there's resistance to change. | ||
There's a resistance to, you know, accepting these alternative theories. | ||
Well, can you imagine trying to be a historian 200 or 300 years from now looking at this era? | ||
the amount of information that you have to sift through. - Right. | ||
- Some of which is bullshit, some of which is, you know, all of it will contradict each other. | ||
I mean, that's a headache, that task. | ||
You know, history's only gonna get harder 'cause there's just a complete preponderance of information. - There's a preponderance of information, but at least we have information. - We have accurate footage, but, you know, that was only a short period that's now ending because now we don't know if footage is real. | ||
There's deep fakes, there's all sorts. | ||
The age of kind of, I suppose, empirical media is kind of on its way out. | ||
At least that you can be ensured is empirical because from now on, who knows what's what. | ||
What's also interesting when, you know, for a long time, they had no idea what happened to the Mayans, you know, and there was all these theories about them leaving, what happened, and now the predominant theory is they were killed by disease. | ||
Smallpox. | ||
Yeah, which makes more sense than anything. | ||
I mean, I think it's now believed that after Europeans first arrived in the Americas, within, I think it's within 100 years, 90% of the population had died. | ||
Yes, from disease. | ||
And, you know, they're only just now starting to find these traces of vast civilizations in the Amazon. | ||
I'm sure there'll be many more to come. | ||
You know, there are rock paintings appearing. | ||
There are... | ||
In one particular point, evidence of ramps up to the Amazon on one side of the river and then down on the other. | ||
Bridges that would have spanned hundreds of meters. | ||
Huge, complex and quite advanced civilizations that just... | ||
In a jungle, if everyone dies, it'll grow over in no time at all. | ||
And it seems like a lot of people might have returned to a hunter-gathering subsistence life in the jungle from that. | ||
that because if there's a plague you know plagues are usually in in you know sort of pre-scientific times and even perhaps today are viewed by a lot of people as divine retribution punishment so flee the city head to the yeah back into the wild and I'm sure plenty of people saw COVID at that for some for some time as well it was a lot worse than COVID smallpox but the other thing is the lidar evidence have you seen that stuff that they're using Is this the big ring? | ||
Cities were built in big circular shapes. | ||
Not just that, but grids that indicate irrigation and blocks of cities. | ||
And Graham Hancock talked about that as well on the podcast. | ||
And there's a great video that's available on YouTube where he discusses The potential population of the Amazon reaching as much as 20 million people at one point in time. | ||
That there's vast cities there. | ||
Did you also know that the Amazon itself was created by agriculture? | ||
That all that rainforest, most of those trees were a direct result of different trees and different plants that people planted. | ||
When there was a civilization. | ||
So it had been Savannah or Pampas or something? | ||
Well, it was just different. | ||
They're not exactly sure what it... | ||
You know, they used to think it was all natural, and now they don't think it's natural. | ||
Please pull up something about that. | ||
Now there's direct evidence... | ||
Here it goes. | ||
While previously thought to have been an empty wilderness in pre-contact times, it's become increasingly clear that the Amazon has, first, a deep and ancient pattern of human settlement dating back to 12,000 years ago, and second, that much of the Amazon jungle that we know today is in fact An anthropogenic, if you just click on that, there's actually better articles that detail it. | ||
Okay, here it goes. | ||
While previously thought to have been an empty wilderness, okay, the Amazon infers a deep and ancient pattern. | ||
Second, that much of the Amazon jungle we know is in fact an anthropogenic landscape. | ||
That is, the Amazon has been modified extensively by indigenous populations for the past 12,000 years. | ||
The changes that the indigenous populations made in the Amazon rainforest in the past We're nowhere near the level of intensive extract we see going on in the massive deforestation burning today. | ||
Rather, indigenous populations increase the overall biodiversity and quality of the soil. | ||
This is not what I'm looking for. | ||
There's a better article that shows that most of the trees in the Amazon were a result of agriculture. | ||
So that was sort of creating ecological diversity... | ||
And then when people died, it just overran. | ||
And it overwhelmed what used to be these cities. | ||
You know, that's the whole Legend of the Lost City of Z, right? | ||
That book? | ||
Yeah, I read that. | ||
It was great. | ||
There it is. | ||
Supposedly pristine, untouched Amazon rainforest was actually shaped by humans. | ||
Over thousands of years, native people play a strong role in molding the ecology of this vast wilderness. | ||
This is from the Smithsonian, so it's a legitimate source, but there's a bunch of different trees that they point to that these people planted, and then these trees just overwhelmed the landscape when all the people died off from the plague. | ||
And when they're using the LIDAR to go over these areas that they used to assume were just mounds, they're realizing, oh, this used to be structures, and there used to be people living in these areas. | ||
It's fascinating. | ||
It's wild stuff, man. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, listen, Charlie, I'm glad you're alive. | ||
I'm glad you're not in a Russian prison, and I'm glad I had a chance to talk to you. | ||
And these books that you have out that are available right now, one is On Roads That Echo, and the other is Through Sand and Snow. | ||
Did you do an audio version of these as well? | ||
Yeah, they're both on Audible. | ||
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Did you read it? | |
I read it. | ||
Oh, excellent. | ||
I love hearing that. | ||
Yeah, no, they're out. | ||
Get hold of them. | ||
But thank you so much for having me on. | ||
My pleasure. | ||
It's been a lot of fun, and thanks to Jamie and you for having me here. | ||
It's been awesome. | ||
Our pleasure. | ||
Thank you very much for coming. | ||
And do you have social media that people can find you on as well? | ||
Yeah, I'm on Instagram and Twitter, at CW Explore, like Charlie Walker, CW Explore. | ||
Explore? | ||
Explore. | ||
There it is right there, CW Explore. | ||
And my website is cwexplore.com. | ||
Check it out. | ||
That's where I post most of my stuff. | ||
And I don't know what will be next yet, but that's the place to follow it. | ||
Well, when you come up with another one, let us know. | ||
And I'd love to sit down and do this again. | ||
That would be a pleasure. | ||
And stay out of jail, buddy. | ||
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Please. | |
Thank you, Charlie. | ||
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Cheers. | |
All right. |