In this episode of the podcast, I chat with Charlie about his travels around the world on his bike. We talk about how he got into cycling, what it's like to be a backpacker, and how to deal with injuries like a broken wrist and a torn calf. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it makes you think about how you can get out of your comfort zone when it comes to getting out on your bike and into the world around you. If you're looking for a bit of motivation and inspiration to get out there and explore the world, this is the episode for you! Enjoy the episode and spread the word to your friends about this podcast! Have a listen to this episode if you like what you hear, share it on your socials and tell me what you thought of it in the comments below! Peace, Blessings, Cheers, EJ and Cheers. - The Cheers Gang. Timestamps: 3:00 - Why do you do what you do? 4:30 - Why you do it? 5:10 - How do you travel? 6:40 - What does it take? 7:15 - What are you looking forward to? 8:20 - What is your biggest challenge? 9:00- What are your biggest fear? 10:30- What do you want to do in the future? 11:20- What would you like to see in the next episode? 12:40- Why are you going to do next? 13: What is a good day? 14:00 15: What kind of person do you would you look for? 16:00 + 17: How do I want to travel the most difficult thing? 17:40 18:10 19:20 21: How would you get back from a day in the most challenging place? 22:30 23:30 What do I like to do more? 26:00 Do you need a bike? 27:30 Do you like a good night out? 24:00 Can you have a bike in a good morning? 25: What s your biggest problem? 29:00 What are my biggest weakness? 30:00 Should you need to have a map? 35:00 Is there a bike bag? 32:00 How can I get a bike with a bike or a helmet?
00:00:52.000And 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.
00:01:09.000And 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.
00:01:22.000I spend most of my time travelling in the developing world where that's just building a barrier.
00:01:27.000Whereas 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.
00:01:34.000What was your first trip that you did like this?
00:01:39.000Besides 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,
00:01:55.000there's a thousand miles between the two.
00:01:59.000LAUGHTER Didn't get off to the best start.
00:02:02.000I 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.
00:05:12.000And then just pack an extra, you know, 10-20% and it should be all right.
00:05:17.000Which is perhaps a slightly scattergun, irresponsible approach.
00:05:20.000But I've slowly got a bit better at knowing what's needed.
00:05:23.000I've never got into calories and counting the numbers of it.
00:05:28.000I totally see the value in that, and a lot of people who do similar sorts of things do.
00:05:33.000But 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.
00:05:44.000You know, a few months you can go with a slightly impalanced diet, maybe take some multivitamins.
00:05:48.000I would imagine that you're burning a lot of calories, though, riding that bike through the desert for 250 miles.
00:06:12.000But it was, for me, it was revelatory because I just got this idea of what bike travel could be.
00:06:18.000And 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.
00:07:22.000And 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.
00:07:37.000It's quite a helpful sort of key to unlocking other memories.
00:07:47.000Initially, I was saving, scrimping and saving.
00:07:50.000And 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.
00:08:45.000I came up with the idea before I really gave it a lot of thought.
00:08:49.000The 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.
00:08:58.000And 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.
00:09:04.000And 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.
00:09:12.000And out of sort of shame or embarrassment, you'll probably end up going through with it.
00:10:49.000So 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.
00:11:25.000But I didn't know what route I was going to be taking for that.
00:11:28.000Again, I didn't allow myself to get too bogged down with details.
00:11:32.000And also, over the course of nearly half a decade, so much changes.
00:11:36.000The Arab Spring happened after I started.
00:11:38.000So 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.
00:12:11.000And 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.
00:12:21.000And I think he was expecting some specs or, you know, what I was riding.
00:12:25.000And all I could really say is, actually, it got stolen this morning.
00:14:53.000When you say picked up, did you pick up on the fly or did you prepare?
00:14:57.000Probably 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.
00:15:07.000And then I got quite good at just sort of, I guess, charades.
00:15:11.000China was always linguistically the hardest place.
00:15:14.000But 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.
00:15:29.000And then putting out from behind me an egg and pointing at it.
00:15:33.000They go, oh, the foreigner wants an egg.
00:15:46.000I 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.
00:15:52.000And 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...
00:16:16.000And that, you know, you pick it up pretty quick when it's in front of you for maybe six, eight hours in a day.
00:16:20.000And when that was done, I'd wash them off and maybe learn some new words and sort of carry on.
00:16:24.000So 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.
00:16:32.000What is it like when you're alone for that long?
00:16:37.000That'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.
00:16:51.000And on a good day, I was there in winter, which is not ideal.
00:17:54.000So 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.
00:18:08.000And of course, the Chinese government doesn't want people seeing these sorts of scenes.
00:18:12.000So they made the whole area off limits to foreigners.
00:18:14.000And basically, well, it still is really.
00:18:16.000You can visit limited little pockets in Lhasa, the capital, and a couple of other kind of temples in towns nearby.
00:18:24.000But 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.
00:18:34.000So that was the only way I could get in was to sort of sneak in.
00:18:37.000But 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.
00:18:44.000You know, I was up there for about six weeks and...
00:18:46.000I probably had two conversations in that time.
00:19:10.000So 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.
00:19:24.000It is an interesting thing about human beings that we seem to have a requirement for other people's company.
00:19:52.000And, you know, I guess this is my cod evolutionary sort of take on it.
00:19:57.000But 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.
00:20:06.000And so, you know, probably would have been bred out.
00:20:08.000You know, we've selected for people who live in communities.
00:21:13.000It's total freedom and that can be an indulgence, a self-indulgence.
00:21:20.000I mean, I've never spent that kind of time alone, but I've spent time in the woods.
00:21:25.000And 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.
00:21:44.000When 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.
00:21:55.000And it's definitely a positive thing to do.
00:21:58.000The 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.
00:22:07.000And 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.
00:22:20.000I mean, I first came across your podcast when I was in the Congo, I think.
00:22:24.000And, you know, podcasts are great, but suddenly you've got company all day and that's a way to...
00:22:30.000Thinking 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.
00:22:40.000Like 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.
00:22:50.000How did you decide that amount of time?
00:23:32.000They were taking a more circuitous route than me.
00:23:34.000But 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.
00:23:40.000And 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.
00:23:51.000And we cycled into Congo DRC. There's two Congos, the big one, the fucked up one, I guess.
00:23:59.000We 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.
00:24:08.000But there was a river there and we had been aware that this was going to happen.
00:24:13.000And 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.
00:24:20.000You 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.
00:24:31.000We bought one that was about five and a half meters long, I think.
00:24:34.000And for the next month, we kind of battled this thing down a river.
00:24:38.000But as we say, it was not in great shape.
00:24:41.000And we had to get in all our gear and two bicycles and these things sit really low in the water.
00:24:46.000Maybe two inches of clearance, you know, any small rapids, the water's coming in and you're going down.
00:24:51.000But 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.
00:25:00.000And the whole village just gathered around us in this big excited but concerned crowd and they were tutting and shaking their heads.
00:25:06.000And a sort of spokesperson essentially stepped forward and said, really, I don't think you should go on the river.
00:26:23.000There were just footpaths connecting villages.
00:26:25.000And no one else was stupid enough to travel up and down the river.
00:26:27.000People had canoes, pirogs, but they would just use them for fishing.
00:26:30.000So they would just sit on the water, play some nets, come back out.
00:26:34.000And 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.
00:27:11.000But, yeah, we'd hear those quite a lot at night, and...
00:27:15.000We 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.
00:27:49.000What did they give you to get over the malaria?
00:27:52.000Was 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.
00:28:26.000But the drips were the most frightening thing, because he didn't use clean needles each time.
00:28:29.000So 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.
00:28:44.000So how long did it take you to recover from the malaria?
00:28:46.000Well, 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.
00:28:52.000So we had to get out of the country within a certain amount of time.
00:28:55.000So after, I think it was probably about eight days, we then, you know, I was able to walk here.
00:29:43.000So 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.
00:29:53.000And suddenly I just saw all these trucks that had kind of, you know, run off the tracks into the trees.
00:29:57.000And there were people who had been stuck there for days and days and days.
00:31:12.000They can't break through that crust of ice as they would with snow with their hooves to get to the grass.
00:31:17.000So come spring, actually last time I was in Mongolia, the whole countryside was just littered with corpses of sheep and horses and goats.
00:31:23.000So 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.
00:31:30.000But it wasn't too bad when I was there.
00:31:32.000The horse I would, at night, so I spent about two months hiking across Mongolia with this horse.
00:31:38.000I tried to ride it, but it was so small, a tiny little pony.
00:31:41.000I'd gone to quite a lot of effort to find a horse that was up to the challenge.
00:31:44.000I went out into this village outside the capital city, asked around.
00:31:50.000And, you know, you can't do anything there without having to drink copious amounts of vodka.
00:31:53.000It's a real pain in the ass, to be honest.
00:32:01.000Well, 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.
00:32:08.000You know, it'd be rude to refuse because, you know, it's an offering.
00:32:11.000And 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.
00:32:17.000But, you know, this kind of quite unpleasant paint-stripping vodka and just bottles and bottles and bottles.
00:32:21.000So 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.
00:32:29.000And finally, we met these people who had a, this guy had a horse to sell.
00:34:56.000People would be eaten alive by wolves.
00:34:58.000The wolves would find these wounded soldiers and tear them apart.
00:35:02.000And then people would go out on scouting missions and they wouldn't find anything but boots and pieces of their clothes covered in blood.
00:35:09.000And then they realized, like, Jesus Christ, we're losing more people to wolves than we are to the Germans or the Russians.
00:35:15.000Actually, 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.
00:35:24.000It 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.
00:36:53.000In winter, I've not been there in winter, but in winter it's the most polluted city on earth.
00:36:57.000Because 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.
00:37:09.000But to heat them, they're just using coal or yak shit or horse shit or cow shit.
00:37:15.000And so just all of the particulate matter.
00:37:18.000So 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.
00:37:34.000But, yeah, there's just this kind of pool of pollution that hangs over this narrow, long valley that the capital stretched along.
00:37:40.000But 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.
00:37:46.000They had in about 2012, they opened a huge mine, I think Tokdokoy, I think the name, I forget.
00:37:54.000But in 2012, The Economist magazine found Mongolia to have the world's fastest growing economy.
00:38:00.000Because they opened this one mine and overnight the economy grew by 40% that month.
00:38:08.000It was a very, very low base start line.
00:38:11.000But yeah, I think that's largely gold and copper.
00:38:13.000And 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.
00:38:22.000But I think that's turned the country around quite a lot.
00:41:11.000Or 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?
00:41:28.000People are very friendly wherever you go, broadly speaking.
00:41:31.000That's really fascinating because you probably have a different perspective of just running into strangers in other countries than most people do.
00:41:38.000Most people would think that people would be very hesitant.
00:41:41.000You know, some weird Englishman shows up and wants to use your computer.
00:41:47.000Wherever I go, I tend to be a bit of a novelty, so people are interested initially.
00:43:00.000About 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.
00:43:34.000I 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.
00:43:42.000So 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.
00:43:48.000I'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.
00:43:54.000And 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.
00:45:24.000Well, people started asking me to give presentations about the trip I'd been on, you know, sort of photo slideshows, I guess.
00:45:30.000And I started doing more and more of those at, you know, to village halls and clubs and festivals and schools and businesses.
00:45:36.000And that slowly became, like, about half of my living.
00:45:39.000And I realized, no, I could do this for a job.
00:45:41.000You know, this could be a living and enable me to carry on, you know, taking on challenges.
00:45:46.000So since then, you know, there's always something in the pipeline.
00:45:50.000Do some sort of journey, come back, relate the story, write about it, repeat.
00:45:55.000Now, when you start up again, is there any hesitation about the length of the trip?
00:46:04.000That 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.
00:46:17.000I mean, the longest I've done since then is eight months, so it's a lot different.
00:46:22.000And the last couple have been two or three months.
00:46:24.000But was it because of that four-year one where you're like, that's a little much?
00:46:29.000Well, you just, you know, you get a bit more settled.
00:46:31.000Also, now I've started to kind of build a career.
00:46:33.000You don't want to totally put everything on pause for a huge amount of time again.
00:46:37.000You mean by build a career, the writing?
00:46:41.000And, you know, it's not like I have, you know, a monthly paycheck or, you know, a salary, a pension, anything like that.
00:46:49.000So you kind of got to keep feeding the beast.
00:46:50.000And so for the speeches, like, what are you doing?
00:46:53.000Are you, like, posting up at a theater and people come to see you talk?
00:46:56.000I 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.
00:47:09.000You would be the last person I would want to have come to talk.
00:47:12.000Because I was like, these people are going to quit and they're going to go wander the world.
00:47:17.000I've spoken to a handful of CEOs about that.
00:47:20.000And one, maybe charitably, but I think he was right.
00:47:24.000He said, you know, I kind of said what you said as a joke.
00:47:28.000And 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.
00:47:37.000That's not going to be the most motivated person.
00:47:40.000But I'm not there to say, hey, quit your job and fuck off for years on a bicycle.
00:48:19.000I think most of that is nonsense, though.
00:48:22.000I 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.
00:48:33.000At the risk of insulting a few people I know, I totally agree with you.
00:48:37.000But then again, I haven't read those books, and also...
00:48:40.000I haven't read all of them, clearly, but I've read enough bullshit where I'm like, God...
00:48:45.000Yeah, well, there's a huge tendency out there for people to kind of take on the persona of a guru, essentially.
00:48:52.000And there's so many charlatans out there.
00:49:14.000As 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.
00:49:28.000It's just I don't think they're right.
00:49:29.000Yeah, 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.
00:49:38.000I go, don't you know everything about your grandmother?
00:49:40.000What the fuck is the point of someone telling you some things you already know?
00:49:44.000Do 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?
00:49:54.000And you can see the look on his face when he was kind of...
00:49:57.000Resisting but realizing that I might be right, but didn't want to admit that he got hosed.
00:50:01.000I think a lot of people just want to believe it.
00:50:03.000And that's also totally understandable.
00:50:05.000It's the same from my perspective with belief in afterlife.
00:50:09.000People want to believe that because it's comforting and it totally makes sense to want to believe it.
00:50:25.000But I guess the burden of proof is on people who have come up with this idea because there's nothing to substantiate it.
00:50:32.000But there's a long history of human understanding that there's something else besides what we experience in this realm.
00:50:42.000And 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.
00:51:00.000And then there's this feeling when someone dies, like they're not there anymore.
00:51:04.000Like, have you ever been around a dead body?
00:52:15.000Darren 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.
00:52:52.000Randy went to the big evangelical churches where they have faith healers and people contacting the other side.
00:53:02.000He went there and I think I'm remembering this right.
00:53:05.000One 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,
00:53:21.000unwitting audience members, which is, you know, it's hilarious and it's also deeply disturbing.
00:53:27.000People get, you know, taken for thousands and, you know, they can...
00:53:31.000It's just taking advantage of the most vulnerable people and I've got no time for that.
00:53:36.000And there's only one step removed from that to a lot of these motivational people.
00:53:40.000Because 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.
00:53:52.000They'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.
00:54:01.000But 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.
00:54:11.000But then when you look into their lives, the people that are the motivational people, Yeah.
00:54:39.000But 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.
00:54:53.000Well, 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.
00:54:59.000You 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.
00:55:05.000You know, I think it's far too easy for people to abuse other people's sort of good faith.
00:55:30.000And 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.
00:55:39.000If you sign up now, I will give you the secrets of how you can become successful.
00:55:45.000And you're sitting there in your shitty apartment and you're like, fuck, I want to be successful.
00:56:26.000It deals with the longing for answers in this purely uncertain, open-ended life that we exist in.
00:56:35.000And 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.
00:56:46.000Yeah, I mean, I don't, you know, when I'm billed as a quote-unquote motivational speaker, I actually don't like that phrasing.
00:56:53.000I would prefer, you know, inspirational.
00:56:55.000I 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.
00:57:05.000But 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...
00:57:12.000More proactive or more motivated or anything like that because I think, as you're saying, it's quite often disingenuous.
00:57:19.000I 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.
00:57:27.000But it's just so strange and sad to watch these people buy into his nonsense.
00:57:32.000He'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.
00:57:43.000Yeah, it's like a shitty pyramid scheme.
00:57:46.000It is in a way, but it's a confidence game.
00:57:51.000You're playing upon people's desire for answers that don't exist.
00:57:58.000There'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.
00:58:39.000I mean, I try to focus on telling stories.
00:58:41.000You know, like if you read those, for instance, you might find some inspiration within them, but hopefully it's just going to be interesting.
00:58:47.000Well, what you're doing is, I mean, obviously you have these super unusual life experiences that you can relay.
00:58:55.000And 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.
00:59:04.000A lot of my experiences have been sort of how not to.
00:59:10.000Actually, I think that's always valid as well.
00:59:14.000It'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.
00:59:27.000Well, speaking of horribly wrong, let's talk about your most recent one, because this is what led you here.
00:59:34.000And this is a wild experience that you just returned from.
00:59:39.000And just tell people what you've done.
00:59:43.000So 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.
01:01:02.000And so every winter it's super cold, and people survive in that.
01:01:06.000And they used to survive, many of them in a sort of nomadic sense, living in sort of skin tents.
01:01:12.000Reindeer, you know, hide, teepees, essentially.
01:01:15.000So 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.
01:01:24.000Isn't February the total depths of winter?
01:01:31.000Well, I mean, I was prepared for minus 50 Celsius, which is sort of minus...
01:01:35.000I guess it's about minus 60 Fahrenheit.
01:01:38.000They hit the same at minus 40. 40, yeah.
01:01:41.000But because each degree is different, it gets confusing straight away.
01:01:44.000So 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...
01:01:54.000Traditional ways of life are being threatened by the climate changing.
01:01:59.000Last 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.
01:02:13.000But at the same time, an area the size of Belgium in Yakutia was burning, or collectively, all the different wildfires at the same time.
01:02:20.000So they have crazy bad wildfires out there.
01:02:23.000Also just close to Verkhoyansk, that town with the record cold, they had a record Arctic high of 39 point something degrees Celsius.
01:02:42.000Yeah, I just wanted to go and check it out, see what it was like.
01:02:44.000So 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.
01:02:54.000Zimnik or Zimniki, as they call them there.
01:02:56.000A bit like your sort of ice road truckers, I guess.
01:02:58.000But as you're on the river, the river's frozen perhaps two metres thick and towards the top on the frozen sea ice.
01:03:04.000And to hike up to this town called Tixie up on the north coast.
01:03:20.000Russian 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.
01:03:27.000And when I flew out, you know, with hindsight, it all seems kind of stupid to have gone, maybe foolhardy.
01:03:32.000But 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.
01:03:42.000But all the world's media, all commentators, all pundits were saying this is just a bluff.
01:03:47.000Trying 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.
01:03:58.000But they marched across the border, and two days later, a formal invasion.
01:04:06.000They launched their full-scale nationwide invasion, marched into Kiev, bombed everything.
01:04:16.000Batagai, the small town where I started hiking up in the Arctic, that is geographically the same distance from Vancouver as it is from Kiev.
01:04:29.000I was on the same time zone as Central Australia, just really, really far away.
01:04:33.000And I kind of thought about it and I thought, well...
01:04:36.000A, I'm here and it's going to be interesting.
01:04:38.000You know, I'm possibly one of, if not the last tourists in Russia, certainly out in the East.
01:04:43.000And 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.
01:04:58.000And so I thought, right, I'm going to carry on with this trek, but I'll just try and keep across information.
01:05:04.000But 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.
01:05:13.000And from there onwards, I couldn't get any phone signal.
01:05:18.000Basically, the only real information I could get was local state media.
01:05:22.000I passed a village perhaps once a week.
01:05:25.000And 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.
01:05:39.000And they were slowly just drip-feeding, drip-feeding is the wrong word, they were just gushing this false information out into their public space.
01:05:47.000And loads of people believed everything they heard, totally believed everything.
01:05:52.000You 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.
01:06:02.000And that evening I was in some guy's sort of cabin just outside town.
01:06:07.000We'd met and went for drinks with some other people, and he said, hey, let's go back to ours for some drinks.
01:06:12.000And this guy, I'll call him Anatole, I don't want to say his name, but...
01:06:17.000He started dicing up some horse ribs to cook us some sort of, you know, peppering them and everything.
01:06:22.000And he asked me what I thought about Ukraine.
01:06:32.000But, you know, it seems like this is going to get really serious.
01:06:35.000And 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.
01:06:44.000Of 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.
01:06:51.000And he said, yeah, well, you know, it's great because, you know, Vladimir Putin is making Russia great again.
01:06:57.000And this is Russian land and it belongs to Russia.
01:07:01.000And those Ukrainians are all Nazis anyway.
01:07:05.000And, you know, we're going to, they're performing genocide on Russian peoples.
01:07:09.000And 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.
01:07:20.000But the fact that, I mean, this guy was Sakha.
01:07:26.000This 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.
01:07:39.000And 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.
01:08:22.000And 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.
01:08:32.000I don't quite believe everything I'm being told.
01:08:34.000Or even some people who said, I'm ashamed to be Russian.
01:08:49.000You have no idea that this is going to happen.
01:08:51.000It starts happening while you're there.
01:08:53.000And 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.
01:09:06.000Are you thinking You have to get out of there?
01:09:10.000Are you thinking you are a part of this now?
01:09:13.000You're going to document what you're seeing and this will add to whatever you're writing in the future?
01:09:51.000You know, I suppose I felt like, you know, I'm essentially a neutral observer.
01:09:54.000But of course I wasn't, because I'm British.
01:09:56.000And Britain very quickly took a stance along with the EU and America, you know, pro-Ukraine stance.
01:10:02.000And it's great, you know, here, wandering around Austin, you see Ukrainian flags everywhere.
01:10:06.000After finally getting home, I went to little villages in the countryside and the church has a Ukrainian flag hoisted on top of the flagpole.
01:10:13.000The West, for want of a better term, really took up the cause of Ukraine very, very quickly.
01:10:18.000And I suppose that made me not a neutral observer, but a representative of the opposition, if not the enemy.
01:10:38.000In 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.
01:10:59.000So we were on business visas because the longest tourist visa you could get back then was only 30 days.
01:11:53.000We used Google Maps to tell us how to get to this town, Gori, which incidentally is where Stalin was born.
01:12:00.000And Google Maps said, yeah, you come down...
01:12:02.000Out 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.
01:12:44.000Got 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.
01:13:11.000Which isn't the right thing to say when a Russian soldier arrests you.
01:13:14.000He 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.
01:13:29.000And it turned out the river was the border, and we had unwittingly just crossed into it.
01:13:35.000It's part of Russia, essentially, but it's set up like the Donbass is already being, as a kind of a little puppet state.
01:13:43.000And when they were interrogating us under the frowning portrait of Putin, they were saying, why did you do this?
01:14:43.000Anyway, 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.
01:14:54.000At both of those times, I was given a small fine and sent on my way.
01:14:58.000But this time, you know, this winter, after about three weeks of hiking, I arrived at this town.
01:15:05.000It was the first, the only town on the route.
01:15:24.000And the judge started screaming at the police and said, get them some food straight away.
01:15:27.000So, you know, it was all friendly and fine.
01:15:28.000They 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.
01:15:39.000Do you have to explain what you're doing?
01:15:41.000The Georgians were across it because it had been put out on the FSB communications.
01:15:46.000So they knew that two tourists had got in trouble.
01:15:50.000And 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.
01:15:59.000But you're not supposed to be there, right?
01:16:02.000We 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.
01:16:11.000How would you be able to cross it legally?
01:16:38.000But now, when you got in trouble with the Russian authorities, it was a much more serious issue.
01:16:43.000Yeah, 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.
01:16:53.000So it was known where I was at all times.
01:16:57.000Although 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.
01:17:12.000All the way down to Batagai, the town where I started hiking to fuel the region with a little power station.
01:17:20.000And so people were clearly, as I found out later, reporting to the authorities where I was at any given time.
01:17:26.000The two villages I passed through before reaching the first town, it was quickly by the village elders, I think.
01:17:33.000Because there's no presence of authorities in these villages.
01:17:37.000They're tiny, three, four hundred people.
01:17:40.000You know, it was passed on where I was.
01:17:42.000So 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.
01:17:56.000On 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.
01:18:09.000The Soviets were really keen to evenly populate this huge expanse of land that they owned, so they built industrial settlements all over the place.
01:18:18.000Anyway, as I approached Isquiga, a police jeep was waiting for me a few miles outside town.
01:18:23.000And they said, get into the jeep for a chat.
01:19:24.000And 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.
01:19:35.000So, you know, people were totally aware of where I was, what I was doing.
01:20:59.000It's part of this kind of strange, kind of, you know, Nothing is true.
01:21:04.000So are people reporting you along the way?
01:21:06.000I mean, did you ascertain how this got to these soldiers?
01:21:11.000Well, 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.
01:21:18.000And so there was no secret that I was going to come through Ustquiga.
01:21:22.000And 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.
01:21:31.000And I think, I mean, it became quite clear that they had...
01:21:36.000We 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.
01:22:03.000And 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?
01:22:09.000Because 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.
01:22:18.000They're aware that I might have access to that, so they want to know what I think.
01:22:24.000So they kind of came up with these witnesses and said, right, you've got to pay this fine and then you can go.
01:22:30.000And I thought, right, well, it's a £20 fine, $30, and then I can go.
01:22:35.000There's no point staying here all day.
01:22:37.000I might as well just sign the papers and go.
01:22:41.000But the guy who they got to translate for me, he walked out with me when we were all done.
01:22:48.000And 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.
01:23:18.000So 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.
01:23:46.000It's another one of these, the Russians have a phrase for this, like a dying town, a town more dead than alive.
01:23:53.000And 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.
01:24:03.000He told me that the FSB, the KGB, wanted to talk to me.
01:24:07.000And 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.
01:24:13.000And they were a bit taken aback by that.
01:24:15.000And they said, can you come back at this time tomorrow?
01:24:18.000And it felt like an interrogation, but it eventually turned out it was just this standard procedure.
01:24:24.000They 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?
01:24:49.000I went back to where I was staying, and I was recording...
01:24:54.000So I took with me a little Zoom, like a little dictaphone.
01:24:57.000You know, a lot of people use them for podcasts, I think.
01:24:59.000And 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.
01:25:11.000But naturally, with what was going on and people telling me of their opinions about Ukraine...
01:25:16.000In my own little recordings, in my tent at night, sometimes I get a little sort of political, I guess.
01:25:21.000And 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.
01:25:30.000When they came to my door, I was recording on my dictaphone.
01:25:34.000And I went to answer the door and just slipped it in my pocket.
01:25:36.000And they said, right, come to the police station now.
01:25:38.000And so I went, but it was still recording.
01:25:40.000So I had a live mic throughout this whole police process.
01:25:43.000And the first thing they did in the police station was take my phone, turn it off so I wasn't recording.
01:25:47.000And so little did they know there was this hot mic in my pocket.
01:25:50.000So after that was done, I got back to where I was staying.
01:25:53.000I kind of, in my own words, said what had happened.
01:25:55.000Took the little micro SD card out and then unscrewed a plug adapter, you know, from like a British plug to a Russian plug.
01:26:03.000Unscrewed that, wrapped the SD card up in a little scrap of white paper, slotted it in there, screwed it back up.
01:26:07.000It's like, you know, I don't want to lose this.
01:26:10.000It's not really a huge problem, but best just to hide it and have it safe.
01:26:14.000Up in Tixie, I sort of recorded my final thoughts again and I had this little SD card.
01:27:32.000And I said, well, I met this guy who I'd met on the road who...
01:27:39.000It's a small town, so I didn't want to lie to them.
01:27:41.000I thought best just to say who I'd met.
01:27:42.000So 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.
01:27:50.000And 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.
01:28:06.000So they essentially got me to provide them with false witnesses.
01:29:50.000And 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.
01:30:01.000And I was taken back to the sort of apartment I'd rented in this town.
01:30:07.000And 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.
01:30:18.000And so with them in front of me, I had to pack everything up.
01:30:21.000Among 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.
01:30:29.000And all I could do was I had a head torch next to it on the table because they were watching me pack.
01:30:35.000You know head torches have that little sort of hinge so it can sort of angle down on your forehead.
01:30:39.000I 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.
01:30:48.000And 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.
01:31:38.000On arrival in Yakutsk, there was another bailiff waiting for me.
01:31:41.000And he said, right, well, you have to now go and stay in this kind of hotel for foreigners until you fly home.
01:31:46.000And I thought, well, that's not ideal.
01:31:48.000But again, it's not the end of the world.
01:31:50.000And 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.
01:31:59.000And, you know, my shoelaces were taken away, my belt was taken off, all my goods were locked up in a locker.
01:32:03.000And, you know, after being processed and checked in, the door slammed, or the cell door slammed shut behind me.
01:33:27.000And they said, right, you're going to the court.
01:33:28.000And 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.
01:33:37.000But 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.
01:33:50.000And I'd lost quite a lot of weight during this trek.
01:33:52.000So my trousers are falling down, my hiking shoes had these massive sort of, you know, tongues lolling out the front.
01:33:57.000And 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.
01:34:05.000Meanwhile, my hands are pinned to this guy to my right.
01:34:07.000But the judge looked at the papers for, you know, like two minutes and said, yeah, no, your crimes are too serious.
01:34:14.000There's a political element and, you know, you're going back into the detention centre.
01:34:19.000And this was probably the time when I felt most low.
01:34:24.000About a week earlier, I had suddenly, unexpectedly been dragged in front of a TV camera and interviewed.
01:34:34.000That felt like being tried by the Court of Public Opinion.
01:34:39.000Eventually the news bit aired, I think the day before my appeal.
01:34:43.000But 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.
01:34:52.000Again, no photos were ever provided that, you know, backed up that story.
01:34:56.000And all the while, you know, those first two weeks...
01:35:01.000All of my belongings are in their possession.
01:35:03.000And the police have come and searched.
01:35:04.000They've made me turn on their phone, my phone, unlock it for them.
01:35:07.000I had a GPS device, which really freaks them out.
01:35:09.000My GoPro to them looked like a spy camera.
01:35:11.000But 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...
01:35:19.000On 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.
01:35:30.000And although technically those things weren't really incriminating, the fact that they had been hidden didn't look good.
01:35:37.000And 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.
01:35:52.000anyone really speaking the truth about the military.
01:35:57.000And, you know, these recordings had lots of me talking about the invasion, the atrocities in Bucha, and, you know, all sorts.
01:36:03.000And 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.
01:36:13.000I slipped it in my trousers, which again, freaked me out a little bit.
01:37:06.000And after the appeal was rejected, I then thought, well, this could be a really long time.
01:37:12.000I 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.
01:37:21.000Or 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.
01:37:31.000I 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.
01:37:40.000I 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.
01:37:51.000I think a bit of news came out about her the other day.
01:37:54.000But, 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.
01:38:40.000Well, 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.
01:38:48.000Yeah, 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?
01:39:01.000Chimki Court of Moscow region granted the 18-day extension at the request of investigators.
01:39:06.000The agency quoted the court's press service as saying, it is typical of Russian courts to extend detention repeatedly until trial.
01:39:14.000Ms. Greiner's lawyer, Alexander Boykov, could not immediately be reached for comment.
01:39:21.000Could you scroll down a little bit further?
01:39:23.000What it says that American basketball players...
01:39:26.000Starr 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...
01:41:13.000I mean, I think I was very lucky to be...
01:41:15.000You 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.
01:41:22.000Had I been in Moscow, like Brittany Greiner, then I think things might have been very different.
01:41:28.000Are you worried now about talking about this openly, that they might target you?
01:41:44.000I'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.
01:41:58.000There's one guy who I believe he was one of the witnesses used against me in one of the two places.
01:42:22.000I'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...
01:42:37.000I wouldn't feel safe and probably wouldn't be safe.
01:42:40.000But equally me being outside Russia now talking about What's happened and also what, you know, referencing what has been happening in Ukraine.
01:42:48.000I'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.
01:42:57.000I 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.
01:43:22.000What's the significance of the letter Z? So that's the, I mean, it stands for Za Pobedi, like for victory.
01:43:28.000And 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.
01:43:39.000But all over Russia, you'll see now cars or trucks or buses with the Z on them.
01:43:45.000It's this like Z. Mark of, like, Russian pride in the special operation that's being undertaken in Ukraine, the invasion.
01:43:54.000But all these, you know, soldiers on this flight, you know, they were sort of in their 40s.
01:43:59.000They 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.
01:44:08.000I was thinking if they're flying from here, maybe some of them will be deployed to Ukraine.
01:44:11.000And 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.
01:44:23.000Even 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.
01:44:35.000It's like 12,000 miles of sort of frontier.
01:44:37.000And 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.
01:44:46.000So they've, in the last few years, massively ramped up their military personnel there, their military hardware.
01:44:52.000So, you know, that's to defend against any attacks from the north by sea or air or whatever.
01:44:58.000And 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.
01:45:09.000So how did they eventually let you go and why?
01:45:13.000So 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.
01:45:24.000And to do that, you know, being taken to Moscow involves handcuffs and guards.
01:45:29.000And it's like this whole big rigmarole.
01:45:40.000For the other people there, that's just a case of just waiting.
01:45:43.000And they were basically all undocumented workers.
01:45:45.000So people who had either outstayed their work visa or never had one.
01:45:49.000And, you know, most of them seem fairly stoical about it, although some of them had been there for...
01:45:54.000I 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.
01:46:01.000But 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.
01:46:09.000He had been in a prison for two and a half years beforehand for some criminal offense that he wouldn't tell me what.
01:46:13.000I don't really know what his story was.
01:46:16.000But they deport you when the next sort of deportation run happens to be booked up.
01:46:22.000And 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,
01:46:41.000And so, you know, hurriedly I got my wonderful girlfriend to arrange flights so that I could fly with them on this flight to Moscow.
01:46:48.000And 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.
01:46:59.000So we arranged this flight, and I was taken with them.
01:47:04.000Finally, I'm moving, I'm getting out of here.
01:47:06.000Had it not worked out that time, they gave me a COVID test.
01:47:10.000Had 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.
01:47:45.000A guy to Armenia, a guy to Uzbekistan, and another fella to Kyrgyzstan.
01:47:51.000And finally they said, right, it's your time for check-in.
01:47:55.000I 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.
01:48:34.000Again, I haven't been left unsupervised with all my stuff at any point.
01:48:39.000And so suddenly they had all my possessions, including that head torch, including the plug socket, including my diary, which they got their hands on.
01:48:46.000And for an hour and a half, they just went over everything.
01:48:48.000They went through all the phone conversations.
01:48:51.000They went back on my phone through photos for years.
01:48:54.000Eventually they came across a picture of me from 10 years earlier.
01:48:59.000In Afghanistan with a big beard and a sort of headscarf and an AK-47 in the desert, which really didn't help.
01:49:06.000And it was a totally innocent picture.
01:49:08.000One 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.
01:49:18.000And, you know, they kept pulling up things on my phone saying, you know, what's this?
01:51:48.000With the British government, basically the British had a sort of £240 million unpaid debt.
01:51:56.000Before the Shah was deposed, they had sold, they had taken money, £240 million worth of money for some tanks.
01:52:05.000But after the Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Revolution, the British just didn't deliver the tanks and held the money.
01:52:11.000So it was actually like a fair grievance, to be honest.
01:52:13.000But she was held until eventually that was agreed to be paid.
01:52:17.000So it was a very naked bargaining chip thing.
01:52:20.000And that was totally forefront of my mind.
01:52:23.000The 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.
01:52:32.000And then just as my flight was about to take off, they suddenly said, right, pack everything up.
01:52:38.000And they ran me through the departures lounge at a run to the gate where they were clearly waiting for me.
01:53:01.000So 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.
01:53:07.000So on little scraps of paper, keeping them all sort of separate.
01:53:09.000I wrote what was happening day to day and this morning I was reading through it and it got me on edge again.
01:53:13.000I was like freaking out because it just brought back that sense of insecurity.
01:53:17.000Being in this cell writing stuff, there are cameras in the ceiling, you're always watched, you never know who's watching.
01:53:22.000You never know who's going to next go and look through your stuff.
01:53:48.000If 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.
01:53:58.000Although the one that we're looking at now with the six, it turns out that's kind of a bent die.
01:54:02.000That rolls a six pretty much every time.
01:54:56.000So 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 find ways to kill time but mostly it was books.
01:55:09.000Thankfully 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.
01:55:19.000So in the course of probably about 23 days, I tallied up.
01:55:22.000I read 7,000 pages plus of books, just reading whatever I could get hold of, some of which wasn't great, some was fantastic.
01:55:47.000That must have been a harrowing experience.
01:55:49.000Do you still have nightmares about it?
01:55:51.000I'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.
01:56:00.000Which, I mean, when I was inside for the first week or so, I'd wake up every morning thinking I was elsewhere.
01:56:05.000And 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.
01:56:36.000And 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.
01:56:49.000I 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.
01:57:03.000I got out like three weeks ago and I'm still, I guess, sort of picking over it in my mind.
01:59:46.000I didn't use them, but I saw loads of people using them.
01:59:49.000I think, I mean, they're always effective.
01:59:50.000For 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.
02:00:03.000So the Second World War is this kind of foundational story.
02:00:06.000So many millions of people died, and it's the great triumph of Russia to have been...
02:00:11.000So instrumental in defeating the Nazis.
02:00:13.000And Russia was incredibly instrumental.
02:00:15.000The 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.
02:00:29.000And 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.
02:00:39.000And the news was just covered in grainy old footage from the Second World War.
02:00:44.000And they had got a few little clips from...
02:01:28.000So, 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.
02:01:58.000Yeah, when they spray paint lines on the street where the lines are.
02:02:03.000Also, you flip it on its side and it's a Z. Yeah, right.
02:02:06.000But 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.
02:02:24.000However, 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.
02:02:35.000And 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,
02:02:52.000kind of, you know, just random violent attacks.
02:02:54.000But they just ram all this down the throats of the public.
02:03:05.000I think there's been some changes there.
02:03:07.000There have been a few brief, high-profile people speaking out, but they quickly get suppressed or arrested or whatever.
02:03:13.000And 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.
02:03:21.000And so quickly dissent got kind of quashed.
02:03:25.000And 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,
02:03:46.000But understandably, no one's putting their head above the parapet and saying this, because there's nothing to gain.
02:03:51.000If 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.
02:03:59.000They've still got labor camps, labor prisons, penal colonies, they call them, dotted around the country.
02:04:04.000And so people understandably are just keeping their heads down and getting on with life.
02:04:09.000And it's been weird since coming back, because I had, and to some extent still have, this massive...
02:04:38.000And getting out, it's been very interesting seeing this kind of, firstly, the incredible and totally worthwhile, noble support of Ukraine.
02:04:47.000And it's been great to see that at a public level, at a state level, and long may that continue.
02:04:53.000And maybe we'll talk a bit about the future in a minute.
02:04:56.000Also, 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...
02:05:21.000I think McDonald's, for instance, leaving Russia, I think that's the right thing to do.
02:05:28.000And just two days ago, all the McDonald's restaurants were reopened under the new branding, which is tasty, and that's it.
02:06:18.000The 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.
02:06:24.000But like tennis players who are individuals, you don't play tennis for your country.
02:07:48.000It's like 45 million people or something.
02:07:50.000I 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.
02:08:06.000I think we're suddenly realizing how much of a powerhouse Ukraine is in its own right.
02:08:11.000So 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?
02:08:29.000I'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.
02:08:35.000You 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...
02:08:46.000I 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.
02:08:54.000If something like that happened briefly while I was inside, then that news pops up and then disappears again quite quickly.
02:09:00.000And that's the stuff I might not know.
02:09:02.000But 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.
02:09:11.000And that's been quite a good way to sort of stop the gap.
02:09:15.000It 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.
02:09:29.000Is it difficult to get back on track and to try to have a semblance of normalcy?
02:09:35.000Yeah, I mean it's been a really flat out time since I got back.
02:09:38.000Also a bunch of friends are all getting married this summer so I'm sort of darting around all over the place.
02:09:42.000I mean this month I've literally got four weddings and a funeral.
02:09:44.000It's a busy time just socially as well.
02:09:47.000It's summer and it's nice to be out and to be normal again.
02:09:52.000But 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.
02:10:02.000The soldiers were sometimes pricks, but that's not a big deal.
02:10:06.000Secondly, what's happened to me is, in the grand scheme of things, totally insignificant and irrelevant, and I've still got a home.
02:11:59.000I 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.
02:12:11.000There's a few places I've never experienced.
02:12:13.000I'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.
02:12:42.000That'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.
02:12:50.000I 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.
02:13:49.000I 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.
02:13:57.000It's like they're almost born to suffer and just put up with crap in a very staunch, almost admirable way.
02:14:10.000And 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.
02:14:18.000But I guess the feeling of kinship has faded somewhat.
02:14:22.000Yeah, I just, I wonder if at all, if this is going to relax to the point where travel is going to be possible again.
02:14:30.000Well, that's the next thing, you know, like how long does this go on?
02:14:36.000Well, 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.
02:14:48.000But 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.
02:15:04.000But he has to politically say, I'm not giving up.
02:15:09.000I'm not making any concessions of land.
02:15:10.000You know, we fight until we restore our sort of sovereign borders of Ukraine.
02:15:15.000And if he were to make some peace deal with the Russians that conceded territory, he'd possibly be out of office straight away.
02:15:23.000And that gives the chance for Moscow to try and insert a puppet candidate.
02:15:33.000If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.
02:15:35.000If 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.
02:16:24.000There 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.
02:16:41.000I mean, there are tens of thousands of troops they've lost.
02:17:49.000Well, 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.
02:18:06.000Because 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.
02:18:17.000And essentially was about real discussions that were being had during the 1950s and 60s.
02:18:23.000By several generals who thought it would be a good idea to preemptively attack Russia and preemptively attack China with nuclear weapons.
02:19:30.000You 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.
02:19:42.000Russia has totally shot itself in the foot.
02:19:45.000And so he is clearly mad enough to make a move that stupid.
02:19:48.000So potentially he is mad enough to launch a nuclear missile.
02:19:52.000Well, particularly if he's really fatally sick.
02:19:56.000I mean, if that really is happening and he really doesn't have anything to lose.
02:20:01.000You 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,
02:20:21.000that he's very committed to this idea of his legacy.
02:20:24.000I think he probably only sees that in territorial terms.
02:20:28.000So, four or five days ago was the 350th birthday of Peter the Great, who was a Romanov Tsar who massively expanded Russia's territory.
02:20:40.000And 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.
02:20:50.000I mean, Peter conquered Finland from the Swedes, so the Finns must be terrified.
02:20:55.000But I genuinely think he sees it as...
02:20:59.000Restoring Russia to its greatest extent, which was the Soviet Empire.
02:21:02.000And 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.
02:21:40.000But, 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.
02:21:52.000And, 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.
02:22:00.000And that's totally, you know, it's just a failed project.
02:22:03.000But, you know, he's not going to listen to that.
02:22:06.000Yeah, and also there's a fear that China is watching this and contemplating whether or not to invade Taiwan.
02:22:19.000Gone from being European-ruled in the 1990s to kind of mostly maintaining that sort of tradition and now recently gone full totalitarianism.
02:22:32.000Well, 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.
02:22:42.000So that would be 2047, but it's already gone.
02:22:46.000And with China and Taiwan, I fear, it's not a case of if, it's a case of when.
02:22:53.000But thankfully, the West's reaction to, you know, they haven't just turned a blind eye to Ukraine.
02:22:59.000And so China probably will be thinking, you know, this is not going to be easy.
02:23:03.000The 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.
02:23:11.000Yeah, 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.
02:23:34.000Yeah, 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.
02:23:43.000It's just the whole thing is so tense and it didn't...
02:23:45.000Five years ago, there was no fear at all.
02:23:48.000Five years ago, it was like everything was...
02:23:49.000Like, look at this 2019 event that they were having in Moscow.
02:23:53.000Where I was like, ooh, maybe I'd like to go there.
02:24:11.000Their architecture is so uniquely Russian.
02:24:15.000When you look at just the colors and the beautiful buildings in Moscow.
02:24:21.000And 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...
02:24:41.000I mean, what they've done with chess, what they've done with literature, what they've done particularly with martial arts.
02:24:49.000I 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.
02:25:46.000And of course, you've got the incredible wealth of kind of oligarchs and the kind of kleptocracy in Moscow.
02:25:54.000But I mean, the vast majority of Russian people don't have a great deal.
02:25:57.000They really aren't very wealthy, but they are very literate.
02:26:01.000They're relatively well educated, even if some of the history they're taught is total cobblers.
02:26:05.000And so they have an incredibly large population from which to excel at all sorts of things, science as well.
02:26:14.000I 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...
02:26:28.000I didn't totally understand why, A, they were able to do that, or B, why everybody was in support of that.
02:26:35.000Is there a direct connection between these oligarchs and either supporting Putin or financing Putin?
02:26:44.000I 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.
02:27:09.000There were a few and they were slowly just kind of removed or defeated.
02:27:13.000And 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.
02:27:26.000I mean, also, frankly, people who are multi-billionaires in Russia It's a corrupt state.
02:27:34.000No one's making that money completely legitimately.
02:28:09.000I 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.
02:28:32.000One 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,
02:28:52.000they need the semen of older men, and they ingest it orally and anally.
02:28:59.000And 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.
02:29:16.000Sambian tribes write a passage that requires young boys to drink semen if they want to transition to adulthood.
02:29:25.000um 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.
02:29:53.000Some people have even tagged it as a form of ritualized homosexuality.
02:29:57.000Usually 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.
02:30:06.000Surprisingly, the Sambia tribe considers the ingestion of semen to be a compulsory ritual for male development.
02:30:12.000For them, it is preferable for young boys to be seen as warriors than to be judged weaklings.
02:30:19.000I mean, a lot of cultures do some weird shit for rites of passage.
02:30:26.000I mean, they take them in when they're like six years old.
02:30:29.000There'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.
02:30:47.000It's relatively low stakes, although I guess there's quite a lot of psychological harm potentially.
02:30:52.000But I mean, this doesn't, I mean, it shocks me, but it doesn't usually surprise me.
02:31:38.000This is then followed by more beatings with the aim of toughening the boys so they can be powerful warriors.
02:31:44.000While 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.
02:31:52.000Once the bloodletting ceremony is over, the young boys are made to perform fellatio on the older boys.
02:31:58.000After 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.
02:32:15.000Apart from taking in semen, the new initiates are forced to observe a strict diet that will give them strength.
02:32:23.000If you scroll back where we were before, though, it talks about the mothers.
02:32:28.000Until the blowjobs, this kind of sounded like a Spartan take on an ayahuasca ceremony.
02:32:47.000Hence, the lads are separated from their mothers and any other females so their blood won't be contaminated as they mature into adulthood.
02:32:54.000The semen drinking custom is in different stages.
02:32:57.000The 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.
02:33:07.000I mean, there's a lot of crazy shit out there.
02:33:09.000I mean, they still have, sort of as a mark of mourning, if a family member dies, people cut off the tip of a finger.
02:33:16.000And 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.
02:33:22.000But it's also hard to tell because everyone's got these sort of 18-inch machete blades that they use for everything.
02:33:28.000I think some just get lost sort of by mistake.
02:33:36.000I 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.
02:33:49.000I mean, their country has something like 750 languages.
02:33:54.000They nowadays communicate largely just with Pidgin English or Tok Pidgin, as they call it.
02:34:00.000Which is a sort of a broken English, kind of bastardized, simple English.
02:34:05.000But 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.
02:34:16.000So they develop different languages, different customs, different faith, religions, everything.
02:34:20.000And it's like that across the country, particularly up in the highlands.
02:35:04.000Two 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.
02:35:16.000And 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,
02:35:35.000And one of those marriages had several children.
02:35:38.000I 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.
02:35:56.000I got to hang out with him a bit, got to know him well, and he's just a nice sort of normal guy.
02:36:01.000I 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.
02:36:13.000Do you still have contact with his father?
02:36:21.000It's part of a trilogy, the Black Harvest trilogy.
02:36:25.000But First Contact is interviews with these three brothers, by which point they're already quite old.
02:36:29.000But 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.
02:37:34.000I mean, there are still rumors that in Papua New Guinea there might still be uncontacted tribes.
02:37:39.000Like in the Amazon, there's still a few dozen uncontacted tribes.
02:37:43.000But I believe most of them sort of know there's a world out there.
02:37:48.000The Brazilian, largely government, sort of protects them and keeps them in isolation as much as anything because they're just vulnerable to disease, perhaps.
02:37:56.000But then the one, I think, the most astounding kind of lost tribe is the North Sentinelese.
02:38:32.000He was on neighboring islands, but I think they got wind of this character.
02:38:37.000Yeah, there's pictures of him, and there's pictures of natives dressed up like Roman soldiers and stuff.
02:38:43.000He 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.
02:39:09.000So 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.
02:40:14.000Uncontacted people in this day and age is very strange.
02:40:17.000I 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.
02:40:32.000The people that live there, the direct descendants of people who left Africa 60,000 years ago and landed on that island.
02:40:38.000Yeah, 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.
02:40:47.000And 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.
02:40:55.000The Aborigines and the New Guineans are from like a very, very ancient wave of migration.
02:41:19.000Now 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.
02:42:31.000I guess with new archaeological techniques, new scanning, new LiDAR, just the books are being totally rewritten on a yearly basis.
02:42:40.000Yeah, well, they're all a proponent now of the...
02:42:43.000The 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.
02:42:55.000And what that Younger Dryas impact theory is is that there was a certain time somewhere between...
02:43:01.000There's multiple times, but it started around 12,000 years ago.
02:43:06.000There was impacts, and the impacts from asteroid impacts...
02:43:09.000Reversed an ice age or paused an ice age?
02:43:24.000When 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.
02:43:59.000And this stuff is all, it's sort of like that, but it's directly caused by impacts.
02:44:02.000But this stuff all exists in this time period of 12,000 years ago.
02:44:06.000And then again, somewhere, they believe somewhere 11 or 10,000 years ago.
02:44:11.000So, 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.
02:44:26.000That there was some very sophisticated architecture and construction methods that date back far beyond what we think of.
02:44:36.000When 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.
02:44:45.000And 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.
02:45:02.000Yeah, 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.
02:45:13.000So 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.
02:45:24.000They don't indicate erosion by sand and wind.
02:45:29.000The 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,
02:45:46.000when you're talking about clear evidence of water erosion, this is rock-solid stuff.
02:45:53.000There's a knock-on effect as well, I suppose.
02:45:55.000If 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.
02:46:12.000It's very unfortunate when you see the resistance, too, because it's so clearly ego-based.
02:46:16.000I've seen people argue against it, and they get really angry, and they start insulting, and ad hominems, and it's really weird.
02:46:22.000Because the one that you can't fuck with is Gobekli Tepe.
02:46:27.000Because Gobekli Tepe was purposely covered somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 years ago.
02:47:28.000Well, 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.
02:47:42.000And 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.
02:48:00.000And 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.
02:48:11.000Even 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.
02:48:26.000You know, of the British Empire, for example, of colonialism.
02:48:29.000Because when I was growing up, we were taught that Britain conquered the world and brought civilization to all the noble savages.
02:48:38.000And 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?
02:49:15.000And I think that's, you know, tying it neatly back in.
02:49:18.000That'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.
02:49:26.000It shows that history is not a fixed, determinate thing.
02:49:29.000Well, it's unfortunate we don't have like a real rock-solid history of the world.
02:49:35.000We 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.
02:50:12.000We have accurate footage, but that was only a short period that's now ending because now we don't know if footage is real.
02:50:18.000There's deep fakes, there's all sorts.
02:50:20.000The age of kind of, I suppose, empirical media is kind of on its way out.
02:50:29.000At least that you can be ensured is empirical because from now on, who knows what's what.
02:50:33.000What'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.
02:50:49.000Yeah, which makes more sense than anything.
02:50:51.000I 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.
02:52:07.000Cities were built in big circular shapes.
02:52:09.000Not just that, but grids that indicate irrigation and blocks of cities.
02:52:14.000And Graham Hancock talked about that as well on the podcast.
02:52:16.000And 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.
02:53:04.000While 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,
02:53:24.000if you just click on that, there's actually better articles that detail it.
02:53:30.000While previously thought to have been an empty wilderness, okay, the Amazon infers a deep and ancient pattern.
02:53:37.000Second, that much of the Amazon jungle we know is in fact an anthropogenic landscape.
02:53:41.000That is, the Amazon has been modified extensively by indigenous populations for the past 12,000 years.
02:53:48.000The 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.
02:53:58.000Rather, indigenous populations increase the overall biodiversity and quality of the soil.
02:54:31.000Supposedly pristine, untouched Amazon rainforest was actually shaped by humans.
02:54:35.000Over thousands of years, native people play a strong role in molding the ecology of this vast wilderness.
02:54:41.000This 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.
02:54:55.000And 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.