The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1832 - Charlie Walker

00:00:14.000 Alright Charlie, first of all, thanks for being here.

00:00:16.000 My pleasure.

00:00:17.000 Very nice to meet you.

00:00:18.000 Why do you do the things that you do?

00:00:21.000 First question is the hardest one.

00:00:25.000 I guess over the years have formed a whole bunch of different answers to that.

00:00:29.000 Some of them flippant and sarcastic.

00:00:32.000 Without rambling on for ages and ages, I suppose it comes down to...

00:00:35.000 I'm just really curious.

00:00:36.000 I want to get to these places, see people living lives differently to mine.

00:00:41.000 I grew up in a tiny little village where it's nice, but nothing happened.

00:00:44.000 Where'd you grow up?

00:00:45.000 Just close to Salisbury in the southwest of England.

00:00:48.000 About 10 miles from Stonehenge, down there.

00:00:51.000 Oh, wow.

00:00:52.000 And yeah, I suppose I started traveling when I was about 18, took a year out between school and university, and just got more and more curious and slowly realized that I enjoyed traveling more if I was getting to places by, I suppose, physically difficult means.

00:01:09.000 And that particularly helps, I suppose, if you turn up in some remote community in a, not that I've been doing this, but in a helicopter or a 4x4 or whatever, There's instantly a distance, a sort of divide.

00:01:22.000 I spend most of my time travelling in the developing world where that's just building a barrier. 1.00

00:01:27.000 Whereas if you turn up on foot or in a little kayak or on a horse or whatever, then I think people kind of take to that a little bit more.

00:01:34.000 What was your first trip that you did like this?

00:01:39.000 Besides backpacking around Africa, the first time I did anything sort of particularly physically challenging was I flew to Beijing and I had a flight out of Mongolia and kind of quite last minute I thought, oh, well, you know,

00:01:55.000 there's a thousand miles between the two.

00:01:57.000 I'll take a bike, a bicycle.

00:01:59.000 LAUGHTER Didn't get off to the best start.

00:02:02.000 I went to a friend's 21st birthday party about 10 days before leaving, and I don't really remember the party, but when I wake up in the morning, one of my quadriceps had snapped.

00:02:11.000 Not torn, but snapped.

00:02:12.000 The doctor said that the two ends would kind of flap around like fishtails and eventually graft onto the rest.

00:02:17.000 I don't know how scientific that was.

00:02:19.000 And then on my first night in Beijing, I fell over and broke my wrist a bit drunk.

00:02:23.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:02:24.000 Two weeks later, when I sort of cut my cast off and I sort of, you know, strapped my knee up a bit and pedaled out.

00:02:29.000 I wasn't in the best shape.

00:02:30.000 And frankly, the following two... 0.61

00:02:32.000 So you just went with a torn calf, quadriceps muscle, fucked up wrist, just went anywhere?

00:02:40.000 Yeah, I mean, I started slow. 0.96

00:02:41.000 I'm not a, like, I'm not a sportsman.

00:02:43.000 You know, I'm not an athlete.

00:02:44.000 I've always just liked to, I've never really particularly trained for anything.

00:02:48.000 I tend to try and keep fit, but that's kind of it.

00:02:51.000 So I've always sort of thought, start slow and build up.

00:02:54.000 And it only took two weeks to cross up to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.

00:03:01.000 And once I crossed the border into Mongolia, there was just no road.

00:03:04.000 It was, you know, it's just desert.

00:03:05.000 And there's kind of tire tracks all over the place.

00:03:07.000 And you just got to...

00:03:08.000 You know, take a northeast bearing and sort of stick with it. 0.98

00:03:11.000 And frankly, those two weeks were kind of shitty. 0.92

00:03:14.000 I didn't particularly enjoy them.

00:03:17.000 But, I mean, you're probably aware of the concept of type two fun. 0.99

00:03:21.000 You know, you've done something and it's crap. 0.79

00:03:23.000 But then once you've finished, you start to rose tint it. 0.99

00:03:25.000 Right.

00:03:26.000 And before I'd even left Mongolia, I was already thinking, yeah, there could be something in this.

00:03:30.000 And I saw the potential of...

00:03:32.000 Bicycle travel.

00:03:33.000 You can travel a fair distance.

00:03:36.000 If you want, you can go 100 miles a day.

00:03:38.000 You can go 60 miles very comfortably.

00:03:39.000 You still have a lot of the day there.

00:03:41.000 You can travel very cheaply.

00:03:42.000 You can travel for ages.

00:03:43.000 And you get to see all those places in between that you wouldn't really go near if you're on a bus or a train or a car, whatever it is.

00:03:50.000 Did you have any idea of where food would be?

00:03:54.000 How you would get through these areas?

00:03:57.000 Did you understand what towns were available?

00:04:01.000 For that first ride I had a map and I knew that besides a 250 mile gap in the Gobi, there'd be enough towns to get resupplies.

00:04:15.000 So you just had to go 250 miles through the Gobi Desert on a bike with a torn quad and a fucked up wrist.

00:04:22.000 Yeah, yeah, in short. 0.75

00:04:24.000 But you can carry quite a lot on a bike.

00:04:25.000 You can carry, if necessary, in later years, you can carry two, three, four weeks of food pretty easily.

00:04:33.000 It's not going to be very exciting.

00:04:34.000 It's going to be just a lot of rice and noodles and stuff like that.

00:04:37.000 But you can sort of stack it up.

00:04:39.000 Did you plan ahead for that?

00:04:41.000 Did you understand what your requirements were going to be?

00:04:44.000 Did you sit down and write it all out?

00:04:47.000 I'm going to be there for X amount of hours.

00:04:49.000 I'm going to need Y amount of calories.

00:04:52.000 No, I've never been good at planning.

00:04:55.000 Well, no, that's not true.

00:04:56.000 That's not fair.

00:04:56.000 I've never loved getting granular with planning.

00:05:00.000 I, you know, when I'm planning food for, you know, earlier this year, I had to plan food for about a month.

00:05:06.000 And I kind of look, that's about a breakfast and just times that a bunch of times.

00:05:10.000 That's about a lunch.

00:05:12.000 And then just pack an extra, you know, 10-20% and it should be all right.

00:05:17.000 Which is perhaps a slightly scattergun, irresponsible approach.

00:05:20.000 But I've slowly got a bit better at knowing what's needed.

00:05:23.000 I've never got into calories and counting the numbers of it.

00:05:28.000 I totally see the value in that, and a lot of people who do similar sorts of things do.

00:05:33.000 But I've generally thought I don't need to work out that I've got precisely enough Protein for any given day or fat or carbohydrate, whatever it is, because usually these aren't hugely long endeavours.

00:05:44.000 You know, a few months you can go with a slightly impalanced diet, maybe take some multivitamins.

00:05:48.000 I would imagine that you're burning a lot of calories, though, riding that bike through the desert for 250 miles.

00:05:55.000 Yeah.

00:05:57.000 I mean, I look back at that trip there, and I think that was quite straightforward, really.

00:06:01.000 And I do think that...

00:06:02.000 I'm not one of these people who says, hey, anybody can do anything.

00:06:05.000 But I don't think that particular ride across to Mongolia was...

00:06:10.000 Especially difficult.

00:06:12.000 But it was, for me, it was revelatory because I just got this idea of what bike travel could be.

00:06:18.000 And it was only a couple of weeks less, probably 10 days after I finished, that I got a bit drunk and made on a Genghis Khan vodka and made quite a rash decision to cycle for what ended up being about four years.

00:06:29.000 Genghis Khan Booker?

00:06:30.000 What are you saying?

00:06:31.000 Vodka.

00:06:31.000 Oh, Genghis Khan Vodka.

00:06:33.000 Sorry, yeah.

00:06:33.000 Okay, no worries.

00:06:34.000 I've got a plummy accent.

00:06:35.000 No worries.

00:06:36.000 Yeah, and I made this decision to cycle from the UK back to the UK via the furthest away point in each of Europe, Asia and Africa.

00:06:44.000 And that ended up taking about four years.

00:06:47.000 So, you do this first trip and you decide after it's completed that, you know, you get this...

00:06:56.000 Interesting feeling, you know, it was fun, it was exciting, it was adventurous, and that this is something you're gonna do often.

00:07:02.000 Are you writing about these things?

00:07:04.000 Are you making videos?

00:07:06.000 Like, what are you doing once you're done?

00:07:09.000 I write, basically.

00:07:11.000 I'm not a videographer.

00:07:12.000 I take photos.

00:07:14.000 I didn't, for the four-year trip that followed, I didn't have social media at that time.

00:07:20.000 So I very much focused on writing.

00:07:22.000 And every day, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how sweaty and uncomfortable I might be in a tent or cold or whatever, I will write down what happened that day and just get it all down and later you can then kind of get yourself back into that frame of mind and all these other details will suddenly start springing back in.

00:07:37.000 It's quite a helpful sort of key to unlocking other memories.

00:07:42.000 Yeah, but writing is my main focus.

00:07:45.000 How do you fund these trips?

00:07:47.000 Initially, I was saving, scrimping and saving.

00:07:50.000 And that first long journey, I lived for four and a half years, as it turned out, on about £12,000, which back then would have been, I guess, $16,000.

00:08:01.000 For four years?

00:08:02.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:08:03.000 So I lived in a tent.

00:08:04.000 I ate very cheaply.

00:08:05.000 Occasionally, I'll get a night in a hostel or something.

00:08:07.000 You can live for a really small amount of money if you're just out in the wild.

00:08:11.000 More recently, I get sponsorship or grants that sort of help and cover expenses.

00:08:17.000 But I've always done things in quite a lo-fi way.

00:08:19.000 I've never done hugely complicated or expensive journeys.

00:08:22.000 I've always quite enjoyed the accessibility of doing stuff that anyone logistically probably could do if they put a bit of thought to it.

00:08:31.000 The four-year one.

00:08:33.000 How does one go about deciding that you're going to do something that's going to take four years out of your life?

00:08:39.000 Did you recognize that it was going to take that long?

00:08:42.000 I reckon it would take about that.

00:08:44.000 And rashly is the answer.

00:08:45.000 I came up with the idea before I really gave it a lot of thought.

00:08:49.000 The first thing I did is told a bunch of people, you know, family included, hey, I'm going to, in a year's time, I'm going to head off on a bike for about four years.

00:08:58.000 And once I told a bunch of people, then it became almost a certainty to me because, you know, I think I would have been embarrassed to then back down.

00:09:04.000 And so I guess, I mean, I've always found that quite handy with any project, you know, just let people know, set yourself a start date, and then the wheels are already in motion.

00:09:12.000 And out of sort of shame or embarrassment, you'll probably end up going through with it.

00:09:16.000 Whew! 0.99

00:09:17.000 I can't think that anybody would fault you for quitting.

00:09:22.000 I mean, I don't think anybody would say, oh, Charlie, you only did three years.

00:09:26.000 I came close a bunch of times.

00:09:27.000 By the time I got three years, then it's like, well, I might as well finish it off.

00:09:32.000 And when you get to the end of that, did you write a book?

00:09:35.000 Oh, I have something for you.

00:09:36.000 Oh, there you go.

00:09:38.000 Actually, I've got something else as well.

00:09:41.000 Bear with me.

00:09:42.000 Let's see what we've got here.

00:09:45.000 These are, I believe, for you, Joe.

00:09:49.000 Oh, thank you.

00:09:50.000 Those two books are about that four-year bike ride.

00:09:52.000 There you go.

00:09:53.000 And I've got a couple for Jamie.

00:09:55.000 And now, once you do this, so you get back, and I would imagine, like, writing down everything at the end of the day, I'm sure, helps.

00:10:07.000 But it's got to be difficult to sort of capture the nuances of each experiment.

00:10:14.000 If you're writing for four years, I would imagine there's a lot of very notable experiences you're having during this time.

00:10:21.000 Like, how are you remembering all these and documenting them?

00:10:25.000 I mean, photos help as well.

00:10:27.000 Over the course of four years, I've probably had something like 15,000 photographs, and that helps furnish a picture.

00:10:34.000 But it's really just what I said.

00:10:36.000 About 1,600 days, I kept a journal every single day.

00:10:39.000 Sometimes they're very brief.

00:10:40.000 You mean just writing it down, hand to paper?

00:10:42.000 Yeah, in a bunch of tatty old notebooks that I've got, kind of falling apart on a shelf somewhere.

00:10:47.000 And what was the path?

00:10:49.000 So I started near Salisbury, where I grew up, headed across the channel up Western Europe through Scandinavia to Nordkapp, which is the northernmost point of Europe.

00:11:00.000 It's up in the Norwegian Arctic.

00:11:02.000 That's quite a dramatic place.

00:11:03.000 The sort of monument at Nordkapp is at the top of a 300-yard high cliff.

00:11:09.000 You go and look over the railing and you've got the Arctic Ocean sort of crashing against it.

00:11:12.000 The North Pole is another 1,200 miles on.

00:11:15.000 Then I took a sort of very long wiggly path across Eurasia to Singapore, which took, you know, nine, ten months or so.

00:11:23.000 Jesus Christ!

00:11:25.000 But I didn't know what route I was going to be taking for that.

00:11:28.000 Again, I didn't allow myself to get too bogged down with details.

00:11:32.000 And also, over the course of nearly half a decade, so much changes.

00:11:36.000 The Arab Spring happened after I started.

00:11:38.000 So the Middle East, the geography and the geopolitics of the Middle East totally changed after I started before I got back around to that part of the world.

00:11:47.000 Is this your bike?

00:11:48.000 That is the second of two bikes.

00:11:51.000 Did one of them break?

00:11:53.000 The other one, the one I started with, I got off eBay for £100 second hand.

00:11:58.000 Not a great bike, you know, basic.

00:12:01.000 And that one got me all the way about 34,000 miles to Cape Town.

00:12:06.000 And then that bike was sadly stolen.

00:12:08.000 It was locked up on the street.

00:12:10.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:12:11.000 And coincidentally, that afternoon, I'd been invited on a radio show to talk about my trip, and the DJ asked me about his bike, you know, and Capetonians, you know, they're into cycling, mountain biking.

00:12:21.000 And I think he was expecting some specs or, you know, what I was riding.

00:12:25.000 And all I could really say is, actually, it got stolen this morning.

00:12:28.000 And he...

00:12:28.000 I'm about to murder an accident, and you'll get angry emails.

00:12:31.000 But he said, oh, no, that's absolutely terrible.

00:12:34.000 Like, let's get this boy a bicycle.

00:12:35.000 We can get him back home.

00:12:36.000 And he said, any of you listeners out there, you've got a bicycle.

00:12:39.000 You send us a message.

00:12:40.000 We'll get it to this boy.

00:12:42.000 And about six or seven bikes were sort of presented to me the next day.

00:12:46.000 Well, I had to go around the city and collect them all up.

00:12:48.000 But a couple of kids' bikes.

00:12:50.000 One was an antique.

00:12:51.000 One had been found in a canal area.

00:12:52.000 The frame of which I ended up using.

00:12:54.000 So I took them all apart and I made one bike from all the different parts.

00:12:57.000 And just the bottom bracket, the kind of part between the pedals in that sort of hub, that was the only part I got from a shop.

00:13:04.000 And the rest was just these decimated bikes, kind of bastardized into this one Frankenstein frame.

00:13:11.000 Well, that's a cool story.

00:13:13.000 And so then this bike you rode for the remainder of the journey.

00:13:16.000 Yeah, that got me 10,000 miles in one year back home.

00:13:20.000 And then was stolen a few weeks later in London.

00:13:22.000 Was it really?

00:13:23.000 Yeah, it was basically unrideable by that point.

00:13:25.000 I can't tell which one.

00:13:26.000 Yeah, that's the first one.

00:13:27.000 That's up in Tibet.

00:13:28.000 How long do bike tires last?

00:13:30.000 Because I know you change car tires.

00:13:32.000 I don't think I've ever changed a bike tire, but I can imagine the rubber.

00:13:35.000 Oh, they definitely wear out.

00:13:36.000 Yeah.

00:13:37.000 I think...

00:13:38.000 I kept a tally of all this stuff.

00:13:40.000 I think I got through something like 20 tires.

00:13:42.000 But, I mean, they last a little longer if you don't buy a pair for $3 in an African village that are made in China. 1.00

00:13:47.000 Is that what you did?

00:13:48.000 No, I could, you know, just got whatever I could.

00:13:50.000 And I think 256 punctures, 20 or so chains.

00:13:55.000 Like, you know, there's a phrase in the UK, Trigger's Broom.

00:13:59.000 There was an old TV show called Only Fools and Horses where some not-too-bright character gets an award from the council.

00:14:04.000 He's a street sweeper.

00:14:05.000 For having the same broom for 17 years.

00:14:08.000 And after he's given this medal, he says, no, it takes a lot of dedication to care for a broom.

00:14:13.000 This broom's had 17 new handles and 25 new heads over the years.

00:14:18.000 And that's kind of what the bike was like.

00:14:19.000 Besides the frame, just about every other part was slowly swapped out as I went around.

00:14:23.000 Wow.

00:14:24.000 And when you're traveling through all these places, what kind of language barriers are there?

00:14:32.000 Do you understand other languages besides English?

00:14:35.000 I'm not a natural linguist.

00:14:38.000 I can get by in French.

00:14:39.000 That was handy in sort of Central and West Africa.

00:14:43.000 I picked up and sort of worked quite hard at Russian.

00:14:46.000 I've got some Russian, which in the Stan, Central Asia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, etc.

00:14:52.000 That was handy.

00:14:53.000 When you say picked up, did you pick up on the fly or did you prepare?

00:14:57.000 Probably a few months before I got to that part of the world, I picked up some audio lessons and just sort of listened to them while I was on the road.

00:15:07.000 And then I got quite good at just sort of, I guess, charades.

00:15:11.000 China was always linguistically the hardest place.

00:15:14.000 But even after I learned how to ask for an egg in a village shop in some rural area, I still preferred to do it the way I'd done for weeks up to that point, which was go into a shop and start flapping, clucking your wings and clucking slightly more and more manically.

00:15:29.000 And then putting out from behind me an egg and pointing at it.

00:15:33.000 They go, oh, the foreigner wants an egg. 1.00

00:15:35.000 Yeah, we'll get him some eggs.

00:15:35.000 Oh, that's hilarious.

00:15:36.000 So you can make a bit of a game of it.

00:15:39.000 And of course, in lots of parts of the world, there are plenty of people who do speak good English.

00:15:43.000 So...

00:15:46.000 I wasn't washing a great deal at this time in my life, you know, living in a tent, getting the odd splash wash in a puddle or a river or whatever.

00:15:52.000 And so my hands, which were in front of me on the bike's handlebars most of the day, when I arrived in a new country, I'd find the first English speaker I could and ask them how to...

00:16:03.000 Count to ten in their language.

00:16:05.000 And then I'd write on my knuckles, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten on each hand.

00:16:09.000 And then, you know, on the palm, hot, cold, yes, no, good, bad, up, down, left, right.

00:16:14.000 Just a whole bunch of vocabulary.

00:16:16.000 And that, you know, you pick it up pretty quick when it's in front of you for maybe six, eight hours in a day.

00:16:20.000 And when that was done, I'd wash them off and maybe learn some new words and sort of carry on.

00:16:24.000 So even though I was passing through regions and didn't have all that long to get to grips with many languages, I got a bit of a head start with that.

00:16:31.000 Oh wow.

00:16:32.000 What is it like when you're alone for that long?

00:16:37.000 That's probably the biggest challenge and I've definitely got better at that over the years but when I was off on that bike trip you know there were There were times, particularly up in Tibet, where that picture was, that the road I was following in Tibet is the western sort of approach to Tibet.

00:16:51.000 And on a good day, I was there in winter, which is not ideal.

00:16:54.000 It's cold.

00:16:55.000 But on a good day, there'd be maybe one vehicle going in either direction.

00:16:58.000 But often there'd be several days at a time with no vehicles and there were no settlements along the way.

00:17:05.000 And later on, to get into Tibet, I didn't have permission.

00:17:09.000 So I had to, in the night, I cut a hole in the fence of the military base and snuck into Tibet.

00:17:15.000 So beyond that point, I was having to kind of hide.

00:17:16.000 To get into Tibet.

00:17:17.000 So it's difficult to get into Tibet?

00:17:19.000 Yeah.

00:17:19.000 So Tibet used to be an independent country.

00:17:23.000 A lot of protests.

00:17:24.000 Most ethnic Tibetan people don't want to be part of China.

00:17:27.000 But in the 50s, the People's Liberation Army.

00:17:31.000 Marched in.

00:17:32.000 And this was only a couple of years after the Beijing Olympics.

00:17:37.000 And in the lead up to those, there were in Lhasa, the capital, I think it was around three dozen self-immolations.

00:17:45.000 You're aware of that phrase?

00:17:46.000 Yeah.

00:17:48.000 And for the listeners who might not know.

00:17:50.000 Well, they probably know from the Rage Against the Machine cover.

00:17:52.000 Yeah, exactly that.

00:17:54.000 So people marching out in front of the soldiers or the police, pouring a tin of petrol over themselves or gasoline, lighting themselves on fire and burning to death in protest at what they see as the occupation of their country.

00:18:08.000 And of course, the Chinese government doesn't want people seeing these sorts of scenes.

00:18:12.000 So they made the whole area off limits to foreigners.

00:18:14.000 And basically, well, it still is really.

00:18:16.000 You can visit limited little pockets in Lhasa, the capital, and a couple of other kind of temples in towns nearby.

00:18:24.000 But to do that, you've got to be in a group with a guide and a vehicle and permits and, you know, it's expensive and you're just not allowed to travel by yourself with a bike.

00:18:34.000 So that was the only way I could get in was to sort of sneak in.

00:18:37.000 But after that point, I was then having to hide the whole time and to bring it back to your question, the loneliness there, I really, really struggled.

00:18:44.000 You know, I was up there for about six weeks and...

00:18:46.000 I probably had two conversations in that time.

00:18:49.000 It was really hard.

00:18:50.000 But now I've got a lot better at it.

00:18:53.000 I keep meaning to look this up.

00:18:56.000 It's one of those people that's always quoted.

00:18:58.000 It'll be Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain, someone like that, once said that loneliness is the paucity of one's own company.

00:19:05.000 And solitude is the richness of it.

00:19:08.000 And it's two sides of the same coin.

00:19:10.000 So being by yourself can totally suck, but if you just kind of try and flip the perspective a bit, and it's not always possible, and it's certainly not easy, you can then enjoy the space, the peace, the freedom, particularly if you've got a busy life when you go back home.

00:19:24.000 It is an interesting thing about human beings that we seem to have a requirement for other people's company.

00:19:29.000 I mean, we really do.

00:19:31.000 We do enjoy moments of solitude, like sitting on a dock, looking out at an ocean, just relaxing maybe, having a cup of coffee by yourself.

00:19:42.000 If that goes on for too long, we have like a deep feeling of longing and a sorrow comes over us.

00:19:50.000 Well, we're pack animals.

00:19:51.000 Yeah.

00:19:52.000 And, you know, I guess this is my cod evolutionary sort of take on it.

00:19:57.000 But I suppose anyone over the millions of years of our evolution who had that instinct to always be by themselves probably wouldn't have been passing their genes on so much.

00:20:06.000 And so, you know, probably would have been bred out.

00:20:08.000 You know, we've selected for people who live in communities.

00:20:11.000 Yeah, it makes sense.

00:20:12.000 It only makes sense.

00:20:12.000 But it's so strange how intense it is when you are alone for long periods of time.

00:20:19.000 And for people that have never experienced that, what you've done in doing that is really extraordinary.

00:20:28.000 And I would imagine it gives you some very unique insight into how your own mind works.

00:20:33.000 Yeah.

00:20:36.000 I think I've always been relatively good in my own company.

00:20:39.000 I suppose...

00:20:41.000 Years ago, I might have referred to myself as a loner in the positive sense of that word.

00:20:46.000 I guess it's probably a bit of an insult as well.

00:20:49.000 But I do like my own company.

00:20:51.000 I'm happy in my own company.

00:20:52.000 But I have got...

00:20:53.000 I suppose over long periods, I would realize later that I'd essentially de-socialized.

00:20:59.000 And suddenly being back in a community or around people where I can have a conversation, it just takes a bit of time to kind of...

00:21:11.000 You've got no one else to answer to.

00:21:13.000 It's total freedom and that can be an indulgence, a self-indulgence.

00:21:20.000 I mean, I've never spent that kind of time alone, but I've spent time in the woods.

00:21:25.000 And when you're by yourself for a day or two, one of the things that always hits me is you start evaluating your own life, evaluating relationships, evaluating friendships, evaluating work, various things that you don't normally think about in such great depth.

00:21:44.000 When you're alone and you don't have anyone to talk to, it's like those are the things that the mind wants to dig up and maybe examine.

00:21:52.000 Did you find that?

00:21:54.000 Definitely.

00:21:55.000 And it's definitely a positive thing to do.

00:21:58.000 The more time you've got to chew things over, the more to grips you're going to get with any problems in your life or whatever it might be.

00:22:07.000 And then there's always the temptation, which I... I'm quite regimented with myself about how long I allow myself to listen to music or podcasts or whatever in any given day when I'm off doing some trip like this.

00:22:20.000 I mean, I first came across your podcast when I was in the Congo, I think.

00:22:24.000 And, you know, podcasts are great, but suddenly you've got company all day and that's a way to...

00:22:30.000 Thinking about and learning about whatever's been spoken about, but you're not exploring things by yourself in the way that you can if you just have silence and peace.

00:22:38.000 And I'm quite strict with myself.

00:22:40.000 Like on my latest trip, I'd allow myself in the morning an hour of listening to something, and then in the afternoon maybe another hour at some point, and then while cooking dinner I could listen to something like that.

00:22:50.000 How did you decide that amount of time?

00:22:54.000 It was arbitrary, essentially.

00:22:56.000 It just needed to ensure that I wasn't doing that all the time.

00:23:01.000 It wouldn't always be exactly an hour, but maybe a podcast.

00:23:04.000 One of yours is the whole morning, of course.

00:23:07.000 Something short like that.

00:23:09.000 You went through the Congo on a bike?

00:23:12.000 I started on a bike.

00:23:14.000 I was actually with someone else for this part.

00:23:15.000 This is the bike journey.

00:23:17.000 So this was 2014. A guy from Scotland who I'd met, he was motorbiking down the east coast of Africa with a couple of friends.

00:23:27.000 I think about seven times.

00:23:28.000 We kept bumping into each other.

00:23:30.000 They were covering a lot more ground.

00:23:32.000 They were taking a more circuitous route than me.

00:23:34.000 But in Cape Town, him and I spent a bit of time together and he said, hey, when you go to Congo, I'll fly up and I'll join you.

00:23:40.000 And so in the capital of Zambia, Lusaka, he flew up, he bought a bike for I think about 90 pounds, like a sort of three-gear, shitty, heavy, sort of strong bike.

00:23:51.000 And we cycled into Congo DRC. There's two Congos, the big one, the fucked up one, I guess. 1.00

00:23:59.000 We cycled across the border in the south in the Copper Belt and then followed the border all the way across the south of the country until eventually the road we were following just kind of ran out. 0.98

00:24:08.000 But there was a river there and we had been aware that this was going to happen.

00:24:11.000 The Lulua is the name of the river.

00:24:13.000 And so we bought a dugout canoe, or a pirog, they call it there, which is essentially just a tree trunk with the inside scooped out.

00:24:20.000 You know, it's a sort of typical, I suppose you'd say, tribal canoe that you'd see right across the world in South America, in sub-Saharan Africa, in Papua New Guinea, the same sort of thing.

00:24:31.000 We bought one that was about five and a half meters long, I think.

00:24:34.000 And for the next month, we kind of battled this thing down a river.

00:24:38.000 But as we say, it was not in great shape.

00:24:41.000 And we had to get in all our gear and two bicycles and these things sit really low in the water.

00:24:46.000 Maybe two inches of clearance, you know, any small rapids, the water's coming in and you're going down.

00:24:51.000 But as we, after we bought it, we pulled it up onto the riverbank and we turned it upside down and we were patching some little leaks and cracks and trying to kind of brace it.

00:25:00.000 And the whole village just gathered around us in this big excited but concerned crowd and they were tutting and shaking their heads.

00:25:06.000 And a sort of spokesperson essentially stepped forward and said, really, I don't think you should go on the river.

00:25:13.000 There are rapids and waterfalls.

00:25:15.000 And we're like, yeah, you'll be right.

00:25:16.000 And there are hippos and crocodiles.

00:25:17.000 And, you know, if you guys don't drown, you'll be eaten and you'll be dead in a day either way.

00:25:23.000 And we took it with a pinch of salt.

00:25:25.000 And that month was probably the most fraught of my life.

00:25:28.000 It was... 0.95

00:25:29.000 It was ridiculous. 0.93

00:25:30.000 Every day we'd be struggling down rapids. 0.67

00:25:32.000 The smallest little rapid would be enough to sink us.

00:25:34.000 And the boat wouldn't sink.

00:25:34.000 It would just go, you know, down.

00:25:36.000 It would sit, you know, two or three inches under the water.

00:25:39.000 But unless we had them all strapped down, all our bags would start floating off in different directions.

00:25:43.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:25:43.000 And we'd sort of splashing around in the water trying to gather everything.

00:25:45.000 Oh, that one's got the money and the cameras. 0.96

00:25:46.000 Oh, get that bag. 0.99

00:25:47.000 That's got all of our food.

00:25:48.000 Passports over there.

00:25:49.000 And all the while you're wondering when is a crocodile just going to come and sort of grab your ankle.

00:25:53.000 Did you see them?

00:25:54.000 We only saw one.

00:25:56.000 Really?

00:25:57.000 I mean, they're around.

00:25:58.000 Everyone kept saying they're around.

00:25:59.000 Lots of people said they do see them.

00:26:01.000 I think they've been hunted quite a lot over the years.

00:26:04.000 And although these are on the Congo—this is a tributary of the Congo River—they're Nile crocodiles.

00:26:10.000 That's the species.

00:26:11.000 And they grow up to—they get really big.

00:26:13.000 They're 20 feet long.

00:26:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:26:15.000 I think that's about the max.

00:26:16.000 Yeah, they're huge.

00:26:18.000 That's a dangerous animal.

00:26:19.000 Yeah.

00:26:21.000 We were in a really remote area.

00:26:22.000 There were no roads.

00:26:23.000 There were just footpaths connecting villages. 1.00

00:26:25.000 And no one else was stupid enough to travel up and down the river. 0.97

00:26:27.000 People had canoes, pirogs, but they would just use them for fishing. 0.99

00:26:30.000 So they would just sit on the water, play some nets, come back out.

00:26:34.000 And we, one afternoon, were paddling along, and there was this group of maybe 50 men on the riverbank, all just waving and singing and dancing around, shaking machetes about their heads.

00:26:44.000 And so we didn't pull over.

00:26:45.000 We thought, we'll pass by.

00:26:47.000 But a few hundred yards on, there were just two men on the bank, and we pulled up to them and said, you know, what's going on there?

00:26:53.000 And they said, oh, they just killed a crocodile, a big one.

00:26:55.000 And I said, how big?

00:26:56.000 And they said, five metres.

00:26:57.000 So that's about 15, 16 feet.

00:26:58.000 Yeah, so big.

00:27:00.000 One night, a hippo.

00:27:01.000 Well, we'd hear the hippos sort of honking out.

00:27:03.000 Yeah, they make that very particular noise.

00:27:04.000 We'd hear them out on the water.

00:27:05.000 What does a hippo noise sound like?

00:27:06.000 Sort of a...

00:27:07.000 As best I can do.

00:27:11.000 But, yeah, we'd hear those quite a lot at night, and...

00:27:15.000 We had to camp on the riverbank, but the hippos go out for walks around at night, and sometimes there'd be shoulder-high elephant grass, and the only places that we could really pitch a camp would be in these channels that the hippos would tread through it.

00:27:27.000 So, yeah, it was a difficult time.

00:27:30.000 After a month, we finally reached a road, sort of sand tracks, I guess.

00:27:35.000 And a couple days later just managed to get to a town in time for me to collapse into bed with a pretty severe case of malaria.

00:27:41.000 Oh wow.

00:27:42.000 But I had typhoid fever at the same time, so it was like double trouble.

00:27:45.000 Oh boy.

00:27:46.000 So I couldn't really walk for about a week.

00:27:48.000 So yeah, that was a...

00:27:49.000 What did they give you to get over the malaria?

00:27:52.000 Was really lucky I managed to get, we managed to get to a town and I went to the Catholic mission where they had a nurse and said like, Please treat me.

00:28:01.000 Archie is my friend.

00:28:03.000 He'll buy the drugs.

00:28:05.000 And so this nurse, a guy, actually whose name I shouldn't say, he gave me drips of ciprofloxacin and I'm trying to remember.

00:28:22.000 Metanidazole, I think.

00:28:23.000 Two different antibiotics.

00:28:25.000 Just a lot of drips.

00:28:26.000 But the drips were the most frightening thing, because he didn't use clean needles each time.

00:28:29.000 So he would sort of do the drip in the morning, yank it out my arm, and then just kind of hang it over the mosquito net, come back in the afternoon, kind of blow it off, and then plug it straight up into my arm.

00:28:39.000 Great.

00:28:39.000 So if you don't die of malaria, you'd die of infection.

00:28:41.000 Yeah.

00:28:42.000 You know, it was a worrying time.

00:28:43.000 Yeah.

00:28:44.000 Jesus Christ.

00:28:44.000 So how long did it take you to recover from the malaria?

00:28:46.000 Well, I didn't have long because we had to get, you know, our visas were only three months and we'd already been going for over two months.

00:28:52.000 So we had to get out of the country within a certain amount of time.

00:28:55.000 So after, I think it was probably about eight days, we then, you know, I was able to walk here.

00:29:02.000 I was still super weak.

00:29:04.000 We then had to go and sort of get passage on a bus, as they call it there.

00:29:08.000 But this is just a truck with a metal shipping container in the back of it.

00:29:13.000 And we spent about five days on these trucks kind of bouncing around.

00:29:16.000 You either cling to the top.

00:29:17.000 There's no roads.

00:29:17.000 It's all just mud tracks.

00:29:19.000 In the rainy season, which was kind of not far off, it would take a month to do that five-day drive to the capital that we...

00:29:26.000 Because there's been so much mud...

00:29:27.000 Well, yeah, the roads just churn up.

00:29:29.000 The roads, the tracks that we were on were sometimes these sort of channels carved five, six yards deep into the mud.

00:29:37.000 Wow.

00:29:37.000 And so as soon as it starts raining, they're all completely gone.

00:29:41.000 I came across the...

00:29:43.000 So the monsoon arrived six weeks or so later, by which time I was up in the other Congo, way up in the north, kind of near the border of Cameroon and Central African Republic on these mud tracks.

00:29:53.000 And suddenly I just saw all these trucks that had kind of, you know, run off the tracks into the trees.

00:29:57.000 And there were people who had been stuck there for days and days and days.

00:30:01.000 I mean, I couldn't even push my bike.

00:30:02.000 I had to carry it for...

00:30:04.000 About a day and a half, take everything off, carry it for a mile, hide it in a bush, walk back.

00:30:08.000 It was five miles for every one mile forward, just portaging it back and forth. 0.99

00:30:12.000 Holy shit, man. 1.00

00:30:14.000 How much crime did you encounter? 1.00

00:30:16.000 Not a huge amount.

00:30:18.000 I mean, my pocket got picked in Malaysia, which is one of the safest places in the world.

00:30:28.000 My horse got stolen in Mongolia.

00:30:30.000 That happens.

00:30:32.000 You had a horse?

00:30:32.000 Yeah, they're not expensive.

00:30:34.000 How much is a horse?

00:30:35.000 I bought a horse for about £120, so I guess £150 or so.

00:30:39.000 You get a horse for £150?

00:30:41.000 It depends how many...

00:30:42.000 Every few years Mongolia has... 0.81

00:30:44.000 They call it a...

00:30:47.000 Snow on ice event.

00:30:49.000 So essentially, Mongolia winter is really cold.

00:30:52.000 It gets down to about minus 40 Fahrenheit or Celsius.

00:30:56.000 And if it snows and then thaws and then freezes, you get this crust of ice over the ground.

00:31:05.000 The horses, which are kind of left to their own devices over winter, they're kind of semi-feral, it's called.

00:31:09.000 They're kind of half-wild.

00:31:12.000 They can't break through that crust of ice as they would with snow with their hooves to get to the grass.

00:31:17.000 So come spring, actually last time I was in Mongolia, the whole countryside was just littered with corpses of sheep and horses and goats.

00:31:23.000 So if they've had a bad winter before, sometimes they lose up to about a third of their kind of national livestock, then horses cost quite a lot.

00:31:30.000 But it wasn't too bad when I was there.

00:31:32.000 The horse I would, at night, so I spent about two months hiking across Mongolia with this horse.

00:31:38.000 I tried to ride it, but it was so small, a tiny little pony.

00:31:41.000 I'd gone to quite a lot of effort to find a horse that was up to the challenge.

00:31:44.000 I went out into this village outside the capital city, asked around.

00:31:50.000 And, you know, you can't do anything there without having to drink copious amounts of vodka. 0.99

00:31:53.000 It's a real pain in the ass, to be honest. 0.99

00:31:54.000 You have to? 0.99

00:31:55.000 Yeah, I mean, that's just the way everything is done.

00:31:58.000 How so?

00:31:59.000 Well, hey, you want to come and look at a horse?

00:32:01.000 Great.

00:32:01.000 Well, let's first drink some vodka and we'll pour a little offering to the gods and we'll flick a little bit into the sky as an offering to the sky god.

00:32:08.000 You know, it'd be rude to refuse because, you know, it's an offering.

00:32:11.000 Right.

00:32:11.000 And then, I mean, to be fair, I was in my mid-twenties, so I was, you know, I was quite happy just to drink the stuff.

00:32:17.000 But, you know, this kind of quite unpleasant paint-stripping vodka and just bottles and bottles and bottles.

00:32:21.000 So I spent this long day going from person to person to person out, you know, in the sticks, you know, driving across, you know, grasslands, you know, off-road.

00:32:29.000 And finally, we met these people who had a, this guy had a horse to sell.

00:32:33.000 And he said, yeah, here's the horse.

00:32:35.000 Do you want to check it out?

00:32:36.000 And I was like, all right.

00:32:36.000 I had never ridden a horse before.

00:32:38.000 I didn't know what I was looking for.

00:32:39.000 But I thought, I'll check out the hooves.

00:32:40.000 I was about to try and check the back hooves.

00:32:42.000 And they're like, no, no, no, don't do that. 0.96

00:32:43.000 You'll get your face kicked off.

00:32:45.000 But I checked the front hooves. 0.95

00:32:46.000 I checked its teeth.

00:32:48.000 She was a female horse. 1.00

00:32:50.000 Didn't look too old.

00:32:53.000 Decent, strong.

00:32:55.000 Coat was in good condition.

00:32:56.000 I thought, yeah, this is fine.

00:32:57.000 And we agreed a price.

00:32:58.000 And about two days later, I had to go back to the capital to get my stuff, buy a saddle.

00:33:03.000 About two days later, I came back, met the guy, and he presented me with this horse. 0.97

00:33:06.000 I was like, well, that's a different colour and it's got testicles. 0.51

00:33:08.000 So that's a different horse altogether, but there wasn't really much I could do about it.

00:33:13.000 So this horse didn't really take to being ridden.

00:33:15.000 I don't think it was too small.

00:33:17.000 I don't think he could really cope with me and my not very heavy bags.

00:33:20.000 So you just used it sort of as a pack horse?

00:33:22.000 Pack horse, yeah.

00:33:23.000 So we walked, and at night I would make a fire.

00:33:25.000 You'd hear wolves howling often.

00:33:28.000 I'd make a fire and sort of tether the horse 10 yards away, and that's kind of the first line of defense.

00:33:33.000 And one morning the horse had been, you know, the tether had been cut and someone had been in the night.

00:33:37.000 But I pretty much got to where I was going.

00:33:38.000 Oh, before I forget, this is a Mongolian wolf tooth for you, which an old hunter gave me.

00:33:43.000 He claimed that he shot the wolf, but I was not 100% sure about that.

00:33:46.000 Why is that?

00:33:48.000 Well, there's a kind of braggadocio element to it.

00:33:52.000 It's kind of a macho thing to have shot wolves.

00:33:54.000 And I met a lot of people who said, yeah, I've killed many wolves.

00:33:56.000 But back in Soviet times, Mongolia was kind of a satellite.

00:33:59.000 It wasn't technically part of the Soviet empire, but it was sort of a protectorate.

00:34:03.000 There used to be a quota.

00:34:04.000 Every Mongolian man had to kill two wolves each year to sort of keep their numbers down.

00:34:08.000 Otherwise, they would decimate the livestock. 0.71

00:34:11.000 Anyway, that's from a wolf that he got hold of somehow.

00:34:15.000 Maybe he shot it.

00:34:16.000 You're skeptical though.

00:34:18.000 Well, I'm kind of a skeptic generally, I think.

00:34:22.000 And the way he told me, it didn't give me necessarily the impression that he had shot it.

00:34:28.000 Do you know the story about the World War I Russian-German standoff with wolves?

00:34:33.000 They took like a two-day truce, right?

00:34:35.000 Yeah.

00:34:35.000 They took a truce.

00:34:37.000 They stopped fighting to kill the wolves because there were so many soldiers who were getting killed by wolves.

00:34:41.000 They were losing like one or two soldiers a day or something.

00:34:43.000 It was something insane.

00:34:44.000 Well, the problem was, you know, they were fighting trench warfare, right?

00:34:48.000 And so they would get shot and they would be crying and screaming out in these trenches.

00:34:53.000 And then you would hear...

00:34:56.000 People would be eaten alive by wolves.

00:34:58.000 The wolves would find these wounded soldiers and tear them apart.

00:35:02.000 And then people would go out on scouting missions and they wouldn't find anything but boots and pieces of their clothes covered in blood.

00:35:09.000 And then they realized, like, Jesus Christ, we're losing more people to wolves than we are to the Germans or the Russians. 0.82

00:35:15.000 Actually, just earlier this year, I came across a memorial to Finnish POWs who had been sent up to this distant part of Siberia from that war, people who had been captured.

00:35:24.000 It was crazy to think they'd been captured way out there in Europe, and they'd been sent to this desolate spot at the end of the continent and just told to fish to supply the Russian Navy, I think it was.

00:35:35.000 But there were all these...

00:35:38.000 The cliffs at the north of Asia, facing out, you can't imagine a more barren, isolated, brutal spot.

00:35:45.000 I saw one, I was told there was another somewhere nearby that I didn't spot.

00:35:49.000 Just a crucifix set up for the dead Finns. 1.00

00:35:52.000 I don't know how many were sent out there.

00:35:54.000 So if the wolves don't get you, and the Russians do, then the cold will get you eventually. 0.99

00:36:00.000 What was the terrain like in Mongolia when you're making your way through this?

00:36:06.000 Mostly steppe grassland, but I went through some sort of low mountains.

00:36:13.000 It's an incredible country, Mongolia.

00:36:16.000 It's just so ripe for adventure.

00:36:19.000 It's about the same size as Spain, France, and Germany put together, but the population's just over three million.

00:36:25.000 Oh, wow.

00:36:26.000 It's the most sparsely populated country on Earth.

00:36:28.000 Really?

00:36:29.000 It's kind of a person per square kilometer.

00:36:33.000 But more than half the population live in the capital, and there are a handful of other, not big, but towns.

00:36:38.000 And so the countryside is just open.

00:36:40.000 What is the capital like?

00:36:44.000 It's changed a lot since I first went.

00:36:47.000 It was all just kind of grim Soviet apartment blocks. 0.95

00:36:51.000 And it's set in this kind of valley.

00:36:53.000 In winter, I've not been there in winter, but in winter it's the most polluted city on earth.

00:36:57.000 Because everyone, there's kind of increasingly people are being drawn into the capital from outside and they come in and set up their yurts or gurs as they call them, these kind of circular felt tents which you can survive the harshest conditions in. 0.99

00:37:09.000 But to heat them, they're just using coal or yak shit or horse shit or cow shit. 0.98

00:37:15.000 And so just all of the particulate matter. 0.98

00:37:18.000 So it's the most polluted by a particular count on the PM10, I think, the size of particle, which I think if you breathe in, they can get quite deep into your lungs, but not all the way to the tips like that tiny ones in Beijing, for instance.

00:37:34.000 But, yeah, there's just this kind of pool of pollution that hangs over this narrow, long valley that the capital stretched along.

00:37:40.000 But recently, you know, they've got, I think there's like a Shangri-La there now and some high glass buildings, and it's changing quite a lot.

00:37:46.000 They had in about 2012, they opened a huge mine, I think Tokdokoy, I think the name, I forget.

00:37:54.000 But in 2012, The Economist magazine found Mongolia to have the world's fastest growing economy.

00:38:00.000 Because they opened this one mine and overnight the economy grew by 40% that month.

00:38:05.000 It's all relative, right?

00:38:07.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:38:08.000 It was a very, very low base start line.

00:38:11.000 But yeah, I think that's largely gold and copper.

00:38:13.000 And since then there's been a lot of wrangling over how much, what percentage of the profits is kept channeled into Mongolia and what percentage goes outside.

00:38:22.000 But I think that's turned the country around quite a lot.

00:38:25.000 But there's no fences.

00:38:26.000 The whole countryside is just...

00:38:27.000 There's the Gobi Desert.

00:38:28.000 There's...

00:38:29.000 There's sort of taiga, like Siberian forest across the north.

00:38:32.000 There are the Altai mountains in the west.

00:38:34.000 The rest is grasslands and there's lakes and rivers everywhere.

00:38:37.000 And there's just no fences.

00:38:37.000 It's all common land.

00:38:39.000 And you can just head wherever you want.

00:38:41.000 It's awesome.

00:38:41.000 It's really great.

00:38:42.000 It's wild that they still use those felt tents, because that was literally what Genghis Khan... 0.76

00:38:48.000 Yeah, exactly the same.

00:38:49.000 And nowadays they'll have maybe a car battery to run.

00:38:53.000 They'll have a satellite dish and a TV, and it's changing quite a lot.

00:38:58.000 I mean, there's only one or two homes that still looked...

00:39:02.000 Really quite similar internally, how they would have 800 years ago when Chinggis Khan was charging across the continent. 1.00

00:39:09.000 Wow.

00:39:10.000 And so this trek through Mongolia took you how long?

00:39:14.000 I was there for three months in total.

00:39:17.000 So I did two months on the horse, and then once the horse was pinched, I got to more or less where I wanted to go.

00:39:22.000 And so then I got the bike back and carried on cycling through to Central Asia.

00:39:28.000 And then once you get to Central Asia, then how long before you get back to where you wanted to go?

00:39:35.000 Well, this was all part of that same long bike ride.

00:39:37.000 So, you know, there was probably still two years to go to get down three.

00:39:45.000 Probably.

00:39:45.000 That's so crazy.

00:39:47.000 Two and a half, perhaps, to get down three.

00:39:48.000 That is so crazy.

00:39:49.000 Through, like, Central Asia, the Middle East, and down the whole east side of Africa.

00:39:53.000 Now, are you corresponding with anyone back home while this is happening?

00:39:57.000 Do people know you're safe?

00:39:58.000 Like, how are you...

00:39:59.000 I emailed as and when I could.

00:40:02.000 When I took the ferry from Britain to France at the beginning of the trip, phones were different back then.

00:40:11.000 It wasn't a Nokia 3310, but it was something along those lines.

00:40:14.000 This is 2010. I think the first iPhone might have just come out, but it was a long time ago.

00:40:18.000 I'm thinking that was 2007, if I remember correctly.

00:40:22.000 Oh, right.

00:40:22.000 Okay.

00:40:23.000 Wasn't it?

00:40:24.000 Something like that.

00:40:25.000 I think the first iPhone, somewhere around then.

00:40:28.000 I didn't want a phone.

00:40:31.000 I wanted freedom from all that.

00:40:34.000 My plan had been, I arranged my phone contract or company that the contract would run out around about that time.

00:40:39.000 I planned when crossing the channel to go up to the top of the ferry and just hurl it into the sea.

00:40:46.000 The ferry company kindly gave me a free crossing in their club class and the bar was quite open.

00:40:53.000 So I didn't get around to that.

00:40:54.000 And a few weeks later, I just sort of tossed it in a lake in Sweden, which with hindsight, I don't feel good about.

00:40:59.000 Yeah, that's plastic.

00:40:59.000 I shouldn't have done that.

00:41:00.000 But it's symbolic.

00:41:02.000 Yeah.

00:41:02.000 So I didn't, you know, I kept in touch with family through email as best as often as I could.

00:41:08.000 Just use like internet cafes?

00:41:10.000 Exactly.

00:41:10.000 Yeah.

00:41:11.000 Or if, you know, if I couldn't find that, I'd just, I mean, I got quite good at just like going into a You know, some random office and say, hey, can I use your computer?

00:41:19.000 Really?

00:41:19.000 People were surprisingly receptive.

00:41:21.000 You know, you're in the middle of, you know, Iraqi Kurdistan.

00:41:24.000 Can I use your computer?

00:41:25.000 Yeah, yeah, sure.

00:41:26.000 Just turn it off when you're done.

00:41:27.000 Oh, thanks.

00:41:28.000 Wow.

00:41:28.000 People are very friendly wherever you go, broadly speaking.

00:41:31.000 That's really fascinating because you probably have a different perspective of just running into strangers in other countries than most people do.

00:41:38.000 Most people would think that people would be very hesitant.

00:41:41.000 You know, some weird Englishman shows up and wants to use your computer.

00:41:47.000 Wherever I go, I tend to be a bit of a novelty, so people are interested initially.

00:41:53.000 Did you anticipate that?

00:41:55.000 What did you think you were going to be able to do, or did you just figure it out along the way?

00:42:00.000 Yeah, I just figured it out as I went.

00:42:02.000 So you didn't have any plan, like, this is how I'll make sure that everyone knows I'm okay?

00:42:06.000 No, no.

00:42:08.000 You know, back then I probably wasn't great at sort of keeping my parents in the loop exactly as to where I was.

00:42:14.000 And when I went to Afghanistan, I didn't tell them about it.

00:42:16.000 I told one friend and said, if you don't hear from me in six weeks, then perhaps call the government.

00:42:22.000 And so I, you know, I tried to keep them sort of as unworried as possible.

00:42:28.000 Which, I mean, I've got three siblings, so there's spares.

00:42:31.000 It's alright.

00:42:34.000 Spares.

00:42:35.000 So, when you get done with this trip, I mean, this is a four-year trip.

00:42:39.000 What do you do?

00:42:41.000 Do you have a home at this point in time, or did you not have an apartment anymore?

00:42:45.000 No, I had nowhere to...

00:42:48.000 I mean, I went back to my parents' place for a few weeks, and I had £30 to my name when I came back.

00:42:53.000 What is the first day back like?

00:42:55.000 Like when you show up at your parents' house, what is that like?

00:42:59.000 Weird.

00:43:00.000 About two months before I finished, I think I was still somewhere in southern Morocco or Mauritania, my dad said via email, you know, let's have a party when you get back.

00:43:09.000 Let's have sort of a homecoming.

00:43:10.000 And so we arranged, we picked a time and a date and arranged a place in London.

00:43:16.000 A street where friends and family could come and gather and we had a little sort of welcome home party.

00:43:20.000 So I was told, yeah, at the stroke of seven o'clock, you've got to be here on this street.

00:43:24.000 And I, you know, turned up and there were, you know, 120, 150 people, some of whom I hadn't seen for years and years and years.

00:43:32.000 It was totally surreal.

00:43:34.000 Wow.

00:43:34.000 I was still quite, the six months following, this was about six months on from when I was ill in Congo, my health hadn't been good throughout that.

00:43:42.000 So I'd been on my ride up through France, for instance, winter was coming and I was getting these incredible like stomach cramps every now and then.

00:43:48.000 I'd have to, I remember one particular day when I basically just kind of veered off the road in a village and fell into someone's woodshed.

00:43:54.000 And then about 10 minutes later, I kind of came round and there was just this elderly French couple standing over me, not wondering what to do with me.

00:44:00.000 So I wasn't particularly well. 0.74

00:44:01.000 But I turned up at this homecoming party with a beard down to my tits and hair down to my shoulders. 0.93

00:44:07.000 I looked at a right state, to be honest. 0.69

00:44:09.000 And it was strange how quickly I felt normal back among people again, initially at least.

00:44:16.000 It was over the coming days that the weird itch of wanting to move came back.

00:44:22.000 So you got wanderlust almost immediately afterwards.

00:44:26.000 Yeah, I guess a couple of weeks on, the novelty of having a comfy bed each night wore off pretty quick.

00:44:31.000 And I needed to find a job to earn some money, so I picked up the first job I could find.

00:44:37.000 And it was not the sort of job that I think I was going to do long term, but it was just enough to get me back on my feet.

00:44:44.000 What did you do?

00:44:44.000 I sold luxury tours to China for a travel company.

00:44:50.000 And so I'd talk to clients saying, oh, you know, you've got to go to this place.

00:44:54.000 It's great.

00:44:55.000 And they say, what was your experience like then?

00:44:56.000 I said, well, the ground's good and firm.

00:44:57.000 You can put a tent wherever you want.

00:44:59.000 But, you know, the Hyatt will probably be comfortable.

00:45:01.000 You'll be fine.

00:45:03.000 Yeah, that was not necessarily the best fit for me as a job.

00:45:08.000 But soon after that, I started planning the next trip and started writing these books.

00:45:12.000 And sort of since then, I've kind of turned that into a career.

00:45:16.000 So immediately you sort of understood when you returned, like, this is not a one-off.

00:45:21.000 This is something you're just going to continue to do.

00:45:23.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:45:24.000 Well, people started asking me to give presentations about the trip I'd been on, you know, sort of photo slideshows, I guess.

00:45:30.000 And I started doing more and more of those at, you know, to village halls and clubs and festivals and schools and businesses.

00:45:36.000 And that slowly became, like, about half of my living.

00:45:39.000 And I realized, no, I could do this for a job.

00:45:41.000 You know, this could be a living and enable me to carry on, you know, taking on challenges.

00:45:46.000 So since then, you know, there's always something in the pipeline.

00:45:50.000 Do some sort of journey, come back, relate the story, write about it, repeat.

00:45:55.000 Now, when you start up again, is there any hesitation about the length of the trip?

00:46:04.000 That four-year thing, even though I'm sure it must have been a fascinating and wonderful experience, there had to be a little bit of a hesitation of committing to that much of your life again.

00:46:17.000 I mean, the longest I've done since then is eight months, so it's a lot different.

00:46:22.000 And the last couple have been two or three months.

00:46:24.000 But was it because of that four-year one where you're like, that's a little much?

00:46:29.000 Well, you just, you know, you get a bit more settled.

00:46:31.000 Also, now I've started to kind of build a career.

00:46:33.000 You don't want to totally put everything on pause for a huge amount of time again.

00:46:37.000 You mean by build a career, the writing?

00:46:39.000 Yeah, the writing and the speaking.

00:46:41.000 And, you know, it's not like I have, you know, a monthly paycheck or, you know, a salary, a pension, anything like that.

00:46:49.000 So you kind of got to keep feeding the beast.

00:46:50.000 And so for the speeches, like, what are you doing?

00:46:53.000 Are you, like, posting up at a theater and people come to see you talk?

00:46:56.000 I do some at theatres, a lot at schools, ones for businesses will be at conferences or they just want someone to come in for the afternoon to kind of, you know, spark up their team or, you know, a real variety, all sorts of different events.

00:47:09.000 You would be the last person I would want to have come to talk.

00:47:12.000 Because I was like, these people are going to quit and they're going to go wander the world.

00:47:16.000 I'm going to have no workforce.

00:47:17.000 I've spoken to a handful of CEOs about that.

00:47:20.000 And one, maybe charitably, but I think he was right.

00:47:24.000 He said, you know, I kind of said what you said as a joke.

00:47:28.000 And he said, well, you know what, if I've got a member of staff, if I've got an employee who wants to go away for that huge amount of time, then they probably shouldn't be working for me.

00:47:37.000 That's not going to be the most motivated person. 0.99

00:47:40.000 But I'm not there to say, hey, quit your job and fuck off for years on a bicycle. 0.99

00:47:47.000 I'm there to try and... 0.99

00:47:48.000 With businesses, it's different talks, different events, it's all different.

00:47:51.000 But with businesses, I'm there to...

00:47:53.000 To take some of the lessons about resilience, ambition, etc.

00:47:58.000 from what I've been doing and try and apply that to their lives, to their setting.

00:48:03.000 But aren't those lessons only learned through the experiences?

00:48:07.000 I mean, I would imagine...

00:48:09.000 They're definitely best learned through experiences.

00:48:11.000 But I think you can, in the same way that...

00:48:14.000 I mean, one of the biggest genres of literature is self-help, right?

00:48:17.000 And that's just reading about it.

00:48:19.000 I think most of that is nonsense, though.

00:48:22.000 I think, like, literally, when I look at, like, self-help books and self-help people and mentors and stuff, there's a large percentage, more than half, that's nonsense.

00:48:33.000 At the risk of insulting a few people I know, I totally agree with you.

00:48:37.000 But then again, I haven't read those books, and also... 0.98

00:48:40.000 I haven't read all of them, clearly, but I've read enough bullshit where I'm like, God... 0.83

00:48:45.000 Yeah, well, there's a huge tendency out there for people to kind of take on the persona of a guru, essentially. 0.97

00:48:52.000 And there's so many charlatans out there.

00:48:54.000 There are so many...

00:48:55.000 You know, it's like with a lot of esoteric pursuits and alternative things.

00:49:00.000 You know, there's things that are rooted in fact or that are kind of, you know, veering that way.

00:49:05.000 And there are things that are...

00:49:06.000 I mean, like mediums, for instance. 0.93

00:49:09.000 I mean, I've got...

00:49:10.000 I don't mind saying it.

00:49:11.000 I don't care how many people are listening.

00:49:12.000 I've got no time for that because...

00:49:14.000 As far as I'm concerned, I think the two ways they describe it are they're either open eye, which means they know they're conning everyone, or they're shut eye, which means that they genuinely believe what they're doing.

00:49:25.000 And that's a different thing.

00:49:27.000 I'm kind of fine with that.

00:49:28.000 It's just I don't think they're right.

00:49:29.000 Yeah, I have a friend who went to a medium, and it's kind of a hilarious story because he goes, he knew everything about my grandmother, knew everything about this.

00:49:38.000 I go, don't you know everything about your grandmother? 0.92

00:49:40.000 What the fuck is the point of someone telling you some things you already know? 0.97

00:49:43.000 Yeah, that are on our Facebook page. 0.98

00:49:44.000 Do you think that it's possible that these were leading questions and that through these leading questions, they sort of talked you into giving them the answers?

00:49:54.000 And you can see the look on his face when he was kind of...

00:49:57.000 Resisting but realizing that I might be right, but didn't want to admit that he got hosed.

00:50:01.000 I think a lot of people just want to believe it.

00:50:03.000 And that's also totally understandable.

00:50:05.000 It's the same from my perspective with belief in afterlife.

00:50:09.000 People want to believe that because it's comforting and it totally makes sense to want to believe it.

00:50:12.000 I personally don't.

00:50:13.000 You don't believe in any sort of afterlife?

00:50:16.000 I don't, no.

00:50:17.000 But do you disbelieve?

00:50:19.000 Meaning?

00:50:19.000 I don't believe in it either, but I don't disbelieve in it.

00:50:22.000 Well, I can never know that it's not.

00:50:24.000 Right.

00:50:25.000 But I guess the burden of proof is on people who have come up with this idea because there's nothing to substantiate it.

00:50:32.000 But there's a long history of human understanding that there's something else besides what we experience in this realm.

00:50:42.000 And I think a lot of that has to do, most likely, through either the consumption of psychedelic compounds or through ritual practices like holotropic breathing or something, where it gives them the sense that maybe what you see is only part of the picture.

00:51:00.000 And then there's this feeling when someone dies, like they're not there anymore.

00:51:04.000 Like, have you ever been around a dead body?

00:51:06.000 I have, yeah.

00:51:07.000 It's a weird feeling, right?

00:51:09.000 It's like, it's not just that they're dead.

00:51:13.000 It's not just that they're not breathing anymore.

00:51:14.000 It's an emptiness.

00:51:15.000 They're not there.

00:51:16.000 Yeah.

00:51:17.000 It's hard to explain, but the first time I ever saw a dead body was my grandfather.

00:51:22.000 It was an open casket.

00:51:25.000 And I remember immediately thinking like, oh...

00:51:28.000 That's not him.

00:51:28.000 He's not there.

00:51:29.000 Like, he's not there.

00:51:31.000 It's not as simple as... 0.96

00:51:32.000 Well, it's also weird because they had him made up and shit. 0.98

00:51:35.000 You know, they put makeup on you, which is very odd. 0.98

00:51:37.000 Yeah.

00:51:38.000 But it's this very clear feeling that he's gone.

00:51:43.000 And so there's this thought, well, where did he go?

00:51:46.000 Did he go somewhere else?

00:51:47.000 Is there a place where you go?

00:51:49.000 And that's a totally understandable thing to think.

00:51:53.000 And to...

00:51:54.000 You know, to kind of experiment with the idea of.

00:51:57.000 But I suppose it can never be proven.

00:51:59.000 So it's kind of a moot point anyway, I guess.

00:52:01.000 I guess.

00:52:02.000 I mean, it's interesting.

00:52:02.000 It's interesting to discuss.

00:52:04.000 I don't disbelieve, but I don't believe.

00:52:06.000 But I also think that's a slightly different thing to mediums.

00:52:09.000 Oh, yeah.

00:52:09.000 And I'm a huge fan of, sadly, he died last year, I think, the amazing Randy.

00:52:13.000 Yes.

00:52:14.000 Yeah, James Randi.

00:52:15.000 Darren Brown, various people who sort of, you know, unlock or rather give away some of the secrets of cold reading and show you just how easy it is to manipulate people's belief.

00:52:26.000 Yes.

00:52:27.000 Yeah, Darren is very open about that.

00:52:29.000 And there's a guy named Banachek who I've had on the podcast before as well as Darren.

00:52:35.000 And Banachek is the first guy that I ever met that openly talked about the techniques that he used. 0.98

00:52:41.000 He's like, I'm not gonna tell you the techniques, but I'm gonna tell you this is bullshit. 0.90

00:52:44.000 I am tricking these people into thinking that I can read into them and find out about their past and find out about their life. 1.00

00:52:51.000 It's just bullshit. 0.98

00:52:52.000 Randy went to the big evangelical churches where they have faith healers and people contacting the other side. 0.99

00:53:02.000 He went there and I think I'm remembering this right.

00:53:05.000 One of his accomplices essentially just went there with a little shortwave radio and just scanned through the settings until he found the feed to the pastor's ear, feeding the information that someone else was researching online for these unsuspecting Audience members,

00:53:21.000 unwitting audience members, which is, you know, it's hilarious and it's also deeply disturbing.

00:53:26.000 It's deeply disturbing.

00:53:27.000 People get, you know, taken for thousands and, you know, they can...

00:53:31.000 It's just taking advantage of the most vulnerable people and I've got no time for that.

00:53:36.000 And there's only one step removed from that to a lot of these motivational people.

00:53:40.000 Because my feeling on these motivational people is that a lot of them are taking advantage of the fact that some people have this longing for discipline and structure.

00:53:52.000 They've experienced moments in their life where things are going well and then things fall apart or they self-sabotage or they start drinking or gambling or whatever their problem is.

00:54:01.000 But these people that are motivating these people, these people that they're charging exorbitant amounts of money for some structure that they put together they want these folks to follow.

00:54:11.000 But then when you look into their lives, the people that are the motivational people, Yeah.

00:54:39.000 But if you're going to talk to someone who's trying to motivate you for success, and his only success is to tricking people into coming to see him motivate people for success and charging them exorbitant amounts of money for it, well then, I don't like that.

00:54:53.000 Well, it's the same as the irony of Trump having written the art of the deal, or rather having had someone ghostwrite it for him.

00:54:59.000 You know, Trump, who was just born into a huge amount of money and by all accounts just slowly lost it over years and years and years.

00:55:05.000 You know, I think it's far too easy for people to abuse other people's sort of good faith.

00:55:12.000 We're generally credulous creatures.

00:55:14.000 You know, we want to believe stuff.

00:55:15.000 We want things to believe in.

00:55:17.000 Well, there's so much uncertainty about the future, and so there's this longing for someone to hold our hand.

00:55:25.000 Someone please show me.

00:55:26.000 Someone please give me a guide.

00:55:28.000 Tell me the steps to follow.

00:55:30.000 And when people see that people have this longing, they take advantage of it, and they try to get these people to pay money for these secrets.

00:55:39.000 If you sign up now, I will give you the secrets of how you can become successful. 0.99

00:55:45.000 And you're sitting there in your shitty apartment and you're like, fuck, I want to be successful. 1.00

00:55:49.000 It's Scientology, isn't it? 1.00

00:55:50.000 It's similar.

00:55:50.000 Same thing.

00:55:51.000 Well, I think that's more in, like, how to organize your life.

00:55:53.000 But it's similar.

00:55:55.000 It's the secrets that you unlock to success.

00:55:58.000 I mean, written by one of the worst science fiction writers ever.

00:56:01.000 Have you ever read some of his stuff?

00:56:02.000 I don't plan to.

00:56:04.000 Oh, my God.

00:56:05.000 Well, I've had the guy who's the head guy of Scientology. 1.00

00:56:10.000 The fuck's his name again? 0.97

00:56:12.000 Yeah, I had his dad, Ron Miscavige, on, and he explained to me how he got his son into it and the whole deal behind it. 0.99

00:56:20.000 It's fucking fascinating because it deals with those very questions.

00:56:25.000 It deals with psychology. 0.96

00:56:26.000 It deals with the longing for answers in this purely uncertain, open-ended life that we exist in.

00:56:35.000 And so many people have that desire for structure and for someone to come along and tell them that everything is going to be okay if you follow these rules, which is obviously not true.

00:56:46.000 Yeah, I mean, I don't, you know, when I'm billed as a quote-unquote motivational speaker, I actually don't like that phrasing.

00:56:53.000 I would prefer, you know, inspirational.

00:56:55.000 I tend to, you know, it's almost an entertaining storytelling exercise, but with, you know, certain themes that people can, you know, take away if they want to.

00:57:05.000 But I've never liked the idea of ramming down people's throats a bullet-pointed step-by-step of, you know, how to be better or...

00:57:12.000 More proactive or more motivated or anything like that because I think, as you're saying, it's quite often disingenuous.

00:57:18.000 Most of the time.

00:57:19.000 I know a guy who does it who used to be a terrible comedian, and then he became a motivational guy, and now he's much more successful at that.

00:57:27.000 But it's just so strange and sad to watch these people buy into his nonsense. 0.97

00:57:32.000 He's not successful, except at taking people and getting them to pay a lot of money to teach them how to be successful, which is fucking strange. 0.99

00:57:43.000 Yeah, it's like a shitty pyramid scheme. 0.95

00:57:46.000 It is in a way, but it's a confidence game. 0.59

00:57:51.000 You're playing upon people's desire for answers that don't exist.

00:57:56.000 I mean, you can motivate people.

00:57:58.000 There's a lot of people, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of people out there that are super successful that can tell you how they did it.

00:58:03.000 And there's a lot of benefit in that.

00:58:05.000 There's great benefit in that.

00:58:06.000 But most of those people are not charging you for that.

00:58:09.000 I mean, they might write a book about it, or maybe they do a podcast on how to succeed a business or something like that.

00:58:15.000 They're good at it.

00:58:17.000 They actually have experience. 0.99

00:58:19.000 But there's a fucking whole industry. 0.93

00:58:22.000 And online, because of social media, the barrier for entry is so small that you see so many people with these... 0.99

00:58:30.000 Everything is motivational.

00:58:32.000 All their posts are motivational. 0.96

00:58:33.000 Like, surely you have to have other shit to say other than motivating people. 0.94

00:58:38.000 It's weird. 0.98

00:58:39.000 Yeah.

00:58:39.000 I mean, I try to focus on telling stories.

00:58:41.000 You know, like if you read those, for instance, you might find some inspiration within them, but hopefully it's just going to be interesting.

00:58:47.000 Well, what you're doing is, I mean, obviously you have these super unusual life experiences that you can relay.

00:58:55.000 And what the, I mean, that's my thing about it is like, God, if I heard those, I would be very tempted to go and want some of those experiences for myself.

00:59:04.000 A lot of my experiences have been sort of how not to.

00:59:07.000 Right.

00:59:07.000 Well, that's how you learn, right?

00:59:09.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:59:10.000 Learn from my mistakes.

00:59:10.000 Actually, I think that's always valid as well.

00:59:14.000 It's a lot easier, I think, to take something on board from someone who says, this is what I did, and it went horribly wrong, and this is why I wouldn't do it again like that, than to say, I did this, and I'm fantastic, and it went really well, and you're a different person, and it might be the same for you.

00:59:27.000 Well, speaking of horribly wrong, let's talk about your most recent one, because this is what led you here.

00:59:34.000 And this is a wild experience that you just returned from.

00:59:39.000 And just tell people what you've done.

00:59:42.000 Sure.

00:59:43.000 So I've been planning for almost a year to go to A region of Siberia called Yakutia, which is the largest administrative area in the world.

00:59:53.000 So it's one region of Russia.

00:59:54.000 It's almost the same size as India. 0.93

00:59:57.000 I think it's about 96% the size of India, but only 1 million people.

01:00:01.000 So it's massive and empty, and it's far north.

01:00:04.000 About half of it is north of the Arctic Circle.

01:00:07.000 And there's one large city, but outside that there are scattered some remote and very remote communities.

01:00:14.000 And there, for the most part, there are plenty of sort of crumbling, near-abandoned industrial towns from the Soviet era as well.

01:00:23.000 But there are lots of scattered small villages of indigenous Siberian peoples, particularly the Sakha, who are the largest villages.

01:00:35.000 We're good to go.

01:00:46.000 So the record recorded low, and Jamie might be able to confirm this, but a place called Vrhojansk.

01:00:54.000 I can't remember the exact temperature, and it's in Celsius anyway, but about minus 67.3, something like that.

01:01:00.000 And that's inhabited.

01:01:02.000 People live there.

01:01:02.000 And so every winter it's super cold, and people survive in that.

01:01:06.000 And they used to survive, many of them in a sort of nomadic sense, living in sort of skin tents. 0.96

01:01:12.000 Reindeer, you know, hide, teepees, essentially.

01:01:15.000 So I wanted to get out there, experience some elements, not in the total depths of winter, but in sort of February, March, April, of that extreme cold.

01:01:24.000 Isn't February the total depths of winter?

01:01:27.000 I think January's their coldest time.

01:01:30.000 What is February?

01:01:31.000 Well, I mean, I was prepared for minus 50 Celsius, which is sort of minus...

01:01:35.000 I guess it's about minus 60 Fahrenheit.

01:01:38.000 They hit the same at minus 40. 40, yeah.

01:01:41.000 But because each degree is different, it gets confusing straight away.

01:01:44.000 So I wanted to get out there, experience this cold, and just meet some of these people scattered around and just kind of see what their lives are like and also see if they're changing with the...

01:01:54.000 Traditional ways of life are being threatened by the climate changing.

01:01:59.000 Last summer, you might remember, it was all over the news for a while, perhaps less than America, because you guys got your own wildfires here, but an island in Greece, Evia, was on fire, the whole island essentially, really bad wildfires.

01:02:13.000 But at the same time, an area the size of Belgium in Yakutia was burning, or collectively, all the different wildfires at the same time.

01:02:20.000 So they have crazy bad wildfires out there.

01:02:23.000 Also just close to Verkhoyansk, that town with the record cold, they had a record Arctic high of 39 point something degrees Celsius.

01:02:32.000 Again, that's about 100 and...

01:02:34.000 Yeah, that's high.

01:02:35.000 It's about the same as it is here today, I think.

01:02:36.000 Yeah.

01:02:37.000 All the way up there.

01:02:39.000 Yeah, in the Arctic Circle.

01:02:41.000 That's insane.

01:02:42.000 Yeah, I just wanted to go and check it out, see what it was like.

01:02:44.000 So I planned to hike a few hundred miles along frozen rivers, which in winter for about three months get sort of ploughed and turned into ice roads.

01:02:54.000 Zimnik or Zimniki, as they call them there.

01:02:56.000 A bit like your sort of ice road truckers, I guess.

01:02:58.000 But as you're on the river, the river's frozen perhaps two metres thick and towards the top on the frozen sea ice.

01:03:04.000 And to hike up to this town called Tixie up on the north coast.

01:03:07.000 It's a port town.

01:03:09.000 But I arrived, I flew in on the 21st of February.

01:03:13.000 And the world changed a lot in the sort of three or four days after that.

01:03:17.000 The day after I arrived.

01:03:20.000 Russian forces marched across the border where they've been massing, you know, up to I think about 140,000 troops by the time I flew out. 0.98

01:03:27.000 And when I flew out, you know, with hindsight, it all seems kind of stupid to have gone, maybe foolhardy.

01:03:32.000 But at the time, basically the entire world, except for presumably Putin, the US intelligence and UK intelligence, which both seem to think something's going to happen. 0.65

01:03:42.000 But all the world's media, all commentators, all pundits were saying this is just a bluff.

01:03:46.000 You know, this is just Putin.

01:03:47.000 Trying to, you know, scare NATO into concessions, you know, to get more promises that NATO won't spread, you know, that Ukraine won't join NATO, whatever else.

01:03:58.000 But they marched across the border, and two days later, a formal invasion.

01:04:06.000 They launched their full-scale nationwide invasion, marched into Kiev, bombed everything.

01:04:12.000 And I was so far away from all this.

01:04:16.000 Batagai, the small town where I started hiking up in the Arctic, that is geographically the same distance from Vancouver as it is from Kiev.

01:04:25.000 So it's just really, really far away.

01:04:26.000 I was closer to the North Pole.

01:04:28.000 I was east of Pyongyang.

01:04:29.000 I was on the same time zone as Central Australia, just really, really far away.

01:04:33.000 And I kind of thought about it and I thought, well...

01:04:36.000 A, I'm here and it's going to be interesting.

01:04:38.000 You know, I'm possibly one of, if not the last tourists in Russia, certainly out in the East.

01:04:43.000 And I've got this almost unique but accidental opportunity to see this country and the lives of normal people, ordinary citizens as what seems to be a horrific, you know, potentially the brink, the precipice of World War Three starts to unfold.

01:04:58.000 And so I thought, right, I'm going to carry on with this trek, but I'll just try and keep across information.

01:05:04.000 But as soon as I got to Batagai, it's a short flight from the capital of the region up to Batagai on an old Antonov twin prop, sort of Soviet plane.

01:05:13.000 And from there onwards, I couldn't get any phone signal.

01:05:18.000 Basically, the only real information I could get was local state media.

01:05:22.000 I passed a village perhaps once a week.

01:05:25.000 And you turn on, I mean, the most insane thing was turning on the, and I mean, you'll be aware of this, I'm sure, but you turn on the local news out there, and they're talking about Ukraine on their news segments, and every second or third sentence will have the word fascism or Nazism.

01:05:39.000 And they were slowly just drip-feeding, drip-feeding is the wrong word, they were just gushing this false information out into their public space.

01:05:47.000 And loads of people believed everything they heard, totally believed everything.

01:05:52.000 You know, I remember while I was still in the capital, just the day after I arrived, the troops had gone into the Donbass, this disputed territory in the east that they're sort of annexing.

01:06:02.000 And that evening I was in some guy's sort of cabin just outside town.

01:06:07.000 We'd met and went for drinks with some other people, and he said, hey, let's go back to ours for some drinks.

01:06:12.000 And this guy, I'll call him Anatole, I don't want to say his name, but...

01:06:17.000 He started dicing up some horse ribs to cook us some sort of, you know, peppering them and everything.

01:06:22.000 And he asked me what I thought about Ukraine.

01:06:25.000 This is really early days.

01:06:26.000 And I said, well, you know, I don't...

01:06:28.000 I have to be careful with what I was saying.

01:06:30.000 I don't know that much about it.

01:06:32.000 But, you know, it seems like this is going to get really serious.

01:06:35.000 And I'm also aware that when I turn on my phone and look at the news apps, the information I get from the BBC or The Guardian or whatever else is totally different from what I see here.

01:06:44.000 Of course, I knew all this, but I was sort of couching it in terms that gave him the chance to kind of, you know, I didn't want to preach.

01:06:51.000 And he said, yeah, well, you know, it's great because, you know, Vladimir Putin is making Russia great again.

01:06:57.000 And this is Russian land and it belongs to Russia. 0.96

01:07:01.000 And those Ukrainians are all Nazis anyway. 1.00

01:07:05.000 And, you know, we're going to, they're performing genocide on Russian peoples. 0.94

01:07:09.000 And the thing I found, like, craziest about all this, not just the fact that he was so precisely parroting Putin's propaganda, you know, which I had assumed beforehand people would be taking with a pinch of salt.

01:07:20.000 But the fact that, I mean, this guy was Sakha.

01:07:23.000 He's not a Slav. 1.00

01:07:24.000 He's not a white Russian. 0.91

01:07:26.000 This guy is from a people who about 400 years ago were brutally, aggressively colonized by a sort of Militaristic, expansionist, czarist Russia who spread into the area and just took over.

01:07:39.000 And I just thought somehow, with hindsight naively, that these people that were from an ethnically different background, heritage, might not be quite so sold on the cause of Russian nationalism, which is essentially what Putin used to sell the invasion in the first place.

01:07:57.000 But no, he was totally sold on it.

01:08:00.000 And then just as the following kind of weeks unfolded, as I started hiking, the war ramped up.

01:08:06.000 I only got little snippets of information.

01:08:07.000 It was very hard to know what was actually going on.

01:08:10.000 I just met more and more people with, to be frank, a complete gamut of opinions.

01:08:14.000 I met lots of people who, like him, were just bullish and quite hawkish.

01:08:18.000 Yeah, we'll take back Ukraine. 0.99

01:08:19.000 It belongs to Russia. 1.00

01:08:20.000 They're all fascists. 0.64

01:08:22.000 And then I met people who quietly, I'm not going to say any names, but people who one-on-one would quietly confide, I'm not quite sure about this.

01:08:32.000 I don't quite believe everything I'm being told.

01:08:34.000 Or even some people who said, I'm ashamed to be Russian.

01:08:39.000 I'm embarrassed about this.

01:08:40.000 I don't feel like I'm part of this country now.

01:08:44.000 What was your feeling going through?

01:08:47.000 So you're going through this trip.

01:08:49.000 You have no idea that this is going to happen.

01:08:51.000 It starts happening while you're there. 0.98

01:08:53.000 And then you find yourself accidentally involved in a sense that you're a foreign observer trapped in this land where all this crazy shit is going down. 0.98

01:09:06.000 Are you thinking You have to get out of there? 0.99

01:09:10.000 Are you thinking you are a part of this now?

01:09:13.000 You're going to document what you're seeing and this will add to whatever you're writing in the future?

01:09:19.000 A bit of both, really.

01:09:21.000 It occurred to me a bunch of times, should I be leaving?

01:09:24.000 Should I be getting out of here?

01:09:25.000 Just days after the invasion, Russian flights to Europe were all... 0.58

01:09:31.000 The airlines were sanctioned.

01:09:32.000 They couldn't fly into European airports.

01:09:34.000 So my flight hadn't yet been formally cancelled, but it wasn't going to happen.

01:09:37.000 I knew that much.

01:09:38.000 So getting out was already going to be complicated.

01:09:41.000 But I didn't feel...

01:09:44.000 I didn't feel personally threatened.

01:09:46.000 And perhaps I should have.

01:09:51.000 You know, I suppose I felt like, you know, I'm essentially a neutral observer.

01:09:54.000 But of course I wasn't, because I'm British.

01:09:56.000 And Britain very quickly took a stance along with the EU and America, you know, pro-Ukraine stance.

01:10:02.000 And it's great, you know, here, wandering around Austin, you see Ukrainian flags everywhere.

01:10:06.000 After finally getting home, I went to little villages in the countryside and the church has a Ukrainian flag hoisted on top of the flagpole.

01:10:13.000 The West, for want of a better term, really took up the cause of Ukraine very, very quickly.

01:10:18.000 And I suppose that made me not a neutral observer, but a representative of the opposition, if not the enemy.

01:10:26.000 But I've been...

01:10:30.000 I've been in trouble with the authorities in Russia before, on previous occasions.

01:10:34.000 I've been through the Russian court system a couple of times.

01:10:37.000 How so?

01:10:38.000 In 2017, I was skiing through the Ural Mountains, which is, they kind of divide European Russia from Siberia, and came into a town for a resupply after a couple of months out in the mountains, and the police Arrested me and my friend.

01:10:59.000 So we were on business visas because the longest tourist visa you could get back then was only 30 days.

01:11:06.000 We needed three months plus.

01:11:08.000 So we got business visas and they said you're committing tourism while traveling on a business visa.

01:11:15.000 So we were taken to court for committing tourism, for sort of abusing the grounds.

01:11:20.000 Did you explain that that is your business?

01:11:22.000 Yeah.

01:11:23.000 Did that work?

01:11:24.000 They didn't go for it.

01:11:24.000 But, I mean, the fine was, you know, 20 pounds or something.

01:11:27.000 But you have books, though.

01:11:28.000 I would imagine.

01:11:29.000 Well, I didn't yet have them.

01:11:31.000 Oh, okay.

01:11:32.000 But, I mean, I had a website.

01:11:35.000 But then, you know, later we got a border infraction.

01:11:38.000 We were kayaking down a river on the border of Russia and Kazakhstan.

01:11:40.000 And it turns out where the river is the border, you're not allowed to be.

01:11:43.000 And then months later in Georgia, we were up in the mountains of Georgia. 0.99

01:11:50.000 And I mean, it's dumb, really.

01:11:53.000 We used Google Maps to tell us how to get to this town, Gori, which incidentally is where Stalin was born. 0.63

01:12:00.000 And Google Maps said, yeah, you come down...

01:12:02.000 Out of this valley, out of the mountains into this valley, go up river, there's a river through the valley, go up river for about a mile, cross the bridge and then carry on on the road and you'll be there, you know, this evening.

01:12:13.000 I thought, great, easy.

01:12:14.000 We went down and then at the bridge there were Georgian soldiers, or police, police I think, and they said, no, it's close.

01:12:20.000 And they wouldn't explain why.

01:12:22.000 And I, you know, I had some Russian by this point, so, you know, I could have understood if they explained, but they didn't.

01:12:26.000 They just said, no, it's close, just go away.

01:12:28.000 And so I kind of put it into Google again and it said, yeah, it's going to be, you know, like a day and a half.

01:12:32.000 It's like a long, longer way around.

01:12:34.000 And we were sort of after it, you know, keen for a rest.

01:12:36.000 And I thought, well, the river doesn't look that deep.

01:12:38.000 So we went, you know, a few hundred meters downstream and just pushed our bikes across.

01:12:43.000 It was like ankle deep.

01:12:44.000 Got to the other side, scrambled up a bank, got on the road, started cycling and thought, yeah, you know, finally we've got one over on the authorities.

01:12:50.000 It's always been a bit of a headache.

01:12:52.000 And about 30 seconds later, a military jeep sped up behind us and sort of pulled over in front of us, and a soldier climbed out.

01:12:59.000 And the first thing I noticed was he had the Russian tricolor, the flag, on his arm.

01:13:03.000 And I thought, well, that's strange, because the border is about 50 miles north of here.

01:13:07.000 And he said, what are you doing here?

01:13:09.000 And I said, what are you doing here?

01:13:11.000 Which isn't the right thing to say when a Russian soldier arrests you.

01:13:14.000 He said, this is South Ossetia, which is that there was a short five-day war in 2008, and Russia just sort of invaded an annexed part of Georgia.

01:13:29.000 And it turned out the river was the border, and we had unwittingly just crossed into it.

01:13:35.000 It's part of Russia, essentially, but it's set up like the Donbass is already being, as a kind of a little puppet state.

01:13:43.000 And when they were interrogating us under the frowning portrait of Putin, they were saying, why did you do this?

01:13:50.000 It's a border.

01:13:52.000 Why have you violated our sovereign territory?

01:13:55.000 And I said, you know, it was just the maps on our phone.

01:13:57.000 And the guy from the FSB, formerly the KGB, said, ah, Google Maps, right?

01:14:02.000 And I said, yeah.

01:14:03.000 And he goes, ah, it's an American company.

01:14:04.000 I said, yeah.

01:14:05.000 And he said, well, America doesn't recognize South Ossetia.

01:14:08.000 So Google Maps has just told me to go through this disputed territory.

01:14:11.000 Jesus, Google.

01:14:14.000 Later I looked at it and there was a tiny little dotted line, but the route, it just said go through there.

01:14:18.000 But I said, who does recognize it?

01:14:20.000 And he said, well, you know, the South Ossetians do, and Russia does. 0.77

01:14:24.000 I was like, sure, that's kind of a given.

01:14:25.000 And I said, anyone else?

01:14:27.000 He said, yeah, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

01:14:29.000 I was like, it's good company.

01:14:31.000 And he said, also, have you heard of Nauru?

01:14:33.000 It's a tiny little Pacific Island nation of about 10,000 people.

01:14:36.000 They're the only other people who back then at least formally recognized South Ossetia.

01:14:41.000 I guess Belarus might do now.

01:14:43.000 Anyway, so, you know, I was familiar with Russian, you know, I know that being arrested in Russia for some minor sort of administrative infraction isn't, you know, isn't necessarily a huge deal.

01:14:54.000 At both of those times, I was given a small fine and sent on my way.

01:14:58.000 But this time, you know, this winter, after about three weeks of hiking, I arrived at this town.

01:15:05.000 It was the first, the only town on the route.

01:15:07.000 So did they let you go?

01:15:10.000 In South Ossetia?

01:15:11.000 Yeah, once they pulled you over, like, how do you get out of this?

01:15:14.000 So, well, we were in a cell for a night and then in the court where the judge said, is there anything you want to say?

01:15:22.000 And I said, well, I'm really hungry.

01:15:23.000 They haven't really fed us.

01:15:24.000 And the judge started screaming at the police and said, get them some food straight away.

01:15:27.000 So, you know, it was all friendly and fine.

01:15:28.000 They then, at sunset, marched us through all this kind of, you know, razor wire and concrete defenses and unexploded ordnance signs and handed us over to the Georgian authorities.

01:15:39.000 Do you have to explain what you're doing?

01:15:41.000 The Georgians were across it because it had been put out on the FSB communications.

01:15:46.000 So they knew that two tourists had got in trouble.

01:15:50.000 And sure enough, on the other side of the border, there were people from the British Embassy, the Georgian police, the tourism industry, the Ministry of the Interior.

01:15:57.000 So we had this long debrief.

01:15:59.000 But you're not supposed to be there, right?

01:16:02.000 We crossed the border, not knowing it was a border, so it was totally innocent, but we crossed the border illegally, because it is a border.

01:16:11.000 How would you be able to cross it legally?

01:16:14.000 Well, only from Russia.

01:16:15.000 Only from Russia.

01:16:16.000 So that area where you crossed, it's just illegal to cross in that area?

01:16:21.000 Yeah.

01:16:21.000 Did you explain what you do?

01:16:23.000 And how did they respond to that?

01:16:25.000 I explained.

01:16:25.000 I think they very quickly understood that we weren't spies.

01:16:28.000 This is five years ago.

01:16:31.000 They very quickly understood that we weren't spies.

01:16:33.000 It wasn't, obviously, quite such a time of heightened tensions like now.

01:16:37.000 Right.

01:16:38.000 But now, when you got in trouble with the Russian authorities, it was a much more serious issue.

01:16:43.000 Yeah, well this time I didn't, and I stand by this, I didn't do anything wrong, but they were, it seemed quite quickly, looking for a way to get me out of there.

01:16:53.000 So it was known where I was at all times.

01:16:57.000 Although there was only one settlement every week, this river, the road, the Zimnik on the river I was hiking along, saw perhaps 15 trucks a day hauling coal from a port at the river mouth, like hundreds of kilometers away.

01:17:12.000 All the way down to Batagai, the town where I started hiking to fuel the region with a little power station.

01:17:20.000 And so people were clearly, as I found out later, reporting to the authorities where I was at any given time.

01:17:26.000 The two villages I passed through before reaching the first town, it was quickly by the village elders, I think.

01:17:33.000 Because there's no presence of authorities in these villages.

01:17:37.000 They're tiny, three, four hundred people.

01:17:40.000 You know, it was passed on where I was.

01:17:42.000 So when I approached Ustkviga, this town, which used to have 5,000 or 6,000 residents, now there's like 500 or 600, so basically there's not many people just living scattered among the ruins of this kind of town.

01:17:56.000 On the north side of the town, there's a cement factory that was built and completed just before the Soviet Union fell apart, so it never produced a single sack of cement because there was no longer any reason to live in this desolate, throwaway town in the middle of nowhere.

01:18:09.000 The Soviets were really keen to evenly populate this huge expanse of land that they owned, so they built industrial settlements all over the place.

01:18:18.000 Anyway, as I approached Isquiga, a police jeep was waiting for me a few miles outside town.

01:18:23.000 And they said, get into the jeep for a chat.

01:18:26.000 And I said, no, that's fine.

01:18:27.000 And actually, that morning had been my coldest morning.

01:18:29.000 It was minus 48 or 49 degrees Celsius that morning, which I think is about 55 Fahrenheit.

01:18:35.000 And so my feet were still numb.

01:18:36.000 And I was only too happy to get in the car and have a chat with them in the warmth.

01:18:39.000 And they asked me all these questions for about an hour.

01:18:41.000 You know, what are you doing here?

01:18:43.000 Yeah.

01:18:43.000 So this was in my very pigeon Russian.

01:18:45.000 These guys didn't speak a word of English.

01:18:47.000 What are you doing here?

01:18:48.000 You know, why are you visiting?

01:18:50.000 And I just said, I'm here.

01:18:51.000 I'm interested in the culture, the traditions, the backgrounds, the winter, the wildlife.

01:18:56.000 You know, I'm a tourist.

01:18:58.000 And they made me sign a document promising to obey the rules of the country while I was in it, which fair enough.

01:19:04.000 But then they drove off.

01:19:06.000 Well, they took selfies with me and then drove off.

01:19:08.000 And then I continued into the town.

01:19:10.000 They took selfies with you?

01:19:11.000 Oh, everyone takes selfies in Russia.

01:19:13.000 Really?

01:19:14.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:19:15.000 In fact, they even refer to any picture with a person in it as a selfie.

01:19:18.000 It doesn't need to be taken by oneself.

01:19:20.000 That's an English word that's just bled through into Russian for a picture.

01:19:23.000 Interesting.

01:19:24.000 And again, selfies, I found out later that people were taking selfies with me, you know, truckers along the way, and then these were popping up on various kind of Instagram accounts in the area that lots of people followed.

01:19:35.000 So, you know, people were totally aware of where I was, what I was doing.

01:19:38.000 And again, I had nothing to hide.

01:19:40.000 Sort of.

01:19:41.000 We'll come to that in a minute.

01:19:43.000 But in Ustkviga, they came and found me.

01:19:47.000 They came and knocked on the door in the place that I was staying.

01:19:49.000 I was there for three nights.

01:19:50.000 And they said, come to the police station for registration.

01:19:54.000 I said, that's fine.

01:19:56.000 Again, no problem.

01:19:57.000 And in the police station, slowly it became clear that they were giving me a fine.

01:20:01.000 And when I asked, what's the fine for?

01:20:03.000 I wasn't initially concerned.

01:20:05.000 What's the fine for?

01:20:06.000 And they said, oh, you're conducting journalism while traveling on a tourist visa.

01:20:11.000 You can now get, well, briefly, I guess you can't now, get a 90-day tourist visa to Russia as of recently.

01:20:17.000 So this time I was on the correct visa, a tourist visa.

01:20:20.000 But they said, you're conducting journalism.

01:20:21.000 I said, I'm not.

01:20:22.000 And they said, no, you're a journalist.

01:20:23.000 We've seen on your website, you've written for the BBC, which is true, but travel pieces.

01:20:30.000 You've written for these newspapers, again, travel articles based on essentially tourism.

01:20:36.000 And they said, well, that's journalism here.

01:20:37.000 And we also hear you've been talking to people.

01:20:39.000 And I said, well, yeah, that's not illegal.

01:20:43.000 And you've been taking photographs.

01:20:45.000 Again, no problem.

01:20:46.000 But they then suddenly claimed that I've been asking provocative questions about the, as they call it, the special operation.

01:20:53.000 Because the war, within Russia, the war is not a war.

01:20:56.000 It's illegal to call it a war.

01:20:57.000 It's a special operation.

01:20:59.000 It's part of this kind of strange, kind of, you know, Nothing is true.

01:21:04.000 So are people reporting you along the way?

01:21:06.000 I mean, did you ascertain how this got to these soldiers?

01:21:11.000 Well, they knew I was, you know, the route I was following was, you know, along this river over some hills to another river and then up to this town on the coast.

01:21:18.000 And so there was no secret that I was going to come through Ustquiga.

01:21:22.000 And they knew what day it was going to be because someone had probably reported seeing my tent, you know, 20 miles down the road the previous night where I'd camped.

01:21:31.000 And I think, I mean, it became quite clear that they had...

01:21:36.000 We spoke for a while and eventually when they started making these accusations, I said, look, right, I don't really understand exactly what you're saying.

01:21:42.000 I need you to find a translator.

01:21:43.000 And so they found some guy who spoke a bit of English and he translated as best he could.

01:21:49.000 And they basically come up with, they sort of fabricated witnesses who said, yeah, he was asking about the war in Ukraine.

01:21:55.000 He called it a war.

01:21:57.000 You know, he was trying to sort of provoke, you know, difficult conversations.

01:22:02.000 And it really wasn't the case.

01:22:03.000 And frankly, wherever I went, almost one of the One of the first questions people would ask about me is, what do you think of the situation in Ukraine?

01:22:09.000 Because whether or not they believe what they're being told by their news, they are aware because the news talks about, quote unquote, the fake news that the West is putting out.

01:22:18.000 They're aware that I might have access to that, so they want to know what I think.

01:22:24.000 So they kind of came up with these witnesses and said, right, you've got to pay this fine and then you can go.

01:22:30.000 And I thought, right, well, it's a £20 fine, $30, and then I can go.

01:22:35.000 There's no point staying here all day.

01:22:37.000 I might as well just sign the papers and go.

01:22:40.000 And so I did that.

01:22:41.000 But the guy who they got to translate for me, he walked out with me when we were all done.

01:22:48.000 And as we were walking down the street, he said, so when they were on the phone to HQ back in Yakutsk, the capital, I overheard the people on the other end of the phone saying that these guys should pin two administrative offenses on me so that I can be deported.

01:23:04.000 And I'd resisted.

01:23:05.000 I'd pushed back quite hard saying, you know, this is not what I'm doing.

01:23:08.000 I'm not doing journalism.

01:23:09.000 This is not true or whatever.

01:23:10.000 And I'm glad I did.

01:23:12.000 Had I not, then they possibly would have deported me then and there.

01:23:16.000 But I was free to carry on.

01:23:18.000 So I carried on about another four weeks, you know, got up onto the tundra, visited some reindeer herders, you know, got to some very remote settlements and spent the final sort of 10 days hiking on the frozen Arctic Ocean, you know, camping out, you know, under some of the most incredible starscapes and northern lights.

01:23:36.000 It was beautiful, a really good time.

01:23:38.000 I arrived in Tixie, this port town at the end, which used to have, I think, like 15,000 people.

01:23:44.000 Now it has about 5,000 people.

01:23:46.000 It's another one of these, the Russians have a phrase for this, like a dying town, a town more dead than alive.

01:23:53.000 And on arrival in Tixie, someone who I'd met on the road weeks earlier, who I got in touch with on arrival, he said, you know, get in touch, we'll catch up.

01:24:03.000 He told me that the FSB, the KGB, wanted to talk to me.

01:24:07.000 And I thought, right, we'll just take the bull by the horns, I'll just go to their building, and I'll say, I hear you want to talk to me, I'm here.

01:24:13.000 And they were a bit taken aback by that.

01:24:15.000 And they said, can you come back at this time tomorrow?

01:24:16.000 So I did.

01:24:18.000 And it felt like an interrogation, but it eventually turned out it was just this standard procedure.

01:24:24.000 They asked me these questions, who I was, Name of my family members, the history of my family, did any of my ancestors ever, were they ever in the British forces?

01:24:33.000 Do I have any political beliefs?

01:24:34.000 Was I in the army?

01:24:35.000 Just all these kind of standard suspicious questions.

01:24:38.000 And it went on about two, three hours.

01:24:41.000 And when we were finally done, the guy said, okay, well, that's it.

01:24:43.000 You're free to go.

01:24:43.000 I was like, oh, great.

01:24:44.000 He said, make sure you visit the museum.

01:24:45.000 There's a mammoth skeleton.

01:24:47.000 You know, have a good time.

01:24:47.000 Good luck to you.

01:24:49.000 I went back to where I was staying, and I was recording...

01:24:54.000 So I took with me a little Zoom, like a little dictaphone.

01:24:57.000 You know, a lot of people use them for podcasts, I think.

01:24:59.000 And for another podcast with a friend that'll surface in a month or so, I've been recording my experiences in my own voice along the way of the cold, the people I met, the odd conversation with other people.

01:25:11.000 But naturally, with what was going on and people telling me of their opinions about Ukraine...

01:25:16.000 In my own little recordings, in my tent at night, sometimes I get a little sort of political, I guess.

01:25:21.000 And after that encounter in Oosterkwieger, when they came to my door, these policemen the first time, sorry, four weeks back, I know we're jumping around.

01:25:30.000 When they came to my door, I was recording on my dictaphone.

01:25:34.000 And I went to answer the door and just slipped it in my pocket.

01:25:36.000 And they said, right, come to the police station now.

01:25:38.000 And so I went, but it was still recording.

01:25:40.000 So I had a live mic throughout this whole police process.

01:25:43.000 And the first thing they did in the police station was take my phone, turn it off so I wasn't recording.

01:25:47.000 And so little did they know there was this hot mic in my pocket.

01:25:50.000 So after that was done, I got back to where I was staying.

01:25:53.000 I kind of, in my own words, said what had happened.

01:25:55.000 Took the little micro SD card out and then unscrewed a plug adapter, you know, from like a British plug to a Russian plug.

01:26:03.000 Unscrewed that, wrapped the SD card up in a little scrap of white paper, slotted it in there, screwed it back up.

01:26:07.000 It's like, you know, I don't want to lose this.

01:26:10.000 It's not really a huge problem, but best just to hide it and have it safe.

01:26:14.000 Up in Tixie, I sort of recorded my final thoughts again and I had this little SD card.

01:26:20.000 It was just on the table.

01:26:22.000 And another one, I was worried, you know, my journal, my diary that I've been writing each day, I was worried that that might get taken.

01:26:30.000 With the villages I passed through towards the end, you know, it was made very clear that the authorities were waiting for me in Tixie.

01:26:35.000 I thought, well, you know, that might get seized.

01:26:38.000 Not the end of the world if it does.

01:26:39.000 If I, with my GoPro, take a picture of every single page and I can hide that little SD card in the same plug socket.

01:26:46.000 But when the knock came on my door in Tixie, I'd been asleep.

01:26:50.000 I'd actually fallen asleep reading Kafka, the trial, this guy getting arrested and not knowing what it's all about.

01:26:58.000 They came to the door and everything was just kind of out.

01:27:01.000 And they said, it was the police again, they said, can you come to the station for registration?

01:27:05.000 I said, again, well, this is a little ominous, but registration, fine.

01:27:09.000 I'd already, you know, the day before spoken to the FSB. I knew everything was fine.

01:27:13.000 And in the station, it quickly became clear.

01:27:17.000 Well, after about an hour of just this long, asking lots of questions, I said, well, can I go now?

01:27:21.000 And they said, no, no, you can't go.

01:27:23.000 And that's when I understood I'm under arrest, and this is maybe a little bit more serious.

01:27:27.000 And once again, they said, who have you spoken to?

01:27:30.000 Who have you met in Tixie?

01:27:32.000 And I said, well, I met this guy who I'd met on the road who...

01:27:39.000 It's a small town, so I didn't want to lie to them.

01:27:41.000 I thought best just to say who I'd met.

01:27:42.000 So I met this guy, and I've met this other bloke, and they didn't know who either of these people were, and they were asking questions about who they were.

01:27:50.000 And without leaving the room, without making a call, without doing any texting, me having just explained to them who these people were, and they didn't know who they were, they quickly said, right, well both those people are providing witness to say that you have been conducting journalism and asking questions about Ukraine.

01:28:06.000 So they essentially got me to provide them with false witnesses.

01:28:13.000 And this process went on for hours.

01:28:15.000 They got an English teacher to translate for us.

01:28:18.000 And as the hours passed, the English teacher became more and more fed up.

01:28:22.000 She was meant to be, I think, someone with a disease in the town. 0.88

01:28:28.000 There was a bake sale to raise money for him, and she was meant to be cooking cupcakes with her daughter that evening.

01:28:33.000 And, you know, I'd ruined this because it was already, you know, they took me at about 4.30.

01:28:39.000 Anyway, at 9.30 after a lot of waiting around they finally said, right, you're going to court now.

01:28:43.000 I thought, well, it's 9.30.

01:28:44.000 How's that going to work?

01:28:45.000 And they took me to another building, an old Soviet-looking apartment block-type building.

01:28:49.000 But on the third floor, there was a courtroom.

01:28:51.000 And in the courtroom, they got this judge who just seemed pissed off.

01:28:56.000 You know, he'd been dragged out of his home at 9.30 at night to deal with something.

01:29:02.000 And the teacher was so pissed off by this point that she wasn't really translating in full anymore.

01:29:06.000 So, you know, the judge would speak a whole, you know, paragraph, and she would give me a half sentence in translation.

01:29:12.000 And so the trial unfolded.

01:29:14.000 I had been supposedly conducting journalism again.

01:29:18.000 They had these witnesses who said I'd said this, that and the other.

01:29:22.000 And they also said, most worryingly, that I'd been photographing restricted military sites or sensitive military sites.

01:29:31.000 And the judge found me guilty and he said, you'll pay a fine.

01:29:35.000 Again, not much, like 70 bucks, something like that.

01:29:39.000 And you are banned from Russia for five years and you have to leave.

01:29:42.000 You'll be deported.

01:29:43.000 And I thought, right, it's not the end of the world.

01:29:46.000 It looks like Russia's not particularly a place to go back to for five years.

01:29:50.000 It's fine.

01:29:50.000 And so at that point, as far as I was aware, I would fly back to Yakutsk Get my own flight back to England via some other third country and then fly home.

01:30:00.000 Done.

01:30:01.000 And I was taken back to the sort of apartment I'd rented in this town.

01:30:07.000 And probably 20 minutes later, there was a knock at the door and it was the police guy and they said, oh, actually, you have to be in the cell tonight.

01:30:15.000 Pack everything you have up.

01:30:17.000 And we're going now.

01:30:18.000 And so with them in front of me, I had to pack everything up.

01:30:21.000 Among the stuff that was all kind of laid out was one of these little SD cards with the second half of all the recordings from this Zoom on it.

01:30:29.000 And all I could do was I had a head torch next to it on the table because they were watching me pack.

01:30:35.000 You know head torches have that little sort of hinge so it can sort of angle down on your forehead.

01:30:39.000 I bent the hinge down, put the SD card in that bit and just snapped it shut and put a rubber band around the whole thing.

01:30:45.000 But that just felt really precarious.

01:30:47.000 You know, that's not well hidden.

01:30:48.000 And that's the last time I was, you know, just before that point was the last time I was unattended with all my stuff for weeks to come, as it turned out.

01:30:56.000 I packed everything up.

01:30:57.000 We were taken to the cell, fingerprinting.

01:31:00.000 I was eventually about 1.30, put it into this little cell.

01:31:04.000 And I was thankfully tired enough.

01:31:05.000 I got some sleep, woke up in the morning.

01:31:08.000 And from that point on, I was accompanied or escorted by bailiffs, technically, although they said, we're Russia's U.S. Marshals.

01:31:15.000 They were quite keen to sort of compare themselves to U.S. Marshals.

01:31:19.000 And I'd already changed my flight that I had booked a week away to the following day to get me back to the capital.

01:31:26.000 And so I was deported on, well, sent down to Yakutsk on the flight that I'd booked, but with a man as an escort.

01:31:34.000 And at this point, I still thought, like, I'm free when I get to Yakutsk.

01:31:37.000 I'll go home.

01:31:38.000 On arrival in Yakutsk, there was another bailiff waiting for me.

01:31:41.000 And he said, right, well, you have to now go and stay in this kind of hotel for foreigners until you fly home. 0.99

01:31:46.000 And I thought, well, that's not ideal.

01:31:48.000 But again, it's not the end of the world.

01:31:50.000 And then on the drive in this minibus to the detention center, it turned out, yeah, it was a detention center for foreigners, and it was just a prison.

01:31:59.000 And, you know, my shoelaces were taken away, my belt was taken off, all my goods were locked up in a locker.

01:32:03.000 And, you know, after being processed and checked in, the door slammed, or the cell door slammed shut behind me.

01:32:11.000 And then there I am.

01:32:13.000 And I don't know how long for.

01:32:14.000 You know, that's one of the sort of bleakest moments where I just, I didn't know what exactly is going to happen after that point.

01:32:23.000 I still, I suppose, was thinking a few days and I'll probably be out.

01:32:27.000 And they were sort of saying maybe 10 days.

01:32:29.000 You've got to wait for the paperwork to come down from the coast or whatever.

01:32:32.000 But after a few days, you know, time had come and gone.

01:32:35.000 I was in the cell.

01:32:36.000 I mean, you're in the cell around the clock, 24 hours a day, not allowed outside.

01:32:40.000 Food's handed through a little hatch in the cell.

01:32:42.000 I shared it with two other men.

01:32:45.000 And after a few days, they said, right, you know, you should be getting a lawyer.

01:32:49.000 And I was allowed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 15 minutes of access to my phone.

01:32:54.000 So back home via these frantic, hurried phone calls, my uncle and my girlfriend were kind of, you know, arranging, trying to help out.

01:33:04.000 And so we arranged for a lawyer to come in and he said, right, well, we'll appeal the decision.

01:33:08.000 But that appeal wasn't heard for two weeks.

01:33:11.000 And that appeal was dismissed out of hand.

01:33:15.000 I was taken to the court.

01:33:16.000 And this is after two weeks, you know, by this point I was You know, I was not a happy guy.

01:33:21.000 I mean, it was almost comical going to the court for the appeal.

01:33:23.000 You know, I was so desperate to get outside.

01:33:25.000 I hadn't been outdoors for two weeks.

01:33:27.000 And they said, right, you're going to the court.

01:33:28.000 And I knew that meant I'd get to be outdoors for a few minutes, you know, as I walked from the door into the minibus and from the minibus into the court at the other end.

01:33:37.000 But they put me in cuffs and then they, with another pair of handcuffs, cuffed me to one of the guards who had a taser and there was another guard on the other side with a taser and they wouldn't let me have my shoelaces or my belt back.

01:33:50.000 And I'd lost quite a lot of weight during this trek.

01:33:52.000 So my trousers are falling down, my hiking shoes had these massive sort of, you know, tongues lolling out the front.

01:33:57.000 And walking down the courthouse corridors, I was doing this kind of weird, you know, John Wayne wide-kneed shuffle to try and stop my trousers from falling down.

01:34:05.000 Meanwhile, my hands are pinned to this guy to my right.

01:34:07.000 But the judge looked at the papers for, you know, like two minutes and said, yeah, no, your crimes are too serious.

01:34:14.000 There's a political element and, you know, you're going back into the detention centre.

01:34:19.000 And this was probably the time when I felt most low.

01:34:24.000 About a week earlier, I had suddenly, unexpectedly been dragged in front of a TV camera and interviewed.

01:34:32.000 And that was a bit concerning.

01:34:34.000 That felt like being tried by the Court of Public Opinion.

01:34:39.000 Eventually the news bit aired, I think the day before my appeal.

01:34:43.000 But they had gone up to Tixie and they got witness statements from one bloke who I never even met saying, yeah, you know, he was talking about Ukraine and he was photographing these military sites.

01:34:52.000 Again, no photos were ever provided that, you know, backed up that story.

01:34:56.000 And all the while, you know, those first two weeks...

01:35:01.000 All of my belongings are in their possession.

01:35:03.000 And the police have come and searched.

01:35:04.000 They've made me turn on their phone, my phone, unlock it for them.

01:35:07.000 I had a GPS device, which really freaks them out.

01:35:09.000 My GoPro to them looked like a spy camera.

01:35:11.000 But when they first laid out all my belongings, as some policeman, you know, I was taking cuffed out my cell to be, you know, to turn everything on for him and sort of...

01:35:19.000 On the table laid out in this neat little row was all my items and among them was this plug socket and that head torch with the hidden little SD card in it.

01:35:30.000 And although technically those things weren't really incriminating, the fact that they had been hidden didn't look good.

01:35:37.000 And I probably should have said earlier, back in March, two months earlier, they had introduced a new law with a maximum sentence of up to 15 years for journalists providing or sort of spreading fake news about the military, i.e.

01:35:52.000 anyone really speaking the truth about the military.

01:35:54.000 After the invasion?

01:35:55.000 After the invasion.

01:35:57.000 And, you know, these recordings had lots of me talking about the invasion, the atrocities in Bucha, and, you know, all sorts.

01:36:03.000 And my whole diary, which up to this point I'd kept hidden because when I was checked into the cell while they were going through all my stuff, I just slipped it in my trousers because I thought this diary doesn't look good.

01:36:13.000 I slipped it in my trousers, which again, freaked me out a little bit.

01:36:16.000 Are they going to frisk me?

01:36:17.000 Are they not?

01:36:18.000 I got it into the cell and then I just hid it in plain sight among my belongings.

01:36:21.000 And it was all the stuff in the locker that the police went and looked through.

01:36:25.000 So there's just a lot of things going on.

01:36:26.000 I'm constantly on edge that I'm just about to become a political bargaining chip.

01:36:31.000 Did they find the SD cards?

01:36:34.000 No, thankfully.

01:36:36.000 This is actually the first time I've spoken about those SD cards.

01:36:39.000 And, you know, those would have qualified me for at least, you know, you're a journalist, if not espionage. 0.70

01:36:45.000 And the guards in the prison who were, I mean, I think they were probably nice, normal guys, but they treated, they were wankers to us.

01:36:52.000 I mean, they kept on saying to me, are you a spy? 0.86

01:36:54.000 And don't fight my country.

01:36:55.000 You know, they would also, on their phones, look up phrases in English and then kind of chant them back at me, you are a spy walker.

01:37:02.000 And so it was a scary time.

01:37:06.000 And after the appeal was rejected, I then thought, well, this could be a really long time.

01:37:12.000 I could be here for months, and the longer I'm here, the more chance there is that either they'll find some of these SD cards or Or my diary.

01:37:21.000 Or that they will, you know, some ambitious cop, some ambitious policeman or bureaucrat will decide to pick up my case again to retry me under the criminal offence.

01:37:31.000 I mean, given they'd made up most of their evidence anyway, it's no stretch to think that they could pin on me the fake news journalist thing and put me away for 15 years.

01:37:40.000 I mean, I didn't even know of her at the time, but since getting out, I've learned about, and I'm going to get her name wrong, but Brittany Grinner, the basketball player, who, I mean, we don't really even know where she is.

01:37:51.000 I think a bit of news came out about her the other day.

01:37:54.000 But, I mean, she's clearly being, in my opinion, I mean, it's totally outrageous, but she, I think, is being held as a prisoner swap fodder. 0.66

01:38:02.000 They will use her when convenient.

01:38:05.000 Yeah, they're trying to get...

01:38:06.000 There's an arms dealer that we have, and they're trying to get the arms dealer swapped for the basketball player.

01:38:15.000 Because she had a CBD vape.

01:38:17.000 Yeah.

01:38:17.000 And they arrested her like a week before the invasion even happened.

01:38:21.000 They knew what was going to happen, it seems, and they just held on to her.

01:38:24.000 Yeah, she's valuable, I guess.

01:38:26.000 And I mean, I hope that she's out as soon as possible, but I really worry about...

01:38:37.000 Held in jail for another 18 days.

01:38:39.000 Yeah, but what does that mean?

01:38:40.000 Well, she's been there for over 100 days already, and I mean, I was inside for not very long, but 18 days feels like an eternity.

01:38:48.000 Yeah, it says, drug smuggling charges until July 2nd, pushing her jail stint past the four-month mark, according to the official state news agency, TASS. How do you say that word?

01:38:59.000 Kimke? 0.99

01:39:00.000 Chimki. 1.00

01:39:01.000 Chimki Court of Moscow region granted the 18-day extension at the request of investigators.

01:39:06.000 The agency quoted the court's press service as saying, it is typical of Russian courts to extend detention repeatedly until trial.

01:39:14.000 Ms. Greiner's lawyer, Alexander Boykov, could not immediately be reached for comment.

01:39:21.000 Could you scroll down a little bit further?

01:39:23.000 What it says that American basketball players...

01:39:26.000 Starr was arrested four months ago after the Russian official said they found a vape cartridge bearing traces of hash oil in her luggage while she was passing through the...

01:39:36.000 Sherman Tyevo.

01:39:37.000 Sherman Tyevo Airport, Moscow's main international airport.

01:39:41.000 The charge carries a jail sentence of up to 10 years. 1.00

01:39:44.000 Fuck. 1.00

01:39:45.000 Yeah, I mean, they... 1.00

01:39:47.000 I really hope this proves to be correct that it's only 18 more days.

01:39:52.000 You never know with Russia. 0.86

01:39:54.000 I mean, just this morning I saw on the news Navalny has essentially disappeared.

01:39:58.000 They moved him to an undisclosed location.

01:40:00.000 Oh, boy.

01:40:00.000 His lawyer went to visit him this morning.

01:40:03.000 And when he said, you know, where's Alexei?

01:40:05.000 The prison just said, we have no convict of such a name.

01:40:10.000 And that's it.

01:40:10.000 That's all this.

01:40:11.000 Can you explain who that is to people?

01:40:12.000 Sorry, yeah.

01:40:12.000 Alexei Navalny is the sort of Russian opposition politician who, he's been a very vocal critic and opponent of Putin for years.

01:40:22.000 He, I mean, Boris Nemtsov was a close ally of him.

01:40:26.000 He was killed by the regime.

01:40:29.000 Navalny was locked up under fraud charges, I think, with a two-year sentence.

01:40:34.000 About two weeks ago, they added another nine years and said that he was inciting I mean, they've gone full autocrat now.

01:40:41.000 There's no longer any pretense.

01:40:43.000 But Navalny is the guy who was in Europe for a while, and then he flew from Germany back to Russia incredibly bravely.

01:40:51.000 Many would say foolishly, but he's very dedicated to trying to liberate the Russian people from the tyranny that they're living under.

01:40:58.000 He flew back knowing full well what that would mean.

01:41:01.000 And that was after they had already tried to kill him with Novichok.

01:41:04.000 They put Novichok in his pants in a hotel room in Berlin or something.

01:41:09.000 And now he's disappeared.

01:41:13.000 I mean, I think I was very lucky to be...

01:41:15.000 You know, the fact that I'm out now at all, I think probably stems from the fact that I was all the way out there in the East, where people are a little sort of out of the loop.

01:41:22.000 Had I been in Moscow, like Brittany Greiner, then I think things might have been very different.

01:41:28.000 Are you worried now about talking about this openly, that they might target you?

01:41:34.000 A little bit.

01:41:36.000 But...

01:41:36.000 Yes and no.

01:41:39.000 I mean, the thing that I'm most...

01:41:44.000 I'm most mindful of is, and that's why I've probably sounded quite vague about some of the people I've essentially cited in this chat, is I need to be very careful because being associated with me for various people in Russia could be a real problem for them.

01:41:58.000 There's one guy who I believe he was one of the witnesses used against me in one of the two places.

01:42:05.000 He's not a Russian citizen.

01:42:06.000 He's from another country. 0.99

01:42:07.000 And he's got in touch with me saying he's now being deported.

01:42:10.000 He's lived there for 10 years.

01:42:11.000 And that's...

01:42:12.000 I mean, it's not my fault, but it's on my head.

01:42:16.000 I am not... 1.00

01:42:17.000 I mean, maybe they're going to try and fuck with me. 0.99

01:42:20.000 I don't plan to go back. 0.99

01:42:22.000 I'm banned for five years anyway, but unless there's a total change of regime, not just Putin falls or is strung up from a lamppost or something and is replaced by his next mate...

01:42:33.000 But like an actual perestroika again.

01:42:36.000 Then I won't go back.

01:42:37.000 I wouldn't feel safe and probably wouldn't be safe.

01:42:40.000 But equally me being outside Russia now talking about What's happened and also what, you know, referencing what has been happening in Ukraine.

01:42:48.000 I'm the last person they care about, you know, because there are actual journalists doing actual journalism, spreading actual news and facts about the incredible atrocities.

01:42:57.000 I mean, when we flew from Tixie down to Yakutsk on the flight, firstly, they were like in the airport, there were banners with the letters Z everywhere.

01:43:06.000 And there were a bunch of soldiers.

01:43:08.000 I should say, so Tixie It used to be a restricted zone.

01:43:13.000 And then in January 2021, they declassified it.

01:43:16.000 And that's how my trip became viable.

01:43:19.000 And I thought, okay, great.

01:43:20.000 It's safe to go there now.

01:43:22.000 What's the significance of the letter Z? So that's the, I mean, it stands for Za Pobedi, like for victory. 0.80

01:43:28.000 And that's what the Russians have on their tanks, Z and V. So they, you know, the tanks that have driven across into Ukraine, they've all got the letter Z marked out on them in paint or tape.

01:43:39.000 But all over Russia, you'll see now cars or trucks or buses with the Z on them.

01:43:45.000 It's this like Z. Mark of, like, Russian pride in the special operation that's being undertaken in Ukraine, the invasion.

01:43:54.000 But all these, you know, soldiers on this flight, you know, they were sort of in their 40s.

01:43:59.000 They looked, you know, judging by their age and sort of epaulettes and stars all over them, they looked like they were probably relatively senior personnel.

01:44:06.000 And sitting on that flight was weird.

01:44:08.000 I was thinking if they're flying from here, maybe some of them will be deployed to Ukraine.

01:44:11.000 And if they're deployed to Ukraine, maybe some of these guys will be sanctioning or at least turning a blind eye to rape and murder and torture in the weeks to come.

01:44:23.000 Even as they were declassifying it, they installed a bunch of missile silos, surface air missile silos outside the town, which I wasn't aware of.

01:44:32.000 So it's Russia's huge Arctic coast.

01:44:35.000 It's like 12,000 miles of sort of frontier.

01:44:37.000 And they've got three points ranged along it that are the kind of hubs of their, they call it the ice curtain, their Arctic defense strategy.

01:44:45.000 And Tixie is one of those.

01:44:46.000 So they've, in the last few years, massively ramped up their military personnel there, their military hardware.

01:44:52.000 So, you know, that's to defend against any attacks from the north by sea or air or whatever.

01:44:58.000 And so that, you know, was, I guess, why they were particularly on edge about me being there and this idea of, you know, photographing the military, which, again, I hadn't been, but that was why they sort of summoned that.

01:45:09.000 So how did they eventually let you go and why?

01:45:13.000 So when they've got foreigners in this detention center to deport you, they've got to take you to Moscow first because there's no international airport in Yakutsk.

01:45:24.000 And to do that, you know, being taken to Moscow involves handcuffs and guards.

01:45:29.000 And it's like this whole big rigmarole.

01:45:30.000 They do it on the state budget.

01:45:31.000 You have no say over when it happens.

01:45:33.000 So you just have to wait.

01:45:35.000 And for the other, I think there were no more than about 12 people in this detention center.

01:45:39.000 There were only five cells.

01:45:40.000 For the other people there, that's just a case of just waiting.

01:45:43.000 And they were basically all undocumented workers.

01:45:45.000 So people who had either outstayed their work visa or never had one.

01:45:49.000 And, you know, most of them seem fairly stoical about it, although some of them had been there for...

01:45:54.000 I didn't get to talk to many because I was in a cell with two for two weeks and then by myself for two weeks after that.

01:46:01.000 But I think the longest any of them were there were probably about six weeks, except one Ukrainian guy who had been given a six-month sentence there.

01:46:09.000 He had been in a prison for two and a half years beforehand for some criminal offense that he wouldn't tell me what.

01:46:13.000 I don't really know what his story was.

01:46:16.000 But they deport you when the next sort of deportation run happens to be booked up.

01:46:22.000 And very last minute on the 16th, I think, of May, when I'd been inside nearly four weeks, They said, right, on Wednesday, two days from now, if you can book flights to coincide with this deportation that we're doing of three other people,

01:46:38.000 then you can go with it.

01:46:41.000 And so, you know, hurriedly I got my wonderful girlfriend to arrange flights so that I could fly with them on this flight to Moscow.

01:46:48.000 And from there I would then, as they told me, I would go through customs and immigration and then I'd be in the departures lounge and I'm sort of essentially out of Russia and then free to go.

01:46:59.000 So we arranged this flight, and I was taken with them.

01:47:03.000 And that was a huge relief.

01:47:04.000 Finally, I'm moving, I'm getting out of here.

01:47:06.000 Had it not worked out that time, they gave me a COVID test.

01:47:10.000 Had I been positive for COVID, had we managed to not get the flight, had there been no seats left on the plane, then I would have had to wait for the next one, which they told me was going to be sort of late July.

01:47:19.000 So yeah, another two months or so.

01:47:22.000 So thankfully we got tickets.

01:47:23.000 I got on that flight, you know, marched on in your handcuffs again.

01:47:27.000 Five bailiffs escorting the four of us, sort of prisoners.

01:47:30.000 They took us to Moscow, to Sheremetyevo Airport, the same airport where Brittany Greiner was arrested.

01:47:37.000 And we were then put into a small room to wait for our respective check-in times for our different flights.

01:47:42.000 Me to London via Dubai with Emirates.

01:47:45.000 A guy to Armenia, a guy to Uzbekistan, and another fella to Kyrgyzstan.

01:47:51.000 And finally they said, right, it's your time for check-in.

01:47:55.000 I went and got my bag checked in, was taken through security and immigration by a SWAT team, a two-person SWAT team with a bunch of police.

01:48:04.000 There was a whole gang of people.

01:48:06.000 Finally got through and they gave me my passport back and my phone back and said, right now.

01:48:11.000 And I was like, great, this is it.

01:48:13.000 I'm free.

01:48:14.000 And they said, right, just wait here a minute.

01:48:15.000 And then suddenly I was taken through this extra layer of security that I hadn't expected.

01:48:21.000 And there were about six cops who didn't know who I was.

01:48:25.000 They'd been given, I guess, a one sheet or a little stack of papers saying about my case.

01:48:29.000 And they basically were just given me and all my bags and just...

01:48:33.000 Well, my backpack.

01:48:34.000 Again, I haven't been left unsupervised with all my stuff at any point.

01:48:39.000 And so suddenly they had all my possessions, including that head torch, including the plug socket, including my diary, which they got their hands on.

01:48:46.000 And for an hour and a half, they just went over everything.

01:48:48.000 They went through all the phone conversations.

01:48:51.000 They went back on my phone through photos for years.

01:48:54.000 Eventually they came across a picture of me from 10 years earlier.

01:48:59.000 In Afghanistan with a big beard and a sort of headscarf and an AK-47 in the desert, which really didn't help. 0.99

01:49:06.000 And it was a totally innocent picture.

01:49:07.000 I'd been cycling along.

01:49:08.000 One of the Afghan National Army soldiers, you know, the good guys at a road checkpoint, invited me for tea, and their hobbies are kind of drinking tea and taking pictures with guns in the desert.

01:49:18.000 And, you know, they kept pulling up things on my phone saying, you know, what's this?

01:49:22.000 What's this for?

01:49:22.000 They found my diary.

01:49:24.000 This is the first time someone got their hands on my diary and they start reading through.

01:49:27.000 One of them could speak decent English, reading through stuff.

01:49:30.000 And I, thankfully, in the prison, had censored a bunch of stuff.

01:49:32.000 I'd gone through and I'd scrubbed things out.

01:49:33.000 Big black marks all over the place.

01:49:35.000 For instance, you know, it's a diary day by day, you know, given the date.

01:49:39.000 The third day, in big block capitals, it said at the top, Russia invades Ukraine.

01:49:43.000 I was like, scrub that out.

01:49:44.000 It was a wealth of stuff.

01:49:46.000 Had they really looked closely, that would probably still be visible.

01:49:49.000 Or you turn it over on the back, you can see where the pen mark is pressed, the impressions.

01:49:52.000 There was just a wealth of stuff there that they could have locked me up for.

01:49:57.000 And this is now in Moscow, where it just felt more serious.

01:50:01.000 And this process went on for ages.

01:50:03.000 They were asking me loads of questions.

01:50:04.000 And I started to realize, in my mind, I was realizing, that's it.

01:50:09.000 Like, this is, you know, it's just got, like, we're back to square one, but worse.

01:50:13.000 And my flight time was sort of ticking slowly closer.

01:50:16.000 And they showed no sign of letting me go.

01:50:18.000 And I was like, no, I've got to get on my flight soon.

01:50:19.000 And they started looking through just all the pictures on my camera.

01:50:23.000 And I mean, they're also going to like personal conversations on WhatsApp on my phone.

01:50:27.000 And it was it was a really my girlfriend who I just texted when I got my phone back saying, you know, I've got my phone.

01:50:33.000 It's all done.

01:50:34.000 It's all over.

01:50:34.000 She then was trying to reply and call me and the messages were marked as read.

01:50:38.000 The calls were just getting hung up each time.

01:50:40.000 So she was freaking out because suddenly, like I say, I'm free.

01:50:43.000 And suddenly it seems I don't have access to my phone.

01:50:45.000 And I'm in Moscow. 0.94

01:50:47.000 So this went on for an hour and a half, during which, like, in Russia, everyone shits on whoever's below them. 0.99

01:50:54.000 So all these people were trying to intimidate the shit out of me. 0.96

01:50:57.000 And they were saying, okay, well, you know, you've got to wipe your phone, you've got to wipe every photo that you have on your camera. 0.95

01:51:03.000 And like, you know, if it came to it, I'd be willing to do that.

01:51:06.000 But I didn't want to, because I also want to have some record of this journey I've been on, which was great until I was arrested.

01:51:14.000 And it starts to feel like I'm about to get locked up.

01:51:17.000 This is it.

01:51:17.000 And it's either going to be espionage or journalism, fake news journalism, and I'm going to be here for years.

01:51:25.000 There's a British woman who got locked up for basically the same thing in Iran and was behind bars for six years.

01:51:32.000 And it wasn't helped by the fact that Boris Johnson, now the Prime Minister, was Foreign Secretary at the time.

01:51:37.000 And he said publicly, oh, she's just teaching people journalism. 0.58

01:51:40.000 It's fine.

01:51:41.000 She was there.

01:51:42.000 She's an Iranian-British dual national.

01:51:44.000 She was there visiting her family.

01:51:46.000 So that didn't help.

01:51:47.000 And she became a bargaining chip.

01:51:48.000 With the British government, basically the British had a sort of £240 million unpaid debt.

01:51:56.000 Before the Shah was deposed, they had sold, they had taken money, £240 million worth of money for some tanks.

01:52:05.000 But after the Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Revolution, the British just didn't deliver the tanks and held the money.

01:52:11.000 So it was actually like a fair grievance, to be honest.

01:52:13.000 But she was held until eventually that was agreed to be paid. 0.57

01:52:17.000 So it was a very naked bargaining chip thing.

01:52:20.000 And that was totally forefront of my mind.

01:52:23.000 The amount of sanctions, the amount of things that Britain is doing at the moment to sort of hinder Russia and to aid Ukraine, I could be pretty useful.

01:52:32.000 And then just as my flight was about to take off, they suddenly said, right, pack everything up.

01:52:38.000 And they ran me through the departures lounge at a run to the gate where they were clearly waiting for me.

01:52:45.000 So I got on the plane.

01:52:47.000 The last soldier was gone behind me.

01:52:48.000 The doors shut.

01:52:49.000 The plane took off, and the minute those wheels took off, I just broke down, like floods of tears.

01:52:55.000 It was the first time in the whole long month.

01:52:58.000 Dude, I'm freaking out, you're here.

01:53:00.000 I know.

01:53:01.000 So this morning, I thought having this chat with you, I should probably read through my diary, because in prison I was allowed pen and paper.

01:53:07.000 So on little scraps of paper, keeping them all sort of separate.

01:53:09.000 I wrote what was happening day to day and this morning I was reading through it and it got me on edge again.

01:53:13.000 I was like freaking out because it just brought back that sense of insecurity.

01:53:17.000 Being in this cell writing stuff, there are cameras in the ceiling, you're always watched, you never know who's watching.

01:53:22.000 You never know who's going to next go and look through your stuff.

01:53:24.000 It just scared the shit out of me. 0.97

01:53:26.000 Jesus Christ, man.

01:53:28.000 Sorry, I think I relayed all that quite scatterly.

01:53:30.000 No, it was amazing.

01:53:31.000 It was great.

01:53:32.000 It's hard to kind of tell it chronologically, I guess.

01:53:35.000 It's kind of interesting.

01:53:36.000 Oh, yeah.

01:53:37.000 If you ever find yourself in prison and you need some dice, you can make them with bread and toothpaste for the dots.

01:53:45.000 Oh, this is bread?

01:53:47.000 Yeah, this is bread.

01:53:48.000 If you take the crust off and just kind of knead the flesh of the bread kind of back into dough, add a bit of water, it becomes quite sort of versatile.

01:53:58.000 Although the one that we're looking at now with the six, it turns out that's kind of a bent die.

01:54:02.000 That rolls a six pretty much every time.

01:54:03.000 But the other ones were pretty equal.

01:54:05.000 And I had time to, like, with each of them, I rolled them like 300 times to, like, Tally what they came up with.

01:54:10.000 You know, it's just anything to kill time.

01:54:12.000 So one of those dice was almost perfectly fair.

01:54:14.000 One of them was alright.

01:54:15.000 The one with that six was not good.

01:54:16.000 And were you gambling with people?

01:54:19.000 No, not gambling.

01:54:20.000 I mean, we had...

01:54:20.000 So I was the only one who didn't smoke.

01:54:23.000 I'm a non-smoker and two other guys in the cell smoking.

01:54:25.000 It wasn't ideal, but they quit.

01:54:27.000 This is the first two weeks when I had cellmates.

01:54:29.000 We're good to go.

01:54:56.000 So 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.

01:55:09.000 Thankfully a local friend and the lawyer that I hired were allowed to deliver me some English language books I mean, I didn't get them immediately.

01:55:19.000 So in the course of probably about 23 days, I tallied up.

01:55:22.000 I read 7,000 pages plus of books, just reading whatever I could get hold of, some of which wasn't great, some was fantastic.

01:55:31.000 I did a lot of sit-ups and push-ups.

01:55:33.000 My last day I did 700 sit-ups, which...

01:55:36.000 I mean, it's all gone now.

01:55:37.000 I've been back and I've been living well slash badly since I got home.

01:55:41.000 But yeah, just anything to kill time.

01:55:44.000 Well, no one can fault you for that. 1.00

01:55:46.000 God damn, man. 0.99

01:55:47.000 That must have been a harrowing experience. 1.00

01:55:49.000 Do you still have nightmares about it?

01:55:51.000 I've never had nightmares about it, but I have had once or twice since I got back when I've woken up sort of thinking that I'm still there.

01:56:00.000 Which, I mean, when I was inside for the first week or so, I'd wake up every morning thinking I was elsewhere.

01:56:05.000 And almost the most depressing thing was the first morning when I woke up and I wasn't at all surprised to be in this prison. 0.83

01:56:10.000 You know, that was a bit shitty.

01:56:12.000 But actually, I don't really dream.

01:56:14.000 I very rarely remember any dreams slash nightmares.

01:56:17.000 So thankfully, that hasn't been a problem.

01:56:20.000 I think I'm more or less all right.

01:56:22.000 Maybe I'm...

01:56:23.000 I mean, I'm very British.

01:56:24.000 I'm probably just, like, compacting all my trauma and burying it.

01:56:28.000 I also spent 10 years at boarding school, which was quite good training for prison.

01:56:33.000 I guess.

01:56:36.000 And had just been living outdoors in super cold temperatures for a while, so I guess the novelty of being inside with running water and food bought to you, even though it wasn't great food.

01:56:49.000 I think I was quite good at trying to see the bright side, and I put myself through quite a lot of stressors in the past, and so I'm probably fairly resilient to things like this, but it's definitely left a mark, and I'm sure I'll be I mean, it's recent.

01:57:03.000 I got out like three weeks ago and I'm still, I guess, sort of picking over it in my mind.

01:57:07.000 Have you started to write about it?

01:57:09.000 I wrote an article for the Sunday Times that went out about a week ago.

01:57:14.000 And that was a really good sort of cathartic process, like going through it all, reading over stuff and just trying to...

01:57:22.000 I'm trying to process it formally as opposed to just vague thoughts drifting about.

01:57:26.000 But I will start shortly, work on a book about it, about the whole trip, not just about this time in prison.

01:57:32.000 Because, frankly, the prison time, you know, it's quite dramatic.

01:57:36.000 But it was largely just very boring, frightening and frustrating.

01:57:40.000 Yeah.

01:57:40.000 Was it disturbing seeing the effectiveness of the propaganda on the populace?

01:57:45.000 I mean, that seems to be...

01:57:48.000 The most disturbing thing.

01:57:50.000 After about 10 days, a TV was put into our cell, which for about 30 seconds I thought, this is great, you know, something to distract. 0.94

01:57:59.000 And then I immediately realized this is going to be blaring, loud, crap Russian TV shows around the clock. 1.00

01:58:04.000 And it very quickly started to drive me mad. 0.98

01:58:06.000 I was very glad to then, a few days later, be put in a cell by myself.

01:58:11.000 But that meant that I had daily access to the propaganda when the war was three months in.

01:58:19.000 And I mean, it's insane.

01:58:22.000 They're obsessed with this idea that the government has sold this idea, the Kremlin, that it's liberating people from Nazism. 0.55

01:58:31.000 And I think that's because throughout the whole Soviet era, the Soviet state's founding myth was the Bolshevik Revolution.

01:58:42.000 And that slowly changed because, I mean, I think Putin is slowly kind of removing or sort of diminishing Lenin's reputation.

01:58:52.000 He's actually starting to try and sort of rehabilitate Stalin's reputation, which is astounding, frankly.

01:58:57.000 But the founding myth, essentially, myth's not fair.

01:59:02.000 The founding story of the Russian Federation now is basically the Second World War or the Great Patriotic War, as they call it.

01:59:10.000 In which so many millions of Russians died.

01:59:12.000 How is he trying to rehabilitate Stalin's image?

01:59:16.000 I mean, in Russia you can rewrite the history books.

01:59:20.000 It's that simple.

01:59:21.000 And they don't have general access to the internet, right?

01:59:25.000 The internet is heavily sort of censored.

01:59:28.000 And more and more.

01:59:29.000 You know, when I arrived, there was still Instagram and Twitter and whatever.

01:59:32.000 And as soon as the invasion happened, they cut Twitter.

01:59:36.000 They cut or just severely restricted the bandwidth to, I think, Instagram.

01:59:41.000 But lots of people have VPNs.

01:59:42.000 They find ways around it.

01:59:44.000 Are VPNs effective in that regard?

01:59:46.000 Can you use them?

01:59:46.000 I didn't use them, but I saw loads of people using them.

01:59:49.000 I think, I mean, they're always effective.

01:59:50.000 For people who don't know what we're talking about, virtual private network, you can use them to pretend you're in a different country, you can use them to access different parts of the internet that might be restricted.

02:00:00.000 Exactly.

02:00:03.000 So the Second World War is this kind of foundational story.

02:00:06.000 So many millions of people died, and it's the great triumph of Russia to have been... 1.00

02:00:11.000 So instrumental in defeating the Nazis. 0.73

02:00:13.000 And Russia was incredibly instrumental.

02:00:15.000 The Eastern Front, the war back then for Ukraine in particular, Stalingrad, you know, this was like untold numbers of deaths, you know, way outnumbers the Western Front, even with the Dunkirk, the D-Day landings and stuff.

02:00:29.000 And so Russia sees its noble defeat of Nazism and oppression and fascism as its kind of almost its national raison d'etre, its reason to be.

02:00:39.000 And the news was just covered in grainy old footage from the Second World War.

02:00:44.000 And they had got a few little clips from...

02:00:49.000 Are you aware of the Azov Battalion?

02:00:51.000 Those are the Nazis.

02:00:54.000 The concept of Nazism is different, right?

02:00:58.000 It's more of a nationalism than it is an anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic Nazism.

02:01:04.000 Yeah, and I mean, I'm definitely not an expert on this.

02:01:06.000 Am I right about that?

02:01:07.000 Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much it.

02:01:08.000 But I mean, that was the Azov Battalion's roots, at least.

02:01:11.000 And I guess it's sort of white nationalism.

02:01:13.000 Are they using swastikas?

02:01:15.000 They've got their own sort of take on a slightly swastika-esque symbol, I guess.

02:01:20.000 What is it?

02:01:20.000 Can we see what that looks like?

02:01:22.000 It's kind of a yellow and black type symbol, I think.

02:01:25.000 But how is it correlated with Nazism?

02:01:28.000 So, well, the Azov Battalion's roots, and you'll probably be able to pull up better information than I'm able to sort of summon from my slightly sketchy memory, but their roots were a while ago, and they did have this kind of line of extremism, I guess.

02:01:42.000 But that's changed a lot.

02:01:44.000 So there it is.

02:01:45.000 I mean, there's definitely a swastika inspiration to that.

02:01:48.000 Yeah, similar.

02:01:50.000 But it also looks like when they find utilities, you know, like when they draw that thing on the street.

02:01:56.000 Oh, yeah.

02:01:57.000 You know what I'm talking about?

02:01:58.000 Gasworks.

02:01:58.000 Yeah, when they spray paint lines on the street where the lines are.

02:02:03.000 Also, you flip it on its side and it's a Z. Yeah, right.

02:02:06.000 But I think I'm right in saying that with the invasion, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Azov battalion sort of broadened and other people joined and that kind of element was constricted and had a diminishing role.

02:02:24.000 However, there is out there online from a long time ago, sort of plenty of Azor Battalion propaganda, people marching, there's the odd sort of Sieg Heil, Hitler saluting.

02:02:35.000 And that stuff has all been dredged up and it's just put all over the place, as well as other footage, kind of grainy, you know, video phone film footage that claims to be, but I'm pretty sure wasn't, members of the Azor Battalion just beating up strangers on the street,

02:02:52.000 kind of, you know, just random violent attacks.

02:02:54.000 But they just ram all this down the throats of the public.

02:02:57.000 And it does seem like the vast...

02:03:00.000 I mean, after Putin invaded, his popularity within Russia soared.

02:03:04.000 Really?

02:03:05.000 Yeah.

02:03:05.000 I think there's been some changes there.

02:03:07.000 There have been a few brief, high-profile people speaking out, but they quickly get suppressed or arrested or whatever.

02:03:13.000 And there were initially protests across the country, but in the first two or three days of the war, something like 15,000 people were arrested.

02:03:21.000 And so quickly dissent got kind of quashed. 0.97

02:03:25.000 And in my admittedly limited experience of an admittedly niche, far remote part of Russia, it seemed like plenty of people, and I had to be very careful about generalizations here, but it seemed like plenty of people either realized that it's just bullshit and they're being lied to, 0.95

02:03:43.000 or had their doubts. 0.95

02:03:45.000 It's just...

02:03:46.000 But understandably, no one's putting their head above the parapet and saying this, because there's nothing to gain.

02:03:51.000 If you speak out, you're going to get in trouble, or your family are going to get in trouble, and trouble can mean years in prison, or in basically the gulag.

02:03:59.000 They've still got labor camps, labor prisons, penal colonies, they call them, dotted around the country.

02:04:04.000 And so people understandably are just keeping their heads down and getting on with life.

02:04:09.000 And it's been weird since coming back, because I had, and to some extent still have, this massive...

02:04:19.000 I think?

02:04:38.000 And getting out, it's been very interesting seeing this kind of, firstly, the incredible and totally worthwhile, noble support of Ukraine.

02:04:47.000 And it's been great to see that at a public level, at a state level, and long may that continue.

02:04:53.000 And maybe we'll talk a bit about the future in a minute.

02:04:56.000 Also, there's this slightly worrying kind of general russophobia that has me a little bit uncomfortable because at the beginning of the war, it was very much billed in Western media, at least as one man's mad war, you know, Putin's crazy sort of, you know...

02:05:21.000 I think McDonald's, for instance, leaving Russia, I think that's the right thing to do. 1.00

02:05:28.000 And just two days ago, all the McDonald's restaurants were reopened under the new branding, which is tasty, and that's it.

02:05:37.000 That's the new name?

02:05:38.000 Yeah.

02:05:38.000 So they just basically took their McDonald's stores?

02:05:41.000 Yeah, they're selling all the same shit. 0.99

02:05:42.000 The secret ingredients won't be there. 0.99

02:05:52.000 Connection to the state, it seems, have been experiencing quite a lot of hardship as well.

02:05:57.000 Russian athletes.

02:05:58.000 Yeah, particularly.

02:06:00.000 I mean, Wimbledon's a very good example.

02:06:01.000 I totally disagree with the idea of Russian tennis players being banned from playing at Wimbledon.

02:06:06.000 And I think it's right that Wimbledon is not counting as a tennis rankings tournament this year.

02:06:12.000 There was criticism of Canelo Alvarez boxing against Bivali.

02:06:16.000 Right.

02:06:17.000 These are athletes.

02:06:18.000 The Olympics are slightly different when you're representing your country and there's a sort of state-sponsored doping program that's been going on for years.

02:06:24.000 But like tennis players who are individuals, you don't play tennis for your country.

02:06:28.000 You play tennis for yourself.

02:06:29.000 You don't box for your country unless it's Rocky IV. You box for yourself.

02:06:34.000 And I don't feel good about some of these sort of things that are happening.

02:06:40.000 Yeah, I share that concern.

02:06:41.000 It's actually made its way into billiards.

02:06:44.000 There's a man named Fedor Gorst who's a top-level pool player, and there's people that want him banned from tournaments.

02:06:52.000 I mean, that just seems vindictive, frankly. 0.94

02:06:56.000 It just seems ignorant. 0.90

02:06:57.000 If you're just a Russian sports person who's keeping their head down, that's not fair. 1.00

02:07:04.000 If you're someone who's up the regime, this is great, let's go good old Putin.

02:07:10.000 Male Russian gymnast recently, I think, who used a podium place to, you know, to perform a letter Z or something.

02:07:17.000 I'm not entirely sure.

02:07:18.000 Yeah, that's a bit different.

02:07:19.000 People sharing sort of public support and essentially, you know, repeating propaganda.

02:07:25.000 That's a different thing.

02:07:26.000 But if you're just a sports person, then I think it's not really right.

02:07:29.000 Well, it's fascinating how many athletes come out of Ukraine, how many great boxers have come out of Ukraine.

02:07:35.000 The Klitschko brothers, of course, one of them is the mayor, which is really insane.

02:07:40.000 And also, you know, Lomachenko.

02:07:44.000 There's quite a few, like, elite boxers.

02:07:46.000 It's a massive country as well.

02:07:48.000 It's like 45 million people or something.

02:07:50.000 I think for a long time we kind of chose to forget just how large and important Ukraine is, particularly with grain and all the exports, chemical exports, nuclear power, all these things that they produce and farm and whatever there, as well as human exports.

02:08:06.000 I think we're suddenly realizing how much of a powerhouse Ukraine is in its own right.

02:08:11.000 So for the three weeks since you've been out, have you been playing catch-up, trying to absorb as much media as possible and get a sort of an objective understanding of what's happening over there?

02:08:21.000 Yeah, I've been trying my best to.

02:08:22.000 It is difficult with just checking the news because you tend to just get the latest developments.

02:08:28.000 And I'm...

02:08:29.000 I'm sure there'll be things that, you know, over the coming months that come out that I had no idea about that was massive news for a day or two.

02:08:35.000 You know, if I'd been in over the period that these two British and one Moroccan citizens were recently sentenced to death in Donetsk for having fought with the...

02:08:46.000 I mean, they were all in the Ukrainian forces before the invasion anyway, but they've been tried and found guilty and given the death sentence for being mercenaries.

02:08:54.000 If something like that happened briefly while I was inside, then that news pops up and then disappears again quite quickly.

02:09:00.000 And that's the stuff I might not know.

02:09:02.000 But actually, the best solution to that I found is by trawling through podcasts from the period that I was in, podcasts from news outlets and various political discussion, whatever.

02:09:11.000 And that's been quite a good way to sort of stop the gap.

02:09:15.000 It seems like in your recovery from prison and dealing with just the psychological stress and then absorbing all this information, I mean, that has to be taking up a gigantic portion of your life.

02:09:29.000 Is it difficult to get back on track and to try to have a semblance of normalcy?

02:09:35.000 Yeah, I mean it's been a really flat out time since I got back.

02:09:38.000 Also a bunch of friends are all getting married this summer so I'm sort of darting around all over the place.

02:09:42.000 I mean this month I've literally got four weddings and a funeral.

02:09:44.000 It's a busy time just socially as well.

02:09:47.000 It's summer and it's nice to be out and to be normal again.

02:09:50.000 God, it must be nice.

02:09:52.000 But I also feel I have to point out that although what happened to me was psychologically quite frightening, firstly, I was never beaten or abused or starved or anything like that.

02:10:02.000 The soldiers were sometimes pricks, but that's not a big deal.

02:10:06.000 Secondly, what's happened to me is, in the grand scheme of things, totally insignificant and irrelevant, and I've still got a home.

02:10:12.000 I haven't been bombed.

02:10:12.000 I haven't lost a family member.

02:10:14.000 Of course.

02:10:14.000 I think, if anything, I would like my experiences to highlight that I think?

02:10:48.000 Percent of cases end in a guilty verdict.

02:10:50.000 If you're accused of something in Russia, you are guilty.

02:10:52.000 That's it.

02:10:53.000 There's no dispute.

02:10:56.000 I would advise no one to go there.

02:11:00.000 It's not safe to be a foreigner, particularly if you're from one of the NATO or Western or EU countries.

02:11:07.000 That is wild.

02:11:08.000 It's lost.

02:11:09.000 As a country, it's lost.

02:11:11.000 We're back to the bad old days.

02:11:13.000 I was, there was discussion about fights taking place in Russia and I think we might have done a UFC in Moscow.

02:11:22.000 I think we did.

02:11:23.000 I think there was a UFC in Moscow.

02:11:25.000 See if that's the case.

02:11:26.000 UFC is huge.

02:11:27.000 Yeah, well they had one of the greatest heavyweight champions ever in Fyodor Emelianenko.

02:11:34.000 Yeah, Fight Night 163. Yeah, Zabit.

02:11:38.000 Yeah, Zabit Magomed Shapirov, who's one of the top flight guys.

02:11:46.000 Sharapov, excuse me. 0.97

02:11:47.000 I always fuck his name up. 0.99

02:11:48.000 Magomed Sharapov versus Calvin Kader, which is a great fight that took place in Russia. 0.99

02:11:53.000 So this was, when was this?

02:11:56.000 2019, yeah.

02:11:57.000 Did you go over for that?

02:11:58.000 I did not.

02:11:59.000 I don't do the fight nights, but there was discussion of doing a major event over there, and whenever there's a major event, I get tempted to going just to see.

02:12:11.000 There's a few places I've never experienced.

02:12:13.000 I've never experienced Moscow, and I think the architecture is spectacular, and I'd be interested in just seeing what it's like over there, and Unfortunately, you'd be an absolute gift to the authorities.

02:12:25.000 To arrest me?

02:12:26.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:12:27.000 Particularly, I suppose you're publicly an advocate of substances that are very much banned in Russia.

02:12:31.000 Oh yeah, all of them.

02:12:33.000 And they will swab every inch of you. 0.74

02:12:35.000 They'll find some stuff, I'm sure.

02:12:37.000 Well, just testing me.

02:12:38.000 Or they'll just say they found some stuff.

02:12:39.000 That's the thing.

02:12:40.000 It doesn't have to be true.

02:12:42.000 That's what I've heard about this basketball player woman, Brittany Griner, that they believe that they might have even planted these things or lied about what's in there. 1.00

02:12:50.000 I don't have any desire to go over there now, but back then I was tempted because I'm just curious about the experience of going to these places.

02:12:58.000 It is a fascinating place.

02:13:00.000 It's got an incredible history and I think the history is what has drawn me there a lot.

02:13:06.000 I've been a few times in the last few years.

02:13:10.000 It's basically a morbid curiosity. 1.00

02:13:12.000 Russia's history is just a relentless parade of shit. 1.00

02:13:17.000 The deaths are counted by the vague estimated millions as opposed to precise numbers. 1.00

02:13:26.000 It's scored more own goals in history than any other country, surely.

02:13:31.000 They really have What is that expression?

02:13:39.000 What are you saying?

02:13:40.000 Scored more what?

02:13:49.000 I think this is part of what I've historically admired about Russian people that I've met as well, is that they are just incredibly stoical. 0.97

02:13:57.000 It's like they're almost born to suffer and just put up with crap in a very staunch, almost admirable way. 0.58

02:14:06.000 And I do find that admirable. 0.94

02:14:10.000 And I can somewhat relate to it because I've, over the years, put myself through a lot of, you know, unnecessarily put myself through a lot of, like, difficult times.

02:14:18.000 But I guess the feeling of kinship has faded somewhat.

02:14:22.000 Yeah, I just, I wonder if at all, if this is going to relax to the point where travel is going to be possible again.

02:14:30.000 Well, that's the next thing, you know, like how long does this go on?

02:14:33.000 I think years.

02:14:35.000 You think years?

02:14:36.000 Well, so the big question at the moment, Zelensky is, unfortunately, and in fact, I would like to say this now, because for months on the inside, I could never say it, Slava, Ukraine, you know, victory to the Ukrainian people.

02:14:47.000 You know, I'm totally behind them.

02:14:48.000 But Zelensky is in this impossible situation where it's going to be very, very hard to completely defeat and repel the Russian forces beyond, you know, out of the Donbas, for instance, this bit in the east that they've seized and even the Crimea.

02:15:04.000 But he has to politically say, I'm not giving up.

02:15:09.000 I'm not making any concessions of land.

02:15:10.000 You know, we fight until we restore our sort of sovereign borders of Ukraine.

02:15:15.000 And if he were to make some peace deal with the Russians that conceded territory, he'd possibly be out of office straight away.

02:15:23.000 And that gives the chance for Moscow to try and insert a puppet candidate.

02:15:27.000 That's a problem.

02:15:32.000 15 years now.

02:15:33.000 If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.

02:15:35.000 If the pushback isn't hard enough and they are allowed to occupy and set up their two puppet states in the Donbass, then they've got that and next it'll be more of Ukraine or Estonia or Latvia or even Finland. 0.67

02:15:49.000 Who knows?

02:15:51.000 And it's, you know, where does it stop?

02:15:54.000 And it has to stop somewhere.

02:15:55.000 You know, making peace and allowing them to have some of the territory of Ukraine is pausing rather than solving the problem. 0.83

02:16:03.000 And I feel like it's better off just fixing this problem now, but it's going to be a long...

02:16:09.000 It's a grinding, unpleasant solution and who knows how long it will take or what the outcome will be.

02:16:13.000 I'm not farsighted.

02:16:15.000 I'm not clairvoyant.

02:16:16.000 Nobody seems to have a real clear understanding of how this could ever possibly play out in a positive way.

02:16:23.000 Yeah.

02:16:24.000 There are people who, and I don't know entirely if I agree with this, but there are certain commentators who are saying that The war in Ukraine grinding on for a long time is from the kind of NATO perspective, sort of the ideal scenario because Russia just gets weakened.

02:16:41.000 I mean, there are tens of thousands of troops they've lost.

02:16:44.000 No one knows.

02:16:44.000 It's an official secret.

02:16:45.000 No one in Russia knows.

02:16:46.000 But, you know, they are losing so many people, so much hardware.

02:16:50.000 I mean, their economy is actually doing fine because, you know, all the price of export of natural...

02:16:55.000 You know, fossil fuels is shot up and they're still exporting just as much as they ever have.

02:16:59.000 So they're actually not feeling economically that much strain yet, but that's to come, I think.

02:17:05.000 But, you know, the longer it goes on, the more weakened Russia becomes.

02:17:08.000 And that's sort of, you know, ideal from the view, the standpoint of the opponents of Russia.

02:17:14.000 But I mean, it's just horrific for the Ukrainian people who essentially are the sort of cannon fodder to, you know, to that end. 1.00

02:17:22.000 And there's always the looming threat that he uses a nuke.

02:17:25.000 Yeah.

02:17:26.000 Well, that's the thing.

02:17:27.000 I mean, that's the fault with nuclear weapons in the first place.

02:17:31.000 It doesn't make sense.

02:17:33.000 But he probably just about is mad enough.

02:17:36.000 And everyone thought that he was, like, bluffing this whole time.

02:17:39.000 But it does seem like he's genuinely mad.

02:17:40.000 And if he...

02:17:42.000 I mean, a lot of people...

02:17:43.000 There's a lot of sort of conspiracy theory around, I suppose, about his health.

02:17:47.000 Perhaps he's got...

02:17:48.000 Bone cancer?

02:17:49.000 Well, Oliver Stone said that he was being treated for cancer when he went to visit him and have interviews with him, which was a few years ago.

02:17:57.000 Right.

02:17:58.000 Oliver was over there, and did you ever see that?

02:18:00.000 He showed him Dr. Strangelove?

02:18:04.000 Yeah, which is wild, right?

02:18:06.000 Because Dr. Strangelove is all about a bunch of mad people deciding to use the bomb and conceding that we'll lose a couple million here or there, but it's no big deal.

02:18:17.000 And essentially was about real discussions that were being had during the 1950s and 60s.

02:18:23.000 By several generals who thought it would be a good idea to preemptively attack Russia and preemptively attack China with nuclear weapons.

02:18:34.000 What was Putin's take on this film?

02:18:36.000 Do we know?

02:18:37.000 Oliver Stone was on here and he talked about it.

02:18:40.000 We looked at photographs of him and videos of him showing the Dr. Strangelove film to Putin.

02:18:47.000 I think he...

02:18:49.000 It was probably paying lip service to the dangers of nuclear weapons and this and that.

02:18:53.000 But, you know, he's already used hypersonic weapons.

02:18:56.000 And I think in many ways that...

02:18:59.000 And those hyperbaric ones that suck all the oxygen out of the city.

02:19:03.000 I mean, it's horrific.

02:19:04.000 Yeah, it's horrific.

02:19:05.000 But I mean, if he was mad enough to begin this invasion, which, I mean, there's no logic to it.

02:19:12.000 Right.

02:19:13.000 And there's no, whatever outcome, he still loses.

02:19:16.000 Right.

02:19:17.000 Like Russia has massively isolated itself.

02:19:21.000 And for the prosperity of Russia as a whole and its kind of integration, I know that China is still kind of there on the fence.

02:19:28.000 Right.

02:19:30.000 You know, if you put together the kind of the European bloc and America and Canada and all these other countries who, you know, who are on the sort of the liberal side, you know, that's much more important, you know, economically.

02:19:42.000 Russia has totally shot itself in the foot. 1.00

02:19:45.000 And so he is clearly mad enough to make a move that stupid. 1.00

02:19:48.000 So potentially he is mad enough to launch a nuclear missile. 1.00

02:19:52.000 Well, particularly if he's really fatally sick.

02:19:56.000 I mean, if that really is happening and he really doesn't have anything to lose.

02:20:01.000 You know, my friend Lex Friedman, who is Russian, he does not think that's going to happen because he thinks that Putin wants to have a legacy of benefiting Russia, and that if he does die, and if he is dying, That he wants to have something in his legacy that shows that he was of benefit to Russia,

02:20:21.000 that he's very committed to this idea of his legacy.

02:20:24.000 I think he probably only sees that in territorial terms.

02:20:28.000 So, four or five days ago was the 350th birthday of Peter the Great, who was a Romanov Tsar who massively expanded Russia's territory.

02:20:40.000 And Putin said in a sort of public celebration and speech, he said, you know, I see myself as picking up where Peter left off in reclaiming Russian territory.

02:20:50.000 I mean, Peter conquered Finland from the Swedes, so the Finns must be terrified.

02:20:55.000 But I genuinely think he sees it as...

02:20:59.000 Restoring Russia to its greatest extent, which was the Soviet Empire. 0.90

02:21:02.000 And lots of people within Russia, normal people, think that, you know, the Ukrainians, the Latvians, the Uzbeks, all these people are their kind of national brethren and that they belong under the mantle of Russia.

02:21:18.000 That's what's terrifying, right?

02:21:19.000 That there's a precedent, that there's some sort of a rationalization for him acquiring these countries again.

02:21:25.000 But I mean, Russia is in itself a massive imperial project.

02:21:28.000 It's an empire.

02:21:29.000 It's still an empire today.

02:21:30.000 Where I was has no right being ruled by Moscow.

02:21:33.000 It doesn't really make any sense.

02:21:34.000 And, I mean, he's picked his time, you know, the greatest extent of Russian Empire.

02:21:38.000 That's where it should be again.

02:21:40.000 But, I mean, one of the, I think possibly the Kenyan Prime Minister or Foreign Minister, or no, I think it was Kenya's ambassador to the UN a few weeks ago said, look, you know, we can't all just hark back to some colonial era.

02:21:52.000 And, you know, Kenya could dispute borders with Tanzania or Britain could suddenly go mad again and say, we want to paint the map pink and, you know, reconquer all the world.

02:22:00.000 And that's totally, you know, it's just a failed project.

02:22:03.000 But, you know, he's not going to listen to that.

02:22:06.000 Yeah, and also there's a fear that China is watching this and contemplating whether or not to invade Taiwan.

02:22:13.000 Yeah.

02:22:13.000 I mean, we've already seen Hong Kong lost in the last couple of years.

02:22:17.000 I mean, as far as I'm concerned.

02:22:19.000 Completely lost.

02:22:19.000 Gone from being European-ruled in the 1990s to kind of mostly maintaining that sort of tradition and now recently gone full totalitarianism.

02:22:32.000 Well, the deal on the handover in 1997 was that the laws and the autonomy of Hong Kong remains inviolate for 50 years after the handover.

02:22:42.000 So that would be 2047, but it's already gone.

02:22:44.000 They've upped the timetable.

02:22:46.000 And with China and Taiwan, I fear, it's not a case of if, it's a case of when.

02:22:53.000 But thankfully, the West's reaction to, you know, they haven't just turned a blind eye to Ukraine.

02:22:59.000 And so China probably will be thinking, you know, this is not going to be easy.

02:23:03.000 The world's not just going to roll over and let us conquer Taiwan, which is, you know, one of the world's most sort of healthy functioning democracies.

02:23:11.000 Yeah.

02:23:11.000 Yeah, I've read there was some speculation about China economically divesting in the West and that they're going to liquidate assets and they're doing this to mitigate the amount of impact it would have if they're sanctioned for invading Taiwan.

02:23:30.000 I hadn't heard that.

02:23:31.000 That's very worrying.

02:23:32.000 Yes.

02:23:33.000 Yeah.

02:23:34.000 Yeah, that's what I was reading about that, but I don't understand economics enough to really speculate whether or not it's accurate or whether or not this person has a valid point.

02:23:43.000 It's just the whole thing is so tense and it didn't...

02:23:45.000 Five years ago, there was no fear at all.

02:23:48.000 Five years ago, it was like everything was...

02:23:49.000 Like, look at this 2019 event that they were having in Moscow.

02:23:53.000 Where I was like, ooh, maybe I'd like to go there.

02:23:55.000 Maybe that'd be interesting.

02:23:56.000 You know, I'm just fascinated in the architecture.

02:23:59.000 You know, when you look in Moscow...

02:24:01.000 And the metro in particular.

02:24:02.000 Each metro station is like an artwork.

02:24:04.000 It's like a, you know, sort of a totally different architecture in each one.

02:24:08.000 They're really, really impressive.

02:24:10.000 It's also so unique.

02:24:11.000 Their architecture is so uniquely Russian.

02:24:15.000 When you look at just the colors and the beautiful buildings in Moscow.

02:24:21.000 And sort of 19th century, I know now we build bigger buildings, but from a 19th century perspective, monumental architecture, huge buildings, big, long, organized projects, streets that are...

02:24:32.000 Yeah, I mean, look at this.

02:24:33.000 It's incredible.

02:24:34.000 Look at that.

02:24:34.000 That's incredible.

02:24:36.000 And each station is totally different.

02:24:37.000 They are really, really impressive.

02:24:39.000 Well, they're such impressive people.

02:24:41.000 I mean, what they've done with chess, what they've done with literature, what they've done particularly with martial arts.

02:24:49.000 I mean, they have some of the most dominant fighters in the history of the sport have come out of Russia, particularly in MMA, but in boxing as well.

02:24:58.000 And wrestling.

02:24:59.000 I mean, there's just so many incredible athletes that have come out of that system.

02:25:04.000 And obviously, there's an intense amount of corruption and cheating involved, too.

02:25:10.000 Have you ever seen the documentary Icarus?

02:25:12.000 Yeah.

02:25:12.000 It was just a great documentary just to understand the extent of their cheating in international competition.

02:25:20.000 Yeah, I mean, it's also a massive population.

02:25:23.000 I think about 144 million people.

02:25:26.000 And although it's, I mean, their national average income is pretty woeful.

02:25:32.000 You know, it's, I think, you know, the now outmoded terms, first world and third world.

02:25:39.000 The second world was the Soviet Union. 0.95

02:25:41.000 I didn't know that till recently.

02:25:43.000 So they're kind of, they're neither here nor there.

02:25:45.000 And that's still sort of the case.

02:25:46.000 And of course, you've got the incredible wealth of kind of oligarchs and the kind of kleptocracy in Moscow.

02:25:54.000 But I mean, the vast majority of Russian people don't have a great deal.

02:25:57.000 They really aren't very wealthy, but they are very literate.

02:26:01.000 They're relatively well educated, even if some of the history they're taught is total cobblers. 0.95

02:26:05.000 And so they have an incredibly large population from which to excel at all sorts of things, science as well.

02:26:14.000 I wanted to talk to you about the oligarchs, because one of the things that I found fascinating about this, and I have all sorts of questions, is once they started taking yachts and real estate away from the...

02:26:28.000 I didn't totally understand why, A, they were able to do that, or B, why everybody was in support of that.

02:26:35.000 Is there a direct connection between these oligarchs and either supporting Putin or financing Putin?

02:26:44.000 I think, and again, I'm not totally across this, but my understanding is that you basically can't be an oligarch in Russia unless you have Putin's blessing.

02:26:57.000 There have been various...

02:26:58.000 As Putin came to power and then slowly became more powerful, there are various oligarchs who sort of...

02:27:04.000 Try to rival him for power.

02:27:07.000 Berezovsky, there's Media Modal.

02:27:09.000 There were a few and they were slowly just kind of removed or defeated.

02:27:13.000 And so the idea is that if you're an oligarch, you probably have the blessing of Putin and therefore potentially your wealth might be at his disposal or you're in his pocket.

02:27:26.000 I mean, also, frankly, people who are multi-billionaires in Russia It's a corrupt state.

02:27:34.000 No one's making that money completely legitimately.

02:27:37.000 And there's that element.

02:27:40.000 But with seizing it and who's having their assets seized, it does seem quite complicated.

02:27:46.000 And it does seem like they just spread quite a wide net to start off with.

02:27:51.000 But again, this was happening while I was kind of out of the loop, so I'm not all that keyed in.

02:27:55.000 I'm quickly going to run to the toilet, if that's right.

02:27:58.000 Yeah, go ahead.

02:27:58.000 The restroom.

02:27:59.000 We could wrap this up unless you want to keep going.

02:28:01.000 You want to keep going?

02:28:02.000 Up to you.

02:28:02.000 I'm easy.

02:28:03.000 Do you have more to talk about?

02:28:05.000 I bet you do.

02:28:06.000 Go take a leak.

02:28:07.000 All right.

02:28:08.000 We'll see you in a couple of minutes.

02:28:09.000 I guess the one thing that we haven't spoken about that we could is Papua New Guinea, where probably the most bizarre country I've ever been to.

02:28:17.000 Did you experience any cannibalism?

02:28:19.000 I met people who remembered those times, but cannibalism, it seems, is gone now.

02:28:24.000 Sort of since the 70s, really.

02:28:26.000 What about the semen warriors? 0.98

02:28:28.000 The semen warriors? 0.98

02:28:29.000 You don't know about that?

02:28:30.000 I'd like to hear about that.

02:28:30.000 Oh my goodness.

02:28:32.000 One of the most bizarre practices that I've read about from New Guinea is the ritual abuse of young boys they get at an early age taken in by older men and they're told That in order to grow strong,

02:28:52.000 they need the semen of older men, and they ingest it orally and anally. 0.98

02:28:58.000 See if you can find this. 0.96

02:28:59.000 And this has been going on for, I mean, I don't know how long, but it's one of the most bizarre practices because it's like a ritualistic abuse and sexual abuse of young boys.

02:29:16.000 Sambian tribes write a passage that requires young boys to drink semen if they want to transition to adulthood.

02:29:25.000 um and it's not just semen drinking it's like they they call the father like they call them anal fathers it's very strange stuff according to demands of this custom semen is thought to have some sort of a masculine spirit and young boys can only possess the spirit by drinking it it's a custom believed to be a huge proof of masculinity and strength over the years Different meanings have been ascribed to the semen ritual.

02:29:53.000 Some people have even tagged it as a form of ritualized homosexuality. 0.62

02:29:57.000 Usually the young lads are not allowed to make a voluntary decision, but are simply threatened by the older men to partake in various activities in an effort to prove their masculinity.

02:30:06.000 Surprisingly, the Sambia tribe considers the ingestion of semen to be a compulsory ritual for male development.

02:30:12.000 For them, it is preferable for young boys to be seen as warriors than to be judged weaklings. 0.99

02:30:19.000 I mean, a lot of cultures do some weird shit for rites of passage. 0.98

02:30:23.000 That's out there. 1.00

02:30:23.000 This is fucking out there. 1.00

02:30:24.000 And they take them in very young. 1.00

02:30:26.000 I mean, they take them in when they're like six years old. 0.99

02:30:29.000 There's also, I mean, they used to have the, and this thankfully is gone now, but they used to have the custom, you know, just sort of headhunters, and your basically rite of passage is to kill another man, which I think is, I mean, as bizarre as this is, I think that's kind of even weirder, because this is pretty fucked up. 0.81

02:30:47.000 It's relatively low stakes, although I guess there's quite a lot of psychological harm potentially. 0.62

02:30:52.000 But I mean, this doesn't, I mean, it shocks me, but it doesn't usually surprise me.

02:30:56.000 Stop scrolling.

02:30:57.000 Scroll back.

02:30:59.000 Read this here.

02:31:00.000 After the boys are removed from their mothers, they're then flogged with long sticks during a bloodletting ceremony.

02:31:06.000 The elders kickstart the blood purification ritual. 0.67

02:31:23.000 We're good to go.

02:31:31.000 Once the nose-poking is done, the blood starts falling from the nose.

02:31:35.000 The elders make a collective war cry.

02:31:38.000 This is then followed by more beatings with the aim of toughening the boys so they can be powerful warriors.

02:31:44.000 While a lot of the people would view the nose-poking as an extremely painful and intrusive exercise, the Sambias see it as a display of endurance and strength. 0.92

02:31:52.000 Once the bloodletting ceremony is over, the young boys are made to perform fellatio on the older boys. 0.92

02:31:58.000 After ingesting the semen, also known as male milk, it is expected that it will help the boys grow stronger due to the presence of a substance called jirungdu within it. 0.89

02:32:15.000 Apart from taking in semen, the new initiates are forced to observe a strict diet that will give them strength.

02:32:23.000 If you scroll back where we were before, though, it talks about the mothers. 0.95

02:32:28.000 Until the blowjobs, this kind of sounded like a Spartan take on an ayahuasca ceremony. 0.98

02:32:32.000 Right. 0.99

02:32:32.000 But it's also like they're removed from their mothers because they've... 0.99

02:32:37.000 Okay, scroll up.

02:32:38.000 Keep going up there.

02:32:39.000 Yeah, the reason for detaching the boys is because the tribe considers the blood of women to be unclean.

02:32:44.000 That's really common, like worldwide.

02:32:46.000 Whew.

02:32:47.000 Hence, the lads are separated from their mothers and any other females so their blood won't be contaminated as they mature into adulthood. 0.95

02:32:54.000 The semen drinking custom is in different stages.

02:32:57.000 The initial stage, as soon as the young Sambia boys turn age seven or nine, they're instantly taken from their mothers as a form of detachment. 1.00

02:33:05.000 This is fucking wild shit. 1.00

02:33:07.000 I mean, there's a lot of crazy shit out there. 1.00

02:33:09.000 I mean, they still have, sort of as a mark of mourning, if a family member dies, people cut off the tip of a finger. 0.99

02:33:16.000 And so you get up into some of the more remote parts of the Highlands and you meet someone and you shake their hand and they might have only sort of one full finger left.

02:33:22.000 But it's also hard to tell because everyone's got these sort of 18-inch machete blades that they use for everything.

02:33:28.000 I think some just get lost sort of by mistake.

02:33:33.000 It's just the most...

02:33:36.000 I mean, the country is so geographically broken, you know, like the terrain is so inhospitable, so hard to travel through, that they've developed all these very, very quirky customs because all the tribes are in such isolation.

02:33:49.000 I mean, their country has something like 750 languages.

02:33:54.000 They nowadays communicate largely just with Pidgin English or Tok Pidgin, as they call it.

02:34:00.000 Which is a sort of a broken English, kind of bastardized, simple English.

02:34:05.000 But before that, you know, the tribes, you might have one tribe that's living in one valley and two miles away in another valley for hundreds of years, there's another tribe and they've never had any contacts with each other.

02:34:16.000 So they develop different languages, different customs, different faith, religions, everything.

02:34:20.000 And it's like that across the country, particularly up in the highlands.

02:34:24.000 The river deltas are a bit different.

02:34:25.000 But I mean, the highlands are thought to be We're good to go.

02:34:52.000 On an island with a coast on which people lived, let alone a huge world beyond that with all sorts of other people.

02:35:00.000 There were three Australian brothers.

02:35:04.000 Two of them ended up staying and living in PNG. One of them married three, I think maybe sisters, but three women who were Tribal princesses.

02:35:16.000 And this is a sort of, let me get this right, an Irish emigre Australian gold prospector in the 30s, who's from this massive outside interconnected world, suddenly going up and marrying people from a civilization that had no smelting, they just had stone tools,

02:35:33.000 no writing, no literature.

02:35:35.000 And one of those marriages had several children.

02:35:38.000 I met one of those guys, this guy who's The product of the sun of these two totally disparate worlds, this kind of clash of civilizations, which I found so interesting.

02:35:47.000 What was he like?

02:35:48.000 He was great.

02:35:48.000 Bernie, a really nice guy.

02:35:51.000 He manages a coffee plantation in a town called Hagen up in the Highlands.

02:35:55.000 Really sound dude.

02:35:56.000 I got to hang out with him a bit, got to know him well, and he's just a nice sort of normal guy.

02:36:01.000 I suppose because his mother was a princess, he's sort of kind of a senior within the tribe, but at the same time kind of half foreigner and half outsider, so he's sort of between the two worlds as well.

02:36:13.000 Do you still have contact with his father?

02:36:15.000 His father passed away.

02:36:16.000 There's a really good documentary called First Contact, an 80s documentary.

02:36:20.000 It's on YouTube.

02:36:21.000 It's part of a trilogy, the Black Harvest trilogy.

02:36:25.000 But First Contact is interviews with these three brothers, by which point they're already quite old.

02:36:29.000 But on their first encounter, getting up into the highlands, these people they met, there's footage, there's photos from this unique encounter in the 1930s.

02:36:38.000 Really, really interesting.

02:36:40.000 This is not the same place where...

02:36:43.000 There's a tribe there where they have these... 0.93

02:36:47.000 They've made models of airplanes that they worship.

02:36:52.000 The cargo cults.

02:36:53.000 Those, I believe...

02:36:57.000 I mean, it's that part of the world.

02:36:59.000 I don't think it's Papua New Guinea.

02:37:00.000 It could be potentially part of some of the Solomon Islands.

02:37:03.000 It might be some small Filipino islands.

02:37:07.000 I'm not entirely sure.

02:37:08.000 I know what you mean.

02:37:09.000 Yeah.

02:37:09.000 Yeah, they would see these planes and think that they were gods.

02:37:12.000 So they've recreated them.

02:37:14.000 They've recreated them out of, like, sticks.

02:37:16.000 Yeah, they had, like, bamboo radio control towers and, like, bamboo radios that obviously don't work.

02:37:22.000 They're just bamboos.

02:37:24.000 But I've read about that a long time ago.

02:37:26.000 I can't remember the details that well.

02:37:27.000 But yeah, that was pretty cool.

02:37:28.000 How fascinating that in the 1930s they were able to find these Stone Age tribes there.

02:37:33.000 Well, it makes you think.

02:37:34.000 I mean, there are still rumors that in Papua New Guinea there might still be uncontacted tribes.

02:37:39.000 Like in the Amazon, there's still a few dozen uncontacted tribes.

02:37:43.000 But I believe most of them sort of know there's a world out there.

02:37:48.000 The Brazilian, largely government, sort of protects them and keeps them in isolation as much as anything because they're just vulnerable to disease, perhaps.

02:37:56.000 But then the one, I think, the most astounding kind of lost tribe is the North Sentinelese.

02:38:02.000 Yeah, sure.

02:38:03.000 And every now and again someone marches out with the Bible.

02:38:04.000 That's where the missionary...

02:38:06.000 Do you know who Commander Maurice Vidal Portman is?

02:38:10.000 No.

02:38:11.000 He's a famous British explorer slash pervert who went to visit those people.

02:38:17.000 And he's probably responsible for their hostility towards outsiders in a lot of ways. 1.00

02:38:22.000 Because this guy would go there and dress them up in weird outfits and measure their dicks and shit. 0.99

02:38:28.000 That was North Cincinnati? 0.99

02:38:30.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:38:30.000 Are there pictures of him?

02:38:32.000 He was on neighboring islands, but I think they got wind of this character.

02:38:37.000 Yeah, there's pictures of him, and there's pictures of natives dressed up like Roman soldiers and stuff. 0.98

02:38:43.000 He would do weird shit with them, and he would comment on the size of their penises and testicles, so he was like measuring them and stuff, and he was clearly some fucking weirdo who was involved in some very strange shit, and he was doing, you know, the awesomeness of science and exploration. 0.99

02:38:59.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:39:00.000 I think he's one of the reasons why I think that the most recent missionary got murdered.

02:39:06.000 Right.

02:39:06.000 Because they probably have...

02:39:08.000 They don't have a written language. 0.96

02:39:09.000 So they probably have these oral stories and these legends of these white dudes who show up and start measuring dicks and give everybody the flu. 0.96

02:39:17.000 Yeah. 0.94

02:39:17.000 Well, I think there's only a few dozen of them. 0.94

02:39:19.000 And after the big...

02:39:21.000 Tsunami back in 2003, 2002, 2003. After that, it was years before there were any signs of them seen again.

02:39:29.000 So potentially they, you know, came close to destruction.

02:39:31.000 Yeah, there's been a few boats that have been stranded nearby and have barely gotten away before these people murdered them.

02:39:37.000 Arrows and spears.

02:39:38.000 Yeah.

02:39:39.000 Well, there's only 39 of them that they've documented.

02:39:43.000 They don't know how many there are there.

02:39:44.000 They don't even think they have fire.

02:39:48.000 They've got to have fire.

02:39:49.000 I don't know.

02:39:50.000 I think there's some dispute as to whether or not they have fire.

02:39:54.000 How wet is their climate?

02:39:58.000 I don't know.

02:39:59.000 They do know that they have metal now.

02:40:01.000 They seem to have fashioned knives and swords from the wreckage of one of the ships.

02:40:07.000 Yeah.

02:40:08.000 Well, that'd be interesting.

02:40:09.000 I mean, I have no intentions of marching in there.

02:40:12.000 Well, it's just crazy.

02:40:13.000 It's wild.

02:40:14.000 Uncontacted people in this day and age is very strange.

02:40:17.000 I mean, there's semi-contacted people in the Amazon, and it's so interesting because you get essentially a window into 60,000 years ago with the people in North Sentinel Island.

02:40:32.000 The people that live there, the direct descendants of people who left Africa 60,000 years ago and landed on that island.

02:40:38.000 Yeah, and there's interesting sort of, because of the sort of, exodus is the wrong word, I guess, but the migrations out of Africa came in waves.

02:40:47.000 And some of the early people seem to have, you know, with their wave of migration, headed all the way up, over, around, down, and into Melanesia.

02:40:55.000 The Aborigines and the New Guineans are from like a very, very ancient wave of migration.

02:41:00.000 And everyone else came a lot later.

02:41:02.000 But these people had already inhabited these...

02:41:04.000 Well, I guess the two islands were one continent at that time.

02:41:07.000 The sea levels were lower.

02:41:08.000 But they had already sort of started existing in total isolation.

02:41:12.000 I mean, people...

02:41:13.000 The numbers get disputed because they keep finding more things that pushes back the timeline.

02:41:17.000 But now they're looking...

02:41:18.000 It was for ages, 40,000 years.

02:41:19.000 Now they're looking at sort of 60,000 to 80,000 years just living, you know, totally isolated while, you know, the rest of the world was, I suppose, a more interconnected, you know, human trade networks very quickly bought corners of the world into connection.

02:41:34.000 I mean, it's only about...

02:41:36.000 Is it 12, 15,000 years ago that people crossed the Bering Strait to the Americas and the Americas were populated?

02:41:41.000 I mean, that's kind of a blink of an eye compared to 80,000.

02:41:45.000 Well, I think people were here before that then now.

02:41:47.000 Now they're pushing the timeline back of human beings in North America, which is really interesting.

02:41:52.000 They're finding a lot of pre-Clovis evidence of civilizations, stone tools and all sorts of other things.

02:42:00.000 Fossilized remains.

02:42:31.000 I guess with new archaeological techniques, new scanning, new LiDAR, just the books are being totally rewritten on a yearly basis.

02:42:40.000 Yeah, well, they're all a proponent now of the...

02:42:43.000 The two of those guys together is a really fascinating combination because they're proponents of the Younger Dryas impact theory, and there's a lot of physical evidence that points to that.

02:42:55.000 And what that Younger Dryas impact theory is is that there was a certain time somewhere between...

02:43:01.000 There's multiple times, but it started around 12,000 years ago.

02:43:06.000 There was impacts, and the impacts from asteroid impacts...

02:43:09.000 Reversed an ice age or paused an ice age?

02:43:13.000 Yes, it stopped the ice age.

02:43:13.000 It killed the ice age and probably did it very quickly.

02:43:20.000 Randall Carlson has some really fascinating physical evidence that points to it.

02:43:23.000 First of all, core samples.

02:43:24.000 When they go to core samples and they go to 12,000 years ago, there's a direct evidence of iridium, large amounts of iridium, which is very common in space and very rare on Earth.

02:43:33.000 Also, nuclear glass.

02:43:37.000 Trinitite, I think it's called, and it's named after the Trinity, the first nuclear bomb experiments.

02:43:43.000 And that they detect this glass that happens when they detonate a nuclear bomb, but also happens on impacts of comets and asteroids.

02:43:54.000 And that this stuff is all over the place.

02:43:56.000 Sort of like obsidian, that kind of.

02:43:57.000 Yes, yes.

02:43:59.000 And this stuff is all, it's sort of like that, but it's directly caused by impacts.

02:44:02.000 But this stuff all exists in this time period of 12,000 years ago.

02:44:06.000 And then again, somewhere, they believe somewhere 11 or 10,000 years ago.

02:44:11.000 So, most likely, what they're supposing, what the theory is, is that there was probably a very advanced civilization that created things like Gobekli Tepe, and there's even some theories about the Old Kingdom of Egypt.

02:44:26.000 That there was some very sophisticated architecture and construction methods that date back far beyond what we think of.

02:44:36.000 When we think of the Great Pyramid of Giza, they believe is 2,500 years old, but he thinks that it's very possible that it was even earlier than that.

02:44:45.000 And there's also some physical evidence that was uncovered by geologist Robert Schock, rather, from Boston University, where he points to the water erosion around the Temple of the Sphinx that shows signs of thousands of years of rainfall.

02:45:01.000 I remember that.

02:45:02.000 Yeah, and the problem with that is the last time there was real rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9,000 years ago, and that the whole area back then used to be a rainforest.

02:45:13.000 So he's like, you have to go at least that far back, but probably thousands of years before that, because you need thousands of years of rainfall to develop these deep fissures on the stone structure.

02:45:24.000 They don't indicate erosion by sand and wind.

02:45:29.000 The problem is archaeologists and people who have been teaching in universities and writing books about the history of these people are very reluctant to accept this new information, even though it's like When you're talking about geology,

02:45:46.000 when you're talking about clear evidence of water erosion, this is rock-solid stuff.

02:45:53.000 There's a knock-on effect as well, I suppose.

02:45:55.000 If you admit that one thing is significantly older or it's formed in a different way or in a different place to something else, then that just knocks everything else out of whack and you've basically got to start your entire archaeological process again, which I guess is why you get Yeah, wrongly, because that's not the scientific method, but you get resistance to these new ideas.

02:46:12.000 It's very unfortunate when you see the resistance, too, because it's so clearly ego-based.

02:46:16.000 I've seen people argue against it, and they get really angry, and they start insulting, and ad hominems, and it's really weird. 0.99

02:46:22.000 Because the one that you can't fuck with is Gobekli Tepe. 1.00

02:46:27.000 Because Gobekli Tepe was purposely covered somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 years ago. 0.99

02:46:33.000 And they know that for a fact.

02:46:36.000 They've tested all the soil around it, and they're in the middle of excavating that site.

02:46:41.000 And it's an immense site.

02:46:43.000 With these enormous stone columns and 3D animals carved on the columns, which indicate that they weren't carved into the columns.

02:46:53.000 The columns were carved around to create these 3D animals, which is really sophisticated stuff.

02:46:59.000 And it's more than 12,000 years old.

02:47:02.000 It was covered up.

02:47:03.000 And so they think it was like a deliberate time capsule to preserve...

02:47:06.000 They don't know.

02:47:07.000 I think that was Graham's theory.

02:47:09.000 Yeah, it's his theory.

02:47:10.000 To preserve the whole antediluvian, the flood myth or story, at least, that seems to be in so many different cultures.

02:47:21.000 Yeah.

02:47:21.000 I think that ties in with Randall's idea of a huge wave of floods and the Ice Age.

02:47:27.000 Yes.

02:47:28.000 Well, that ending of the Ice Age, one of the things that they point to is the geographical or geological evidence, rather, all over North America that seemed to indicate massive amounts of water moving through areas radically and quickly changing the landscape.

02:47:42.000 And Randall has some really incredible evidence of that that he shows in the form of slides and As you zoom out and you see the water evidence, it's really interesting stuff because we have this inclination to look at history.

02:47:57.000 Okay, we've got that down.

02:47:58.000 We've got it.

02:47:59.000 This is it.

02:48:00.000 And then upon new evidence, instead of like going, oh, maybe we were wrong, they just dig their heels in and they say, no, I wrote a book on this.

02:48:07.000 I made my thesis about this.

02:48:09.000 This is fact.

02:48:10.000 I think that's exactly the same.

02:48:11.000 Even with modern human history, we're really resistant to kind of think that the way we, I mean, there's the last few years, a lot in Britain, I don't know how much about in the US, but there's been a big discussion about how we view and teach our needs.

02:48:26.000 You know, of the British Empire, for example, of colonialism.

02:48:29.000 Because when I was growing up, we were taught that Britain conquered the world and brought civilization to all the noble savages. 0.95

02:48:36.000 And it was totally insane.

02:48:38.000 And it's only just about now, and particularly summer two years ago, with the debate about statues and should we really learn our history from statues or should we learn it from books and reassessing facts?

02:48:50.000 And should we have statues...

02:48:52.000 We're good to go.

02:49:14.000 Yeah.

02:49:15.000 And I think that's, you know, tying it neatly back in.

02:49:18.000 That's what I find interesting with Russia because Russia is able to recreate as convenient its history every 10 years or so in a cynical way, admittedly. 0.81

02:49:26.000 It shows that history is not a fixed, determinate thing.

02:49:29.000 Well, it's unfortunate we don't have like a real rock-solid history of the world.

02:49:35.000 We have some really amazing evidence and some incredible work has been done by archaeologists and geologists and all these people that are trying to get a sense of it.

02:49:44.000 But there's resistance to change.

02:49:47.000 There's a resistance to, you know, accepting these alternative theories.

02:49:52.000 Well, can you imagine trying to be a historian 200 or 300 years from now looking at this era?

02:49:57.000 Right.

02:50:12.000 We have accurate footage, but that was only a short period that's now ending because now we don't know if footage is real.

02:50:18.000 There's deep fakes, there's all sorts.

02:50:20.000 The age of kind of, I suppose, empirical media is kind of on its way out.

02:50:29.000 At least that you can be ensured is empirical because from now on, who knows what's what.

02:50:33.000 What's also interesting when, you know, for a long time, they had no idea what happened to the Mayans, you know, and there was all these theories about them leaving, what happened, and now the predominant theory is they were killed by disease.

02:50:48.000 Smallpox.

02:50:49.000 Yeah, which makes more sense than anything.

02:50:51.000 I mean, I think it's now believed that after Europeans first arrived in the Americas, within, I think it's within 100 years, 90% of the population had died.

02:51:01.000 Yes, from disease.

02:51:02.000 And, you know, they're only just now starting to find these traces of vast civilizations in the Amazon.

02:51:08.000 I'm sure there'll be many more to come.

02:51:10.000 You know, there are rock paintings appearing.

02:51:13.000 There are...

02:51:14.000 In one particular point, evidence of ramps up to the Amazon on one side of the river and then down on the other.

02:51:24.000 Bridges that would have spanned hundreds of meters.

02:51:26.000 Huge, complex and quite advanced civilizations that just...

02:51:30.000 In a jungle, if everyone dies, it'll grow over in no time at all.

02:51:34.000 And it seems like a lot of people might have returned to a hunter-gathering subsistence life in the jungle from that.

02:51:41.000 Because if there's a plague, plagues are usually...

02:51:50.000 Yeah.

02:52:04.000 Is this the big ring?

02:52:07.000 Cities were built in big circular shapes.

02:52:09.000 Not just that, but grids that indicate irrigation and blocks of cities.

02:52:14.000 And Graham Hancock talked about that as well on the podcast.

02:52:16.000 And there's a great video that's available on YouTube where he discusses The potential population of the Amazon reaching as much as 20 million people at one point in time.

02:52:28.000 That there's vast cities there.

02:52:29.000 Did you also know that the Amazon itself was created by agriculture?

02:52:35.000 That all that rainforest, most of those trees were a direct result of different trees and different plants that people planted.

02:52:46.000 When there was a civilization.

02:52:48.000 So it had been Savannah or Pampas or something?

02:52:50.000 Well, it was just different.

02:52:52.000 They're not exactly sure what it...

02:52:53.000 You know, they used to think it was all natural, and now they don't think it's natural.

02:52:57.000 Please pull up something about that.

02:52:58.000 Now there's direct evidence...

02:53:03.000 Here it goes.

02:53:04.000 While previously thought to have been an empty wilderness in pre-contact times, it's become increasingly clear that the Amazon has, first, a deep and ancient pattern of human settlement dating back to 12,000 years ago, and second, that much of the Amazon jungle that we know today is in fact An anthropogenic,

02:53:24.000 if you just click on that, there's actually better articles that detail it.

02:53:28.000 Okay, here it goes.

02:53:30.000 While previously thought to have been an empty wilderness, okay, the Amazon infers a deep and ancient pattern.

02:53:37.000 Second, that much of the Amazon jungle we know is in fact an anthropogenic landscape.

02:53:41.000 That is, the Amazon has been modified extensively by indigenous populations for the past 12,000 years.

02:53:48.000 The changes that the indigenous populations made in the Amazon rainforest in the past We're nowhere near the level of intensive extract we see going on in the massive deforestation burning today.

02:53:58.000 Rather, indigenous populations increase the overall biodiversity and quality of the soil.

02:54:04.000 This is not what I'm looking for.

02:54:05.000 There's a better article that shows that most of the trees in the Amazon were a result of agriculture.

02:54:13.000 So that was sort of creating ecological diversity...

02:54:17.000 And then when people died, it just overran.

02:54:19.000 And it overwhelmed what used to be these cities.

02:54:23.000 You know, that's the whole Legend of the Lost City of Z, right?

02:54:26.000 That book?

02:54:27.000 Yeah, I read that.

02:54:28.000 It was great.

02:54:29.000 There it is.

02:54:31.000 Supposedly pristine, untouched Amazon rainforest was actually shaped by humans.

02:54:35.000 Over thousands of years, native people play a strong role in molding the ecology of this vast wilderness.

02:54:41.000 This is from the Smithsonian, so it's a legitimate source, but there's a bunch of different trees that they point to that these people planted, and then these trees just overwhelmed the landscape when all the people died off from the plague.

02:54:55.000 And when they're using the LIDAR to go over these areas that they used to assume were just mounds, they're realizing, oh, this used to be structures, and there used to be people living in these areas.

02:55:06.000 It's fascinating.

02:55:07.000 It's wild stuff, man.

02:55:08.000 Yeah.

02:55:09.000 Well, listen, Charlie, I'm glad you're alive.

02:55:12.000 I'm glad you're not in a Russian prison, and I'm glad I had a chance to talk to you.

02:55:16.000 And these books that you have out that are available right now, one is On Roads That Echo, and the other is Through Sand and Snow.

02:55:25.000 Did you do an audio version of these as well?

02:55:27.000 Yeah, they're both on Audible.

02:55:29.000 Did you read it?

02:55:30.000 I read it.

02:55:30.000 Oh, excellent.

02:55:31.000 I love hearing that.

02:55:32.000 Yeah, no, they're out.

02:55:34.000 Get hold of them.

02:55:35.000 But thank you so much for having me on.

02:55:36.000 My pleasure.

02:55:36.000 It's been a lot of fun, and thanks to Jamie and you for having me here.

02:55:40.000 It's been awesome.

02:55:40.000 Our pleasure.

02:55:41.000 Thank you very much for coming.

02:55:42.000 And do you have social media that people can find you on as well?

02:55:44.000 Yeah, I'm on Instagram and Twitter, at CW Explore, like Charlie Walker, CW Explore.

02:55:52.000 Explore?

02:55:52.000 Explore.

02:55:53.000 There it is right there, CW Explore.

02:55:55.000 And my website is cwexplore.com.

02:55:59.000 Check it out.

02:55:59.000 That's where I post most of my stuff.

02:56:01.000 And I don't know what will be next yet, but that's the place to follow it.

02:56:05.000 Well, when you come up with another one, let us know.

02:56:07.000 And I'd love to sit down and do this again.

02:56:09.000 That would be a pleasure.

02:56:10.000 And stay out of jail, buddy.

02:56:11.000 Please.

02:56:12.000 Thank you, Charlie.

02:56:13.000 Cheers.

02:56:14.000 All right.

02:56:14.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 15, 2022

Joe Rogan Experience #1832 - Charlie Walker

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