Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEdIBcBAqtY
[Music] all right charlie first of all thanks for being here my pleasure very nice to meet you why do you do the things that you do first question is the hardest one um i i guess over the years have formed a whole bunch of different answers to that some of them flippant and sarcastic without rambling on for ages and ages i suppose it comes down to i'm just really curious i want to get to these places see you know people living lives differently to mine i grew up in a tiny little village where you know it's nice but nothing happened where'd you grow up uh just close to salisbury in the southwest of england uh about 10 miles from stonehenge down there oh wow um and yeah i suppose i started traveling when i was about 18 took a year out between school and uh and university and just got more and more curious and slowly realized that i enjoyed traveling more if i was getting to places by i suppose physically difficult means and that particularly helps i suppose if you turn up in some remote community in a not that i've been doing this but in a helicopter or 404 or whatever there's instantly a distance a sort of divide you know you're i spend most of my time uh traveling in the developing world where that's just building a barrier whereas if you turn up on foot or in a little kayak or on a horse or whatever then i think people kind of take to that a little bit more what was your first trip that you did like this uh besides backpacking around africa uh 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 it's there's a thousand miles between the two i'll take a bike a bicycle um didn't get off to the best start i i went to a friend's 21st birthday party about 10 days before leaving and i don't really remember the party when i wake up in the morning one of my quadriceps had snapped um not torn but snapped the the
doctor said that the two ends would kind of flap around like fish tails and eventually graft onto the rest i don't know how scientific that that was and then on my first night in beijing i fell over and broke my wrist a bit drunk sorry jesus two two weeks later when i sort of you know cut my cast off and sort of you know strapped my knee up a bit and peddled out i wasn't in the best shape and and frankly the following two he just went with a torn calf with quadriceps muscle [ __ ] up wrist just went anywhere yeah i mean i started slow i'm not a like i'm not a sportsman you know i'm not an athlete i've always just like to i've never really particularly trained for anything i tend to try and keep fit but that's that's that's kind of it um so i've always sort of thought start slow and build up and the the two it only took two weeks to to cross up to the ulamba tour the the capital of mongolia and once i crossed the border into mongolia there was just no road it was you know it's just desert and there's kind of tire tracks all over the place and you just gotta you know take a northeast bearing and sort of stick with it um and frankly those two weeks were kind of shitty like i didn't particularly enjoy them um but yeah i mean you're probably aware of the concept of type 2 fun you know you've done something and once you've it's it's crap but then once you've finished you start to rose tint it right and before i even left mongolia i was already thinking yeah this there could be something in this and i saw the potential of bicycle travel you know you you can travel a fair distance you know if you want you can go 100 miles a day you can go 60 miles very comfortably and still have a lot of the day there you can travel very cheaply you can travel for ages and you get to see all those places in between that you wouldn't really go near if you're you know on a bus or a train or a car whatever it is did you have any idea of like where food would be how you would get through these areas like did you understand like what towns were available i knew i mean i had a for that first ride i had a map and i knew uh that
besides a i guess a 250 mile gap in the gobi uh there'd be you know enough towns to to get get resupplies so you just had to go 250 miles through the gobi desert but you can carry a bike with a torn quad in a [ __ ] up wrist yeah yeah in short but you can carry quite a lot on a bike you know you can carry if necessary and you know later in later years you can carry you know two three four weeks of food pretty easily it's not gonna be very exciting it's gonna be just a lot of rice and noodles and stuff like that but uh you can you can sort of stack it up did you plan ahead for that did you do you understand what your requirements were going to be did you like did you sit down and write it all out i'm going to be there for x amount of hours i'm going to need at y amount of calories no i've never been good at planning well no that's that's not true that's not fair i've never loved getting granular with planning um i you know when i'm planning food for uh you know earlier this year i had to plan food for about a month and i kind of looked that's about a breakfast and just times that a bunch of times that's about a lunch and then just pack an extra you know 10 20 and you should be all right um which is which is perhaps a slightly sort of scattered and irresponsible approach but i've i've slowly got a bit better at knowing what's what's needed and i mean i've never got into um calories and counting the numbers of it um i totally see the value in that and a lot of people who do similar sorts of things do um but i've i've generally thought you know i don't need to work out that i've got precisely enough protein for any given day or fat or carbohydrate whatever it is because usually these aren't hugely long endeavours you know a few months you can go with a slightly imbalanced diet maybe take some multivitamins i would imagine that you're burning a lot of calories though riding that bike through the desert for 250 miles yeah um i mean like i look back at that trip there and i think that was quite straightforward really and i do think that i'm not one of these people who says hey anybody can do anything but i don't think that particular ride across you know across to mongolia was
especially difficult um but it was it was for me it was uh revelatory because i just got this idea of what bike travel could be and it was it was only a couple of weeks less probably ten days after i finished that i got a bit drunk and made a on on a genghis khan booker and made quite a rash decision to cycle for what ended up being about four years um genghis khan booker what are you saying vodka oh genghis khan vodka sorry okay no worries i've got a plumbing accent um yeah and i made this decision to cycle uh from the uk back to the uk via the furthest away point in each of europe asia and africa and that ended up taking about four years so you do this first trip and you decide after it's completed that you know you get this interesting feeling you know it was fun it was exciting was adventurous and that this is something you're going to do often are you writing about these things are you making videos like what are you what are you doing once you're done um i i write basically um i'm i'm not a videographer i take photos uh i didn't for the four-year trip that followed i didn't have social media at that time um so i very much focused on writing and every day at the end of the day doesn't matter how sort of sweaty and uncomfortable i might be in a tent or cold or whatever i will write down what happened that day and just just get it all down and later you can then kind of you know get yourself back into that frame of my frame of mind and all these other details will suddenly start springing back in it's it's quite a helpful sort of uh key to unlocking other memories um yeah but uh writing is my main focus how do you fund these trips uh initially i was saving scrimping and saving and um that first long journey i lived for four and a half years as it turned out on about 12 thousand pounds which back then would have been i guess sixteen thousand dollars um for four years yeah yeah so i lived in a tent i ate very cheaply occasionally i'll get a night in a hostel or something um you can live for a really small amount of money if you're just out in the wild more recently i i get sponsorship or grants that sort of you know help and
cover expenses but i've always done things in quite a low fight way i've never done hugely complicated or expensive journeys i've always quite enjoyed the uh i guess the accessibility of doing stuff that anyone logistically probably could do if they if they put a bit of thought to it the four year one like how does one go about deciding that you're gonna do something that's gonna take four years out of your life like did you recognize that it was going to take that long like would it i reckon it would take about that and rashly is the answer i kind of you know i came up with the idea before i really gave it a lot of thought and the first thing i did is told a bunch of people you know family included hey i'm gonna in a year's time i'm gonna head off on a bike for about four years and once i told a bunch of people then it became almost a certainty to me because you know i think i would have been embarrassed to then back down um and so i guess i mean i've always found that quite handy with any with any project you know just let people know set yourself a start date and then the wheels are already in motion uh and out of sort of shame or embarrassment you'll probably end up going through with it that's i can't think that anybody would fault you for quitting i mean i don't think anybody would say oh charlie you only did three years i came close a bunch of times by the time i got three years you know then it's like well i might as well might as well finish it off and when you get to the end of that are you gonna did you write a book did you did you i have something for you oh there you go before i forget actually i got something else as well um bear with me what have we got here these are i believe for you joe well thank you um those two books are about that for you by the way yeah um and i've got a couple for jamie and now once you do this so you get back and i would imagine like
writing down everything at the end of the day i'm sure helps but it's got to be difficult to sort of capture this the nuances of each experiment if you're writing for four years i would imagine there's a lot of very notable experiences you're having during this time like how are you remembering all these and documenting them and i mean it like photos help as well you know over the course of four years i probably had something like 15 000 photographs and that that helps you know furnish a picture but um i mean it's really just what i said about what sixteen hundred days i kept a journal every single day sometimes they're very brief you know just me just writing it down hand paper yeah and in a bunch of you know tattled notebooks that i've got kind of you know falling apart on a shelf somewhere and what was the path um so i started uh near salisbury where i grew up um headed across the channel up western europe through scandinavia to nordcapp which is the the northernmost point of europe it's up in the norwegian arctic um that's quite a dramatic place the the sort of monument at nordcap is at the top of a um 300 meter hike or 300 yard high cliff you're going to look over the railing and you've got the arctic ocean sort of crashing against it the north pole is another 1200 miles on um then i took us a very long wiggly path across eurasia to singapore which took you know nine ten months or so jesus christ but i didn't know what route i was going to be taking for that um you know i i didn't again i didn't allow myself to get too bogged down with details and also over the course of nearly half a decade so much changes you know the arab spring happened after i started so the middle east you know the geography and the geopolitics the middle east totally changed after i started before i got back around to that part of the world is this your bike uh that is the second of two bikes yeah that one i did one of them break so the the the other one the one i started with i got off ebay for 100 pounds second hand so not not a great bike you know
basic um and that one got me all the way about 34 000 miles to cape town and then that bike was sadly stolen just i was locked up on it was locked up on the street oh jesus and coincidentally that afternoon i i've been invited on a radio show to talk about my trip and the the dj asked me about his bike you know and capetonians you know they're into cycling mountain biking and i think he was expecting some specs or you know you know what i was writing and all i could really say is actually it got stolen this morning and he i'm about to murder an accent and you'll get angry emails but uh he said oh no that's absolutely terrible like let's get this boy key a bicycle we can get him back home and he said any any listeners out there you've got a bicycle you send us a message we'll get it to this boy um and about six or seven bikes were sort of presented to me the next day well i had to go around the city and collect them all up but a couple of kids bikes one was an antique one had been found in a canal um the frame of which i ended up using so i took them all apart and i made one bike from all the different parts and i just the bottom bracket the kind of part between the the pedals in that sort of hub that was the only part i got from a shop and the rest uh was just these these decimated bikes kind of you know bastardized into this this one frankenstein frame well that's a cool story yeah and so then this bike you rode for the remainder of the journey yeah that got me ten thousand miles in one year back home and then was stolen a few weeks later in london was it really yeah it was basically unrideable by that point because i can't tell which one yeah that's the first one that's up into that how long do bike tires last because i know you change car tires i don't think i've ever changed a bike tire but i can imagine the rubber oh they definitely wear out yeah um i think i i kept a tally of all this stuff i think i got through something like 20 tires but i mean they last a little longer if you don't buy a pair for three dollars in an african village that are made in china is that what you did yeah i could you know i just got whatever i could and i think 256
punctures 20 or so chains like you know there was a there's a phrase in the uk triggers broom there's an old tv show called only fools and horses where some not too bright character gets an award from the council he's a street sweeper for having the same room for 17 years and uh you know after he's given this medal you know he says no it takes a lot of dedication to care for a broom this brooms had 17 new handles and 25 new heads over the years and that's kind of what the bike was like you know besides the frame just about every other part was slowly swapped out as soon as i went around wow and when you're traveling through through all these places what kind of language barriers are there do you i mean do you understand other languages besides english i'm not a natural linguist um i i can get by in french that was handy in sort of central and west africa i picked up and sort of worked quite hard at russian i got some russian um which in the the stan central asia uzbekistan kazakhstan etc that was handy when you say picked up did you pick up on the fly or did you prepare i uh probably a few months before i got to that part of the world i picked up some um like audio lessons and just sort of listened to them while i was while i was on on the road um and then i got quite good at just sort of i guess charades you know even even if like china was always linguistically the hardest place but even after i learned how to ask for an egg you know in a village shop to some rural area i still preferred to do it the way i'd done for you know for weeks up to that point which was going to show up and start you know flapping clucking your wings and sort of clucking slightly more and more manically and then pulling out they're buying me an egg and pointing out and they go oh the foreigner wants an egg yeah we're getting some eggs yeah you can make a bit of a game of it uh yeah and of course in lots of parts of the world there are plenty of people who do speak good english um so i also i wasn't um
i wasn't washing a great deal at this time in my life you know living in a tent getting the odd splash wash in a puddle or a river or whatever and so my hands which were on front of me in the bike sorry in front of me on the bike's handlebars most of the day uh when i arrived in a new country i'd find the first english speaker i could and ask them how to count to ten in their language and then i'd write on my knuckles one two three four five six seven eight nine ten on each hand and then you know on the palm hot cold yes no good bad up down left right just a whole bunch of vocabulary and that you know you pick it up pretty quick when it's in front of you for maybe six eight hours in a day and when that was done i'd wash them off and maybe learn some new words and sort of carry on so even though i was passing through regions and and didn't have all that long to get to grips with many languages i got a bit of a head start with that oh wow um what is it like when you're alone for that long that's probably the biggest challenge and i 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 the western sort of approach to tibet and on a good day i was there in winter which is not ideal it's cold but on a good day there'd be maybe one vehicle going in either direction but often there'd be several days at a time with no vehicles and um there were you know no settlements along the way and later on so to get into tibet i didn't have permission so i had to in the night i cut a hole in the fence of a military base and snuck into into tibet uh so beyond that point i was having to get into so it's difficult to get into tibet yeah so so the you know tibet used to be an independent country a lot of process most you know ethnic tibetan people don't want to be part of china but in the 50s the the you know the people's liberation army marched in uh and uh this was only a couple of years after the um the beijing olympics and in the lead up to those there were in in lassa
the capital i think it was around three dozen uh self-immolations you're aware of that phrase yeah yeah and usually yeah and you know for the listeners you might not know well they probably know from the rage against the machine cover yeah yeah exactly that so people marching out in yeah in front of the the soldiers or the police pouring a tin of petrol over themselves or gasoline lighting themselves on fire and burning to death you know in protest at what they see is the occupation of their country uh and of course the the chinese government doesn't want people seeing these sorts of scenes so they they made the whole area off limits to foreigners and basically what still is really that you you can visit sort of limited little pockets in in in lassa the capital and a couple of other kind of temples in towns nearby but to do that you've got to be in a group with a guide and a vehicle and permits and you know it's it's it's expensive and and you you're just not allowed to travel by yourself with it with a bike so that was the only way i could get him was to sneak in but after that point i was then having to to hide the whole time and and to bring bring it back to your question the loneliness there i really really struggled you know i was up there for about six weeks and you know probably had two conversations in that time it was it was really hard um but now i've got a lot better at it and this i keep meaning to look this up because there's someone it's one of those people that's always quoted it'll be oscar wilde or mark twain someone like that once said that uh loneliness is the paucity of one's own company and uh solitude is the richness of it uh and it's two sides of the same coin so being by yourself can totally suck but if you just kind of try and flip the perspective a bit and you know it's not always possible and it's certainly not easy you can then sort of you know enjoy the pa the space the peace the freedom um particularly if you've got a you know kind of a busy life when you go back home it is an interesting thing about human beings that we seem to have a
requirement for other people's company i mean we really do like we do enjoy moments of solitude you know like sitting on a dock you know looking out at an ocean just relaxing maybe having a cup of coffee by yourself but if that goes on for too long we have like a deep feeling of longing and a sorrow comes over us and we're pack animals yeah and you know i guess this is my cod evolutionary uh sort of take on it but i suppose anyone over the millions of years of our evolution who had that instinct to always be either by themselves probably wouldn't have been passing their jeans on so much and so you know it probably would have been spread out you know we've selected for people who live in communities yeah it makes sense it only makes sense but it's it's so strange how uh intense it is when when you are alone for long periods of time and for people that have never experienced that it's uh i mean what you've done in in doing that is uh it's really extraordinary and i would imagine it gives you some very unique insight into how your own mind works yeah uh i think i've always been relatively good in my own company i i i suppose years ago i might have referred to myself as a loner in the in the sort of the positive sense of that word supposed to i guess it's probably a bit of an insult as well yeah but i you know i do like my own company i'm i'm happy in my own company but i have got i suppose over long periods i i would realize later that i sort of essentially desocialized and you know suddenly being back in in a community or around people where i can have a conversation it just takes a bit of time to kind of you know equalize after after being by yourself for a long time um because you you got no one else to answer to yeah you know it's it's uh it's it's total freedom and that can be uh an indulgence a self-indulgence one i mean i've never spent that kind of time alone but i've spent time in the woods and when you 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 you know work various things that you don't normally
think about in such great depth but when you're alone and you don't have anyone to talk to it's like those are the things that the mind wants to dig up and maybe examine did you find that definitely and it's um it's definitely a positive thing to do you know the more yeah time you've got to chew things over the you know the more to grips you're going to get with any any problems in your life or you know whatever it might be and then there's always the temptation which i kind of i'm quite uh 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 um i mean i first came across your podcast when i was in the congo i think um and you know it's you know podcasts are great you know but suddenly you've got company all day and that's a way to i suppose you you know you'll be thinking about and learning about whatever's been spoken about but you're not exploring things by yourself in the way that you can if you just have silence and peace and i'm quite strict to myself like on my latest trip you know i'd allow myself in the morning you know an hour of listening to something and then in the afternoon maybe another hour at some point and then while cooking dinner i could listen to something like that how did you decide that amount of time uh i mean it was arbitrary essentially it just needed to be to just ensure that i wasn't you know you know doing that all the time so i'd it wouldn't always be exactly an hour but maybe a podcast right yeah one of yours is the whole morning of course but um yeah you know something short like that you went through the congo on a bike uh i started on a bike i was actually with someone else for this part of this is the bike journey um so this was 2014. um a guy from scotland who i'd met he was motorbiking down the uh the east coast of africa with a couple of friends and i think about seven times we kept bumping into each other they they were covering a lot more ground they were taking a more sort of circuitous route than me but in cape town him and i spent a bit
of time together and he said hey we'll see you know when you go to congo i'll fly up and i'll join you and so in the cattle of zambia lusaka he 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 uh and we we cycled into congo drc you know there's two congos the big one the the [ __ ] up one i guess um we cycled across the border in the south in 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 um but there was a river there and we've been aware that this was going to happen the lulu is the name of the river and so we uh we bought a dugout canoe which is or pirog they call it there which is essentially just a tree trunk with the inside scooped out you know it's sort of typical i suppose it's a tribal canoe that you'd see right across the world in all you know south america in sub-saharan africa in papua new guinea same sort of thing and we bought one that was about five and a half meters long i think and for the next month we kind of battled this thing down a river um but as we he so it was not a it was not in great shape and we had to get in all our gear and two bicycles and these things sit really low in the water you've got maybe two inches of clearance you know any small rapids the water's coming in and you're you're going down um but as we after we bought it we pulled it up onto the riverbank we turned it upside down we were patching some little leaks and cracks and trying to kind of brace it and the whole village just gathered around us in this big excited but concerned crowd and they were tutting and shaking their heads and a sort of spokesperson essentially stepped forward and said really i don't think you should go on the river there are there are rapids and waterfalls and we're like yeah you'll be right and there are hippos and crocodiles and you know if you guys don't drown you'll be eaten and you'll be dead in a day either way um and we took it with a pinch of salt and and that month was probably the most fraught
of my life it was it was ridiculous every day we'd be struggling down rapids the smallest little rapid would be enough to sink us and the boat wouldn't sink it would just go you know down it would sit you know two or three inches under the water but unless we have them all strapped down all our bags will start floating off in different directions splashing around in the water trying to gather everything oh that one's got the money and the cameras oh get that bag that's got all of our food yeah over there and all the while you're wondering when is the crocodile just gonna come to grab your ankle did you see them we only saw one really um they so they they i mean they're around everyone kept saying they're around lots of people yeah said they you know they do see them i think they've been hunted quite a lot over the years and although these are on the congo so this is a tributary of the congo river um they're nile crocodiles that's the species and they grow up to i mean they get really big they're 20 feet long uh yeah yeah i think that's about the max yeah they're huge um that's a dangerous animal yeah i mean it was it was a we were in a really remote area there were no roads there were just footpaths connecting villages and no one else was stupid enough to travel up and down the river you know people had canoes pirogs but they would just use them for fishing so they would just sit on the water you know place some nets come back out and we we one afternoon paddling along and there was this group of maybe 50 men on the riverbank all just waving and singing and dancing around shaking machetes above their heads and so we didn't pull over you know we thought we'll pass by but a few hundred yards on there were just two men by the by the on the bank and we pulled up to them and said you know what what's going on there and they said oh they just killed a crocodile a big one and i said how big and they said five meters so that's about 15 16 feet yeah so big um one like a hippo yeah well we'd hear the hippos sort of honking out yeah they made that very particular noise we'd hear them out what does a hip-hop noise sound like
[Applause] [Music] as best i can do um but yeah we'd hear those quite a lot at night and um you know we had to camp on the riverbank but the hippos go out for walks around at night and sometimes there'd be you know shoulder high elephant grass and the only places we could really pitch a camp would be in these channels that the hippos would tread through it so it was yeah it was a it was a difficult time after a month we finally reached a road lots of sand tracks i guess uh and a couple days later just managed to get to a town in time for me to collapse into bed with a pretty severe case of malaria oh wow but i had typhoid fever at the same time so it was like double trouble oh boy so i couldn't really walk for about a week um so yeah that was a what did they give you to get over the malaria was really lucky i managed to get we managed to get to a town um and i went to the catholic mission um where they had a nurse and said like please dream me um arch you'll buy archie is my friend um he'll buy the drugs and uh so this this nurse um a guy uh actually whose name i shouldn't say um he uh he gave me drips of um ciprofloxacin uh and i think i'm trying to remember metanidazole i think two different antibiotics um just a lot of drips but the drips are the most frightening thing because he didn't use clean needles each time so one boy 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 into my heart great so if you don't die malaria you die of infection yeah you know it was it was a worrying time yeah jesus christ so how long did it take you to recover from the malaria well i didn't have long because we had to get our visas were only three months and and we'd already been going for over two months um so we had to get out of the country within a certain amount of time so um after i think it was probably about eight days um we then uh you know i was i was able to walk here i was still super weak we then had to go and sort of
get passage on a a bus as they call it there but this is just a truck with a you know metal you know shipping container in the back of it and we spent about five days on these trucks kind of bouncing around you either cling to the top there's no roads it's all just mud tracks um in in the rainy season which was kind of not far off uh it would take a month to do that five day drive to the capitol that we because it'd be so much mud well yeah the roads just churn up you know the the roads the tracks that we were on were sometimes these sort of you know channels carved five six yards deep into the mud you know wow and so as soon as it starts raining they're all completely gone um i came across the so the monsoon arrived six weeks or so later by which time i was up in the other congo way up in the in the north kind of near the border of cameroon and central african republic on these mud tracks and suddenly i just saw all these trucks that kind of you know run off the tracks into the into the trees and there were people who had been stuck there for days and days and days um and i mean i couldn't even push my bike i had to carry it for about a day and a half take everything off carry it for a mile hide it in a bush walk back it was it was five miles for every one mile forward just portaging it back and forth holy [ __ ] man yeah how much crime did you encounter not a huge amount i mean i um i mean like my pocket got picked in in malaysia which is one of the safest places in the world uh my horse got stolen in mongolia that that happens um they had a horse yeah they're not they're not expensive how much is a horse i bought a horse for about 120 pounds so i guess 50 bucks or so you get a horse for 150 bucks it depends how many every few years mongolia has um they call it a uh uh snow or nice event so essentially the mongolia winter is really cold it gets down to about minus 40 fahrenheit or celsius um and if uh if it snows and then thaws and then freezes
you get this crust of ice over the ground the the horses which are kind of left to their own devices over winter they're kind of semi-feral it's called you know they're kind of half wild um they they can't break through that crust of ice as they would with snow with their hooves to get to the grass so come spring actually last time i was in mongolia the whole countryside was just littered with corpses of sheep and horses and boats so if they've had a bad winter before sometimes they you lose up to about a third of their kind of national livestock then horses cost quite a lot but it wasn't too bad when i was there um the horse i would sort of at night so i spent about two months hiking across mongolia with this horse i tried to ride it but it was so small tiny little pony i'd gone to quite a lot of effort to find the horse that was up to the challenge and i went out into this sort of village outside the capital city asked around and and you know you can't do anything there without having to drink copious amounts of vodka it's a real pain in the ass to be honest you have to uh yeah i mean that's just the way everything is done um and how so well hey you want to come and look at a horse great well let's first um let's first you know let's first drink some vodka and um we'll pour a little offering to the gods and we'll flick a little bit into the skies and offering to the sky god you know be rude to refuse because you know it's an offering right and then i mean to be fair i was in my mid-20s so i was you know i was quite happy just to drink the stuff um but uh you know this kind of quite unpleasant paint stripping vodka and just bottles and bottles and bottles so i spent this long day going from person to person to person out you know in the sticks um you know driving across you know grasslands you know off-road and finally we met these people who had a this guy had a horse to sell and he said yeah here's the horse do you want to check it out and i was like all right i didn't i had never ridden a horse before i didn't know what i was looking for but i thought i'll check out the hooves i was about to try and check the back who's and they're like no no no don't do that you get your face kicked
off but i checked the front hooves i checked his teeth you know um she it was a female horse didn't look too old you know decent strong you know coat was in good condition i thought yeah this is fine and we agreed a price and um about two days i had to go back to the capital to get my stuff buy a saddle about two days later i came back met the guy and he presented me with this horse it's like that's a different color and it's got testicles so that's a that's a different horse altogether but you know it wasn't really much i could do about it um so this horse didn't really take to being ridden um i don't think it was too small i don't think he could really cope with me and my not very heavy bags so you just use it sort of as a pack horse yeah so we walked and at night i would make a fire you'd hear wolves howling often i'd make a fire and sort of tether the horse 10 yards away and that's kind of the first line of defense um and one morning the horse had been uh you know the tether had been cut and someone had been in the night but i pretty much got to where i was going oh before i forget this is a mongolian wolf tooth for you which an old hunter gave me he claimed that he shot the wolf but i was not 100 sure why is that that well it's you know there's a kind of uh you know braggadocio braggadocio element to it's kind of a macho thing to have shot wolves and i met a lot of people said yeah i've killed many wolves but back in soviet times there were you know mongolia was kind of a satellite it wasn't technically part of the soviet empire but it was sort of a protectorate there used to be a quota every mongolian man had to kill two wolves each year um to sort of keep their numbers down otherwise they would decimate the the livestock um anyway that's uh that's uh from a from a wolf that he got hold of somehow maybe he shot it you're skeptical though well i'm i'm kind of a skeptic generally i think um and the way he told me it didn't give me necessarily the impression that he had shot it do you know the story about uh the world war one uh russian german standoff it's wolves they took like a two-day treaty
yeah yeah they took a truce they they stopped fighting to kill the wolves because there were so many soldiers were getting killed by wolves they were losing like one or two soldiers a day it was something insane they had well the problem was you know they were fighting trench warfare right and so they would get shot and they would be crying and screaming out in these trenches and then you would hear when people would be eaten alive by wolves the wolves would find these wounded soldiers and tear them apart and then people would go out on scouting missions and they wouldn't find anything but boots and you know and pieces of their clothes covered in blood and then they realized like jesus christ we're losing more people to wolves than we are to the germans of the russians actually just earlier this year i came across a memorial to to finish sold pows who have been sent up to this distant part of siberia from that war people have been captured it was crazy to think they've been captured like way out there and sort of you know in europe and they've been sent to this desolate spot at the end of the continent and just told to fish to sort of supply the russian navy i think it was but they're all these like on the the the cliffs at the north of asia like facing out i mean you can't imagine a more like baron isolated brutal spot and there was just uh i i saw one i was told there was another somewhere nearby that i didn't spot just a crucifix set up for the for the the dead finns i don't know how many were sent out there but yeah so if you know if the wolves don't get you and the russians do then you know the cold will get you eventually what was the like was the terrain like in mongolia when you're making your way through this um mostly step grassland um but i went through some sort of low mountains um it's the most it's an incredible country mongolia like it's it's just so ripe for adventure it's uh it's about the same size as spain france and germany put together uh but the population's just over three million and oh wow most of it it's the most sparsely
populated country on earth um it's kind of a person per square kilometer um but but more than half the population live in the capital and there are a handful of other not big but you know towns and so the countryside's just open and it's what is the capital like uh it it's changed a lot since i first went um you know it was a it was all just kind of grim soviet apartment blocks and it's set in this kind of valley in winter i've not been there in winter but in winter it's the most polluted city on earth because everyone to there's kind of increasingly people are being drawn into the capital from outside and they come in and set up their yurts or girls as they call them these kind of circular felt tense which you can survive you know the harshest conditions in but to heat them they're just using coal or yak [ __ ] or horseshit or you know um cow [ __ ] and so just all of the particulate matter so it's it's the most polluted by a particular count on the the pm 10 i think the size of particle which you 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 um but uh yeah there's just this kind of pull of pollution that hangs over this narrow long valley that the capital stretched along but recently you know they've got i think there's like a shangri-la there now and some high glass buildings and it's changing quite a lot they had in about 2012 they opened a huge mine the i think tokto [ __ ] i think the name i forget but in in 2012 uh the economist magazine found mongolia to have the world's fastest growing economy because they opened this one mine and overnight the economy grew by 40 like that month um it's all relative right yeah and exactly yeah it was a very very low base start line um but yeah i think that's largely gold and copper um and since then there's been a lot of wrangling over how much you know what percentage of the profits is you know kept channeled into mongolia and what percentage goes outside but uh that's i think that's turned the country around quite a lot but but there's no fences
the whole country says just you know there's the gobi desert there's sort of um tiger like siberian forest across the north there are the altai mountains in the west the rest is grasslands and there's lakes and rivers everywhere and there's just no fences it's all common land and you can just head wherever you want it's awesome it's really great it's wild that they still use those felt tents because that was literally what yeah exactly the same um and you know nowadays they'll have maybe a car battery to run you know they'll have a satellite dish and a tv and you know it's changing quite a lot um there's i mean there's only one or two homes did that still looked really quite similar to in internally how they would have 800 years ago when chingas khan was charging across the continent wow and so this trek through mongolia took you how long i was there for three months in total um so i did two months on the horse and then once the horse was pinched i got to more or less where i wanted to go and so then i got got the bike back and carried on cycling um sort of through to central asia and then once you get to central asia then how long before you get back to where you wanted to go uh well this was all part of that same long like right so you know there was probably still two years to go together to get you know downstream that's so crazy yeah two and a half perhaps down three three like central asia the middle east and down the whole east side of africa now are you corresponding with anyone back home while this is happening do people know you're safe like how are you i emailed sort of as and when i could i um when i when i took the uh ferry from uh britain to france at the beginning of the trip i had um you know phones were different back then i had a really it wasn't a nokia 3310 but it was something along those lines this is 2010 i think the first iphone might have just come out but it's a long time ago i think that was 2007. if i remember correctly all right okay what
something like that i think the first iphone somewhere around them because there's yeah i think somewhere around there but i didn't want a phone you know i wanted sort of you know freedom from all that my plan had been i let you know i arranged my phone contract that the company that the contract would run out around about that time and i planned when crossing the channel to like go up to the top of the ferry um and just hurl it into the sea the the ferry company kindly gave me like a a free crossing in there sort of club class and the bar was quite you know open so i didn't get around to that and a few weeks later i just sort of tossed it in a lake in sweden which with hindsight i don't feel good about you know that's probably i shouldn't have done that but it's symbolic yeah um so i i didn't you know i kept in touch with family through email as best as often as i could just use like internet cafes exactly yeah or if you know if i couldn't find that i just i mean i got quite good at just like going into a you know some random office and saying hey can i use your computer really people were surprisingly receptive you know you're in the middle of you know iraqi kurdistan can i use your computer yeah yeah sure just um turn it off when you're done oh thanks wow people people are very friendly wherever you go broadly speaking that's really fascinating because you probably have a different perspective of just running into strangers in other countries than most people do most people would think that people would be very hesitant you know some weird englishman shows up and wants to use your computer well i think i wherever i go i tend to sort of be a bit of a novelty so people are interested initially um did you anticipate that like like what did you think you were going to be able to do to or did you just figure it out along the way yeah i just figured out as i went um so you didn't have any plan like this is how i'll make sure that everyone knows i'm okay no no um you know back then i probably wasn't great at sort of keeping my parents in the loop exactly as to where i was and
when i went to afghanistan i didn't tell them about it i told one friend and said if you don't hear from me in six weeks then perhaps cool call the government um and so i you know i i tried to keep them sort of as unworried as possible um which i mean i've got three siblings so there's there's spares it's all right [Laughter] spares so when you get done with this trip i mean this is a four year trip what do you do do you have a home at this point in time or did you not have an apartment anymore no i i um i i hadn't i had nowhere to i mean i went back to my parents place for a few weeks and i had no i had 30 pounds to my name when i came back what is the first day back like like when you when you show up at your parents house what is that like weird oh well so i um about two months before i finished i think i was still somewhere in southern morocco or mauritania my dad said via email you know let's have a party when you get back let's have a sort of a homecoming and so we arranged we picked a time and a date and arranged a place in london um a street where friends and family could come and gather and we had a little welcome home party so i was told yes at the stroke of seven o'clock you've got to be here on this street um and i you know turned up and there were you know 120 150 people some of them i hadn't seen for for years and years and years it was totally surreal wow i was still quite the six months following um this was about six months on from when i was ill in congo my health hadn't been good throughout that so i'd been on my ride up through france for instance winter was coming and i was getting these incredible like stomach cramps every now and then i'd have to i remember one particular day when i basically just kind of veered off the road in a village and fell into someone's wood shed and then about 10 minutes later i kind of came round and there was just this elderly french couple standing over me not wondering what to do with me so i wasn't particularly well but i turned up at this this homecoming party you know with a beard down to my tits and you know hair down to my shoulders i looked
a right state to be honest um and it was strange how quickly i felt kind of normal back among people again initially at least it was over the coming days that you know the kind of the weird you know itch of wanting to move came back and so you got like wanderlust almost immediately afterwards in yeah in the in so i guess a couple of weeks on you know the novelty of having a comfy bed each night wore off pretty quick and i needed to find a job to earn some money so i picked up the first job i could find um and you know it's not the sort of job that i think you know i was going to do long term but it was it was just enough to get me back on my feet what did you do i sold luxury tours to china for a travel company and so i talked to clients saying well exactly you know i talked to clients saying oh you know you've got to go to this place it's great and they say what was your experience like that i said well the ground's good and firm you can put a tent wherever you want but you know the the the hyatt will probably be comfortable you'll be fine um yeah it was it was that was uh not necessarily the best fit for me as a job but soon after that i started planning the next trip and started writing these books and and sort of since then i've kind of turned that into a career so immediately you sort of understood when you returned like this is not a one-off this is something you're just going to continue to do yeah yeah well people started asking me to give presentations about the trip i've been on you know sort of photo slideshows i guess and i started doing more and more of those at you know to village halls and clubs and festivals and schools and businesses and that slowly became like about half of my living and i realized i could do this for a job you know this could be this could be a living um and enable me to carry on you know taking on challenges so since then there's you know there's there's always something in the pipeline do some sort of journey come back relate the story write about it repeat now when you start up again are you is there any hesitation about like the length of the
trip like that four year thing even though i'm sure it must have been a fascinating and wonderful experience there had to be a little bit of a hesitation of committing to that much of your life again i well i mean the longest i've done since then is eight months so yeah it's it's a lot different and the last couple of into two or three months but it was was it because of that four year one where you're like that's a little much well you just yeah you get a bit more settled or also now i've started to kind of build a career you don't want to totally put everything on pause for a huge amount of time again you mean by build a career the writing yeah the writing and the speaking and you know it's not like i have you know a monthly paycheck um or a you know salary or pension anything like that so you kind of got to keep feeding the beast and so for the speeches like what are you doing are you like posting up at a theater and people come to see you talk i do summit theaters um a lot at schools uh ones for businesses will be at uh conferences or they just want someone to come in for the afternoon to kind of you know spark up their team or you know a real variety all sorts of different events you would be the last person i would want to have come to talk because i was like these people are going to quit they're going to go wander the world i'm going to have no workforce i've spoken to a handful of ceos about that and um one maybe charitably but i think he was right he said um you know if i i kind of said what you said as a joke and he said well you know what if i've got a member 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 you know you know that's not going to be the most motivated person but but i'm not there to you know say hey you know quit your job and [ __ ] off for years on a bicycle i'm there to try and i mean with businesses it's different different talks different events it's all different but with businesses i'm there to
to sort of take some of the lessons about resilience um you know ambition etc from what i've been doing and try and apply that to to their lives to their to their setting but isn't aren't those lessons only learned through the experiences i mean i would imagine they're definitely best learned through experiences yeah but i think you can in the same way that um i mean one of the biggest genres of literature is self-help right and that's just reading about it i think most of that is nonsense though i i think in that like literally when i look at like self-help books and self-help people and mentors and stuff there's a large percentage more than half that's nonsense at the risk of insulting a few people i know i totally agree with you um but then again i haven't read you know i haven't read those books and also i haven't read all of them clearly but i've read enough [ __ ] where i'm like god yeah well there's a huge tendency out there for people to kind of take on the persona of a guru essentially yeah and there's so many charlatans out there there are so many you know it's like with a lot of um esoteric pursuits and alternative things you know there's there's there's things that are rooted in in fact or that are kind of you know veering that way and there are things that are i mean like uh mediums for instance yeah i mean i've got i don't mind saying it i don't care how many people listening i've got no time for that because as far as i'm concerned they're either 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 you know they genuinely believe what they're doing and you know that's that's a different thing i'm kind of fine with that it's just i don't think they're right yeah i have a friend who went to a medium and it's kind of a hilarious story because he goes he he knew everything about my grandmother knew everything about this i go don't you know everything about your grandmother what the [ __ ] is the point of someone telling you some things you already know yeah that are on my facebook page is do
you think that it's possible that these were leading questions and that through these leading questions they sort of talked you into giving them the answers and you can see the look on his face when he was kind of resisting but realizing that i might be right but didn't want to admit that he got hosed i think there's a lot of people just want to believe it yeah that's also totally understandable you know it's the same like from my perspective with um you know belief in afterlife you know people want to believe that because it's comforting and it totally makes sense to want to believe it i personally don't but you don't believe in any sort of afterlife i don't know but do you disbelieve meaning i don't believe in it either but i don't disbelieve it well i can never know that it's not right but i guess the burden of proof is on people who have come up with this idea because there's nothing to substantiate it but there's a long history of human understanding that there's something else besides what we experience in this realm and i think a lot of that has to do most likely through either the consumption of psychedelic compounds or through ritual practices like holotropic breathing or something where it gives them the sense that maybe what you see is only part of the picture and then there's this feeling when someone dies like they're not there anymore like have you ever been around a dead body i have yeah it's a weird feeling right it's like it's it's not just that they're dead it's not just they're not breathing anymore they're not there yeah yeah it's it's it's hard to explain but the first time i ever saw a dead body was my grandfather it was an open casket and i remember immediately thinking like oh that's not him he's not there like he's not there it's not as simple as well it's also weird because they had him made up and [ __ ] you know they put makeup on you which is very odd yeah but it's this very clear feeling that he's gone
and so there's this thought well where did he go did he go somewhere else is there a place where you go you know and that's a totally understandable thing to to think and and to you know to kind of experiment with the idea of but right i suppose it can never be proven so it's kind of a moot point anyway i guess i guess i mean it's interesting it's interesting to discuss i don't disbelieve but i don't believe but i also think that's a slightly different thing to mediums oh yeah and i'm a huge fan of sadly he died last year i think the amazing randy yes yeah james randy darren brown various people who sort of you know unlock or rather give away the secret some of the secrets of cold reading and show you just how easy it is to manipulate people's belief um yes yeah darren is very open about that and there's a guy named banach who i've had on the podcast before as well as darren and banichek is the first guy that i ever met that openly talked about the techniques that he used he's like i'm not going to tell you the techniques but i'm going to tell you this is [ __ ] i am tricking these people into thinking that i can read into them and find out about their past and find out about their life it's just [ __ ] well randy went to um you know the uh sort of big evangelical churches where they have um faith healers and people you know contacting the other side he he went there and i think i think i'm remembering this right either his his like 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 sort of pastor's ear yeah feeding the information that someone else was researching online for these these sort of unsuspecting audience members unwitting audience members um which is you know it's hilarious and it's also deeply disturbing because it's deeply people you know taken for thousands and you know they they can it's just taking advantage of the most vulnerable people no time for that and there's only one step removed from that to a lot of these motivational people
because my my feeling on these motivational people is they're a lot of them are taking advantage of the fact that some people have this longing for discipline and structure and and some sort like 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 the pro their problem is but these people that are motivating these people these people that they're they're charging exorbitant amounts of money for some structure that they put together they want these folks to follow but then when you look into their lives the people that are the motivational people most of them haven't done [ __ ] like all they're doing is motivating people which doesn't you know if you want to have uh a conversation about how to invest with warren buffett well that makes sense to me like here's a man who's spent his life investing successfully in businesses he's very well versed in that and he can give you some understanding of the practices that he uses but if you're going to talk to someone who's trying to motivate you for success and his only success is to tricking people into coming to see him motivate people for success and charging them exorbitant amounts of money for it well then i don't like that well it's the same as the irony of trump having written the art of the deal um or rather having had someone ghostwrite it for him you know trump who was just born into a huge amount of money and by all accounts just slowly lost it over years and years and years yeah um you know i think it's it's it's far too easy for people to uh uh abuse other people's sort of good faith we're generally credulous creatures you know we want to believe stuff we want things to believe in well we also don't you know there's there's so much uncertainty about the future and so there's this longing for someone to hold our hand someone please show me someone please give me a guide someplace tell me the steps to follow yeah and and when people see that people have this longing they take advantage of it and they they try to get these people to pay money for these secrets if you sign up now i will give you the secrets of how you can
basic become successful and you're sitting there in your shitty apartment you're like [ __ ] i want to be successful isn't it it's similar same thing well i think that's more than like how to organize your life but it's similar it's similar secrets that you unlocked to success i mean written by one of the worst science fiction writers ever you've read some of this stuff i i don't plan to oh my god well i've had um the guy who's the uh head guy of scientology the [ __ ] his name again david yeah i had his his dad ron miscavige on and he explained to me how he got his son into it and the whole the whole deal behind it is this [ __ ] fascinating because it deals with those very questions like it deals with psychology it deals with like the the longing for answers in this purely uncertain open-ended life that we exist in and so many people have that desire for structure and for someone to come along and tell them that everything is going to be okay if you follow these rules which is obviously not true yeah i mean i i don't um you know when i'm billed as a quote unquote motivational speaker i actually don't like that phrasing i would prefer you know inspirational um i tend to you know it's it's almost a an entertaining storytelling exercise but with you know certain themes that people can you know take away if they if they want to but i i've never liked the idea of ramming down people's throats bullet pointed step by step of you know how to be better or more proactive or more motivated or anything like that because i i think as you're saying it's quite often disingenuous most of the time i know a guy who does it who used to be a terrible comedian and then he became a motivational guy and now he's much more successful at that but it's just so strange and sad to watch these people buy into his nonsense like you know he's not successful like except at taking people and getting them to pay a lot of money to teach them how to be successful which is [ __ ] strange yeah it's like a it's like a shitty pyramid scheme it is in a way and but it's you know it's a confidence game you're
you're playing upon people's desire for answers that don't exist i mean you can motivate people like there's a lot of people don't get me wrong there's a lot of people out there that are super successful that can tell you how they did it and there's a lot of benefit in that there's great benefit in that but most of those people are not charging you for that i mean they might write a book about it or they you know maybe they do a podcast on you know how to succeed a business or something like that but they're good at it they're actually they actually have experience but there's a [ __ ] whole industry and online because of social media the barrier for entry is so small that you see so many people with these they all they ha everything is motivational all their posts are motivational like surely you have to have some other [ __ ] to say other than motivating people this is weird yeah i mean i try to focus on telling stories you know like if you read those for instance you might find some inspiration within them but hopefully it's just going to be interesting well what you're doing is i mean obviously you have these super unusual life experiences that you can relay and what the i mean that's my my thing about it is like god if i heard those i would be very tempted to go and want some of those experiences for myself a lot a lot of my experiences have been sort of how not to right well that's how you learn right yeah exactly learn from my mistakes actually i think that's that's always valid as well you know it's 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 then to say i did this and i'm fantastic and it went really well and you're a different person it might be the same for you well speaking of horribly wrong let's talk about your most recent one because uh this is what led you here and this is this is a wild experience that you just returned from and um just so tell people what you've done sure so i i've been planning for almost a year to go to a region of siberia called yakutia which is it's the largest administrative area
in the world so it's one region of russia it's almost the same size as india i think it's about 96 the size of india but only one million people so it's massive and empty and it's far north about half of it is north of the arctic circle and there's there's one large city but outside that there are scattered some remote and very remote communities um and they're for the most part um there are plenty of sort of you know crumbling near abandoned industrial towns from the soviet area as well but there are there are lots of scattered small villages of indigenous siberian peoples particularly the sakha who are the the largest uh ethnicity in in the region um and then there are smaller peoples like the ivani the ivenky who traditionally heard it reindeer there's all sorts of people scattered across this massive area and i wanted to to head out there it's it's the it's also the coldest inhabited place on earth um so at the the record recorded low and jamie might be able to confirm this but a place called virgo i can't remember the exact temperature and it's in celsius anyway but about minus 67.3 something like that um and that's inhabited people live there and so every winter it's super cold and people survive in that and they used to survive many of them in a sort of nomadic sense living in in sort of skin tense um reindeer you know hide teepees essentially so i wanted to get out there experience some elements not in the total depth of winter but instead of february march april um of that extreme cold is in february the total depths of winter um i think january's their coldest time what is there well i mean i was prepared for minus 50 celsius which is sort of minus i guess it's about minus 60 fahrenheit they hit the same at minus four 40. yeah but because that degree is different it gets confusing straight away um so i want to get out there experience this cold and just meet some of these people scattered around and just kind of see you know see what their lives are like and also see if they're changing with the you know if their lives that's a traditional ways of
life are being threatened by the the climate changing you know in um summer last summer when you might remember those it was uh i mean it was all over the news for a while perhaps less in america because you guys got your own wildfires here but um an island in greece evia was was on fire like the whole island essentially really bad wildfires but at the same time an area the size of belgium in yakutia was burning or all collectively all the different wildfires at the same time um so they you know they have crazy bad wildfires out there uh also just close to the highest that town with the record cold they had a record arctic high of um 39 point something degrees celsius again that's about a hundred and yeah at the time so that's about the same as it is here today i think yeah um and all the way up there yeah in the arctic circle um yeah i just wanted to go and check it out see what it was like so i you know planned to hike a few hundred miles along frozen rivers which in winter for about three months get sort of plowed and turned into ice roads um zimnic or zimnicki as they call them there a bit like your sort of ice road truck is i guess yeah but if you're on the river the river's frozen perhaps two meters thick and towards the top on the frozen sea ice and to hike up to this town called tixi up on the north coast um it's a port town um but i arrived i flew in on the 21st of february and the world changed a lot in the in the sort of three or four days after that um the day after i arrived uh russian forces marched across the border where they've been massing you know up to i think about 140 000 troops by the time i flew out and when i flew out you know with hindsight it all seems kind of stupid to have gone maybe foolhardy but at the time basically the entire world except for presumably putin the us intelligence and uk intelligence which both seem to think something's gonna happen but all the world's media all commentators all pundits were saying this is just a bluff you know this is just putin trying to you know scare nato into concessions you know to get
more promises that nato won't spread it you know that ukraine won't join nato whatever else um but they marched they marched across the border um and two days later they formally formerly a formal invasion they uh they they you know launched their full-scale nationwide invasion marched into kiev bombed everything and i was so far away from all this you know batagai the small town where i started hiking up in the arctic um that is geographically the same distance from vancouver as it is from kiev you know so it's just really really far away i was closer to the north pole i was east of pyongyang i was on the same time zone as central australia just really really far away and i kind of thought about it and i thought well hey i'm here and it's going to be interesting you know i'm possibly one of if not the last tourists in russia certainly out in the east and i've got this almost unique but accidental opportunity to see this country and the lives of normal people ordinary citizens as what seems to be a horrific you know potentially the brink the precipice of world war three starts to unfold and so i thought right i'm going to carry on with this trek but i'll just try and keep across you know information um and but as soon as i got to batagai is a short flight from the capital of the region up to batagai on an old antonov twin prop sort of soviet plane and from there almost my you know i couldn't get any phone signal i basically the only real information i could get was local state media i passed a village perhaps once a week um and you turn on that i mean the most the most insane thing was turning on the and i mean you'll be aware of this i'm sure but you turn on the local news out there and they're talking about ukraine on their news segments and every second or third sentence will have the word fascism or nazism and they were slowly just drip feeding triple things wrong word they were just gushing this false information out into their public space and loads of people believed everything they heard totally believed everything you know the
i remember while i was still in the capital just the day after i arrived the the you know the troops had gone into the dumbass this disputed territory in the easter they're sort of annexing and that evening i was in some guy's uh sort of cabin just outside town i you know we'd met and went for drinks with some other people and he said let's go back to ours for some drinks uh and this guy i'll call him anatol i don't want to say his name but um he he started dicing up some horse ribs to cook us some some sort of you know peppering them and everything and he asked me what i thought about ukraine it's just really early days um and i said well you know i don't i had to be careful with what i was saying i don't know that much about it but it you know it seems like this is going to get really serious and i'm also aware that when i turn on my phone and look at the news apps the information i get from the bbc or the guardian or whatever else is totally different from what i see here of course i knew all this was sort of couching it in terms that gave him the chance to kind of you know i wasn't i didn't want to preach yeah um and he said yeah well you know it's great because um you know vladimir putin is is making russia great again and this is this is russian land and it belongs to russia and um those ukrainians are all nazis anyway um and you know we're gonna uh they're performing genocide on russian peoples and the thing i found like craziest about all this not just the fact that he was so precisely parroting putin's propaganda you know which i had assumed beforehand people would be taken with a pinch of salt but the fact that i mean this guy was saka he's not a slav he's not a white russian this guy is from a people who about 400 years ago were brutally aggressively colonized by a sort of militaristic expansionist czarist russia who spread into the area and and yeah and just took over and i just thought somehow with hindsight naively that these people that were from a you know sort of ethnically different background heritage might not be quite so sold on the cause of russian nationalism which is
essentially what putin used to sell the invasion in the first place but no he was totally he was totally sold on it and then just as the following kind of weeks unfolded as i started hiking the war ramped up i only got little snippets of information it was very hard to know what was actually going on i just met more and more people with to be frank a complete gamma of opinions you know i met lots of people who like him were just bullish and quite you know hawkish yeah you know we'll take back ukraine it belongs to russia they're all fascists um and then i met people who quietly you know i i i'm not going to say any names but people who like one-on-one would quietly confide you know i i'm not quite sure about this you know i don't quite believe everything i'm being told or even some people who who you know said you know i'm i'm ashamed to be russian i'm embarrassed about this you know i i don't feel like i'm part of this country now um but what was your feeling going through so you're you're going through this trip you have no idea that this is going to happen it starts happening while you're there and then you find yourself accidentally involved in in a sense that you're a foreign observer trapped in this land where all this crazy [ __ ] is going down are you thinking you have to get out of there are you thinking you you are a part of this now you're going to document what you're seeing and this will add to whatever you're writing in the future a bit of both really um it you know it occurred to me a bunch of times should i be leaving should i be getting out of here you know just days after the invasion uh flights you know russian flights to europe were all you know the airlines were sanctioned they couldn't fly into european airports so my flight hadn't yet been formally cancelled but it wasn't going to happen i knew that much so getting out was already going to be complicated but i didn't feel i didn't feel personally threatened
and perhaps i should have um it you know i i suppose i felt like you know i'm essentially a neutral observer but of course i wasn't because i'm british and britain very quickly took a stance along with the eu and america you know pro-ukraine stunts and it's great you know here wandering around austin you see ukrainian flags everywhere and after finally getting home you know i went to little villages in the countryside and the church has a ukrainian flag hoisted on top of the flagpole you know the the the west for want of a better term really like took up the cause of ukraine very very quickly and i suppose that made me not a neutral observer but a representative of the opposition if not the enemy um but i've been you know i've been i've been in trouble with the authorities in russia in russia before on previous occasions i've been through the russian court system a couple of times how so um in 2017 i was skiing through the ural mountains which is they they kind of divide european russia from siberia um and uh came into a town for a resupply after a couple of months out in the mountains and the police arrested me and my friend and um and so we were on business visas because the longest tourist visa you could get back then was only 30 days we needed you know three months plus so we got business visas and uh they said you're they said you're committing tourism while traveling on a business visa so we were taken to court for committing tourism you know for sort of abusing the did you express that is your business yeah yeah i mean did that work they didn't go for it but i mean the fine was you know 20 pounds or something well you have books though i would imagine i didn't yet have fun oh okay but i mean i had a a a website um but then you know later we got a border infraction we were kayaking down a river on the border of russia and kazakhstan and it turns out where the river is the border you're not allowed to be and then
months later in georgia um we were up in the mountains of georgia and i mean it's done really we used google maps to tell us how to get to this town gory which incidentally is where stalin was born um and uh google maps said yeah you come down out of this valley out to the mountains into this valley uh go up upriver there's a river through the valley got river for about a mile cross the bridge and then carry on on the road and you'll be there you know this evening i thought great easy we went down and then at the bridge there were georgian soldiers or police police i think and they said no it's closed and they wouldn't explain why and i you know i had some russian by this point so you know i could have understood if they explained but they didn't they just said no it's close just go away and so i kind of put it into google again and it said yeah it's going to be you know like a day and a half it's like a long longer way around and we were sort of after you know keen for a rest and i thought well the river doesn't look that deep so we went um you know a few hundred meters downstream and just pushed our bikes across it was like ankle deep got to the other side scrambled up a bank got on the road started cycling and thought yeah you know finally we've got one over on the authorities it's always been a bit of a headache and uh about 30 seconds later a military jeep sped up behind us and pulled over in front of us and a soldier climbed out and he had the first thing i noticed was he had the russian trickle or the flag on his arm i thought well that's strange because the border is about 50 miles north of here and he said what are you doing here and i said what are you doing here which isn't the right thing to say when a russian soldier arrests you he said which is that there's a short five-day war in 2008 2008 and russia just sort of invaded an annexed part of georgia and it turned out the river was the border and we had unwittingly just crossed into it um so we you know got
i mean the russia is part of russia essentially but it's set up like the dom bas is already being as a kind of a little puppet state um and when they were interrogating us under the frowning portrait of putin um they they were saying like you know why did you do this you know you like it's a border what let's you know why have you violated our sovereign territory and i said like we you know we just it was just the maps on our phone and the the guy from the fsb formerly the kgb said ah google maps right and i said yeah and he goes ah it's an american company i said yeah he said well america doesn't recognize um south ossetia so google maps has just told me to go through this disputed territory jesus google a little later i looked at it and there was a tiny little dotted line but the root it just said go through there um but i said who does recognize it and he said well you know the south assetians do and russia does it's like sure that's kind of a given and i said anyone else says yeah venezuela and nicaragua it's like a good company and and he said also have you heard of naoru this tiny little pacific island nation of about ten thousand people they're the only other people who back then at least formally recognize south dassettia um i guess belarus might do now um anyway so you know i was familiar with russian you know i i know that being arrested in russia for some minor sort of administrative uh infraction isn't you know isn't necessarily a huge deal at both those times i was given a small fine and sent on my way um but this time you know this winter uh after our three weeks of hiking i arrived at this town it was the first the only restaurant yeah so they did they let you go uh in south dakota yeah once they have they pulled you over like how do you get out of this uh so while we were in a cell for a night and then in the court um where the judge said is there anything you want to say and i said well i'm really hungry they haven't really fed us and
the judge started screaming at the police said get them some food straight away so you know it was all friendly and fine they then at sunset marched us through all this kind of you know razor wire and concrete defenses and unexploded ordnance signs and handed us over to the georgian authorities do you have to explain what you're doing the georgians were across it because it had been put out on the fsb sort of communications so they knew that um that the two tourists had been had got in trouble and sure enough on the other side of the border there were people from like the british embassy the georgian police the tourism industry the ministry of the interiors we had this long debrief but you're not supposed to be there right you're not to well we crossed the border not knowing it was a border it was totally innocent but we crossed the border uh illegally because it is a it is a border and how would you be able to cross it legally well only from russia only from russia yeah so that area where you crossed is it it's just illegal to cross in that area yeah yeah did you explain what you do and yeah how did they respond to that i explained i mean i think they they very quickly understood that you know we weren't spies this is five six five years ago right they very quickly understood that you know we weren't spies it wasn't obviously quite such a heightened time of heightened tensions like now right um but now when you got in trouble with the russian authorities it was a much more serious issue yeah well this time i didn't and i stand by this i didn't do anything wrong but they were it seemed quite quickly looking for a way to get me out of there um so it was known where i was at all times although there was only one settlement every week this river the road the zimnic on the river i was hiking along um saw perhaps 15 trucks a day um uh hauling coal from a port at the river mouth like hundreds of kilometers away all the way down to batagai the town where i started hiking to you know sort of fuel the the region with a little power station um and so people were clearly as i found
out later reporting to the authorities where i was at any given time uh the two villages i passed through before reaching the first town you know it was quickly sort of by the village elders i think sort of because there's no presence of authorities in these villages they're tiny you know three four hundred people um you know it was it was passed on where i was so when i approached usd this this town which used to have five or six thousand residents now there's like five or six hundred so basically there's not many people just living scattered among the ruins of this kind of 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 like desolate you know sort of throwaway town in the middle of nowhere the soviets were really keen to kind of evenly populate this huge expanse of land that they owned so they built sort of industrial settlements all over the place um anyway as i approached uzquiga a police jeep was waiting for me a few miles outside town and they said get into the jeep for a chat and i said that's fine you know and actually that morning had been my coldest morning it was minus 48 or 49 degrees celsius that morning which i think is about 55 fahrenheit um and so my feet were still numb i was only too happy to get in the car and have a chat with them in the warmth and they ask me all these questions for about an hour you know what do you do last year um yeah so this was in my very pigeon russian these guys didn't speak a word of english uh what are you doing here you know why are you visiting and i just said i'm here i'm interested in the the culture the traditions the backgrounds the winter the wildlife you know i'm a tourist um and they made me sign a document promising to obey the rules of the country while i was in it which fair enough
um but then i can they drove off well they took selfies with me and then drove off um and then we can i continued into the town and the next day everyone takes selfies in russia really yeah yeah yeah in fact they even refer to any picture with a person in it as a selfie it doesn't need to be taken by oneself that's an english word that's just bled through into russian for a picture um so and again selfies i found out later that people were taking selfies with me you know truckers along the way and then these were popping up on various kind of instagram accounts in the area that lots of people followed so you know people were totally aware of where i was what i was doing and again i had nothing to hide sort of we'll come to that in a minute um but uh in usquiega they came and found me they came and knocked on the door in the place that i was staying i was there for three nights and they said come to the police station for um registration i said that's fine again no problem and in the police station slowly it became clear that they were giving me a fine and when i asked what's the fine for and i wasn't initially concerned um what's the fine form and they said oh you're um you're conducting journalism while traveling on a tourist visa you can now get night well briefly could i guess you can't now get a 90-day tourist visa to russia as of recently so at this time i was on the correct visa a tourist visa but they said you're conducting journalism and i said i'm not and they said no you're a journalist we've seen on your website you've written for the bbc which is true but travel pieces you've written for these newspapers again travel travel articles based on essentially tourism um and they said well that's journalism here and we also hear you've been talking to people and i said well yeah it's not illegal and you've been taking photographs again no problem but they then suddenly claimed um that i've been asking provocative questions about the as they call it the special operation
because the war within russia the war is not a war it's illegal to call it a war it's a special operation it's part of this kind of strange kind of you know nothing is true so are people reporting you along the way i mean did you ascertain how this got to these soldiers uh well they they knew i was you know the route i was following was you know along this river over some hills to another river and then up to this town on the coast and so there was no secret that i was going to come through usquiga and they 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 when where i'd camped um and i think i mean it became quite clear that they had so we spoke for a while and eventually when they started making these accusations i said look right i don't really understand exactly what you're saying i need you to find a translator and so they found some guy who spoke a bit of english and um he translated as best he could and they basically come up with they sort of fabricated witnesses who said yeah he was asking about the war in ukraine he called it a war um you know he was he was trying to sort of provoke you know difficult conversations and it really wasn't the case and frankly wherever i went almost one of the first questions people would ask about me is what do you think of the situation in ukraine because they're whether or not they believe what they're being told by their news that they are aware because the news talks about quote unquote the fake news that the west is putting out they're aware that i might have access to that so they want to know what i think um so they kind of came up with these witnesses and said right like you've got to pay this fine um and then you can go and i thought right well it's a 20 pound fine 30 and then i can go there's no point staying here all day i might as well just like sign the
papers and go um and so i did that but the guy who they got to translate for me he walked out with me when we were all done and as we were walking down the street he said so when they were on the phone to hq back in yakutsk the capital um i overheard the people on the other end of the phone saying that these guys should pin two administrative offenses on me so that i can be deported and i'd resisted i'd push back quite hard saying you know this is not what i'm doing i'm not doing journalism this is not true or whatever and i'm glad i did um had i not then they possibly would have deported me then and there but i was free to carry on so i carried on about another four weeks you know got up onto the tundra visited some reindeer herders you know got some very remote supplements and spent the final sort of ten days hiking on on the frozen arctic ocean you know camping out you know under some of the most incredible starscapes and northern lights it was beautiful really good time um i arrived in tixi this port town at the end which used to have i think like 15 000 people now has about 5 000 people it's another one of these the russians have a phrase for this like a dying town a town more dead than alive um and uh 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 um he told me that the fsb the kgb wanted to talk to me and i thought right well just take the bull by the horns i'll just go to their building and i'll say i hear you want to talk to me i'm here and they were a bit taken aback by that and they said can you come back at this time tomorrow so i did and um they said they it felt like an interrogation but eventually turned out it was just this standard procedure they asked me these questions who i was the name of my family members the history of my family did any of my ancestors ever
were they ever in the british forces do i have any political beliefs was i in the army just all these kind of standards suspicious questions uh and it went on about two three hours and when we were finally done the guy said okay that's it you're free to go oh great he said make sure you visit the museum there's a mammoth skeleton you know have a good time good luck to you i went back to where i was staying and um i was recording so i took with me a little zoom like a little dictaphone you know a lot of people use them for podcasts i think and for another podcast with a friend that'll surface in a month or so i've been recording my experiences in my own voice along the way of the cold the people i met the odd conversation with other people um but naturally with what was going on and people telling me of their opinions about ukraine in my own little recordings in my tent at night sometimes i get a little sort of political i guess and after that encounter with the uh in usquiga when they came to my door these policemen the first time sorry four weeks back i know we're jumping around um when they came to my door i was recording on my dictaphone and i went to answer the door and just slipped it in my pocket and they said right come to the police station now and so i went but it was still recording so i had a live mic throughout this whole police process and the first thing they did in the police station was take my phone turn it off so i wasn't recording and so little did they know there was this hot mic in my pocket um so after that was done i got back to where i was staying i kind of in my own words except what had happened took the little micro sd card out um and then unscrewed a plug adapter you know from like a british plug to a russian plug unscrewed that wrapped the sd card up in a little scrap of white paper slotted it in there screwed it back up it's like you know i don't want to lose this it's not really a huge problem but best just to hide it have it safe um up in tixi i sort of recorded my final thoughts uh again and i had this little sd card it was just on the table um and
another one i was worried in my journal that my diary that i've been writing in each day i was worried that that might get taken you know because slowly the with the villages i passed through towards the end you know it was made very clear that the authorities were waiting for me in dixie i thought well you know that might get seized not the end of the world if it does if i with my gopro take a picture of every single page and i can hide that little sd card in the same plug socket but when the knock came on my door in dixie i'd been asleep i'd actually fallen asleep reading kafka the trial this guy getting arrested and not knowing what it's all about um they came to the door and everything was just kind of out and they said um it was the police again they said can you come to the station for registration and i said again well this is you know a little ominous but registration fine i'd already you know the day before spoken to the fsb i knew everything was fine and in the station um it quickly became clear after about an hour of just this long asking lots of questions i said well can i go now and they said no no you can't go and that's when i understood i'm under arrest and this is maybe a little bit more serious and once again they well they said who have you spoken to who have you met in dixie and i said um well i met this guy who i'd met on the road who it's a small town so i didn't want to lie to them i thought best just to say who i'd met so i met this guy and i've met this other bloke um and they didn't know who either of these people were and they were asking questions about who they were and without leaving the room without making a call without doing any texting me having just explained to them who these people were and they didn't know who they were they quickly said right well both those people are um are providing witness to say that you have been conducting journalism and asking questions about ukraine so you know they sort of essentially got me to provide them with false witnesses um and this process went on for hours they got an english teacher to translate for us
and as the hours passed the english teacher became more and more fed up she was meant to be i think someone with a disease in the town there was a bake sale to raise money for him and she was meant to be cooking cakes cupcakes with her daughter that evening and you know i'd ruined this because it was already you know they took me at about 4 30. anyway at 9 30 after a lot of waiting around they finally said right you're going to court now i thought it was 9 30. how's that going to work and they took me to another building an old soviet looking apartment blocked that building but on the third floor there was a courtroom and in the courtroom they got this judge who just seemed pissed off you know he had been dragged out of his home at 9 30 at night to deal with some thing and the teacher was so pissed off by this point that she wasn't really translating in full anymore so you know the judge would speak a whole you know paragraph and she would give me a half sentence in in translation and so the trial unfolded i had been supposedly you know conducting journalism again they had these witnesses who said i said this that and the other and they also said most worryingly that i've been photographing um restricted military sites or sensitive military sites um and the judge found me guilty and he said you'll pay a fine again not much like 70 bucks something like that um and you are banned from russia for five years and you have to leave you'll be deported and i thought right you know yeah it's not the end of the world you know it looks like russia's not particularly a place to go back to for five years you know it's fine and so at that point as far as i was aware i would be i would fly back to yakutsk get my own flight back to england via some other third country and then fly home done um and i was taken back to my uh the sort of apartment i'd rented in this town
and um probably 20 minutes later there's a knock at the door and it was the police car and they said oh actually you have to be in the cell tonight pack everything you have up and and we're going now and so with them in front of me i had to pack everything up among the stuff that was all kind of laid out was one of these little sd cards with the second half of all the recordings from this zoom on it and all i could do was i had a head torch next to it on the table because they were watching me pack um you know head torches that little sort of hinge so it can sort of angle down on your forehead um i bent the hinge down put the sd card in that bit and just snapped it shut and put a rubber band around the whole thing but that just felt really precarious you know that's not well hidden and that's the last time i was you know just before that point was the last time i was unattended with all my stuff for weeks to come as it turned out i packed everything up we were taken to the cell fingerprinting i was eventually about 1 30 put into this little cell um and you know i was thankfully tired enough i got some sleep woke up in the morning and from that point onwards i was accompanied or escorted by uh bailiffs technically although they said we're we're russia's u.s marshals they're quite keen to sort of compare themselves to u.s marshals um and i had already changed my flight that i had booked a week away to the following day to get me back to the capital and so i was deported on well sent down to yakuza on the flight that i'd booked but with a man as an escort and at this point i still thought like i'm just i'm free when i get to yakuza i'll go home on arrival in yakuza there was another bailiff waiting for me and he said right well you have to now go and stay in this this kind of hotel for foreigners until you fly home and i thought well that's not it's not ideal but again it's not the end of the world and then on the drive in this minibus to the detention center it turned out yeah it was it was
a detention center for foreigners and it was just a prison um and you know my shoelaces were taken away my belt was taken off all my goods were locked up in a locker and uh you know after being processed and checked in the door slammed the cell door slammed shut behind me and then there i am and i don't know how long before you know that that's you know one of the sort of bleakest moments where i just i didn't know what exactly is going to happen after that um i still i suppose was thinking a few days and i'll probably be out um and they were sort of saying maybe ten days you gotta wait for the paperwork to come down from the coast or whatever but after a few days you know time had come and gone i was in this cell i mean you're in the cell around the clock 24 hours a day uh not allowed outside food's handed through a little hatch in the cell i shared it with two other men um and after a few days they said right you know you should be getting a lawyer and i was allowed on mondays wednesdays and fridays 15 minutes of access to my phone so back home via these frantic hurried phone calls my my uncle and my girlfriend were kind of you know arranging trying to help out and so we arranged for a lawyer to come in and he said right well we'll appeal the decision but that appeal wasn't hurt for two weeks and that appeal was dismissed out of hand i was taken to the court um and this is after two weeks you know by this point i was not a happy guy um i mean it's almost comical going to the court for the appeal you know so desperate to get outside i hadn't been outdoors for two weeks and they said right you're going to the court and i knew that meant i'd get to be outdoors for a few minutes you know as i walked from the door into the minibus and in from the minibus into the court at the other end but they 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 on my belt bag and i'd lost quite a lot of weight during this trek so my trousers were falling down my hiking shoes had these massive you know tongues lolling out the front and walking walking down the courthouse corridors i was doing this kind of weird you know john wayne wide-need shuffle to try and stop my trousers from falling down meanwhile my hands are pinned to this guy to my right but the the judge looked at the papers for you know like two minutes and said yeah no it's your crimes are too serious um there's a political element and you know you're going back into the detention center and this was probably the time when i felt most low um about a week earlier i had suddenly unexpectedly been dragged onto in front of a tv camera and interviewed and that was a bit concerning that felt like um you know being tried by the court of public opinion they had um eventually the news bit aired i think the day before my appeal but they had gone up to tixie and they got witness statements one from one bloke who i never even met saying yeah you know he was talking about ukraine and he's photographing these military sites again no photos were ever provided that you know backed up that story and all the while you know those those first two weeks all of my belongings are in their possession and the police have come and searched they made me turn on their phone my phone unlock it for them i had a gps device which really freaks them out my gopros to them look like a spy camera but when they first laid out all my belongings to some policemen you know i was taking cuffed out my cell to be you know to turn everything on for him and sort of on the table laid out in this neat little row was all my items and among them was this plug socket and that head torch with the hidden little um sd card in it and although
technically those things weren't really incriminating the fact that they're being hidden didn't look good and i probably should have said earlier back in march two months earlier they had introduced a new law with a maximum sentence of up to 15 years for journalists um providing or sort of spreading fake news about the military i.e anyone really speaking the truth about the military after the invasion after the invasion uh and you know these recordings had lots of me talking about the invasion the atrocities in butcher and you know all sorts and my whole diary which up to this point i'd kept hidden because when i was checked into the cell while they were going through all my stuff i just slipped it in my trousers um because i thought this diary doesn't look good i slipped in my trousers which again freaked me out a little bit are they going to frisk me are they not i got it into the cell and then i just hit it in plain sight among my belongings and it was all the stuff in the locker that the police went and looked through so there's just a lot of things going on i'm constantly on edge that i'm just about to become you know a political bargaining chip did they find the sd cards no thankfully this is actually the first time i've spoken about those sd cards and you know those would have qualified me for at least you know euro journalists if not espionage and the guards in the prison who were i mean i think they were probably nice normal guys but they treated they were wankers to us um i mean they kept on saying to me are you a spy and don't fight my country you know they would also on their phones look up phrases in english and then kind of chant them back at me you are a spy walker um and so it was it was a a scary time um and after the appeal was rejected i then thought well you know this could be this could be a really long time you know i could be here for months and the longer i'm here the the more chance there is that either they'll find some of these these sd cards or my diary or
that they will you know some ambitious you know cop some ambitious policeman or bureaucrat will decide to pick up my case again to re-trial try me under the criminal offence i mean given they'd made up most of their evidence anyway it's no stretch to think that they could pin on me the fake news journalist thing and put me away for 15 years um i mean i i didn't know that i 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 yeah the basketball player who i mean we don't really even know where she is i think i think a bit of news came out about her the other day but i mean she's clearly being in my opinion i mean it's totally outrageous but she i think is being held you know as a prisoner swap fodder you know they they will use her when convenient yeah they're trying to get um there's a an arms dealer that we have and they're trying to get the arms dealer swapped for the basketball player because she had a cbd vape yeah and they arrested her like a week before the invasion even happened you know they knew what was going to happen it seems and they just held on to her yeah she's valuable i guess and and i mean i you know i i hope that she's out as soon as possible but i really worry about you know whether they'll um oh held in jail for another 18 days yeah but what does that mean well she's she's been there for over 100 days already and yeah i mean i was i was inside for for not very long but 18 days feels like an eternity yeah says uh on 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 kimki kim ki court of moscow region granted the 18 day extension at the request of investigators the agency quoted the court's press services saying it is typical of russian courts to extend attention repeatedly until trial miss greiner's lawyer alexander boykov could not immediately be reached for comment yeah say that i mean that could you scroll down a little bit further what it says that american basketball players uh star was arrested four months
ago after the russian officials said they found a vape cartridge bearing traces of hash oil in her luggage while she was passing through the sure sherman thieving airport moscow's main international airport the charge carries a jail sentence of up to 10 years [ __ ] yeah i mean they i really i really hope this proves to be correct that it's only 18 more days i you never know with with russia i mean just this morning i saw the news navalny has essentially disappeared they moved him to an undisclosed location oh boy his lawyer went to visit him this morning and when he said you know where's alexi the the prison just said um we have no convict of the of such a name and that's it that's all they say can you explain who that is to people so yeah alexis navalny is the sort of russian opposition politician who uh he's been a very vocal critic and opponent of putin for years he i mean boris nemtsov was a close ally of him he was killed by the regime navalny was locked up under fraud charges i think for with a two-year sentence about two weeks ago they added another nine years and said that he was inciting opposition i mean they've gone full autocrat now yeah there's no longer any pretence um but but uh navalny is the guy who who was in europe for a while and then he flew from germany back to russia incredibly bravely many would say foolishly but you know he he's very dedicated to trying to sort of liberate the russian people from the tyranny that they're living under um he flew back knowing full well what that would mean and that was after they had already tried to kill him with novichok they put novichok in his pants in a hotel room in in berlin or something and now he's disappeared um it's i mean i think i was very lucky to be this you know the fact that i'm out now at all i think probably stems from the fact that i was all the way out there in the east where people are a little sort of out of the loop had i been in moscow like brittany greiner then i think things might have been very different are you worried now about talking about
this openly that they might target you a little bit but um yes and no i mean the thing that i'm most um most mindful of is and that's why i've probably sounded quite vague about some of the you know people i've essentially cited uh in in this chat is i need to be very careful because being associated with me for various people in russia could be a real problem for them there's one guy who i believe is being he he was uh one of the witnesses used against me in one of the two places um he's not a russian citizen he's from another country and he's got in touch with me saying he's now being deported he's lived there for 10 years and that's that's i mean it's not my fault but it's on my head um i am not i mean maybe maybe they're gonna try and [ __ ] with me i i don't plan to go back you know i'm banned for five years anyway but unless there's a total change of regime not just you know putin falls or is strung up from a lamppost or something and is replaced by his you know next mate but like an actual like perestroika again then i won't go back i wouldn't feel safe and probably wouldn't be safe but equally me being outside russia now talking about what's happened and also what you know you know referencing what has been happening in ukraine i'm the last person they care about you know because there are there are actual journalists doing actual journalism spreading actual news and facts about the the incredible atrocities i mean when i when we flew from tixie down to yakuza on the flight firstly they were like in the airport there were um banners with the letters z z everywhere um and there were a bunch of soldiers i should say so txe um it used to be a restricted zone and then in january 2021 they sort of declassified it and that's how my trip became viable and i thought okay great it's safe to go there now what's the significance of the letter z uh so that's the um uh i mean it stands for za po betty like for victory and that's what the russians have on their
tanks uh z and and v um so they they you know the tanks that have driven across into ukraine they've all got the letters there marked out on them in paint or tape but all over russia you you'll see now cars or trucks or buses with the zed on them it's this like mark of like russian pride in the the the special operation that's that's being undertaken in in ukraine the invasion um but all these you know soldiers on this flight you know they were they were sort of in their 40s and they looked you know judging by their age and sort of epaulets and stars all over them they look like they're probably relatively senior personnel and sitting on that flight was weird i think if they're flying from here maybe someone will be deployed to ukraine and if they're deployed to ukraine maybe some of these guys will be sanctioning or at least turning a blind eye to rape and murder and torture in in the weeks to come um but tixi itself even as they were declassifying it they installed a bunch of um missile silos surface air missile silos outside the town which i wasn't aware of so it's russia's huge arctic coast it's like 12 000 miles of sort of frontier and they've got three points ranged along it that are the kind of hubs of their they call it the ice curtain their arctic defense strategy and tixie is one of those so they've uh in the last few years massively ramped up their military personnel their their military hardware um so you know that's to defend against any attacks from the north by sea or air or whatever um 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 you know why they sort of summoned that so how did they eventually let you go and why um so they when they've got foreigners in this detention center detention center um to deport you they've got to take you to moscow first because there's no international airport in yakutsk and to do that they you know the being taken to
moscow involves handcuffs and guards and it's like this whole big rigmarole they do it on the state budget you have no say over when it happens so you just have to wait and for for the other i think there were no more than about 12 people in this detention center there were only five cells for the other people there that's just a case of just waiting and they were basically all undocumented workers um so people who had either outstayed their work visa or never had one and you know they're they're they most of them seem fairly hysterical about it although some of them had been there for i didn't get to talk to many because i was in a cell with two for two weeks and then by myself for two weeks after that um but i think the longest any of them were there were probably about six weeks um except one ukrainian guy who had been given a six year six month sentence there and he had been in prison for two and a half years beforehand for some criminal offence that he wouldn't tell me what i don't really know what his story was um but they deport you when the next sort of deportation run happens to be booked up and very last minute on the 16th i think of may um when i'd been inside nearly four weeks they said right uh on wednesday two days from now um if you can book flights to coincide with this deportation that we're doing of three other people then you can go with it um and so you know hurriedly i got my wonderful girlfriend to arrange flights so that i could fly with them on this flight to moscow and from there i would then as far as they told me i would go through customs and immigration and then i'll be in the departures lounge and i'm sort of essentially out of russia and then free to go um so we arranged this flight and i was taken with them and that was a huge really finally i'm moving i'm getting out of here um had uh it not worked out that time they gave me a covert test had i been positive for covid
um 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 it was going to be so late july so you know another two months or so um so thankfully we got tickets i got on that flight you know marched on in handcuffs again um five bailiffs escorting the four of us sort of prisoners they took us to moscow to share them at yavo airport the same airport where britney greiner was arrested and we were then put into a small room to wait for our respective check-in times for our different flights me to london via dubai with emirates a guy to armenia a guy to uzbekistan and another fella to kyrgyzstan and finally they said right it's your time for check-in i went and got my bag checked in was taken through um sort of security and immigration by a swat team a two-person sort of swat team with a bunch of police there was a whole gang of people finally got through and they gave me my passport back and my phone back and said right now and i was like great i'm you know this is it i'm free and they said right just wait here a minute and then suddenly i was taken through this extra layer of security that i hadn't expected and there were about six cops who didn't know who i was they've been given i guess a one sheet or a little stack of papers saying about my case and they basically were just given me and all my bags and just my you know my backpack again i haven't been left un supervised with all my stuff at any point and so suddenly they had all my possessions including that head torch including the plug socket including my diary which they got their hands on and for an hour and a half they just went over everything they went through all the phone conversations they went back on my phone through photos for years eventually they came across a picture of me from 10 years earlier in afghanistan with a big beard and a sort of headscarf and an ak-47 in the desert which really didn't
help and it was totally innocent picture i'd been cycling along one of the afghan national army soldiers you know the good guys at a road checkpoint invited them for tea and their hobbies are kind of drinking tea and taking pictures with guns in the desert um and you know they they kept pulling up things on my phone saying you know what's this what's this for they found my diary this is the first time someone got their hands on my diary and they start reading through one of them could speak decent english reading through stuff and i thankfully in the prison had censored a bunch of stuff i've gone through and i'd scrapped things out i had big black marks all over the place for instance the third you know it's a diary day by day you know given the date the third day in big block capitals it said at the top russia invades ukraine i was like scrubbed that out you know this just there was just there was a wealth of stuff had they really looked closely that would probably still be visible or you turn it over on the back you can see where the pen mark is pressed the impressions there was just a wealth of stuff there that they could have you know you know locked me up for and this is now in moscow where it just felt more serious and this process went on for ages who were asking me loads of questions and i i started to realize in my mind i was realizing that's it like this is you know it's just got like we're back to square one but worse um and that the my flight time was sort of ticking slowly closer and they showed no sign of letting me go and i was like no i got to get on my flight soon and they started looking through just all the pictures of my camera and i mean they're also going to like personal conversations on whatsapp on my phone and like it was it was a really uh my girlfriend who i just texted when i got my phone back saying you know i've got my phone it's it's all done it's all over she then was trying to reply and call me and the messages were marked as red the calls were just getting hung up each time so she was freaking out because suddenly like i say i'm free and suddenly it seems i don't have access to my phone and i'm in moscow so this went on for an hour and a half during which um it's like in russia
everyone shits on whoever's below them you know so all these people were trying to intimidate the [ __ ] out of me um and they were saying okay well you know you've got to wipe your phone you've got to wipe every photo that you have on your camera and i like you know if it came to it i'd be willing to do that but i didn't want to because i also want to have some record of this journey i've been on which was great until i was arrested um and it started to feel like i'm about to get locked up this is it and it's either going to be espionage or journalism you know fake news journalism and i'm going to be here for years you know um there's a british woman who got locked up for basically the same thing in iran and was behind bars for six years um and you know it wasn't helped by the fact that um boris johnson now the prime minister was foreign secretary at the time and he said publicly oh she's just teaching people journalism it's fine right she was there you know she's a iranian british dual national she was there visiting her family so that like didn't help and she became a bargaining chip with the british government um basically the british had a sort of 240 million pound unpaid uh debt they had before the shelves deposed they had sold they'd taken money for 240 million pounds worth of money for uh some tanks but after the the iranian revolution um the islamic revolution the british just didn't deliver the tanks and held the money so it was actually like a fair grievance to be honest but um uh she was held until eventually that was agreed to be paid it was a very like naked bargaining chip thing and that was totally for forefront of my mind like this is you know this the amount of sanctions the amount of you know things that britain is doing at the moment to sort of hinder russia and to aid ukraine like i i could be pretty useful and then just as my flight was you know like about to take off they suddenly said right pack everything up and they ran me through the departures lounge like at a run um to the gate where they were clearly
waiting for me um so i got on the plane um you know the last soldier was gone behind me the doors shut uh the plane took off and the minute those wheels took off i just broke down like i floods of tears it was the first time in the whole uh the whole like you know long months dude i'm freaking out and you're here i know we're like so this morning like you know i thought having this chat with you i should probably read through my like diary because in prison i was a loud pen and paper so on little scraps of paper keeping them all sort of separate i wrote what was happening day to day and this morning i was reading through it and it got me on edge again you know i was like freaking out because it just brought back that sense of insecurity you know being in this cell writing stuff there are cameras in the ceiling you're always watched you never know who's watching um you never know who's gonna next go and look through your stuff it's just you know scared the [ __ ] out of me jesus christ man sorry i think i relayed all that quite scatterly because you know that was amazing it was great uh to kind of tell it chronologically i guess because it's kind of interesting oh yeah if you ever find yourself in prison and you need some dice um you can make them with bread and toothpaste for the dots this is bread uh yeah this is bread if you take the crust off and just kind of knead the flesh of the bread kind of back into dough add a bit of water uh it becomes quite sort of um you know versatile um although the one that we're looking at now with the six it turns out that's kind of a bent die that rolls a six pretty much every time but the other ones were pretty equal and i had time to like with you know with each of them i rolled them like 300 times to like tally what they came up you know it's just anything to kill time so one of those dice was almost perfectly fair one of them was all right the one with that six was not good and were you gambling with people no not gambling i mean we had so i was the only one who didn't smoke um i'm a non-smoker and two other guys in the cell smoking it wasn't ideal but they
this is the first two weeks when i had cellmates they quickly ran out of cigarettes and started smoking tea you know they would like tear open tea bags and sprinkle the tea into a page ripped out of a russian sort of pulp fiction novel um which uh you know it was was kind of desperate times bizarre no we didn't gamble but we made a drafts or checkers board using you know the kind of the paper toggle that you hold when you're dipping a tea bag there were two different colors of those the you know tea and bread was about half the diet so we you know we got a bunch of those that we could use as drafts or checkers and those guys i don't actually know how to play backgammon but they set up a backgammon board for themselves using dice and yeah you find ways to kill time but um mostly it was books thankfully a local friend and the lawyer that i hired were allowed to deliver me some english language books which i i mean uh so i didn't get them immediately so in the course of probably about 23 days i tallied up i read 7000 pages plus of books just you know just reading i mean whatever i could get hold of some of which wasn't great some was fantastic um i did a lot of sort of sit-ups and push-ups my last day i did 700 sit-ups which um it's all gone now you know i've been back and i've been living living well slash badly since i got home but uh yeah just anything to kill time well no one can fault you for that god damn man that must have been a harrowing experience do you still have nightmares about it i've never had nightmares about it but i have had once or twice since i got back when i've woken up sort of thinking that i'm still there which i mean when i was inside for the first week or so i'd wake up every morning thinking i was elsewhere and almost the most depressing thing was the first morning when i woke up and i wasn't at all surprised to be in this prison um you know that was a bit shitty but i actually i don't really dream i very rarely remember any dreams um nightmares so thankfully uh that hasn't been a problem i think i'm more or less all right maybe i'm i mean i'm very
british i'm probably just like compacting all my all my trauma and burying it um i also spent 10 years at boarding school which was quite good training for prison i guess um and had just been you know living outdoors and you know super cold temperatures for a while so i guess the novelty of being inside with like running water and um you know food bought to you even though it wasn't great food um you know they were like i i think i was quite good at trying to see the bright side and i put myself through quite a lot of stresses in the past and so i'm probably fairly resilient to things like this but it's definitely left a mark and you know i'm sure i'll be it's recent i got out like three weeks ago and i still i guess sort of picking over it in my mind have you started to write about it um i wrote a article for the sunday times that went out about a week ago and that was a really good sort of cathartic process like going through it all reading over stuff and just trying to trying to like process it formally as opposed to just vague thoughts drifting about but um i i will start shortly work on a book about it um about the whole trip not just about this time in prison because frankly the prison time you know it's quite dramatic um but it was largely just very boring frightening and frustrating um was it disturbing seeing the effectiveness of the propaganda on the populace i mean that that seems to be the most disturbing thing yeah um after about 10 days in the uh a tv was put into our cell which for about 30 seconds i thought this is great you know something to distract and then i immediately realized this is going to be blaring loud crap russian tv shows around the clock and it know very quickly started to drive me mad i was very glad to then a few days later be put in a cell by myself um but that meant that i you know had like daily access to the propaganda you know when the war was sort of three weeks sorry three months in and i mean it's it's insane they're obsessed
with this idea that it's well you know the the government has sold this idea the kremlin that it's that it's liberating people from nazism and i think that's because you know throughout the whole soviet era the the you know the soviets of state's founding myth was the bolshevik revolution uh and that slowly changed because i mean i think um putin is slowly kind of removing lent or sort of diminishing lenin's reputation he's actually starting to try and sort of rehabilitate stalin's reputation which is astounding frankly um but the founding myth essentially myth's not fair the founding story of the the of the russian federation now is basically the second world war or the great patriotic war as they call it um in which so many millions of russians died was he trying to rehabilitate stalin's image um just i mean in russia you can rewrite the history books it's you know it's it's that simple he's and they don't have general access to the internet right uh the internet is heavily sort of censored and more and more you know when i arrived there was still instagram and twitter and whatever and as soon as the the invasion happened they they cut twitter they cut or just severely restricted the bandwidth to i think instagram but a lot of people have vpns they find ways around it are vpns effective in that regard can you use them too i didn't use them but i saw loads of people using them i think i mean they're always effective i think people don't know what we're talking about virtual private network yeah you can use them to pretend you're in a different country you can use them to access different parts of the internet that might be restricted exactly um and but yeah so the second world war is this kind of you know foundational story so many millions of people died and it's the great triumph of russia to have been so instrumental in defeating the nazis and russia was incredibly instrumental the eastern front the war back then for ukraine in particular stalingrad you know this was this was
like untold numbers of deaths you know it way outnumbers the western front even with the dunker the d-day landings and stuff um and so russia sees you know its noble defeat of nazism and oppression of fascism as it's kind of almost its national rezondet it's reason and the news was just covered in like grainy old footage from the second world war and uh they got a few little clips uh from uh are you aware of the azov battalion yeah so those are the nazis and and but it's a different kind of the concept of nazism is different right yeah it's more of a nationalism than it is like an anti-jewish anti-semitic nazism yeah and i mean i'm definitely not an expert am i right about yeah yeah that's that's pretty much it but i mean that was the as of battalion's roots at least and i guess it's sort of white are they using swastikas they've got their own sort of take on a slightly swastika-esque symbol i guess what is it can we see what that looks like the it's kind of a yellow and black tight symbol i think um but uh but why how is it correlated with nazism so well the azov battalion's roots and 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 this kind of line of extremism i guess um but that's changed a lot they um so there you go yeah i mean there's definitely a swastika inspiration to that yeah similar but they they've uh you know it also looks like when they find utilities you know you know like uh when they draw that thing on the street oh yeah when they're doing you know what i'm talking about yeah when they spray paint lines on the street where the where the lines are also you flip it on its side and it's a said yeah right but they uh i think i'm right in saying that with the uh invasion the annexation of crimea in 2014 the azo battalion sort of broadened um and other people joined and that kind of element was you know constricted and and became you know had a diminishing role however there is out there online from a long time ago sort of plenty of [ __ ] battalion
propaganda people marching there's the odd sort of zeke heil yeah hitler saluting um 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 um you know video phone film footage that claims to be but i'm pretty sure wasn't um members of the azov italian just beating up strangers on the street kind of you know just random violent attacks but they just they just ram all this down the throats of the public and it does seem like the vast i mean after putin invaded his popularity within russia sword really yeah i think there's been some changes there there have been a few brief high-profile people speaking out but they quickly get suppressed or arrested or whatever and there were initially protests across the country but in the first like two or three days of the war something like 15 000 people were arrested um and so quickly descent got kind of quashed um and in admittedly limited experience of an admittedly niche far remote part of russia it seemed like plenty of people and i you know i had to be very careful about generalizations here but it seemed like plenty of people either realize that it's just it's [ __ ] and they're being lied to or were you know had their doubts it's just understandably no one's putting their head above the parapet and saying this because there's no there's nothing to gain you know if you speak out you're gonna get in trouble your family are going to get in trouble and trouble can mean years in prison or in basically the gulag they've still got labor camps labor prisons penal colonies they call them dotted around the country um and so you know people understandably are just keeping their heads down and getting on with life and it's been weird since coming back because you know i had i had and to some extent still have this massive hole in my knowledge of what's going on
with the with the the war because i didn't have uh you know phone service while i was out in the wild and then very quickly i was even in tixie there was no wi-fi anywhere and very quickly i was suddenly banged up in a prison with without access you know brief phone calls to try and manage my you know my appeal or logistics whatever but never any you know looking at the news and getting out it's been very interesting seeing this kind of firstly the incredible and totally worthwhile noble you know support of ukraine and it's been great to see that at a public level at a state level and you know long may that continue and maybe we'll talk a bit about the future in a minute but also there's this slightly worrying kind of general russophobia that has me a little bit uncomfortable because at the beginning of the war it was very much billed in western media at least as one man's mad war you know putin's crazy sort of you know crusade to try and write himself in the history books and claim back what he saw as russian lands and slowly that narrative seems to have changed the point where with some of the i mean there's there's companies who i mean i think mcdonald's for instance leaving russia i think that's the right thing to do and just two days ago all the mcdonald's restaurants were reopened under the new branding which is tasty and that's it which is something that's the new name yeah so they just basically took their mcdonald's stores selling all the same [ __ ] [ __ ] the same thing yeah the secret ingredients won't be there um but then there's also uh you know just like russian people or companies that have no connection to to the state it seems have you know been experiencing quite a lot of hardship as well russian athletes yeah yeah particularly i mean wimbledon's a very good example i totally disagree with the idea of uh russian tennis players being banned from playing at wimbledon and i think it's right that wimbledon is not counting as a sort of a tennis rankings tournament there was criticism of canelo alvarez boxing against beval right but these are athletes the
olympics is slightly different when you're representing your country and there's a sort of state-sponsored dope doping program that's been going on for years but like tennis players who are individuals you don't play tennis for your country you play tennis for yourself you don't box for your country unless it's rocky iv yeah box for yourself um and i i i have a slight i don't feel good about some of these sort of things that are happening yeah i share that concern yeah it's actually made it's all the its way into billiards there's a man named fedor gorst who's a top level pool player and uh there's people that want him banned from tournaments i mean that's that just seems vindictive frankly it just seems if um if you're just a russian sports person who's keeping their head down that that's not fair if you're someone who's like you know you know up the regime this is great let's go good old putin like there was some male russian gymnast recently i think who used a podium place to you know to perform a letter zed or something i'm not entirely sure yeah that's a bit different people sharing sort of public support and essentially you know repeating propaganda that's a different thing but if you're just a sports person then i think it's it's not it's not really right well it's fascinating how many athletes come out of ukraine and how many great boxers have come out of ukraine and the klitschko brothers of course one of them is the mayor which is really insane yeah and um also um you know uh lomachenko there's there's quite a few like elite boxers it's a massive country as well yeah it's like 45 million people or something it's i think 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 you know exports chemical exports nuclear power all these things that they produce and farm and whatever there as well as like human exports uh i think we're suddenly realizing like how much of a powerhouse ukraine is in its own in
its own right so for the three weeks since you've been out have you been playing catch-up trying to absorb as much media as possible and get a sort of an objective understanding of what's happening over there yeah i've been i've been trying my best to it's it is difficult with um just checking the news because you tend to just get the latest developments and i'm i'm sure there'll be things that you know over the coming months that come out that i had no idea about that was massive news for a day or two um you know if i'd been in over the period that these two british and one moroccan citizens were recently sentenced to death in uh donetsk for having fought with the you i mean they were all in the ukrainian forces before the invasion anyway but they've been tried and found guilty and given the death sentence for being mercenaries if if something like that happened you know briefly while i was inside then that news pops up and then disappears again quite quickly and and that's the stuff i i might not know but actually the best solution to that i found is by trawling through podcasts from the period that i was in podcast from news outlets and and you know various political discussion whatever and that's been quite a good way to sort of you know stop the gap it seems like in your recovery from prison and dealing with just the the psychological stress and then absorbing all this information i mean that has to be taking up a gigantic portion of your life is it is it difficult to get back on track and to try to have a semblance of normalcy it's yeah i mean it's been a really flat out time since i got back also a bunch of friends are all getting married this summer so i'm still dancing around all over the place going i mean this month i've literally got four weddings and a funeral it's a you know it's a busy time just socially as well it's summer and it's nice to be out and to be normal again um god it must be nice but i also i feel uh i i have to point out that although what happened to me was psychologically quite frightening firstly i was never like beaten or abused or starved or anything like that
you know the soldiers were sometimes pricks but that's not a big deal secondly what's happened to me is in the grand scheme of things totally insignificant and irrelevant and i still got a home i haven't been bombed i haven't lost a family member like you know i i think if anything i would like my experience is to highlight the the extent to which russia is gone as a functioning state and we knew it wasn't a functioning democracy but it's it's post-truth you know it's it's it's a state where it doesn't matter if something is a totally blatant lie it you can be i mean russian i'm gonna get this stat wrong jamie might be able to pull it up but of cases that go to court in russia i think the latest statistic is 99.97 or 99.7 perhaps percent of cases end in a guilty verdict you know if you're accused of something in russia you are guilty that's it there's no there's no dispute and and it's just it's not a country i mean i i would advise no one to go there you know like it's it's it's not safe to be a foreigner particularly if you're from one of the kind of nato or western or eu countries that is wild it's just it's lost it's as a country it's lost we're back to the to the kind of the bad old days i was there was discussion about fights taking place in russia and i think we might have done a ufc in moscow i think we did i think there was a ufc in moscow see if that's the case ufc is huge yeah but yeah well they had uh one of the greatest uh heavyweight champions ever in fyodor amelianenko yeah fight night 163 and yeah as shapiro who's uh one of the top flight guys sharapov excuse me i know he's [ __ ] his name up magomed sharapov versus calvin kater which is a great fight that took place in russia so this was when was this 2019 yeah did you go i did not i did i don't do the fight nights but there was discussion of doing um a major event over there and
when whenever there's a major event uh i get tempted to going just to see i there's a few places i've never experienced i've never experienced moscow and i think the architecture is spectacular and i'd be interested in just seeing what it's like over there and unfortunately you'd be an absolute gift to the authorities um i i would trust me yeah yeah particularly i suppose you're publicly an advocate of substances that are very much banned in russia oh yeah and you know they will they will swab every inch of you they'll find some stuff i'm sure we'll just test them or they'll just say they found some stuff yes it doesn't have to be true that's what i've heard about that basketball player woman brittany griner that they believe that they might have even planted these things or or lied about what's in there i don't uh 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 like it is a fascinating place and it's got an incredible history and i i think the history is what has drawn me there a lot i've been a few times in the last few years and um i mean it's basically a morbid curiosity like russia's history is just a relentless parade of [ __ ] yeah like it's just the you know the peop that the deaths are counted by the sort of vague estimated millions as opposed to you know precise numbers you know it's just it's been it's scored more own goals in history than any other country surely you know they they really have [ __ ] themselves over a lot of times in a lot of ways and and and this is frankly what i what is expression what are you saying scored more what own goals so in right yeah yeah um and they i mean i think this is part of what i've historically admired about russian people that i've met as well is that they are just incredibly stoical it's like they're almost born to suffer and just put up with crap in a very like staunch almost admirable way and i i do find that you know admirable um
and and i can somewhat relate to it i've over the years put myself through a lot of you know unnecessarily put myself through a lot of like difficult times uh and but i i guess the feeling of kinship has faded somewhat yeah i just uh i wonder if at all if this is going to relax to the point where travel is going to be possible again because it well that's the next thing you know like how long does this go on i think right i think years you think yours well so the big question at the moment zalenski is um unfortunately and um in fact i would like to say this now because for months on the inside i could never say slava ukraine you know victories of the ukrainian people you know i'm totally behind them but zolensky is in this impossible situation where it's going to be very very hard to completely defeat and repel the the russian forces beyond you know out of the donbass for instance this bit in the east that they've seized um and even the crimea but he has to politically um say i'm not giving up i'm not making any concessions of land you know we fight until we restore our sort of sovereign borders of ukraine and if he if he were to make some peace deal with the russians that conceded territory he'd possibly be out of office straight away and that gives the chance for moscow to try and insert a puppet candidate that's a problem but more importantly if you i mean with russia we've seen this over the last 15 years now if you give them an inch they'll take a mile if if uh if you know the pushback isn't hard enough and they are allowed to occupy and set up their two puppet states in in the donbass then they've got that and next it'll be more of ukraine or estonia or latvia or even finland although who knows um and and it's you know where where does it stop and it has to stop somewhere you know making peace and allowing them to have some of the territory of ukraine is pausing rather than solving the problem um and if i feel like it's better off just fixing this problem now but it's going to be a long grinding unpleasant solution and who
knows how long it will take or what the outcome will be i you know i'm not far-sighted i'm not clairvoyant but nobody seems to have like a real clear understanding of how this could ever possibly play out in a positive way yeah i mean a lot i mean there are people who and i don't know entirely if i agree with this but there are certain commentators who are saying that um the war in ukraine grinding on for a long time is from the kind of you know nato perspective sort of the ideal scenario because russia just gets weakened i mean the tens of thousands of troops they've lost no one knows it's an official secret no one in russia knows but you know they are losing so many people so much hardware i mean their economy is actually doing fine because you know all the price of export of um natural you know fossil fuels is shot up and they're still exporting just as much as they ever have so they're actually not feeling economically that much strain yet but that's to come i think um but you know the longer it goes on the more weakened russia becomes and that's sort of you know ideal from the view the standpoint of the opponents of russia but i mean it's just it's just a it's horrific for the ukrainian people who essentially are the sort of cannon fodder to you know to that end and there's always the looming threat that he uses a nuke yeah well that's the thing you i mean that's the fault with nuclear weapons in the first place you know it doesn't make it doesn't make sense but he probably just about is mad enough and everyone thought that he was like bluffing this whole time but it does seem like he's genuinely mad and if he i mean a lot of people uh there's a lot of sort of conspiracy theory around i suppose about his health perhaps he's got bone cancer well oliver stone said that he was being treated for cancer when he went to visit him and have interviews with him with which was a few years ago right oliver was over there and he did you ever see that he showed him dr strangelove
yeah which is wild right because dr strangelove is all about a bunch of mad people deciding to use the bomb and conceding that we'll lose a couple of million here or there but it's no big deal and essentially was about real discussions that were being had during the 1950s and 60s by several generals who thought it would be a good idea to preemptively attack russia and preemptively attack china with nuclear weapons what was putin's take on this film do we know i don't i mean oliver stone was on here and he talked about it we actually watched we looked at photographs of him and videos of him showing the doctor strangelove film to putin and you know i think he was probably paying lip service to the dangers of nuclear weapons and this and that but the you know he's already used hypersonic weapons and i i think in many ways that uh and those um hyperbaric ones that sucks all the oxygen out of the city i mean it's terrific yeah it's horrific but i mean if if he was mad enough to to begin this invasion which i mean there's no there's no logic to it right and there's no there's no whatever outcome he still loses right like russia has has you know massively isolated itself and you know that it's for the prosperity of russia as a whole and it's kind of integration i know that china is still kind of there on the fence but um 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 yeah that's much more important you know economically russia has has totally shot itself in the foot and so he is clearly mad enough to make a move that stupid so potentially he is mad enough to launch any um missile well particularly if he's really fatally sick i mean if that if that really is happening and he really uh doesn't have anything to lose you know my friend lex friedman who is russian he does not think that's going to happen
because you think that putin wants to have a legacy of benefiting russia and that if he does die and if he is dying that he wants to have something in his legacy that shows that he was of benefit to russia that he's very committed to this idea of his legacy i think he probably only sees that in territorial terms um so uh four or five days ago was the 350th birthday of peter the great who you know was a romanov tsar who massively expanded russia's territory and putin said in a sort of public celebration and speech he said you know i see myself as picking up where peter left off in reclaiming russian territory i mean peter conquered finland from the swedes so the finns must be terrified but but i think i genuinely think he sees it as restoring russia to its greatest extent which was the soviet empire and lots of people within russia normal people think that you know the ukrainians the latvians the the specs all these people are their kind of national brethren and that they belong under the mantle of russia that's what's terrifying right that there's a precedent that there's some sort of a rationalization for him acquiring these countries again but i mean russia is in itself a massive imperial project you know it's an empire it's still an empire today you know where i was has no right being ruled by moscow it doesn't really make any sense and i mean he's picked his time you know the greatest extent of russian empire that's where it should be again but i mean one of the i think possibly the kenyan prime minister or foreign minister or no i think it was the kenya's ambassador to the un a few weeks ago said look you know we can't all just heart back to some colonial era and you know kenya could dispute borders with tanzania or britain could suddenly go mad again and say we want to paint the map pink and you know reconquer all the world and that's totally you know it's just a failed project but you know he's not going to listen to that
yeah and also there's a fear that china is watching this and contemplating whether or not to invade taiwan yeah yeah i mean we've already seen hong kong lost in the last couple of years that's i mean as far as i'm completely lost yeah gone from being european ruled in the 1990s and to kind of mostly maintaining that sort of tradition and and now recently gone full totalitarianism well the deal on on the handover in 97 was that the laws and the autonomy of hong kong remains inviolate for 50 years after the handover so that would be 2047 but it's already gone you know they've upped the timetable yeah and you know it's not with china and taiwan i fear it's not a case of if it's a case of when thankfully the the west's reaction to you know they haven't just turned a blind eye to ukraine and so china probably will be thinking you know this is not going to be easy the world's not just going to roll over and let us conquer taiwan which is you know one of the world's most sort of healthy functioning democracies um yeah yeah i've read uh there was some speculation about china economically divesting in the west and that they're going to liquidate assets and they're doing this so that to mitigate the amount of impact it would have if they're sanctioned for invading taiwan i hadn't heard that that's very worrying yes yeah yeah that's sort of i was reading about that but i don't understand economics enough to really speculate whether or not that's accurate or whether or not this person has a valid point it's just the whole thing is so tense and it didn't five years ago there was no fear at all five years ago it was like everything was like look at this 2019 event that they were having in moscow where i was like ooh maybe i'd like to go there maybe that'd be interesting you know i'm just fascinated in the architecture you know when you look in moscow and the metro in particular each metro station is like an artwork it's like a you know sort of a totally different architecture in each one they're really really impressive it's also so unique like their their architecture is so uniquely russian yeah
like when you look at what's going like the the just the colors and the beautiful buildings in moscow and and sort of 19th century you know i know now we build bigger buildings but from a 19th century perspective monumental architecture huge buildings yeah big long organized projects streets that are yeah i mean look at this it's incredible and look at that that's incredible and each station's totally different you know they are really really impressive well they're such impressive people i mean what they've done with chess what they've done with literature what they've done with particularly with martial arts i mean they have some of the most dominant fighters in the history of the sport have come out of russia particularly in mma and but in boxing as well and wrestling i mean there's just so many incredible athletes that have come out of that system and obviously there's a intense amount of corruption and cheating involved too have you ever seen the documentary icarus yeah which is a great um great documentary to just to understand the extent of their cheating in international competition yeah it's i mean it's also a massive population there i think about 144 million people um and although it's um i mean their national average income is is is pretty woeful you know they it's it's i think the you know the for the now outmoded uh terms first world and third world yeah the second world was the soviet union i didn't know that until recently so they're kind of they're neither here nor there um and that's still sort of the case and of course you've got the incredible wealth of kind of oligarchs and the kind of kleptocracy in in moscow but i mean the vast majority of russian people don't have a great deal you know they they really aren't very wealthy but they are very literate they're relatively well educated even if some of the history they're taught is total cobblers um and so they they they have an incredibly large population from which to you know to excel at all sorts of things
science as well i wanted to talk to you about the oligarchs because one of the things that i found fascinating about this and i i have all sorts of questions is once they started taking yachts in real estate away from the like i didn't totally understand why a they were able to do that or b why everybody was in support of that like is there a direct connection between these oligarchs and either supporting putin or financing putin or what i i think and again i'm you know i'm not totally across this but my understanding is that um the you basically can't be an oligarch in russia unless you kind of have putin's blessing you know there have been various you know as putin came to power and then slowly became more powerful there are various oligarchs who sort of you know tried to rival him for power you know berezovsky there's media model that there were a few and they were slowly just kind of removed or defeated yeah 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 or i mean also frankly people who who are multi-billionaires in russia it's a corrupt state no one's making that money completely legitimately um and there's that element that but with seizing it and who's having their assets seized it does seem quite complicated and it does seem like they just spread quite a wide net to start off with um but again this was happening while i was kind of out of the loop so i'm not all that keyed in i'm quickly going to run to the toilet if that's yeah the restroom we could wrap this up unless you want to keep going you want to keep going up to you i'm easy do you have more to talk about um i bet you do go take a leak all right all right we'll see in a couple minutes i guess the one thing that we haven't spoken about that we could is papua new guinea probably the most bizarre country i've
ever been to did you experience any cannibalism uh i met people who remembered those times but cannibalism it seems is gone now yeah sort of since the 70s really what about the semen warriors semen warriors you don't know about that i'd like to hear about that oh my goodness one of the most bizarre practices um that i've read about from new guinea is the ritual abuse of young boys they get at an early age taken in by older men and they're told that in order to grow strong they need the semen of older men and they ingest it orally and anally see if you can find this and they're 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 seems it's like a ritualistic abuse and sexual abuse of young boys samian tribes rite of passage that requires young boys to drink semen if they want to transition to adulthood um and it's not just semen drinking it's like they they call the father like they call them anal fathers it's very strange stuff is demanding yes according to demands of this custom sema 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 belief to be a huge proof of masculinity and strength over the years different meanings have been ascribed to the semen ritual some people have even tagged it as a form of ritualized homosexuality usually the young lads are not allowed to make a voluntary decision but are simply threatened by the older men to partake in various activities in an effort to prove their masculinity surprisingly the zambia tribe considers the ingestion of semen to be a compulsory ritual for male development for them it is preferable for young boys to be seen as warriors than to be judged weaklings i mean a lot of cultures do some weird [ __ ] first this is a right to passage that's that's out there this is [ __ ]
out there and they take them in very young i mean they take them in when they're like six years old um there's also uh i mean they used to have that and this this thankfully is gone now but they used to have the custom you know just of headhunters and you're basically right of passage is to kill another man um which i think is i mean as bizarre as this is i think that's kind of even weirder um because this is pretty [ __ ] up it's relatively low stakes although i guess there's quite a lot of uh psychological harm potentially um but i mean this doesn't i mean it shocks me but it doesn't hugely surprise you stop scrolling stop just crawl back listen read this here after the boys are removed from their mothers they're then flogged with long sticks during a bloodletting ceremony the elders kick-start the blood purification ritual by inserting two canes in the nostrils of the new initiates until they vomit blood each boy is held against a tree and sticks and sharp grasses are shoved up his nose during the process the elders continuously poke the throats of the boys with an arrow like objects till they vomit any contaminating influence within them once the nose poking is done the blood starts flowing from the no falling from the nose the elders make a collective war cry this is then followed by more beatings with the aim of toughening the boys so they could be powerful warriors while a lot of the people would view the nose poking as extremely painful and intrusive exercise the samvi see it as a display of endurance and strength once the bloodletting ceremony is over the young boys are made to perform fellatio on the older boys after ingesting the semen also known as male milk it is expected that it will help the boys grow stronger due to the presence of a substance called within it apart from taking in semen the new initiates are forced to observe a strict diet that will allow them that will give them strength if you scroll back where we were before though it talks about the mothers yeah until the [ __ ] this kind of sounded like a spartan take on an ayahuasca ceremony right but it's it's also like they're removed from
their mothers because they're the they've okay scroll up keep going up there yeah the reason for detaching the boys because the tribe considers the blood of women to be unclean that's really common like worldwide hence the lads are separated from their mothers and any other female so their blood won't be contaminated as they mature into adulthood the semen drinking custom is in different stages the initial stage as soon as the young zambia boys turn age seven or nine they're instantly taken from their mothers as a form of detachment this is [ __ ] wild [ __ ] i mean there's there's a lot of crazy [ __ ] out there i mean they still have um it's sort of as a mark of mourning if a you know family member dies people cut off the tip of a finger and so you get off into some of the more remote parts of the highlands you meet someone you shake their hand and they might have only sort of one full finger left it's also hard to tell because everyone's got these you know sort of you know 18-inch machete blades that they use for everything you know i think some just get lost you know sort of by mistake um though it's it's just the most i mean the country is so geographically broken you know like the terrain is so inhospitable so hard to travel through that they've developed all these very very quirky customs because all the tribes are in such isolation i mean they their country has something like 750 languages um they they nowadays communicate largely just with uh pidgin english or tokbejin as they call it which is a sort of a broken english kind of bastardized simple english um but before that you know the tribes you might have one tribe that's living in one valley and two miles away in another valley for hundreds of years there's another tribe and they've never had any contacts with each other so they develop different languages different customs different faith religions everything and it's it's like that across the country particularly up in the highlands the the river deltas are a bit different but i
mean the highlands are thought to be uninhabited until the 1930s and then this um these these australian brothers these gold prospectors flew over the interior in a light aircraft for the first time and they looked down they saw valleys with clear signs of habitation so they mounted an expedition and over weeks marched up into the interior with you know dozens of porters and they found about a million people living there they just kind of lost stone age peoples that most of them didn't know they were on an island with a coast on which people lived let alone a huge world beyond that with you know all sorts of other people um one of the actually there were three australian brothers um two of them ended up staying and living in png one of them married three i think maybe sisters um but three three women who were tribal uh princesses and this is this is a sort of um let me get this right an irish emma gray australian gold prospector in the 30s who's from this massive outside interconnected world suddenly going up and marrying people from a civilization that you know had no smelting they just had stone tools no writing no literature and that that one of those marriages had several children i met one of those guys this guy who's the product of the son of these two totally desperate worlds this kind of clash of civilizations which i found so interesting what was he like he was great bernie a really nice guy he's kind of he manages a coffee plantation in a town called hagen up in the highlands really sound dude i got to hang out with him a bit got to know him well and he's just just a nice sort of normal guy i suppose because his mother was a princess he's sort of kind of a senior within the tribe but at the same time kind of half foreigner and half outsider so he's sort of between the two worlds as well do you still have contact with his father uh his father had passed away there's a really good documentary called first contact 80s documentary it's on
youtube it's part of a trilogy the black harvest trilogy but first contact is um with interviews with these three brothers by which point they're already quite old but on their first encounter getting up into the highlands these people they met there's footage there's photos from this this unique encounter in the 1930s really really interesting um this this is not the same place where there's there's a tribe there where they have these they've made models of airplanes that they worship they're cargo cults those i believe i mean that it's that part of the world i don't think it's papua new guinea it could be potentially part of some of the solomon islands it might be some small um filipino islands i i'm not in touch i know i know what you mean yeah yeah they would see these planes and think that they were gods so they've recreated them they've recreated them out of like sticks yeah they had like bamboo radio control towers and and like bamboo radios that obviously don't work they're just bamboos they had yeah but i've read about that a long time ago i can't remember the details that well but yeah that was pretty cool how fascinating that in the 1930s they were able to find these stone age tribes there well it makes you think i mean there are still rumors that in papua new guinea there might still be uncontacted tribes like in the amazon there's still a few dozen uncontacted tribes but i believe most of them sort of know there's a world out there but 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 um but then the one i think the most astounding kind of lost tribe is the the north center in elise yeah where it sure is yeah and every now and again so on march that's where the missionary yeah yeah do you do you know who uh commander maurice vidal portman is no this is a famous british explorer slash pervert who went to visit those people and uh he's probably responsible for their hostility towards outsiders in a lot of
ways because this guy would go there and dress them up in weird outfits and measure their dicks and [ __ ] and that was no sense yeah yeah yeah well it was pictures of it it was cl he was on neighboring islands but i mean i think they got wind of this character yeah there's pictures of him and there's pictures of uh natives dressed up like roman soldiers and stuff he would do weird [ __ ] with them and he would comment on the size of their penises and testicles so he's like measuring them and stuff and he was clearly some [ __ ] weirdo who was involved in some very strange [ __ ] and he was doing and you know the awesomeness of science and exploration yeah but he's i think he's one of the reasons why i think that that the most recent missionary got murdered right because they probably have they don't have a written language so they probably have these oral stories in these legends of these white dudes who show up and start measuring dicks and give everybody the flu yeah well i think there's only a few dozen of them and after the big um tsunami back in 2003 2002 2003. um after that it was years before there were any signs of them seen again so potentially they you know came close to destruction yeah there's been a few boats that have been stranded nearby and have barely gotten away before these people uh murdered them arrows and spears yeah well they're um there's only 39 of them that they've documented they don't know how many there are there they don't even think they have fire i gotta fire i don't know i think there's some dispute as to whether or not they have fire well because if it i mean how wet is their climate you know i don't know they do know that they have metal now they seem to have fashioned knives and swords from the wreckage of one of those ships yeah yeah that'd be interesting i mean i i have no intentions of marching in there well it's just great it's wild uncontacted people in this day and age is very strange i mean there are there's semi-contacted people in the amazon and it's just it's it's so interesting because you get
essentially a window into 60 000 years ago with the the people in north sentinel island they the people that live there the direct descendants of people left africa 60 000 years ago and landed on that island yeah there's there's interesting sort of because the the sort of exodus is the wrong word i guess but the migrations out of africa came in waves and some of the early people seem to have you know with their wave of migration headed all the way up over round down and into melanesia so the the aborigines and the new guineans are from like a very very ancient wave of migration and everyone else came a lot later but these people had already inhabited these well i guess the two islands were one continent at that time the sea levels were lower but they had already sort of started existing in total isolation for i mean people the numbers get disputed they keep finding more things that pushes back the timeline but now they're looking it was for ages 40 000 years now they're looking at sort of 60 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 the human trade networks very quickly brought corners of the world into interconnection and it's only about is it 12 15 000 years ago that people crossed the bering strait to the americas and the americas were populated i mean yeah yeah it's kind of a blink of an eye compared to 80 000. well i think people were here before that then now now they're they're pushing the timeline back of uh human beings in north america which is really interesting they're finding uh a lot of uh pre-clovis uh evidence of civilizations stone tools and all sorts of other things and fossilized remains i read a book by someone who you had on this podcast a while ago whose name i'm gonna forget but you had him on with randall carson one time and he's got graham hancock graham hancock exactly um and i mean some of his theories seemed a little tenuous but some of them were fascinating like evidence of civilizations being in places you know tens of thousands of years before yeah
and i mean it was through that podcast record that i was first introduced to quebec lee tepee and you know it's just it's incredible how i guess with new arche archaeological techniques new scanning new lidar just the the books are being totally rewritten on a kind of yearly basis yeah well they're they're all a proponent now of the the two of those guys together is a really fascinating conversa uh combination because they're they're proponents of the younger driest impact theory and there's a lot of physical evidence that points to that and what that younger driest impact theory is is that there was a certain time somewhere between it's there's multiple times but it started around 12 000 years ago there was impacts and the impacts uh from asteroid impacts reversed an ice age or yeah it stopped the ice age yeah she killed the ice age and and and probably um did it very quickly and the impacts randall carlson has some really fascinating physical evidence that points to it first of all core samples when they go the core samples and they go to 12 000 years ago there's a direct evidence of iridium large amounts of iridium which is very common in space and very rare on earth also nuclear glass uh trinitite i think it's called and it's it's named after the trinity um the first uh nuclear bomb experiments right and that they detect this glass that uh happens when they detonate a nuclear bomb but also happens on uh impacts of comets and asteroids and that this stuff is all over the place at that same obsidian that kind of yes yes and this stuff is all it's sort of like that but it's directly caused by impacts but this stuff all exists in this time period of 12 000 years ago right and then again somewhere um they believe somewhere else 11 or 10 000 years ago so most likely what they're supposing what the theory is is that there was probably a very advanced civilization that created things like gobekli tepe and there's even some theories about the old kingdom of egypt that there was some very sophisticated architecture in construction methods that were date back
far beyond what we think of when we think of the great pyramid of giza they believe is 2500 years old but he thinks that it's very possible that was even earlier than that and there's also some physical evidence um that was uncovered by geologist ron robert shock rather from boston university where he points to the water erosion around the temple the sphinx that shows signs of thousands of years of rainfall i remember that yeah and the problem with that is the last time there was real rainfall in the nile valley was 9 000 years ago and that the whole area back then used to be a rainforest and that so he 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 and a stone structure yeah that they they don't indicate erosion by sand and wind the problem is archaeologists and people who have been teaching in universities and writing books about the history of these these people are very reluctant to accept this new information even though it's like you know when when you're talking about geology when you're talking about like clear evidence of water erosion like this is like rock solid stuff this is not like cool yeah there's like there's like a knock-on effect as well i suppose if you know if you admit that one thing is significantly awesome or formed in a different way or in a different place to something else then that just knocks everything else out of whack and you basically got to start your entire archaeological process again which i guess is why you get you know wrongly because that's not the scientific method but you get resistance to these new ideas it's very unfortunate when you see the resistance too because it's so clearly ego based i've seen people argue against it and they get really angry and they start insulting and ad hominems and it's really weird because the the real the one that you can't [ __ ] with is go beckley tepe because gobekli tepe was purposely covered somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 000 years ago
and um they know that for a fact they've they've tested all the soil around it and they're in the middle of excavating that site and it's an immense site with these enormous stone columns and 3d animals carved on the columns which indicate that they weren't carved into the columns the columns were carved around to create these 3d animals which is really sophisticated stuff and it's more than 12 000 years old it was covered up it was like a deliberate time capsule to preserve they don't know cult i think that was graham's theory yeah that's his theory but to preserve you know in in the almost the whole you know the answers you know something yeah the flood uh myth that seems to or story at least that seems to be in so many different cultures yeah that's but that's i think that ties in with randall's idea of a you know a huge wave of floods and the ice age yeah well that ending of the ice age one of the things that they point to is the geographical or geological evidence rather all over north america that seemed to indicate massive amounts of water moving through areas radically and quickly changing the landscape and randall has some really incredible evidence of that that he shows in the form of slides and as you zoom out and you see the water evidence it's really interesting stuff because we have this inclination to look at history okay we've got that down we've got it this is it and then upon new evidence instead of like going oh maybe we were wrong they just dig their heels in and they say no i wrote a book on this i made my thesis about this this is fact i think that's exactly the same even with modern human history we're really resistant to kind of think that the way we i mean there's the last few years a lot in britain i don't know how much about in in the us but there's been a big discussion about how we view and teach our history you know of the british empire for example of colonialism because when i was growing up we were taught that like britain conquered the world and brought civilization to all the you know the noble savages you know and it was it was totally insane and it's only just about now and particularly summer two years
ago with the debate about statues and should we really learn our history from statues or should we learn it from you know books and reassessing facts and you know should we have statues you know commemorating people who maybe did horrific things but all these you know these sort of you know arguments debates and essentially culture war has brought to the fore this idea of you know we definitely need to sometimes reassess history and that can work both ways as well um but you know history isn't fact whether it's the history of a landscape over tens of thousands of years or the history of the people over a century and i think that's you know tying it neatly back in that's what i find interesting with russia because russia is able to recreate as convenient its history every 10 years or so in a cynical way admittedly but it shows that history is not a fixed determinate thing well it's unfortunate we don't have like a real rock solid history of the world we have some really amazing evidence and some incredible work has been done by archaeologists and geologists and all these people that are trying to get a sense of it but there's resistance to there's resistance to change there's a resistance to you know accepting these alternative theories well can you imagine trying to be a historian two or three hundred years from now looking at this era the amount of information that you have to sit through right some of which is [ __ ] some of which is you know all of it will contradict each other i mean that's a headache that task you know history is only going to get harder because there's just a you know complete preponderance of information there's a preponderance of information but at least we have information we have accurate footage but you know that was only a short period that's now ending because now we don't know if footage is real you know there's deep right there's all sorts you know the the age of kind of i suppose empirical media is is is kind of you know on its way out you know at least that you can be insured is empirical because from now on who knows what's what what's also interesting when you know for a long time they had no idea what happened to
the mayans you know and there they there was all these theories about them leaving what happened and now the the predominant theory is they were killed by disease school folks yeah which makes more sense than anything well i mean i i think it's now believed that after uh europeans first arrived in the americas within i think within a hundred years ninety percent of the population had died yes francis they're only just now starting to find these traces of vast civilizations in the amazon i'm sure there'll be many more to come you know these these these uh there are rock paintings appearing there are uh in one particular point um evidence of um sort of ramps up to the amazon on one side of the river and then down on the other you know bridges that would span hundreds of meters you know huge kind of you know complex and quite advanced civilizations that just you know if you in a jungle if everyone dies it'll grow over in no time at all and and it seems like a lot of people might have returned to a hunter-gathering you know subsistence uh life in the jungle from that because if there's a plague you know plagues are usually in in you know sort of pre-scientific times and even perhaps today are viewed by a lot of people as kind of divine retribution punishment so flee the city head to the yeah back into the wild and i'm sure plenty of people saw covert at that for some for some time as well as that was a lot worse than kovitz smallpox but the the other thing is uh the lidar evidence have you seen that stuff that they're using is this the the uh the big ring cities were built built in big circular shapes not just that but grids that indicate irrigation in blocks of cities and graham hancock talked about that as well on the podcast and there's a great video that's available on youtube where he just discusses um the potential population of the amazon reaching as much as 20 million people at one point in time that there's vast cities there did you also know that the amazon itself was created by agriculture that the all that rain forest most of those trees were a direct result of different trees and different plants
that people planted when there was a civilization so and then it's savannah or pampas or something well it was just different they're not exactly sure what you know they used to think it was all natural and now they don't think it's natural go please pull up something about that now that there's direct evidence um here it goes while previously thought to have been an empty wilderness in pre-contact times has become increasingly clear that the amazon has first a deep and ancient pattern of human settlement dating back to 12 000 years ago and second that much of the amazon jungle that we know today is in fact an anthropogenic if you just click on that there's there's actually better articles that detail it okay here it is um while previously thought to be an empty willingness uh okay the amazon in first deep and ancient pattern second that much of the amazon jungle we know is in fact an anthropogenic landscape that is the amazon has been modified extensively by indigenous populations for the past 12 000 years the changes that the indigenous populations made the amazon rainforest in the past were nowhere near the level of intensive extraction we see going on in the massive deforestation burning today rather indigenous populations increase the overall overall biodiversity and quality of the soil this is not what i'm looking for there's uh there's a better article that shows that most of the trees in the amazon were a result of agriculture so that was sort of creating uh ecological diversity and then it just when people died it just overran yeah and it over overwhelmed what used to be these cities you know that's the whole um legend of the lost city of z right that book yeah in the film that was great supposedly pristine untouched amazon rainforest was actually shaped by humans over thousands of years native people play a strong role in molding the ecology of this vast wilderness this is from the smithsonian so it's a legitimate source but there's a bunch of different trees that
they point to that these people planted and then these trees just overwhelmed the the landscape with the when all the people died off from the plague you know 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 yeah and there used to be people living in these areas that's it's it's fascinating wild stuff man yeah well listen charlie i'm glad you're live i'm glad you're not a russian prison and i'm glad i had a chance to talk to you and these books that you have out that are available right now uh one is uh on roads that echo and the other is through sand and snow did you do an audio version of these as well uh yeah they're both on audible did you read it i read it oh excellent i love hearing that yeah no they're they're out get all of them um but thank you so much my pleasure it's been it's been a lot of fun and thanks to jamie and you for having me here it's been awesome our pleasure thank you very much for coming and do you have social media that people can find you on as well yeah i'm on uh instagram and twitter at cw explore like charlie walker cw explore um explore explore there it is right there cw explorer and my website is cw cwxplore.com check it out that's where i post most my stuff and i don't know what'll be next yet but uh that's the place to follow it well when you come up with another one let us know and i'd love to sit down and do this again that'd be a pleasure and stay out of jail buddy please thank you charlie cheers all right bye everybody [Music] [Applause] you