Slow Baja - Carl Honoré In Praise of Slow

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

For episode number one hundred and fifty, I proudly bring you this important and thoughtful conversation with Journalist Carl Honoré. Honoré is the leading voice of the global Slow Movement. We recently spent some time at Los Sagrados Horse Sanctuary in Pescadero discussing his bestselling book "In Praise of Slowness." In his books, lectures, and TED Talks, Honoré advocates embracing one's inner tortoise and slowing down. He criticizes the Western world's obsession with speed and promotes a more deliberate, unhurried approach to life. Honoré not only explores the negative impacts of our fast-paced society but also champions those who have adopted a slower, more mindful lifestyle. In a world dominated by haste and diversion, Honoré underscores the importance of deceleration. He provides actionable strategies that empower individuals to not just survive, but thrive in a rapidly changing world, all while prioritizing their well-being and fostering meaningful connections. Enjoy this Slow Baja conversation with Carl Honoré. Watch the conversation on YouTube. Listen to the conversation on Apple. Learn more about Carl Honoré here. Get your Baja insurance here. More information on Slow Baja Adventures.

Hey, this is Michael Emery. Thanks for tuning into the Slow Baja. This podcast is powered by Tequila Fortaleza, handmade in small batches, and hands down my favorite tequila. You know, I've long said it. Ask your doctor if Baja's right for you. If you've been hankering to get down to Slow Baja,

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You know, I just went, and I can't wait to share a super, super slow. Baja experience with you. And just so you know, I'm always open to help you with your Baja trip planning. And if you'd like me to organize and lead a private guided tour, I've done it. I loved it. All the pictures, all the information, all the deets are over there at slowbaha.com slash adventures. Or just hit me up at slowbaha.com slash contact. Hey, big thanks to those of you who've contributed to our Baja baseball project. You know, we launched our gear deliveries on my winter expedition. Michael and Matthew from Barbers for Baja were along for the ride,

and we got to deliver that critically needed baseball gear up and down the peninsula. It was really, truly amazing. And on my last trip, I got to go to the state baseball championships and see some of our alums playing, some recipients of the Baja Baseball Gear Deliveries. And congratulations to Guerrera Negro and Mulehe, the Ostenaros, and the Cardinalitos won silver and bronze at the state championships. Big stuff. It's really fun to be there and fun to see them. All right, well, please help us continue this vital work. Make your tax-deductible donation at the Barbers for Baja.org. Click the baseball and Baja link. And I thank you from the

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My friends at Apple tell me this is the 150th Slow Baja podcast. So my heaping dose of gratitude goes out to you. Sincere, honest, thanks. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for the support. Thanks for the messages. Thanks for the reviews. Thanks for repin slow Baja on your truck or your Baja bike.

Thanks for sporting that slow Baja trucker cap. Thanks. I mean it. From the bottom of my heart, getting teared up here. All right. You know, when I started this thing, I had no idea where it was going. I didn't know what I was doing. I just knew I had this burning curiosity about Baja

and I was going to figure out how to get it out and do this podcast and go conversation to conversation. And I'm just delighted that I'm still as enthusiastic about show 150 as I was about show number one. And I've deeply, deeply enjoyed feeding my own curiosity and bringing you all these conversations. And I look forward to the next one. And I look forward to the next 150. All right. Well, today's show is with Carl Honore. Carl is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, TED speaker, that's main stage, Ted. That's main stage Ted. His TED Talk, in praise of slow, has millions of views. He is the voice of the global slow movement. His first book in the U.S., it's called In Praise of Slowness around the rest of the world. It's in

praise of slow, like his TED talk. It chronicles the global trend towards putting on the breaks in everything from work to food to parenting. The Financial Times said it is to the slow movement what Das Capital is to communism. And with that amazing analogy, without further ado, I'm going to bring you Carl Honorre from Baja Los Sagados Horse Sanctuary, my amigo, Carl Honorary, today on episode 150 of the Slow Baja podcast. Hey, well, I think we're just going to get started here. Beautiful morning in Toto Santos.

Slow Baja podcast with Carl Honor-A. This is where we want to talk slow, right? Home of Slow Baja. Yeah, I'm pretty honored, frankly, that you're here, that you've taken the full Slow Baja plunge from, let me get my readers off, listeners. Yeah, you've gotten the full Slow Baja plunge. Picked you up at the airport yesterday.

You had an hour plus ride in a rickety old truck all open to the elements. We went up a dirt road. We're staying at this beautiful horse and donkey sanctuary. You're in a cabin. I'm in a glamping tent. But most importantly, Carl, the best damn shower in Baja. You got it. You didn't even know you had it.

This is by far the best shower in Baja. I would be here just for the shower, to be honest. It only gets better from there. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm welcome. Thank you. is all the talkie I'm going to do. The rest of the show is all about you. It's a treat to be here. Yeah, I'm delighted. So Carl and I connected over the internet, and he's a guru of slow, and I'm

trying to get a lot slower in my life, and I'm pleased that you're here, and we're going to get right into it. You wrote an incredible book, and you told me last night it's about 20 years ago that you wrote that. Yeah, it's called Impraise of Slowness in the U.S. market. Everywhere else in the English world is called Impraise of Slow. In Praise of Slow. All right. Well, I've read in Praise of Slowness a couple of times and listened to you on audio. So I've had your voice in my head for the last 1,200 miles. I've been driving Slow Baja on this trip.

Listen to your TED talk a few times. Funny yesterday, I said, where did you do your TED talk? And you said, which one? There's some kudos in there somewhere, isn't there? Well, again, I'm delighted you're here. And we're going to get into the story, the genesis of your, your, your, serious deep dive on finding, integrating slow and getting slow into your own life and writing this amazing book about it and the TED talk and the whole thing you've been doing for the last

20 years where you've been rapidly ripping through the world telling people all about slowing down. It all stemmed from a legit story. You didn't have time to read a bedtime story to your son. Yeah. I mean, for me, the whole adventure started when I began reading bedtime stories to my son. And back in those days, I just could not slow down. So I'd go into his room at the end of the day and speed read Snow White. So I'd be skipping lines, paragraphs. I became an expert in what I called the multiple page turn technique, which I don't know if you... I have kids.

We've all been there, right? You try and sneak three, four, but it never works, right? Because our kids know the stories back to front. So my son would always catch me and say, Daddy, why are there only three dwarves in the story? You know what happened to grumpy? And this lamentable state of affairs went on for some. sometime until I caught myself flirting with buying a book I'd heard about called the one minute bedtime story. So snow white in 60 seconds. And when I heard about this book, I thought,

hallelujah, what a great idea. I need this book. Now, Amazon, drone delivery. But then the second reaction came flowing in. And it was like a light bulb over the head moment. I just suddenly thought, whoa, has it really come to this? Am I really in such a hurry? I'm prepared to fob off my little boy with a soundbite at the end of the day. And it was a moment of genuine And pretty searing epiphany. It was like an out-of-body experience. I could just see myself there in sharp relief. And what I saw was, it was just ugly, and it was unedifying, and it was wrong.

I was racing through my life instead of actually living it. And a dog has just deposited a ball between my legs. So a small game of fetch is unrolling as we do this podcast, which is very slow and very Baja, I think, much in the spirit of the occasion. Yeah, we're not hiding. anything here. If a dog wants to drop a ball in our lap, we're going to deal with that as we do. So I've been in that position. We have three kids in their 20s now. I remember the bedtime stories and the normally in reverse of what was happening in you at my house, I was reading

myself to sleep and my son was like, hey, dad, there's more tint in here. Tell me about what Captain Haddock's doing. But you had that moment where you said WTF basically. What am I doing? But you were international journalist hopping the globe doing, you know, big stuff in London, and it's hard to step off of that track. So how soon after the epiphany came the project? Well, the project came pretty soon after the epiphany, but the project was long and slow, right? I think this is one of the ironies of today is that we're all so pumped up with adrenaline. We're all so impatient that we even want to. slow down fast, right? I hear from people all the time. I kid you not. You say, you know,

I read your book. I saw your talk. And I know I need to slow down. So I signed up for yoga. I ran across the street to do some meditation. I rushed home to cook a slow food meal from my, and you think, you're not quite getting this here. It slowing down is a process. It takes time. It's very often one step forward, one step back. You go sideways. You lose your way. But you you carry on, right? You keep going. And eventually you re- connect with your inner tortoise, if you like. And you find yourself in a place where every moment of your day ceases to be a race against the clock.

You're still engaged in the modern world. You're still living a full, even I would say a fuller life, right? You're doing interesting things like I do with my life as people on the outside look at my life and think, that doesn't seem very slow. But what matters is what it feels like to me. And I genuinely do not feel rushed anymore. I get lots done, but I do it well. I'm there.

I'm present. I enjoy it fully. But I'm not in a hurry. And that's really, I think, what we're talking about here with slow. Because the whole slow culture quake is not, like, I'm not an extremist of slowness. Let's get that out on the table out front. I love speed. Faster is often better.

We all know that, yeah. But not always. And that really, I think, is the key to unlocking the slow revolution with a capital S. It's about doing things at the right speed. So sometimes fast. Yeah, musicians talk about the tempo juxto, the right tempo for the moment. Sometimes you want to go fast, but sometimes you want to slow. things down. And then you play with all the different rhythms, paces, tempos, speeds in between.

And I think you've drilled a bit deeper. Slow really is a, it's a mindset. It's quality over quantity. It's being present in the moment. It's doing one thing at a time, if you remember those days. Ultimately, really slow, I think, is about doing everything not as fast as possible, but as well as possible, which is a very simple idea, but one with the power to revolutionize in a good way, every single thing you do. Yeah. And you really took a deep dive on. that and did your homework, did your research slow food, slow cities, slow sex? I mean, you went all there. Yeah, I went all there, all in, and then out again. Yeah, well, I think this is the joy of slow. It's a simple lens, but it can be applied to every field of human endeavor. So I wrote in

praise of slow or in praise of slowness it published 20 years ago, but since then, the slow revolution has just erupted. So you will find in every single human activity imaginable a slow movement. So whether it's slow education, slow fashion, slow travel is huge now. And I think you, with Slow Baja, you're part of that, right? I'm trying. I'm trying. Yeah.

So, yeah, it's a very simple idea, but one that can just level up to use a phrase at the moment every single thing you do. And so now that you're down this path, what parts of this have really, really resonated with I know we had a lovely dinner last night at Iirubuena, farmed a table, that's fabulous. And we were talking about both of our passions for spending some time, thinking about a meal, planning a meal, shopping at the farmer's market. This is an activity that my wife and I are doing all the time, multiple specialty shops, whether the prosciutto is coming from here or the we were talking about our fondness for the ficcacha shop, Ligera Bakery, and North Beach in my old neighborhood. It was so amazing, so amazing that you were there and you experienced because that's world-class. In Ligera, I didn't find Ficccia that good, you know, when I was in Italy.

But what parts of this have you really integrated into your life? You've made it clear, and you made it clear to me last night that you weren't, you're not rushed, no matter what you're doing. Yeah. Around the world, you know, the, you would think you would be very much on the fast track and you would snap your fingers and turn on slow, Carl, because most of the time it's fast, angry Carl, but you don't, thankfully that's not the scenario we're talking about here. Yeah. No, no, it's, I mean, I guess in a sense, what you're really doing is you're changing the chip, right? You're slipping that slow chip into your brain, and that means that you arrive at each moment thinking, how can I get the most out of this moment, right? How can I get, how can I live this

moment completely and utterly and fully? And once you do that, it just becomes second nature to whether you're thinking about how you interact with your children, how you write a report, work, how you exercise, how you prepare a meal and enjoy it around the table, breaking bread with the people who matter to you most. Once you arrive with that slow spirit, I think everything just changes. It flips for the better. But in some ways, I think the thing that has most surprised me in a wonderful way with slowing down is if you dig even deeper than the surface changes. So we talk about slow sex, slow education, all these things you can do in set activities. There is something deeper, a deeper heartbeat, I think, beating in the slow movement. And it's

this. I think for many people, speed, busyness, distraction, a fast forward lifestyle is a form of denial. It's a way of running away from yourself. It's so much easier to avoid the big questions, like, who am I? What is my purpose here? Am I living the right life for me? It's easier to sweat the small stuff, to get very busy and freak out over, you know, where are my keys? I'm late from 11 a.m. That is much easier to do in the short run. Eventually, you're going to pay a price for not confronting the big questions. But I think that's why many of us have a sense that we are skimming the surface of our lives when we get stuck in roadrunner mode.

And when you slow down, the first thing you realize when you genuinely slow down, slow with a capital S, is that you have a kind of meeting with yourself, right? I think this is what we get disconnect from ourselves when we get stuck in fast forward. And I found that slowing down really is at its core about getting back in touch, with who you are, right? Listening to the whispers of your own heart, grappling with those deep, eternal, tidal questions that define who you are and how you wanna move through the world.

And that really is the magic of slow, I think, ultimately. Sure, you can hang on the Christmas tree, slow sac, slow education, all the great meals, all that stuff is wonderful. But I think if you go deep down to the volcanic core, it's about getting to the heart of who you really are, getting to the heart of the matter. And that's what Slow does for anyone.

It's there for all of us. It's not something you have to pay a lot of money for on Amazon. It's there for all of us if we just take that first step towards putting on the brakes. So this is something that I caught yesterday as I was, you know, prepping for this conversation and sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic coming to get you at the airport. I'm listening to your TED Talk, and you just touched on this for just a second in your TED. And it really did resonate with me.

We're so busy scrolling right now. We're scrolling. We're so invested in other people's BS that we're not focusing on who we are. Yeah. and what matters to us and how how we move through our own lives and through the world and all that. And can you unpack that a little bit more about, you know, the kind of deep dive you've had on getting into who you are and then helping the other people that I'm sure you're consulting to businesses and speaking in groups and getting people to really figure out this core, core issue? Yeah. Well, I think we live in a society obsessed with speed, with cramming more and more into less and less time.

But it's also plugged into something bigger, especially, I would say, in the last sort of 15 years with the rise of social media, which is that we live in a kind of distraction industrial complex where everything around us is built to take away, to chip away at our attention, to spread us into different corners, to spread us thinly, right, so that we just skim the surface, we scroll, we glance. We touch and then move on very quickly, right? And that creates a short-term adrenaline rush, which makes you feel like you're alive, you're taking part in the great drama of early 21st century living. But what you're doing, actually, is you're just wasting your time, right?

And I think this is what so many people discover once they really get into slowing down is that they go deep, right? Because fast is shallow, it touches the surface and skips along. Slow goes deep, it gets down to the heart, gets to the core of the matter. And I think that can be as simple as just being alone with your thoughts, right?

Something that people find so terrifying now. I mean, you just mentioned driving to pick me up and listening to TED Talk and so on. I mean, we used to walk places with nothing but our own thoughts rattling around inside our heads. Now, who goes anywhere without listening to a podcast or with one eye on the Instagram feed? You know, and it's just this constant drip, drip, drip, this constant barrage of electronic interruptions, which keeps us just right on the surface of things. And I think we get so accustomed to that that slowing down becomes frightening.

Becomes frightening metaphysically because it means we're going to have to confront ourselves for the first time, many for us, for the first time in years. But it also means that we have to move away from the easy thrills of that distraction industrial complex, right? Because it's tapping into bits of our lizard brain that we find really alluring and hard to give up. the kind of little dopamine squirts, right?

But if you move away from that, I like a bit of dopamine as much as anyone, of course, right? Of course, right? It has its moments. But there are other moments where you just need to step back and let things flow, right? And it's not surprising that, you know, the whole flow being a flow state in praise of slow could very easily be in praise of flow, right? I think flow and slow, it's not surprising they rhyme. I think there's a lot to do with that. I think when we start to flow through our lives, instead of charging through them, then everything changes, right, at a deep tectonic level.

Well, I know that you hear so much about professional athletes or, you know, even my son, getting into that flow state where the whole game slows down. Yes. Whether it's hockey, which you're so passionate about, or football where all that chaos and drama and, you know, pain can be crashing down on you and that quarterback still sees the whole thing in slow motion, you know? I mean, I'm a, you know, I'm a, you know, I'm a, you know, I'm a, you know, I'm a, huge sports guy and I love the metaphor of sports for slow.

Because if you think of the greatest stars, the top athletes in any sport, especially team sports, what is the one thing they all have in common? They're never in a rush. Yeah. Like the game can be moving at superhuman speed, but they're moving around it like little bubbles of zen, of calm, of focus. They've got a slow, clear picture of what's going on around them. They always have enough time, even though it's a little.

minimal pockets of space, the great players always have time. They're unrushed. They're slow, right? In action, that's slow in action. And even Jackie Stewart, which, you know, again, we were talking a little bit about heroes. You spent some time in Argentina, so I put you on the spot to see how much you know about Argentina. Immediately first question, how about Fongio? Fonjo, Jackie Stewart probably would have said Fongio was the greatest driver in the world,

but Jackie Stewart was a damn fine driver. And he was probably the first one who always said, you've got to slow down to go fast. Exactly. Yeah. And so you touched on Zen. meditation, I know. What parts of getting inside your own head and trying to tune out everything else have you researched, experienced, and integrated that have paid off? Well, I do meditation. I do yoga as well. And I think some people find those a little bit hard to get to grips with

at the start. They can feel a little woo-woo and so on. So what I recommend to people, if they're looking for a way to start uncoupling from this tsunami of distraction and over-stimulation and caffeine is to walk. Like that is the most simple act of slowness, right, is walking. Because really coming back to the idea of the tempo juxto, right, being the core of the slow message, finding the right tempo for the moment. When we walk, we know instantly and intuitively whether we're walking at the right speed. You know, when you're walking with someone else and you're having to walk a little faster

or a little slower. It's not talking about you, Amy. He's not talking about me. My wife, the fast walker. I'm thinking of my wife here as well. And it's just, it's uncomfortable. Whereas if you're walking at the right speed, you feel it.

And I think that's so useful as a way to get into the whole slow revolution is through the body, right? Because this is something we lose in a fast forward culture, the connection between mind and body. It gets systematically obliterated by the go faster, do everything at once culture. And bringing the mind and body back together is one of the main benefits of slowing down. And a beautiful, simple way to do that is to walk.

Just go for a walk. And all the great thinkers in history have always known that walking is the secret, the launch pad, to creativity, to connection with the self, to exploration of the soul, to touching the sky. Right. You know, whether it's Kafka or Nabokhov or Wolf, they all have talked about walking as being the doorway through which you be. pass to find yourself, to find others, to find great thoughts. This is where walking, I think, is a really good way to reconnect with those deeper, slower rhythms. And especially if you can do it in nature, because that's another way to tap in slow is we know that being, we're sitting in glorious nature here at the moment. We can hear the wind riffling in the trees, there's horses

neighing in the background. I can hear cicadas. This is nature at its finest, right? And nature slows us down. Nature doesn't do speed, right? We try, as you, beings to accelerate Mother Nature, that always ends badly for everybody. Nature is slow by its very nature, right? It has its tempo juice to it. It has the right tempo. It always follows it. And we know the science is really clear on this, that being in green spaces lowers feelings of stress, enhances feelings of calm, sharpens concentration. It slows us down. And that's why people talk about, well, the Japanese talk about forest bathing. You talk about ecotherapy or green time. Just simply being in a green space and walking, bringing those two things together, I think, is a superpower when it comes

to slowing down. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And driving very slowly and not stressful conditions. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that our kids are about the same age, you know, college and post-college. And one of the things that also struck me from your research and your talks, the Harvard letter of slowing down. Now, I lived in a pressure cooker environment where, unfortunately, in the top high school that my son went to, you know, kids were committing suicide,

you know, before, because of poor test marks and whatnot, and parents as well. And it was when our son got accepted there, we just don't worry about it. You're going to be fine. Like, whatever, you're going to be fine. And he was fine. And he was fine.

Yeah. And how do you get folks who are so caught up with what the perceived others are doing, and if they can't get their kid into the Ivy League or to the Oxford Cambridge in your world or the top university, they're going to fail. How do you get folks to just understand it's going to be okay? Yeah.

Well, the first thing to say is it is going to be okay, right? Especially the more a parent is freaking out about their child performing at the highest level, that tells me that that kid is, if the parent just back, That kid is going to be fine, right? Whatever school pretty much they go to, the studies show they're going to be absolutely fine. But that doesn't get away from the kind of tornado of panic that kicks in, especially in high school, right? As parents start freaking about the next step. What can you do?

Well, I work with schools around the world, and I find one thing that really calms the nerves for parents who are on that particular front line looking with terror in their hearts at the college application process or in San Francisco kindergarten applications. That's true. That's right. If you're not in the right nursery school, the kindergarten. If you're not in the right preschool, you're not getting into the right private kindergarten. Is to get them connected with parents who are further down the track.

Because this is one of the weird things that happens with modern parenting is that we get siloed into age cohorts. So I remember when my kids were born, we were plugged into an antinatal group with women who are going to be having children within the same six-month period as our kids. And you're just in that group. And everybody has got the same. Horizons has the same life experience and can therefore create its own echo chamber of panic, right?

Yeah. But if you have somebody who's two or three years ahead, their kids gone through what your kid's gone through, they've come out just fine, and hearing those stories and meeting those children and seeing their eyes light up when they talk about the non-Ivey League school they went to, but that opened their world to a whole way of being that has completely sent them on a path that's, you know, luminous, that I think can be a big, big panic reducer for parents. It's just getting your head out of that short-term echo chamber and connecting with people who are further down the parenting track.

You realize actually it is going to be okay. Yeah, funny. We had a friend of my wife's mother was over for dinner one night, and our kids were, you know, toddlers. And she had been retired, but she'd been a family therapist. And she just had a glass of wine in her hand. And she just said, 90% of child rearing is just getting through it. Yeah.

And she was actually kind of right. Yeah. Well, that's been most of what parenting has been for most of human history, right? Until we got into this last generation where we turned parenting into a cross between a competitive sport and product development. Yeah. Which is not serving anyone particularly well. Well, Baja is serving us pretty well. We're going to take a quick break here to talk to you about our friends at Baja bound insurance.

if you want to get down to Los Sagados and Tos Santos and have this delightful experience here in your sprinter van or your forerunner or you want to glamp or camp or stay in a beautiful cabin like Carl is staying in. You need car insurance and Baja Bound is the place to get it, so we'll be right back after we hear from my friends Jeff Hill and Baja Bound. Here at Slow Baja, we can't wait to drive our old land cruiser south of the border. When we go, we'll be going with Baja Bound insurance.

Their website's fast and easy to use. Check them out at Bajabound.com. That's Bajabound.com, serving Mexico travelers since 1994. You know, I don't always drink beer, but when I do, it's a slow Baja Mexican Lager from my friends at Modo Sonora Brewing in Tucson, Arizona. If you're in Tucson, hell, if you're anywhere in Arizona, get yourself over to Motosanora Brewing. Order up an ice-cold, slow Baja Mexican Lager.

And if you love it, pick yourself up a six-pack to go. That's right. You can get it right there in the cooler, right there. at the brewery, that's Motus Sonora Brewing in Tucson, Arizona. Hey, we're back with Carl Honoré, and we're having a lovely chat about all the ways to slow down. Food. Food is a big one. Food is a big one. You know, I notice here in Baja the difference that you can walk into somebody's taco stand, and they're slinging tacos as fast as they can make them, but there's a joy behind it. You've traveled.

the world. I have never found anybody particularly joyous slinging fast food burgers in the United States or fast food tacos in the United States. What do you think the difference is an approach to food around the world versus the fast, fast, you know, industrial food that we have in the States, or how do you integrate slow into food? The key word there, you said it, is industrial. Right. It's not so much about the speed of preparation, because coming back to the idea of the tempo justo with food, for instance. Sometimes you want to cook at very high speed, right? You make something in a stir-fry and a walk. You don't want to take an hour over that, right? It's got to be fast. But if you're slow cooking a shoulder of lamb, yeah, you might want to

do it three, four hours in a low heat. So you're playing with those different rhythms and cadences. I think what's different between those two examples you gave there, the fast-slinging Taco maker in Baja versus the burger, you know, producing, you know, fast food work is the industrialization, right? It's an industrial. The chain has been industrialized. It's been sped up from farm, from the way that the animals are reared and the crops are produced to the way it gets shipped around, frozen half the time, and then the way it's produced on an industrial scale with an industrial spirit, I think. You use the word joy as well. I think it, joy is edited. it out of that equation and it's all about bottom line production output it's all numbers it's

stats right it's metrics it's not love and I think you lose love you lose joy and that's what you feel in these these roadside taco stalls in places like mexico you just feel you know you go in and there who's been making those tacos by the same recipe that she learned from her mother and sure she can whip them out as fast as you want but there's a lot of slow has gone into you to that moment of speed. That's the key here. I think that you build the slow into the culture

and that allows you to deliver useful speed in the right moments. Yeah, I would have liked to have seen the process that went into making those chips that we ate last night with the guacamole

because you know that those chips were hand padded, hand pressed, hand made, hand fried, and they were delightful. I would say they were, I'm going to go out

and say they were in probably the top three chips I have ever had in my life. I actually woke up thinking of them this morning. just about the texture and the flavor. They had so much flavor. If you think of an industrial tortilla chip in the United States,

I mean, it's just a kind of bland vehicle for another bland industrial salsa that's been turned out on a massive plant off the highway in Ohio. You know, there's just no joy there. It's just ticking boxes and tweaking little bits of our brain reward circuitry to keep us eating more. It's like, you know, like the Pringle chips, right? They're just engineered so that you want to have. eat the next one after the next one. But is there anything,

is there a more desolate feeling than getting to the bottom of a tin of Pringle chips? I'm not sure. We're about the same age. They were pretty exciting when they came out when we were in elementary school. But yes,

I don't find myself craving Pringles. And I certainly don't feel good if I've ever gotten to the bottom of a tube. I don't think anybody does. I feel like if Dante had an eighth circle of hell, it would be, it would be catered to by the North American fast food industry.

Yeah, I think you might be right. Hey, let's get on to kinder thoughts, deeper thoughts, slow. You play sports, you fly airplanes, you drive, you get speeding tickets on the way to slow events. That was a long time ago, to be fair. Yeah. Have you found a way to slow those aggressions down, the driving, the... Yeah, I do actually. You play hockey.

That's a very fast, aggressive sport. You play squash. That's a pretty aggressive sport. Yeah, I think aggression. has a place in sport. It has a place, I would say, sometimes even in business here and there, maybe a little bit of aggression can be useful if it's channeled and framed wisely. I mean, speed has all kinds of benefits. There's no question. But it's about trying to find the right balance, right, between knowing when to go fast and when to go slow. And I feel I've now got

that with driving. I used to find it almost physically painful to be in the middle lane when somebody overtook me. Now I just water off a duck's back, right? And I literally have not had a speeding ticket since that one you're referring to two decades ago. Touch wood, right? Because occasionally, you know, you can, you know, I'm not a paragon of slowness. I can get infected by other people's stress and impatience sometimes. And I may find myself driving a little over the speed limit here and there.

You know, it's, but, but, you know, by and large. By large. The rule of thumb is no. Can you unpack a little bit of the hair and the tortoise? It's the hair, brain, and the tortoise mind. Is that the quote you brought forth? Yeah. It's the idea that the brain, well, the brain has lots of different modes, right?

And the fast mode, fast thinking, is that kind of shoot from the hip, make a quick decision, reactive. And that's immensely useful everywhere from the boardroom to the football field everywhere. Right. We need that kind of fast thinking. But we also need the other side of that equation, which is slow thinking, which is that deeper, richer, more nuanced mode of thought that we slip into when we slow down. And the science is really clear on this, that when people are in a relaxed, unhurried, mellow state, the brain wave shift, right?

We get into that more creative mode of thought that psychologists, they call it slow thinking. And that's why, I mean, I'm sure you know this. I mean, anyone listening will know this from their own lives. If you think for a moment, when do your best ideas usually come to you? Right? I mean, you can ask that question all over the world to any kind of audience and no one anywhere will ever say my best ideas come when I'm juggling 43 emails. Right.

Or racing to meet a deadline with the boss breathing on my neck. You know what the number one answer you get to that question is? Where do my best ideas come to me? It's in the shower. Or walking the dog or swinging in a hammock in Bahra. Right? It's in those slow moments because it's when we slow down. that we fire up the creative furnaces, that there's, and always has been a deep,

intimate and powerful bond between slowness and creativity. And the greatest thinkers in the arts, science, and business have always understood this, that you have to slow down to fire up the imagination, to let the creative juices flow. Yeah, I often wonder what would happen if Picasso had had his day ruined by staring at his smartphone, or if Einstein didn't have that time to just stare into the blue and, you know, think about nothing what he was deeply thinking, but it looked like he was just staring into the blue in a transcendental state. But a lot of great thinkers. Winston Churchill was a great napper. Charles Darwin called himself a slow thinker, right? I mean, this is where some of the most

transformative, transcendent thinking that has changed the world has come from people just slowing down and lay their minds wander, right? And that is so hard to do now when we're surrounded by the endless temptations of social media, right? And I wonder now, we're only, what, 15 years into this grand experiment of social media. I wonder if we'll look back in 50 years now and see this time of constant distraction as a real low point of human creativity. If we start looking back across the moments of real peak of human breakthroughs in blue sky thinking and hugely innovative thoughts, I wonder if we're going to find that this was a this was one of the valleys yeah well my son the painter just deleted twitter he said i just don't need

it i just i just don't need to hear what other people are saying i can find my basketball highlights someplace else it's just too much noise i mean we need it's are we talking a lot about pace and slowness but we also as human beings we need silence we need moments of quiet of serenity and because it's in those moments that you can step back and see the big picture and connect the dots and it's through that the magic of the mind wandering that you unlock all kinds of deep secrets in yourself, in your work, in the circle of people around you. That's where the music and the magic happen. Social media just gets in the way.

But look, this is all sounding a little bit gloomy. I'm actually a natural-born optimist, and I do think that we will come out of this moment of trough or valley, right, where we are with social media getting in the way of deep thinking. I think it's already happening. I'll give you one example, which is this new social ritual. I don't sure if you've heard about it called stacking. Do you know what stack is? I do not know what stacking is.

This is when young people go out, like the 20-somethings or whatever teens, go out to have a coffee together in Starbucks. They all sit around the table together, pile up their phones in a stack, and whoever grabs the phone first to check out Snapchat or Instagram pays the bill for everybody. Right? And it's just a nifty way of saying, we have this moment here together now. We'll never have this moment again. Why ruin it by trying to be in several other moments at the same time? And what is really hopeful about that emerging ritual of stacking is that it's not something that was created by our generation, right? Or baby boomers, you know, people who didn't grow up with screens.

It's come from the digital natives, the kids who grew up with screens all around them who were saying, okay, I like social media. Screens have a role to play in my life. But sometimes enough is enough, right? I need to change gears. I need to be able to get away from that wall of sound, right? That sound and fury. Yeah. But that sound is the old black.

black and white, fuzzy of a TV when it went off the signal of our childhood. That's all that is. Yeah. That's all that is. Hey, I'm going to change gears a little bit here and let you do some blatant self-promotion. That's like a bit of self-mole. BSP, it's the BSP period of Slow Baja. You're here because you're at the Modern Elder Academy.

That's right. You've not your first visit. You've been to Baja before. You speak Spanish fluently and you're doing something kind of neat. Yeah. Modern Elder Academy, for those who don't know, was set up by Chip Conley of Airbnb. And it's a retreat here in Baja where people can come and rethink the arc of their lives, right? Because we're living in a time of extraordinary longevity, longer lifespans.

And yet we've inherited the cult of youth. We've inherited this grim, downbeat view of aging that it's all game over at 30 or you're finished at 40 or you're the wrong side of 50, right? So this idea that everything slides downhill from a certain age. And that's preposterous. It's not true that actually aging is an extraordinary process where David Bowie has a great quote about this. He talks about aging being an amazing process whereby you become the person you are always supposed to be.

And I think that's a wonderful metaphor for aging. I think that gets at what the modern Elder Academy is all about. It's about pausing whatever age you are and saying, who am I? How do I fit into the world? What do I want my journey through these many decades to be? the decades I've already gone through. What have I learned? What can I use that to open a new chapter, to pivot and move through a new doorway? And it's a very exciting place to be because you get people from all walks of life coming together with the same mission, which is to, A, to feel good about

where they are in their lives, you know, age-wise, and number two, to think, what do I want to do next? What do I want to look back on and think, yeah, I made a good choice here. I started down a path that's really lit me up, that's made my life worth living. And so it starts out of the week, everybody's a little bit anxious, and at the end, people go away with a lot of wind in their sails, and it's an exciting thing to do. So, yeah, so I'm here now to do the first Spanish-language one that they've ever done.

They've all been in English up until now. So we've got a lot of Latin Americans flying in as we speak to have the modern Elder Academy experience. Fantastic, fantastic. So what are your takes on the bit of Baja you've seen? You've been here before. You've tried to travel around in a little rental car. You've got down some dirt road.

So slow Baja is a little better for that than what you experienced. Yeah. I like the rough edge of Baja because so much of modern travel now is polished. It's got a varnish. It feels the same as everywhere else. It's been industrialized. It's a product. And I feel like Baja still has that raw edge to it that feels.

I mean, there are a lot of people who've moved in from other countries here. So it's got a cosmopolitan vibe to it, but it still looks at a glance as you're moving through the landscape. It looks like it did 200 years ago, right? And it has that feel to it. And that brings with it a real joy, I think, to, especially in the modern world where we spend so much time in, you know, in just places that look the same and feel the same or with a screen.

I feel like Baha, you, the moment you come out of the airport and feel the wind in your hair and see the cacti on the hills ahead. and it just feels like a stepping into a different dimension. Yeah, well, you're just in Yorkshire. You're not in Yorkshire anymore. You're a long way from Yorkshire, that's for sure. Exactly, exactly. In the best possible way.

Carl, you give a lot of advice. You're talking to Fortune 500 companies. You're talking to three and a half million people watch that TED talk. That which one? What was the other TED talk you did? Marmarie's recent TED talk is about aging and attitudes to age. And that's aging Boulder, right? Aging.

Exactly. My book is both. Boulder. Boulder, yeah. So let's get back to the first one that we're still stuck on here with in praise of slowness here in the United States. Highly recommended, you can easily find it. It's still in regular old bookstores because it's an international bestseller. And then you can go to your regular bookstore and have them ordered if they don't have it on the shelf.

I would definitely, definitely recommend reading in praise of slowness. I've enjoyed it immensely, and I've enjoyed you reading it to me. Oh, you did. It's an audio book. Making miles. I've read it both. It was on the bedside table. This may be an overshare for the slow Baja world. Sunday nights I like to read in the bath. I like to take a long bath, maybe sip a little Fortaleza tequila, and read up usually for somebody that I'm going to interview. So I've read Carl's book, mainly in the bath.

I'm hoping that was the sex chapter. That's a poor visual for many of us. But anyways, I enjoyed reading it immensely. What sort of, I know you have to break the advice stuff down into kind of short, digestible chunks, but what are your go-toes on getting people to actually integrate this amazing work that you've done and actually start to slow their, their rudder lives down? A couple of weeks ago, I just published a new book called Slower, which has 50 tips for slowing down in a fast more on. Also available on audio.

Some of those, right, which are fresh in my mind. I always recommend to people to start by doing less, right? We live in a society where we're chronically trying to do too much to squeeze way too many things into way too little time. So prioritize. Like put aside some time and look at what you're trying to squeeze into the average day or week and identify the things that you can drop. Because there are things that you can drop. No one is that important that everything in their to-do list is essential. It's just not true.

We're deluding ourselves as we think otherwise. So find stuff every day that you can just let go and open up some space, time, and oxygen for the stuff that really matters, right? So do less, right? I think that's a starting point. And one way to do that actually is a little addendum is I recommend keeping a not to-do list. A not-do list. So you move stuff from that to-do list and put it on your not-to-do list and keep those not-to-do lists in a drawer somewhere or on your phone or whatever and come back to them later. because they're very useful in this sense that in the moment, because we're under so much pressure to do more, to cram stuff in, that we feel terrified at the prospect of letting anything go.

But actually, most of it can go because it's not that important. So if you have a not-to-do list, you revisit it three months from now and look at the things you dropped three months ago, you realize that the stuff you thought at that point was essential, wasn't. You've totally forgotten those things that weren't that important. So it gives you that not to do list. It gives you a bigger perspective. It gives you a longer-term view, which I think can reframe the kind of panic relationship we have with doing things, right? We're always, we become human doings instead of human beings. And I think by doing less, we become more like human beings.

A second tip I always give to people is we've touched on it lightly here is technology, right? Use the off button. So I mentioned the stacking ritual. I think it's really important just to, I mean, turn off notifications, yeah? nobody needs to have their notice well occasionally maybe you do but for the most part turn them off because if you have your notifications open what you're doing effectively is you're

allowing other people to control your time to decide when you're going to be distracted they are the ones who are pulling the strings on your attention turn off the notifications you can still get all your messages but you decide when to look at your inbox right and I found for me that was a big game changer because I had you know I was already doing the slow thing when smartphones really exploded.

And I just went with what everyone else did, which was notifications on and found myself, just turn them off, right? I never miss anything that's important, but I also never get distracted, right? Because I'm calling the shots on my incoming messages. A third suggestion I always make is to incorporate some kind of slow ritual into your life,

and that could be anything from yoga to knitting to reading poetry. I love sketching, like sketching things. I'm a terrible artist. I would never show any of my public sketches publicly. But there's something about the act of looking at something, looking again, and then looking again, that just slows you right down. Because we never do that.

We glance, we move on, right? And there's something about sketching. I find that just vaccinates me against the virus of hurry, right? So build some little slow ritual into your day. It doesn't have to be a four-hour extravaganza. It can sometimes just be five minutes, but it will just inject a little rhythm of slow. Well, we were talking again last night at dinner about your trip to San Francisco and how amazing it was that you were in my neighborhood.

And you're probably in line for that facacha. And while you were probably in line, you were watching the Chinese ladies across the street in Washington Square Park do their Tai Chi and their group exercise. And so let's change gears into your new project Boulder and talking about some of the things that you've researched, some of the ideas on living longer, living bolder, slow exercise, Tai Chi. Chi Gong, you've written about that in praise of slowness. You've come up with lots of anecdotes, research about how people have been able to integrate the slow into their fast parts of their life and perform better. Let's get into Boulder now. Yeah, well, as I touched on earlier, it's the Boulder, the subtitle is making the most of our

longer lives, and it's really just about reframing aging. because we have a, I think, a chamber of horror's view of aging, right? That it's something seen as shameful. It brings feelings of guilt. We've read slightly disgusted by the idea of growing older. And yet it's the most natural thing in the world. We are all growing older all the time. Every damn day.

Exactly. We all have skin in this game. And yet we all somehow find ourselves playing into the cult of youth. And it's woven into our vernacular. Think of the words we use. We talk about older people. We talk about, you know, showing my age. I talked about some of them earlier,

wrong side of 50, the senior moment, right? Everything transmits the same message, which is that growing older sucks. Now, obviously, some of the things about growing older are not wonderful, right? No, we're both in our 50s. We know that there are some things that are not great, you know. But there are many things that actually stay the same.

And some do get better, right? But this is the untold story. The truth is, that really any age can be wonderful. Any age can be extraordinary, but only if we embrace it. If you embrace the present without pining for the past or shrinking in horror from the future, and that allows you to unlock all kinds of joy and magic at any stage of life. And that's kind of what Boulder is about. It's about saying, well, there's a little pun in the title, isn't there right? It's like, be older, bolder, right? It's kind of, we're aging boldly. And I think

the world is undergoing a seismic shift at the moment. You know, we're in, in the middle of a demographic revolution. We're living better for longer than ever before in human history. But in some weird ways, have we ever felt worse about growing older? So that's what I'm taking on. I guess with my earlier work on Slow, I was tackling the cult of speed. With this new work, I'm tackling the cult of youth. And have you taken, do you have any takeaways from these cultures that always get trotted out that live, have people living into their,

hundreds with alarming regularity. It seems like they have community in common, a good diet, active sex lives and lots of cases, but it seems to be its community. It's not really rocket science, is it? I mean, we are communal animals. We're social beings. We go back to our ancient ancestors.

It was all about sitting around the fire, campfire together. It was community. It was the tribe. And we've lost that. We live in a world now that's atomized. We live in our own individual silos. And I think speed is part of that. Because one of the things you can never accelerate is human relationships.

No matter how much of a rush you're in, you can never make someone fall in love with you faster. It just doesn't work that way. You might want to get married next week, but these things have a natural rhythm, a natural time to them. You might need someone to backpack around South America with you next month, but you can't turn that person into a best friend by downloading an app from Amazon.

These things take time and attention. They're slow relationships. But relationships are the core. We know the science is super clear now, right? That loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Social relationships are the cornerstone of a life well-lived, of a healthy life, of a life worthy of the name. And if you go across any culture where people are living and thriving into their deeper decades, right, strong social relationships will be at the heart of that.

And we have sacrificed human connection on the altar of speed in Western cultures. We are more connected than ever before, but more lonely than ever before. Right. We're an inch deep and a mile wide and not making time for anything. Nothing. Yeah. What else have you found? Well, another thing that you find is that novelty, learning is something that keeps us fresh, keeps us sharp, keeps you fit physically, mentally.

Curious mind. Curious mind. keeping an open mind. And that's something you find, I think, across all cultures, is that people who live longer tend to be people who keep an open mind. They're open to new experiences. And we live in a world now in the modern, you know, West. That's just this extraordinary, limitless buffet of opportunities of newness. And yet we don't really go deep on it. We just flit around like a butterfly in a flower bed, right, just hopping from thing to thing. To go with an open mind in and learn something new, that is so, so good for us, right? Physically, emotionally, mentally,

cognitively. But how often, when was the last time you, you know, when was the last, we actually invested real time, slowed down, and learned something with real depth and texture and context? Many of us don't do that anymore. We just, we download something and take a box and move on to the next thing, right? For sure. My poor Spanish at my 40th year of coming to Bob is case and point of my distracted mind, but I'm working on it. I'm working on it this year. Working on two things, learning how to speak Spanish fluently or approaching fluently and making more time for fishing.

Do you have any slow hobbies? Do you have time for hobbies? I do. I mean, my main hobby, we mentioned it earlier is food, man. In another world, I am a chef, right? Or I'm a cook somewhere. Just making food for people and sitting around the table. breaking bread. I love to cook. So every day I will make something, right? I don't,

nothing I eat is processed. Everything is made from scratch. And we're not talking about four-hour 20-course banquets, right? We're talking sometimes just a simple dish. But there's something about for me about the act of simply making something with your hand. I mean, I'm always in my head for my work. I'm about words, about speaking and writing and all that. And to go down to the kitchen and unpeel a little bit of garlic, slice some onion, throw it into the oil, hear it crackling and sizzling, and then the aroma's, you're firing up all your senses, right? And there's something so tactile and simple and human about that moment of cooking. And then the sharing of it with the people, I feel like people say, how do you show love?

I know that I show love through cooking for people. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Hey, Carl, before you go, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about the power of slow and how I listen to it on audio here in Baja, driving in between places when I had a chance to not die on a pothill-filled road or with cows jumping out of the bushes at me. And it's more of a work progress. It's something you lead people through exercises. Yeah. through audio. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, it's something I made in the mountains of Colorado, actually, years ago. And I just spent three days in a studio. I had it put together, it was really a pulling together of all the little tips and hacks and ideas for slowing down. And I wanted to put it into a how-to format because the books, my big books that I write, so Imprays are slow or the slow fix or boulder are big think books. So they have a lot of ideas. You can read them and, pluck out, oh, that person did this. I could do that in my life. But it's not a, you know,

here are three things you must do before breakfast. It's not a how to. Right. It's less of the how to. It's not slow for dummies. Yeah. It's a kind of how to think about this subject. And then as a kind of footnote afterwards, I will put together a sort of how to book. So I did the audio book, the power for power of slow, which has lots of ideas for just putting slow in action in your own life. And then I've done more recently, I put a book together called 30 Days to Slow, which is a a workbook that is really structured for people who like to have it all laid out for them right across a 30-day period. And that speed yoga and the 30-day is to slow. I think I make a joke about speed yoga in there somewhere.

And then I mention again this book I've very recently published called Slower, 50 Ways to Slow Down and to Thrive in a Fast World, which is one tip, which I suggest trying one a week. And just if it works, stick with it or modify it to fit your needs and just work your way through it that way. Can links to all those be found at Carl Honorary.com? As I say, everything, the one link is Carlonorea.com. And it's all there. And that'll be in the show notes. And Carl, we just want to touch on the last subject.

You were talking about you were one of nine who survived the survivor process of the TED Talk masterclass. So can we go into that again? Sure. Just recap what we were discussing earlier. Yeah, that you've produced a master class. People can find it via how. Yeah. Well, at the moment, Ted has moved it on to you.

YouTube. So it's on the YouTube Masterclass Network. But again, the link is on my, on my link page, carloneroy.in. Info. And Ted decided, looked across the media landscape and decided we need to have our version of masterclass. So they enlisted nine speakers to do the first wave, to create a masterclass. So I was one of the nine. I went to studio in Brooklyn, spent a couple days filming, and took a lot of time, I'll tell you, before the filming months to pull the script. together and get all the ideas home, did fact-checked and everything, buttoned up, watertight, turned up, did it. And then it went out in the world. Actually, before mine even hit the web, Ted had decided for internal reasons to can the whole project. So these nine...

Thanks, Carl. Yeah, maybe it was mine that did it for them. We're not doing any more of that. So they, so effectively these nine got made. They are out in the world. Mine and the other eight are available on YouTube for anyone to download anywhere in the world. But they will not pay Ted, as far as we know, will never make another master class. So it's a kind of, I don't know, is it a weird honor? I don't know, it's kind of strange to have been in this. I think it's a weird honor. It'll be a footnote of Ted history at some point that who are the nine people,

you know, name one of the nine people who, perhaps. I'm going to definitely put in the weird honor category. All right, well, it's been a real honor. Thank you very much for making some time for me in Baja and taking a ride in old slow Baja. That must have been a, what am I getting myself into moment for you? This isn't exactly a airport. Airport limousine. I felt right at home the moment I clambered into that front seat.

So I've enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you very much. All right. Cheers. We did it. Thanks. Cheers. Hey, well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Carl Honor.

If you want to find out more about him and all of his writings and his TED talks and all of that, that's Carl Honorer. Dot info. Carl Honore, H-N-O-R-E dot info. You can see it all there. He's an age disruptor. He's the voice of the slow movement. And he's a damn cool.

guy and I can't believe that he would agree to meet me. Let me pick him up at the airport in my 50 plus year old truck, drive him an hour north down some dirt roads to a horse and donkey sanctuary to hang out just so we could talk about being slow on the Slow Baja podcast. So thanks, Carl. That was cool and I really appreciate you letting me in to talk to you about slow. All right, if you like what I'm doing, all this stuff that I'm talking about driving down three, thousand miles down and back to Baja to interview Carl and truck that gets 10 miles to the gallon. That's what is that? 300 gallons of gas.

Yeah. So that's five bucks a gallon. It's a lot. Time is money and money is something that I rarely have in the slow Baja account. So if you've got some tacos jingling in your pocket and you like what you've been listening to here, 150 shows of it, it's about time to drop a taco in the tank and help me keep doing this. There's some merch in the stores. We've got some hats. We've got some stickers, black t-shirts. The coverage are getting a bear there, and that's always a reflection of my financial state.

So if there's something there that catches your eye, a canvas shopping bag, that deluxe canvas shopping bag is really great. I've been traveling a lot this summer, and I've been using that as my carry-on. It's got the zippered top. It's got the zippered inside security pocket. It will fit an awful lot of stuff. I was carrying all sorts of stuff around the Overland Expo, Pacific Northwest. It really was cool having that bag. there, great addition. So we get one of those. All right, well, you know, 150 episodes got me thinking about all the folks that I've talked to in the last couple of years. And a few of them have stood out to me, you know, and I don't want to say I've got favorites. See, things are like

kids, you know, they really are. But I will say there's a couple of them here that I want to say, if you're looking for a show, you know, I've not been dropping that many shows lately. That's also related to travel and related to finances and such. But if you're looking to dive into the archive and check out some of the past shows. I'm going to tell you, Johnny Johnson, R-I-P-Amigo Johnny Johnson. I've got to thank Lynn Cheneth for getting Johnny to the actual podcast there. I think you had to go get him out of bed. Carol Mears also was an amazing resource and help in getting that interview set up. She's terrific and has been so kind to me. So thanks to Carol and to Lynn. Both Roger Mears and Lynn Cheneth have also been on the Slow Baja podcast. Check out there.

conversation but Sal Fish I've had him on the show twice Sal has just been terrific really great conversation so I implore you to go check out Sal English bikes and wild dogs Hayden Scott and Joy Hayden Robert Scott Tuffer and Joy talk about riding English motorcycles on the Nora and just that was the first time I really said this is what I'm supposed to be doing these are the conversations I'm supposed to be recording really enjoyed that one Mary McGee. So much good has come from Mary since we've had that slow Baja conversation. She's been inducted to the Off-road Motor Sports Hall of Fame. She's had a 30-for-30 film, which I don't think is out in release. I just got to see the presser, which is amazing, amazing story of Mary condensed in a 30 minutes. So Mary McGee, check out that interview. I'm going to go see her taking a trip out west, and I'm going to drive out to Nevada and shoot a new podcast with Mary talking about the film and everything that's happened to her. since the last conversation, so look forward to that.

Christian Beamish, like I say, Matt Sawyer, listener, told me about Christian Beamish, and I looked him up, and he was first, like, you know, pro-author kind of a guy that I reached out to and had to do a little back and forth during COVID, had to do a little back and forth to get into his space and record an interview in-person, Voyage of the Comranont. It's really a lovely book. I've read it a couple of times. I've listened to it on audiobook on long trips. I've given it away his gifts a few times.

just gave it to Tom Hill, who was on the show from Iron Reson, the founder of Iron Res, and I just sent him the book. It's really a lovely story, Christian Beamish Voyage of the Comran. Check that one out. Patty. And I just saw Patty at Overland Expo in Bend, Oregon. And her story had nothing to do with Baja. And I took some liberties.

But she and her dude, Lauren, who later went on to become her husband, were the first. They got a Guinness World Record for this, the first to drive the dairy, and not trying to float it down in rivers or whatever, but actually hack a pack a pack. path through the jungle and drive the Darien. And once they got through the Darien, which was truly harrowing, and Patty really can spin an amazing tale, once they got through the Darian, they just kept on driving because the roads were just so easy after that

that they ended up driving the little Jeep CJ5 all the way around the world. And being up at Overland Expo and seeing all these rigs that are so built out and so kidded out and so capable to see Patty's little Jeep that just drove all the way around the world after they got through the Darien. She's an amazing storyteller. So check her out. Greg Tomlinson, he's wearing the number one record plate here.

He's the most listened to podcast. Greg Tomlinson came on a trip with Hayden and some other guys riding motorcycles with me, my first sort of feeling out the slow Baja adventures. I was being a Sherpa and a guide for four dudes on vintage bikes. And he's just a cool guy. He and I had a lovely conversation about just growing up in Southern California with Baja in your backyard and what that does to you for motorcycle riding for surfing, for camping, for all of that. Greg, check him out. He's number one on the Slow Baja podcast. Edy Littlefield

Sunby, maybe the very first podcast that I really crammed for. She's an author, Cancer Survivor, walk the entire El Camino Real, a stunning story of perseverance, grit, determination, a beautiful woman, a wonderful storyteller, and she's just been a damn good friend to me and to Slow Baja since recommending folks for the show. And so if you haven't heard little edie or if you haven't heard lately, tune in Edie Littlefield Sunby. Finding Chango. This is one of my favorites. I got to tell you, it's such a sleeper. It's the story of the surfing monkey. That's right, the ceramic surfing monkey, which was ubiquitous when I started going to Baja in the 80s. It was a bank. It's not a bank. It's a sculpture. And it's just a great story of the fellow who crafted that thing and the story of somebody who

became obsessed about finding out how that thing was made. And sometimes that's all it is on the slow Baja is just following your obsession. Graham McIntosh, he got obsessed with Baja. He was a lazy Brit. He will tell you that. Couch Potato and became obsessed with Baja and walked the entire perimeter of the peninsula and wrote a stunning book about it into a desert place. We had a lovely talk.

I'm really glad the bottle of Hornitos that was on his front seat didn't get stolen, but I would have replaced it with some four delays. I would have. John Rebman. John Redmond so enthusiastic. I can't wait to go to Baja with John. He is a conservator of rare plants at the San Diego Natural History Museum and a Baja plant expert. And again, he just brings plants alive. And I can't wait to be in Baja with him. He's really a terrific conversationalist. Riding the Baja divide with her bull. Again, you know, I would love to be able to ride the Baja divide. It was at 1,700 miles or something. Herbool did it. It's a stunning accomplishment, and he really brought it to life. Natalia Badan, the soul of the Valle de Guadalupe. I really enjoyed talking to her, and tragically, you know, much of her property was burned recently, but she's a lovely, lovely woman with a

60, 70-year history in the Valle. And again, you can feel the weight of what's happening with the development there in our conversation. Zuel Martinez, Ziole Martinez, Boy, glad I had a chance to talk to him. He's had some health issues since. He's a terrific maker of Knife tour guide, whale watching. He'll get you out into the wild. Amazing guy, and I wish him well. Paul, gangster.

I really enjoyed talking to Paul. Again, that was during COVID. I think we sat about 25 feet away from each other. We were practically shouting at each other in his front yard with the parrots flying over. but he traveled with Harry Crosby and has such an amazing recollection of those times, which were really amazing times in Baja, as Harry was bringing attention to little known to the outside world,

very, very little known things to the outside world, but these amazing, amazing cave paintings. And he was absolutely obsessed by it, and Paul was his student and got a chance to ride an awful lot and make a lot of those photographs. If there's a picture of Harry in the photograph of the cave painting, Paul probably made it. David Cure,

David Kier, you know, I've talked to David three times at least, and he broke down the 50-year history of the Trans-Peninsula Highway. He's written a book on the missions, and we talked about it on the show. And he has 50-plus years, nearly 60 years of Baja travel, and he remembers every dang second of it. So David Kier, pick out one of his shows and listen to that. And I'm going to wrap it up with a couple of racers here. The Salt of the Earth racer, my buddy, Kurt Leduc. Just love talking to Kurt. he paid me one of the great compliments. I don't get many compliments. So Kurt said, you know, you really got me.

And it was wonderful sitting next to him at the off-road motorsports Hall of Fame banquet. You know, he leans over and he said, and again, you know, I'm sitting next to Kurt on one side. I got off-road Motorsports Hall of Fame or Johnny Campbell on the other. Across from Larry Raglan and Kurt said, you know, our slow Baja conversation, you really got me. Like, you really got me. And it just warmed my heart because that's what I'm really trying to do. I'm trying to bring these stories out of these people that I'm fascinated by. hope that they, you know, open up and share from the heart. Anyways, last but not least, Pete Springer, first podcast I ever dropped. Pete Springer, such a great storyteller. He built the FJ40 that won his class in the 1973, off-road Baja Sports Committee race, not the NORA, not the score, the one in between. Pete had a month and 300 bucks to build that truck. He built it and it won, and he's just a great storyteller. He traveled at Baja at such an interesting time, flying around, running airplanes out of gas, landing him on the road, crashing motorcycles because, you know, he was young and dumb, and driving old 1940s trucks down dirt roads in the 60s and just really traveled Baja to great time and has all his marbles and can really weave a great story. So listen to one of those or both of those Pete Springer conversations. All right, well, again, thanks for listening to me and listen to me ramble on a little bit. this outro, but again, it really is meaningful to have you here. I'm going to tell you about Mary

McGee. She had a pal, Steve McQueen. Steve McQueen loved Baja, and he said to Mary, you got to get off of that pansy road racing bike and come to Baja with me. And she said, ooh, and get dirty. But she did. And she was the first person to solo the Baja 500, which is an amazing thing. But back to her pal, Steve McQueen. Steve said, Baja's life, anything that happens before? or after. It's just waiting. You know, people always ask me, what's the best modification that I've ever made to slow Baja? Without a doubt, it's my Shielman seats. You know, Toby at Shielman USA could not be easier to work with. He recommended a Vero F for me and a Vrero F XXL for my navigator, Ted, as Ted's kind of a big guy.

And Toby was absolutely right. The seats are great and they fit both of us perfectly. And let me tell you, after driving around Baja for over a year on these seats, I could not be happier. Shieldman, Slow Baja approved. Learn more and get yours at shieldman.com.