So... Alright - The Empty Quarter

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

Geoff discovers a documentary that shines a light on one of the most remote and mysterious places on Earth, The Empty Quarter. Sponsored by Katos Koffee http://katoskoffee.com code SOALRIGHT10 , Shady Rays http://shadyrays.com – Black Friday sale active from 11/17 – 11/30 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, I was bouncing around YouTube the other day just kind of killing time, and actually, let me ask you a question, and feel free to answer this to yourself in a room alone or to email me at eric at jeffsposs.com. Your response, I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious. How do you kill time? Not like, oh, I'm going to sit down, I'm bored, I'm going to sit down and watch a movie or play a video game or read this book that I've been meaning to read or I'm just going to play an album that I know I love. I mean, you're bored.

The TV show you're watching doesn't sound good to you. You're between books. You're sick of all your music. And you just want to idly thumb through shit. I imagine most people... I know my fiance fiance, she used to spend a ton of time on Instagram, but now TikTok, I think, has replaced a lot of that. So I'd say it's probably mostly TikTok, but then Instagram for her. There was a time when I spent a lot of time on Twitter and social media, but I've kind of gotten over it, I guess, at this point. Anyway, I have noticed that I am browsing YouTube listlessly in ways that I never used to. Whereas my aforementioned fiance will pick up TikTok and spend 30 or 45 minutes or seven hours. But I've been finding myself gravitating more towards YouTube,

which I never did in the past. I know that sounds stupid, because I have helped run a business that uses YouTube as a distribution platform, major distribution platform. And it's clearly very important to not only our business, but to a lot of businesses and to a lot of people around the world. I mean, I don't know if this is still accurate, but I remember reading one time that YouTube counted as like the number three search engine in the world, believe it or not. So, you know what? Let's believe it or not. Let's look that up.

Is YouTube the biggest search engine, let's say? Okay, well, I'm getting a lot of reports here that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world as of right now. Here's one from, they're all old articles. I guess people don't give enough of a shit to write these kinds of stories anymore. Here's something from 2017. This is clearly a trusted source. This is a website called searchenginejournal.com. And according to them in 2017, number one, Google search was Google. Number one, online search was Google. Number two, I forgot that become a fucking verb. Number one, online search was Google.

Number two, I forgot that that'd become a fucking verb. Number two is YouTube. Yeah, okay. So there you go. I mean, that gives you an idea of how big and important and integral YouTube is to the fabric of the internet at this point. But because I made hours and hours and hours and hours of footage and content for YouTube every week, I didn't spend a lot of time there hanging out watching it when I got home. And it's only been lately that through... Actually,

during the pandemic, I started... I don't know about y'all, but I felt... Well, I think I have a good idea that you all also felt pretty isolated during the pandemic. I don't think I'm out over my skis here in generalizing that. And one of the ways that I kind of killed the monotony and also had some escapism is I started watching drone tours of cities, like people that will just kind of like tour New York City or boroughs or parts of New York City or other major cities around the world in drones. And then it kind of became like a whole new thing

around the pandemic because a lot of cities were empty. And so people were flying drones around mostly empty cities, which gave it this really apocalyptic kind of, I don't know, last night on earth feel to it. It was really interesting. And I guess I just kind of built up on that because it was through that that I eventually found Sloppy Joe's, the live stream for the bar in Key West that has become a whole lot of content and now even merchandise for the F*** Face podcast. Wouldn't know anything about that if I hadn't been just idly browsing YouTube. Anyway, the point being is I'm surprised by how much I use YouTube these days when I just don't know what to do. I don't want to sit down and play Gems of War. I don't want

to read my Dash Hammett book. I don't want to listen to my playlist and i certainly don't want to watch the new episode of love island i just want to i just want to find something that's not those things right not the things that i'm currently staring at constantly and so the other day i was browsing around and i found a documentary that i'm still serious about the email thing email me and let me know how you spend that time because i'm just curious about what everybody's methods are for that specific kind of idle time wasting, I guess would be how I would describe it. Found this documentary about these two kids. And I say kids. I apologize.

Anybody who's under 40 to me as a kid, I think they're in their early to mid 20s. They're adults. mid-20s. They're adults. But these two kids from the UK, who had been, well, at least one of them had been inspired by a great British explorer of the past, I think from the 40s or the 50s, whose name escapes me at this moment, but I feel like I need to tell you, so I'm going to look it up right now. And his name is Wilford Thessager. He lived from 1910 to 2003. He was one of many British explorers who would go set off into uncharted territories, inhospitable environments, whether they be jungles like the Amazon and Fawcett, who did it, or the people who explored the Arctic and the North Pole, or the explorers who tried to open up trade routes. You know what? Honestly, I feel like the

Brits over-index in explorers and adventurers. I don't know what it is about them. Not being a Brit myself, I'm not in on the secret, but it does really seem, because I've been doing a lot of reading and I've been doing a lot of researching on forgotten and mysterious places, and usually within like five or ten minutes of starting to peel back the layers

of whatever onion I'm looking into, there is at least two, maybe three British explorers who, like, one discovered a place or set out to find a thing and then disappeared, and then another one tried to retrace his steps and came back, and then a third one tried to outdo him, and then he disappeared, and then there was a search party, and then now nobody knows what happened to him. But there are so many of those people in the history of the last 200 years. They really seem... I'm sure there are

adventurers and explorers from all walks of life and from all cultures. It just seems to me that the Brits really over-indexed on it. They also, I guess, over-indexed on colonization, which is less cool and probably, I guess, similar. I guess the explorers were just... They just didn't want to colonize the stuff they found. They just wanted to find stuff, plant a flag, say they did it, and move on. Curious people, I guess. Curious, curious people. Anyway, these kids, they were inspired by this Thesiger dude, Wilford Thesiger, who circumnavigated a place called the Empty Quarter.

And this documentary about them that I watched is, in fact, called Into the Empty Quarter. And this documentary about them that I watched is in fact called Into the Empty Quarter. Let me read the synopsis from IMDb about this documentary, which by the way, I watched on YouTube. It was freely available. About, I don't know, maybe, I don't know how long it was, but it was meaty. It was at least 45 minutes, probably. Wilfred Thesiger was one of Britain's great explorers and writers, blah, blah. I already said that. His greatest journeys were through the world's largest sand desert, the empty quarter of the Arabian Peninsula. Inspired by their hero, adventurer Alistair Humphreys, which, by the way, is a hell of an adventurer name. If you're going to adventure, if you're going to strike off on

your own, which is you and a buddy or you and a buddy or like you and a pack mule alistair humphries is is probably the dude you want to follow right like that or that's the name you want to take into the jungle alistair humphries and then leon mccarron which is a it's a fine name too but i it doesn't sound very adventurous to me they attempt to journey on their own into the empty quarter their trip is hastily planned and low budget unable to afford camels and on and as an aside they mentioned this in the movie they were like in the documentary not empty quarter. Their trip is hastily planned and low budget, unable to afford camels. And as an aside, they mentioned this in the documentary. Not only couldn't they afford them, they wouldn't know what to do with them if they had them. They don't know how to take care of a camel. So this was completely off the table for them. Instead, they hope to drag a homemade steel

cart filled with 300 kilograms of supplies. See, I'm American. I don't know how much 300 kilograms is, and if you're American, you probably don't either. So let's find out together. Well, that's meaty. 300 kilograms is about 661 pounds.

So, yeah, about the equivalent of three or four people there. Anyway, they hope to drag a 600 pound homemade steel cart, which was dubiously designed. I got to be honest, the second I think the first like 10 minutes is them having this cart made to the specifications that they think they need. And you can immediately tell that it is not it is not desert worthy. I don't Yeah, but it becomes a part of the story becomes a character in the documentary in itself. So I don't want to spoil anything. Anyway, they drag their home or attempt to drag their homemade steel cart through the

ferocious desert heat. This film is their story. I had never heard of the Empty Quarter before in my life until I read the title of that documentary. So I decided to watch it and found it to be a pretty fun, quick, interesting little documentary, not the greatest documentary in the world, but it had a lot of charm and a lot of heart to it. And it's kind of a positive message. You're along with them through the isolation and the desolation and the heat and the wind

and all of the crazy vastness of the empty Quarter, which is, like I said, this desert that I had never heard about in my life. And I'll get into the specifics of it after this. Anyway, it's basically just them dragging this thing through the Empty Quarter. The Empty Quarter is a desert that's very, very, very large. I think it's the largest continuous sand desert in the world. It's larger than the country of France. I'll probably have some facts about this

a little later in the episode. But it borders four countries. A lot of it is in Saudi Arabia. Then to the right of that is the UAE and Dubai. And then below, directly below, on the left is Yemen and on the right is Oman. And they couldn't get permission to go through, even though the meat the left is Yemen and on the right is Oman. And they couldn't get permission to go through, even though the meat of it is in Saudi Arabia, they couldn't get permission

to go through Saudi Arabia. So they kind of skirted around. I wouldn't even say the outskirts is so big, but they skirted to Oman, north into the desert. So anyway, their goal is to walk, oh gosh, I don't even remember how much it is 900 miles i think through the desert and by the way this desert is much much much larger and i think they would have liked to have taken a larger walk through it but they couldn't get permission to go through saudi arabia like i said so they're they're kind of doing it around this way and the documentary is just kind of them spending a couple of months just walking and pulling this cart and dealing with the inadequacy of the cart and then you know upgrading and repairing and and really learning to appreciate the kindness of

strangers i think that i i mean i can't speak for them but i i can speak to the insights that they expressed in the movie and it's kind of funny. They talked about how the simplicity of life was really growing on them because they knew they went to bed at night, and then they got up in the morning, and all they had to do was walk. At some point, they would eat, and they would drink when they could, and then just walk, and then go to bed, and go to sleep, and get up, and do it again the next day over and over and over again, which seems daunting and boring and depressing. But they really got into it. I think that they described a rhythm that they were into it where they really started to appreciate just how simple life was. You're just following a path.

And I kind of like that idea, I have to admit. And there were moments where they would just see lights in the dark. That's another thing too. They're in the middle of this desert, and it seems so far away from everything. They talk about how it's one of the most remote places in the world, and that the empty quarter is one of the hottest and driest places on Earth, and almost no one lives there or can live there. But you're still constantly seeing lights off in the distance. They're doing their own cinematography through the whole film. So like when one of them walks, the other one films and vice versa. And they'll do setup shots where we just have to do this kind of stuff in film, like when we're filming ourselves to you, like you go off on a hill and you set up a shot and then you run down and then you walk across it.

So you get like the cool, you know, grand vista and give an idea of the vastness of the place and stuff. And even in those shots, you'll sometimes see just cars driving through the desert in the background. So I know that they were far more alone than maybe some of the shots made it seem. And they talk a lot about the isolation and how glad they were to have each other and how lonely it would be without anybody. And that even was something that came up a lot in the book that they read by that Thessager dude. I think he said that without local people, the journey would have been a meaningless penance. And he really learned to, as well, to just love the humanity of strangers

and the kindness of the people that live there, the Bedouins who live out in and among the desert. And that was kind of a fun thing to watch because they would keep, like, cars would pull up when they're walking on, there's times when they have to walk down like desert roads and a car would pull up and there would be a language barrier. But they would sit around and the person from the car would share lunch with them. He'd have a date.

So they'd bring them ice cream or Pepsi's. These guys, one of these dudes is a man after my own heart, loved Pepsi and talked about a whole lot. Anytime he talked about something he wanted that he couldn't have in the desert, it seemed to be a Pepsi. And I completely and totally agree with that. And I wonder, it makes me wonder if I was out in the desert for two or three or four months, what would be the thing I would crave? What would you crave? Would it be something as simple as a diet Pepsi? Would it be a big steak dinner? Would it be a bag of Doritos? I don't even know. I kind of hope I don't ever have to find out if I'm being honest with you.

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All right. The other kind of interesting thing about the documentary was how the desert kind of surreptitiously provided for them along the way. There's one point early on when they just spot off in the desert a little bit some potato chips, like a bag of potato chips, crisps, as they call them, of course. And they go over there, and it's a ton. I guess a truck drove, they determined a truck drove by down the road, and it just dumped a bunch of potato chips out of the back of it i don't think intentionally i think they just flew out and so they were they were a part of the desert that was littered with tomato flavored pretzel sticks or whatever the fuck it was and that was just a free food they

had and then at one point early on they had this they suffered a huge blow when they realized that their foam mattress that they sleep on on the ground blew off their cart at some point throughout the day. And man, that motherfucker is gone. There's no way they're getting that back, right? And so they just had to sleep on the ground. And then, at least through the edit, who knows how long it was in the actual process. But in the edit, the next day, they find a rug, like an old prayer rug that's just folded up, not even folded up, just like bunched up on the ground, half covered in dirt. And it's gross and old and disgusting and covered in who knows what, but it's something for them to lay on. And it literally, it really, they don't even talk about it, but it's just something you

kind of pick up, at least I picked up as I was watching it. It just really did seem like when they really needed something, the desert gave it to them in some small or, like I said, inconspicuous or surreptitious way. I thought that was pretty fascinating. Anyway, eventually they make it through. The first place they stop is actually a museum, gorgeous, very modern, very fancy museum dedicated to that guy Thesiger and his journey, because he was one of the first people to do the journey. I thought he was the first, but then I read about somebody who did it before him. So anyway, he was one of the most profound and prolific explorers of that era. And there's a huge, really gorgeous museum kind of on

the outskirts of, I guess, whatever town. I think they actually built it at some trade route or something that he discovered or found near Dubai. And that's where the story actually, it kind of leaves the, I guess, the empty quarter behind and takes on the last, just like the last few minutes, but I think it's some of the most interesting. They've been in the desert for months and months and months just alone with each other, or I'm not sure exactly how long, but a couple months alone with each other. And with the exception of a trucker who will stop

and share a little bit of food with them, or even just somebody who they'll run into a Bedouin and strike up a conversation and just to have some human interaction with. Then the last bit of their journey. They want to end at the Burj Khalifa, which is the tallest building in the world, which I think is kind of an interesting juxtaposition. They're traveling through this desolate wasteland that may or may not have contained living and thriving societies in in the past and that's where this whole

this episode's going i guess ultimately but they go through this wasteland of nothing and then they end it in i guess one of the most if not the most impressive feats of human engineering the tallest building in the world which is 2700 well actually i actually, I'll get specific. It is 828 meters or 2716.5 feet. It's 160 plus stories. I don't understand when they say that it says more than 160 stories. So is it 161 stories? If it's 163, why not just say it's 163? 160 seems like such an arbitrary number. And it's probably the same. No, it's three. It's three digit number. And it's probably the same. It's a three-digit number. The actual answer is a three-digit number. So just give me the three-digit number.

It's the fucking same thing. Anyway, the thing that they struggle with as they're making their way back into society and then into humanity, into a thriving city, and then into eventually the museum where they're headed to then go on to the Burj Khalifa, they realize that this cart is a nightmare. They don't know what to do with it. It eventually got them through the desert with the modifications they made to it. But now they have this big clunky cart that is in no way suited, even though it's made out of like bicycle tires and welded aluminum,

it is in no way suited to be carted around a busy city with millions of people in cars and trucks. And they're afraid they're going to get fucking killed trying to cart this thing around. So they end up trying to and ultimately being able to donate it to this museum, which seems very apropos. And then the documentary is essentially over

with them learning that they, you know, they learn what they're capable of. And they had a lot of really positive stuff to say about how they appreciated the technology and how thriving the most of the Middle East is in the current day. And just how cool it was to see the juxtaposition of like, people living out in the desert, you know, camel farming, and, you know, and essentially being kind of nomadic. And then on the other side of that desert is a 2,700-foot building that those same people made. It's pretty wild, if you think about it. It's kind of an interesting message, kind of a fun little documentary.

Although I will say there was one moment in it that was really... Man, I'm really bummed that they didn't further explore. But they're just in the middle of traveling through the desert one day. It's just suddenly there's a shot at night, and there's animal carcasses all over the ground. And they're like, we just walked up into this. We're just in the middle of the desert. There were lights over here earlier. We didn't know if they were friendly or not. We walked over this way. We're exhausted. It's been a really long day. And then suddenly we're surrounded by hundreds, it looked like, and hundreds of dead animals in various stages of decomposition. Big animals, small animals, camels, fucking dogs, just horses maybe. It looked like just all kinds of animals and bones and carcasses. And the desert, it was super ominous that it was shot at night. So it looked like the Blair Witch Project. And they're kind of like, yeah, this is really creepy. And we don't know what the fuck this is. We can't figure out why it exists. These animals haven't been... Their meat hasn't been harvested, really. And it doesn't appear to be a mass execution site because there are varying stages of decomposition. There's old-ass bones, and then there's a camel

over there that looks like it just died, and then there's some sort of a wolf-dog thing over here that looks like it's been dead for a couple months, and it just looks like a place where they bring dead stuff out in the middle of nowhere, and it's really, really creepy, and they talk about being, like, freaked out and creeped out, but they're too...

and, like, probably the worst place they could hunker down for the night, but they're too tired to go on, so they just spend the night there. And then it's just the next day, and they're just going along. And I don't know what... They never circle back on that at the end of the documentary and say, oh, by the way, we looked into it, and this is what all those hundreds of dead animals were. We're just kind of left to our own imagination. Which, by the way, if anybody does know what they were, I would, once again, drop me an email. I would love to know, because I thought it was really creepy. And it reminded me of a place I went to in Kuwait

when I was in the military called the Tank Graveyard, where it was a bunch of burned out and blown up tanks and other military vehicles that were kind of similarly just decaying in the desert and the sand was kind of reclaiming them. And it had a very similar creepy, old, gross, dead vibes. Yeah, it was weird. creepy, old, gross, dead vibes. Yeah, it was weird. Also, I'll point out something from the documentary that I've been fortunate enough to know since my time in the military,

which is that there is no better sunrise and sunset on Earth than in the Middle East. Yeah, those deserts, the sunrise and the sunset of those deserts is unlike anything else I've ever experienced. And they capture it beautifully a few times in that documentary. And it is like an un-really beautiful place. I know it seems kind of like plain and desolate, but man, when you're in it and you're staring at the vastness of it and you can see so much sky and so much land and it's just untouched and undisturbed,

So much sky and so much land, and it's just untouched and undisturbed. It's really supremely beautiful, I have to say. So I thought it was a fun little documentary, but it piqued my interest on this place, The Empty Quarter, which is what I thought the documentary was about. But it really was just about these kids just kind of retracing steps and seeing if they were able to. And they were less interested in The Empty Quarter itself than they were from getting to point A to point B, I think. And that's fine. That's totally awesome. That was their story. But I just wanted to know more about the Empty Quarter because like I said, I'd never heard of it. And then it's got a really cool name.

And they described it so interestingly, I wanted to learn a little bit more about it. Here's what I learned. First off, the Empty Quarter is the Western name for it. Its actual name is Rub al-Khali, which is also a very cool name. And it is a desert that encompasses about a third of the southern Arabian Peninsula. It covers 250,000 square miles or about 650,000 square kilometers. That makes it larger than the entire country of France, which, man, that's a pretty big desert. And I think the Sahara Desert is still larger or at least contains more sand. And as I think I said earlier, it's in Saudi Arabia Oman the UAE and then Yemen and it's

considered part of the larger Arabian desert it's uh it's about a thousand kilometers or 600 miles long and then about 500 kilometers or 300 miles wide and it's covered in sand dunes like you would see in the movies that go as high as 800 feet and there's also gravel and gypsum plains and i don't know if you've ever been in that it's not like in the movies the desert it's actually at least in my experience in kuwait in the middle my experience in the middle east uh it was the desert was a lot there was a lot more going on in the desert there was a lot there was honestly a lot of trash but there were a lot more like rocks and and just like the desert the pictures you see are of these sand dunes that are just like perfectly smooth but then when you see are of these sand dunes

that are just like perfectly smooth. But then when you're right up on them, some of those are true, but the most of the desert is actually, there's a lot pretty rocky and kind of gravelly and not nearly, kind of like how when you're in a plane and you look down at a forest

and the trees seem so soft or the grass seems so soft and you think like, you think like, you think like, oh, I could just roll around in that. And then you realize that it's full of sticks and briars and pokers and thorns and shit. It's not nearly as soft up close as it looks from 30,000 feet. The climate is interesting. It's called hyperarid and they have an annual precipitation, a rainfall of less than 50 millimeters, which is about two inches, which means that it is, I think, the second driest place on Earth, even drier

than the Sahara Desert. It's like twice as dry as the Sahara Desert. I think it's only, the only place drier is the Atacama Desert, which is another fascinating place I want to read about. That covers Argentina and Chile, the Atacama Desert, which is another fascinating place I want to read about. That covers Argentina and Chile, the Atacama Desert. And I think that's slightly drier than the Empty Quarter, but it is listed as the driest nonpolar desert in the world and the second driest overall. I guess a lot of people discount the polar deserts. It's only behind some specific spots within the Mercurdo Dry Valleys.

What the fuck is that? The Mercurdo Dry Valleys are, oh, snow-free valleys in Antarctica. So there you go. The driest place on Earth is in Antarctica. The second driest is in Argentina and Chile. And then I guess the third driest would be this place, the Empty Quarter or Rub al-Khali. And I think what was

the most interesting to me about it is they say it's too inhospitable for humans to live in, for the most part. The temperature gets up into the 120s and the daytime, and it gets as low as the 50s at night, which is a tremendous swing 50s don't

seem that cold but if you're in a windy windy windy ass desert and it was over 100 in the daytime and then it drops to the 50s at night it is it's about as cold as you're going to be able to handle i think it may not be uh super hospitable to humans, but spiders and scorpions and rodents fucking love living there. Also, there used to be cheetahs which roamed. They call Asiatic cheetahs which roamed the empty quarter. They say that they're all but regionally extinct from the desert. I guess that means that they're not extinct from the world, but they're they're no longer there. but they're no longer there.

That would fucking suck to just be humping your aluminum cart with bicycle wheels 400 miles into a desert and then see a desert cheetah. You're pretty boned at that point. And there is a road that runs through it from Oman to Saudi Arabia, which I think they built in 2021. There are some inhabitants, a few. Those would be, I guess,

nomadic tribes. I don't know them. I'm reading them from a list. There's the Almarah tribe, the Banyu Yam tribe, the Banyas tribe, and probably a few others. So there are people out there that are living, but not a lot. It's pretty inhospitable. So after some Google searches and a little bit of reading, I wanted to find more documentaries. And that's when I discovered that for a place that is one of the most unlivable and remote and uninhabitable on earth, there sure are a lot of assholes on YouTube that have been there and made videos. Like, I spent three nights by myself in the empty quarter, or my best friend and I drove across the empty quarter in a Land Rover,

or I took an adventure vacation to the empty quarter. There are probably a hundred YouTube, I guess they're, I don't know, travel vloggers or whatever that have made videos spending time in the empty quarter, which made it seem a lot less cool, if I'm being honest with you, after seeing all those assholes littered throughout it. And most of those videos I found to be truly terrible. I tried to watch a bunch, you know, because I wanted to learn what I could about the place. And they're very, a lot of pretty vapid and far more centered around the person there and a lot less about the place and the there. But I kept searching. And that's when I started to see stuff pop up like videos called, Is the Empty Quarter the Atlantis of the Sands?

What about Aram of the Pillars? Hidden Cities. The Rom of the Pillars, Hidden Cities. There's tons of videos that are like ancient alien style that talk about aliens and giants, lost civilizations. So that seemed way more interesting to me than some asshole with a GoPro filming themselves sliding down a sand dune. So I started to watch those,

and that's when I discovered that there really was a lot to The Empty Court. It was was not empty it was not empty at all for a very long time it was a supposedly a thriving metropolis uh one of the richest and most prosperous places in the world at times oh anyway before I go on if you did want to go on one of those adventure tours in the empty quarter there uh you can you can go for, it's like five grand for like 10 or 11 days. So I'm sure it would be about as convenient a way to see that place as possible. Now that I'm looking over my notes, I realized that, uh, we have a long way to go. We haven't even scratched the surface on what's below the surface

of the empty quarter. And that's, uh, turns out to be the most interesting part of this whole journey for me, learning about it is its past. And so I think to do that justice, we should probably do it in another episode of this podcast. This is our first cliffhanger, our first two-parter.

Huh. I hope you don't hate that. All right. So, hey, everybody. It's future Jeff here. All right. I will at some point, but I don't want to give you the idea that it's coming out next week or anything because it turns out that story is a lot bigger than I was able to wrap my head around. And I didn't I want to do it justice when I do get back to it. So it'll be a while. All right.