The Joe Rogan Experience - #1832 - Charlie Walker

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

Charlie Walker is an explorer, writer, and public speaker who specializes in long distance, human-powered expeditions.  http://www.cwexplore.com/

the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day all right Charlie first of all thanks for being here my pleasure very nice to meet you why do you do the things that you do first First question is the hardest one. I guess over the years have formed a whole bunch of different answers to that, some of them flippant and sarcastic. Without rambling on for ages and ages, I suppose it comes down to, I'm just really curious.

I want to get to these places, see people living lives differently to mine. I grew up in a tiny little village where it's nice, but nothing happened. Where'd you grow up? Just close to Salisbury in the southwest of England. About 10 miles from Stonehenge down there. Oh, wow. And yeah, I suppose I started traveling when I was about 18, took a year out between school and university, and just got more and more curious and slowly realized that I enjoyed traveling more if I was getting to places by, I suppose, physically difficult means.

And that particularly helps, I suppose, if you turn up in some remote community in a, not that I've been doing this, but in a helicopter or a 4x4 or whatever, there's instantly a distance, a sort of divide. I spend most of my time traveling in the developing world where that's just building a barrier. Whereas if you turn up on foot or in a little kayak or on a horse or whatever, then I think people kind of take to that a little bit more. What was your first trip that you did like this? Besides backpacking around Africa, the first time I did anything sort of particularly physically challenging was I flew to Beijing and I had a flight out of Mongolia. And kind of quite last minute, I thought, oh, well, you know, there's a thousand miles between the two. I'll take a bike, a bicycle. Didn't get off to the best start.

I went to a friend's 21st birthday party about 10 days before leaving. And I don't really remember the party, but when I wake up in the morning, one of my quadriceps had snapped. Not torn, but snapped. The doctor said that the two ends would kind of flap around like fishtails and eventually graft onto the rest. I don't know how scientific that was. And then on my first night in Beijing, I fell over and broke my wrist a bit drunk. Oh, Jesus. Two weeks later, when I sort of cut my cast off and sort of strapped my knee up a bit and pedaled out, I wasn't in the best shape.

And frankly, the following two – So you just went with a torn calf, quadriceps muscle, fucked up wrist. You just went anywhere. Yeah. I mean I started slow. I'm not a – like I'm not a sportsman. I'm not an athlete. I've always just liked to – I've never really particularly trained for anything. I tend to try and keep fit, but that's kind of it. So I've always sort of thought start slow and build up. And it only took two weeks to cross up to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. And once I crossed the border into Mongolia, there was just no road. It was, you you know it's just desert and there's kind of tire tracks all over the place and you just gotta you know take a northeast bearing and sort of stick with

it and frankly those two weeks were kind of shitty I can't I didn't particularly enjoy them but yeah I mean you're probably aware of the concept of type 2 fun you know you've done something and once you've it's yes but then once you finished you start to rose-tint it right and before i'd even left mongolia i was already thinking yeah there could be something in this and i saw the potential of bicycle travel you know you you can travel a fair distance you know if you want you can go 100 miles a day you can go 60 miles very comfortably and still have a lot of the day there you can travel very cheaply you can travel for ages and you get to see all those places in between that you wouldn't really go near if you're, you know, on a bus or a

train or a car, whatever it is. Did you have any idea of like where food would be, how you would get through these areas? Like, did you understand like what towns were available? I knew, I mean, I had a, for that first ride, I had a map and I knew, uh, that besides, uh, I guess a 250 mile gap in the Gobi, uh, that there'd be enough towns to, to get, get resupplies. So you just had to go 250 miles through the Gobi desert, but you can carry a bike with a torn quad and a fucked up wrist. Yeah. Yeah. In short, but you can carry quite a lot on a bike. You can carry, if necessary, in later years, you can carry two, three, four weeks of food pretty easily.

It's not going to be very exciting. It's going to be just a lot of rice and noodles and stuff like that. But you can sort of stack it up. Did you plan ahead for that? Did you understand what your requirements were going to be? Did you sit down and write it all out? I'm going to be there for x amount of hours, I'm gonna need at y amount of calories? No, I've never been good at planning. Well, no, that's not true. That's not fair. I've never loved getting granular with planning. I, you know,

when I'm planning food for, you know, earlier this year, I had to plan food for about a month and I kind of looked, that's about a breakfast and just times that a bunch of times that's about a lunch and then just pack an extra, you know, 10, 20% and you should be all right. Um, which is, which is perhaps a slightly sort of scattergun irresponsible approach, but I've, I've slowly got a bit better at knowing what's, what's needed. And I mean, I've never got into, got into calories and counting the numbers of it. I totally see the value in that. And a lot of people who do similar sorts of things do. But I've generally thought, you know, I don't need to work out that

I've got precisely enough protein for any given day or fat or carbohydrate, whatever it is, because usually these aren't hugely long endeavors. You know, a few months you can go with a slightly imbalanced diet, maybe take some multivitamins. I would imagine that you're burning a lot of calories, though, riding that bike through the desert for 250 miles. Yeah. I mean, I look back at that trip there, and I think that was quite straightforward, really. And I do think that I'm not one of these people who says hey anybody can do anything but i don't think that particular ride across you know across to

mongolia was especially difficult um but it was it was for me it was uh revelatory because i just got this idea of what bike travel could be and it was it was only a couple of weeks less probably 10 days after i finished that i got a bit drunk and made on a Genghis Khan vodka and made quite a rash decision to cycle for what ended up being about four years. Genghis Khan booker? What are you saying? Vodka. Oh, Genghis Khan vodka. Sorry, yeah. Okay, no worries.

I've got a plummy accent. No worries. Yeah, and I made this decision to cycle from the UK back to the UK via the furthest away point in each of Europe, Asia, and Africa. And that ended up taking about four years. So you do this first trip and you decide after it's completed that, you know, you get this interesting feeling, you know, it was fun, it was exciting, it was adventurous, and that this is something you're going to do often. Are you writing about these things?

Are you making videos? Like, what are you doing something you're going to do often. Are you writing about these things? Are you making videos? Like, what are you doing once you're done? I write, basically. I'm not a videographer. I take photos. I didn't for the four-year trip that followed. I didn't have social media at that time. So I very much focused on writing.

And every day, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how sweaty and uncomfortable I might be in a tent or cold or whatever, I will write down what happened that day and just get it all down. And later you can then kind of get yourself back into that frame of mind. And all these other details will suddenly start springing back in. It's quite a helpful sort of key to unlocking other memories. Yeah, but writing is my main focus. How do you fund these trips?

Initially, I was saving, scrimping and saving. And that first long journey, I lived for four and a half years, as it turned out, on about 12,000 pounds, which back then would have been, I guess, $16,000.

For four years? Yeah, yeah. So I lived in a tent. I ate very cheaply. Occasionally, I'll get a night in a tent. I ate very cheaply. Occasionally, I'll get a night in a hostel or something. You can live for a really small amount of money if you're just out in the wild. More recently, I get sponsorship or grants that sort of help and cover expenses. But I've always done things in quite a lo-fi way. I've never done hugely complicated or expensive journeys. I've always quite enjoyed the,

I guess, the accessibility of doing stuff that anyone logistically probably could do if they put a bit of thought to it. The four-year one, like, how does one go about deciding that you're going to do something that's going to take four years out of your life? Like, did you recognize that it was going to take that long? I reckoned it would take about that. And rashly is the answer. I kind of, you know, I came up with the idea before I really gave it a lot of thought. And the first thing I did is told a bunch of people, you know, family included, hey, I'm going to, in a year's time, I'm going to head off on a bike for about four years. And once I told a bunch of people, then it became almost a certainty to me because, you know, I think I would have been embarrassed to then back down.

And so I guess, I mean, I've always found that quite handy with any project, you know, just let people know, set yourself a start date, and then the wheels are already in motion. And out of sort of shame or embarrassment, you'll probably end up going through with it. That's, I can't think that anybody would fault you for quitting. I mean, I don't think anybody would say, Oh, Charlie, you only did three years. I came close a bunch of times. Did you? By the time I got three years,

then it's like, well, I might as well finish it off. And when you get to the end of that, did you write a book? Oh, I have something for you. Oh, there you go. Actually, I've got something else as well. Bear with me. Let's see what we've got here.

These are, I believe believe for you joe oh thank you um those two books are about that four-year bike there you go um and i've got a couple for jamie and now once you do this so you get back and i would imagine like writing down everything at the end of the day I'm sure helps but it's got to be difficult to sort of capture this the nuances of each experiment if you're writing for four years I would imagine there's a lot of very notable experiences you're having during this time like how are you remembering all these and documenting them? I mean, like, photos help as well. You know, over the course of four years,

I probably had something like 15,000 photographs, and that helps, you know, furnish a picture. But, I mean, it's really just what I said. About 1,600 days, I kept a journal every single day. Sometimes they're very brief, you know. You mean just writing it down, hand to paper? Yeah, in a bunch of, you know, tatty old notebooks that I've got kind of, you know, falling apart on a shelf somewhere. And what was the path? So I started near Salisbury where I grew up, headed across the channel up

Western Europe through Scandinavia to Nordkapp, which is the northernmost point of Europe. It's up in the Norwegian Arctic. That's quite a dramatic place. The sort of monument at Nordkapp is at the top of a 300 meter high, 300 yard high cliff. You go and look over the railing and you've got the Arctic Ocean sort of crashing against it, the North Pole is another 1200 miles on. Then I took a sort of very long wiggly path across Eurasia to Singapore, which took, you know, nine, 10 months or so. Jesus Christ. But I didn't know what route I was going to be taking for that. You know, I didn't, again, I didn't allow myself to get too bogged down with details.

And also, over the course of nearly half a decade, so much changes. You know, the Arab Spring happened after I started. So the Middle East, you know, changed the geography and the geopolitics. The Middle East totally changed after I started before I got back around to that part of the world. Is this your bike? That is the second of two bikes. Did one of them break? The other one, the one I started with, I got off eBay for £100 secondhand.

Not a great bike, basic. And that one got me all the way, about 34,000 miles to cape town uh and then that bike was sadly stolen just i was locked up on it was locked up on the street oh jesus and coincidentally that afternoon i'd been invited on a radio show to talk about my trip and the the dj asked me about his bike you know and cape tonians uh you know they're into cycling mountain biking and i think he was expecting some specs or you know know, what I was riding. And all I could really say is, actually, it got stolen this morning. And he, I'm about to murder an accent and you'll get angry emails.

But he said, oh, no, that's absolutely terrible. Like, let's get this boy a bicycle. We can get him back home. And he said, any of you listeners out there, you've got a bicycle. You send us a message. We'll get it to this boy. And about six or seven bikes

were sort of presented to me the next day well i had to go around the city and collect them all up but a couple of kids bikes one was an antique one had been found in a canal um the frame of which i ended up using so i took them all apart and i made one bike for all the different parts and i just what the bottom bracket the kind of part between the the pedals in that sort of. That was the only part I got from a shop. And the rest was just these decimated bikes, kind of bastardized into this one Frankenstein frame. Well, that's a cool story. And so then this bike you rode for the remainder of the journey. Yeah, that got me 10,000 miles in one year back home.

And then was stolen a few weeks later in London. Was it really? Yeah, it was basically unrideable by that point. I can't tell which one. Yeah, that's the first one. That's up in Tibet. How long do bike tires last? Because I know you change car tires.

I don't think I've ever changed a bike tire, but I can imagine the rubber. Oh, they definitely wear out. Yeah. I think I kept a tally of all this stuff. I think I got through something like 20 tires. But, I mean, they last a little longer if you don't buy a pair for $3 in an African village that are made in China.

Is that what you did? No, I could, you know, just got whatever I could. And I think 256 punctures, 20 or so chains. Like, you know, there's a phrase in the UK, triggers broom. There's an old TV show called Only Fools and Horses where some not too bright character gets an award from the council. He's a street sweeper for having the same broom for 17 years and uh you know after he's given this medal he you know he says no it takes a lot of dedication to care for a broom this broom's had 17 new handles and 25 new heads over the years and that's kind of what the bike was like you know

besides the frame just about every other part was slowly swapped out as I went around. Wow. And when you're traveling through all these places, what kind of language barriers are there? Do you understand other languages besides English? I'm not a natural linguist. I can get by in French. That was handy in sort of Central and West Africa. I picked up and sort of worked quite hard at Russian. I got some Russian, which in the Stan, Central Asia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, etc. That was handy. When you say picked up, did you pick up on the fly? Or did you prepare? I probably a few months before I got to that part of the world, I picked up some like audio lessons, and just sort of listen to them while i was while i was on the road

um and then i got quite good at just sort of i guess charades you know even even if china was always linguistically the hardest place but even after i learned how to ask for an egg you know in a village shop to some rural area i still preferred to do it the way i'd done for you know for weeks up to that point which was going to a shop and start flapping, clucking your wings and sort of clucking slightly more and more manically. And then, pulling out from behind me an egg and pointing at it. They go, oh, the foreigner wants an egg. Yeah, we'll get him some eggs.

Oh, that's hilarious. So, yeah, you can make a bit of a game of it. And of course, in lots of parts of the world, there are plenty of people who do speak good English. lots of parts of the world there are plenty of people who do speak good English um so I also I wasn't um I wasn't washing a great deal at this time in my life you know living in a tent getting the odd splash wash in a puddle or a river or whatever and so my hands which were on front of me in the bike uh sorry in front of me on the bike's handlebars most of the day uh when I arrived in a new country I'd find the first English speaker I could and ask them how to count to 10

in their language and then I'd write on my knuckles 1 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 on each hand. And then, you know, on the palm, hot, cold, yes, no, good, bad, up, down, left, right, just a whole bunch of vocabulary. And that, you know, you pick it up pretty quick when it's in front of you for maybe six, eight hours in a day. And when that was done, I'd wash them off and maybe learn some new words and sort of carry on. So even though I was passing through regions and didn't have all that long to get to grips with many languages, I got a bit of a head start with that. Oh, wow. What is it like when you're alone for that long? That's probably the biggest challenge. And I've definitely got better at that over the years. But when I was off on that bike trip, you know, there were times,

particularly up in Tibet, where that picture picture was that the road I was following in Tibet is the the western sort of approach to Tibet and on a good day I was there in winter which is not ideal it's cold but on a good day there'd be maybe one vehicle going in either direction but often there'd be several days at a time with no vehicles and there were you know no settlements along the way. And later on, so to get into Tibet, I didn't have permission. So I had to sort of, in the night, I cut a hole in the fence of the military base and snuck into Tibet.

So beyond that point, I was having to kind of hide. To get into Tibet, so it's difficult to get into Tibet? Yeah, so Tibet used to be an independent country. A lot of process. Most ethnic Tibetan people don't want to be part of China, but in the 50s the People's Liberation Army marched in. And this was only a couple of years after the Beijing Olympics, and in the lead-up to those there were in Lhasa, the capital,

I think it was around three dozen self-immolations. You're aware of that phrase? Yeah. Yeah, and usually monks. Yeah, and for the listeners who might not know. Well, they probably know from the Rage Against the Machine cover. Yeah, yeah, exactly that. So people marching out in front of the soldiers or the police,

pouring a tin of petrol over themselves or gasoline, lighting themselves on fire and burning to death in protest at what they see as the occupation of their country. And of course, the Chinese government doesn't want people seeing these sorts of scenes. So they made the whole area off limits to foreigners. And basically, well, it still is really. You can visit sort of limited little pockets in Lhasa, the capital, and a couple of other kind of temples in towns nearby. But to do that, you've got to be in a group with a guide and a vehicle and permits, and it's expensive, and you're just not allowed to travel by yourself with a bike. So that was the only way I could get in was to sort of sneak in.

But after that point, I was then having to hide the whole time. And to bring it back to your question, the loneliness there, I really, really struggled. I was up there for about six weeks and probably had two conversations in that time. It was really hard. But now I've got a lot better at it. And I keep meaning to look this up because there's someone, it's one of those people that's always quoted. It'll be Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain, someone like that, once said that loneliness is the paucity of one's own company and solitude is the richness of it. And it's two sides of the same coin.

So being by yourself can totally suck. But if you just kind of try and flip the perspective a bit, and it's not always possible and it's certainly not easy, you can then sort of enjoy the space, the peace, the freedom, particularly if you've got a kind of a busy life when you go back home. It is an interesting thing about human beings that we seem to have a requirement for other people's company. I mean, we really do. We do enjoy moments of solitude, like sitting on a dock, looking out at an ocean, just relaxing, maybe having a cup of coffee by yourself. But if that goes on for too long, we have like a deep feeling of longing

and a sorrow comes over us. And we're pack animals. Yeah. And, you know, I guess this is my cod evolutionary sort of take on it. But I suppose anyone over the millions of years of our evolution who had that instinct to always be there by themselves

probably wouldn't have been passing their genes on so much. so you know probably would have been bred out you know we've selected for people who live in communities yeah it makes sense it only makes sense but it's it's so strange how uh intense it is when when you are alone for long periods of time and for people that have never experienced that it's uh i mean what you've done in doing that is really extraordinary. And I would imagine it gives you some very unique insight into how your own mind works. Yeah. I think I've always been relatively good in my own company. I suppose years ago I might have referred to myself as a loner in the sort of positive sense of that word, I suppose.

So I guess it's probably a bit of an insult as well. Yeah. But, you know, I do like my own company. I'm happy in my own company. But I have got, I suppose over long periods, I would realize later that I'd sort of essentially de-socialized. And, you know, suddenly being back in a community or around people where I can have a conversation,

it just takes a bit of time to kind of, you know, equalize after being by yourself for a long time. Because, I mean, you've got no one else to answer to. You know, it's total freedom, and that can be an indulgence, a self-indulgence. I mean, I've never spent that kind of time alone, but I've spent time in the woods and when you're by yourself for a day or two one of the things that always hits me is you start evaluating your own life evaluating relationships

evaluating friendships evaluating work various things that you don't normally think about in such great depth but when you're alone and you don't have anyone to talk to, it's like those are the things that the mind wants to dig up and maybe examine. Did you find that? Definitely.

And it's definitely a positive thing to do. The more time you've got to chew things over, the more to grips you're going to get with any any problems in your life or you know whatever it might be and then there's always the temptation which i kind of i'm quite uh regimented with myself about how long i allow myself to listen to music or podcasts or whatever in any given day when i'm off doing some trip like this um i mean i first came across your podcast when i was in the Congo I think and you know it's you know podcasts are great you know but suddenly you've got company all day and that's a way to I suppose you know you'll be thinking about and learning about whatever's been spoken about but

you're not exploring things by yourself in the way that you can if you just have silence and peace and I'm quite strict with myself like on my latest trip you know I'd allow myself in the morning you know an hour of listening to something and then in the afternoon maybe another hour at some point and then while cooking dinner i could listen to something like that how did you decide that amount of time uh it was arbitrary essentially it just needed to be to just need to ensure that i wasn't you know you know doing that all the time so i'd it wouldn't always be exactly an hour but maybe a podcast right yeah one of yours is the whole morning of course but um yeah you know something short like that you went through the Congo on a bike I

started on a bike I was actually with someone else for this part of this is the bike journey mm-hmm so this was 2014 a guy from Scotland who I'd met he was motorbiking down the the east coast of Africa with a couple of Scotland who I'd met, he was motorbiking down the east coast of Africa with a couple of friends, and I think about seven times we kept bumping into each other. They were covering a lot more ground. They were taking a more sort of circuitous route than me.

But in Cape Town, him and I spent a bit of time together, and he said, hey, well, when you go to Congo, I'll fly up and I'll join you. And so in the capital of Zambia, Lusaka, he flew up, he bought a bike for, I think, about 90 pounds, like a sort of three-gear, shitty, heavy, strong bike.

And we cycled into Congo, DRC, you know, there's two Congos, the big one, the fucked up one, I guess. We cycled across the border in the south in the Copper Belt and then followed the border all the way across the south of the country until eventually the road we were following just kind of ran out. But there was a river there and we had been aware that this was going to happen.

The Lulua is the name of the river. And so we bought a dugout canoe, which is, or a pirogue, they call it there, which is essentially just a tree trunk with the inside scooped out. You know, it's your sort of typical, I you say tribal canoe that you'd you'd see right across the world in all sorts you know in south america and sub-saharan africa and you know papua new guinea the same sort of thing we bought one that was about five and a half meters long i think and for the next month we kind of battled this thing down a river um but as we say it was not a it was not in great shape and we had to get in it all our gear and two bicycles and these things sit really low in the water maybe two inches of clearance you know if any small rapids the water's

coming in and you're you're going down um but as we after we bought it we pulled it up onto the riverbank and we turned it upside down and we were patching some little leaks and cracks and trying to kind of brace it and the whole village just gathered around us in this big excited but concerned crowd and they were tutting and shaking their heads. And a sort of spokesperson essentially stepped forward and said, really, I don't think you should go on the river. There are rapids and waterfalls. And we're like, yeah, it'll be all right. And there are hippos and crocodiles.

And, you know, if you guys don't drown, you'll be eaten and you'll be dead in a day either way. And we took it with a pinch of salt. And that month was probably the most fraught of my life. It was ridiculous. Every day we'd be struggling down rapids. The smallest little rapid would be enough to sink us. And the boat wouldn't sink. It would just go down.

It would sit two or three inches under the water. But unless we had them all strapped down, all our bags would start floating off in different directions. And we're splashing around in the water trying to gather everything. Oh, that one's got the money and the cameras. Oh, get that bag. That's got all of our food. Oh, Jesus.

Fast forward over there. And all the while you're wondering when is a crocodile just going to come and sort of grab your ankle. Did you see them? We only saw one. Really? So they, I mean, they're around. Everyone kept saying they're around. Lots of people we met said they do see them.

I think they've been hunted quite a lot over the years. And although these are on the Congo, this is a tributary of the Congo River, they're Nile crocodiles. That's the species. And they grow up to, I mean, they get really big. They're 20 feet long. Yeah, yeah. I think that's about the max. Yeah, they're huge.

That's a dangerous animal. Yeah. I mean, we were in a really remote area. There were no roads. There were just footpaths connecting villages. And no one else was stupid enough to travel up and down the river. You know, people had canoes, pirogues. We were in a really remote area. There were no roads. There were just footpaths connecting villages. And no one else was stupid enough to travel up and down the river. People had canoes, pirogues.

But they would just use them for fishing because they would just sit on the water, play some nets, come back out. And we, one afternoon, were paddling along. And there was this group of maybe 50 men on the riverbank, all just waving and singing and dancing around, shaking machetes about their heads. And so we didn't pull over. We we thought we'll pass by but a few hundred yards on there were just two men by the by the on the bank and we pulled up to them and said you know what what's going on there and they said oh they just killed a crocodile a big one and i said how big and they said five meters so that's about 15 16 feet yeah so big um one night a hippo yeah well we'd hear the hippos

sort of honking out yeah they make that very particular noise, we'd hear them out on the water as best I can do but yeah we'd hear those quite a lot at night and we had to camp on the riverbank but the hippos go out for walks around at night and sometimes there'd be shoulder high elephant grass

and the only places we could really pitch a camp would be in these channels that the hippos would tread through it. So, yeah, it was a difficult time. After a month, we finally reached a road, sort of sand tracks, I guess, and a couple of days later just managed to get to a town in time for me to collapse into bed with a pretty severe case of malaria. Oh, wow.

But I had typhoid fever at the same time, so it was like double trouble. Oh, boy. So I couldn't really walk for about a week. So, wow. But I had typhoid fever at the same time, so it was like double trouble. Oh, boy. So I couldn't really walk for about a week. So, yeah, that was quite a touching day. What did they give you to get over the malaria? I was really lucky. We managed to get to a town, and I went to the Catholic mission where they had a nurse and said, like, please treat me.

Archie is my friend. He'll buy the drugs. And so this nurse, a guy, actually whose name I shouldn't say, he gave me drips of ciprofloxacin and I think, I'm trying to remember, metanidazole, I think. Two different antibiotics. Just a lot of drips. But the drips were the most frightening thing because he didn't use clean needles each time.

Oh, boy. So he would sort of do the drip in the morning, yank it out my arm, and then just kind of hang it over the mosquito net, come back in the afternoon, kind of blow it off, and then plug it straight into my arm. Great. So if you don't die of malaria, you die of infection. Yeah. It was a worrying time.

Jesus Christ. So how long did it take you to recover from the malaria? Well, I didn't have long cause we had to get, you know, our visas were only three months and we'd already been going for over two months. Um, so we had to get out of the country within a certain amount of time. So, um, after, I think it was probably about eight days. Um, we then, uh, you know, I was, I was able to walk here but I was still super weak. We then had to go and sort of get passage on a bus, as they call it there. But this is just a truck with a metal shipping container in the back of it. And we spent about five days on these trucks kind of bouncing around. You either cling to the top.

There's no road. It's all just mud tracks. In the rainy season, which was kind of not far off, it would take a month to do that five day drive to the capital that we because it's so much mud well yeah the roads just churn up you know the the roads the tracks that we were on were sometimes these sort of you know channels carved five six yards deep into the mud you know wow and so as soon as it starts raining they're all completely gone i came across the so the monsoon arrived six weeks or so later by which time I was up in the other Congo way up in the north

kind of near the border of Cameroon and Central African Republic on these mud tracks and suddenly I just saw all these trucks that had kind of run off the tracks into the trees and there were people who had been stuck there for days and days and days I mean I couldn't even push my bike I had to carry it for about

a day and a half take everything off, carry it for a mile hide it in a bush, walk back it was five miles for every one mile forward just portaging it back and forth holy shit, how much crime did you encounter? not a huge amount

I mean my pocket got picked in Malaysia which is one of the safest places in the world my pocket got picked in Malaysia, which is one of the safest places in the world. My horse got stolen in Mongolia. That happens. You had a horse? Yeah, they're not expensive.

How much is a horse? I bought a horse for about 120 pounds, so I guess 150 bucks or so. You get a horse for 150 bucks? It depends how many, every few years Mongolia has, they call it a snow on ice event. So essentially, Mongolia winter is really cold.

It gets down to about minus 40 Fahrenheit or Celsius. And if it snows and then thaws and then freezes, you get this crust of ice over the ground. The horses, which are kind of left to their own devices over winter,

they're kind of semi-feral, it's called. They're kind of half-wild. They can't break through that crust of ice as they would with snow, with their hooves, to get to the grass. So come spring, actually last time I was in Mongolia, the whole countryside was just littered with corpses of sheep and horses and goats. So if they've had a bad winter before, sometimes they lose up to about a third of their national livestock.

Then horses cost quite a lot, but it wasn't too bad when I was there. The horse I would sort of at night, so I spent about two months hiking across Mongolia with this horse. I tried to ride it, but it was so small, a tiny little pony. I'd gone to quite a lot of effort to find a horse that was up to the challenge. I went out into this sort of village outside the capital city, asked around. And, you know, you can't do anything there without having to drink copious amounts of vodka. It's a real pain in the ass, to be honest. You have to? Yeah. I mean, that's just the way everything is done. And how so? Well, hey, you want to come and look at a horse? Great. Well, let's first,

let's first, you know, let's first drink some vodka and we'll pour a little offering to the gods and we'll flick a little bit into the sky as an offering to the sky god you know be rude to refuse because you know it's it's an offering right and then i mean to be fair i was in my mid-20s so i was you know i was quite happy just to drink the stuff um but uh you know this kind of quite unpleasant paint stripping vodka and just bottles and bottles and bottles so i spent this long day going from person to person to person out you out in the sticks, driving across grasslands, off-road. And finally we met these people who had a – this guy had a horse to sell.

And he said, yeah, here's the horse. Do you want to check it out? And I was like, all right. I had never ridden a horse before. I didn't know what I was looking for. But I thought, I'll check out the hooves. I was about to try and check the back hooves. And they're like, no, no, no, don't do that. You'll get your face kicked off. But I checked the front hooves. I was about to try and check the back hooves. And they're like, no, no, no, don't do that. You'll get your face kicked off. But I checked the front hooves. I checked its teeth.

You know, she was a female horse. Didn't look too old. You know, decent, strong, you know, coat was in good condition. I thought, yeah, this is fine. And we agreed a price. And about two days later, I had to go back to the capital to get my stuff, buy a saddle. About two days later, I came back, met the guy, and he presented me with this horse. I was like, well, that's a different color, and it's got testicles.

So that's a different horse altogether, but it wasn't really much I could do about it. So this horse didn't really take to being ridden. I don't think it was too small. I don't think he could really cope with me and my not very heavy bags. So you just used it sort of as a pack horse? Pack horse, yeah. So we walked, and at, I would make a fire. You'd hear wolves howling often.

I'd make a fire and sort of tether the horse 10 yards away. And that's kind of the first line of defense. And one morning, the horse had been, you know, the tether had been cut and someone had been in the night. But I pretty much got to where I was going. Oh, before I forget, this is a Mongolian wolf tooth for you, which an old hunter gave me. He claimed that he shot the wolf, but I was not 100% sure about that. Well, there's a kind of braggadocio element to it. It's kind of a macho thing to have shot wolves.

And I met a lot of people who said, yeah, I've killed many wolves. But back in Soviet times, there were – you know, Mongolia was kind of a satellite. It wasn't technically part of the Soviet empire, but it was sort of a protectorate. There used to be a quota. Every Mongolian man had to kill two wolves each year to sort of keep their numbers down. Otherwise they would decimate the livestock. Anyway, that's from a wolf that he got hold of somehow. Maybe he shot it.

You're skeptical though. Well, I'm kind of a skeptic generally, I think. And the way he told me, it didn't give me necessarily the impression that he had shot it. Do you know the story about the World War one Russian-German standoff with wolves? They took like a two-day truce. Yeah yeah they took a truce they they stopped fighting to kill the wolves because there were so many soldiers are getting killed by wolves. They were losing like one or two soldiers a day or something. It was something insane they had, the problem was

you know, they were fighting trench warfare. Right? And so they would get shot and they would be crying and screaming out in these trenches. And then you would hear people would be eaten alive by wolves. The wolves would find these wounded soldiers and tear them apart.

And then people would go out on scouting missions and they wouldn't find anything but boots and you know and pieces of their clothes covered in blood and then they realized like Jesus Christ we're losing more people to wolves and we are to the Germans of the Russians actually just earlier this year I came across a memorial to finish sold POWs who had been sent up to this distant part of Siberia from that war people have been captured mmm it was crazy to think they'd been captured like way out there and sort of, you know, in Europe.

And they'd been sent to this desolate spot at the end of the continent and just told to fish to sort of supply the Russian Navy, I think it was. But there are all these, like on the cliffs at the north of Asia, like facing out. I mean, you can't imagine a more like barren, isolated, brutal spot

and there was just I saw one I was told there was another somewhere nearby that I didn't spot just a crucifix set up for the for the dead fins I don't know how many were sent out there and yeah but yeah so if you know if the wolves don't get you and the Russians do then you know the cold will get you eventually what was it like was the terrain like in Mongolia when you're making your way through this? Mostly steppe, grassland. But I went through some sort of low mountains. It's an incredible country, Mongolia.

It's just so ripe for adventure. It's about the same size as Spain, France, and Germany put together. But the population is just over 3 million. Oh, wow. It's the most sparsely populated country on earth. Really? It's kind of a person per square kilometer. But more than half the population live in the capital.

And there are a handful of other, not big, but towns. And so the countryside is just open. What is the capital like? It's changed a lot since I first went. It was all just kind of grim Soviet apartment blocks. And it's set in this kind of valley. In winter, I've not been there in winter, but in winter it's the most polluted city on earth.

Because everyone, there's kind of increasingly people being drawn into the capital from outside. And they come in and set up their yurts or gurs, they call them these kind of circular felt tents which you can survive you know the harshest conditions in but to heat them they're just using coal or yak shit or horse shit or cow shit and so just all of the particulate matter that so it's the most polluted by a particular count on the the pm10 I think, the size of particle, which I think if you breathe in, they can get quite deep into your lungs, but not all the way to the tips like that tiny ones in Beijing, for instance.

But yeah, there's just this kind of pool of pollution that hangs over this narrow, long valley that the capital stretched along. But recently, you know, they've got, I think there's like a Shangri-La there now and some high glass buildings, and it's changing quite a lot. They had in about 2012, they opened a huge mine. I think it's Toktogoy, I think the name, I forget. But in 2012, The Economist magazine found Mongolia to have the world's fastest growing economy because they opened this one mine, and overnight, the economy grew by 40% like that month.

It's all relative, right? Yeah. And exactly. Yeah. It was a very, very low base start line. But yeah, I think that's largely gold and copper. And since then, there's been a lot of wrangling over how much, you know, what percentage of the profits is kept channeled into Mongolia and what percentage goes outside.

But I think that's turned the country around quite a lot. But there's no fences. The whole countryside is just, you know, there's the Gobi Desert. There's sort of Taiga, like Siberian forest across the north. There are the Altai Mountains in the west. The rest is grasslands and there's lakes and rivers everywhere. And there's just no fences. It's all common land and you can just head wherever you want.

It's awesome. It's really great. It's wild that they still use those felt tents because that was literally what Genghis Khan. Yeah, exactly the same. And, you know, nowadays they'll have maybe a car battery to run, you know, they'll have a satellite dish and a TV, and, you know, it's changing quite a lot. I mean, there's only one or two homes I've visited

that still looked really quite similar internally how they would have 800 years ago when Chinggis Khan was charging across the continent. Wow. And so this trek through Mongolia took you how long? I was there for three months in total. So I did two months on the horse and then once the horse was pinched, I got to more or less where I wanted to go. And so then I got the bike back and carried on cycling sort of through to Central Asia. And then once you get to Central Asia, then how long before you get back to where you wanted to go? Well, this was all part of that same long bike ride. So, you know, there was probably still two years to go to get, you know, down through.

Charlie, that's so crazy. Two and a half, perhaps. That is so crazy. Through, like, Central Asia, the Middle East, and down the whole east side of Africa. Now, are you corresponding with anyone back home while this is happening? Do people know you're safe?

Like, how are you? I emailed sort of as and when I could. When I took the ferry from Britain to France at the beginning of the trip, I had, you know, phones were different back then. I had a really old, it wasn't a Nokia 3310, but it was something along those lines. This is 2010.

I think the first iPhone might have just come out, but it's a long time ago. I think that was 2007, if I remember correctly. Oh, right, okay. What? Something like that. I think the first iPhone, somewhere around then, because there's, yeah, I think somewhere around then.

But I didn't want a phone, you know. I wanted sort of freedom from all that. And my plan had been, you know, I arranged my phone contract, the company that the contract would run out around about that time. And I planned when crossing the channel to, like, go up to the top of the ferry and just hurl it into the sea. planned when crossing the channel to like go up to the top of the ferry and just hurl it into the sea. The ferry company kindly gave me like a free crossing in their sort of club class and the bar

was quite, you know, open. So I didn't get around to that. And a few weeks later, I just sort of tossed it in a lake in Sweden, which with hindsight, I don't feel good about. Yeah, that's plastic. I shouldn't have done that. But it's symbolic. Yeah. So I didn't, you know, I kept in touch with family through email as best, as often as I could. Did you use like internet cafes? Exactly. Yeah. Or if, you know, if I couldn't find that, I'd just, I mean, I got quite good at just like going into a, you know, some random office and saying, hey, can I use your computer? Really? People were surprisingly receptive. You know, you're in the middle of, you know,

Iraqi Kurdistan. Can I use your computer? Yeah, yeah, sure. Just turn it off when you're done. Oh, thanks. Wow. People are very friendly wherever you go, broadly speaking. That's really fascinating because you probably have a different perspective of just running into strangers in other countries than most people do. Most people would think that people would be very hesitant.

You know, some weird Englishman shows up and wants to use your computer. Well, I think wherever I go, I tend to sort of be a bit of a novelty, so people are interested initially. Did you anticipate that, though? Like, what did you think you were going to be able to do, or did you just figure it out along the way? Yeah, I just figured it out as I went.

So you didn't have any plan, like, this is how I'll make sure that everyone knows I'm okay? No, no. You know, back then I probably wasn't great at sort of keeping my parents in the loop exactly as to where I was. And when I went to Afghanistan, I didn't tell them about it. I told one friend and said, if you don't hear from me in six weeks, then perhaps call the government. And so, you know, I tried to keep them sort of as unworried as possible, which, I mean, I've got three siblings, so there's spares.

It's all right. Spares. So when you get done with this trip, I mean, this is a four-year trip, what do you do? Do you have a home at this point in time, or did you not have an apartment anymore? No, I hadn't. I had nowhere to, I mean, I went back to my parents' place for a few weeks and I had 30 pounds to my name when I came back.

What is the first day back like? Like when you show up at your parents' house, what is that like? Weird. So about two months before I finished, I think I was still somewhere in southern Morocco or Mauritania. My dad said via email, you know, let's have a party when you get back. Let's have a sort of a homecoming. And so we arranged, we picked a time and a date and arranged a place in London, a street where friends and family could come and gather and we had a little sort of welcome home party.

So I was told, yeah, at the stroke of seven o'clock, you've got to be here on this street. So I was told, yeah, at the stroke of 7 o'clock, you've got to be here on this street. And I turned up, and there were 120, 150 people, some of whom I hadn't seen for years and years and years. It was totally surreal. Wow. I was still quite, the six months following, this was about six months on from when I was ill in Congo. My health hadn't been good throughout that. So I'd been on my ride up through France, for instance.

Winter was coming, and I was getting these incredible stomach cramps every now and then. I remember one particular day when I basically just kind of veered off the road in a village and fell into someone's woodshed. And then about 10 minutes later, I kind of came round and there was just this elderly French couple standing over me, not wondering what to do with me. So I wasn't particularly well. But I turned up at this homecoming party with a beard down to my tits and hair down to my shoulders. I looked at the right state, to be honest.

And it was strange how quickly I felt kind of normal back among people again, initially at least. It was over the coming days that kind of the weird itch of wanting to move came back. So you got like wanderlust almost immediately afterwards? Yeah. I guess a couple of weeks on, the novelty of having a comfy bed each night wore off pretty quick. And I needed to find a job to earn some money. So I picked up the first job I could find. And it's not the sort of job that I think I was going to do long term, but it was just enough to get me back on my feet. What did you do? I sold luxury tours to China for a travel company.

And so I talked to clients saying, oh, you know, you've got to go to this place. It's great. And they say, what was your experience like then? I said, well, the ground's good and firm. You can put a tent wherever you want. But, you know, the Hyatt will probably be comfortable. You'll be fine. Yeah, but that was not necessarily the best fit for me as a job.

But soon after that, I started planning the next trip and started writing these books. And sort of since then, I've kind of turned that into a career. So immediately, you sort of understood when you returned, like, this is not a one-off. This is something you're just going to continue to do. Yeah, yeah. Well, people started asking me to give presentations about the trip I'd been on you know sort of photo slideshows i guess and i started doing more and more of those at you know

to village halls and clubs and festivals and schools and businesses and that slowly became like about half of my living and i realized i could do this for a job you know this could be this could be a living um and enable me carry on, you know, taking on challenges. So since then, you know, there's always something in the pipeline. Do some sort of journey. Come back. Relate the story. Write about it.

Repeat. Now, when you start up again, are you – is there any hesitation about, like, the length of the trip like that four-year thing even though i'm sure it must have been a fascinating and wonderful experience there there had to be a little bit of a hesitation of committing to that much of your life again i well i mean the longest i've done since then is eight months so yeah it's a lot different and the last couple have been sort of two or three months but it was was it because of that four-year one where you're like it's a lot different and the last couple have been two or three months but it was was it because of that four-year one where you're like that's a little much well you just yeah you get a bit more settled or also now i've started to kind of build a career you don't want to totally

put everything on pause for a huge amount of time again you mean by build a career the writing yeah the writing and the speaking and you know it's not like I have, you know, a monthly paycheck or, you know, a salary, a pension, anything like that. So you kind of got to keep feeding the beast. And so for the speeches, like, what are you doing? Are you, like, posting up at a theater and people come to see you talk? I do some at theaters, a lot at schools. Ones for businesses will be at conferences or they just want someone to come in for the afternoon to kind of spark up their team or a real variety of all sorts of different events. You would be the last person I would want to have come to talk

because I was like, these people are going to quit and they're going to go wander the world. I'm going to have no workforce. I've spoken to a handful of CEOs about that and one, maybe charitably, but I think he was right. He said, I kind of said what you said as a joke. And he said, well, you know what, if I've got a member of staff, if I've got an employee who wants to go away for that huge amount of time, then they probably shouldn't be working for me. You know, that's not going to be the most motivated person.

But I'm not there to, you know, say, hey, you know, quit your job and fuck off for years on a bicycle. I'm there to try and, I mean, with businesses, it's different, different talks, different events. It's all different. But with businesses, I'm there to sort of take some of the lessons about resilience, you know, ambition, et cetera, from what I've been doing and try and apply that to their lives, to their setting. But aren't those lessons only learned through the experiences? I mean, I would imagine. They're definitely best learned through experiences.

Yeah. But I think you can, in the same way that, I mean, one of the biggest genres of literature is self-help, right? And that's just reading about it. I think most of that is nonsense, though. I think, like, literally, when I look at, like literally when i look at like self-help books and self-help people and mentors and stuff there's a large percentage more than half that's nonsense at the risk of insulting a few people i know i totally agree with you um but then again i haven't

read you know i haven't read those books and also i haven't read all of them no clearly but i've read enough bullshit where i'm like, God. Yeah, well, there's a huge tendency out there for people to kind of take on the persona of a guru, essentially. Yes. And there's so many charlatans out there. There are so many. You know, it's like with a lot of esoteric pursuits and alternative things. You know, there's things that are rooted in fact or that are kind of, you know, veering that way.

And there are things that, I mean, like mediums, for instance. Yeah. I mean, I've got, I don't mind saying it. I don't care how many people are listening. I've got no time for that because as far as I'm concerned, they're either, I think the two ways they describe it are they're either open eye, which means they know they're conning everyone. Or they're shut eye, which means that they, you know, they genuinely believe what they're doing. And, you know, that's a different thing. I'm kind of fine with that. It's just I don't think they're conning everyone or they're shut-eye, which means that they genuinely believe what they're doing. And that's a different thing. I'm kind of fine with that.

It's just I don't think they're right. Yeah, I have a friend who went to a medium, and it's kind of a hilarious story because he goes, he knew everything about my grandmother, knew everything about this. I go, don't you know everything about your grandmother? What the fuck is the point of someone telling you some things you already know? Yeah, they're on our Facebook page. Do you think that it's, that are on our Facebook page.

Do you think that it's possible that these were leading questions and that through these leading questions, they sort of talked you into giving them the answers? And you can see the look on his face when he was kind of resisting but realizing that I might be right, but didn't want to admit that he got hosed. I think a lot of people just want to believe it. And that's also totally understandable. It's the same from my perspective with belief in afterlife.

People want to believe that because it's comforting and it totally makes sense to want to believe it. I personally don't. You don't believe in any sort of afterlife? I don't, no. But do you disbelieve? Meaning? I don't believe in it either, but I don't disbelieve in it.

Well, I can never know that it's not. Right. I don't believe in it either, but I don't disbelieve in it. Well, I can never know that it's not. Right. But I guess the burden of proof is on people who have come up with this idea because there's nothing to substantiate it. But there's a long history of human understanding that there's something else besides what we experience in this realm. what we experience in this realm. And I think a lot of that has to do most likely through either the consumption of psychedelic compounds

or through ritual practices like holotropic breathing or something where it gives them the sense that maybe what you see is only part of the picture. And then there's this feeling when someone dies, like they're not there anymore. Like have you ever been around a dead body? I have, yeah. It's a weird feeling, right?

It's like it's not just that they're dead. It's not just that they're not breathing anymore. It's an emptiness. They're not there. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to explain, but the first time I ever saw a dead body was my grandfather.

It was an open casket, and I remember immediately thinking, like, oh, he's not there. He's not there. It's not as simple as, well, it's also weird because they had him made up and shit. They put makeup on you, which is very odd. But it's this very clear feeling that he's gone.

And so there's this thought, well, where did he go? Did he go somewhere else? Is there a place where you go? And that's a totally understandable thing to think and to kind of experiment with the idea of, but I suppose it can never be proven. So it's kind of a moot point anyway, I guess. I guess. I mean, it's interesting. It's interesting to discuss. I don't disbelieve, but I don't believe. But I also think that's a slightly different thing to mediums. Oh, yeah. And I'm a huge fan of, sadly, he died last year, I think, the amazing Randy. Yes. Yeah. James Randy. Darren Brown, various people who sort of, you know, unlock or rather give away the secret, some of the secrets of cold reading and show you just

how easy it is to manipulate people's belief. Yes. Yeah, Darren is very open about that. And there's a guy named Banachek who I've had on the podcast before as well as Darren. And Banachek is the first guy that I ever met that openly talked about the techniques that he used. He's like, I'm not going to tell you the techniques, but I'm going to tell you this is bullshit. I am tricking these people into thinking that I can read into them and find out about their past and find out about their life. It's just bullshit. Well, Randy went to, you know, the sort of big evangelical churches where they have faith healers and people contacting the other side. He went there and I think I'm remembering this right.

And people contacting the other side. And he went there and I think I'm remembering this right. Either his – like one of his accomplices essentially just went there with a little shortwave radio and just scanned through the settings until he found the feed to the sort of pastor's ear. Yeah. Feeding the information that someone else was researching online for these sort of unsuspecting audience members, unwitting audience members. Which is hilarious and it's also deeply disturbing. It's deeply disturbing. People get, you know, taken for thousands.

And, you know, they can... It's just taking advantage of the most vulnerable people. Yeah. And I've got no time for that. And there's only one step removed from that to a lot of these motivational people. Because my feeling on these motivational people is a lot of them are taking advantage of the fact that some people have this longing for discipline and structure and some sort,

like they've experienced moments in their life where things are going well and then things fall apart or they self-sabotage or they start drinking or gambling or whatever their problem is. But these people that are motivating these people, these people that they're, they're charging exorbitant amounts of money for some structure that they put together. They want these folks to follow. But then when you look into their lives, the people that are the motivational people, most of them haven't done shit. Like all they're doing is motivating people, which doesn't, you know, like if you want to have a conversation about how to invest with Warren Buffett, well, that makes sense to me. Like here's a man who's spent his life investing

successfully in businesses. He's very well versed in that and he can give you some understanding of the practices that he uses. But if you're going to talk to someone who's trying to motivate you for success and his only success is to tricking people into coming to see him motivate people for success and charging them exorbitant amounts of money for it, well, then I don't like that. Well, it's the same as the irony of Trump having written The Art of the Deal or rather having had someone ghostwrite it for him. You know, Trump, who was just born into a huge amount of money and by all accounts just slowly lost it over years and years and years. Yeah. You know, I think it's far too easy for people to abuse other people's sort of good faith. We're generally credulous creatures.

You know, we want to believe stuff. We want things to believe in. Well, we also don't, you know, there's so much uncertainty about the future. And so there's this longing for someone to hold our hand. Someone please show me. Someone please give me guide some please tell me the steps to follow Yeah, and and when people see that people have this longing They take advantage of it and they they try to get these people to pay money for these secrets if you sign up now I will give you the secrets of how you can become successful. And you're sitting there in your shitty apartment.

You're like, fuck, I want to be successful. It's Scientology, isn't it? Similar. Same thing. Well, I think that's more on like how to organize your life. But similar. It's the secrets that you unlock to success. I mean, written by one of the worst science fiction writers ever.

Have you ever read some of his stuff? I don't plan to. Oh, my god. Well, I've had the guy who's the head guy of Scientology. What the fuck's his name again? Yeah, I had his dad, Ron Miscavige on, and he explained to me how he got his son into it and the whole deal behind it. It's just fucking fascinating because it deals with those very questions. Like it deals with psychology. It deals with like the longing for answers in this purely uncertain, open-ended life that we exist in. And so many people have that desire for structure and for

someone to come along and tell them that everything is going to be okay if you follow these rules, along and tell them that everything is going to be okay if you follow these rules, which is obviously not true. Yeah. I mean, I don't, you know, when I'm billed as a quote unquote motivational speaker, I actually don't like that phrasing. I would prefer, you know, inspirational. I tend to, you know, it's almost an entertaining storytelling exercise, but with, you know, certain themes that people can take away if they want to. But I've never liked the idea of ramming down people's throats a bullet-pointed step-by-step of how to be better or more proactive or more motivated or anything like that

because I think, as you're saying, it's quite often disingenuous. Most of the time. I know a guy who does it who used to be a terrible comedian and then he became a motivational guy and now he's a motivational guy and now he's much more successful at that but it's just so strange and sad to watch these people buy into his nonsense like you know he's not successful like except at taking people and getting them to pay a lot of money to teach them how to be successful which is fucking strange yeah it's

like a it's like a shitty pyramid scheme. It is in a way, but it's a confidence game. You're playing upon people's desire for answers that don't exist. I mean, you can motivate people. There's a lot of people, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of people out there that are super successful that can tell you how they did it, and there's a lot of benefit in that. There's great benefit in that. But most of those people are not charging you for that. I mean, they might write a book about it or they, you know, maybe they do a podcast on, you know, how to succeed a business or something like that, but they're good at it. They're

actually, they actually have experience there, but there's a fucking whole industry and online because of social media the barrier for entry is so small that you see so many people with these they all they have everything is motivational all their posts are motivational like surely you have to have something other shit to say other than motivating people this weird yeah I mean I try to focus on telling stories you know like if you read those yeah you might find some inspiration within them, but hopefully it's just going to be interesting.

Well, what you're doing is, I mean, obviously you have these super unusual life experiences that you can relay. And what the, I mean, that's my thing about it is like, God, if I heard those, I would be very tempted to go and want some of those experiences for myself. Well, a lot of my experiences have been sort of how not to. Right. Well, that's how you learn, right? Yeah, exactly. Learn from my

mistakes. Actually, I think that's always valid as well. It's a lot easier, I think, to take something on board from someone who says, this is what I did and it went horribly wrong and this is why I wouldn't do it again like that. Then to say, I did this and I'm fantastic and it went really well and you're a different person. It might be the same for you. Well, speaking of horribly wrong, let's talk about your most recent one, because this is what led you here. And this is this is a wild experience that you just returned from. And just so tell people what you've done.

Sure. So I I've been planning for almost a year to go to a region of Siberia called Yakutia, which is the largest administrative area in the world. So it's one region of Russia. It's almost the same size as India. I think it's about 96% the size of India, but only one million people. So it's massive and empty. And it's far north. About half of it is north of the Arctic Circle.

And there's one large city. But outside that, there are scattered some remote and very remote communities. And for the most part, there are plenty of sort of crumbling, near-abandoned industrial towns from the Soviet era as well. But there are lots of scattered small villages of indigenous siberian peoples particularly the saha who are the the largest uh ethnicity in in the region um and then there are smaller peoples like the aveni the avenki who traditionally herded reindeer there's all sorts of people scattered across this massive area and i wanted to head out there it's the it's also the coldest inhabited place on Earth.

So the record recorded low, and Jamie might be able to confirm this, but a place called Verkhoyansk. I can't remember the exact temperature, and it's in Celsius anyway, but about minus 67.3, something like that. And that's inhabited. People live there. And so every winter it's super cold, and people survive in that. And they used to survive, many of them in a sort of nomadic sense, living in sort of skin tents, reindeer, you know, hide, teepees essentially.

So I wanted to get out there, experience some elements, not in the total depths of winter, but in sort of February, March, April, of that extreme cold. Isn't February the total depths of winter, but in sort of February, March, April, of that extreme cold. Isn't February the total depths of winter? I think January is their coldest time. What is February? Well, I mean, I was prepared for minus 50 Celsius, which is sort of minus, I guess it's about minus 60 Fahrenheit.

They hit the same at minus 40. 40, yeah. But because each degree is different, it gets confusing straight away. So I wanted to get out there, experience this cold, and just meet some of these people scattered around and just kind of see what their lives are like and also see if they're changing with the, you know, if their lives, their sort of traditional ways of life

are being threatened by the climate changing. You know, in summer, last summer, when you might remember those, it was all over the news for a while perhaps less so in america because you guys got your own wildfires here but um an island in greece evia was was on fire like the whole island essentially really bad wildfires but at the same time an area the size of belgium in yakutia was burning or collectively all the different wildfires at the same time um so they you know they have crazy bad wildfires out there. Also just close to Verkhoyansk, that town with the record cold, they had a record Arctic high of 39 point something degrees Celsius.

Again, that's about 100. Yeah, that's high. It's about the same as here today, I think. Yeah. All the way up there. Yeah, in the Arctic Circle. That's insane. Yeah, I just wanted to go and check it out, see what it was like.

So I planned to hike a few hundred miles along frozen rivers, which in winter for about three months get sort of plowed and turned into ice roads. Zimnik or Zimniki, as they call them there. A bit like your sort of ice road truckers, I guess. I don't know. But it's on the river.

The river's frozen perhaps two meters thick and towards the top on the frozen sea ice. And to hike up to this town called Tixi up on the north coast. It's a port town. But I arrived, I flew in on the 21st of February. And the world changed a lot in the sort of three or four days after that. The day after I arrived, Russian forces marched across the border where they'd been massing, you know, up to I think about 140,000 troops by the time I flew out. And when I flew out, you know, with hindsight,

it all seems kind of stupid to have gone maybe foolhardy. But at the time, basically the entire world except for presumably Putin, the US intelligence and UK intelligence, which both seem to think something's gonna happen. But all the world's media, all commentators, all pundits were saying, no, this is just a bluff. This is just Putin trying to scare NATO into concessions to get more promises that NATO won't spread, that Ukraine won't join NATO, whatever else. But they marched across the border,

and two days later, a formal invasion. They, you know, launched their full-scale nationwide invasion, marched into Kiev, bombed everything. And I was so far away from all this, you know, Batagai, the small town where I started hiking up in the Arctic, that is geographically the same distance from Vancouver as it is from Kiev. So it's just really, really far away. I was closer to the North Pole. I was east of Pyongyang. I was on the same time zone as Central Australia, just really, really far away.

And I kind of thought about it and I thought, well, A, I'm here and it's going to be interesting. You know, I'm possibly one of, if not the last tourists in Russia, certainly out in the east. And I've got this almost unique but accidental opportunity to see this country and the lives of normal people, ordinary citizens, as what seems to be a horrific, you know, potentially the brink, the precipice of World War III starts to unfold. And so I thought, right, I'm going to carry on with this trek, but I'll just try and keep across, you know, information. But as soon as I got to Batagai it's a short flight from the capital of the region up to Batagai on an old Antonov twin

prop sort of soviet plane and from there onwards my you know I couldn't get any phone signal I basically the only real information I could get was local state media. I passed a village perhaps once a week. And you turn on the, I mean, the most insane thing was turning on the, and I mean, you'll be aware of this, I'm sure, but you turn on the local news out there and they're talking about Ukraine on their news segments. And every second or third sentence will have the word fascism or Nazism. And they were slowly just drip feeding, drip feeding is the wrong word. They were just gushing this false information out into their public space. And loads of people believed everything they heard, totally believed everything. You know, I remember while I was still in the capital, just the day after I arrived,

the troops had gone into the Donbass, this disputed territory in the east that they're sort of annexing. And that evening I was in some guy's uh sort of cabin just outside town i you know we'd met and went for drinks with some other people and he said there let's go back to us for some drinks uh and this guy i'll call him anatole i don't want to say his name but um he he started dicing up some horse ribs to cook us some some sort of you know peppering them and everything and he asked me what I thought about Ukraine. This is really early days. And I said, well, you know, I don't, I had to be careful with what I was saying.

I don't know that much about it. But, you know, it seems like this is going to get really serious. And I'm also aware that when I turn on my phone and look at the news apps, the information I get from the BBC or The Guardian or whatever else is totally different from what I see here. Of course, I knew all this, but I was sort of couching it in terms that gave him the chance to kind of, you know, I didn't want to preach. And he said, yeah, well, you know, it's great because, you know, Vladimir Putin is making Russia great again.

And this is Russian land and it belongs to Russia. And those Ukrainians are all Nazis anyway. And, you know, they're performing genocide on Russian peoples. And the thing I found craziest about all this, not just the fact that he was so precisely parroting Putin's propaganda, you know, which I had assumed beforehand people would be taken with a pinch of salt. But the fact that I mean, this guy was Saka. He's not a Slav. He's not a white Russian. This guy is from a people who about 400 years ago were brutally that were from a you know sort of ethnically different background heritage might not be quite so sold on the cause of Russian nationalism which is essentially what Putin used to sell the invasion in the first place but no he was totally

he was totally sold on it and then just as the following kind of weeks unfolded as I started hiking the war ramped up, I only got little snippets of information, it was very hard to know what was actually going on. I just met more and more people with, to be frank, a complete gamut of opinions. You know, I met lots of people who like him were just bullish and quite, you know, hawkish. Yeah, you know, we'll take back Ukraine, it belongs to Russia. They're all fascists. And then I met people who quietly, you know, I'm not going to say any names, but people who like one on one would quietly confide, you know, I'm not quite

sure about this. You know, I don't quite believe everything I'm being told. Or even some people who said, you know, I'm ashamed to be Russian. I'm embarrassed about this. You know, I don't feel like I'm part of this country now um but what was your feeling going through so you're you're going through this trip you have no idea that this is going to happen it starts happening while you're there and then you find yourself accidentally involved in in a sense that you're a foreign observer trapped in this land where all this crazy shit is going down are you thinking you have to get out of there?

Are you thinking you are a part of this now? You're going to document what you're seeing and this will add to whatever you're writing in the future? A bit of both really it occurred to me a bunch of times should I be leaving should I be getting out of here?

You know, just days after the invasion, flights, you know, Russian flights to Europe were all, you know, the airlines were sanctioned. They couldn't fly into European airports. So my flight hadn't yet been formally cancelled, but it wasn't going to happen. I knew that much. So getting out was already going to be complicated. But I didn't feel I didn't feel personally threatened. And perhaps I should have. You know, I suppose I felt like, you know, I'm essentially a neutral observer. But of course, I wasn't because I'm British. And Britain very quickly took a stance along with the EU and America, you know, pro-Ukraine stance. And it's great, you know, here wandering around Austin, you see Ukrainian flags everywhere. And after finally getting home, you know, pro-Ukraine stance. And it's great, you know, here wandering around Austin, you see Ukrainian flags everywhere. And after finally getting home, you know,

I went to little villages in the countryside and the church has a Ukrainian flag hoisted on top of the flagpole. You know, the West, for want of a better term, really like took up the cause of Ukraine very, very quickly. And I suppose that made me not a neutral observer, but a representative of made me not a neutral observer but a representative of the opposition if not the enemy um but i've been you know i've been i've been in trouble with the authorities in russia in russia before on previous occasions i've been through the russian court system a couple of times also um in 2017 i was skiing through the ural mountains, which is, they kind of divide European Russia from Siberia, and came into a town for a resupply after a couple of months out in the mountains, and the police arrested me and my friend, and so we were on business visas, because the longest

tourist visa you could get back then was only 30 days. We needed three months plus. So we got business visas and they said you're committing tourism while traveling on a business visa. So we were taken to court for committing tourism, for sort of abusing the grounds. Did you explain that that is your business? Yeah. Did that work? They didn't go for it.

But, I mean, the fine was, you know, 20 pounds or something. But you explain that that is your business? Yeah. Did that work? They didn't go for it. But the fine was £20 or something. But you have books though. I would imagine. I didn't yet have. But I had a website. But then later we got a border infraction. We were kayaking down a river on the border

of Russia and Kazakhstan and it turns out where the river is the border you're not allowed to be. And then months later in Georgia we were up in the sort of mountains of Georgia and I mean it's dumb really we used google maps to tell us how to get to this town Gori which incidentally is where Stalin was born and google maps said yep you come down out of this valley out of the mountains into this valley, go up river. There's a river through the valley. Go up river for about a mile, cross the bridge,

and then carry on on the road, and you'll be there this evening. Great, easy. We went down, and then at the bridge, there were Georgian soldiers, or police, police, I think. And they said, no, it's closed. And they wouldn't explain why. And I had some Russian by this point, so I could have understood understood if they explained but they didn't they just said no it's close just go away and so I kind of put it into google again and it said yeah it's going to be

you know like a day and a half it's like a long longer way around and we were sort of after it you know keen for a rest and I thought well the river doesn't look that deep so we went um you know a few hundred meters downstream and just pushed our bikes across it was like ankle deep got to the other side scrambled up a bank got on the road started cycling and thought yeah you know finally we've got one over on the authorities it's always been a bit of a headache and uh about 30 seconds later a military jeep sped up behind us and sort of pulled over in front of us and a soldier climbed out and he had the first thing i noticed was he had the russian trickle or the flag on his arm i thought well that's strange because the border is about 50 miles north of here. And he said, what are you doing here? And

I said, what are you doing here? Which isn't the right thing to say when a Russian soldier arrests you. He said, this is South Ossetia, which is that there was a short five-day war in 2008, is South Ossetia, which is that there was a short five-day war in 2008, and Russia just sort of invaded an annexed part of Georgia. And it turned out the river was the border, and we had unwittingly just crossed into it. So we got, I mean, it's part of Russia essentially, but it's set up like the Donbass is already being,

as a kind of a little puppet state. And when they were interrogating us under the frowning portrait of Putin, they were saying like, you know, why did you do this? You know, like it's a border. Why have you violated our sovereign territory? And I said, you know, it was just the maps on our phone. And the guy from the FSB, formerly the KGB, said, ah, Google Maps, right? And I said, yeah. And he goes, ah, it's an American company. I said, yeah. And he said, well, America doesn't recognize South Ossetia. So Google Maps just told me to go through this disputed territory. Jesus, Google.

Later I looked at it, and there was a tiny little dotted line, but the route, it just said go through there. But I said, who does recognize it? And he said, well, you know, the South Ossetians do, and Russia does. I was like, sure, that's kind of a given. And I said, anyone else? He goes, yeah, Venezuela and Nicaragua. I was like, it's good company.

And he said, also, have you heard of Nauru? It's a tiny little Pacific island nation of about 10,000 people. They're the only other people who back then at least formally recognized South Ossetia. I guess Belarus might do now. Anyway, so, you know, I was familiar with Russian... I know that being arrested in Russia for some minor sort of administrative infraction isn't necessarily a huge deal. At both of those times, I was given a small fine and sent on my way. But this time, this winter, after about three weeks of hiking, I arrived at this town. It was the first,

the only town on the route. So did they let you go? In South Osetia? Yeah. Once they have, they pulled you over, like, how do you get out of this? So, well, we were in a cell for a night and then in the court where the judge said, is there anything you want to say? And I said, well, I'm really hungry. They haven't really fed us. And the judge started screaming at the police and said, get them some food straight away. So, you know, it was all friendly and fine. They then at sunset marched us through all this kind of, you know, razor wire and concrete defenses and unexploded ordinance signs

and handed us over to the Georgian authorities. Do you have to explain what you're doing? The Georgians were across it because it had been put out on the FSB sort of communications. So they knew that two tourists had been, had gotten in trouble. And sure enough, on the other side of the border, there were people from like the British embassy, the Georgian police, the tourism industry, the ministry of the interior. So we had this long debrief. But you're not supposed to be there, right? You're not to... We crossed the border, not knowing it was a border. It was totally

innocent, but we crossed the border illegally because it is a border. How would you be able to cross it legally? Well, only from Russia. Only from Russia. So that area where you crossed, it's just illegal to cross in that area? Yeah.

Did you explain what you do and how did they respond to that? I explained, I mean, I think they, they very quickly understood that, you know, we weren't spies. This is five, six, five years ago. They very quickly understood that, you know, we weren't spies. It wasn't obviously a quite such a heightened time of heightened tensions like now. Right. But now when you got in trouble with the Russian authorities, it was a much more serious issue. Yeah. Well, this time I didn't, and I stand by this, I didn't do anything wrong, but they were, it seemed quite quickly, looking for a way to get me out of there. So it was known where I was at

all times. Although there was only one settlement every week, this river, the road, the Zimnik on the river I was hiking along, saw perhaps 15 trucks a day hauling coal from a port at the river mouth, like hundreds of kilometers away, all the way down to Batagai, the town where I started hiking to sort of fuel the region with a little power station. And so people were clearly, as I found out later, reporting to the authorities where I was at any given time. The two villages I passed through before reaching the first town, you know, it was quickly sort of by the village elders, I think, sort of because there's no presence of authorities in these villages. They're tiny, you know, 300, 400 people.

You know, it was passed on where I was. So when I approached Ustquiga, you know, it was passed on where I was. So when I approached Ust-Kuiga, this town, which used to have 5,000 or 6,000 residents, now there's like 500 or 600. So basically there's not many people just living scattered among the ruins of this kind of... On the north side of the town, there's a cement factory that was built and completed just before the Soviet Union fell apart. So it never produced a single sack of cement because there was no longer any reason to live in this like desolate, you know, sort of throwaway town in the middle of nowhere. The Soviets were really keen to kind of evenly populate

this huge expanse of land that they owned. So they built sort of industrial settlements all over the place. Anyway, as I approached Uskwiga, a police jeep was waiting for me a few miles outside town. And they said, get into the jeep for a chat and I said that's fine you know and actually that morning had been my coldest morning it was minus 48 or 49 degrees celsius that morning which I think is about 55 fahrenheit

and so my feet were still numb and I was only too happy to get in the car and have a chat with them in the warmth and they asked me all these questions for about an hour you know what are you doing here yeah so this was in my very pigeon Russian. These guys didn't speak a word of English. What are you doing here? You know, why are you visiting? And I just said, I'm here. I'm interested in the culture, the traditions, the background, the winter, the wildlife.

You know, I'm a tourist. And they made me sign a document promising to obey the rules of the country while I was in it, which fair enough. But then I can, they drove off, well, they took selfies with me and then drove off. And then we can, I continued into the town. They took selfies? Oh, everyone takes selfies in Russia. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, they even refer to any picture with a person in it as a selfie. It doesn't need to be taken by oneself. That's an English word that's just bled through into Russian for a picture. Interesting. So, and again, selfies, I found out later that people were taking selfies with me, you know, truckers along the way.

And then these were popping up on various kind of Instagram accounts in the area that lots of people followed. So, you know, people were totally aware of where I was, what I was doing. And again, I had nothing to hide, sort of. We'll come to that in a minute. But in Usquiga, they came and found me. They came and knocked on the door in the place that I was staying. I was there for three nights. And they said, come to the police station for registration.

I said, that's fine. Again, no problem. And in the police station, slowly it became clear that they were giving me a fine. And when I asked, what's the fine for? And I wasn't initially concerned, what's the fine for? And they said, oh, you're conducting journalism while traveling on a tourist visa. You can now get, well, briefly could, I guess you can't now, get a 90-day tourist visa to Russia as of recently. So this time I was on the correct visa, a tourist visa. But they said, you're conducting journalism. I said, I'm not. And they said, no, you're a

journalist. We've seen on your website, you've written for the BBC, which is true, but travel pieces. You've written for these newspapers, again, travel articles based on essentially tourism. And I said, well, yeah, that's not illegal. And you've been taking photographs. Again, no problem. But they then suddenly claimed that I'd been asking provocative questions about the, as they call it, the special operation. Because the war, within Russia, the war is not a war. It's illegal to call it a war. It's a special operation. It's part of this kind of strange kind of, you know, nothing is true.

So are people reporting you along the way? I mean, did you ascertain how this got to these soldiers? Well, they knew I was, you know, the route I was following was, you know, along this river, over some hills to another river, and then up to this town on the coast. And so there was no secret that I was going to come through Ustquiga. And they knew what day it was going to be because someone had probably reported seeing my tent, you know, 20 miles down the road the previous night where I'd camped. And I think, I mean, it became quite clear that they had...

So we spoke for a while, and eventually when they started making these accusations, I said, look, right, I don't really understand exactly what you're saying. I need you to find a translator. And so they found some guy who spoke a bit of English and he translated as best he could. And they basically come up with these sort of fabricated witnesses who said, yeah, he was asking about the war in Ukraine. He called it a war. You know, he was he was trying to sort of

provoke, you know, difficult conversations. And it really wasn't the case. And frankly, wherever I went, almost one of the first questions people would ask about me is what do you think of the situation in Ukraine? Because whether or not they believe what they're being told by their news, they are aware because the news talks about, quote unquote, the fake news that the West is putting out. They're aware that I might have access to that.

So they want to know what I think. So they kind of came up with these witnesses and said right like you've got to pay this fine um and then you can go and I thought right well it's a 20 pound fine 30 dollars and then I can go there's no point staying here all day I might as well just like sign the papers and go um and so I did that but the the guy who they got to translate for me he walked out with me when we were all done and as we were walking down the street he said so when they were on the phone to HQ back in Yakutsk the capital I overheard the people on the other end of the phone saying

that these guys should pin two administrative offenses on me so that I can be deported and I'd resisted. I'd pushed back quite hard saying, you know, this is not what I'm doing. I'm not doing journalism. This is not true or whatever. And I'm glad I did. Had I not, then they possibly would have deported me then and there. But I was free to carry on.

So I carried on about another four weeks, you know, got up onto the tundra, visited some reindeer herders, youders, got some very remote settlements and spent the final 10 days hiking on the frozen Arctic Ocean, camping out under some of the most incredible starscapes and Northern Lights. It was beautiful, a really good time. I arrived in Tixi, this port town at the end, which used to have, I think, 15,000 people. Now it has about 5,000 people it's another one of these the Russians have a phrase for this like a dying town a town

more dead than alive and on arrival in Tixi someone who I'd met on the road weeks earlier who I got in touch with on arrival he said you know get in touch we'll catch up he told me that the FSB the KGB wanted to talk to me and right, we'll just take the bull by the horns. I'll just go to their building and I'll say, I hear you want to talk to me. I'm here. And they were a bit taken aback by that. And they said, can you come back at this time tomorrow? So I did. And they said they it felt like an interrogation, but eventually turned out it was just this standard procedure. They asked me these questions, who I was, the name of my family members, the history of my family. Did any of my ancestors ever, were they ever in the British forces?

Do I have any political beliefs? Was I in the army? Just all these kind of standard suspicious questions. And it went on about two, three hours. And when we were finally done, the guy said, OK, well, that's it. You're free to go. I was like, oh, great. He said, make sure you visit the museum. There's a mammoth skeleton. You know, have a good time. Good luck to you.

I went back to where I was staying and I was recording. So I took with me a little Zoom, like a little dictaphone. You know, a lot of people use them for podcasts, I think. And for another podcast with a friend that'll surface in a month or so, I've been recording my experiences in my own

voice along the way of the cold, the people I met, the odd conversation with other people but naturally with what was going on and people telling me of their opinions about Ukraine in my own little recordings in my tent at night, sometimes I get a little sort of political I guess and after that

encounter with the in Ustquiga, when they came to my door these policemen the first time sorry four weeks back I know we're jumping around when they came to my door I was recording on my dictaphone and I went to answer the door and just slipped it in my pocket and they said right come to the police station now and so I went but it was still recording so I had a live mic throughout this whole police process and the first thing they did in the police station was take my phone, turn it off so I wasn't recording.

And so little did they know there was this hot mic in my pocket. So after that was done, I got back to where I was staying. I kind of, in my own words, said what had happened, took the little micro SD card out and then unscrewed a plug adapter, you know, from like a British plug to a Russian plug, unscrewed that, wrapped the SD card up in a little scrap of white paper, slotted it in there, screwed it back up. It's like,

you know, I don't want to lose this. It's not really a huge problem, but best just to hide it, have it safe. Up in Tixi, I sort of recorded my final thoughts again, and I had this little SD card. It was just on the table. And another one i was worried you know my journal that my diary that i've been writing in each day i was worried that that might get taken you know because slowly the with the villages i passed through towards the end you know it was made very clear that the authorities were waiting for me in tixie i thought well you know that might get seized not the end of the world if it does if i with my gopro take a picture of every single page and i can hide that little s SD card in the same plug socket.

But when the knock came on my door in Tixi, I'd been asleep, I'd actually fallen asleep reading Kafka, the trial, this guy getting arrested and not knowing what it's all about. They came to the door and everything was just kind of out. And they said, it was the police again, they said, can you come to the station for registration? I said, again, well, this is a little ominous but registration fine i'd already you know the day before spoken to the fsb i knew everything was fine and in the station um it quickly became clear well after about an hour of just this long asking lots of questions i said

well can i go now and they said no no you can't go and that's when I understood I'm under arrest and this is maybe a little bit more serious and once again they well they said who have you spoken to who have you met in Tixie and I said um well I met this guy uh who I'd met on the road who it's a small town so I didn't want to lie to them I thought best just to say who I'd met so I met this guy and I've met this other bloke and they didn't know who either of these people were. And they were asking questions about who they were. And without leaving the room, without making a call, without doing any texting, me having just explained to them who these people were and they didn't know who they were. They quickly said, right, well, both those people are providing witness to say that you have been conducting journalism and asking questions about Ukraine. So, you know, they sort of essentially got me to provide them with false

witnesses. And this process went on for hours. They got an English teacher to translate for us. And as the hours passed, the English teacher became more and more fed up she was meant to be I think someone with a disease in the town there was a bake sale to raise money for him and she was meant to be cooking cakes cupcakes with her daughter that evening and you know I'd ruined this because it was already you know they took me at about 4 30 anyway at 9 30 after a lot of waiting around they finally said right you're going to court now I thought well it's, it's 9.30. How's that going to work? And they took me to another building, an old Soviet-looking apartment block type building. But on the third floor, there was a courtroom.

And in the courtroom, they got this judge who just seemed pissed off. You know, he'd been dragged out of his home at 9.30 at night to deal with something. And the teacher was so pissed off by this point that she wasn't really translating in full anymore. So, you know, the judge would speak a whole paragraph and she would give me a half sentence in translation. And so the trial unfolded. I had been supposedly, you know,

conducting journalism again. They had these witnesses who said I said this, that and the other. And they also said, most worryingly, that I'd been photographing restricted military sites or sensitive military sites. And the judge found me guilty. And he said, you'll pay a fine, again, not much, like 70 bucks, something like that. And you are banned from Russia for five years, and you have to leave, you'll be deported. And I thought, right, you know, it's not the end of the world. You know, it looks like Russia is not particularly a place to go back to for five years. You know, it's fine.

And so at that point, as far as I was aware, I would be I would fly back to Yakutsk, get my own flight back to England via some other third country and then fly home. Done. And I was taken back to my sort of apartment i'd rented in this town and um probably 20 minutes later there was a knock at the door and it was the police again they said oh actually you have to be in the cell tonight pack everything you have up and and we're going now and so with them in front of me i had to pack everything up among the stuff that was all kind of laid out was one of these little sd cards with the second half of all the recordings from this zoom on it. And all I could do was I had a head torch next to it on the table because they were watching me pack, you know, head torches are that

little sort of hinge so it can sort of angle down on your forehead. I bent the hinge down, put the SD card in that bit and just snapped it shut and put a rubber band around the whole thing but that just felt really precarious you know that's not well hidden and that's the last time I was you know just before that point was the last time I was unattended with all my stuff for weeks to come as it turned out I packed everything up we were taken to the cell um you know fingerprinting I was eventually about 1 30 put into this little cell um and you know I was thankfully tired enough. I got some sleep, woke up in the morning. And from that point onwards, I was accompanied or escorted by bailiffs, technically,

although they said, we're Russia's U.S. Marshals. They were quite keen to sort of compare themselves to U.S. Marshals. And I had already changed my flight that I had booked a week away to the following day to get me back to the capital. And so I was deported on, well, sent down to Yakutsk on the flight that I'd booked, but with a man as an escort. And at this point, I still thought, like, I'm just, I'm free when I get to Yakutsk, I'll go home. On arrival in Yakutsk, there was another bailiff waiting for me. And he said, right, well, you have to now go and stay in this this kind of hotel for foreigners until you fly home. And I thought, well, that's not it's not ideal. But again, it's not the end of the world. And then on the drive in this minibus to the

detention center, it turned out, yeah, it was a it was a detention center for foreigners and it was just a prison. And, you know, my shoelaces were taken away, my belt was taken off, all my goods were locked up in a locker. And, you know know after being processed and checked in the door slam or the cell door slam shut behind me uh and then there i am and i don't know how long for you know that that's you know one of the sort of bleakest moments where i just i didn't know what exactly is going to happen after that point um i still i suppose was thinking a few days and i'll probably be out um and they were sort of saying maybe 10 days you got to wait for the paperwork to come down from the coast or whatever but after a few days you know time had come and gone i was in this

cell i mean you're in the cell around the clock 24 hours a day uh not allowed outside food's handed through a little hatch in the cell i I shared it with two other men. And after a few days, they said, right, you know, you should be getting a lawyer. And I was allowed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 15 minutes of access to my phone. So back home via these frantic, hurried phone calls, my uncle and my girlfriend were kind of, you know, arranging, trying to help out. And so we arranged for a lawyer to come in and he said, right, well, we'll appeal the decision. But that appeal wasn't heard for two weeks. And that appeal was dismissed out of hand. I was taken to the court.

And this is after two weeks. You know, by this point, I was not a happy guy. I mean, it's almost comical going to the court for the appeal. I was so desperate to get outside. I hadn't been outdoors for two weeks. And they said, right, you're going to the court. And I knew that meant I'd get to be outdoors for a few minutes, you know, as I walked from the door into the minibus and from the minibus into the court at the other end. But they put me in cuffs and then they, with another pair of handcuffs, cuffed me to one of the guards who had a taser. And there was another guard on the other side with a taser.

And they wouldn't let me have my shoelaces or my belt back. And I'd lost quite a lot of weight during this trek. So my trousers were falling down. My hiking shoes had these massive tongues lolling out the front. And walking down the courthouse corridors, I was doing this kind of weird John Wayne wide-kneed shuffle to try and stop my trousers from falling down. Meanwhile, my hands are pinned to this guy to my right. But the judge looked at the papers for, you know, like two minutes

and said, yeah, no, your crimes are too serious. There's a political element, and, you know, you're going back into the detention centre. And this was probably the time when I felt most low. About a week earlier, I had suddenly, unexpectedly been dragged onto, in front of a TV camera and interviewed. And that was a bit concerning. That felt like, you know, being tried by the court of public opinion. They had, eventually the news bit aired, I think the day before my appeal.

But they had gone up to Tixie and they got witness statements from one bloke who I never even met saying, yeah, you know, he was talking about Ukraine and he's photographing these military sites. Again, no photos were ever provided that backed up that story. And all the while, you know, those first two weeks, all of my belongings are in their possession. And the police have come and searched. They made me turn on the phone, my phone, unlock it for for them i had a gps device which really freaks them out my gopro to them looked like a spy camera but when they first laid out all my belongings or some policeman you know i was taking cuffed out my cell to be you know to turn everything on for him and sort of on the table laid out in this neat little row was all my items and among them was this plug socket

and that head torch with the hidden little um sd card in it and although technically those things weren't really incriminating the fact that they've been hidden didn't look good and i probably should have said earlier back in march two months earlier they had introduced a new law with a maximum sentence of up to 15 years for journalists providing, sort of spreading fake news about the military, i.e. anyone really speaking the truth about the military. After the invasion. After the invasion. And, you know, these recordings had lots of me talking about the invasion, the atrocities in Bucha and, you know, all sorts. And my whole diary, which up to this point I'd kept hidden because when I was checked into the cell while they were going through all my stuff,

I just slipped it in my trousers because I thought this diary doesn't look good. I slipped it in my trousers, which again, freaked me out a little bit. Are they going to frisk me? Are they not? I got it into the cell and then I just hid it in plain sight among my belongings. And it was all the stuff in the locker that the police went and looked through. So there's just a lot of things going on. I'm constantly on edge that I'm just about to become, you know, a political bargaining chip. Did they find the SD cards? No, thankfully. This is actually the first time I've spoken about those SD cards. And, you know, those would have qualified me for at least, you know, you're're a journalist if not espionage and the guards in the prison who were I mean I think they were probably nice normal guys but they treated

they were wankers to us um I mean they kept on saying to me are you a spy and don't fight my country you know they would also on their phones look up phrases in English and then kind of chant them back at me that you are a spy walker um and so it was a scary time. And after the appeal was rejected, I then thought, well, you know, this could be a really long time. You know, I could be here for months. And the longer I'm here, the more chance there is that either they'll find some of these SD cards or my diary, or that they will, you know, some ambitious cop, some ambitious policeman or bureaucrat will decide to pick up my case again to retry me under the criminal offense. I mean, given they'd made up most of their evidence anyway, it's no stretch to think that they could pin on me the fake news journalist thing and put me away for 15 years. I mean, I didn't know that I didn't even know of her at the time.

I mean, I didn't know that I didn't even know of her at the time. But since getting out, I've learned about and I'm going to get her name wrong. But Brittany Grinner, the basketball player who I mean, we don't really even know where she is. I think I think a bit of news came out about her the other day. But I mean, she's clearly being in my opinion. I mean, it's totally outrageous. But she, I think, is being held as a prisoner swap fodder. You know, they will use her when convenient.

Yeah, they're trying to get... There's an arms dealer that we have, and they're trying to get the arms dealer swapped for the basketball player. Because she had a CBD vape. Yeah. And they arrested her like a week before the invasion even happened. They knew what was going to happen, it seems,

and they just held on to her. Yeah, she's valuable, I guess. And, I mean, I hope that she's out as soon as possible, but I really worry about, you know, whether they'll, oh. Held in jail for another 18 days. Yeah, but what does that mean? Well, she's been there for over 100 days already. Yeah.

And, I mean, I was inside for not very long. But 18 days feels like an eternity. Yeah. It says a drug smuggling charges until July 2nd, pushing her jail stint past the four-month mark, according to the official state news agency, TASS. How do you say that word? Kimki? Kimki. Kimki Court of Moscow Region granted the 18-day extension at the request of investigators.

The agency quoted the court's press services saying, it is typical of Russian courts to extend detention repeatedly until trial. Ms. Greiner's lawyer, Alexander Boykov, could not immediately be reached for comment. Yeah, so the, I mean the... Could you scroll down a little bit further? What it says that American basketball players, Star was arrested four months ago after the Russian officials said they found a vape cartridge bearing traces of hash oil in her luggage while she was passing through the Sheremetyevo airport, Moscow's main international airport.

The charge carries a jail sentence of up to 10 years. Fuck. Yeah. I mean, they, I really, I really hope this proves to be correct that it's only 18 more days. I, you never know with, with Russia. I mean, just this morning I saw on the news Navalny has essentially disappeared. They moved him to an undisclosed location. His lawyer went to visit him this morning. And when he said, you know, where's Alexei, the prison just said, we have no convict of such a name. And that's it. That's all they said. Can you explain who that is to people?

Sorry, yeah. Alexei Navalny is the sort of Russian opposition politician who he's been a very vocal critic and opponent of Putin for years. He, I mean, Boris Nemtsov was a close ally of him. He was killed by the regime. Navalny was locked up under fraud charges, I think, with a two-year sentence. About two weeks ago, they added another nine years and said that he was inciting opposition.

I mean, they've gone full autocrat now. There's no longer any pretense. But Navalny is the guy who was in Europe for a while. And then he flew from Germany back to Russia incredibly bravely, many would say foolishly, but he's very dedicated to trying to liberate the Russian people from the tyranny that they're living under. He flew back knowing full well what that would mean. And that was after they had already tried to kill him with Novichok. They put Novichok in his pants in a hotel room in Berlin or something. And now he's disappeared. It's, I mean, I think I was very lucky to be this, you know, the fact that I'm out now at all,

I think probably stems from the fact that I was all the way out there in the east where people are a little sort of out of the loop. Had I in moscow like britney griner um then i think things might have been very different are you worried now about talking about this openly that they might target you a little bit but um yes and no i mean the thing that i'm most um most mindful of is and that's why I've probably sounded quite vague about some of the you know people I've essentially cited uh in in this chat is I need to be very careful because being associated with me for various people in Russia could be a real problem for them there's one guy who I believe is being he he was uh one of the witnesses used against me in one of the two places um he's not

a russian citizen he's from another country and he's got in touch with me saying he's now being deported he's lived there for 10 years and that's that's um i mean it's not my fault but it's on my head um i am not i mean maybe maybe they're going to try and fuck with me i i don't plan to go back you know i'm banned for five years anyway but unless there's a total change of regime not just you know putin falls or is strung up from a lamppost or something and is replaced by his you know next mate but like an actual like perestroika again um then i won't go back i wouldn't feel safe and probably wouldn't be safe but equally me being outside russia now talking about what's happened and also what you

know you know referencing what has been happening in in ukraine i'm the last person they care about you know because there are there are actual journalists doing actual journalism spreading actual news and facts about the the incredible atrocities i mean when i when we flew from tixi down to yakutsk on the flight firstly they were like in the airport, there were banners with the letters Z everywhere. And there were a bunch of soldiers, I should say. So Tixi, it used to be a restricted zone. And then in January 2021, they sort of declassified it. And that's how my trip became viable. And I thought, okay, great, it's safe to go there now. What's the significance of the letter Z? So that's the, I mean, it stands for Za Porbedi, like for victory.

And that's what the Russians have on their tanks, Z and V. So they, you know, the tanks that have driven across into Ukraine, they've all got the letter Z marked out on them in paint or tape. But all over Russia, you'll see now cars or trucks or buses with the Z on them. It's this like mark of like Russian pride in the special operation that's being undertaken in Ukraine, the invasion. But all these soldiers on this flight, you know, they were sort of in their 40s. They looked, you know, judging by their age and sort of epaulets and stars all over them. They look like they're probably relatively senior personnel.

And sitting on that flight was weird. I was thinking if they're flying from here, maybe some of them will be deployed to Ukraine. And if they're deployed to Ukraine, maybe some of these guys will be sanctioning or at least turning a blind eye to rape and murder and torture in the weeks to come. But Tixi itself, even as they were declassifying it, they installed a bunch of missile silos, surface air missile silos outside the town, which I wasn't aware of. So it's Russia's huge Arctic coast. It's like 12,000 miles of sort of frontier. And they've got three points ranged along it that are the kind of hubs of their, they call it the ice curtain, their Arctic defense strategy. that are the kind of hubs of their, they call it the ice curtain, their Arctic defense strategy.

And TIXI is one of those. So they've, in the last few years, massively ramped up their military personnel there, their military hardware. So, you know, that's to defend against any attacks from the north by sea or air or whatever. And so that, you know, was, I guess, why they were particularly on edge about me being there and this idea of, you know, photographing the military, which again, I hadn't been, but that was, you know, why they sort of summoned that. So how did they eventually let you go and why? So they, when they've got foreigners in this detention center, to deport you, they've got to take you to Moscow first because there's no international airport in Yakutsk. And to do that, they, you know, they know, being taken to Moscow involves handcuffs and guards.

And it's like this whole big rigmarole. They do it on the state budget. You have no say over when it happens. So you just have to wait. And for the other, I think there were no more than about 12 people in this detention center. There were only five cells. For the other people there, that's just a case of just waiting. And they were basically all undocumented workers. So people who had either outstayed their work visa or never had one.

And, you know, most of them seem fairly stoical about it, although some of them had been there for, I didn't get to talk to many because I was in a cell with two for two weeks and then by myself for two weeks after that. But I think the longest any of them were there were probably about six weeks, except one Ukrainian guy who had been given a six-month sentence there and he had been in a prison for two and a half years beforehand for some criminal offence that he wouldn't tell me what so I don't really know what his story was but they deport you when the next sort of deportation run happens to be booked up

and very last minute on the 16th I think of May when I'd been inside nearly four weeks they said right on Wednesday two days from now if you can book flights to coincide with this deportation that we're doing of three other people then you can go with it and so you know hurriedly I got my wonderful girlfriend to arrange flights so that I could fly with them on this flight to Moscow and from there I would then as far as they told me I would go through customs and immigration and then I'd be in the departures lounge and I'm sort of essentially out of Russia and then free to go so we arranged this flight and I was taken with them and that was you know huge really finally I'm moving I'm getting

out of here um had uh it not worked out that time they gave me a COVID test had I been positive for COVID um had we managed to not get the flight had there been no seats left on the plane then I would have had to wait for the next one which they told me it was going to be sort of late July so you know another two months or so um so thankfully we got tickets. I got on that flight, marched on in your handcuffs again. Five bailiffs escorting the four of us, sort of prisoners. They took us to Moscow to Sheremetyevo Airport, the same airport where Brittany Greiner was arrested. And we were then put into a small room

to wait for our respective check-in times for our different flights. Me to London via Dubai with Emirates, a guy to Armenia, a guy to Uzbekistan, and another fella to Kyrgyzstan. And finally they said, right, it's your time for check-in. I went and got my bag checked in. I was taken through security and immigration by a SWAT team,

a two-person SWAT team with a bunch of police. It was a whole gang of people. Finally got through and they gave me my passport back and my phone back and said, right, now. And I was like, great, this is it, I'm free. And they said, right, just wait here a minute. And then suddenly I was taken through this extra layer of security that I hadn't expected.

And there were about six cops who didn't know who I was. They'd been given, I guess, a one sheet, you know, or a little stack of papers saying about my case. And they basically were just given me and all my bags and just, well, my, you know, my backpack. Again, I haven't been left unsupervised with all my stuff at any point. And so suddenly they had all my possessions,

including that head torch, including the plug socket, including my diary, which they got their hands on. And for an hour and a half, they just went over everything. They went through all the phone conversations. They went back on my phone through photos for years. Eventually, they came across a picture of me from 10 years earlier in Afghanistan with a big beard and a sort of headscarf and an AK-47 in the desert, which really didn't help. And it was a totally innocent picture. I'd been cycling along. One of the Afghan National Army soldiers, you know, the good guys,

at a road checkpoint invited me for tea. And their hobbies are kind of drinking tea and taking pictures with guns in the desert. And, you know, they kept pulling up things on my phone saying, you know, what's this, what's this for? They found my diary. This is the first time someone got their hands on my diary and they start reading through. One of them could speak decent English. Reading through stuff

and I, thankfully, in the prison had censored a bunch of stuff. I'd gone through and I'd scrubbed things out. Big black marks all over the place. For instance, you know, it's a diary day by day. Given the date, the third day in big block capitals, it said at the top Russia invades Ukraine. I was like, scrub that out. You know, there was just a wealth of stuff. Had they really looked closely, that would probably still be visible or youitals it said at the top Russia invades Ukraine it's like scrub that out you know this it just there was just there was a wealth of stuff had they really looked closely

that would probably still be visible or you turn it over on the back you can see where the pen mark is pressed the impressions there was just a wealth of stuff there that they could have you know you know locked me up for and this is now in Moscow where it just felt more serious and this process went on for ages they were asking me loads of questions and I've I started to realize what in my mind I was realizing that's it like this is you know it's just got like we're back to square one but worse um and the the my flight time was sort of ticking slowly closer and they showed no sign of letting me go and I was like no I've got to get on my flight soon and they started looking through just all the pictures on my camera um and I mean they

were also going to like personal conversations on whatsapp on my camera. And, I mean, they were also going to, like, personal conversations on WhatsApp on my phone. And, like, it was a really – my girlfriend, who I'd just texted when I got my phone back, saying, you know, I've got my phone. It's all done. It's all over. She then was trying to reply and call me, and the messages were marked as red. The calls were just getting hung up each time. So she was freaking out because suddenly, like, I say I'm free, and suddenly it seems I don't have access to my phone and i'm in moscow so this went on for an hour and a half during which um it's like in russia everyone shits on whoever's below them you know so all these people were

trying to intimidate the shit out of me um and they were saying okay well you know you've got to wipe your phone you've got to wipe every photo that you have on your camera and like you know if it came to it i'd be willing to do that but i didn't want to because i also want to have some record of this journey i've been on which was great until i was arrested um and it started to feel like i'm about to get locked up this is it and it's either going to be espionage or journalism you know fake news journalism and i'm going to be here for years. You know, there's a British woman who got locked up for basically the same thing in Iran and was behind bars for six years.

And, you know, it wasn't helped by the fact that Boris Johnson, now the prime minister, was foreign secretary at the time, and he said publicly, oh, she's just teaching people journalism, it's fine. Oh, jeez. She was there, you know, she's an Iranian-British dual national. She was there visiting her family. So that, like, like didn't help and she became a bargaining chip with the

british government um basically the british had a sort of 240 million pound unpaid uh debt they before the shah was deposed they had sold they'd taken money for 240 million pounds worth of money for uh some tanks. But after the Iranian revolution, the Islamic revolution, the British just didn't deliver the tanks and held the money. So it was actually like a fair grievance, to be honest. But she was held until eventually that was agreed to be paid. So it was a very like naked bargaining chip thing.

And that was totally forefront of my mind. Like this is, you know, the amount of sanctions, the amount of, you know, things that Britain is doing at the moment to sort of hinder Russia and to aid Ukraine. Like I could be pretty useful. And then just as my flight was, you know, like about to take off, they suddenly said, right, pack everything up. And they ran me through the departures lounge, like at a run to the gate where they were clearly waiting for me. departures lounge like at a run um to the gate where they were clearly waiting for me um so i got on the plane um you know the last soldier was gone behind me the doors shut uh the plane took off and the minute those wheels took off i just broke down like i floods of tears it was the first time in the whole uh the whole like you know long month dude i'm freaking out you're here i know well like so this morning like you know i thought having this chat with you i should probably read

through my like diary because in prison I was allowed pen and paper. So on little scraps of paper, keeping them all sort of separate, I wrote what was happening day to day. And this morning I was reading through it and it got me on edge again. I was like freaking out because it just brought back that sense of insecurity. Being in this cell writing stuff, there are cameras in the ceiling. You're always watched. You never know who's watching. You never know who's going to next go and look through your stuff. It just scared the shit out of me.

Jesus Christ, man. Sorry, I think I relayed all that quite scatterly. No, it was amazing. It was great. It's hard to kind of tell it chronologically, I guess. It's kind of interesting. Oh, yeah. If you ever find yourself in prison and you need some dice, you can make them with bread and toothpaste for the dots.

Oh. This is bread? Oh, this is bread? Yeah, this is bread. If you take the crust off and just kind of knead the flesh of the bread kind of back into dough, add a bit of water, it becomes quite sort of versatile. Although the one that we're looking at now with the six, it turns out that's kind of a bent die. That rolls a six pretty much every time. But the other ones were pretty equal and i had time to like with you know with each of them i rolled them like 300 times to like tally what they came up you know it's just anything to kill time so one of those

dice was almost perfectly fair one of them was all right the one with that six was not good and were you gambling with people no not gambling i mean we had so i was the only one who didn't smoke um i'm a non-smoker and two other guys in the cell smoking. It wasn't ideal. But this is the first two weeks when I had cellmates. They quickly ran out of cigarettes and started smoking tea. They would tear open tea bags and sprinkle the tea into a page ripped out of a Russian sort of pulp fiction novel, which was kind of desperate times for them. How bizarre.

No, we didn't gamble, but we made a drafts or checkers board using the kind of the paper toggle that you hold when you're dipping a teabag. There were two different colors of those. Tea and bread was about half the diet. So we got a bunch of those that we could use as drafts or checkers. And those guys, I don't actually know how to play backgammon, but they set up a backgammon board for themselves using dice. And, you know, you find ways to kill time.

But mostly it was books. Thankfully, a local friend and the lawyer that I hired were allowed to deliver me some English language books, which I, I mean, so I didn't get them immediately. So in the course of probably about 23 days, I tallied up. I read 7,000 pages plus of books, just, you know, just reading, I mean, whatever I could get hold of, some of which wasn't great. Some was fantastic. I did a lot of sort of sit-ups and push-ups. My last day I did 700 sit-ups, which,

I mean, it's all gone now, you know, I've been back and I've been living, living well slash badly since I got home. But yeah, just anything to kill time. Well, no one can fault you for that. God damn, man. That must have been a harrowing experience. Do you still have nightmares about it? I've never had nightmares about it, but I have had once or twice since I got back when I've woken up sort of thinking that I'm still there.

Which, I mean, when I was inside for the first week or so, I'd wake up every morning thinking I was elsewhere. And almost the most depressing thing was the first morning when I woke up and I wasn't at all surprised to be in this prison. You know, that was a bit shitty. But actually, I don't really dream. I very rarely remember any dreams slash nightmares. So thankfully, that hasn't been a problem.

I think I'm more or less all right. Maybe I'm, I mean, I'm very British. I'm probably just like compacting all my trauma and burying it. I also spent 10 years at boarding school, which was quite good training for prison, I guess. And had just been, you know, living outdoors in, you know, super cold temperatures for a while. So I guess the novelty of being inside with like running water and, um, you know, food bought to you, even though it wasn't great food. Um, you know, like I, I think I was quite good at trying to see the bright side and I put myself through quite a lot of stresses in the past.

And so I'm probably fairly resilient to things like this, but it's definitely left a mark. And, you know, I'm sure I'll be, I mean, it's recent. I got out like three weeks ago and I'm still, I guess, sort of picking over it in my mind. Have you started to write about it? I wrote an article for the Sunday Times that went out about a week ago. And that was a really good sort of cathartic process, like going through it all, reading over stuff, and just trying to like process it formally as opposed to just vague thoughts drifting about. But I will start shortly work on a book about it, about the whole trip, not just about this

time in prison, because frankly, the prison time, it's quite dramatic, but it was largely just very boring, frightening, and frustrating. Was it disturbing seeing the effectiveness of the propaganda on the populace? I mean, that seems to be... The most disturbing thing. Yeah. After about 10 days, a TV was put into our cell, which for about 30 seconds, I thought, this is great, you know, something to distract. And then I immediately realized this is going to be blaring loud crap Russian TV shows around the clock. And it very quickly started to drive me mad.

I was very glad to then a few days later be put in a cell by myself. But that meant that I had daily access to the propaganda when the war was sort of three weeks, sorry, three months in. And I mean, it's insane. They're obsessed with this idea that it's, well, you know, the government has sold this idea, the Kremlin, that it's liberating people from Nazism. And I think that's because, you know, throughout the whole Soviet era, the Soviet state's founding myth was the Bolshevik Revolution. and that slowly changed because i mean i think um putin is slowly kind of removing len or sort of diminishing lenin's reputation he's actually starting to try and sort of rehabilitate stalin's reputation which is astounding frankly um but the founding myth essentially myth's not fair the founding story story of the Russian Federation now is basically the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War, as they call it, in which so many millions

of Russians died. How is he trying to rehabilitate Stalin's image? Just, I mean, in Russia, you can rewrite the history books. It's that simple. And they don't have general access to the internet, right? The internet is heavily censored, and's that simple. And they don't have general access to the internet, right? The internet is heavily sort of censored, and more and more. You know, when I arrived, there was still Instagram and Twitter and whatever. And as soon as the invasion happened, they cut Twitter.

They cut or just severely restricted the bandwidth to, I think, Instagram. But lots of people have VPNs. They find ways around it. Are VPNs effective in that regard? Can you use them? I didn't use them, but I But lots of people have VPNs. They find ways around it. Are VPNs effective in that regard? Can you use them? I didn't use them, but I saw loads of people using them. I think, I mean, they're always effective.

For people who don't know what we're talking about, virtual private network. Yeah. You can use them to pretend you're in a different country. You can use them to access different parts of the internet that might be restricted.

Exactly. But yeah, so the Second World War is this kind of foundational story. So many millions of people died. And it's the great triumph of Russia to have been so instrumental in defeating the Nazis. And Russia was incredibly instrumental. The Eastern Front, the war back then for Ukraine in particular, Stalingrad, you know, this was this was like untold numbers of deaths, you know, way out numbers, the Western Front, even with the Dunkirk, the D-Day landings and stuff. And so Russia sees, you know, its noble defeat of Nazism and oppression and fascism as its kind of almost its national raison d'etre, its reason to be. And the news was just covered in like grainy old footage from the Second World War. And they had got a few little clips from, are you aware of the Azov Battalion? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Those are the Nazis.

But it's a different kind of, the concept of Nazism is different, right? Yeah. It's more of a nationalism than it is like an anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic Nazism. Yeah. And I mean, I'm definitely not an expert. Am I right about that? Yeah, yeah. That's pretty much it. But I mean, that was the Azov battalion's roots, at least. And I guess sort of white nationalism. Are they using swastikas? They've got their own sort of take on it. It's a slightly swastika-esque symbol, I guess. What is it? Can we see what that looks like? It's kind of a yellow and black type symbol, I think.

But how is it correlated with Nazism? So, well, the Azov Battalion's roots, and you'll probably be able to pull up better information than I'm able to sort of summon from my slightly sketchy memory, but their roots were a while ago, and they did have this kind of line of extremism, I guess. But that's changed a lot. So there it is. I mean, there's definitely a swastika inspiration to that.

Yeah, similar. But they've... It also looks like when they find utilities. You know, like when they draw that thing on the street? Oh, yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Gas works. Yeah, when they spray paint lines in the street

where the lines are. Also, you flip it on its side and it's a Z. Yeah, right. But I think I'm right in saying that with the invasion, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Azov Battalion sort of broadened and other people joined. And that kind of element was constricted and had a diminishing role. you know, constricted and became, you know, had a diminishing role. However, there is out there online from a long time ago, sort of plenty of Azar battalion propaganda, people marching.

There's the odd sort of Sieg Heil, Hitler saluting. And that stuff has all been dredged up and it's just put all over the place, as well as other footage, kind of grainy, you know, video phone film footage that claims to be, but I'm pretty sure wasn't, members of the Azov battalion just beating up strangers on the street, kind of random violent attacks. But they just ram all this down the throats of the public and

it does seem like the vast, I mean, after Putin invaded, his popularity within Russia soared. Really? Yeah. I think there's been some changes there. There have been a few Like the vast, I mean, after Putin invaded, his popularity within Russia soared. Yeah. I think there's been some changes there. There have been a few brief high profile people speaking out, but they quickly get suppressed or arrested or whatever. And there were initially protests across the country. But in the first like two or three days of the war, something like 15,000 people were arrested.

And so quickly dissent got kind of quashed. were arrested. And so quickly dissent got kind of quashed. And in my admittedly limited experience of an admittedly niche, far remote part of Russia, it seemed like plenty of people, and I, you know, I had to be very careful about generalizations here, but it seemed like plenty of people either realize that it's just, it's bullshit and they're being lied to, or were, you know, had their doubts. It's just, understandably, they're being lied to or were you know had their doubts it's just understandably no one's putting their head above the parapet and saying this because there's no there's nothing to gain right you know if you speak out you're going to get in trouble or your family are going to get in trouble and trouble can mean years in prison or in

basically the gulag they've still got labor camps you know labor prisons penal colonies they call them dotted around the country um and so you, people understand we are just keeping their heads down and getting on with life. And it's been weird since coming back because, you know, I had, and to some extent still have, this massive hole in my knowledge of what's going on with the war because I didn't have, you know, phone service while I was out in the wild. And then very quickly,

I was even in Tixi, there was no Wi-Fi anywhere. And very quickly, I was suddenly banged up in a prison without access, you know, brief phone calls to try and manage my, you know, my appeal or logistics, whatever, but never any looking at the news. And getting out, it's been very interesting seeing this kind of, firstly, the incredible and totally worthwhile noble you know support of Ukraine and it's been great to see that at a public level at a state level and you know long may that continue and maybe we'll talk a bit about the future in a minute but also there's this slightly worrying kind of general Russophobia that has me a little bit uncomfortable because at the beginning of the war it was very much billed in Western media at least as one man's mad war,

Putin's crazy sort of crusade to try and write himself in the history books and claim back what he saw as Russian lands. And slowly that narrative seems to have changed to the point where with some of the – I mean there's companies who – I mean I think McDonald's, for for instance leaving russia i think that's the right thing to do and just two days ago all the mcdonald's restaurants were reopened under the new branding which is which is uh tasty and that's it which is that's the new name yeah so they just basically took their mcdonald's stores selling all the same shit just the same thing thing. The secret ingredients won't be there. But then there's also just like Russian people or companies that have no connection to the state.

It seems have been experiencing quite a lot of hardship as well. Russian athletes. Yeah, particularly. I mean, Wimbledon is a very good example. I totally disagree with the idea of Russian tennis players being banned from playing at Wimbledon. And I think it's right that Wimbledon is not counting as a sort of a tennis rankings tournament this year. There was criticism of Canelo Alvarez boxing against Bivol. Right.

These are athletes. The Olympics is slightly different when you're representing your country and there's a sort of state-sponsored doping program that's been going on for years but like tennis players who are individuals you don't play tennis for your country you play tennis for yourself you don't box for your country unless it's rocky four yeah box for yourself um and i i i have a slight i don't feel good about some of these sort of things that are that are happening yeah i share that concern, it's actually made its all its way into billiards There's a man named Fedor Gorst who's a top-level pool player and there's people that want him banned from tournaments I mean, that's that just seems vindictive frankly, it just seems if you're if you're If you're just a Russian sports person who's keeping their head down

That that's not fair. If you're someone who's, like, you know, up the regime, this is great, let's go, good old Putin. Like, there was some male Russian gymnast recently, I think, who used a podium place to, you know, to perform a letter Z or something, I'm not entirely sure. Yeah, that's a bit different. People sharing sort of public support and essentially, you know, repeating propaganda.

That's a different thing. But if you're just a sports person then i think it's it's not it's not really right well it's fascinating how many athletes come out of ukraine how many great boxers have come out of ukraine the klitschko brothers of course one of them is the mayor which is really insane yeah and um also um you know uh lomachenko there's's quite a few elite boxers. It's a massive country as well. It's like 45 million people or something. I think for a long time we kind of chose to forget just how large and important Ukraine is,

particularly with grain and all the exports, chemical exports, nuclear power, all these things that they produce and farm and whatever there, as well as human exports. I think we're suddenly realizing how much of a powerhouse Ukraine is in its own right. So for the three weeks since you've been out, have you been playing catch up, trying to absorb as much media as possible and get a sort of an objective understanding of what's happening over there? Yeah, I've been I've been trying my best to. It is difficult with just checking the news because you tend to just get the latest developments.

And I'm sure there'll be things that, you know, over the coming months that come out that I had no idea about that was massive news for a day or two. You know, if I'd been in over the period that these two British and one Moroccan citizens were recently sentenced to death in Donetsk for having fought with the...

I mean, they were all in the Ukrainian forces before the invasion anyway, but they've been tried and found guilty and given the death sentence for being mercenaries. If something like that happened briefly while I was inside, then that news pops up and then disappears again quite quickly. And that's the stuff I might not know. But actually, the best solution to that I found is by trawling through podcasts from the period that I was in, podcasts from news outlets and, you know, various political discussion, whatever. And that's been quite a good way to sort of, you know, stop the gap. It seems like in your recovery from prison and dealing with just the

psychological stress and then absorbing all this information, I mean, that has to be taking up a gigantic portion of your life. Is it difficult to get back on track and to try to have a semblance of normalcy? Yeah. I mean, it's been a really flat-out time since I got back. Also, a bunch of friends are all getting married this summer, so I'm sort of darting around all over the place. I mean, this month I've literally got four weddings and a funeral. It's a busy time just socially as well. It's summer and it's nice to be out and to be normal again. God, it must be nice. But I also, I feel, I have to point out that although what happened to me was psychologically

quite frightening. Firstly, I was never like beaten or abused or starved or anything like that. You know, the soldiers were sometimes pricks, but that's not a big deal. Secondly, what's happened to me is, in the grand scheme of things, totally insignificant and irrelevant, and I've still got a home. I haven't been bombed. I haven't lost a family member.

Of course. You know, I think, if anything, I would like my experiences to highlight the extent to which Russia is gone as a functioning state. And we knew it wasn't a functioning democracy, but it's post-truth. You know, it's a state where it doesn't matter if something is a totally blatant lie.

You can be, I mean, Russian, I'm going to get this stat wrong. Jamie might be able to pull it up. But of cases that go to court in Russia, I think the latest statistic is 99.97 or 99.7 perhaps percent of cases end in a guilty verdict you know if you're accused of something in russia you are guilty that's it there's no there's no dispute um and and it's just it's not a country i mean i i would advise no one to go there you know like it's it's it's not safe to be

a foreigner particularly if you're from one of the kind of NATO or Western or EU countries. That is wild. It's just it's lost. As a country, it's lost. We're back to the kind of the bad old days. I was there was discussion about fights taking place in Russia. And I think we might have done a UFC in Moscow. I think we did.

I think there was a UFC in Moscow. See if that's the case. UFC in Moscow. I think we did. I think there was a UFC in Moscow. See if that's the case. UFC's huge. Yeah. Yeah, well, they had one of the greatest heavyweight champions ever in Fyodor Emelianenko. Yeah, Fight Night 163.

Yeah, Zabit. Yeah, Zabit Magomed Shapirov, who's one of the top flight guys. Sharapov, excuse me. I always fuck his name up. Magomed Sharirov, who's one of the top flight guys. Sharapov, excuse me. I always fuck his name up. Magomed Sharapov versus Calvin Keter, which is a great fight that took place in Russia. So this was, when was this?

2019, yeah. Did you go over for that? I did not. I don't do the fight nights, but there was discussion of doing a major event over there. And whenever there's a major event, I get tempted to going just to see. There's a few places I've never experienced. I've never experienced Moscow, and I think the architecture is spectacular,

and I'd be interested in just seeing what it's like over there. Unfortunately, you'd be an absolute gift to the authorities. I would recommend... To arrest me? Yeah. I suppose you're publicly an advocate of substances that are very much banned in Russia. Oh yeah, all of them. And they will swab

every inch of you. They'll find some stuff, I'm sure, just testing me. Or they'll just say they found some stuff. That's the thing, it doesn't have to be true. That's what I've heard about this basketball player woman, Brittany Griner, that they believe that they might have even planted these things or lied about what's in there. I don't have any desire to go over there now,

but back then I was tempted because I'm just curious about the experience of going to these places. It is a fascinating place, and it's got an incredible history. And I think the history is what has drawn me there a lot. I've been a few times in the last few years. And, I mean, it's basically a morbid curiosity. Like Russia's history is just a relentless parade of shit. Like it's just the, you know, the deaths are counted by the sort of vague estimated millions as opposed to, you know, precise numbers.

You know, it's just – it's been – it's scored more own goals in history than any other country, surely. You know, they really have fucked themselves over a lot of times in a lot of ways. And this is frankly what I – What is the expression? What are you saying? Scored more what? Own goals. Oh, so in football, in soccer, you know, if you kick the ball in your goal by mistake right yeah yeah um and they i mean i think this is part of what i've

historically admired about russian people that i've met as well is that they are just incredibly stoical it's like they're almost born to suffer and just put up with crap in a very, like, staunch, almost admirable way. And I do find that, you know, admirable. And I can somewhat relate to it because I've, over the years, put myself through a lot of, you know, unnecessarily put myself through a lot of, like, difficult times. But I guess the feeling of kinship has faded somewhat. the feeling of kinship has faded somewhat. Yeah, I just, I wonder if at all,

if this is going to relax to the point where travel is going to be possible again. Well, that's the next thing, you know, like how long does this go on? I think years. You think years? Well, so the big question at the moment, Zelensky is, unfortunately, and in fact, I would like to say this now

because for months on the inside, I could never say it, Slava, Ukraine, victory to the Ukrainian people you know I'm totally behind them but Zelensky's in this impossible situation where it's going to be very very hard to completely defeat and repel the the Russian forces beyond you know out of the Donbass for instance this bit in the east that they've seized and and even the Crimea. But he has to politically say, I'm not giving up, I'm not making any concessions of land, you know, we fight until we restore our sort of sovereign borders of Ukraine. And if he were to make some peace deal with the Russians that conceded territory, he'd possibly be out of office straight away.

And that gives the chance for Moscow to try and insert a puppet candidate that's a problem but more importantly if you I mean with Russia we've seen this over the last 15 years now if you give them an inch they'll take a mile if if uh if you know the pushback isn't hard enough and they are allowed to occupy and set up their two puppet states in in the Donbass then they've got that. And next it'll be more of Ukraine or Estonia or Latvia or even Finland, although, you know, who knows. And it's, you know, where does it stop? And it has to stop somewhere, you know, making peace and allowing them to have some of the territory of Ukraine is pausing rather than solving the problem. And I feel like it's better off just fixing this problem now,

but it's going to be a long, grinding, unpleasant solution, and who knows how long it will take or what the outcome will be. I'm not farsighted. I'm not clairvoyant. Nobody seems to have a real clear understanding of how this could ever possibly play out in a positive way. Yeah. I mean, there are people who, and I don't know entirely if I agree with this, but there are certain commentators who are saying that the war in Ukraine grinding on for a long time is from the kind of NATO perspective, sort of the ideal scenario, because Russia

just gets weakened. I mean, the tens of thousands of troops they've lost, no one knows. It's an official secret. No one in Russia knows. But, you know, they are losing so many people, so much hardware. I mean, their economy is actually doing fine because, you know, all the price of export

of natural, you know, fossil fuels is shot up and they're still exporting just as much as they ever have. So they're actually not feeling economically that much strain yet. But that's to come, I think. But, you know, the longer it goes on, the more weakened Russia becomes. And that's sort of, you know, ideal from the view, the standpoint of the opponents of Russia. But I mean, it's just,

it's just, it's horrific for the Ukrainian people who essentially are the sort of cannon fodder to, you know, to that end. And there's always the looming threat that he uses a nuke. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. I mean, that's the fault with nuclear weapons in the first place. You know, it doesn't make sense. But he probably just about is mad enough. And everyone thought that he was, like, bluffing this whole time. But it does seem like he's genuinely mad.

And if he, I mean, a lot of people, there's a lot of sort of conspiracy theory around, I suppose, about his health and perhaps he's got mad and if he i mean a lot of people uh there's a lot of sort of conspiracy theory around i suppose about his health and perhaps he's got you know bone cancer well oliver stone said that he was being treated for cancer when he went to visit him and have interviews with him with which was a few years ago right oliver was over there and he did you ever see that he showed him dr strange love yeahangelove? Yeah, which is wild, right? Because Dr. Strangelove is all about a bunch of mad people deciding to use the bomb and conceding that we'll lose a couple million here or there, but it's no big deal.

And essentially was about real discussions that were being had during the 1950s and 60s by Several generals who thought it would be a good idea to preemptively attack Russia and preemptively attack China and with nuclear weapons what was Putin's take on this film? Do we know I don't I mean Oliver Stone was on here and he talked about it We actually watched we looked at photographs of him and videos of him showing the Dr. Strangelove film to Putin. And, you know, I think he was probably paying lip service to the dangers of nuclear weapons and this and that. But, you know, he's already used hypersonic weapons. And I think in many ways that. And those hyperbaric ones that sucks all the oxygen out of the city.

I mean, it's horrific. Yeah, it's horrific. Yeah, it's horrific. But I mean, if, if, if he was mad enough to, to begin this invasion, which, I mean, there's no, there's no logic to it. Right. And there's no, there's no, whatever outcome, he still loses. Right. Like, like Russia has, has, you know, massively isolated itself and, you know, it's, it's

for the prosperity of Russia as a whole and its kind of integration. I know that China is still kind of there on the fence, but, you know, if you put together the kind of the European bloc and America and Canada and all these other countries who are on the sort of the liberal side, you know, that's much more important, you know, economically. Russia has totally shot itself in the foot. And so he is clearly mad enough to make a move that stupid. So potentially thinks that Putin wants to have a legacy of benefiting Russia.

And that if he does die, and if he is dying, that he wants to have something in his legacy that shows that he was of benefit to Russia, that he's very committed to this idea of his legacy. I think he probably only sees that in territorial terms. So four or five days ago was the 350th birthday of Peter the Great, who was a Romanov czar who massively expanded Russia's territory. And Putin said in a sort of public celebration and speech, he said, you know, I see myself as picking up where Peter left off in reclaiming Russian territory I mean Peter conquered Finland from the Swedes so the Finns must be terrified but but I think I genuinely think he sees it as

restoring Russia to its greatest extent which was was the Soviet Empire. And lots of people within Russia, normal people, think that, you know, the Ukrainians, the Latvians, the Uzbeks, all these people are their kind of national brethren and that they belong under the mantle of Russia. That's what's terrifying, right? That there's a precedent. Yeah. That there's some sort of a rationalization for him acquiring these countries again. But, I mean, Russia is in itself a massive imperial project. You know, it's an empire. precedent. There's some sort of a rationalization for him acquiring these countries again. But I mean, Russia is in itself a massive imperial project. You know, it's an empire,

it's still an empire today. You know, where I was has no right being ruled by Moscow. It doesn't really make any sense. And I mean, he's picked his time, you know, the greatest extent of Russian empire. That's where it should be again. But I mean, one of the, I think possibly the Kenyan prime minister or foreign minister, or no, think it was the Kenya's ambassador to the UN a few weeks ago said, look, you know, we can't all just hark back to some colonial era. And, you know, Kenya could dispute borders with Tanzania or Britain could suddenly go mad again and say, we want to paint the map pink and, you know, reconquer all the world. And it's totally, you know, it's just a failed project. But, you know, he's not going to listen to that yeah and also there's a fear that china is watching this and contemplating whether or not to invade taiwan yeah yeah i mean we've already seen hong kong lost in the last couple of years that's i mean as far as i'm completely lost yeah gone from being European ruled in the 1990s and to kind of mostly maintaining that sort of tradition

and now recently gone full totalitarianism. Well, the deal on the handover in 97 was that the laws and the autonomy of Hong Kong remains inviolate for 50 years after the handover. So that would be 2047, but it's already gone. You know, they've upped the timetable yeah and you know it's not with china and taiwan i fear it's not a case of if it's a case of when thankfully the the west's reaction to you know they haven't just turned a blind eye to ukraine and so china probably will be thinking you know this is not going to be easy the world's not just going to roll over and let us conquer Taiwan, which is, you know, one of the world's most sort of healthy functioning democracies.

Yeah. Yeah, I've read there was some speculation about China economically divesting in the West and that they're going to liquidate assets and they're doing this so that to mitigate the amount of impact it would have if they're sanctioned liquidate assets and they're doing this so that to mitigate the amount of impact it would have if they're sanctioned for invading Taiwan. I hadn't heard that. That's very worrying. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was reading about that, but I don't understand economics enough to really speculate whether or not that's accurate or whether or not this person has a valid point. It's just the whole thing is so tense. And it didn't, five years ago, there was no fear at all. Five years ago, it was like,

everything was like, look at this 2019 event that they were having in Moscow, where I was like, ooh, maybe I'd like to go there. Maybe that'd be interesting. You know, I'm just fascinated in the architecture. You know, when you look in Moscow, like the metro in particular, each metro station is like an artwork. It's like a, you like a sort of a totally different architecture in each one. They're really, really impressive. It's also so unique. Like their architecture is so uniquely Russian. Yeah.

Like when you look at what's going, like just the colors and the beautiful buildings in Moscow. And sort of 19th century. I know now we build bigger buildings. But from a 19th century perspective, monumental architecture, huge buildings, big, long, organized project streets that are, yeah, I mean, look at this. It's incredible. Look at that. That's incredible. And each station is totally different. You know, they are really, really impressive.

Well, they're such impressive people. I mean, what they've done with chess, what they've done with literature, what they've done with particularly with martial arts. I mean, they have some of the most dominant fighters in the history of the sport have come out of Russia, particularly in MMA. But in boxing as well and wrestling. I mean, there's just so many incredible athletes that have come out of that system. And obviously there's a intense amount of corruption and cheating involved too have you ever seen the documentary Icarus yeah it was just a great um great documentary to just to understand the extent of their cheating in

international competition yeah it's I mean it's also a massive population. I think about 144 million people. And although it's, I mean, their national average income is pretty woeful. You know, it's, I think, you know, the now outmoded terms, first world and third world. The second world was the Soviet Union. I didn't know that until recently. So they're kind of, they're neither here nor there. And that's still sort of the case. And of course, you've got the incredible wealth of kind of oligarchs and the kind of kleptocracy in Moscow. But I mean, the vast majority of Russian people don't have a great deal. You know, they really aren't very wealthy,

but they are very literate. They're relatively wellated, even if some of the history they're taught is total cobblers. And so they have an incredibly large population from which to excel at all sorts of things, science as well. I wanted to talk to you about the oligarchs, because one of the things that I found fascinating about this, and I have all sorts of questions is once they started taking yachts in real estate away from the like, I didn't totally understand why a they were able to do that or be why everybody was in support of that. Like, is there a direct connection between these oligarchs and either supporting Putin or financing Putin? I think, and again, I'm not totally across this, but my understanding is that you basically can't be an oligarch in Russia unless you have Putin's blessing. There have been various, as Putin came to power and then slowly became more powerful,

there are various oligarchs who sort of tried to rival him tried to rival him for power, you know, Berezovsky, there's Media Modal, there were a few, and they were slowly just kind of removed or defeated. And so the idea is that if you're an oligarch, you probably have the blessing of Putin. And therefore, potentially, your wealth might be at his disposal, or you're in his pocket. I mean, also, frankly, people who are multi-billionaires in Russia, it's a corrupt state. No one's making that money completely legitimately. And there's that element. But with seizing it and who's having their assets seized it does seem

quite complicated and it does seem like they just spread quite a wide net to start off with but again this was happening while I was kind of out of the loop so I'm not all that keyed in I'm quickly gonna run to the toilet yeah the restroom we could wrap this up unless you want to keep going keep going up to you I'm easy do you have more to talk about? I bet you do. Go take a leak. All right.

All right. We'll see you in a couple of minutes. I guess the one thing that we haven't spoken about that we could is Papua New Guinea, where I've probably the most bizarre country I've ever been to. Did you experience any cannibalism? I met people who remembered those times, but cannibalism, it seems, is gone now. Yeah? Sort of since the 70s, really. What about the semen warriors?

Semen warriors? You don't know about that? I'd like to hear about that. Oh, my goodness. One of the most bizarre practices that I've read about from New Guinea is the ritual abuse of young boys. abuse of young boys they get at an early age taken in by older men and they're told that in order to grow strong they need the semen of older men and they ingest it orally and anally see if you can find this and there this has been going on for i mean don't know how long, but it's one of the most bizarre practices because it's like a ritualistic abuse and sexual abuse of young boys. Samian tribes write a passage that requires young boys to drink semen if they want to transition to adulthood.

And it's not just semen drinking it's like they they call the father like they call them anal fathers it's very strange stuff and according to the mail going yes according to demands of this custom seem is thought to have some sort of a masculine spirit and young boys can only possess the spirit by drinking it. It's a custom believed to be a huge proof of masculinity and strength. Over the years, different meanings have been ascribed to the semen ritual. Some people have even tagged it as a form of ritualized homosexuality. Usually the young lads are not allowed to make a voluntary decision,

but are simply threatened by the older men to partake in various activities in an effort to prove their masculinity. I mean, a lot of cultures do some weird shit for rites of passage. That's out there. This is fucking out there. And they take them in very young. I mean, they take them in when they're like six years old. There's also, I mean, they used to have the, and this thankfully is gone now, but they used to have the custom, you know, just sort of headhunters.

And your basically rite of passage is to kill another man, which I think is, I mean, as bizarre as this is, I think that's kind of even weirder because this is pretty fucked up. It's relatively low stakes, although I guess there's quite a lot of psychological harm potentially. But I mean, this doesn't, I mean, it shocks me, but it doesn't hugely surprise me. Stop scrolling.

Stop. Scroll back. Read this here. After the boys were removed from their mothers, they're then flogged with long sticks during a blood letting ceremony. The elders kickstart the blood purification ritual

by inserting two canes in the nostrils of the new initiates until they vomit blood. Each boy is held against a tree and sticks and sharp grasses are shoved up his nose. During the process, the elders continuously poke the throats of the boys

with an arrow-like object until they vomit any contaminating influence within them. Once the nose poking is done, the blood starts falling from the nose. The elders make a collective war cry. This is then followed by more beatings with the aim of toughening the boys so they could be powerful warriors. While a lot of the people would view the nose poking as extremely painful and intrusive exercise, the Samvias see it as a display of endurance and strength. Once the bloodletting ceremony is over, the young boys are made to perform fellatio on the older boys. After ingesting the semen, also known as male milk, it is expected that it will help the boys grow stronger

due to the presence of a substance called gerundu within it. Apart from taking in semen, the new initiates are forced to observe a strict diet that will give them strength. If you scroll back where we were before, though, it talks about the mothers. Until the blowjobs, this kind of sounded like a Spartan take on an ayahuasca ceremony.

Right, but it's also like they're removed from their mothers because they've, okay, scroll up, keep going up there. Yeah, the reason for detaching the boys is because the tribe considers the blood of women to be unclean. That's really common, like worldwide. Hence, the lads are separated from their mothers and any other females so their blood won't be contaminated as they mature into adulthood. The semen-drinking custom is in different stages.

The initial stage, as soon as the young Sambia boys turn age 7 or 9, they're instantly taken from their mothers as a form of detachment this is fucking wild shit i mean there's there's a lot of crazy shit out there i mean they still have um it's sort of as a mark of mourning if a you know family member dies people cut off the tip of a finger and so you get up into some of the more remote parts of the highlands you meet someone you shake their hand and they might have only sort of one full finger left oh it's also hard to tell because everyone's got these, you know, sort of 18-inch machete blades that they use for everything.

I think some just get lost, you know, sort of by mistake. Though it's just the most, I mean, the country is so geographically broken, you know, like the terrain is so inhospitable, so hard to travel through, that they've developed all these very, very quirky customs because all the tribes are in such isolation. I mean, their country has something like 750 languages. Wow. They nowadays communicate largely just with Pidgin English,

or Tokpijin, as they call it, which is a sort of a broken English, kind of bastardized, simple English. But before that, you know, the tribes, you might have one tribe that's living in one valley and two miles away in another valley for hundreds of years, there's another tribe and they've never had any contact with each other. So they develop different languages, different customs, different faith, religions, everything. And it's like that across the country, particularly up in the highlands. The river deltas are a bit different. But I mean mean the highlands are thought to be uninhabited until the

1930s and then this um these these australian brothers these gold prospectors flew over the interior in a light aircraft for the first time and they looked down and they saw valleys with clear signs of habitation so they mounted an expedition and over weeks marched up into the interior with you know dozens of porters. And they found about a million people living there. It's just kind of lost Stone Age peoples that most of them didn't know they were on an island with a coast on which people lived, let alone a huge world beyond that with all sorts of other people. One of the three Australian brothers, two of them ended up staying and living in PNG.

One of them married three, I think maybe sisters, but three women who were tribal princesses. an Irish emigre Australian gold prospector in the 30s who's from this massive outside interconnected world suddenly going up and marrying people from a civilization that had no smelting, they just had stone tools, no writing, no literature. And one of those marriages had several children. I met one of those guys, this guy who's the product of, the son of these two totally disparate worlds, this kind of clash of civilizations

which i found so interesting what was he like he was great bernie a really nice guy he's kind of uh he manages a coffee plantation in a town called hagen up in the highlands really sound dude i got to hang out with him a bit got to know him well and he's just a just a nice sort of normal guy um i suppose because his mother was a princess he's sort of kind of a senior within the tribe, but at the same time kind of half foreigner and half outsider. So he's sort of between the two worlds as well. Do you still have contact with his father? His father passed away.

There's a really good documentary called First Contact, 80s documentary. It's on YouTube. It's part of a trilogy, the Black Harvest trilogy. But First Contact is interviews with these three brothers, by which point they're already quite old. But on their first encounter, getting up into the highlands, these people they met, there's footage, there's photos from this unique encounter in the 1930s. Really, really interesting. This is not the same place where there's a tribe there where they have these, they've made models of airplanes that they worship.

The cargo cults, those I believe, I mean, it's that part of the world. I don't think it's Papua New Guinea. It could be potentially part of some of the Solomon Islands. It might be some small Filipino islands. I'm not entirely sure. I know what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. They would see these planes and think that they were gods. So they've recreated them. They've recreated them out of like sticks. Yeah. They had like bamboo radio control towers and like bamboo radios that obviously don't work. They're just bamboos. Yeah, but I've read about that a long time ago. I can't remember the details that well.

But yeah, that was pretty cool. How fascinating that in the 1930s they were able to find these Stone Age tribes there. Well, it makes you think, I mean, there are still rumors that in Papua New Guinea there might still be uncontacted tribes. Like in the Amazon, there's still a few dozen uncontacted tribes. But I believe most of them sort of know there's a world out there, but the Brazilian, largely government, sort of protects them

and keeps them in isolation as much as anything because they're just vulnerable to disease perhaps. But then the one, I think, the most astounding kind of lost tribe is the North Sentinelese. You're aware of these guys. And every now and again, someone marches out with a Bible. That's where the missionary Sentinelese. You're aware of these guys. And every now and again someone marches out with a Bible. That's where the missionary, yeah. Do you know who Commander Maurice Vidal Portman is?

No. He's a famous British explorer slash pervert who went to visit those people. And he's probably responsible for their hostility towards outsiders in a lot of ways. Because this guy would go there and dress them up in weird outfits and measure their dicks and shit. That was North Cincinnati?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are there pictures of him? He was on neighboring islands, but I mean, I think they got wind of this character. Yeah, there's pictures of him, and there's pictures of natives dressed up like Roman soldiers and stuff. He would do weird shit with them, and he would comment on the size of their penises and testicles, so he was Roman soldiers and stuff. He would do weird shit with them, and he would comment on the size of their penises and testicles, so he was measuring them and stuff.

He was clearly some fucking weirdo who was involved in some very strange shit, and he was doing the awesome stuff, science and exploration. Yeah. I think he's one of the reasons why I think that the most recent missionary got murdered. Right. Because they probably have, they don't have a written language.

So they probably have these oral stories and these legends of these white dudes who show up and start measuring dicks and give everybody the flu. Yeah. Well, I think there's only a few dozen of them. And after the big tsunami back in 2003, 2002, 2003. After that, it was years before there were any signs of them seen again. So potentially they came close to destruction. Yeah, there's been a few boats that have been stranded

nearby and have barely gotten away before these people murdered them. Arrows and spears. Yeah, well there's only 39 of them that they've documented. They don't know how many there are there. They don't even think they have fire. They've got to have fire.

I don't know. I think there's some dispute as to whether or not they have fire. Well. Because, I mean, how wet is their climate? You know, I don't know. They do know that they have metal now. They seem to have fashioned knives and swords from the wreckage of one of the ships yeah yeah yeah that'd be interesting I mean I

have no intentions of marching in there what's just crazy it's wild the uncontacted people in this day and age is very strange I mean there are there's semi contacted people in the Amazon and it's just it's it's so interesting because you get essentially a window into 60,000 years ago with the the people in North Sentinel Island they the people that live there the direct descendants of people left Africa 60,000 years ago and landed on that island yeah there's there's interesting sort of because the the sort of Exodus is the wrong word I guess but the migrations out of Africa came in waves mmm and some of the sort of exodus is the wrong word, I guess, but the migrations out of Africa came in waves.

And some of the early people seem to have, you know, with their wave of migration headed all the way up, over, around, down, and into Melanesia. So the Aborigines and the New Guineans are from like a very, very ancient wave of migration. And everyone else came a lot later. But these people had already inhabited these, well, I guess, the two islands were one continent at that time the sea levels were lower but they had already sort of started existing in total isolation for i mean people the numbers get

disputed because they keep finding more things that pushes back the timeline but now they're looking it was for ages 40 000 years now they're looking at sort of 60 to 80 000 years just living you know totally isolated while, you know, the rest of the world was, I suppose, a more interconnected, you know, the human trade networks very quickly bought corners of the world into connection. I mean, it's only about, is it 12, 15,000 years ago that people crossed the Bering Strait to the Americas and the Americas were populated. I mean, that's kind of a blink of an eye compared to 80,000.

Well, I think people were here before that then now. Now they're pushing the timeline back of human beings in North America, which is really interesting. They're finding a lot of pre-Clovis evidence of civilizations, stone tools and all sorts of other things and fossilized remains. I read a book by someone who you had on this podcast a while ago whose name I'm going to forget, but you had him on with Randall Carson one time, and he's got... Graham Hancock? Graham Hancock, exactly.

And, I mean, some of his theories seemed a little tenuous, but some of them are fascinating, like evidence of civilizations being in places tens of thousands of years before anyone's thought. And, I mean, it was through that podcast record that I was first introduced to Gobekli Tepe. And it's just incredible how, I guess, with new archaeological techniques, new scanning, new LIDAR,

just the books are being totally rewritten on a kind of yearly basis. Yeah, well, they're all a proponent now of the... The two of those guys together is a really fascinating combination because they're proponents of the Younger Dryas impact theory. And there's a lot of physical evidence that points to that. And what that Younger Dryas impact theory is, is that there was a certain time somewhere between, there's multiple times, but it started around 12,000 years ago there was impacts and the impacts uh from asteroid impacts reversed an ice age or yeah it stopped the ice age it killed the ice age and and and probably um did it very quickly and the impacts randall carlson has some really fascinating physical evidence that points to it first of all core

samples when they go to core samples and they go to 12,000 years ago, there's direct evidence of iridium, large amounts of iridium, which is very common in space and very rare on Earth. Also, nuclear glass. Trinitite, I think it's called, and it's named after the Trinity, the first nuclear bomb experiments. Right. after the Trinity, the first nuclear bomb experiments. Right. And that they detect this glass that happens when they detonate a nuclear bomb, but also happens on impacts of comets and asteroids.

And that this stuff is all over the place at that same- Sort of like obsidian, that kind of- Yes, yes. And this stuff is all, it's sort of like that, but it's directly caused by impacts. But this stuff all exists in this time period of 12,000 years ago. And then again, somewhere, they believe somewhere 11 or 10,000 years ago. So most likely what they're supposing, what the theory is, is that there was probably a very advanced civilization that created things like Gobekli Tepe, and there's even some theories about the old kingdom of Egypt, that there was some very sophisticated architecture and construction methods that date back far beyond what we think of. When we think of the Great Pyramid of Giza, they believe it's 2,500

years old, but he thinks that it's very possible that was even earlier than that. And there's also some physical evidence that was uncovered by geologist Robert Schock from Boston University, where he points to the water erosion around the Temple of the Sphinx that shows signs of thousands of years of rainfall. I remember that. Yeah. And the problem with that is the last time there was real rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9,000 years ago. And that the whole area back then used to be a rainforest.

And that, so he's like, you have to go at least that far back, but probably thousands of years before that, because you need thousands of years of rainfall to develop these deep fissures in the stone structure. There's like grooves. Yeah. They don't indicate erosion by sand and wind. The problem is archaeologists and people who have been teaching in universities and writing books about the history of these people are very reluctant to accept this new information, even though it's like, you know, when you're talking about geology,

when you're talking about, like, clear evidence of water erosion, like, this is, like, rock-solid stuff. This is not, like... Yeah, there's, like, a knock-on effect as well, I suppose. You know, if you admit that one thing is significantly older or it was formed in a different way or in a different place to something else, then that just knocks everything else out of whack, and you've basically got to start your entire archaeological process again, which I guess

is why you get, you know, wrongly, because that's not the scientific method, but you get resistance to these new ideas. It's very unfortunate when you see the resistance too, because it's so clearly ego-based. I've seen people argue against it and they get really angry and they start insulting and add homonyms. And it's really weird because the the real the one that you can't fuck with is gobekli tepe because gobekli tepe was purposely covered somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 years ago and They know that for a fact they've they've tested all the soil around it and they're in the middle of Excavating that site and it's an immense site with these enormous stone columns and 3D animals carved on the columns, which indicate that they weren't carved into the columns.

The columns were carved around to create these 3D animals, which is really sophisticated stuff. And it's more than 12,000 years old. It was covered up. And so they think it was like a deliberate time capsule to preserve... They don't know. I think that was Graham's theory. Yeah, it's more than 12,000 years old. It was covered up. And so they think it was like a deliberate time capsule to preserve. They don't know. I think that was Graham's theory. Yeah, it's his theory.

To preserve, you know, in the, what's the whole, you know, the antediluvian, you know, the flood myth that seems to, or story at least, that seems to be in so many different cultures. Yeah. But that's, I think, that ties in with Randall's idea of a huge wave of floods and the Ice Age stopping. Yeah. Well, that ending of the Ice Age, one of the things that they point to is the geographical

or the geological evidence, rather, all over North America that seemed to indicate massive amounts of water moving through areas radically and quickly changing the landscape. And Randall has some really

incredible evidence of that that he shows in the form of slides. And as you zoom out and you see the water evidence, it's really interesting stuff. Because we have this inclination to look at history. Okay, we've got that down. We've got it. This is it. And then upon new evidence, instead of going oh maybe we were wrong they just dig their heels in and they say no i read a wrote a book on this i made my thesis about this this is fact

well i think that's exactly the same even with modern human history we're really resistant to kind of think that the way we i mean there's the last few years a lot in britain i don't know how much about in in the u.s but there's been a big discussion about how we view and teach our history you know of the british empire for example of colonialism because when i was growing up we were taught that like britain conquered the world and brought civilization to all the you know the noble savages you know and it was it was totally insane and it's only just about now and particularly some or two years ago with the debate about statues and should we really learn our history from statues or should we learn it from you know books and reassessing facts and

you know should we have statues you know commemorating people who maybe did horrific things but all these you know these sort of you know arguments debates and essentially culture war has brought to the fore this idea of you know we definitely need to sometimes reassess history and that can work both ways as well um but you you know, history isn't fact, whether it's the history of a landscape over tens of thousands of years or the history of a people over a century. And I think that's, you know, tying it neatly back in. That's what I find interesting with Russia, because Russia is able to recreate as convenient its history every 10 years or so in a cynical way, admittedly. But it shows that history is not a fixed, determinate thing.

Well, it's unfortunate we don't have like a real rock-solid history of the world. We have some really amazing evidence and some incredible work has been done by archaeologists and geologists and all these people that are trying to get a sense of it. But there's resistance to change. There's a resistance to accepting these alternative theories. Well, can you imagine trying to be a historian 200 or 300 years from now looking at this era, the amount of information that you have to sift through, some of which is bullshit, some of which is, you know, all of it will contradict each other. I mean, that's a headache, that task. You know, history is only going to get harder because there's just a,

you know, complete preponderance of information. There's a preponderance of information, but at least we have information. We have accurate footage, but, you know, that was only a short period that's now ending because now we don't know if footage is real. You know, there's deep fakes, there's all sorts, you know, the age of kind of, suppose empirical Media is is is kind of you know on its way out You know at least that you can be insured is empirical because from now on who knows what's what what's also interesting when you know For a long time they had no idea what happened to the Mayans You know and there they there was all these theories about them leaving what happened and now the the Predominant theory is they were killed by disease.

Smallpox. Yeah, which makes more sense than anything. I mean, I think it's now believed that after Europeans first arrived in the Americas, within, I think it was within 100 years, 90% of the population had died. Yes, from disease. Which is astounding. And they're only just now starting to find these traces of vast civilizations in the Amazon. I'm sure there'll be many more to come.

There are rock paintings appearing. There are, in one particular point, evidence of sort of ramps up to the Amazon on one side of the river and then down on the other, bridges that would have spanned hundreds of meters, huge, complex and quite advanced civilizations that just, in a jungle, if everyone dies, it'll grow over in no time at all. And it seems like a lot of people might have returned to a hunter-gathering,

subsistence life in the jungle from that. Because if there's a plague, plagues, plagues are usually in, you know, sort of pre-scientific times and even perhaps today are viewed by a lot of people as kind of divine retribution punishments. They flee the city, head to the, you know, back into the wild. And I'm sure plenty of people saw COVID at that for some time as well. COVID has that. Well, it's a lot worse than COVID, smallpox. But the other thing is the LIDAR evidence. Have you seen that stuff that they're using? It's just the big ring.

Cities were built in big circular shapes. Not just that, but grids that indicate irrigation and blocks of cities. And Graham Hancock talked about that as well on the podcast. And there's a great video that's available on YouTube where he discusses the potential population of the Amazon reaching as much as 20 million people at one point in time. That there's vast cities there. Did you also know that the Amazon itself was created by agriculture? That all that rainforest, most of those trees were a direct result of different trees

and different plants that people planted when there was a civilization. So it had been Savannah or Pampas or something? Well, it was just different. They're not exactly sure what it, you know, they used to think it was all natural. And now they don't think it's natural. Please pull up something about that. Now that there's direct evidence. Here it goes. evidence, while previously thought to have been an empty wilderness in pre-contact times,

it's become increasingly clear that the Amazon has, first, a deep and ancient pattern of human settlement dating back to 12,000 years ago, and second, that much of the Amazon jungle that we know today is, in fact, an anthropogenic, if you just click on that, there's actually better articles that detail it. Okay, here it goes. While previously thought to have been an empty wilderness, okay, the Amazon infers a deep and ancient pattern. Second, that much of the Amazon jungle we know

is in fact an anthropogenic landscape. That is, the Amazon has been modified extensively by indigenous populations for the past 12,000 years. The changes that the indigenous populations made in the Amazon rainforest in the past were nowhere near the level of intensive extractive we see going on in the massive deforestation burning today. Rather, indigenous populations increased the overall biodiversity and quality of the soil. This is not what I'm looking for. There's a better article that shows that most of the trees in the Amazon

were a result of agriculture. So that was sort of creating ecological diversity. And then when people died, it just overran. Yeah. And it overwhelmed what used to be these cities. You know, that's the whole legend of the lost city of Z, right? That book? Yeah, I read that.

It was great. There it is. Supposedly pristine, untouched Amazon rainforest was actually shaped by humans. Over thousands of years, native people play a strong role in molding the ecology of this vast wilderness. And this is from the Smithsonian, so it's a legitimate source. But there's a bunch of different trees that they point to that these people planted, and then these trees just overwhelmed the landscape

when all the people died off from the plague. And when they're using the LIDAR to go over these areas that they used to assume were just mounds, they're realizing, oh, this used to be structures, and there used to be people living in these areas. That's fascinating. It's wild stuff, man. Yeah.

Well, listen, Charlie, I'm glad you're alive. I'm glad you're not in a Russian prison and I'm glad I had a chance to talk to you. And these books

that you have out that are available right now, one is On Roads That Echo and the other is Through Sand and Snow. Did you do an audio version of these as well? Yeah, they're both on Audible, Kindle. Did you read it? one is on roads that echo and the other is through sand and snow did you do an audio version of these as well? yeah they're both on Audible did you read it?

I read it oh excellent I love hearing that yeah no they're out get a hold of them but thank you so much for having me on my pleasure it's been a lot of fun

and thanks to Jamie and you for having me here it's been awesome our pleasure thank you very much for coming and do you have social media that people can find you on as well? yeah I'm on Instagram and Twitter at CW Explore, like Charlie Walker, CW Explore. Explore.

Explore. There it is right there, CW Explore. And my website is cwexplore.com. Check it out. That's where I post most of my stuff. And I don't know what will be next yet, but that's the place to follow it. Well, when you come up with another one, let us know, and I'd love to sit down and do this again. That would be a pleasure.

And stay out of jail, buddy. Please. Thank you, Charlie. Cheers. All right. Bye, everybody.