[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercus center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at marcus.org for a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links visit conversations withth tyler.com hello everyone and welcome back to
conversation with Tyler today I am chatting with Paul salopek Paul is not here with me Paul where are you I am in Shi province in western China Paul is undertaking one of the most remarkable Feats I have heard of first of all he's an extremely well-known journalist a two-time Pitzer Prize winner you may have read his articles in the National
Geographic the Atlantic and many other Publications but since 2013 he has been embarking on what is called the out of Eden walk which is roughly a 15-year project 24,000 miles I call it walking around the world but it is starting in East Africa the Cradle of mankind and it will finish in Tiara del Fuego and as stated Paul currently is in western China Paul welcome Tyler it's good to be
here with you first question how do you take care of your feet I think I drew a lucky card on the genetics end on feet so the feet more or less take care of me I think I've gotten one or two blisters over the last nine or so years pretty Hardy feet I don't know where that came from so in the foot Department I'm I'm okay I don't really pay too much
attention to my feet to be honest that's amazing now where do you think your supply chain is most vulnerable so I travel a great deal sometimes I run out of things or they break then I have to get a new one what's the biggest supply chain problem you have I try Tyler to kind of live off the local economy as much as possible not out of any sense of
kind of you know intellectual virtue or economic virtue but simply because I I have to I'm walking and everything that I need to use I have to carry on my back so my supply chain I keep it as short as possible it's the local market and that includes everything from notepads to socks and everything in between probably the most tenuous line of Supply would be
maybe electronics for me to do my job a decent lightweight lap talk that you know has a lifespan of a few years given the bangs that it gets in a backpack while walking across continents Electronics configured to do immediate work would be the kind of the most dicey cargo that I carry but pretty much 99% of the rest is is local economy and you
do all this with a single backpack yeah it's it's kind of a ruck sack it's an old Canvas Bag well it's just kind of a one single canvas bag with some straps on it yeah keep it simple what kind of shoes do you use if I can get them that's another thing I wear Merill walking shoes here's kind of a free plug for the Merill company but the honest answer is I I wear whatever is available
anything from leather sandals to plastic gashes that are made in you know all over Turkish ones Chinese ones you name it sneakers pretty much everything why do you write a goodbye essay to each country when you're leaving it you know I don't know how that really started and I I don't do it for every country it's more using borders as a milestone kind of an
emotional Milestone even more than a geographical or political one a look back over the shoulder a glance back at the people that I met before move on into a new Polly so yeah I mean these are kind of small summing UPS along the way on a journey where my word there's just so much to sum up it's complicated and on a given day you're taking notes
or you remember it all Until the End how do you operate with assembling and collecting information yeah that's actually the hardest part of the project you know the walking you can get used to the walking you can train your body to become Adept at plotting out 25 or 30 km a day recording the experiences and and recording the encounters with the people
that I meet recording the personalities and the and the issues raised by my walking Partners which is crucial to the project is where the real heavy lifting happens and it happens in real time I always carry a notepad either on a string around my neck and a shirt pocket or tucked in a cargo pants pocket and jot things down all the time I of course record interviews as well I'm
oldfashioned I'm an analog guy I still take handn notes and then there are book journals I jot summary thoughts in the evenings before going to bed so it's kind of a layered recording experience and these are not uploaded to the cloud they're just physical items that you carry alas yeah I'm carrying about two and a half kilos of notebooks right now because I
generally want to get to a big enough logistical Hub that has reliable express delivery services that I do upload them to the cloud but the the notepads themselves are artifacts of the Walk they're very precious I also take thousands of photographs and many many hours of videos on my phone it's a multimedia project that material gets uploaded in the cloud
instantaneously how do you choose your walking Partners complicated often Word of Mouth there might be somebody in Kazakhstan who I've made friends with who's walked across Western Kazakhstan with me who might know somebody who knows somebody over the Border in usbekistan and that's generally how it works it's only once have I actually had to kind of go out on
the open market and post you know a job opening if you were for a walking partner say in a in a chat room most of it is connections with the people that I'm already walking with and in that sense it's quite nice because it kind of forms links in a chain of of relationships that touch each other all the way across continents it's kind of
nice and these are other walkers so to speak typically or it could be anyone it could be a carpenter or dentist or there people who have their own walking projects very rarely people who have their own walking projects when I do bump into people like that it's wonderful right because we speak the same language I walked with a young man in in India who is walking out Indian
Rivers he's walked more than 5,000 kilometers up the gunga and he's formed a nonprofit to kind of get young Indians to walk the rivers of of India for documentary purposes but most of the time they're not people who are in my biz you know I do walk with journalists I do walk with photographers who produce their own work which again is crucial to
this project it's it's a medley it's not a solo project but the most surprising partners are often the most wonderful people who may not have you know thought before of rambling through home you know to kind of take time off from work take a leave of absence from the family and and go walking for several weeks through a place that they think they know but
soon discover on foot that they don't know it that well at all how is walking with women different from walking with men well you've probably interviewed journalist before and the truth is women have access to a wider range of The Human Experience by virtue of accessing Women's World especially in cultures where that might be difficult for a man
especially a stranger right walking in Over the Horizon an unknown person and so walking with women opens up storytelling for me in ways that are really important and right now in in China just by chance I'm not kind of actively out you know looking for women to walk with but just by chance maybe there's some self- selection here adventurous women curious women probably
more than half the partners through China so far have been women and it's been wonderful what's the meaning of Homer's Odyssey to you it's one of many literary touchstones that go back to even my childhood the reading that probably informed this project you know since I was able to read I grew up in central Mexico and books were scarce and
when I got my hands on them I generally tended to read them cover to cover Greek myology some canonical works that were brought down from the US across the border inform my thinking very early on even you know science fiction Jules Vern things like that boyish sort of interests but Homer as I've discovered starting out he's an Olympian character
in the landscape of epic poetry but I've learned of others you know walking across the world you know the mahabarata and you know faith-based epics in South Asia or the Epic of Manas in kyrgistan right which is longer than Homer and which used to be recited homeric verbally until very recently that's one of the great joys of the project is bumping into other Majestic poetry World
poetry have you ever read Thomas corat the 17th century Englishman no should I he walked to India he's believed to be the first Englishman to have been a tourist in India and he went to India by walking there I believe it took him seven years he spent a lot of time in Italy and then in the Ottoman Empire there's a good biography of him and his own book I
think you can even get it unkindled but that's c r y a t Thomas coryat I'll look for it when I heard about your Endeavor that's what came to mind immediately yeah no that sounds like a kindred spirit you know the foot wonders it's remarkable not even sort of callings or you know pilgrims of course come to mind too these vast and extraordinary
pilgrimages you know throughout the Middle East to mcah walking the old Tarik alhaj roads to Mecca that are still kind of worn into the Bedrock of the hijaz desert those are epic Journeys made by many many many people through time whose stories are never told but there also many many great wonders across many societies and I've tried to
bring their stories to the four as well again it's we're a Restless wondering breed and pretty much every society reflects that at least the ones that I've encountered on foot on my relative to the time before you started what is it you no longer care about or it seems Petty to you now but back then seemed important that's a good question you know nothing you know immediately
Springs to mind of a non-b all nature I mean I've never been a person obsessed with equipment I've never been somebody who is queed into kind of careerist prospects you know my career trajectory which I wouldn't recommend anybody has been very erratic veering from fishing boats into new rooms and into gold mines and West Australia and cattle ranches in
Chihuahua and everywhere else in between so what I remind my readers who ask qu similar questions is that you know I started this when I was 50 pretty well formed personality I sort of knew where I'd come from didn't know where I'm going like everybody else but had a methodology down already I was doing a lot of what I'm doing on this project
already through my journalism career I had wonderful editors at the Chicago Tribune who when they saw an idea idea that merited it gave me the freedom to spend months and months wandering through these stories particularly in Africa so as I've described before the adavine walk is more of an arrival than a departure I don't know if that answers your question or if it's a disappointing
answer but that's the truth what's true is true how is it that you cross the desert right you've been through some of the Gulf States I think yeah I've been through uh several deserts the first was the afar desert in North Ethiopia one of the hottest deserts in the world and then the hijaz in Western Saudi Arabia and then some big deserts in Central
Asia the kizel Kum and and usbekistan you cross deserts with a great attentiveness you seem to want to speed up to get through them as quickly as possible but often they require slowing down and that seems kind of counterintuitive you have to walk when the temperatures are congenial to your survival so sometimes that means walking at night as opposed to the day it means
maybe not covering the distances that you would in more moderate climates so deserts are like a prickly friend you kind of approach them with care but if you invest the time they're pretty inspiring and remarkable I mean there are reasons why you know old Hermits go out into the deserts to seek Visions I was born in a desert I was born in the
Mojave Desert of Southern California so I'm partial to them maybe even by birth do you find deserts to be the most difficult terrain to cross no I find Alpine mountains to be far trickier you know deserts can be fickle deserts can kill you if you're not careful and of course water is the most limiting factor for our survival but Alpine mountain
weather is so unpredictable and a very sunny afternoon can turn into a very stormy late afternoon in a very quick time period so threats like Rock Falls like Avalanches blizzards those for me are are far more difficult to navigate than deserts and also I guess I having been born in the subtropics I don't weather the cold as well so there's that bias thrown in what do you do for
exercise you know try to meet deadline mostly but okay so when I'm parked in an urban area to do work which happens regularly you know this project is taking more than twice as long as originally envisioned I try to do what you do you know I I try to go jogging you know I do push-ups and sit-ups in the room that I'm working in on very rare occasions I've actually you know
gone to a gym and Bishkek with a bunch of Russian bodybuilders I sort of stood out skinny American guy of a certain age to keep in condition especially for rugged topography in that case it was getting over the pomier mountains and Hindu Kush but mostly when I'm in motion the beauty of walking as you know is that it keeps you trim keeps your
cardiovascular system and good Nick keeps you toned and it's low relatively low impact right so you can do a lot of steps you eventually do I'm told we're out of cartilage I don't know where that's going to happen but so far so good yeah so far so good so if someone is thinking of doing a version of your project but maybe much smaller say they
they want to walk across New Jersey what is it you would caution them about or tell them you know well you may not have thought about this problem but you need to worry about this what would that be Tyler I wouldn't have a clue because you know I can't imagine giving somebody advice to do what I'm doing my needs and itions probably you know don't match
anybody else walking across New Jersey or down to the local convenience store you know look up don't always look down at your feet which is a tendency to do when you're walking right take a look around now and then and don't walk too fast do you ever just look at your phone when you're walking the way you would see in say a North American city so many
young people they're just staring or older people just staring at their phones yeah sometimes I have to you know I've got to say that I'm not an agent of virtue like assuming the use of the phone I use it for navigation when I can get a signal I sometimes have to communicate with Logistics while I'm on on the move but I I try to turn the phone off when I'm walking I generally
put it on airplane mode in a pocket somewhere so that I can focus on what I'm doing and it's an amazing tool I mean can you imagine trying to do this with paper maps I mean I would love I love paper maps you know as a kid I love Maps like a lot of boys did I still do but the ability to kind of call up satellite imagery on this little device
and stare at where you are and try to find a safe way over a Glacial Marine is pretty unbeatable something that you know I think Heavens I've got over Marco Polo what kind of reading or prep do you do for each region or how do you choose what to consume or how does that process work it starts pretty much the way foreign correspondents do their reading
right so you read other foreign correspondence work you know mostly in your own language I can read in Spanish too but vast bulk of what I read is in English so I read reporters books which lead to going to you know more specialized reading on everything from you know climate to human rights to geology to you know biodiversity to language Extinction I mean it's just
endless and so in a way all the years that I've been working as a international correspondent have kind of been prep work the way I would approach a big story in Africa back when I was based in johannisburg is pretty much the way I I continue to approach research on this project the difference being that now because I've slowed down and taking
more time I can access more indigenous systems of knowledge that I didn't have the time to do before right and that involves everything from talking to you know a farmer who can instruct me on you know how Gophers might predict weather by the shape of the berms that they push out of their holes in the morning whether rain is coming or not to talking
to scientists from the regions that I'm walking to you know talking to archa ologists talking to agronomists talking to road builders talking to Engineers talking to the guys digging the ditch and putting a gas pipeline in which just happened 2 days ago and watching and wonder as they're laying PVC pipe next to a river in Western China a fascinating amazing technology that
makes you both alarmed to be human but also proud to be human we're clever creatures how do you fund the whole Venture how does that work it's funded by other philanthropies the National Geographic Society is our main partner me and my walking Partners provide them with editorial content and also work with them on educational fronts but there's a kind of a a changing Caravan
of philanthropic partners that you know some come in for a year or two and then drop out and then they're replaced by others it's pretty remarkable I've got to say I mean it's such a long project I don't know too many projects like this that are you know longitudinally so far over the horizon and I've been blessed to have Partners who have that kind of
Over the Horizon vision and who've stuck with me such such as National Geographic do you have to raise new money as you go on or is it sort of all taken care of no I do have to raise money yeah we also crowdfund we love it that our readers help keep this project going so we have a crowdfunder every year yeah it's not easy but it's part of what we
do it's necessary where's the best food you've had food your favorite I love the food in Southwest China by the way I'm sure you enjoyed that oh my gosh yeah just the ingredients that go unes food is is is a whole miracle in itself the corn ucopia what gets grown and the mushrooms right wild mushrooms the Fresh Veggies the dairy products it's just the
stuff that hangs in the trees you know the stuff that glows in the fields in Autumn I walk through Western yunon and the harvest season in October and it was glorious it's this edible landscape I've said this to my Chinese friends I don't think I've been through such a physically exhilarating landscape on foot as yunan yunan just blew my socks
off and made my eyes pop out it is one of these places that people live in and have worked in for so long working the land that there's this remarkable interaction between people and landscape and we're talking you know fields and hillsides that have been farmed for thousands of years and they have these kind of rounded slopes the way human
shoulders are rounded and you know there's almost the land itself seems anthropomorphic and there's you know use you know kind of a new Agy description there's this kind of Harmony the landscape and the human built land Cape is still human scaled you know the villages Are Made of Stone and the roads between them are designed for human
bodies that walk or horses that walk so it was remarkable it was wonderful the food I mean I could make a long list turkey incredible garden vegetables in Anatolia and and yogurts in the caucuses kapis and in Central Asia PL in usbekistan India you know I hope people realize when they go to an Indian restaurant outside of India that they are being exposed to one fractal of a
kaleidoscopic cosmos of flavors that that is so diverse even within small regions of India I'd never been to India before this project so it was a revelation to me and now China yeah we China as you know is a nation of Foodies everybody's concerned with food here and so it's been amazing Yan may be my favorite part of the world why is India
such a good place to walk because Indians will certainly tell you that it is yeah I mean people are still on foot by the million whether it's on pilgrimage or getting to working back or getting to the fields I was always in Walking Company in India I walked how far I think close to 3,800 km across India and spent 17 months doing it because it was just so fascinating I was
stopping all the time and through Northern India which is its own India right very different from Southern India but yeah there were Walkers every day and so you could ask somebody and this is important if you're walking you know Horizon to Horizon for directions and the directions would be accurate because the teller of the directions had paced
off part of those Landscapes whereas in motorized societies and I've written about this it's pointless to talk to somebody in a car if you're on foot about directions because their sense of landscape is limited to these strips of asphalt that are a few meters wide that that wheel Vehicles can go on and beyond that it's just this moving Tableau that's kind of an abstraction in India
people can tell you shortcuts they can tell you where the best tree is to take a break where the best Temple is to sleep at night where the next jug of water waiting the foot traveler lies ahead India was marvelous I felt among A A brotherhood and Sisterhood of Walkers there where has been the worst Food of your journey oh gosh how to be diplomatic the
food that was kind of it was wonderful but you know meat consuming societies pastoral societies that rely on a large intake of both dairy products and meat is fantastic and delicious but I have trouble eating it day after day after day so you know parts of Central Asia were probably the most challenging for me that said I will eat happily eat
anything at all and that's sort of a necessity of maybe doing this kind of thing is you can't be picky and you certainly don't want to turn your nose up at food that's offered as a blessing to you sometimes from people who don't have much themselves so I try whereas I love food Tyler I I'm not a foodie myself I'm very happy with whatever is
sort of shared where did you get the most sick uh I got sick in two places over the last nine years and this might be a testament to how walking keeps you healthy I caught a walking pneumonia in Palestine after coming out of the sterile deserts of of Saudi Arabia for months and months I think my my resistance was low then I walked into a very population dense corner of that
part of the world and and picked up a bug while walking in the rain and had to stop the the walk cuz I got pretty sick and then in the second place I had some water porn sickness in lore in Pakistan and no doubt I don't know where I got it but wherever I got it from I'm sure I enjoyed it because the food was also quite extraordinary in Pakistan and
during earlier coid times you were just stuck in Myanmar is that correct you couldn't cross into China yeah that's right so at first coid was kind of locking down the borders and and making it very difficult to proceed onto China I planed to walk North through Northern Myanmar through kachin to the roui Border Crossing into yunan and then in February as you know of last year there
was a coup that sealed the door closed for sure so I had to break the walk for the first time and get on a plane and fly ahead which I'd never done before since 2013 to go into China and then you know backtrack to the nearest place at the border of of Myanmar to then proceed and you know whereas that is unfortunate it's also part of the story it's also
part of the journey what it's like to walk around the world early in this Century right through a pandemic and a coup the times when you've gotten in trouble and here I'm not even talking necessarily about the walk but your whole career as a journalist what is it that has happened or LED you to get into those kinds of trouble and are you able
to talk about those instances Sudan Pakistan yeah I'm happy to talk about them Tyler in kind of a general way but also and I don't mean to panish but the focus of journalists on the trouble that they get into seems to me maybe a little bit unsavory given the circumstances of the people who you're covering in those scrapes right so whatever happened to me
and I genuinely believe this this is not a cop out to kind of you know not tell the story is whatever happened to me in Africa or elsewhere the tough times I got into I volunteered to go into those situations and I went into them open eyed whereas almost every other human being around me who I was you know ostensibly writing about did not it was
thrust on them so the hardships that I endured in those places seems just a bit unsavory to dwell on them given what everybody else was suffering at the time how do you think of your work as a kind of rethink of Journalism or what journalism can be or should be yeah you know there's a dichotomy here on the one hand the out of Eden walk is most
definitely envisioned as a laboratory Studio experimentation for you know immersive journalism a kind of reportage that's been around for a long time you can call it slow journalism but it really is just immersive journalism right I mean if you're going to do a story about the oil industry and you're going to spend seven months working at a gas station in the Midwest of the United
States to kind of find out where petroleum flows are coming from around the world through that one gas station and you're going to dedicate yourself to it by working as a clerk at that gas station as well as kind of you know getting documents to show that you can actually Trace where that gasoline comes from that I suppose can be called slow
journalism too and I've been doing that for years so I think the walks difference though is as opposed to oneoff projects even weighty projects projects that ran really deep right that I could spend a year on whatever following you know Russian Gunrunner through Africa or whatnot for months and months the difference with the walk is it is really a significant one is
there's an interconnectedness between the stories that appear before me and my walking Partners they're not atomized they're not happening in Little Boxes called environmental story culture story political story economic story these artificial constructs that journalism creates and understandably because the world's complicated and part of the job
is try to make it comprehensible and you build a frame around it but we all know that frame is artificial to some degree arbitrary because the economic story is in fact attached to the health story which is attached to a conflict story which is attached to you know the way I put it before is that you tug on one story a little bit you find that it's
connected to another story that's connected to another story that's connected to another story all the way over the horizon and the walk is a perfect instrument to show that and so the interconnectedness of critical issues that face us all today in the world are highlighted and showcased when you take a journey through them right when you're literally walking through
these headlines and showing that you know they merge into each other there's no boundary there's no wall there's no white space on a page in a magazine or on a on a web page the text just smears into the next story The Walk has been marvelous at doing that um kind of these diagonal connections not rectilinear ones not X and Y AIS but something that
cuts the onion in a diagonal that shows how these stories are overlapping and and touch on each other and touch on on us so that's the out of Eden walks to date kind of the meta takeaway one that I share with students when I talk to them about things like writing and reportage how did your early police reporting job shape what you're doing now that's a kind of slow journalism or
it can be right you know it's counter intuitive because it's often fast kind of the most concrete kind of way to inform me is by training me to stay up at all all night I can pull all nighters right because if you're a cop reporter you don't have a 9 to5 gig you're up at 3:30 in the morning whenever you get some sort of notice that something's
going down you know downtown and you'd better be there so it's fast to be honest at least police reporting that I did at a Small Town Newspaper is you're writing the police blotter and you're kind of picking the two or three big kind of crimes or stories of the day and you're riding them short and tight and you're doing an awful lot of kind of zipping around you know on a motorbike
between crime scenes and trying to make sense of it but what it does tell you what it does inform kind of in my reporting later is just kind of there's this subter Anan World below the veneer of normaly so I worked in a small town called Roswell New Mexico I think it had a few tens of thousands of people its newspaper you know when it had a paper
newspaper we all know Roswell right yeah this is before it became the alien sort of capital America this was back before it kind of jumped on that stick it was just kind of a cow and and natural gas Town out on the Yano esto of New Mexico and if you drove through it it looked like any other kind of you know rural town in in kind of the semi-arid
Southwest but what police reporting shows is kind of all the tensions the ethnic tensions how the stringency of social kind of Moors in a small town where everybody knows everybody's business puts enormous pressure on people so that sometimes they react with bad behavior Right comes out through police reporting so that to me as a young guy on his first job you know I
was like 24 I didn't know anything about journalism and they just gave me that Tyler entry level job in most newspapers right as you you know do the cop beat was really Illuminating about the invisibility of the story right that the invisible stories are often sometimes the most telling when you're writing about societies number one and number
two developing connections and contacts with everybody not just the police but with people who are breaking the law how did working on scalloping boats shape your current project also again another great job to kind of develop endurance for sleeplessness working shifts on a scalloper out of New Bedford you know where you basically are switched on 20
hours a day day after day after day at se these are good questions and they clearly they have informed my work throughout the thing that I like to do and I can't always do it but if I have the opportunity is join people in work and so if you can get into somebody's Workshop if you can get into somebody's field if you can get onto somebody's
canoe somebody's boat if you can join them pushing sheep across the Anatolian plane you are going to be admitted into that person's world and you're going to be able to see that person's identity in a way self-identity how they self-identify people identify themselves by the work they do in ways that you know many many long interviews sitting in a newsroom will just not get so
working on scallopers and all these other manual jobs that I did when I was younger helped me comprehend that fact that there's a really quick way into somebody's head and heart is picking up the tools that they're using and working alongside them how did Growing Up in central Mexico helped shape this project as you know there's a long-standing
central Mexican tradition of walking borders in pre-conquest Times They Carried salt around right I think even through the late 18th century salt and guacamaya feathers and and and you name it you know so that's maybe when this project really started right you can make the argument that that's when when my journey began was when my parents took me across my first international
border I was 5 and a half pulled out of kindergarten in Southern California and thrust into Mexican public schools from one day to the next and growing up in a small community on the edge of a big sprawling exploding City whilea back when I was growing up in this place it was called sapan they were corn fields and and all my friends my Mexican
Playmates were the sons and daughters of farmers but if I went back today I would not be able to find my old home because it's been completely absorbed by urbanization I think that gift that my parents gave me and my brothers and sisters was the primordial key to the storytelling that I'm still doing in a sense I'm still walking back to Mexico
right sure when you're doing your walking what kind of very local media coverage do you get there are obviously articles about you and say us periodicals but I mean coverage in the places where you're at yeah you name it you know radio TV online digital news pages and you'll do interviews with them if they ask for an interview you'll typically do it
typically I will yeah because that's part of the mission is to work with colleagues and interact with colleagues I also give workshops when I can so yeah it's very very Cooperative how do you teach journalism differently than other people do the model that I've been using involves walking so we we set up a workpace in somebody's house in downtown Old City
Kata we invite colleagues to come spend a week with us there and we say we want you to go out on foot and find a story within one kilometer of here and you go find it on foot and you report it on foot and that's a mechanism to slow people down to get them off staring at their phones grazing the internet for information which is part of the process but I think we rely on it too much and
start using your body as one of the main instruments for information gathering so yeah spok and wheel you know have a hub and send people out radially to go find their their stories and then work with them throughout the days to deepen and and and sharpen their vision of what they're writing about do you ever worry that you'll be somehow overwhelmed by
local publicity like Town's people will start following you there'll be a kind of troop or Horde with you everywhere you go you won't be able to look at things peacefully anymore you'll be too scrutinized or is that not in danger of happening you know Tyler always wondering about that early on the first year or so but it hasn't happened yet I
think the project is just too lowkey honestly I think the project is just maybe too slow right it'll capture passing attention but you know we we're living in a digital age when there's just this tidal wave of of media and it's just you know one or 20 stories about the walk and I don't know the kges Press is going to be there for a few days but then it's gone and so no I've
never really had to concern myself with the what would you call it was this American film with Tom Hanks the guy who was box of chocolate you know life is not a box of chocolate guy I forget the name of it but basically I'm not too concerned with having a coder of of kind of people following along it hasn't happened yet given all the walking
you've done the work you've done as you know there's an extensive literature on early human Origins and how quickly we got around the globe mostly on foot has any of your own work revised your views on that like oh it's easier than people think harder than people think they must have taken boats do you have views on those questions yeah do every day and
they're often at loggerheads I mean walking long distances is not easy it can wear you down physically you have to be careful you have to give yourself enough recovery time pounding the sols of your feet on hard surfaces 30 or 40,000 times a day you know put stress on your joints but the thing is is that our ancestors the original Homo sapiens
who trickled Out of Africa at various times in the past Never Walk Like I Do Right they're not out you know basically pacing off gigantic Landscapes they were hunters and gatherers so they moved much more methodically looking for resources five six miles a day often in a loop going back to the same shelter that they were camping and sleeping in moving in
groups of you know a dozen up to 40 people a communal experience and the science as I remind readers because as you might imagine over the last you know nine years the science of ancient human dispersals and Origins has changed a lot as new information comes in and readers write me and say wait you know isn't your hypothesis kind of dated and I say
yes thank God you know right because science is living science is is is a living thing and and and it's a good thing that it keeps changing know the basic consensus that we all came out of Africa still there but the time frames have changed a lot when I left Ethiopia the consensus was maybe 60 to 70,000 years ago what they called something in the third wave pulse the big one that
kind of led to the peopling of the world has been displaced by archaeological and fossil finds that are much older that suggest that people were moving out much much earlier you know more than 100,00 years ago and that's fine by me I'm not going to go back and rewalk parts of the continents to reflect that change it's all part of the record as it were the
ease of walking across vast Landscapes strikes me maybe because of what I do because I look at human landscapes in particular through the prism of Storytelling and it's endlessly fascinating and engaging and it keeps tugging me along so I find it quite easy and I never find it boring ever but does that you know match what our ancestors felt you know I
sort of doubt it who knows what they were thinking we're talking of huge time frames relative to the human lifespan and you know all we can do is speculate about what was going through their imaginations and Minds as they were clearing that you know one mountain pass and then the next I would tend to think given the time that I've spent with
hunter gatherers is that their attention was much more closely focused again on what was available to eat within 20 M away not that snowy mountain peak that the camera pans up to with operatic background music the increasingly popular view that the new world was settled by multiple waves of arrivals do you have an opinion on that yeah I think that's exciting so it was less
contingent than it seemed right would have happened anyway no matter what is I think an implication yes and complicated you know and the fact that they're now making discoveries under sea discoveries right especially for the new world that's pushing back you know the time frame is amazing and extraordinary yeah I don't know the the resilience of human
beings again whether your Hunter gathers coming down the the Western seab Board of North America and canoes or walking across Shanta province is a source of Hope and you know it's it's one of the things that keeps me going what was your biggest surprise when you visited the gorillas in Rwanda that was before this project you realized I know of course
yes absolutely but you've written about it and it sounded amazing what shocked you it's been ages since I've thought about this looking back from the distance of today when was that that was like mid 90s so we're talking more than 25 years ago with st still was being sent there to write about mountain gorillas which is absolutely a valid decision to make given the Rarity of
that species and what our relationship with wild animals has to teach us about being human versus what was happening in the aftermath of this horrific genocide that just happened in Rwanda and so I felt myself to be very torn when I went there as a young reporter my first assignment for National Geographic and I didn't want to blow it and yet at the
same time having spent so many years in Africa as kind of a hardcore conflict reporter focusing on Wildlife when there were 750,000 refugees living on lava Fields just across the border in the Congo and you know some of these refugees were were not exactly innocent bystanders to the genocide they were actually the perpetrator of the killings so I don't even remember
exactly how I handled that but I think I tried to merge those two stories in a way that was maybe more about us than about Mouse and gorillas I don't recall if that was successful what did you like best about Johannesburg so many things about Jai it has a bad reputation with tourists right yeah it does people say it's too dangerous yeah and you know
I've got to say it's been a long time since I've been there and I'd be curious to know how things are going I think I've been away from Johannesburg since 2009 so that's a ways back but it was the UN beautiful sibling of Cape Town you know Cape Town was the kind of the San Francisco of South Africa the place that the tourists flocked to in Johannesburg was the place they avoided
but the grit of Johannesburg the kind of very toughness of it the very hard it is of it it was one of these places that you admire because it is real it's not Boutique aied was what made me love my years there that said I used it Tyler as a base so I was often away you know I would come back to Johannesburg to recharge you know but I was often aake
maybe half the time of every year if not more traveling in Africa covering other stories eventually to get to Tiara del Fuego how exactly will you cross into the new world I don't know you know it's a big question and this is something that doesn't have a resolution ution in the short term is assuming I can get into Russia how far north can I walk the
plan is to walk from the Chinese Border North to Magadan and then to take a ship from there to Alaska when I was in tbli Georgia I met some people who were operating a schooner sailing ship on the uans bringing bulk cargo to the indigenous communities of the uans as a way to break the Monopoly of airplane cargo which was so expensive they're BAS
basically a group of young anarchists they offered to come to Magadan and pick me up and sail back so gosh I mean if that offer is still on the table if I can you know step into Magadan eventually that would be an interesting way to go other than that I haven't given it much thought these kind of big logistical questions are are hard to contemplate so far in advance because
I've got so many you know decisions to make every day tomorrow about you know Logistics and what what to do and where to go last two questions first more approximately where are you walking to next I am walking to cion which boy isn't that a great sentence to utter oh wonderful City yes amazing cherries there don't neglect those oh I'll look
for it I'll look for them it may not be season actually but yeah well I mean it's October I'm not sure when they would be harvesting I mean they're harvesting depends how fast you get there I have about a week to 10 days to cross over the Chingling mountains I'm on the southern Foothills having just crossed over from Sichuan into sha SE me
and my walking partner Le we people in genung have a big climb ahead of us I think up above 3,000 M and then we'll come down into the Basin where Sean is this kind of legendary for me it still kind of shines with the golden atmosphere of of you know fables in literature what'll be really nice in my case is that I've kind of been walking towards seon for 2 to three years coming
across Central Asia following the the Silk Road corridors so I can finally say that I've arrived at one of the poles of the Silk Road that I've been steering Ts for many years last question what kind of final product or output or book or videos or movies or what will result from the trip other than the trip itself and its direct ramifications if I say oh
I want to buy Paul's book or see Paul's movie what what is it we can look forward to I don't know a line of gimme caps you know the legacy is layered so there's my own work which is into the hundreds of thousands of words already I think half a million 99% % of it digital and increasingly there is the work of walking Partners these extraordinary
people who add their amazing talents photographers writers scientists activists environmentalists Educators who just deeply enriching the whole mission of the walk to be frank kind of the Walk is now theirs and I'm almost in some ways a spectator in my own Journey so it'll be their work it'll be my work there'll be educational programming that
hopefully goes on as Legacy work there'll be you know exhibitions perhaps books it's a lot yeah maybe you'll endorse a pair of sneakers too might have to get to that point yeah you know might have to get to that point it's just a rare privilege to be able to to even wake up every morning in this small town of 1.5 million in Northern chassi chingu it's called and know that
I've got some trail ahead of me there'll be some stories waiting along it that I don't know to be able to do that every day is really very motivating yeah very motivating after what happens after as I've said before I I have no plans I don't know grow tomatoes likeed I don't know Paul thank you very much thank you Tyler it's been great to chat with
you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app if you like this podcast please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review this helps other listeners find the show on Twitter I'm @ Tyler Cowan and the show is @ Cowan convos until next time please keep listening and [Music] learning