Paul Salopek on Walking the World

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am chatting with Paul Salopek. Paul is not here with me. Paul, where are you?

I am in Shaanxi 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 Pulitzer 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 Tierra 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 and on feet, so the feet more or less take care of me. I think I've gotten one or two blisters over the last 9 or so pretty hardy feet. I don't know where that came from. So in the foot department, 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 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 laptop that, you know, has a lifespan of a few years given the bangs that it gets in a backpack. Walking across continents. Electronics configured to do media work would be the kind of the most dicey cargo that I carry, but pretty much 99% of the rest is local economy.

And you do all this with a single backpack?

Yeah, it's kind of a rucksack. 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 Merrell walking shoes. Here's kind of a free plug for the Merrell company. But the honest answer is I wear whatever's available. Anything from leather sandals to plastic galoshes 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 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 I move on into a new polity. 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, so 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 kilometers 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, in 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 old-fashioned. I'm an analog guy. I still take hand 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 2.5 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 Uzbekistan. 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 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 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 they're 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 India who is walking out Indian rivers. He's walked more than 5,000 kilometers up the Ganga, and he's formed a nonprofit to kind of get young Indians to walk the rivers 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 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 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 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 mythology, some canonical works that were brought down from the US across the border informed my thinking very early on. Even, you know, science fiction, Jules Verne, 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 Mahabharata in, you know, faith-based epics in South Asia, or the Epic of Manas in Kyrgyzstan, right, which is longer than Homer and which used to be recited Homerically verbally until very recently. That's one of the great joys of the project is bumping into other majestic poetry, oral poetry.

Have you ever read Thomas Coriot, 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, I believe it took him 7 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 on Kindle, but that's C-O-R-Y-A-T, Thomas Coriat. 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 footwanderers, 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 Mecca, walking the old Tariq al-Hajj roads to Mecca that are still kind of worn into the bedrock of the Hejaz Desert. Those are epic journeys made by many, many, many people through time whose stories are never told. But there are also many, many great wonders across many societies, and I've tried to bring their stories to the fore as well. Again, it's— we're a restless wandering breed, and pretty much every society reflects that, at least the ones that I've encountered on foot on my trail.

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? Hmm, that's a good question.

You know, nothing, you know, immediately springs to mind of a non-banal nature. I mean, I've never been a person obsessed with equipment. I've never been somebody who is cued into kind of careerist prospects. You know, my career trajectory, which I wouldn't recommend to anybody, has been very erratic, veering from fishing boats into newsrooms and into gold mines in West Australia and cattle ranches in Chihuahua and everywhere else in between. So what I remind my readers who ask 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 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 Arviden 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 crossed the desert? Right? You've been through some of the Gulf states, I think? Yeah, I've been through several deserts.

The first was the Afar Desert in North Ethiopia, one of the hottest deserts in the world, and then the Hejaz in western Saudi Arabia, and then some big deserts in Central Asia, the Kyzyl Kum in Uzbekistan. 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 rockfalls, like avalanches, blizzards, those for me are far more difficult to navigate than deserts. And also, I guess I'm 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 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. In 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 Pamir 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 in 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, wear 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 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 predilections 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, eschewing 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 the move, but 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 loved 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 moraine is pretty unbeatable, something that, you know, I thank 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 correspondents' work, you know, mostly in your own language. I can read in Spanish too, but the 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 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 an international correspondent have kind of been prep work. The way I would approach a big story in Africa back when I was based in Johannesburg is pretty much the way 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 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 archaeologists, 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 in 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 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 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 into Yunnanese food is a whole miracle in itself. The cornucopia of what gets grown in Yunnan.

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 walked through Western Yunnan in 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 Yunnan. Yunnan 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, to use, you know, kind of a new agey description, there's this kind of harmony. The landscape and the human-built landscape 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 yogurts in the Caucasus, khachapuris, and in Central Asia, plov in Uzbekistan, 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're— China, as you know, is a nation of foodies. Everybody's concerned with food here, and so it's been amazing.

Yunnan 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, well, I mean, people are still on foot by the million, whether it's on pilgrimage or getting to work and back or getting to the fields. I was always in walking company in India. I walked— how far? I think close to 3,800 kilometers 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 are 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 wheeled 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 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 shared.

Where did you get the most sick?

Uh, I got sick in two places over the last 9 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 Saudi Arabia for months and months. I think my, my resistance was low, and then I walked into a very population-dense corner of that part of the world and picked up a bug while walking in the rain and had to stop the walk because I got pretty sick. And then in the second place, I had some waterborne sickness in Lahore 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 COVID times, you were just stuck in Myanmar, is that correct? You couldn't cross into China?

Yeah, that's right. So at first COVID was kind of locking down the borders and making it very difficult to to proceed on to China. I planned to walk north through northern Myanmar, through Kachin, to the Ruli border crossing into Yunnan, 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 Myanmar 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 sound Pollyannish— 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 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 of 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 gonna do a story about the oil industry and you're gonna spend 7 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 Waag difference though is, as opposed to one-off projects, even weighty projects, projects that ran really deep, right, that I could spend a year on, whatever, following, oh, 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, understandably, because the world's complicated and part of the job is trying to make it comprehensible and you build a frame around it. But we all know that frame is artificial and 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've 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 web page, the text just smears into the next story. The walk has been marvelous at doing that, kind of these diagonal connections, not rectilinear ones, not X and Y axis, but something that cuts the onion in a diagonal that shows how these stories are overlapping 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, the 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 counterintuitive because it's often fast. Kind of the most concrete kind of way it informed me is by training me to stay up all night. I can pull all-nighters, right? Because if you're a cop reporter, you don't have a 9-to-5 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 2 or 3 big kind of crimes or stories of the day, and you're writing 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 subterranean world below the veneer of normalcy. 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 of America. This was back before it kind of jumped on that shtick. It was just kind of a cow and natural gas town out on the Llano Estacado of New Mexico. And if you drove through it, it looked like any other kind of, you know, rural town 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 mores 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 Cowen, it's the entry-level job in most newspapers, right? Is you, you know, do the copy. It 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 scallop or out of New Bedford, you know, where you basically are switched on 20 hours a day, day after day after day at sea. 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 plain, 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 help shape this project? As you know, there's a longstanding central Mexican tradition of walking porters. In pre-conquest times, they carried salt around, right? I think even through the late 18th century.

Salt and guacamaya feathers 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, Guadalajara. Back when I was growing up in this place, it was called Zapopan. There were cornfields 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 in, 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 workspace in somebody's house in downtown Old City Calcutta. 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 1 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, spoken wheel, you know, have a hub and send people out radially to go find their stories and then work with them throughout out the days to deepen and sharpen their vision of what they're writing about.

Do you ever worry that you'll be somehow overwhelmed by local publicity, like townspeople will start following you, there'll be a kind of troupe 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, I was wondering about that early on, the first year or so, but it hasn't happened yet. I think the project is just too low-key, honestly. I think the project is just maybe too slow, right? It'll capture passing attention, but, you know, we're living in a digital age when there's just this tidal wave of media, and it's just, you know, 1 or 20 stories about the walk in, I don't know, the Kyrgyz 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 coterie 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, I 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 soles of your feet on hard surfaces 30,000 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 walked 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, 5, 6 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, 9 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 a living thing, and it's a good thing that it keeps changing. The basic consensus that we all came out of Africa is still there, but the time frames have changed a lot. When I left Ethiopia, the consensus was maybe 60,000 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 100,000 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 the, 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 meters 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, undersea 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 resilience of human beings, again, whether you're hunter-gatherers coming down the western seaboard of North America in canoes or walking across Shaanxi Province is a source of hope. You know, 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 realize.

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. Whit Sticks 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 had 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 perpetrators 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 mountain gorillas. I don't recall if I was successful.

What did you like best about Johannesburg? So many things about Jozi. 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 unbeautiful 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 edges of it, it was one of these places that you admire because it is real. It's not boutique-ified, 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 away, maybe half the time of every year, if not more, traveling in Africa, covering other stories.

Eventually, to get to Tierra 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 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 Tbilisi, Georgia, I met some people who were operating a schooner sailing ship on the Aleutians, bringing bulk cargo to the indigenous communities of the Aleutians as a way to break the monopoly of airplane cargo, which was so expensive. They're 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 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 to do and where to go.

Last two questions. First, more approximately, where are you walking to next?

I am walking to Xi'an, 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 Qingling Mountains. I'm on the southern foothills, having just crossed over from Sichuan into Shaanxi. Me and my walking partner Li Huipu and Gengkun have a big climb ahead of us, I think up above 3,000 meters, and then we'll come down into the basin where Xi'an is, this kind of legendary— for me it still kind of shines with the golden atmosphere of, you know, fables and literature. What'll be really nice in my case is that I've kind of been walking towards Xi'an for 2 to 3 years, coming across Central Asia following the Silk 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 towards 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 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 enrichen 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 Shaanxi, Chengdu 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 Tierra del Fuego, as I've said before, I have no plans. I don't know, grow tomatoes like Candide. I don't know.

Posse Alepek, 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 @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.