Transcript: Episode #311: Where the Streets Have No Name
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Paul Salopek 00:00
Hello, everybody. This is Paul. People sometimes ask me why I'm doing this. Why am I walking across the world for year after year, for 1000s of miles across continents, some of them think I'm insane. Over the past 13 months, I've been trekking through southern and southwestern China from the Myanmar border, north through the provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan and now China Sea. Because me walking alone with my own thoughts is only interesting up to a certain point, and probably only interesting. Only interesting to me. So the whole idea is to be joined by the walk on a relay passed off from person to person.
Host 01:12
Thank you for taking the time to listen to today's episode. As you know, the current crisis in Myanmar is extremely concerning, and we appreciate that you're taking the time to stay informed, there is even value in just becoming more aware and helping to inform others. So please consider sharing this episode so that more people may learn about what is happening in the country. It's critical to ensure that this issue remains present in public discourse. But for now, let's get On to the Interview itself.
Brad 02:58
back. I'm joined Today by Paul, who has a fascinating story and fascinating history, but perhaps the most fascinating thing I don't think I've ever encountered this in any person. He's walking it sounds most of the way across the world and and getting to see the world in a way that perhaps very few, if any other humans have ever been able to see it. So before we get into the deep dive, Paul, thank you very much for joining us. I'd like to give you the chance to introduce yourself for the benefit of
Paul Salopek 03:28
the audience. Yeah. No. Thanks for Thanks, Brad, for having me on. Yeah. So I'm, I'm engaged in this global project. It's a storytelling project that involves re walking the pathways, the corridors of the first Homo sapiens, First Out of Africa back in the stone age, and using that kind of first discovery of the planet to kind of look at modern events holding today incredible.
Brad 03:53
And I want to sort of contrast that we'll get to some of the more specific cases. But I want to contrast it because I know that you were in media. I know you were a foreign correspondent for a very long time and and I believe that you you spent quite a bit of time in, let's say, less stable parts of the world. The obvious question that I have is, how, how is your experience different traveling on foot at the pace that, as you say, early Homo sapiens would have done, and experiencing the cultures, the people, the places, and even the same political events that you as a correspondent may have had to have reported on back in the day, versus actually being in these different places as a correspondent and reporting on these events for the benefit of an audience who wants to be educated but not slowing down and taking the time to physically walk through them as you are now.
Paul Salopek 04:51
Yeah. Well, as you, as you mentioned, I mean, as you alluded to the the big difference is time, right? The luxury of time. Most, most reporters these days. Whether they're reporting locally or internationally, are basically competing with each other on a really brutal time clock, as we've entered into the age of the internet, where it's where the news doesn't sleep, it's 24/7 and where it's rewarded above all, is speed. My colleagues in this in the information business, are under enormous pressure to break stories and basically generate as much information as possible to kind of feed the beast, if you will. What I have devised over the last decade or so is is a counterintuitive alternative to that, which I'm calling slow journalism. You know, you've heard of Slow Food, the slow food movement, kind of the the media equivalent of that, where I'm hoping that by investing more time and more thought to the stories that I encounter, in this case, along a walking path across continents, there's a discernible change in the quality of the storytelling, the quality of the journalism, which means it's just, it's, you know, I call it slow journalism, but it has many different names, immersive journalism, literary journalism, in depth journalism, you spend more time with people who live inside of the headlines of our day, and hopefully You come away with a more authentic and more nuanced portrait of that of these people and of these issues. That's it in a nutshell.
Brad 06:28
Yeah, and I think that's something that's that's very sorely lacking. Obviously, those of us on on the podcast and many of the listeners would be aware of just how paltry the coverage has been of the Myanmar crisis by by most of the established media, and many crises happening around the world right now, some of which I'm sure you you have seen firsthand, and I want to look at those sort of in turn. But first you said you were you were tracing the path of early Homo sapiens. I actually was lucky enough to a lecture recently on just that topic, which path in particular are you tracing? Because early Homo sapiens came out of Africa and then sort of branches off and moves around the world in different trajectories. What particular path are you following, and what what leads you to choose that particular path?
Paul Salopek 07:18
So you put your finger on it. I mean, it's, there is no singular pathway. In fact, you know human beings when they dispersed, and I'm using the word dispersed and not migrate, for a reason. Migration implies that there's a knowledge of where you're going, right? You're going from point A to point. It implies that there's a known destination. These might, these movements of human beings, early human beings, they really had no destination, right? They were kind of discovering landscapes as they walked into them. And the people that I'm following are our species. Just to make one distinction, I'm not following, you know, Neanderthals. I'm not following Homo erectus, who who are cousins, but their their origins are pre human, and they they walked out of Africa far before our ancestors did. Our ancestors, scientists think, roamed out of the mother continent sometime between 60 and maybe 150,000 years ago. And they did not encounter an empty world. They encountered a world where there were other homo other hominids of our genus, but not our species, rambling around the landscape right, bumping into people who may have kind of looked like us, but they weren't us, right? If we bred with them, our offspring would not we wouldn't have offspring probably most of the time, so like horses and mules, right? So the people I'm following generally, generally, kind of moved north out of Africa. Some spread into Europe. Some spread into Eurasia. They generally followed coastlines because they offer two ecosystems to harvest food from a terrestrial one and a maritime one, and eventually made their way into the Arctic and across the northern land bridge and along the coast and smaller, small craft down the American continent to the tip of South America. So the arc of my journey, which is, that's why I call it a corridor. There is no real trail. And in fact, people move backwards into Africa too. If it was kind of a radial dispersal, my corridor is basically Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, up through northern China, and then into the North American continent, you know, over in Alaska, and then down to the tip of South America and Tierra del Fuego.
Brad 09:35
I would like to ask this, and I'm by no means an archeologist or a paleontologist, but, you know, I do have a passing interest in these things. My understanding is that earlier this year, or perhaps like halfway through last year, I'm not 100% sure, a discovery in North America that the Suu team mastered on site actually rewrote the best San. Questions we have about human migration to the Americas, and pushed back the date of the original human migration into the Americas by some 10s of 1000s of years. I'm just wondering, is your is your path based on the most recent guesses, or is it based on the the wisdom that we had, sort of, let's say, up until about two years ago.
Paul Salopek 10:22
It's, it's both and so the thing about science, which is wonderful is that it's, it's never static. It's a living thing. So thank heavens. Our knowledge continues to grow. So when I designed my original route way back in 2013 when I left the Rift Valley of Ethiopia, I was basing it on the on the consensus of both scientists at that time, new discoveries have happened that have actually pushed back not just the route of human dispersal in the Americas that you're alluding to, the age of it, but even the age of our species. When I left Africa way back, you know, 11 years ago, the earliest fossils were maybe about, you know, 190,000 years old of Homo sapiens today, they found ones that are 300,000 years old, right? Hugely much older. So what does that mean? It doesn't mean that I'm going to kind of go back and re walk my route. Of course, I only have one lifetime. What I tell my readers is that, you know, my walk is happening in real time at a moment in time, with the best available information about pre history, and of course, it's going to change. And that's just part of it, you know, it's part of it, also coming up against, like geographical borders that open and shut. It's just a moment. It's a snapshot in time, which you're mentioning is actually a part of a growing body of evidence, not just the mastodon site, but there, there are sites in South America, mostly cave sites along the sea that suggest that people reach South America way before the conventional kind of consensus as of like, you know, 10 or 15 years ago until 10 or 15 years ago, maybe, maybe, say, 20 years ago, what high school students were being taught, you know, was that the Clovis People right based on these spear points found in the United States, walked across the land bridge between what is today Siberian Alaska about 12,000 years ago, and that was the earliest evidence. More and more evidence is showing of older and older arrivals, both on foot and in more Intriguingly, by small kind of canoes down the coast, people move very quickly, however, however, what's a little bit hard to kind of convey in popular media is that the scientific method requires that these new discoveries be really vetted, right? Like that, the eight, the aging of them using multiple technique, carbon, you know, whatever carbon, 14 dating, or, you know, whatever other techniques are available. It takes a few years for everybody, all the scientists, to say, Yeah, okay, this is really solid. This mammoth site is is probably true, as opposed to a story that appears, you know, on the BBC or New York Times that says we've discovered something new, which is just the beginning of the discovery, right? And then it's going to be debated. So you're absolutely right with the the human population of the Americas probably happened quite a bit earlier than our conventional knowledge right now, but it's still being determined just how, how much earlier.
Brad 13:13
And so another thing that comes up is, I think, as a as an experiment, or not even, I wouldn't even call what you're doing an experiment. This is an experience, right? And it's, it's, it's kind of fascinating. It almost reminds me of experimental archeology, when you know people sit around pontificating on Well, I think this is this, or I think this would have happened that way until a few people just said, Well, why don't we just try it and see if we can replicate it, see if we can do it. And then, once people sit down and try making stone tools by themselves, or try living, you know, these, these Paleolithic lives themselves, they realize all sorts of things that never would have occurred to them, just sitting around on armchairs, hypothesizing about what could have been, but, but what occurs to me about your travel is that in the last 10s of 1000s of years, hundreds of 1000s of years, the Earth has changed so phenomenally in terms of human impact on the earth, in terms of species change, climate change, weather change, shorelines, all of these sorts of things I do. I do want to how do you feel when you're going on this journey? How closely connected Do you feel to the the undertaking of the earliest hominids?
Paul Salopek 14:36
Very little because of partly what you say is absolutely correct. But consider this, no early Homo sapiens would be lunatic enough, nor could they even pull it off to walk like I am, which is continuously in a line in a linear fashion, right? Because their hunter gatherers, they would have no reason to the path. Certain sort of dispersals that occurred, you know, for God, 1000s of generations of people, was you, kind of you, you hunted out a certain Valley, right? Or the climate was changing over a couple 1000 years, and things are drying out, right? Creeks are drying out, animals getting scarce. And then you kind of, that gave you the push factor to kind of wander over the next mountain ridge into someplace else looking for sustenance. Nobody let me. I just have to be I'll be clear from my readers, you raise a good point. No, nobody that I'm aware of, and there is no record. This is pre history. Kind of walk from Africa to the tip of South America, one go. I mean, that really crazy. What I'm doing, in that sense, is really unusual. But what I'm what I'm trying to do, more than kind of replicate the physicality of that, that kind of, that kind of journey, right? That kind of helped define who we are as we're a global species now, right? And we didn't used to be, is there's no way I can hope to really replicate it, as you mentioned, because the world has been changed by Anthropocene factors so much. But also it's, it's really hard to know sort of, what was the psychology of the people who left, right? They were us, right? But they're moving in bands of, you know, 1520, 25, maximum, maybe 40 people, and they were living off the land, very close to the landscape, in ways that almost no human being living today in 2024 does. There are few bands of hunter gatherers still left in Africa. There are some in the Amazon, of course, in South America, but they're a tiny, tiny fraction of the human experience. So my effort is not really to try to get into that kind of physical culture. You know, I'm walking through Asia right now, and I'm stopping at convenience stores, right to buy coffee or tea, so I'm not making any effort to hunt rabbits with stone points, right? That's sort of not the point of the walk. The point of the walk is more internal, it's more psychological. It's more about intellectual, about sort of, how has time changed? How has the human relationship, not just with landscape, but with time? And it goes back to this earlier point that you made that you know, in media, a reflection of daily life is speeding up faster and faster and faster and faster we're on this merry go round. It's just a blur right now. What if we get off the merry go round and kind of go back to the original time frame of 99.5% of human history, pre history, which is walking? Right? What does that do? What does walking do in terms of changing how you view your place, not just in landscape, but in reality in the world. It does change it, you know, as you know, as anybody who takes a walk around the park, you know, who takes a walk around the neighborhood, you go into a little bit of a different mind frame than if you're sitting down at a computer or if you're riding a, you know, a subway underground somewhere, walking is the not just the oldest form of locomotion, it's the oldest form of thinking, and it's, as I tell my readers, there's no surprise that walking and creativity are have been intimate, intimately linked since day one, right, wondering. Bards, poets, musicians, writers, walking from village to village in ancient Greece or in Mali in West Africa, or ancient sufic nomads, people walking pilgrim trails, prayer trails. This notion of connecting human movement with human thinking and creativity, cognition, learning is very, very old. They go together.
Brad 18:42
It does sort of remind because you're right, it sort of balances this line, the these old traditions in antiquity, and even stretching far past antiquity. On the one hand, you have the sheer commercial element, you know, wandering merchants who go from settlement to settlement to settlement settlement, because there's only so much available capital, and they can't make a permanent living residing in anyone's settlement right there that's not sustainable for them. And on the other hand, you have these ascetic wise men who withdraw completely from society and sit off in caves. But you have this, as you point out, this middle ground between the two, where you have people who don't tie themselves to a single settlement, a single community. They travel from place to place to place, whether to spread their art, whether to spread their philosophy, their teachings, or whether to themselves become more educated. I mean, in the modern era, I would say that there was a Hungarian mathematician, ba who never seemed to work and never seemed to have a place of residence. He would just permanently be a guest with various famous mathematicians, and he would help them solve problems, and they would publish papers together and and that's how he lived. His life, and today, there's actually a metric, the adders number of how many points of connection are you away from a person who has actually written a paper with Erdos BA, so in scientific community, that's quite an important figure. So I've never thought of it that way. It's just, it's just, I'm still processing what you what you said. It's just a fascinating way of looking at this niche within human culture and society, of of the wondering. I don't know what to say, the wondering wise man, the wondering artist, the wondering experiencer. It's difficult to pin down exactly what such a person is, but, but you're right, they seem to always have existed in some form or another.
Paul Salopek 20:46
Yeah, I would say, Yeah. To take your point even further, I would say, so. So you know, if you if you believe the science, if you believe fossil records and archeology, so homogens may have evolved somewhere in what is today Northern Africa, around 300,000 years ago. They, of course, evolved from some earlier form of Homo who also were walkers, who evolved some from some earlier form of of, you know, pre hominid, you know, Australopithecine, what have you who also were walkers. Scientists don't know the exact date, but somewhere between five and 7 million years ago, some ape like ancestor of ours stood up right and started using two legs. So we have been doing this form of moving through reality, moving through what we perceive as reality on two feet. For you know, if you want to go back pre species, millions of years. So it's really, no really, it's no big surprise that our our neurons are wired to absorb the world at this pace and and to and to give things back to the world at this pace. You know whether it's whether it's a poem or an arrow, right? So I think this idea of of novatism, just to put a kind of a blanket statement on it, is it? I kind of think it's humming in our bones. It's in our DNA, and we don't know what to do with it. So we've only sat down. You know, if we've been around 300,000 years, we only sat down, we only stopped on the trail and sat down about 10 to 11,000 years ago, right when we when we when we planted seeds and created agriculture, then we were tied to a geo coordinate, a latitude and longitude, a field. We were kind of, who was domesticating? Who is the question, were we domesticating barley and wheat and rice, or was rice and barley and wheat domesticating us to take care of them, right in one place? And so wonderful things happened with the they call it the Neolithic Revolution. When we planted seeds, we had, you know, you know, we had extra energy in the in our diets to kind of specialize in different, you know, pursuits, the beginning of towns and cities and empires and all these great things, you know, novels and orchestras and architecture. It's, it's magnificent. I, you know, I live in this world just like you do. But I think what I try to remind my readers is the world wasn't always this way. And in fact, for again, one scientist told me, Look, if you put the entire time span of human existence on the planet into a 24 hour period, 300,000 years ago to today, we only are the way we are now, what we call normal, which is settled, which is non nomadic, which is sedentary, which is, you know, increasingly urban. We are only this way the last five minutes of the previous 24 hours and 23 hours. And you know, 55 minutes were nomadic. So what I'm telling folks through my work is, in subtle ways and obvious ways, is, you know, keep a bag packed. You know, either psychically or physically, because the world, as it goes through periods of turbulence, as this century appears to be a bottleneck in many ways, created by people you know, climate crises, what have you, no, but isn't, has always been a coping mechanism. It's an adaptation. It's a survival tool. So you know, maybe you know, Let your inner Nomad speak, and maybe you know, don't, don't dismiss migrants or migration as kind of a lesser form of life, not to say that migrants today don't suffer. Of course, they're not in it for some romantic, you know, big, flowery theory, like the one I'm proposing, they're being pushed by wars or climate crisis or poverty and being pulled by opportunity. And nobody, you know, I've interviewed 1000s of migrants during my 30 year career in journalism. I was in Africa for 10 years, and I was in the Middle East for years. Went to many refugee camps. Nobody wants to leave home voluntarily. Nobody wants to become nomadic again. Fall into very few, right? Almost nobody. And that's normal, and it's obvious why. But. But it's still good to keep this, this kind of tool in your back pocket, of knowing that voting with your feet may be necessary. Again, don't get too comfortable with what you think is permanent. Looking around you at all this concrete and glass and steel, one of the kind of strange perceptions that's kind of walking 27,000 kilometers for me is when I walk through cities. It's not their massiveness that that kind of strikes me as I come in off of farmlands or deserts mountains. It's their ephemerality. They seem really temporary and not, not in some apocalyptic way, like, oh, Doom is coming. It's just, it's, you know, in a few 1000 years, which is an eye blink in the history of humankind, Glacier is going to come back down and scrape them all into moraine, right? And the only thing that's going to be kind of left are the bronze statues that are kind of rolled into balls by ice. You know, the thing that our bronze lasts 5000 years. Everything else doesn't last very long. And it's a nice way to, kind of, for me, to move to the world, because it cultivates a priority list about what's important, right? And it's in for me that's human relationships above all else, and not so much the physical world that's around me.
Brad 26:14
I think there's a, there's a sort of stoic beauty to that, and it sort of touches on, on some of the Buddhist teachings as well about the impermanence of things. And I do think like there are a lot of people who find a lot of comfort in that, there are a lot of people who who find a centering mentally, psychologically, a centering in In contemplating the vastness of the universe, contemplating the vastness of timescales, contemplating the vastness of the world. And as you were talking, I was just reminded of a an Inuit myth, where I don't know whether you would have heard it, but two brothers are pondering and wondering whether the world is large or how big the world is. And so they decide, well, there's only one way to find out. And so one day, they set off with with their wives, and they start walking in opposite directions, and they keep walking, and they keep walking. They keep walking. And their wives have children. Their children grow up. Eventually, their children have children, and so on. And as they keep walking, eventually an entire tribe is coming behind them. And one day, the two brothers have circumnavigated the entire Earth, and they meet each other again at the opposite end of the world. And the two brothers, you know, finally meet, and one of them says the world is large, and the other one says the world is indeed large. And then the two brothers died, and that story always stuck with me, partially because it has some some beautifully like laconic levels of stoicism, but there was also a bit of optimism to it, that these two guys just decided, I want to know how big the world is. And so they went out and they did it themselves, and before they died, they were they were lucky enough to have an answer to their question. But it makes me question on your journey with the world as it is today, with roads, with cities, with the convenience you say, you know you go to a shop to get a tea, with the fact that you know we're having this conversation on a mobile phone, and you're a continent away from me. Do you feel after this journey more so that the world is larger than you gave it credit for, or that the world is actually smaller than you gave it credit for?
Paul Salopek 28:29
That's a really good question, and it flips back and forth almost every day, depending where I am and who I'm interacting with, because it's on some level, because humans are humans, and humans, the human family is as as kaleidoscopic as it seems, living in a kaleidoscopic planet. Boy, are we ever alike? I mean, we bitch and moan about the same we love the same things we you know, we embrace the same things we have, the same delusions, the same vulnerabilities. So in some senses, that makes the world really, really small, right? That you can meet some dude, you know, pushing Yaks around in the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan, and he reminds you of your cousin, you know, living in Barstow, California. So that, in that sense, walking because of its very emphasis on attention and kind of alertness where you pick up patterns right in human behavior and you see them reinforced, and sometimes all you have to do is roll your eyes and laugh, because we are. We are so incredibly alike no matter what we're wearing or what language we're speaking or, you know, what deity we're praying to walking allows you to make these connections that make, make the world seem like home, you know, no matter where you are. And I think that's a gift of the walk is that it's, it's it gives you these muscles, psychic muscles, to basically see through things like culture, ideology and, you know, geographies and make a connection pretty quickly. With somebody who seems at surface level, if you were traveling fast, if you were parachuting in right on a on a flight, you know, whether to do work or on a holiday, what seems quote, unquote exotic is actually cellophane thin. It's just nothing if you spend time with the people through that, through that false veneer of exoticism, of otherness, if you spend any time at all, and this is anybody, not just me, you anybody you know, my nieces, my nephews, kids who have never left the US, you would find very quickly that they're very much like family. They're like they're like your close friends, in ways that are both, you know, wonderful and irritating. And so that's what walking does. It goes back to time, right? This amazing luxury of time. But on the other hand, you know, walking is slow. You know, I walk at five kilometers an hour. On on the average day, I can cover maybe 25 kilometers. Sometimes I cover half that. Sometimes I cover, you know, 45 it depends on on if I bump into somebody interesting, who I then have an interview with, etc. You know, it took me it, you know, when you pace off horizons at 80 centimeters a whack, which is my, you know, the span of my stride takes a long time. Two and a half years walk across China, right? And so, time, yeah, indeed,
Brad 31:23
do you ever get that feeling like we when you're walking and you've got a landmark ahead of you might be, you know, building in the distance, it might be a mountain or something, and you're and you're walking, and you think, I don't know what your process is, but I definitely do this. I remember reading it in the book, holes, really good book, and you keep your eyes down, and you just keep walking. You keep walking in the hopes that when you look back up, that landmark is going to be significantly closer. And then you look and it looks just as distant as it did when you when you first picked it as a reference point. And you get disappointed. Do you do you have that problem where you're trying to reach a landmark, or do you just enjoy every step you take
Paul Salopek 32:01
Sure? No, of course. I mean, you're right, and that's not laughing, because I'm recognizing that. And you know what, when I do that, when I you know, sometimes you know, potentially, don't look at where I'm headed. And I must say that having a, you know, a visible landmark in my view, shed is a rarity. It's not, doesn't happen, right? Because I'm, if you're walking through, you know, the Anatolian plane, there are, there's nothing, right? They're just, you know, farms and farms. But assume there's a big mountain. Assume there's Mount Olympus out there somewhere. When I do that, I have to, I have to laugh at myself, because that means I'm, I'm impatient, right? That means I'm in a hurry on my foot ache, or, you know, I'm thirsty or hungry, or I'm tired and sore, and I'm trying to compress time, which is, you know, counter, counterproductive to the purpose and the philosophy of this, of this crazy project, which is to kind of elongate time, to make time more elastic. So, but I'm human. Of course, I have days like that, other days honest to flip the coin, I feel like I'm moving too fast, that walking, it even walking is too fast to understand the complexity of a human landscape that I'm walking through. Yeah,
Brad 33:15
because that was kind of what I wanted to come to. Are there times when you're walking and you think back on your time as a journalist working in the sort of modern media landscape, and as you're walking and you're having these experiences, are there times when you just think to yourself, like, Oh my God, how could I have represented something so incorrectly, or in such a sort of shallow analysis, or how could I have misunderstood something that I previously thought I was on top of that, that now I see in a completely different way. Have you had those fundamental shifts in understanding of things that you have spoken about, like
Paul Salopek 33:54
looking back and looking at early work and making your teeth ache? That happens? But you know, Brad, what's the alternative? The alternative looking back and seeing something really, really good and say, God, I had talent once. Yeah, I'd almost take the trajectory that you laid out much better than the one that I just described. But no, of course, no, I've covered, I've covered, you know, wars where I've kind of jumped into wars on one side of the war, and then, like, taken a flight and jumped on the other side of the war, and even then, you know, in an attempt to kind of understand, you know, the the nature of mass violence. And I still look back on some of those early efforts, I have a word more the Ethiopian Eritrean war comes to mind where I said, Boy, I really sort of missed the mark. You know, I was reporting on what I was seeing around me and what I was feeling. But damn, I didn't really, you know, have a really deep understanding of the very complex sort of issues between those two, those two people, but, but to be fair, I give I have to look back with compassion on my younger self. I think I did okay. Given the constraints, I did as good as well as I could, given the constraints of the biz, and also I had wonderful editors who helped me become better, and also gave me a string. And here's another thing that I tell people who kind of suddenly discover the walk they're saying, Wow, you so you were like a foreign correspondent, jetting all over the place and writing, kind of breaking news, kind of a international fireman, going from war to, you know, election to whatever, you know, famine. And then you stopped. You got, like a midlife crisis, and you had to decide between, kind of, like buying a convertible Ferrari or something, and going out walking the earth. And then you did this. So you had a big epiphany. The truth is, a lot less interesting. I was sort of doing this for years as a foreign correspondent, because I had these great editors who said, Oh, this is a great story. Take the time you need. So I would spend months on a single story in a place like the Congo, right? And so, in an interesting way, the out of Eden walk this, this project is not a very radical departure from what I've been doing most of my career as an international order. In fact, sometimes I think that, you know my reporting for fast media back then, because I specialized in long form, complex global issues, was kind of a training ground for what I'm doing now.
Brad 36:20
I suppose that that is a very I should put it, it's, it's, it's a kind way to look at your younger self. And I think we all owe it to ourselves to sort of look back and say, Well, okay, I was, I was wet behind the ears. I didn't, I didn't quite know what I know now, but you also can't expect that of someone who hasn't had the experiences that I've had now, I was gonna say.
Paul Salopek 36:42
Yeah, and it's part of the learning process, right? So, you know, you go from kindergarten to first. So I, you know, I don't know if I could, and to be honest, I still feel like I'm in kindergarten most days, right? So, like, haven't I don't have, let me be clear, I don't have any sense tonight talking to you that I've kind of made it in quotes, right? Absolutely every single time. And I'm working on one tonight. I sit down to write a story. I have a crisis of confidence. Can I pull this off? Can I make it better than last one? Can I even start? Can I finish? And that hasn't really changed in 30 plus years of doing what I'm doing. And so, you know, on one hand, there's a linear progression, maybe in certain kind of skill sets, right? Maybe certain tools you get a little better using. But I think it's maybe not too healthy. Let me speak for myself, it's not too healthy to me to say that, Oh, I've, I've made it like, I'm like, at the peak of my I'm at the top of my game. I hope I'm not at the top of my game. I hope I'm gonna get better.
Brad 37:47
Yeah, I was gonna say it reminds me of a poem by by San guy, so a Japanese philosophical poet and somewhat morbid. But there was a, there was a man who was quite ill and and he asked San guy to write a poem for the for the good fortune of his family. And San guy wrote the poem, father dies, man dies, son dies, and and the man was really upset. He was outraged, like, why would you write such a terrible poem for my for my family? And San guy said, Well, you're all going to die. The most fortuitous way for you to die is for the older generation to die, and then the intermediate generation and then the youngest generation. Imagine how much worse it would be if your son died before you. So take solace in this order.
Paul Salopek 38:31
That's great, like it, it's, you know, managing expectations, taking the goodness of what So, yes, no, I'll take that absolutely. Take that to heart. Look, anytime. I think this is maybe not just me, other writers friends, is like, anytime you write a good sentence, and you know, it's a good sentence, you're buzzing for the day, right? You sort of kind of miss that day, and then you have to get up the next morning and do it again and hopefully do it better, right? That's sort of the nature of the beat.
Brad 39:00
Yes. And then the editor tells you to cut that part because it's too long and you're sad. That's right, yeah, been there. Been there. Unfortunately, I'm not capable of writing anything under about 2000 words, and that does not that does not please people. I want to move forward to Myanmar, because this is a context which, as I understand, and I hope I'm not being disrespectful, you don't have a deep sort of familiarity with Myanmar culture and Myanmar political and historical context, but you did find yourself physically in the country as the early stages of the coup were unfolding. Is that correct?
Paul Salopek 39:36
That's right. So, so yeah, and you're absolutely it's not disrespectful at all. It's highly accurate to say I don't have any kind of expertise, kind of in the deep politics of a very complicated country. I walked into Myanmar from northeastern India in early in 2020 with no no suspicion. And I don't think too many people had a suspicion of what was coming. Coming, right? Going to come. You know, following February and I walked from the border crossing to I walked across beautiful jungle mountains. You know, that had, you know, some remnant teak growing in it crossed the mighty Irrawaddy on a boat and made my way into northern the north central part of the country, sleeping at temples, you know, sleeping at various travelers guest houses. And then comes around, you know. And I had ethnic chin walking partners. I had ethnic li Suu walking partners. These are northern ethnic groups, right? And with learning as I was going and then it so it came about that two things happened. One, COVID, right, erupted at the end of that year, and that threw the whole, my whole walking plan, into question, because I was heading from Myanmar Burma into China, and at that point, governments were starting in a panic to to shut down their their borders, right? So that raised a question for me, what do I do? You know, I have to, have to do something, because I'm on a journey. I can, I can pause for a little while, but I can't stop forever. So, so what do you do? So I stopped in Mandalay, the old imperial capital of Myanmar, Burma, as you know, and I, I I decided to go with my walking partner, my Lisa walking partner, to go to his village right, to kind of hang out, to wait out COVID, whatever COVID was. And then the weeks turned into months. I was helping, you know, farmers plant rice. I was, you know, updating my journal. I was writing cultural stories. So it comes around the February of the following year I have to go to go get my my visa extended, because I'd never planned to be there that long, right? So I go down to Yangon, and while I'm in quarantine in a quarantine Hotel in downtown Yangon, I hear first, first the internet gets cut, and then I hear upheaval on the streets, and that's the beginning of the coup. Yeah, that's how I walked into coup. Totally Unprepared. My head in a completely different space. My head was kind of like, how am I getting out of how am I going to get out of Mandalay to walk north towards the border of Yunnan? I arranged a route, had kind of, you know, done a lot of research the area, as you know, is some of it's controlled by the Khin army and some of it's controlled by government troops. And so I had to kind of figure out, you know, is it safe to walk through these areas? The the coup threw everything into upheaval, and what happened was, as the protest around the hotel began to get bigger and bigger and noisier and noisier, and as it was clear that the government was becoming paralyzed, the even the health ministry had stopped working right, because, as you recall, all the folks who were working, a lot of the folks, 1000s of people working for the government, started marching in the streets too As part of the demonstration against the theft of their democracy by the generals. And so who was managing these, these, these quarantine COVID hotels? You know, nobody ever thought about it. But here, you know, probably 1000s of people were kind of locked up in Yangon, myself included, and the health workers were on strike. So what the hotel ended up doing? The poor hotel staff just started writing out handwritten chits saying, you know, we're letting you go. You have completed your quarantine, literally handwritten on a piece of stationery. And I had gone into When, when, the crisis began, I'd gone into work corresponding mode. I you know, I immediately filled the bathtub in my room with water, because thinking water would be shut off, drinking water, I was retrieving leftover food from my waist bin. I was wondering if I could get out of the window using some sort of a sheets tied together, right? Because I had no idea what was going to happen. So fortunate. I didn't have to do do that crazy ladder thing, but I went out onto the street and then just basically started working as a reporter covering what was happening.
Brad 44:32
I just think probably half of the audience has just had a bit of a red flag moment when you said you filled the bathtub drinking water. And I've just thought, oh, man, you don't want to drink the water that comes out of the taps in Myanmar. I mean, you know, if you gotta, you gotta, yeah.
Paul Salopek 44:49
Yeah, it's either that or the toilet mate. Because, yeah, true. No, nothing's being delivered at that point, right? So, anyway, so, so at that point, that's when I really that's when my education. Nation a little bit, you know? And again, I'm not an expert, started into kind of the social and political dynamics of Myanmar.
Brad 45:07
And because you say you were completely unprepared, and that's, that's the thing, because I'm wondering about the days proceeding, because, of course, the the week prior to the coup, we were on pins. And he's like the majority of us, myself included, I have to admit that, you know, I called it and I was wrong. We all said there's no way. There's no way. But the military were on or off, like, one day they were saying, we're going to do a coup. We're going to do a coup. They better, you know, not ratify the results of the election. The next day, they were sending someone out to say, no, no, no, it's just a misunderstanding, and that's not what we said at all. But in the meantime, I think it was on Thursday, the day before the coup. They although the week proceeding, they'd moved troops into napidor and they had surrounded key government buildings, so they clearly put the infrastructure down to stage the coup. But on Saturday, they were, they were saying, no, no, no, no, no, we're de escalating. We're de escalating. And then the coup happened. I'm just wondering, were you following any of that, or were you so focused on the local communities and the immediate experiences and people that you were having that you weren't even processing national level news?
Paul Salopek 46:10
Yeah, your sources are probably Brad much, much better than mine during that time, because I was starting from zero, I would been doing, like, Cultural Historical reporting, you know, in the far north, and I had zero kind of political contacts, none. So I was listening to the rumors sweeping the streets. You know, the first thing that, as I mentioned, that I knew that it was serious from past experience and other other war zones, is that the internet was cut off. And I said, Okay, this is it. That's when I started. And then I went down, and I don't know what, if you know, you you clearly were on the same streets. Might have, even you know, passed each other without knowing it. There was this sense, initially, of euphoria, right? Because it was a youth movement. It was like all kinds of not just students, but delivery guys, right? The guys on you know, were in their scooters, doing during motorcade processions, right? You know, workers, you know, everybody was out kind of in a very amazing burst of pro democratic energy. And I was basically covering that. And then as as the clouds began to gather, you know, as the as the as the threats began to mount against the protesters, I started switching into more kind of conflict coverage, from kind of, you know, mass demonstration politics story into potential pre war scenario. And so I went out to some neighborhood night and spent night with communities that were beginning to create self defense units and also kind of warning units, you know, if they saw police or military kind of circulating, they would go out and they had walkie talkie. They were kind of alerting everybody that that the cops were prowling the streets. Because, as you remember, they were actually kidnapping people, right, going out and snatching organizers and things like that.
Brad 47:58
Yeah, it was, it was, it was brutal. Actually, one of my one of my friends, got got snatched further up north. He managed to, it was released like he got snatched, but he managed to throw his his gas mask and goggles down a drain before they got him so they didn't have any physical evidence they could hold him on. So he was sort of given some sort of summary punishment and released from the prison, thankfully, but it was, it was brutal times, and that's what I wanted to ask about, is like, what? What was it? Not so much that you saw, but what was it that you felt? Because there's, there's, like, you've been in these, these places, you've been in these situations. You know what these, these things are, the feeling in the air like you like when people say you can cut the tension with a knife, I think the majority of people don't know what that actually feels like, because they haven't been there. But when, when you're in these situations, there's a there's an electricity in the air that's different based on what's happening. So you're saying that what you were feeling first was more so it sounds like excitement and and the sort of Hope of the people that you know what, maybe this time we can just, we can just stand up for ourselves and fix this before it returned.
Paul Salopek 49:13
Right in an insane sweep, right in terms of even, like, dealing with past troubles with The with the ruling parties at the time, right, people saw this in a complicated way as to like, Should we just change everything? There was a lot of kind of optimism and a sense of empowerment coursing through the streets of Yangon those days. I can't tell you how many people, young people, were telling me, you know, we're waiting for the UN to step in, right? You know, we're waiting for somebody to come, you know, castigate the junta and take our side, and they're going to come rescue us in some way, as they were kind of making rudimentary body armor right out of trash can lids and things like that. And I just from past experience, you. Yeah, I'd been through revolution before. I'd been through, you know, social upheavals. I've been to out and out shooting wars. But something struck me in Myanmar at that time was this heart cracking innocence, this this astonishing, almost childlike faith in how the world works, right in that the international community, to give the biggest example, that was the most heart cracking, would somehow step in and on the side of justice, right when this very dark force was starting to spread its tentacles across the country again, and I, you know, every time a kid told me this, you know, we're waiting for them to come. You know, you know the US or whatever. You know, I almost didn't have the heart to tell them, my friends, nobody's coming. To save you, nobody's coming. There is no Calvary, right? And you know, I was living rooms were young people, college students, creatives, people going like digital website design animators, guys with earrings and tattoos were like making bows and arrows. I mean, that's how skill it was, right? And they had like, these stone age tools, the people that I'm following on my project sitting on a coffee table next to coke cans and things like that, or iPads, right? And so it was very strange and sad, because I sort of, I don't mean to say that I'm omniscient, I don't, but I saw, you know that that wasn't going to happen, that part of being rescued wasn't going to happen. And then they started right? And so it's telling that the first person that I'm aware of that was shot was a 19 year old girl and killed, and that set the tone for kind of what was coming next. So then it turned into a series of street battles, right that were again, astonishing to me, amazing to me as somebody who's covered conflict in Africa and the Middle East and in Central Asia. I covered Afghanistan, Iraq, every war in Africa between, like 2002 1009 and was the good faith of the protesters who, who never, kind of reacted violently. It was kind of a Gandy esque movement, right? Satyagraha all over again. There was this. It was purely defensive. And I don't know, I mean, you tell me, but when, when the junta apprehended this, then they just basically pulled out the stops and went to full on violence, right? So it was, it was heartbreaking. It was really, I was in crowds where, you know, people are getting I didn't see somebody get shot, but I saw people getting shot at with live round people like screaming for their lives and diving for cover, and people getting hurt and trampled on and, you know, dragging bloodied people into into door wells to get them out of the line of fire. That part was familiar to me, but the fact that that it had reached that point after so long, was sort of on for weeks, as you recall, you know, and there were these peaceful protests. The young protesters were very proud of, like cleaning up the trash after their protests. They're very proud of, like supplying free food and water the protesters all of which is fantastic. It should, it's like it's a shining example of the human spirit. But when you're up against a force that shoots young girls through the head and then started, you know, you know, killing poets and anybody else who stood in the way, the the asymmetry of the violence really, was heart cracking to me, yeah.
Brad 53:42
And a lot of what you just said, you know, resonates with me. I had a friend call me in the early days, and he said that he there was someone that he knew who actually was on the Forbes 30, on the 30 list, and now he's making shields in the revolution. Like, that's, that's what happened, exactly, especially what you said about, like, you know, the cavalry is not coming. You're not going to get help. The early days, like, the first week or two weeks, I had friends, I had students calling me and like, Hey, is the UN going to come in? Is the US going to come in? All these protest signs about RTP and, you know, asking for US intervention and democracy. And it's it was heartbreaking to have to sit there and tell them that this is not going to happen. And then I had to go, and I had to call friends of mine who are much more knowledgeable about International Politics and International Affairs. And I was, and I was asking them, like, Okay, can you explain RTP to me? And and they did, and I was horrified at just how thin and and meaningless the entire RTP document was, and how hard it was even to gratify that in the United Nations. Do you feel coming full circle? Do you feel that the media establishment, the way that they do and do not cover events like not just the crisis itself, but the lack of any cover? Contextualization of Myanmar as a country prior to that, because it's not if it bleeds, it leads, it's not exciting, sexy news. Do you feel that that contributes to the subsequent international let's call it either an apathy or just a hesitancy to to get involved.
Paul Salopek 55:17
Well, I've got to say I can't see how there's not a connection. And you know, if, if, if, if, if, some place, if some human wound, gets the spotlight, it gets the attention. Sadly, in my experience that the spotlight never lingers, right? It's restless. It moves on. But it's really very sobering and often disheartening, why it moves on, or why it never illuminates a wound to begin with. And I think Myanmar, you know, it would happen in Myanmar is kind of an artifact of a lot of things, of history, geopolitics, a phase in the in the history of the world, you know, where the superpower that was kind of, you know, projecting power for ill or good across the world had had its fingers burned in the Middle East, and was in kind of, you know, on its back foot, and was very shy about, you know, getting involved again. There's that. There's the fact that Myanmar is kind of an orphan, right? It doesn't have strong patron. I mean, you know, the Chinese were involved. They have, you know, they're after resources in the far north, but not enough to do much more in terms of, like, just verbiage you know, to hope everybody, you know, non interference, hopefully, you know, gets hurt. Blah, blah, so, and Myanmar didn't have any kind of easily exportable, vital resources that would get, you know, outside parties involved for again, for ill or better, Myanmar was kind of on its own, and that is reflected, I don't know about you, you reported there, but I just think, you know, in terms of international news bureaus, you know, numbers of international correspondence, it's probably pretty not. It doesn't certainly match the Middle East, right, where, if you go to go to some places in the Middle East, you trip over journalists. You know, at every corner, it's under covered to begin with. And then this happens, and it's a complicated comes from a deep history of instability, of military, you know, coups and control. You know, going back to the colonial end of the colonial period. You know, the history of colonialism is involved as well, of course, and even the pre colonial period, right of empire, all of these things about, you know, the core and the in the in the edge, the edge of Burma. You know how they've always interacted, or not, it's hard to explain. It's hard to put into a paragraph in an AP story, right? And so the average reader sitting in Uruguay, or I don't know, Canada, saying, like, what's, my stake in this? Other than just, you know, human compassion, it's far away. Doesn't seem like there's anything we can do. We feel immobilized by it. The the analogy that I would use, it's not perfect, because you can never compare to two wells of human suffering. In fact, it's probably a bit immoral to do so. But just to illustrate a point is, I've seen this before. Of course, I've seen this before. Orphan wars in Africa is the warehouse of orphan wars, right? You know, fair war raging in Eastern Europe, as there was in the Balkans in the 90s. It soaked up all the coverage, whereas at the same time, the biggest war in the world was getting almost zero coverage, and that was the Congo Civil War, where there were many countries involved with troops involved, and they were fighting over natural resources. And when you add to the death toll, all the people who died of disease and injuries due to displacement, that war had millions of victims, millions possibly the biggest um death toll since World War Two. Guess what? You found Congo almost nowhere in the international media, and that was a source of immense frustration for me and some other people who were trying to cover it. So in that sense, the Myanmar conflict had this, this bleak echo right of these African wars that nobody kind of took a significant interest in resolving. So it seems that what I'm hearing lately is that the Burmese themselves have taken matters into their own hands at enormous human cost, and appear to be fighting bravely and heroically against the junta and possibly even pushing it back, right?
Brad 59:46
Absolutely, I mean, and we hope that that continues, although, as you saw talking, I sympathize so much with the conflicts in Africa, I'm routinely, you know, I'm on YouTube, and I'll click on a random video from someone like Deutsche Bella, and they'll be talking. About a conflict that I genuinely didn't know existed, and they'll be talking about, you know, pretty significant terrorist organizations and rebel organizations that I'd never even heard the names of. I'm just thinking how what like what are you talking about, like that? What do you mean? They devastated an entire town like that? Should have been on the news. I should have, you know, I had to Google a Shabab in Mozambique because I didn't know that there wasn't a Shabab in Mozambique. I knew about the one in Sudan. And there's like, no, no. Totally different, totally different, new terrorist organization, massacring people, left, right and center. Like somebody could have said something, you know, but it never makes the headlines. No one cares.
Paul Salopek 1:00:38
Yeah, you know, somebody is saying something would be Brad would be my point. You know, there are people, you know, brave, heroic, indigenous reporters, and even even reporters who are trying to do their jobs well. But, you know, editors back home know their audiences, and so it gets, you know, it gets buried, you know, somewhere, you know, gone way down on the page. So it's, it's an old issue about the limits of human compassion. And to bring this conversation full circle, it kind of alludes to the dilemma of of human compassion through time for we've, we've made a big I've made a big point. About 99% of our our history of our existence on the planet is in small hunting bands of 25 to 40 people. No surprise that that number of people is sort of the limit, the boundaries of our compassion, that we will take action for, right? Immediate family, close relatives, close friends, the size of the number of guys in a military platoon. It's no secret or surprise why it's about 40, right? If that's who you will, that's the limit of who you will. Kind of put your life on the line for and when we're being bombarded today with just all this global news, it's a tsunami of news that pours out of our smartphones. I sort of, I empathize with the average person living anywhere is like, you know, how much can you possibly, you know, even find these conflicts much less than you know, put your heart into them. It's, it's, it's the, it's the paradox of being living in the information age. We have tons of information pouring out of our ears. It's pouring into our eyes, but what we don't have, it seems, is more meaning, right? So that's kind of the goal of this little project, is to try to find stories that have meaning.
Brad 1:02:26
And hopefully they do find their way to an audience who desperately wants to know and wants to be able to do something about that.
Paul Salopek 1:02:34
Well, just given the forum that we're you know that your that your program is is couched in, I would just encourage everybody, and I know we're probably talking to a lot of people who know much more than I do, so it's kind of, you know, singing to the choir, but keep keep Myanmar in your heart, keep it in front of your eyes. Do whatever you can to help the people. But Myanmar there are, there are fantastic on the ground programs to help keep kids in school, to help feed people to help assuage the suffering of refugee populations and neighboring countries, and that kind of support echoes down through time. This goes down generationally. So keep, keep, keep Myanmar in your heart.
Host 1:03:20
Many listeners know that in addition to running these podcast episodes, we also run a nonprofit better Burma, which carries out humanitarian projects across Myanmar, while we regularly post about current needs and proposals from groups on the ground. We also handle emergency requests, often in matters that are quite literally life or death when those urgent requests come in, we have no time to conduct targeted fundraisers, as these funds are often needed within hours. So please consider helping us to maintain this emergency fund. We want to stress that literally any amount you can give allows us to respond more flexibly and effectively when disaster strikes. If you would like to join in our mission to support those in Myanmar who are being impacted by the military coup, we welcome your contribution in any form, currency or transfer method, Your donation will go on to support a wide range of humanitarian and media missions, aiding those local communities who need it most. Donations are directed to such causes as the Civil Disobedience movement, CDM, families of deceased victims, internally displaced person. IDP camps, food for impoverished communities, military defection campaigns, undercover journalists, refugee camps, monasteries and nunneries, education initiatives, the purchasing of protective equipment and medical supplies, COVID relief and more. We also make sure that our donation Fund supports a diverse range of religious and ethnic groups across the country. We invite you to visit our website to learn more about past projects as well as upcoming needs. You can give a general donation or earmark your contribution to a specific activity or project you would like to support, perhaps. Perhaps even something you heard about in this very episode. All of this humanitarian work is carried out by our nonprofit mission, better Burma. Any donation you give on our Insight Myanmar website is directed towards this fund. Alternatively, you can also visit the better Burma website, betterbum.org and donate directly there. In either case, your donation goes to the same cause in both websites, except credit card. You can also give via PayPal, by going to paypal.me/better, Burma. Additionally, we can take donations through Patreon, Venmo, GoFundMe and Cash App. Simply search better Burma on each platform, and you'll find our account. You can also visit either website for specific links to these respective accounts or email us at info@betterburma.org that's better Burma, one word spelled B, E T, T, E R, B, U R, M, A.org. If you would like to give it another way, please contact us. We also invite you to check out our range of handicrafts that are sourced from vulnerable artisan communities across Myanmar, available at alokacrafts.com any purchase will not only support these artisan communities, but also our nonprofit's wider mission, that's Aloka Crafts spelled, A, L, O, K, A, C, R, A, F, T, S, one word, alokacrafts.com. Thank you so much for your kind consideration and support.