From Hull To Eternity: Karl VS. Goliath

A laptop dies, the internet lies about being connected, and somehow that turns into the question we can’t stop asking: if AI is supposedly going to end humanity by 2030, what does that even look like in real life? We talk through the headline panic, the quieter risks people ignore (water use, energy draw, and companies skipping basic containment), and the oddly calming point a smart NPR guest makes: you can unplug it, you can air gap it, and you can choose to log off when the noise gets too loud.

From there we swing into the kind of tech talk that feels like daily life now: Apple hype, Samsung déjà vu, and why a foldable phone sounds more annoying than futuristic. We also get painfully specific about earbuds, ripped tips, and the curse of tiny ear canals, plus the weirdly tempting promise of bone-conduction headphones. It’s a Gen X comfort zone, laughing at gadgets while still being a little haunted by what’s coming.

Then we hit the story that dwarfs everything: Karl Bushby and the Goliath Expedition. In 1998 he starts walking from Punta Arenas, Chile, determined to walk home to Hull, England. That means the Darien Gap, North America’s car-first roads, Alaska, a Bering Strait crossing with shifting sea ice and polar bears, and years of Siberia and visa math that ends in a Russian re-entry ban. When geopolitics shuts doors, he finds another way, including a 31-day open-water swim across the Caspian Sea, and finally reaches France with just the English Channel left. Eurotunnel says no, French law complicates a swim, and then an exception opens a path to finish. If you’ve ever needed proof that stubbornness can be its own kind of map, this is it.

Subscribe wherever you listen, share this with a friend who loves impossible true stories, and leave a review. What do you think is harder, the miles or the paperwork?

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1 SPEAKER_01: Two best friends fucking fast.

We're missing two arcades, we're having a blast.

Seeing these dreams, we on screens, it was all bad.

SPEAKER_03: Welcome to Like Whatever, a podcast for, by, and

about Gen X.

I'm Nicole, and this might be FFF Heatler.

SPEAKER_02: Hello.

SPEAKER_03: We are back together this week.

Yep.

Um, it doesn't mean things are going smoothly.

Things are not going well at all.

SPEAKER_06: So my laptop died.

So I had to emergency get another laptop.

Then I was at my house last night setting everything up so

that it would all be ready to go when we record today.

And it was because it was all there.

I even downloaded it, the script, into Word so that it

would be ready.

I left it open and everything, and I was like, cool, cool, it's

all ready to go.

And now it is not here.

And so I'm desperately trying to figure that out.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: But I really want to talk about this AI stuff this

week.

This is off script right now.

This is.

This is just what I wanted to talk about.

I will say on the way down, I was listening to NPR and a lady

feel made me feel better about it, but I still want to talk

about what's going on.

Okay.

Um so the founder of Anthropic came out this week or last week

and said that um AI is gonna kill all of humanity by 2030.

The end of the year.

We got well, less than four.

Three and a quarter years.

Yes, I did hear that.

So I think Heather just found her script.

SPEAKER_06: I did.

It was an internet issue.

This thing said I had internet.

My phone said I did not have internet.

Right.

I reset the router.

It was in.

We're back.

Okay.

I feel much better.

SPEAKER_03: So the fact that he came out and just said this gave

me some different thoughts when I was like, is this like the guy

that created the atomic bomb that was like, oh shit, like I

didn't know you were gonna do this with it?

Or is it some sort of um distraction, which is something

somebody suggested on their radio today?

Or is it like uh take the liability off you?

Like I told you guys this wasn't gonna be good, so I'm gonna

continue to make it, but just so you know, it's not good.

SPEAKER_06: Well, here's the thing.

It probably is gonna kill us all because it's gonna use all of

our water.

Yes, it's gonna devoid the planet, yes, and look, I'm

guilty, I know I use AI, I'm guilty.

I know, but I use it for things that I'm too lazy.

I know.

Oh, that makes it quite hard.

Yeah, it doesn't make it any better.

I get it.

But like I do it like so.

Last week's title was Hit Me Baby One More Time.

And so I didn't know if that was copyright or right or what.

And instead of me taking 10 hours to try and figure out how

to find that information out, Google just told me.

SPEAKER_03: So yeah, that is true.

So yeah, it w it was worrisome, but then um, so I was listening

to the super smart lady on NPR and they were asking her all the

obvious questions of all the worries of what has come out,

and she said, first of all, you can unplug it.

Like it's not like that was another thing.

SPEAKER_06: I was like, Well, how is it going to kill me

though?

Like, I get some said it could create a bioweapon and blah

blah, but you can unplug it, right?

It's like bullies, yeah.

Now everybody's like, well, now they come into your home on the

internet, it just go off the web, like stop.

Exactly.

Don't go on Facebook anymore, and then the bullies can't get

you.

SPEAKER_03: And then um, talking about um how they said one AI

went and invaded some other AI and it got out and it was doing

stuff it wasn't supposed to be doing.

They said no.

The lady said no, that's the company not doing their job.

Like there's something called an air, I want to say an air pocket

because that's like what I pictured, but it you have to

have this in place to hold it in.

And if that's there, it can't get out.

SPEAKER_06: Right.

SPEAKER_03: So she was like, if it's getting out and going other

places, you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing.

Like, if you talk to cybersecurity people, they will

explain to you how all this works.

So I I obviously don't know even one percent about AI.

Sure.

And I am not going to be able to repeat all of these super smart

things that the super smart lady said.

But she did kind of put my mind at ease that all the hell and

damnation that we're hearing, she's like Well, that's why I

was also when I was hearing it, I was like, wait, but how is it

coming?

SPEAKER_06: I I don't have a robot.

So like it physically can't put hands on me.

So how is it gonna it's not making my food, so it's not

gonna poison me.

Plus, good luck with that AI because I only eat like four

things, and I can tell the difference immediately if it is

not the brand, or if you're trying to fuck with my food, and

I can tell immediately.

I I know the difference between hunts and heinz, and you think

I'm kidding about that.

I am not.

SPEAKER_03: Well, I always kind of imagined it as like uh um Mad

Max Beyond the Thunderdome Armageddon situation where like

we would lose all our resources because it would shut everything

down, and people would start fighting to survive, and wow,

then we'd just have some people in some big machines with crazy

costumes out in the desert driving around.

SPEAKER_06: I mean, I'm not gonna make it through that

anyway.

I don't have that kind of will to survive.

Oh god, me neither.

SPEAKER_03: So I'm going into the I often think that when I

watch things and like your people are chained in a basement

or like it it it you're not gonna get out, but you're gonna

get tortured for a good week or two before just kill yourself.

Like why and do you really want to survive that?

Do you want to come out with all the mental damage that you're

gonna do?

That's too.

I'm like, but why?

SPEAKER_06: Why would you want to I don't know.

Yeah, anyway.

Any and anytime we hear like, oh, well, the you know, when the

bomb comes and it's gonna be Armageddon, and uh, you know, I

live I want to be as close to that bomb as possible.

I'm not trying to live.

SPEAKER_03: I don't want to live on the outskirts of a nuclear

bomb where I like my skin starts to melt and I get cancer.

I want it quick and dirty.

SPEAKER_06: Yes, and and I don't want to be on this earth with

all those people who have been hoarding food, and I don't want

to hear about it because you know they're gonna be the first

people.

SPEAKER_03: These commercials are getting so that are like,

oh, we told you so.

Welcome to my go bag, and my no these survivalist TV show camera

are commercials are too much.

Like, I was married to a survivalist.

Well, that was one of his many personalities at one point.

SPEAKER_06: And that's exactly who I'm talking about.

Like, there's no way I could live on earth with a bunch of

hymns.

SPEAKER_03: Like, we spent a ton of money on stuff we could use

in our survival situation, and now we're divorced 20 years, and

that shit's probably gone somewhere.

I doubt he kept it, but I spent like a lot of money on that, and

now I'm watching these commercials and I'm just like,

it's just the same old, same old, same old, same old.

Like it's and that's how I feel too.

If it ends, I'm somebody come knock me off.

SPEAKER_06: Like, yeah, I'm not interested in going through.

I don't even want to be here with all this, let alone here

without all this.

SPEAKER_03: Air conditioning and junk food and that's why cable

TV and stuff now.

SPEAKER_06: I don't even want to be here with all the good stuff

that we have.

You take all that away, and I really don't have reason.

There's just really no reason at all for me to be here.

unknown: I don't know.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so I was a lot more fired up about the AI when

I text you that I want to talk about it, and then I heard the

lady and she made me feel better.

Made you feel better.

So I don't need to get into it as badly as I did.

So that's good news.

And I found my script.

SPEAKER_06: I know.

I don't have anything to talk about this week.

SPEAKER_03: I think I had some other things that I don't have

anything.

SPEAKER_02: I don't think uh do I know.

SPEAKER_03: God knows you didn't put it in a note.

SPEAKER_06: I didn't put it in a note.

I wouldn't be able to get to my notes now because I have

internet.

Why didn't I just reset the goddamn router?

Like two hours.

I don't know.

I don't have my major, I was having a great week too.

I mean, it wasn't a great week, but a great week for you.

A great week.

Like everything was working, and then my laptop, which by the

way, I fucking love that laptop.

I know.

It's only two years old.

I don't understand.

They don't make this garbage the way they used to.

SPEAKER_03: They sure don't.

I don't know.

I thought I had other things to talk about, but I guess I don't.

SPEAKER_06: I do have one thing because we all know how much I

dislike Apple and how funny.

How funny it is to me that they are coming out with this

foldable phone that I don't know, Samsung had six years ago.

And then everybody's like, well, you know, it's gonna be better

than the Samsung because I hear the Samsung screen peel up.

They're buying the screens from fucking Samsung.

It's Samsung's phone with an apple slapped on it.

Oh lord.

And your Apple nonsense inside.

SPEAKER_03: It's just it's just Yeah, I won't be buying the

folding phone.

SPEAKER_06: That just entertains the hell out of me because they

got this whole thing, and they're like, oh look, it opens,

and I was like, I know.

SPEAKER_03: Samsung have been doing that forever.

They really have.

I've seen the Samsung ones in real life.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't want a phone that folds up.

That's stupid.

It is, yeah, yeah.

The whole phone is stupid.

And I don't buy phones till mine dies.

SPEAKER_06: Well, I do get new Samsung a lot.

Um do not have the phone though, the flip or whatever it's

called.

SPEAKER_03: I love it when my bill drops that$30, whatever

dollars a month.

SPEAKER_06: Well, I do it, I see now I am smart about it because

I'll be like trade yours in for zero zero dollars, and then you

just trade it in, and and because I keep getting the

newest one, because this is 25, and I don't know what they're on

now, but but I do have to do something about my earbuds

because the tips I don't know.

Samsung, but there's new earbuds coming out, so now I gotta wait.

But Samsung did this really stupid thing with their um the

tips of the earbuds, they like pull off, but if you don't pull

them right, the whole thing rips off.

And so I ripped one of them and I can't find the other tips that

come with it.

Like to re- So now I have one with a tip and one without a

tip.

And I don't have any idea what I did.

I know I have them somewhere, but I have Yeah, I can't do

earbuds.

SPEAKER_03: The holes into my ears are too small.

You got tiny ear holes?

I know.

I have to get those ones that hook around the top of your ear

and lay on the outside.

SPEAKER_06: Have you seen the bone condensing ones?

Or bone?

I don't know.

They like hook to your temples.

Ooh.

And it like Star Trek?

Yeah, like yes.

And it like puts it in through your bone conducting.

Bone conducting.

I don't know.

That sounds weird.

Yeah.

unknown: Okay.

SPEAKER_06: Wow.

Now that I've ruined our evening.

So uh like, share, rate review, do that part.

SPEAKER_03: Yep, like, share, rate review.

Uh find us on all the socials.

Find us wherever you listen to podcasts, both at like whatever

pod.

We have an email, likewhateverpod at gmail.com,

and we have a website, www.likewhateverpod.com.

Yes, thank you.

SPEAKER_05: You're welcome.

SPEAKER_06: So we're gonna fuck around and uh find out about

Carl Bushby.

I know what y'all are thinking.

What the fuck are you even talking about?

I just learned about this dude a couple weeks ago.

And then I so we'll get into it, but currently is a thing is

happening.

SPEAKER_03: So this was what you were talking about.

SPEAKER_06: Yes, this is the thing that is currently

happening, and I was like, well, it's supposed to be happening in

September.

The red tape just literally got cut, and now it is expected to

end in November.

So we're gonna have to just pay attention to it now.

I can't wait to find out what this is all about.

It's cra it's and it's insanity.

Like if this doesn't say if this dude isn't like Gen X, I don't

know.

SPEAKER_02: Really.

Alright.

So we're gonna walking is the oldest verb in the human

catalog.

SPEAKER_06: The thing we did before we built wheels, before

we wrote things down, and before we decided that distance was

something to be defeated rather than experienced.

Walking one foot than the other, the body rocking forward into

controlled fading, catching itself repeating, it's the first

thing we learn after we learn to breathe.

And most of us, after the age of five, take it entirely for

granted.

But there is another kind of walking, the kind that does not

stop.

The kind that does not stop for weather or politics or ice or

jungle or the accumulated weight of years.

Uh the kind that does not stop when a government stamps a word

in red across a passport, the kind that does not stop when an

ocean gets in the way.

The kind that began specifically, deliberately,

irrevocably.

In November of 1998, at the southernmost city on earth, a

man from Hull, East Yorkshire, England, who had made a

decision.

The decision was simple.

It was also the most ambitious act of human locomotion in

recorded history.

Carl Bushby, 30 years old, former soldier, dyslexic boy

from a working class city on the mouth of the Humber, was going

to walk home.

Not from the next town, not from the next country, home, from the

bottom of the world to the top of it.

From Punta Era Arnes Arnas Chile, from Chile to whole

England, through South America, Central America, North America,

across the Bering Strait, through Russia, through Asia,

into Europe, across the English Channel, and then north through

England to a terrace treat where his mother will be waiting at

the front gate.

28 years, 30,516 miles, 49,110 kilometers, every continent,

every ocean edge, every border, every bureaucracy, and every

piece of ice and every stretch of open water that separates

land masses from land masses on this particular planet.

That is what Carl Bushby set out to do.

And that is what Carl Bushby has done.

SPEAKER_03: That's crazy.

How have we never heard of this?

I don't know.

Why aren't they like checking in with him over the years?

SPEAKER_06: I mean, he's on Twitter and he's written books,

and it's okay.

SPEAKER_03: Shame on us.

SPEAKER_06: This is a man and his boots and the surface of the

earth and the relentless, grinding, magnificent,

occasionally maddening arithmetic of one foot placed in

front of the other for 28 years.

This is the longest walk home in human history, and it's almost

over.

Almost.

He has not yet crossed the channel.

He has not yet walked through England.

He has not yet reached the front gate, but he is closer today

than he has ever been.

And the world, his mother, are waiting.

We began, we are going to begin at the beginning in Hull in

1969, with a child who could not read the words on a page, but

could read with extraordinarily precision the shape of the

horizon.

Hull is not a city that announces itself.

It sits at the mouth of the Humbar estuary estuary on the

northeastern edge of England, where the river is so wide it

looks like the beginning of the sea, and where the sea, the

North Sea, grey and flat and implaceable, is never very far

from anyone's thoughts.

It's a city built on trade and on fish, and the courage of

troller men who went out into some of the most dangerous

waters in the world and came back smelling of the deep.

Or some did not come back at all.

It's a city that knows about distance.

In 1969, Hull was in transition.

The fishing industry had defined it for generations, was

beginning its long decline.

The cod wars with Iceland were straining the industry and gave

the city its identity, and the docks were changing.

The smell of fish that had been the smell of certain kind of

prosperity was slowly being replaced by the smell of

something less certain.

Into the city, into this particular quality of Northern

English light and northern English stoicism, Carl Bushby

was born.

His father had served in the SAS, the Special Air Service,

the most elite special forces in the British military.

A man by a definition shaped by extreme endurance and the

willingness to push the body past every threshold of comfort

and reason.

That inheritance matters, not because Carl Bushby's story is

simply a military story, it's much more than that, but because

the culture of endurance, of not stopping, of treating suffering

as information rather than instruction did not begin with

Carl.

It was handed to him quietly through the particular texture

of growing up in the shadow of a father who had chosen the

hardest path and walked to the end.

Carl Bushby was not, by the standard measures of childhood,

exceptional.

He struggled in school, not because he was not intelligent,

but because the intelligence he possessed did not conform to the

shapes that school demanded.

He had dyslexia.

Words on a page did not arrange themselves the way they arranged

themselves for children for other children.

Letters moved, sequences inverted.

The act of reading, which other children found straightforward,

was for Carl a daily negotiation with a system that seemed

designed to exclude him.

He was not stupid.

He was, in a profound sense, operating in translation, living

in a world built for a kind of mind he did not have and

learning to navigate it anyway.

There is something important here, something that runs all

the way through the story that follows.

Dyslexia is, among other things, a relationship with difficulty.

The child cannot decode text, learns early that difficulty is

not a reason to stop.

Cannot read, learns to read the room, the weather, the face, the

landscape.

The child who cannot navigate the page learns to navigate

everything else.

He learned that you just keep going.

That difficulty is not the point.

Getting to the other side is the point.

He grew up in Hull, watched the estuary, watched the ships and

the horizon, that particular quality of distance that a flat

seaport city offers.

The sense of the world extends outward.

He was a boy who moved to Iran, who tested the limits of what

his body could do.

So he enlisted, and the British Army, specifically the parachute

regiment, is not a place that accommodates hesitation.

The parachute regiment is one of the most demanding infantry

units in the British Armed Forces, elite, light infantry,

airborne, designed to move fast and hold positions that could

defeat less hardened troops.

Entry requires passing what the regiment calls P Company, a

selection process of extraordinary physical

brutality, a week of tests that include log raises, steeple

chases, assault courses, milling, a form of controlled

boxing, and a series of load-bearing marches across the

Brecon beacons that have, at their worst, killed candidates

who are not adequately prepared.

It sounds like like a Navy SEALs situation.

SPEAKER_03: That's what I was thinking.

SPEAKER_06: It is not a selection designed to find the

strongest man.

It's designed to find the man who will not stop when stopping

feels like the only reasonable option.

That's not the job for me.

No.

I literally just told you how I didn't want to live without the

things I have.

That AI could have it all if it takes it away.

I'm a big stopper.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: I'm a quitter.

Not a winner.

He served 11 years in the parachute regiment, 11 years of

learning what a human body is actually capable of when it is

giving no permission to quit.

Let's see, all this is important because, like, of course.

He learned inside the culture that pain is temporary and

distance is a problem of arithmetic, and that the soldier

who keeps moving when the soldier next to him has stopped

is the soldier who completes the mission.

He also learned in 11 years something about the gap between

what military asks of a man and what the man asks of himself.

The parachute regiment pushed him further than the most

institutions push their people, but Carl, looking at the world

from inside, was already imagining something the regiment

had not designed for him something bigger, something that

would require everything the regiment had given him, and then

28 years more.

He was already looking at the map and he was already asking

the question once asked could not be unasked.

He already becoming the man who would in November of ninety

eight lace up his boots in Chile and begin to walk north.

SPEAKER_02: Crazy.

SPEAKER_06: So it's called the Goliath Expedition.

Okay.

The idea does not arrive like a thunderbolt.

It rarely does.

With the ideas that change everything, it arrives instead

the way a river arrives to sea, gradually the accumulation of a

thousand small decisions and observations and moments of

restlessness, converging into something that finally one day

has a name and shape and a direction.

Carl, still in uniform, still serving in the parachute

regiment, is looking at a map.

He's looking at the shape of the world.

He's asking a question that is in the purest form.

What is the longest continuous walk possible on earth?

And I feel like this is why we could say he's Gen X, because he

was just like, huh.

What is the longest?

And we didn't have Google in 1998.

So he was like, let me look at a map.

SPEAKER_03: Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Definitely.

SPEAKER_06: When you look at the map long enough, it resolves

into a route.

Begin at the southernmost point of South America, at the tip of

Patagonia, where the continent finally runs out of land.

Walk north through the entire length of South America, walk

through Central America, North America, the full length of it,

all the way to Alaska, cross the Bering Strait, and walk west

across Russia, Siberia, Eurasia, the immensity of the Eurasian

landmass, through Central Asia, into Europe, cross the English

Channel, and walk north through England to Hall.

SPEAKER_03: All right, all of that sounds fine, except

Siberia.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

How do you walk across Siberia?

Like there is nothing.

And I've heard it's very dangerous.

It is.

They got lots of things that will eat you.

Yeah.

As well as Russians.

SPEAKER_02: Yes.

And it's cold.

It's cold.

They do not want you there.

unknown: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: No one had ever done it.

Not end-to-end, not on foot, connected, continuous, with no

gap in the line.

It was, in the most literable, literal possible sense, a walk

of a lifetime.

And it would require more than one lifetime worth of ordinary

courage.

Carl named it the Goliath Expedition.

The name is instructive.

Goliath is the thing that is too big, the thing that no

reasonable person would choose to fight.

The thing that you challenge not because you are certain of

winning, but because the alternative, not challenging it.

It's like me and kayaking.

Yes.

You should when you get it, you should name your kayak Goliath.

Carl, former Carl Carl Bushby, soldier from Hull, dyslexic boy,

looked at the Goliath of his planetary walk and did not look

away.

He began planning in the late 90s.

Planning a walk across the entire surface of the earth was

a different proposition than it would be today.

There was no GPS in every pocket.

There was no social media through which to build a

following and fund a journey.

There was no satellite phones that cost the same as a monthly

bus pass.

The world before the turn of the millennium was in many ways a

larger world.

A world of paper maps and embassies and letters of

introduction.

And that's the thing, like going through Siberia, it's not like

they have signs anywhere.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

And I was just thinking, too, just traveling like that, you're

probably in a lot of country, and you're probably not around a

lot of um uh civilization so much, especially like city like

modern type.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: So I'd imagine like every so many years he pops out

somewhere and is like, what is all of this that's happening

now?

Like, what the hell?

SPEAKER_06: Uh a world of paper maps and embassies and letters

of introduction and the slow analog work of making contact

with people in countries you have never visited through

channels that required patience and time and a willingness to

work without immediate feedback.

Yeah, and the language barrier.

Carl Bushby did all of it.

He planned the route on paper, he identified the critical

crossings, he thought about visas, about resupply, about

what a human body would need to sustain itself over months and

years of continuous movement.

He was preparing, in effect, for the most complex logistics

exercise of his life, and he was doing it on the salary of a

paratrooper.

So I am gonna like I am gonna say that it's not actually been

like continuous years.

Of course.

It's like he's not just been like hanging out in the middle

of nowhere, but every time he has to leave, he does come back

to the exact spot he left.

SPEAKER_03: Oh because there So he's been back to England.

SPEAKER_06: We'll get no, he has never gone back to England, he

has never gone home, he has not gone home.

That's the part for me.

I'll tell you.

SPEAKER_03: Okay, I'll wait.

SPEAKER_06: Like currently, I'll give it away.

Right now he's at the he's in France.

Okay, and he had been fighting to get a permit to walk through

the channel, and they won't let him do it.

So red tape has now been cut.

He still is not allowed to walk through the tunnel, but he's

figured something else out.

SPEAKER_03: Imagine you walk 28 years and you're a country over

from home.

You can see it.

It's right the fuck there.

You just need to get right there.

Just let me walk through here.

SPEAKER_06: Because when I was when I heard the podcast about

it, I was like, oh damn.

And so I looked him up and I was like, seriously, seriously.

And then in between the time where I said that, and now

things started moving.

And I was like, oh, so close.

And then I was like, should I just wait?

Because now they're estimating it to be November 1st.

That he and I was like, oh, should I wait to do this?

And we almost did have to wait to do it because I couldn't find

my he left the regiment after 11 years of service.

Uh the parachute regiment is not a job, simple job, it's an

identity.

Uh, you don't care about that.

Uh he left it for something with no guarantee of success, no

financial safety net, no institutional support, and no

precedent.

He left it for a walk, a walkabout.

That's Australian.

He assembled what he needed: the pack, heavy laden with the tools

of long distance movement, the boots already broken in, already

bearing the particular character that good walking boots acquire

through serious use.

The route, plotted on paper, with the careful attention of a

man who spent 11 years understanding that a plan that

fails in the field is a plan that was not adequate to the

field.

He had enough to begin.

He would figure out the rest as he went.

And I feel like that's the most genetic thing.

Like, I don't know.

We'll figure it out.

Just go and see what happens.

In Hull, his mother, Angela, watched her son prepare to

leave.

There's no record of what she said in that moment, no document

of the particular quality of that goodbye, but we can imagine

it, or rather, we don't need to, because any mother who has

watched a child walk towards something enormous and possibly

dangerous knows exactly what that moment contains.

Pride and terror and love and the fundamental helplessness of

watching something, someone you have raised choose a path you

cannot walk with them.

Angela Bushby said goodbye to her son in 1998, and then she

waited.

She is still waiting, but not now for very much longer, but

not for very much longer.

SPEAKER_03: Thank goodness.

Because I was like, man, when you said that in the beginning,

if his mom didn't make it.

I know.

SPEAKER_06: Well, I mean, maybe she I don't know.

Let's see if she can hold out until November.

Like you know she's gonna die the day after he gets there.

Yeah.

Well, but maybe not, because he's a six, he was six born in

sixty-nine, so he's a little bit older than he's not that much

older than he's four years older than me, so he's fifty-seven.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

She's only under seventy.

All right.

Yeah, they're fine.

I'm worried about him, like when he stops.

Like I know as a cocktail waitress for 14 years.

I my body felt like it needed to walk.

Like I needed to get out and go walk because I was so used to

being on my feet all the time.

Like he's he can't sit still.

Well, plus, like, well, then what?

Yeah.

Exactly.

Now what?

Walk the moon.

SPEAKER_06: And he's not gonna he's gonna be like the rest of

us that can't retire because he's not had a job for 28 years.

Exactly.

See, I'm telling you, this dude, like, I know they call us lazy

and all that nonsense, but I feel like at the heart of it,

this is us.

This guy is us.

Like, we are not lazy.

We're just like, you know what?

Fuck it, I'm gonna rock.

Um, you know what I'm gonna do?

I'm gonna walk around this world.

And everybody's like, you can't do that.

And you're like, oh yeah?

Do you want to watch me do it?

I don't care if it takes me fucking 30 years to do it.

SPEAKER_03: Fuck around and find out.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I'm gonna do it.

SPEAKER_03: You just watch.

SPEAKER_06: You can't watch right now because it's only 98

and we don't have that kind of technology right now.

But you just wait.

Punta Irinas.

I know, I know.

I'm so sorry.

SPEAKER_03: It's okay.

SPEAKER_06: At the end of the world, it's the southernmost

city of significant size on the planet, a place where the wind

comes not from the Vex Valley, but from the Antarctic, carrying

ice and salt and the particular desolation of the great southern

ocean.

In November, Patagonia is moving towards its summer.

But summer here is not a warm word.

It's it is merely the least cold season.

The season when the wind drops occasionally, when the light

holds a little longer, when the penguins on the nearby coast

seem briefly less improbable.

It is a place of immense inhuman scale.

The mountains of the southern Andes to the west, the brown

steppe to the east, the Strait of Magellan stretching south and

north, uh always north, the entire length of two continents

is waiting.

And that's another thing.

Like, I know how far I could even walk.

Look, it's enough for me to have to like walk to take the dog out

across the fucking parking lot.

SPEAKER_03: It's like if I get to a building and it's unclear

where the entrance is, so like I park and then I realize I have

to walk like to another.

And then you're like, is it better to walk back to my car

and drive over there?

Or is it just as fast to walk?

Like, yeah, the thought of walking crosses my mind often in

a day.

SPEAKER_02: I don't want to do it.

SPEAKER_03: I even had it uh speaking of kayaking, yes, I

tried to go there on Monday uh after work and come to find out

they don't rent during the week days after Labor Day.

So I got there.

It's like 25 minutes from my house.

I park.

I purposely park where I have to walk just under half a mile to

get down there.

So I'm getting a little exercise, walk down, see it's

closed.

I'm like, God damn it.

And I turn around, I'm walking back, and I'm like, well, I am

here at the state park.

I could take a walk.

Like it's like, fuck that.

I didn't come here to walk, I came here to kayak.

And I walk back, no fucking walk.

And I got my car and I left.

SPEAKER_06: And that's like the thing about.

So, like, yeah, I I I agree.

Walking is stupid, running is even dumber.

Um it to me though, this guy, it's not about the walking to

me, but about like the principle of it.

Yeah.

Like, I could I am fucking stubborn.

And I could see me like picking something and be like, no, I'm

gonna fucking do it.

SPEAKER_03: Yep.

And then being miserable the whole time.

SPEAKER_06: And not walking, because that wouldn't happen,

but like something and just be and I could see me doing

something for 28 years.

I mean, I've been living, which I'm very much opposed to.

So I mean, there is that because I win there.

I'm very much opposed to doing this all the time.

Yes.

I've been working this whole time, which I'm also very much

opposed to.

But like, that's just it.

I am a workaholic.

You are.

I put everything into my whole identity goes into my job.

Like, I define myself by my job.

SPEAKER_03: Correct.

And I am the opposite.

I have a great work ethic, but I have a great work ethic from the

hours the minute I get there till the minute I leave.

I give it a hundred percent, and then after that I'm done.

SPEAKER_06: Like I my whole self-esteem is wrapped up in

what not just my coworkers and like it's not like what other

people think, but like I have to be the best at my job.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: And the job that I currently have, it's like

physically impossible to be the best at this job because

literally everything is working against you all the time.

SPEAKER_03: Like oh, you'd never survive at my place or because

nobody's giving you any kind of pat on the back there.

SPEAKER_06: That's state government for you.

It's and it's it's like I get, I don't, I don't know.

It if if you work in a restaurant, you'd understand

like yes, definitely.

The sense of accomplishment that you get for your own self.

Yeah, oh yes.

Like on a busy night and you fucking killed it.

Oh yes.

That feeling is what I live for.

SPEAKER_03: Yes, I do know that feeling, and it does feel good.

Yeah, but I don't live for it.

I do.

SPEAKER_06: It's like like I like I killed myself as an RCA.

Maybe you'll grow it one day.

Because I was competing with 25-year-olds.

I still compete with a 20, well, he's 30 now, but I still

compete.

He was on vacation all week, and I didn't have anybody, he didn't

be wasn't driving me, so I was done late every day because I

wasn't competing with a 30-year-old who doesn't know

we're competing.

Just kidding, he does.

Because he competes also.

Yes.

That's the whole thing about it.

We drive each other.

Yeah.

Anyhow, it's cold, blah, blah, blah.

Carl Bushby took his first steps in November of 98.

He began to walk north.

These first steps contain within them everything that follows,

all the miles, all the years, all the crossings, the

detentions, the bureaucratic walls, and the frozen streets.

Every journey is, in the first moment, only a single step.

His first steps were on South American soil, in Patagonian

wind, with the weight of everything he needed on his back

and everything he had chosen to leave behind him.

He was thirty years old, and he had the rest of his life ahead

of him, and the plan was to spend it walking.

The length of South America defies easy comprehension.

To walk it is to understand in the most visceral possible way

that the continent is not a shape on a map, it is a physical

reality of almost incomprehensible scale.

From punta, I'm just gonna call it Punta Arenas to the Colombian

border is roughly 8,000 kilometers of road and mountain

and desert and jungle.

The Andes, which runs the full length of the western spine of

the continent, are not a single range but a system of ranges,

and walking through or near them means altitude, real altitude.

Altitude where the body struggles to extract oxygen from

thinner air.

I don't know if you all remember this, but um there was a plane

crash in the Andes and they had to eat each other.

So it is cannibalism up there.

That's no joke.

You gotta eat other people up there.

And and I know that when I was in the Grand Canyon, I struggled

for air.

Ugh yeah.

And it wasn't even close to cannibal level high.

SPEAKER_03: Sure.

It was close to us having to eat each other, though, if one of us

dies.

I mean, it really wasn't.

We thought we were gonna die.

I was ready.

SPEAKER_06: I'll tell you.

I was gonna die.

SPEAKER_03: Actually, I really was terrified we were gonna be

in there in the dark.

I was really truly thought that.

SPEAKER_06: I I looked at Nicole at one point and said, I would

throw your ass off here for a donkey right now.

SPEAKER_03: Yep, yep, yep.

I mean, the sun was setting and we're down, so it looks like

it's setting even faster.

And every attempt to climb, I mean, was just a few minutes and

we'd have to stop to breathe again.

I was like, there's just literally taking 10 steps at a

time, it's not gonna get us there.

I thought it was November January.

SPEAKER_06: No, because it wasn't that cold.

SPEAKER_03: Because it was it was it wasn't cold, it was

chilly in Sedona.

Because I remember in the mornings wearing like a sweater,

but like no winter coats or anything.

SPEAKER_06: No, it wasn't that cold.

I think I think it was like November or December that we

went.

Yeah, because that's when I like to go to Vegas and we went to

Vegas.

Yeah.

Anyway, yeah.

I can't even get out of the goddamn Grand Canyon, so mind

you, this wasn't her entire idea was to hike the Grand Canyon.

That's why I was gonna toss her off.

That was a bad idea.

SPEAKER_03: And going down was so easy.

We're just like doo-doo, walking down, and the people coming back

up look like death.

We were like, what is wrong with them?

It's not even that hard.

What?

Like it's hard.

Gosh.

SPEAKER_06: We're just smokers and stuff, and we have like a

bagel and a bottle of water.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah.

Um the Altiplano, the highest plateau of Peru and Bolivia,

sits at an average of 12,000 feet above sea level.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: The Pampas of Argentina offers a different

kind of difficulty.

Flatness, wind, and distance that does not resolve.

You walk all day, and the horizon is exactly where it was

that morning.

The landscape does not offer the satisfaction of visible

progress.

That sounds like it would make you crazy.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: He walked.

He walked through Argentina and Chile, through Bolivia and Peru,

through Ecuador, Ecuador and Colombia.

He walked through heat and through altitude and through the

particular exhaustion of days that begin and end with the body

doing only one thing, moving forward.

He walked through towns where people had never seen a foreign

man on foot, through cities where no one noticed him,

through stretches of road so empty that only the sounds were

the wind and his own breathing and the rhythm of his boots on

tarmac.

He walked through hunger and through boredom and through the

occasional elation that comes when the body finally stops

fighting the work and begins to accommodate it.

SPEAKER_03: I don't know that feeling.

SPEAKER_06: So also let's all remember what South America was

like in the 90s with the guerrilla warfire.

It was a horrible, like there was some he was not walking

through like friendly, and he's an he was a British person.

So it's not like he would fit in.

SPEAKER_03: No, they would definitely see him.

SPEAKER_06: Between South America and North America, there

is a gap.

The Pan American Highway, which runs from Alaska to the tip of

South America, breaks at one point and one point only, a

stretch of approximately 97 kilometers between the north of

Columbia and the south of Panama, where the road simply

ends, the jungle takes over.

This is the Darien Gap, one of the most lawless, ecologically

dense, and genuinely dangerous territories in the Western

Hemisphere.

A place where the rainforest is so thick that the road builders

gave up, where rivers run through gorge systems that

require rope and nerve to cross, where the ground itself can

become impassable overnight.

It has defeated expeditions, it has killed explorers.

It is, by any reasonable assessment, not a place to walk.

But he walked it.

He entered the Darien from the Colombian side, crossing into a

territory that was at the time contested by FAR FARC guerrillas

and paramilitary groups and the various organizations that use

the jungle impenetrability as a form of operational cover.

The Darien is a place where the law of nations does not reach

with any reliability, where the only authority is the one with

the weapon and the willingness to use it.

Yep.

Nobody's coming to save your ass.

Where a foreign man on foot is simultaneously invisible and

enormously conspicuous.

He navigated the jungle, he navigated the rivers, and then

in the deep green darkness of that borderless place, he was

detained.

Oh.

Dun dun dun.

Also, let's remember he's walking through a jungle with no

GPS.

SPEAKER_03: No vac probably wasn't vaccinated for all the

things that are in the jungle.

He might have gotten.

SPEAKER_06: Well, he was in the military too, so he was probably

already.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They probably already shot.

All right, good.

Yeah.

I don't think they have vaccinations for everything

that's in that thing now.

SPEAKER_06: No problem.

SPEAKER_03: Plus, there's like snakes and shit.

Like stuff wants to eat you.

Everything in there wants to eat you.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: And kill you.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

That's no joke.

Mm-hmm.

The details of the detention, how long it lasted, who held him

under what precise suspicion.

Belonged to the complicated ambiguity of the Darien itself.

He was held days past in a situation not of his choosing,

in a place where the expedition could have ended not by failure

of endurance, but by the simple decision of someone else.

This is one of the characteristic terrors of the

Goliath expedition.

The moment where the threat into the journey comes not from

within Carl Brushby, but from outside him.

He had trained for mountains, cold, and he had not trained for

being held in a jungle by men with guns, waiting to discover

whether he would be released or whether the walk would end there

in the greenest and most impenetrable silence on earth.

He was released.

The expedition continued.

SPEAKER_03: I kind of thought he might have been.

SPEAKER_06: He walked out of the Darien Gap and into Panama, and

the Pan American highway resumed beneath his feet, and Central

America opened ahead of him, and he kept going.

It was worth holding that for a moment, the act of continuing

after the Darien.

It would have been entirely reasonable after detention in

one of the most dangerous territories in the Americas to

reassess, to go home, to declare a partial victory, and let the

rest of the world remain unwalkable.

But he did not.

He walked on.

SPEAKER_02: Crazy.

SPEAKER_06: Because he said he would.

Because Hall was still a long way north, and because stopping

was not the operational in the operational vocabulary.

Let us take a moment and do your diary.

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: Because I repeat your life.

SPEAKER_03: All right.

Dear Diary.

How old was I in 86?

February.

I was gonna turn 13.

I was gonna say I was 12.

Uh, dear diary.

Sorry, I haven't written in such a long time, but I have some

good news and bad news.

Oh, great.

The good news is I've got a new pen pal in Egypt.

Oh, I was a big pen pal person, were you?

Yes.

I used to you'd get the teen magazines and in the back were

the ads where you could send them in.

Oh my god, I freaking love doing that.

SPEAKER_02: Me too.

SPEAKER_03: I actually the other night I was watching something

that had flat Stanley on it, and I used to do flat Stanley's with

my kids.

And so I went on the site and I was like, I wonder if adults can

do flat Stanley.

So I did, and it was like, Yeah, of course you can, blah, blah,

blah.

And I was like, I got up the next day.

I was like, what the fuck are you thinking?

I'm not gonna commit to all that shit.

Like, it was fun at the time, but we should really do pen pals

again.

Pen pals are fun.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah.

I've been waiting for it to come and like wait, like, I don't

know.

We should bring that back.

Let's bring it back.

Bring pen pals back.

Yeah.

None of this email nonsense.

Oh, for real.

Let's let's remember our cursive.

I miss writing letters.

And let's write letters and let's buy stamps.

I know I just write a bunch of case notes.

They have Mr.

Rogers stamps.

Oh.

Betty White stamps.

I just got SpongeBob stamps.

SPEAKER_03: Ooh.

Spongebob's the best.

Uh so new pen pal in Egypt, and I just got done writing her

letter.

Excellent.

The bad news is something I forgot to tell you.

After one month, three weeks, and four days, me and Brian

broke up.

SPEAKER_02: Oh my Brian.

Yeah.

You suck, Brian.

Yeah, he does.

SPEAKER_03: I don't know who he is, but he sucks.

But a whole one month, three days, and or three weeks and

four days.

That's a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

That's a long time.

That is a long time.

We were practically engaged.

You were you uh how you probably had wedding bells on the mind.

SPEAKER_06: That's a real shame.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I know.

There were a lot of boys that came after him.

I was a bit boy crazy.

SPEAKER_06: So I was not.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: I did not have time for boys.

Yeah.

Or care.

Yeah.

I'm telling you, I should have been gay.

Yeah.

I'm sad.

If if if it tells you anything that gay people cannot choose to

be, I should have been gay.

I wish I was gay.

Because my life would be a lot better.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: I just boycott.

I think I was looking for love in all the wrong places.

Well, yeah.

I think it has a lot to do with my trauma and my childhood.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah.

I have my dad.

I didn't probably need any.

My dad was like pretty like, you don't need a man.

Well, he's always said you don't mean and need a man for nothing.

Yeah.

Just learn to do it yourself.

Yeah.

My dad was very feminist.

SPEAKER_03: I just wanted somebody to care about me.

My dad was like, you don't need shit.

Yeah.

That's the best way.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, he didn't.

SPEAKER_03: I think that's the best thing to teach, but look

how I turned out.

Yeah.

Great.

53 years to figure that out.

That's great.

SPEAKER_06: North America is several countries built for the

car.

It's not a metaphor.

The infrastructure of North America, the highways and

interchanges, the commercial strips, the distance between

things was designed from the middle of the 20th century

onward with the assumption that movement would be motorized.

Pedestrians are in much of North America an afterthought.

Sidewalks end abruptly.

Highways carry signs that say, in plain language, no

pedestrians.

The shoulder of the road where it exists at all is a strip of

crumbling asphalt between the white line and the crash

barrier, wide enough to walk, but not quite wide enough to

feel safe.

Carl walked it anyway.

He walked through Mexico and through the United States,

through the desert southwest and the mountain states and the

Great Plains and the Pacific Northwest.

The vast American interior, state by state, mile by mile, as

invisible and as extraordinary as a figure in a dream.

People, when they noticed him, often could not process what

they were seeing.

A man on foot in America with a heavy pack and a British accent.

Walking not to the next town, but to Russia.

The explanation did not compute.

The country is too large for it to compute.

But occasionally it did, and when it did, the response was

the response that Carl Bushby would encounter again and again

throughout the expedition.

The human instinct to help a man who is doing something that

seems impossible.

Roadside assistance, a meal, a place to sleep, the quiet

practical kindness of people who did not know him and did not

need to, who understood simply that he was doing something hard

and that hard things deserve support.

SPEAKER_03: That is very nice to hear.

And also very um as a as someone obsessed with true crime.

I don't know that I could go into strangers' houses and go to

sleep.

Yeah.

I mean, I see both sides of it, and part of it's my problem

because I watch too much of that crap, but especially then.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, that's my serial killers.

Which we did an episode on that.

We did.

SPEAKER_03: I don't remember what it was called.

And there's a new serial killer in Philly.

SPEAKER_02: There is.

Which is exciting.

Where it's we're learning all about it now.

SPEAKER_03: And that other show I told you about is called I

said it was on ID, but it's on oxygen, and it's called I think

it's called Unknown Serial Killers of America.

Man, it's like this one dude, he killed hundreds of women.

Hundreds.

SPEAKER_06: It's crazy because, like, in the episode that that

we did, it was like in the in the 70s, it was like 700 serial

killers were operating, and then it got less and less, and then

and now it's like 60.

Yeah, it's like insane.

Yeah, select gas.

And the pollution in the Pacific Northwest.

unknown: Yep.

SPEAKER_06: AI coming at us.

Oh Lord.

That's the next serial killer.

Yes.

He reached Alaska.

The temperatures dropped, the days shortened dramatically.

The continental cold, different from Patagonia's cold, different

from anything south of the Arctic, settled over everything.

He was at the top of a continent ahead of time, across the water,

was another continent.

Between them, 58 miles of frozen Bering Strait, between him and

Russia, ice, polar bears, and a crossing that no British person

had ever made on foot.

SPEAKER_03: Like, how do he even survived?

Like that, that of all of it, not like walking the world

doesn't even seem like that crazy.

But walk getting through Siberia and Polar Bears.

Polar bears?

They're mean.

And hungry.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah.

They're starving to death now.

SPEAKER_03: Everybody thinks they're cute because they're big

and white, but they will.

They are I think they're one of the most vicious bears.

SPEAKER_06: They are.

They are the largest.

Them and the brown and the black brown bears are the same.

The grizzly.

Them and the grizzly are the same size because basically

they're the same bear and they crossbreed.

And I think that I forget what they do.

Do they look like cows?

No.

They do not.

But they do crossbreed.

They have found cross.

I don't know.

Google it.

Look up what a grizzly and a polar bear make.

SPEAKER_03: That's crazy.

They have crossbred.

Like in nature?

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: Oh.

Yeah.

For reals.

Well, because they're starving.

SPEAKER_03: Where are they?

This may be a dumb question.

Alaska.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's where they cross paths.

Yeah.

Okay.

Grizzlies come from cold too.

SPEAKER_06: Grizzlies are called.

Yeah, I knew that, but yeah.

Like we don't black we have black bears.

Well, we don't have them here, but a little further north.

We Googled it.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's a real thing.

SPEAKER_06: Pizzly bears.

SPEAKER_03: Pizzly bears.

SPEAKER_06: So do you want to take a guess as to what year we

are in on the Bering Strait?

SPEAKER_03: Let me see.

SPEAKER_02: We started in 98.

SPEAKER_03: Started in 98.

Uh we've gone through South America.

No.

unknown: No.

SPEAKER_06: 2006.

SPEAKER_03: Really?

And so it's all because I was trying to think of the how much

more he still had to go after that.

So I was like, well, we're probably about No.

SPEAKER_06: It's 2006.

Damn.

The Bering Strait is not merely a body of water.

We have to remember we don't know how long he was held.

That's true.

And he had to go over those mountains, which he didn't

probably.

There was probably days where he had to just hunker down.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, that's true.

I was I I you know I'm terrible with geography and with spatial

stuff.

So well, it's also like, is he like halfway there?

SPEAKER_06: It's not like he does it continually like right.

I mean, it is basically continuously, but when he runs

across a problem, he does have to stop and fix the problem, and

then he comes back to where he like the like he steps exactly

where he started what left off and start.

Yeah.

So in that way, it's not I mean it is impressive, but he does

no, it's it's super he does take naps.

Yeah.

He's taking naps and stuff.

Jeez, that's crazy.

The uh the Bering Strait isn't is not merely a body of water,

it's the seam of the world, the narrow channel, 58 miles wide.

It's the shortest crossing point that separates the American

continent from the Asian continent, that divides two

hemispheres, that marks the place where the human species

first made the crossing from the old world to the new following

the land bridge that existed here during the last ice age,

and that is now in most seasons submerged.

In winter, in the right conditions, the strait freezes.

Not uniformly, not reliably, not safely, but it freezes.

The ice that forms here is sea ice, moving ice, ice that is

being pushed by currents and broken by tides and reformed and

rebroken in ways that it make it simultaneously solid enough to

walk on and dangerously unpredictable beneath the foot.

SPEAKER_03: He was like Yukon Cornelius from Rudolph the Red

Nose Raindeer.

SPEAKER_06: He is.

In 2006, Carl Bushby and his companion, the French adventurer

Dimitri Kiefer, prepare to cross it.

Two men, 58 miles, polar bear, shifting flows.

The specific hazard of the Bering Strait in winter is not

simply the cold, though the cold is extraordinary.

So he did have like he had groupies.

Yeah, that's smart to take somebody with you.

And then this guy was like, Yeah, I'll go.

But he had a lot of people that would walk with him for a little

while and then drop off.

And so I didn't want to like get into like uh we'd be here

forever.

We'd be here for 38 years if I had to tell you everything.

I'd edit.

Uh temperatures here in February can drop to minus 40, and the

wind that moves across the open Arctic pushes the effective

temperature lower still.

The specific hazard is the ice.

It can appear solid, it can be thin, ice that appears stable

can be moving.

A crack in the ice that opens without warning can appear

between two steps, separating the walker from solid surfaces

with a few feet of water that is at this latitude cold enough to

incapacitate a person in minutes.

You must read the ice the way a sailor reads the sea, constantly

with peripheral attention, trusting the body's instincts as

much as the eye's deliberate assessment.

They navigated polar bears.

The polar bear of the high Arctic is not the polar bear of

the zoo or the nature documentary.

It's an apex predator on its own terrain, curious and powerful

and entirely capable of treating a human being as prey.

A polar bear can cover ground at 30 kilometers an hour.

On ice with a heavy pack, you cannot outrun a polar bear.

No, you know what?

You probably never can outrun a polar bear.

SPEAKER_03: Never.

SPEAKER_06: No matter what.

SPEAKER_03: Only in the movies.

Only one of my biggest pet peeves about movies is when

human beings outrun wild animals.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: You can't do it.

Yeah.

It's impossible.

If you're not fast enough.

No.

And you don't know what you're doing.

No.

And they do.

Because they're hungry.

Yeah.

You manage the encounter through noise and judgment and the

particular calm that comes from having thought through the

scenario in advance and decided what you will do if it arrives.

It arrives, you deal with it, you keep walking.

There are moments on the ice, and this is the nature of ice

crossings, where the route ahead simply disappeared, where a

lead, which is the crack in the ice, opened, or where the ice

and had been pushed by a current into a chaotic field of broken

plates, tilted at odd angles, interlocked with shattered

glass.

In these moments, they swam.

SPEAKER_03: What?

SPEAKER_06: The water temperature of the Bering Strait

in winter is at its warmest a degree or two above freezing.

So how did they not get hyperthermal?

Swimming in it is not swimming in the normal sense.

It's controlled immersion.

It's the management of a body that is trying urgently to tell

you that what you are doing is incompatible with continued

survival.

It is a movement through a medium that wants to take your

heat and your consciousness and your life.

SPEAKER_04: Yep.

SPEAKER_06: They swam through it.

They got to the other side of the broken ice and they kept

walking.

SPEAKER_03: And now they're soaking wet.

unknown: Yep.

SPEAKER_03: Fuck that.

SPEAKER_06: Daisy.

Navigation by compass and instinct by the particular

silence that the Arctic offers.

Plus, you have to think too, like when you're up getting near

like the top of the world and stuff, I imagine the compass is

like Fritzy.

Like because you your poles are jumping, and it's not very

accurate.

I mean, I guess I don't know.

I've never been there, so I can't say.

But from what my brain just told me, what I've learned over years

and years is that it feels like the magnetic fields are anyway.

A silence so complete, which when I was in Alaska and I was

on top of a um glacier, I can tell you that there is no

silence like that.

SPEAKER_03: Like I there was a show on I can't remember.

I think it was somebody famous who did it, but they went to

like different places on Earth and they were at the South Pole.

Was it Will Smith the Will Smith one?

Yeah.

unknown: Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: And he had said how silent it was.

SPEAKER_06: Like it's it's it's insane.

Yeah.

Like there is it's not like just silent, it's like negative

noise.

SPEAKER_03: There's nothing there to make noise.

SPEAKER_06: It's just it's it's insane.

It presses against the ear, then it makes the sound of your own

breathing seem intrusive and loud.

There's nowhere in the world quite like the high Arctic in

winter for this quality of silence.

It is the silence of a world that has not decided whether you

belong in it.

It waits, this silence, and it watches, and you walk through it

one step at a time, reading the ice.

And then Russia.

Carl Bushby and Dmitry Kiefer stepped off the ice and onto

Russian soil.

They had crossed the Bering Strait on foot.

It was 2006.

Carl Bushby was 36 years old, and he was the first Briton in

history to walk across the Bering Strait.

This is the moment that many expeditions build toward, the

single crossing that defines the whole geographical achievement

that crystallizes everything the journey has meant.

He had walked from the bottom of the world to the top of it.

He had crossed the ocean that separates the hemispheres.

He had done something no British person had ever done, and he was

only halfway home.

The second half of the journey was still ahead of him.

Russia was ahead of him.

Siberia was ahead of him, and he was already walking toward it.

SPEAKER_03: I just realized that this started in 98.

And when you asked me what year it was, I was thinking it

started in 89.

Oh.

Okay.

So that's why I got confused.

unknown: Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: Because when you just said his age, I was like,

wait.

Oh.

So yeah, I'm a little slow sometimes.

No worries.

I'm also starving.

So I'm so sorry.

It's been a rough afternoon here.

SPEAKER_06: We're almost there.

Okay.

Russia is not a country.

It's a continent wearing the name of a country.

It spans 11 time zones, which means that when it's morning in

Moscow, it's already late afternoon in Vladistolfic.

And the intervening space between those two cities is

larger than the continental United States.

Siberia alone, which occupies the Asian portion of Russian

east of the Ural Mountains, is approximately five million

square miles.

To rock across it is not a proposition that can be fully

grasped in advance, not even by a man who had just walked across

two American continents.

The scale of Russia requires a different kind of comprehension,

one built not in the planning stage but in the living of it,

kilometer by kilometer, day by day, through a landscape of such

consistent immensity that the world vast becomes inadequate,

and you are left eventually with the silence.

The Siberian taiga?

The great boreal forest that stretches across most of Siberia

is the largest forest on earth.

Large trees, primarily in vast and mathematically repetitive

stands that extend to every horizon and beyond.

In winter, the large is bare and the forest is gray and white and

still a forest of bone and snow, and you can walk for days

without seeing anything that moves except the occasional

raven or the tracks of something larger in the snow.

In summer, the same forest turns briefly violently green, and the

mosquitoes emerge in clouds so dense that they are a weather

system.

Between the forest and the and the forest, there are rivers.

Siberia is drained by rivers of extraordinary size, rivers that

in spring break up their ice and explosions of grinding flow that

you can hear for kilometers.

And between the rivers and the forest there are occasional

villages, days apart sometimes, small settlements of wooden

houses and wood smoke, and people who have lived in a

specific relationship with the specific landscape for

generations, and who regard a man on foot with the particular

equanimity of people who have seen most things.

In those villages, Carl was offered the things that people

in remote places offer travelers, bread and vodka and

warmth, and the wordless hospitality of people who

understand that the wilderness is real and that a man in the

wilderness deserves help.

He could not speak Russian fluently.

He had a phrase book, he had the universal language of a man who

was cold and hungry and grateful.

It was enough.

People helped him.

He walked on, he watched them diminish behind him, those

villages and their smoke and their dogs, and he walked west

into the white immensity of Siberia.

But then, slowly, in the way that bureaucratic problems

always arrive, slowly and then all at once, the paperwork began

to fail.

Russia's visa system is one of the most complex and least

forgiving in the world.

And for a foreign national traveling on foot through a

country this large, the logistics of maintaining valid

visa status while moving and walking pace, perhaps 30

kilometers on a good day, across a country that requires, for

some regions, additional permits beyond the standard visa, is a

problem of almost mathematical impossibility.

Visas expire, applications submitted by post or third

parties are refused without explanation.

The period of permitted stay ends before the expedition had

crossed the necessary territory.

And the Russian bureaucratic machinery, not hostile exactly,

not personally hostile, simply indifferent with the

indifference of an institution that has been doing what it does

for a very long time and sees no reason to accommodate.

The particular needs of a British man.

The months of waiting accumulate.

The expedition does not move.

Russia has become not a landscape but a legal condition.

In 2013, Russia made it formal.

The Russian government issued a ban on Carl Bushby's re-entry

into the country.

So he left and he went to Mexico because he'd already been there.

So whenever he would stop, he would go back to somewhere he

had already been.

SPEAKER_04: Okay.

SPEAKER_06: Instead of moving forward.

So he like took vacations?

Sort of.

Okay.

And this, if I remember correctly, was three years that

he had to stop because they were not, they would not let him back

in the country.

And instead of just going back in the country and be bopping

along without anybody knowing because you're in Siberia.

SPEAKER_03: And I mean Yeah, I was thinking that.

SPEAKER_06: Who would know?

Nope.

He is a man of the military and had to do it.

Not a delay, not a further request for documentation, not

an application pending review, a ban.

He was not permitted to return to Russia.

After years of working through Russian territory, after

crossing the Bering Strait in conditions that would have

stopped most human beings after walking thousands of miles

through Siberian wilderness, a piece of paper bearing the

weight of a government's decision said, no, you may not

continue.

The door is closed.

The specific cruelty of this moment deserves attention.

Carl Bushby had survived the Darien Gap.

He had survived the Bering Strait, he had survived polar

bears and Siberian winters, and the cumulative physical toll of

walking tens of thousands of miles over more than a decade.

He had been stopped periodically by the wilderness, and he had

walked through it, but the wilderness had never issued him

a formal prohibition.

The wilderness had never consulted a statute.

The wilderness had simply been difficult, and he had been more

persistent than it.

A government is a different kind of obstacle because government

has the power to make its obstruction permanent.

His response was the only response available to a man

whose only tool is his body and his refusal to remain still.

He walked, he walked four thousand eight hundred

kilometers, another full scare expedition in its own right,

toward the Russian embassy, toward the Russian authorities

in protest.

In the only language he had ever fully spoken, the language of

the body moving through space.

He made his argument.

The argument was not complex.

The argument was I'm going to keep walking, I'm walking from

Punta Arena to Russia.

I walked across the Bering Strait, I will walk 4,800

kilometers to make this case that you must let me finish what

I started.

The world watched, the media covered a man who would not stop

walking even when he had nowhere left to walk to, even when the

destination was not a geographical point, but a

bureaucratic reversal.

There is something in his protest walk that is more

philosophically interesting than almost anything else in the

story, because it reveals what the Goliath expedition actually

is at its deepest level.

It's not only a physical achievement, it's a sustained

argument made through action that human persistence matters,

but a decision made in 1998 to do something extraordinary is

worth defending.

So he had he would they would let him in for 90 days, so he

would walk for 90 days and then he would leave.

And then he would get another visa.

And he would walk another for another 90 days and then he

would leave.

And then he had to so he had to keep doing 90 days at a time.

SPEAKER_03: It sounds like they were just being of course they

were negative Nancy.

Of course they were.

SPEAKER_06: The years of waiting had a quality that is difficult

to describe without having experienced something like them.

To Carl in the years after the Russian ban, is to be a man in

motion who had been made to stand still, to be a man whose

entire identity is built around the act of moving forward, held

in place by a bureaucratic impasse that his body cannot

solve and his will cannot move.

He waited, he planned, he looked for alternative routes, he did

the mathematics of every possible path from his current

position to hull, measuring each one against the visas available,

the border accessible, the political realities of a world.

And then in February of 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the

world tilted in the redistribution of geographic

geopolitical realities that followed.

The sanctions, the border closing, the sudden

transformation of Russia from a difficult country to an

inaccessible one.

Something was confirmed for Carl that the Russian ban had already

suggested Russia as a route was gone.

Not delayed, not complicated, gone.

And with Russia gone, the overland route through Central

Asia shifted.

Iran, through which an alternate path would have required

transit, was equally inaccessible.

SPEAKER_03: I was gonna say that doesn't sound like a better

option.

Speaking of the war in Ukraine, another thing I heard on the

radio today that was very disturbing, they are kidnapping

people, um and taking them prisoner, of course.

And the one lady was her 71-year-old dad, who's blind in

one eye and walks with a cane.

But what they're doing is taking these people and then they're

contacting the relatives and making them go spy and let them

know if there's security in these places or not before they

will let their and they're letting the loved ones go

sometimes.

The lady still hadn't gotten her dad, but the one lady, her son,

who was like 20, they did let him go.

But yeah, they're making these people spy on their own country

to save their loved ones.

Like the warfare of theirs is nuts.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: But yeah.

The path forward was blocked in every direction except one.

There was the Caspian Sea.

The Caspian Sea is the largest lake in the world.

A body of water so large it is named a sea by the civilizations

that grew up on its shores, despite having no connection to

any ocean.

It is enclosed, landlocks surrounded by five countries:

Russia to the north, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to the east,

Iran to the south, and Azerbaijan to the west.

Its water is brackish between fresh and salt, and its surface

covers approximately 370,000 square kilometers.

It is ancient in the way that only a geographical feature can

be ancient.

It has been there in various forms for 30 million years.

Zoestrian Zoestrian fire temples.

The Azerbaijan coast.

I know Azerbaijan.

The Silk Road ran along its shores.

Oil has been extracted from its seabed for over a century.

It is a sea of civilizations and centuries and deep geological

time.

It was not on Carl's original map, it was not on any map he

drew in Hull in 97, planning the Goliath expedition with a ruler

in a dream.

But the world had rearranged itself and the Caspian was now

the only crossing that could carry the expedition from its

eastern position towards Europe.

He could swim it 186 miles, the world's largest lake crossed by

swimming.

With all the shit on his back.

The logistics involved the Azerbaijani Coast Guard who

accompanied the swim by boat.

Two swimmers from the Azerbaijani national swim team

joined him, swimming alongside him, stroke for stroke, in

support and in solidarity.

There was a support vessel, there was food and rest between

some swim sessions, but the sessions themselves were in open

water, in a sea that is not warm, in conditions that vary

from glassy calm to the kind of chop that makes forward progress

a matter of will rather than technique.

The Caspian, despite being landlocked, generates weather.

It generates waves and the particular hospit hostility that

large bodies of water reserve for people who attempt to cross

them under their own power.

Thirty-one days of open water swimming.

unknown: Wow.

SPEAKER_06: Uh, what does it do to a human body?

The skin, first salt water and sustained immersion turn the

skin to something between leather and paper.

SPEAKER_04: Ew.

SPEAKER_06: Chafing and blistering in places that no

amount of lubrication fully prevents.

The shoulders carrying the load of stroke after stroke after

stroke, hundreds of thousands of strokes over a month of swimming

accumulate a kind of deep tissue fatigue that is different from

the fatigue of running or walking because the water

provides no rest even in the moments between strokes.

Ew.

You are always working against it, as is the mind.

Open water swimming at this scale is a meditation and

confrontation simultaneously.

You are alone with your thoughts and with the water, and that

water has no interest in your thoughts.

And the distance ahead of you on day 12 or day 19 is still

enormous, and the only option is to just keep swimming.

SPEAKER_03: This guy.

SPEAKER_06: Toward England, toward Hall, toward home.

So that was 2022.

2025.

The border crossing into Europe is not a dramatic moment in the

way that the Bering Street was dramatic straight or the Caspian

Sea.

There's no ice, no open water, no polar bears.

Just checkpoint.

There are officials.

There are standard bureaucratic rituals of crossing from one

political jurisdiction into another.

And yet this crossing has a quality that none of the others

had because this is the continent where Carl Bushby was

born.

After crossing South America, North America, Bering Strait,

Siberia, Central Asian, and the Caspian.

After all of that, he is at last on European soil.

SPEAKER_03: That probably felt really good.

SPEAKER_06: The Caucasians gave way to Eastern Europe.

Countries that had not existed when he left Hull in 1998.

Wow.

Countries that had emerged from the disillusion of the Soviet

Union, countries that had joined the European Union, countries

that had changed their name or their borders or their

government in the intervening years passed beneath his feet.

The expedition had begun in the analog world of 1998, was now

moving through a world of smartphones and social media and

real-time GPS tracking.

A world that could have followed his progress hour by hour if it

chose to, a world that had largely caught up to the idea

that a man on foot crossing the planet was a story worth paying

attention to.

He carried 28 years on his face and his joints and in the

particular quality of his walking, the gait that belongs

to a man who walked 30,000 miles, who has learned every

efficiency and every adaptation that long distance movement

teaches, who moves not with the eager pace of a tourist, but

with the measured economical stride of someone for whom

walking is not an activity but a condition.

He was 56 years old.

That's another thing.

So he was in his 50s when he was crossing this Caspian Sea.

I'm not crossing nothing.

I mean, I also haven't walked across the world, so I'm not in

great shape.

He had been doing this since he was 30.

His body knew things about movement and endurance that can

now be learned.

His body was the book.

Eastern Europe became Central Europe.

The road sign shifted from Syrialic to Latin scripts.

The architecture changed.

The particular texture of Western Europe towns and their

market squares and church towers and accumulated layers of

centuries of continuous habitation became recognizable.

He walked through Belgium, flat, damp, crisscrossed by motorways

and can't canals.

Its sky a particular shade of gray that's not quite English,

but is nearly so.

The North Sea was close.

He could feel it.

In the light, in the dampness of the air, in the smell that

reaches you before the sea is visible.

The light of the low countries is the cousin of the light over

Hull, the light of Grey North Sea fringe, the light that had

he had left behind in nineteen ninety eight and not seen since.

He could almost smell England.

Almost.

There was still the channel.

There was there was still between Carl and the white

cliffs of Dover, twenty one miles of the world's busiest

shipping lane, one final crossing, one final obstacle,

one last piece of geography that the world had placed between a

man from Hull and the city where his mother was waiting.

He arrived at the French coast.

He looked at the water and he made his plans.

The English Channel is the most famous stretch of water in the

English imagination.

It is twenty one miles wide at its narrowest point between Cape

Grisnay on the French coast and the South Foreland near Dover on

the English coast.

It has been swam.

Matthew Webb crossed it first in 1875, and since then ten then

thousands have made the crossing.

It has been tunneled, the Chunnel Tunnel, completed in

1994, runs beneath it for approximately 38 miles, carrying

trains between Folkestone and Coquette.

It is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

Approximately 500 vessels transit the channel every day,

tankers, container ships, and ferries, and naval vessels,

creating a traffic density that makes open water crossing a

matter not only of stamina, but of navigation in the most

dangerous possible conditions.

For Carl, the channel presented itself first not as a swimming

challenge, but as a tunneling opportunity.

The channel tunnel has a service tunnel, a third, smaller bore

that runs between the two main rail tunnels, used for

maintenance access and emergency evacuation.

It is connected to the main tunnel by cross passages every

375 meters.

And it runs the full length of the crossing.

It is, in a technical sense, a tunnel through which a person

could walk.

Carl Bushby's team asked Euro Tunnel, may he use the service

tunnel to walk under the channel and complete the Goliath

expedition.

In June 2026, Russian work in there.

SPEAKER_05: The Euro tunnel said no.

SPEAKER_06: Safety grounds, operational grounds.

The service tunnel is a working piece of critical national

infrastructure, not a pedestrian walkway.

And allowing a member of the public to walk through it,

however extraordinary the circumstances, however close to

the end of his 28-year journey, was not something that they

could permit.

Because then everybody's gonna want to do it.

The answer was no, and it was from the organization's

perspective a reasonable answer.

Infrastructure safety is not negotiable.

But from Carl's perspective, the answer was a devastating one.

He had walked 30,516 miles, he had crossed the Strait, the

Caspian Sea, and survived the Darien Gap and endured the

Russian ban.

He was 21 miles from England.

And a tunnel authority had told him no.

SPEAKER_03: He said I even think I could do 21 miles.

SPEAKER_06: He said publicly and without evoquation evoqu

evocation.

Don't kill my dream.

Bro.

I added the bro.

Four words.

They carry the weight of 28 years.

They carry the weight of every mile walked and every mile swam

and every bureaucratic wall navigated.

Don't kill my dream.

Not a demand exactly, not quite a play, something in between.

The statement of a man who has given everything to a single

purpose and is asking the world one more time to get out of the

way.

The phrase was reported, the world heard it, and the world,

which has been following Carl's story with increasing attention

at the finish line, came into view, understood exactly what

was at stake.

His Los Angeles-based team, the organization infrastructure that

built him, built up from the around the expedition over

years, coordinated logistics and permissions and media from the

other side of the world, went to work on the problem.

The tunnel was closed, but the channel itself was not closed.

The question became, could he swim it?

The question was not physical, he had swum the Caspian Sea.

All 186 miles of it in 31 days, he is capable of swimming the

channel.

The question was legal because there is a French law in place

since 1993 that prohibits swimming from the French

coastline, a law designed primarily to prevent the tragic

loss of life among migrants attempting to cross in dangerous

conditions.

A law that would, if applied, literally prevent Carl Bushby

from entering the water on the French side and swimming to

England.

France, in September 2026, granted an exception.

The French government, navigating the law that has

existed since 1993, found a path through it, found within the

apparatus of the state enough people who understood what this

movement was, enough people who recognized that a man who had

walked 20 for 28 years and 30,000 miles deserves the right

to finish where he started.

Permission was granted.

He could swim from the French coast.

He could swim the English Channel.

The planned start date, October 1st, 2026.

Tides and weather permitting, the channel is not a docile

piece of water.

In October, the sea temperature is between 17 and 19 degrees

Celsius.

Cold, but not the cold of the Bering Strait.

The tides in the channel are parallel.

The tidal flow runs diagonally, and a swimmer who does not

account for it is carried off course, adding miles to the

crossing or push backward in relation to their target.

The shipping traffic requires continuous monitoring by pilot

boat, alerting large vessels that a swimmer is in the water.

The crossing under these conditions will take three to

four days.

He will rest on a support boat between swimming sessions, not

sleeping in the water, but not abandoning it either, returning

to it when the body has recovered enough to continue.

He has not, he admits, trained specifically for this swim.

There was no time.

The schedule of the expedition, the routing, the permissions,

the logistics of moving through Europe consume the time that

dedicated swim training would have required.

He said in his characteristic way, I've been too busy planning

the route.

He has been planning the route for twenty eight years.

He knows, however, what his body can do.

He knows it in the way that only a man who has walked and swum

and climbed can across an entire planet can know it from the

inside, completely without illusion.

He knows that his body can swim the English channel.

He knows that because there is nothing left that he does not

know about what his body can do.

And he knows that the other side of the channel, England is

waiting.

Cole is waiting, his mother is waiting.

When he reaches the other shore, when the white cliffs resolve

from abstraction into solid chalk, when his feet find

English shingle beneath the water and walks out of the

channel and onto English soil, there will be a moment, not a

dramatic moment, perhaps, not fireworks or crowds, or the

noise and of an official reception, though there may be

some of those things, but underneath all of that, or

before all that, or in spite of all of that, there will be a

single private geological moment in which a man from Hull touches

England for the first time in twenty-eight years, and the

planet is at last entirely crossed.

And then he will walk north, always north, through the

English countryside, the lands and the hedgerows and the market

towns, the motorway verges and the village greens, the

particular English landscape that is, in its way, the most

familiar and least familiar thing he has ever seen.

He has walked through Patagonia, the Darien Pass, Alaska,

Siberia, and the Caucasus Mountains.

The English countryside is, by conspira comparison, gentle.

It is also for a man who left in 1998, a country that has

changed.

New roads, new towns, new faces, new king, new technologies, a

world that has moved on while he was moving across it.

He is a man returning to a country that is recognizable,

the same and almost entirely different as all countries are

after 28 years.

The character of landscape shifts, becomes flatter, more

open, the sky expanding in the way that skies expand when you

approach the sea.

He crosses he will cross into Yorkshire, into the east riding,

into the outskirts of Hall, the industrial fringe of the city,

the warehouses and streets where he left, and then a terraced

street, a quiet street, the kind of street that exists in every

working class English city, the kind of street where generations

of people have lived in an extraordinary and entirely

extraordinary ways.

A front gate.

His mother, Angela, will be waiting.

She has been waiting for the fullest sense of that word for

28 years.

She has followed the expedition through every phase, through

South America and North America and the Baron Strait, the

protest walk and the bureaucratic years.

She has been the fixed point at the center of the whole enormous

circumference.

The woman who watched her son leave in 1998 and who has never

for a single day stopped waiting for him to come back.

On November 1st, 2026, 28 years after he departed from Punta

Arenas, Cara Bushby is projected to walk through that front gate.

From the southernmost city in the world to a terraced house in

Hull, 30,516 miles, every continent, every ocean edge,

every border, every detention, every frozen crossing, every

bureaucratic wall, every open water mile, every polar bear,

broken flow, mountain and desert, every village where a

stranger gave him bread, every government that said no, every

day that passed while he was held in place, and the

kilometers ahead of him that did not shrink, all of it.

And now this a quiet street, a front gate, a mother closed at

last on the walk itself, as something ancient and stubborn

and entirely irreducibly human.

The world was not built for men like Carl Bushby.

It was built for speed and for efficiency and for the machine,

for the engine and the algorithm and the frictionless

transactions.

And he walked through it anyway, one foot in front of the other

for 28 years because he said he would.

Because Hole was his home, because home was worth 30,516

miles.

Because some men, very few in every generation, when they say

they're going to do something, mean every single word of it,

and they walk and they do not stop and they come home.

SPEAKER_03: That is such a crazy story.

It doesn't even sound real.

I know.

That's what I said.

Like if you watched a movie about that, you'd be like, This

is so fake.

This would never happen.

And yet, it did.

It's so cool.

I can't wait for.

SPEAKER_06: him to get home now i'm gonna be paying attention i

hope he doesn't get attacked by a pack of wild dogs or something

and get on the way home in england and i know right i can't

imagine that once he gets into england there won't be like i i

don't know how i had never heard of this guy i have no idea yeah

i never i that's crazy i heard the podcast about it and i was

like what's his now wait what are we saying here and i go so

cool like i'm thinking the psychology part though when he

does finish november 1st like you said now what now what like

now i mean i he's obviously a very intelligent yeah highly

motivated to the nth degree um so he will find other adventures

but what tops that absolutely nothing yeah like how do you

just go into retirement like how do you just go home to your nice

little and what's your next rush or or achievement like big

fucking deal the stuff I did leave out just so when you

google him he does have a kid okay his wife divorced him prior

to nineteen ninety eight okay and would not let him see his

son okay which was kind of the reason I didn't want to bring a

damper down but that's kind of the reason he has seen his son

has flown to where he is his son has walked with him but I think

there's a little still bit like why didn't you just come home

and we could have been like this is 28 years you missed.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah of course yeah but to that I get it because I

think he needed you know yeah absolutely I mean it just takes

an exceptional human being for something like that it's nothing

we can even understand.

No like that's it's like and he has grandkids.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah I don't think you uh I think they have gone to

they have to go to him because he has not stepped foot in

England.

None at all.

Even through all of a like I said it wasn't like a continuous

every day he was walking for 28 years.

He did have to stop there was a lot of issues at places where he

had had he would have to to find a different way or it would yeah

it would be crazy for him to think he's just run out of money

and fine.

But he would go back to I believe they said it was Mexico.

He would always go back to Mexico because he had already

been so it was like he never went forward somewhere and then

came back.

He would always go back to where he and I I don't know if he had

well he found a woman on his way at some point and she had walked

with him and like they had a relationship and then they broke

up and because you know you're walking across like I don't know

whatever.

But I think he kept going back to her and then okay staying

there for months at a time and so it's not like he did it like

every day for 28 years.

But but basically that does not to me diminish absolutely not

like you set your mind to it and and you know he had to have he

would have to stop because he would have run out of money

where he would have you know and like equipment and all that.

SPEAKER_03: So he would get and the logistics I mean you had to

have expected that things were going to come up yeah with other

countries.

SPEAKER_06: So he also has a you can go check him out he has an

Instagram he wrote a book that's it's it's it's a cool story and

I just feel like that it is kind of a Gen X like when we say

we're gonna fucking do it and no matter how insane it sounds and

even I think to me the gen X part about it is like when you

tell somebody like that's too insane.

Yeah that's when we're like oh yeah hold my beer.

Yeah well it's a hold my beer situation.

It is it is it's a hundred percent like well oh yeah all

right well I'm gonna fucking do it and it might take me 28

years.

So I know I will be keeping an eye on this and at November 1st

I will be watching to see what happens and to see make sure he

crosses.

But October 1st he is going to attempt to cross the channel so

yeah that was really fun like just hearing all the different

conditions in each spot you know was that's and I didn't even get

into like oh yeah like a lot of the short it's it's a crazy they

did a two-part episode on it and it was you know just getting

into all the he had people that would come and walk with him for

a little while and then you know he did get a following and um he

had a team that would grease the wheels for because I mean you're

walking through how many countries you know with all the

nonsense that happens in countries and you know yeah he

had camels for a little while and then like it's it's it's

kind of one of those things where it's like people would

help him and then he would be left but to me like I don't know

the part where you're just alone yeah and just like or like the

Bering Strait like the Bering Strait I think and Siberia is

what that is I don't even under like I I don't know how your

body survived that not just that but like it just goes away and

like you're just floating you don't even know where you are

because you're floating on a piece of ice that could just be

taking you down and then then finally you hit Russia and

you're like well that happened like we made it hooray like and

that is that what happens you're just like I'd imagine it's

probably a little more complex than that but yeah yeah but

thank you.

Sure that was fun now I have to yep okay uh so keep an eye out

for that uh definitely and I'm sure you'll keep us posted.

SPEAKER_03: Of course because now I'm obsessed with this dude.

Yes.

SPEAKER_06: And then when I saw that it was like because when I

first did it I was like oh September because he was like

still in negotiation with the French to get and I was like oh

oh oh are they gonna and then they were like nope.

Then they then I saw like it was literally two days later it

popped up that they let him they were going to let him swim it

and I was like oh my God.

So we all get to witness it.

Yeah um you can find us where you find all the podcasts please

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