Latest / The Overland Journal Podcast / Andrew Comrie-Picard on the Power of Self-Belief and the Trans Global Car Expedition

Transcript

Andrew Comrie-Picard on the Power of Self-Belief and the Trans Global Car Expedition · The Overland Journal Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the Overland Journal podcast. I'm your
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: host Ashley and today I'm joined by a Canadian race
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: car driver, ex Games athlete, stedman, and Baja one thousand champion,
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Andrew Comrie Picard. In this episode, he touches on his
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: childhood in Atlerta, Canada and how his love for driving
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: challenges launched his automotive career. The conversation continues with an
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: in depth book at Comrey Picard's latest project, the Trans
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: Global Car Expedition. This project is the world's first wheeled
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: surface navigation through both geographic polls. We talk about the
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: importance of a good team, the scientific outcomes of the project,
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: and a rundown of the expedition vehicle fleet. Comrie Picard
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: also dives into developing a strong sense of self belief
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: his experiences in Northern Canada and the outcomes of an
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: Arctic test trip were an F one fifty fell through
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: the ice. Thanks so much for joining. We hope you
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: enjoyed this episode. Hello and welcome to the Overland Journal podcast.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: I'm your host Shi Jordano, and my guest today is
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: a Canadian race car driver, ex Games athlete, stuntman stunt coordinator,
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: two time Baja one thousand class winner, Pike's Peak Hill
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: climb record holder, former entertainment lawyer, and most recently part
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: of the trans Global Car Expedition, which is the world's
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: first wheeled surface navigation of the Earth through both geographical polls.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: So welcome Andrew Conrey Picard to the Overland Adjournal podcast.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: Great to have you, Thanks for having me.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: I'm just kidding as.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Much as I know.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: A long intro, but yeah, thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: I'm just starting my day here in Turkey. Sun's almost
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: up and you are wrapping up your day in La
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: and it's technically yesterday.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: So I'm in the future, correct yea, yeah, you look
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: like you're from the future.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Thank you. But you haven't always been based in LA.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: You grew up actually in Alberta, Canada. So tell me
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: what would your childhood self think about how the rides
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: did so far?
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: That's a great question.
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: So I grew up on a farm outside of Edmonton
• 2:10
  Speaker 3: and Alberta, and I guess probably what we were doing
• 2:13
  Speaker 3: as kids characterized as a quasi overlanding. Now we were
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: basically getting stuff stuck in fields and getting them on
• 2:18
  Speaker 3: stuck again from an early age, so all I wanted
• 2:20
  Speaker 3: to be when I was twelve years old, and I
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: always said I worked on top of here for a time,
• 2:23
  Speaker 3: and we always would write when we were trying to
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: write something interesting for people to watch, would say with
• 2:26
  Speaker 3: the cars that people love, the activities people love, or
• 2:28
  Speaker 3: what they loved when they were twelve years old. Basically,
• 2:30
  Speaker 3: we're pandering to adult twelve year olds. And that's what
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: I have gotten to become, because when I was twelve
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: years old, all I wanted to be was a race
• 2:36
  Speaker 3: car driver or an actor, and neither of those things
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: seemed remotely realistic. Coming from outside of Edmonson, Alberta. Nobody
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: we knew I had ever done anything like that. I
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: didn't think that was realistic. So I was recentably good
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: at school, and so I did. I went to school
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: and then university, and then got a good job, and
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: I became a lawyer, and I despised it and was
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: terrible at it, but it made me enough money to
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: buy a better race car. I started racing stuff when
• 2:57
  Speaker 3: I was a kid, thir bikes, snowmobiles, bmxpects before that,
• 3:01
  Speaker 3: and then RC cars actually even before that, which was
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: really my inroad into racing, and I ended up a
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: preteen traveling the world racing RC cars for sponsors and things,
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: and it was pretty serious. And I always say about
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: eighty percent of what I learned about racing I actually
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: learned in model cars. Then I scaled that up and
• 3:17
  Speaker 3: I eventually have two thousand bucks spot a cheap rally
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: car and one thing, I'd do another, and then I
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: got into racing, and then I got into suns and
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: then I got into all this stuff.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: What a journey. And I feel like it's very much
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: of the time of our sort of generation, maybe that
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: we're looking at what our parents are doing as like
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: this roadmap to what we should be doing with our lives.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: And so much has changed in the world since then
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: and going forward and with your kids too, and it
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: seems like these careers that you could never dream of
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: even existing exist now, or you can be creative with
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: what you want to do, and there's so much more
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: flexibility now.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah, certainly with technology telecon saying and the ability to
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: connect across distances like you and I are doing right now,
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: it's incredible. You don't have to be anywhere. I think
• 4:04
  Speaker 3: it's really opened up a lot of possibilities for not
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: just remote work, but overlanders and people who just want
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: to live alternative lifestyles. My high school guidance counselor had
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: a certain number of jobs listed in his book that
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: you could do. The lawyer was in there, but nothing
• 4:18
  Speaker 3: else of what I do is in there. And I
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: like to do a portfolio of stuff. And everybody that
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: I know who's happy and adventurous out in the world
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: is doing a portfolio of things. They may have a
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: mainline thing, or they may I do work for Ford,
• 4:30
  Speaker 3: I do work for I'm on the Transglobal Expedition. I've
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: got a business with entires, and I like it because
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: I like to not get involved in just one thing,
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: and that's realistically possible these days. It's a gig economy
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: for all of us. And just like you, I think
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: that you're traveling, you're writing in different outlets, you're overlanding.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: You get to piece it together the way you want it.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: And I love that because each of us is unique,
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: and why wouldn't you get to build your own unique arc.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. I want to get into the
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Trans Global Car Expedition shortly, but tell me a little
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: bit about what you touched on it a little bit
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: there with all the things that you're doing. But you
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: have a big, broad portfolio, But what are some of
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: the things that keep you busy on a daily basis.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I've got it right now.
• 5:11
  Speaker 3: I've got a particularly wide range of stuff going on
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: the expedition. I'm playing a little hookey from the expedition. Actually,
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: the team is in Panama City getting ready to go
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: through South America or Central America, heading north, back north.
• 5:20
  Speaker 3: After circumnavigating almost all the globe, We're nearly done. I
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: had to come back to Los Angeles because I have
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: a mobile tire company that has trucks that come to
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: your driveway and put tires on cars where you are.
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: It's called Zip Tire.
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: I founded that when I got at a racing eight
• 5:32
  Speaker 3: years ago last week actually, and realized that we could
• 5:35
  Speaker 3: take all our race equipment out to people civilians in
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: the field and put tires on where they are instead
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: of them having to suffer through your tire store. So
• 5:40
  Speaker 3: that's one big thing I have going on, and the
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: expedition is going on. That company more or less ran
• 5:44
  Speaker 3: without me, was gone, and I'm backgarms deep in it.
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: I've got my family, of course, but I've also got
• 5:49
  Speaker 3: some other things. I do brand representative stuff for Ford.
• 5:51
  Speaker 3: So if you go into a Ford dealer, there are
• 5:53
  Speaker 3: like videos playing in the dealership that and I like
• 5:56
  Speaker 3: explaining things.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: I'm a kind of an explainer.
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: I have enough background in technology and I didn't take
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: an engineering degree, but I did physics, and I can
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: speak with the engineers enough that they believe that I
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: understand what they're saying, and then I can explain it
• 6:07
  Speaker 3: in humans. So I say one of the big things
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: that I do is translate in engineering into human and
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: if you walk into a Ford dealer, you'll see a
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: video of me saying, why do you anti nibble control
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: on your steering? And how does that fight across wind
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: and things like that. So I do these explainer videos
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: that explain how stuff works, and I love that. So
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: that's a major thing I work with Ford on that.
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: And then I am now getting involved again. I was
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: involved a little bit in the early days, but I'm
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: getting involved in autonomy autonomous vehicles because of my years
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: of racing and stunts. I still do movie stunts. I
• 6:34
  Speaker 3: just I did another feature film in Dubai for a
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: month last fall, and I love doing the stunts because
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: it's really it's a little like overlanding or a like racing.
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: It's the sort of team of crazy people who's able
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: to do very improbable, difficult things, and your only challenges.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: I wonder if we could make a cargo off that,
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: or I wonder if we could take up that vertical
• 6:51
  Speaker 3: wall and slide around it. And I love that kind
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: of stuff. So I still do the movie stuff, but
• 6:55
  Speaker 3: now I'm getting into vehicle autonomy because autonous vehicles are
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: getting a lot better, quite good, almost good enough that
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: you can ride in them, and I'm now concerned with
• 7:04
  Speaker 3: how to make them drive a lot better. So I
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: also have a company that is working on the algorithms
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: to improve the what we call planning and motion controls
• 7:12
  Speaker 3: of autonomous vehicles.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: So I like that.
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: I like having my fingers in a lot of different pies.
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: Almost everything that I do, except for my family in particular,
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: but everything else revolves around some kind of automobile.
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: And I think that makes sense.
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: I was like always a car kid, came from a
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: car family, and I like challenges with cars. Like my
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: whole life. I've just tried to do hard things with cars.
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: From getting stuck as a kid. I rolled my dad's
• 7:33
  Speaker 3: pickup truck when I was seven. I got stuck in fields.
• 7:36
  Speaker 3: I had to fix trucks and had dune buggies and
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: stuff all through the era. So that was kind of
• 7:41
  Speaker 3: my origin story. And that's what I still do. I
• 7:42
  Speaker 3: just do hard things with cars.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Fantastic. Yeah, I was wondering. I think a lot of
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: people would be like a stunt driver and Hollywood, what
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: is that like? But I'm curious about what were your
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: biggest life takeaways from being a stunt driver, Like big.
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: Lessons and are so one of the things about stunt driving.
• 8:04
  Speaker 3: And I still do it and I've done it for
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: fifteen or twenty years now. And like in Fast and
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: Furior as part of the fans Fast Furious franchise, Deadpool,
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: stuff like that. My favorite one's Atomic Blonde. I'm driving
• 8:13
  Speaker 3: I'm a KGB officer in Atomic Blond. Actually, I get
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: to be a bad guy and I'm driving one of
• 8:17
  Speaker 3: the bad guy cars. And then I'm driving Charlie's Dron's
• 8:19
  Speaker 3: car from the back seat. She's in the front seat
• 8:20
  Speaker 3: and I'm driving the car from a second set of
• 8:22
  Speaker 3: controls in the back seat. That's a good day in
• 8:23
  Speaker 3: my office. But what I learned is some people are
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: very talented, Like across the board. You don't survive in
• 8:29
  Speaker 3: the I was gonna say sport, you don't survive in
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: the business unless you have a lot of talent. But
• 8:33
  Speaker 3: you have to be really easy to work with, likable,
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: you have to be able to connect with people. That's
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: all great, and you can have all those things and
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: still not be able to do the one thing that's
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: really crucial, and that is in the moment where they
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: call action. Like you wait around hours and days and days.
• 8:47
  Speaker 3: You may be there for a couple of weeks and
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: practice and rehearse and then on and then in the
• 8:50
  Speaker 3: moment of action, you got to perform right now, and
• 8:53
  Speaker 3: you may only have ten seconds of what you have
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: to do right It could be weeks leading up to it,
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: and you have to have the belief and through the
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: guy or gal like, you've got to just believe that
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: you're going to deliver.
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: And that's I like that challenge. It's consistent with racing.
• 9:07
  Speaker 3: It was like X Games, I competed at five times
• 9:09
  Speaker 3: and finally want to medal after flipping end over end
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: and messing up a bunch of times you had to
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: come back and believe in yourself and have the technical skills,
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: have all the other skills, but in the moment, you
• 9:19
  Speaker 3: have to believe that you can do it. And we
• 9:21
  Speaker 3: had moments on the Transcobal expedition crossing the North Pole
• 9:24
  Speaker 3: like really hard, tricky, like in terms of off roading
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: and overlanding gnarly gnarly and dangerous stuff. And the South
• 9:31
  Speaker 3: Pole a little bit less so because the Arctic trucks
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: has Antarctic is so screwed down that you can it's
• 9:35
  Speaker 3: relatively relatively it's in the overlanding world. It's it's a
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: good overlanding challenge, but it's a technical challenge, but not
• 9:42
  Speaker 3: moment to moment as much of a driving challenge. Oh,
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: it's hard to It's the same thing on expedition and
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: many of your viewers and friends have been on like
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: the Camel trophy stuff or crawling or rock racing all
• 9:53
  Speaker 3: that stuff. You have moments where you're I call it brinksmanship.
• 9:56
  Speaker 3: It's a thing brinksmanship where you're like you're right out
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: on the ed and there's no margin and you have
• 10:02
  Speaker 3: to rely on your skills and your self belief to
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: get you through. And that's the biggest takeaway for me
• 10:06
  Speaker 3: from stunts is that you have to have that aspect
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: to your personality and to your question about what it's
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: to take away.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: What's it like in Hollywood?
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: It's true of all actors, there were all narcissists, probably,
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: but everybody believes in themselves and believes that they can deliver.
• 10:21
  Speaker 3: But even in the Hollywood community, if you're a stunt
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: person's nice because people are like, oh, even actors, fairly
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: famous actors.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: Like, oh, you're the stunt guy. That's so cool. What
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: are you gonna do? Like, how's it gonna work?
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: Because if you screw up your acting lines or don't
• 10:33
  Speaker 3: deliver it with great emotion or whatever, it's eh.
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: Take again.
• 10:36
  Speaker 3: But if I go to slide the car which Charlie's
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: they're on in it, and I hit something, or in
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: that case, there was a guy with a steady cam
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: like walking around us as I did a reverse one
• 10:44
  Speaker 3: to eighty blind if I'd hit that cameraman, the stakes
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: are huge, right. And then for guys who do in
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: gals who do falls and wirework and fight stunts, and
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: I'm a terrible fight I've done fights in movies, but
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: I look terrible, fire burns and stuff like. The stakes
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: are high and that's part of the fun though. It's
• 10:58
  Speaker 3: the adrenaline and the challenge is part of the rease.
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: We do it, and the ability to deliver in the
• 11:03
  Speaker 3: moment is the satisfaction you take away at the end
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: of the day. And they have great stories too, just
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: like you do it overlanding and then broken axcellent, I
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: had to hike out twenty two miles and all that stuff.
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: It's like we actually intentionally put ourselves in really hard
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: situations just to see if.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: We can get out.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Yes. Absolutely, And then there's this thing like how do
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: you think that you can do it? But then you
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: have to believe that you can do it. You can't
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: just think that you can do it. It has to
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: be like right in there that you believe you can
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: do it. And I think there's a difference there. I
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: think I could talk myself into thinking I can do
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: some things. Truly believing is practice or something.
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: I've been thinking about this a little lately because I've
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: been trying to tease out an Antarctica.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: We were really lucky to meet it.
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: A lot of explore people who's skiing a thousand kilometers
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: to this outpole. Some of them are truly exploring, like
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: going to new places or going to unclimbed roots on
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: peaks and things. And I was trying to distill what's
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: common between all of them, and in all of them
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: there's a passion of curiosity and a passion for a challenge.
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: But you're quite right that the self belief has to
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: be huge. But I think that all of them and
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: us probably built up to it. Nobody wakes up in
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: the middle of their sort of Walter Mayde midlife and says,
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: all I have to do is go and ski two
• 12:21
  Speaker 3: going to see a thousand blong ors this south pole.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: There are people who do that.
• 12:24
  Speaker 3: You can take your own like micro challenges, or start
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: out with micro challenges, and that may be just Hey,
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: overlanding to the next town, or getting through the Rubicon
• 12:31
  Speaker 3: is a pretty pretty big deal, or getting through a
• 12:33
  Speaker 3: single feature on the Rubicon Trail and then piecing it
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: all together and then camping out there if you can
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: until eventual year hungry enough, Hey, how do I get
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: into the rebel rally or how do I get into
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: the Camel Trophy or the modern equivalent, or how do
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: I get into rally racing or expeditions, or how do
• 12:46
  Speaker 3: I go across the North Pole? And so that's what
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: happened with me, is that's how I got involved in
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: the transglobal car expision.
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: We'll talk about it, I'm sure, but I.
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: Was trying to find it. What's the hardest thing I
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: can do? Because I've done the X Games, I've done
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: Baja one thousand, I've done Pike's Peak. But that started
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: by being in a muddy field behind our farm with
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: a dirt bike saying, I wonder if I can get
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: over that mound, and I wonder if I can go
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: fast enough to jump over that board, and I wonder
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: if I can modify this to be able to do
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: a different thing, or what if I roll the um
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: big But I got to roll all the way back
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: over onto its wheels. And I was an only child,
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: so I just got to med friends around and stuff.
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: But I got to mess around a lot on my own,
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: and that ended up being super helpful because I just
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: got to be out there with lots of time and
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: weaponry of machinery and just push a little further. I
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: wond if I can do that. I wonder if I
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: can do that? And the natural extensions. I wonder if
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: I can around the world.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, confidence building one little step at a time over time.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: And that was a great segue into how you went
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: from racing start driving. How did the trans Global Car
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: Expedition come up for you? How did you become involved
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: with that?
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: So is this a dual path on this.
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: I had won the North American Rally Championship nine and
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: then and I was lucky enough to get a factory
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: a couple of additional factory rides.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: I'd been driving from itsu Isshue, but then I drove
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: for Toyoda.
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: And then for Ford, and then we won the John
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: Woodner cop in America, which is a pretty hotly contested
• 14:10
  Speaker 3: class championship to wheel drive clas Championship. And then I then.
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: Ford got out of rallying suddenly.
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: When and in twenty twenty fourteen, let's say twenty thirteen,
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: twenty fourteen, and we just won the championship, and I
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: was like.
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: Oh, I guess that's it all.
• 14:24
  Speaker 3: We done rallying now, And okay, so I just I
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: just won this additional rally championship and I was forty
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: something and I was thinking, I've done these really hard
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: things with cars. I loved doing hard things with cars
• 14:39
  Speaker 3: from being a kid on and most of what I've
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: done is I've done some track racing, also an endurance racing,
• 14:44
  Speaker 3: portra endurance racing and stuff, but most of what I've
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: done has been like some kind of adventure racing or
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: rally racing, the desert racing, what I consider the hard
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: time trial stuff out in the field. I then started
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: to think about what's the hardest thing you can possibly
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: do with a vehicle. And I had met through top
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: Year the team at Artie Trucks and in particular emil
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: Grimsen from Iceland, and I knew that if you wanted
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: to go speduall to the South Pole, you got to
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: go with Artie Trucks because they're the people who do it,
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: and they have it all nailed down. They've done four
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: hund thousand klometers in an Artica now, and if you
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: want to go across the North Pole, no, the only
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: people who gotten close with this normal type vehicle are
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: also Arty Trucks, who helped top Gear us effectively get
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: there in two thousand and seven. And so I started
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: to piece together a pitch that I took to first
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: Ford and then Jeep and Netflix, and that's Discovery Channels
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: who I'd worked with, and I'm trying to get over
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: the line the idea of what I call pull the
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: Pole and then from the south pole to the North Pole.
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: I also was fascinated with the dairy and gap, so
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: that the jungle between Panamunt, Columbia, about sixty miles half
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: swamp half mountains, is to me like the last. There's
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: lots of great overlanding challenges in the world, but it's
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: the key to the trans North American Highway. It's insanity hard.
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: Nineteen seventy of one hundred and fifty British military men
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: tried to get through and several died, and Mark Smith,
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: a legend in overlanding, took a crew through from the
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: south and then one guy and his wife, Lauren Upton
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: and Patty Upton, who you probably know, yeah, went through
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: and actually to my mind, they're the only ones who
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: did it completely without going up or downstream, and they
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: were incredible. So I then ended up interviewing everybody or
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: somebody from every team that had ever been through the
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: Darien with a vehicle, and I'd just done a huge thing.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: This is fifteen years ago now and I went out
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: and where Lauren and Patty used to stay in the
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: desert out by blythe in the winters. I went out
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: and interviewed them, and they showed me their journals and
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: showed me the drawings the pulleys on the ends of
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: the bumpers and the great.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: The nicest thing about that.
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: I don't know if Patty will be upset about the story,
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: but I cold called them in Idaho. I guess they lived,
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: and I said, hey, I fund their number. I said,
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: he you don't know me, but I want to drive
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: through the Darien. And Patty, we drove through the Darien.
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: I'm like that, that's why I'm calling you, and she said, well,
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: you better talk to Lauren and she said Lauren and
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: Lauren come. Was like, hey, sir, you don't know me,
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: but I want to drive.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: Through the Darien. I drove through the Darien.
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: I know that's what I want to talk to you.
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: And it was full of profanities, Hell yeah, and realizing
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: how are you going to do it? And I'd love
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: to do all the swearing, but the podcast would turn off.
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: But the best thing was like he checked me out
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: for ten minutes on the phone and then he pivot
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: and said.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: All right, you're gonna do this. And here's how I
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: screwed up.
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: I started a week too late, and I went the
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: wrong direction and I got stuck on the rains and
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: I had to sit there for three hundred days watching
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: bananas grow.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: Here's how you're gonna do it.
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: And it was so inspiring, and so I'm tearing up
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: just remembering it, because it's a little like that self belief, right,
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: And there's a guy, yeh, Lauren ups there, there's a
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: guy who had a lot of self belief.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: He was cutting down trees to build bridges. Oh, he
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: was a civil engineer.
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: Effectively, he was a bridge builder, but that kind of
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: level of Yeah, a guy like that believing in me
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: that I'm the guy, I'm like, yeah, all right, here,
• 17:30
  Speaker 3: we're gonna do it. And so I pitched that for
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: years and I never quite got it over the line
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: money wise. Really, I remember distinctly Netflix saying the development
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: guy there that I knew, saying, Hey, Andrew, I know
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: you won't really want to do this, and I think
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: it's great too, but I don't it's missing a human aspect.
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: If you want to take your kids who are then
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: like two and three years old, and if you want
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: to take your kids, I'll green light it tomorrow. And
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: I was like, I can't, I can't do that. I
• 17:52
  Speaker 3: can't do that because they were like two and four
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: years old or something at that point, and I'm not
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: going to take them through Columbia at that point in
• 17:58
  Speaker 3: a huge, expensive danger vehicle that.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: Could get up. I didn't want to take my kids through.
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: And look, the Darien also has two truly deadly snakes,
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: several deadly spiders, very evil fire ants.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: It's a fantastic place.
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: And there are others friends in mind in the community,
• 18:12
  Speaker 3: Chris Collard and Chris Walker and Guy and I think
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: Scott Brady himself. We were all like, oh the dairy
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: and someday, but now it's also when the farc rebels
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: ran it more or less. And I even got one
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: of the fixers. Carlos was Lauren Upton's fixer. Carlos a
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: Columbian guy who was like in this picture of him
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: in the seventies, like.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: With a shark tooth necklace and shirt off and whatever.
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: We're going through the Darien with Lauren and then he
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: we got together here he's like a three piece suit
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: Colombian man by that time in the seventies now passed away.
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: But I had him like warming people up in tour
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: Boa and Cartagena to get this thing done. But we
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: didn't get over the line. But had all the planning,
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: had all the root had, and had involved amil grimson
• 18:48
  Speaker 3: of Arty Trucks in the route. As you say, if
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: if you want to go somewhere, we want him on
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: your root planet. And we'd made a really great pitch
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: of it. And then about I guess five years ago
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: i'd put on the back burner, started my business. About
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: five six years ago now he called me up and said, Andrew,
• 19:01
  Speaker 3: you know your idea, A man is going to do it.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: You should meet each other.
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: And so I said, okay, great. And that was the
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: Ceili Shachnovsky who'd come up with what is now the
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: Transglobal Car Expedition. And I wanted to just go South
• 19:12
  Speaker 3: Pole to North Pole continuously on the surface except for
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: the ocean between the Antarctica and South America. He wanted
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: to go all the way around the world from one
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: point back to the same point through both poles. And
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: that's not only what I wanted to do, but more
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: on the other side, and so I said great, and
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: I linked up with him and the trans Global Car
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: Expedition that he was already building. Because of my experience
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: with vehicles, nobody from that side was really a vehicle person,
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: and because of my sort of experience in the media, I
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: ended up coming on as a main team member and
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: now have been one of the core members of the team.
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: So it's been a real privilege for me. Again, like
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: guys who I think have incredible pedigree, like Scott Brady
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: and Chris Collard and Chris Walker, all these guys who
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: were guys who deserve to do this kind of expedition.
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: I feel like I've had an endgame around it and
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: got to go to the go to Everest before climbing
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: some smaller mountains. But we've had this all some huge
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: logistical problems and some huge technical problems to make it happen,
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: and it's been a very suitable challenge for all of us.
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: Long answer to a civil.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: Question there, it is, Well, no, that's great. I want
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: to get into those logistics problems in chat about that,
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: but before that, maybe we'll just touch briefly on the
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: general route from Pole to Pole.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, sure, we had a lot of debate about
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: where to start our end from, but many historic races,
• 20:29
  Speaker 3: like there was Around the World Race that started from
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: New York City in nineteen oh eight with vehicles, and
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: there's the Great Peaking to Paris races in the nineteen
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: oh seven and so on. But Around the World first
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: Round the World Race started from New York City, and
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: there are a couple I'm Canadian, I brought an American,
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: one of my old rally techs who's been on the
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: expedition the hallway through is an American. We have Germans, Icelandics,
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: a lot of Icelandics, and Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, because it's
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: a real mixed bag of people. But we decided to
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: start in the US anyway, because that's where the the
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: spiritual heart of expedition starting is in New York and
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: the Explorers Club is there, and a couple of us
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: remembers I wasn't yet but I am now and I
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: and the media attention in North America is very savvy
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: with this kind of thing, big adventure stuff. So we
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: decided to start from New York City, and of course
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: you have to return from to New York City from
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: the other end. We naturally, I had styled it south
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: to North, South Pole to North Pole, because if you're
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: going to do it in as quick as time as possible,
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: you have to start on the South Pole, stay around Christmas,
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: get through the Darien in February before the rains come,
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: Lauren Upton would tell you. And then you've got to
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: get to the edge of the Arctic Ocean in the
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: north just as the sun the first light comes, but
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: the ice is still firm. And so I had styled
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: it south to north. As a result, Transglobal flipped that
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: on its head a little and started from New York
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: and got to the North Sea ice or the Arctic
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: Ocean ice just as the light was coming up. So
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: we did that last February March, and then we spent
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: the rest of the next year crossing out through Europe
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: in Africa so that we could be arrived at the
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: other coast of Antarctica in November and get to the
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: South Pole like around Christmas. And so it just the
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: seasonality is the same, but it's just because it's a
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: lap starting from New York, it just offset by say
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: one hundred and eighty days or something kind of the
• 22:12
  Speaker 3: not quite but it's offset the schedule. What was your
• 22:14
  Speaker 3: question huge planning, logistics.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: Yes, so logistics. I'm sure you know, multiple teams doing
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: different legs. Some team members are doing multiple legs, I believe,
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: some maybe doing one leg. And then you have quite
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: a selection of vehicles, so you have like different vehicles
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: doing different sections, and then you have to get people vehicles, permits,
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: people from all over the world going through all different
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: places in the world. And I'm assuming I know you
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: did at least one test trip up north. So yeah,
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: maybe just touched on coordinating all of that and how difficult.
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: Well, I have self conscious.
• 22:55
  Speaker 3: A couple of minutes ago, my phone kept buzzing and
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: that was actually the logistics guy.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: We have a team.
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: There's actually there's two team members back in Europe whose
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: concern is how to get all the vehicle carnes and
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: do all the logistical planning and flights and all that stuff.
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: The principle is that we're not to leave the surface,
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: going around the surfaces of the Earth and circumnavigation. The
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: core of that is that there are really three guys
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: who have been and will have been on the surface
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: the whole way through, pretty much the whole way through.
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: I sadly have not been able to be one of them,
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: not because it wasn't I wouldn't have been invited to,
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: but because I've had to come back to take care
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: of some other stuff. But I've been there for what
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: I consider the really hard parts, which is the Arctic crossing,
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: and I've been there for a lot of it. But
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: I did will not do all of South America. I
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: will not do all of Central America, and those are
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: places I'm hoping to go back to with my family
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: and do more more Wheeland through there. But I've been
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: I did the entire crossing of the Arctic from Canada
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: to Greenland, and the entire crossing of Antarctica, including from
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: Cape Town and an icebreaker. So those are the super high,
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: super hard technical parts. But the expedition leader, Vasili Schechnovsky,
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: the expedition cinematographer Max Badelan, who's a great national geographic,
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: experienced cameraman, who he and I I'm very close because
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: I'm also I'm responsible for the media stuff, so I'm
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: directing with him all the content and we've have a
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: wonderful sometime in the near future, very near we hope
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: we'll be able to release a documentary on it and
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: including smaller segments. It's really been been beautiful thing to
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: shoot several drones and incredible footagem around the world, incredible
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: scenery Europe, but Africa, South America, Peru, just unbelievable stuff.
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: So we have great content. But Max has been there throughout,
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: and one other mountain climber, Alexei Safonov, who's a very
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: experienced climber, very experienced traveler, has been with Deeley and
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: the team pretty much the whole way. So those three
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: guys have committed basically eighteen months of their lives to
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: only be doing this. I wasn't able to make that commitment,
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: so I've gone for all the hard parts and a
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: few of the beautiful ones.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: Fantastic. Yeah, not a lot of people can take that
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: much time to focus on one project like that.
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's heartbreaking for me to leave some of the
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: beautiful places, but I reckon that you only get one shot,
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: Like you really only get one shot at the North Pole.
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: I don't know that anybody's ever going to do it again,
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: or not in our lifetimes, or maybe not ever as
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: a result because of the change in the ice cap
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: Antarctica never been done the way that we did it,
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: crossing right across from Progress Station to Public Glacier, but
• 25:10
  Speaker 3: after the ocean south of the Union Glacier, it's north
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: technically of the Union Glacier. Those south pole is doable
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: again by people. The North pole is incredibly hard. I
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: feel pretty lucky to have been able to do both of.
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, tell me, I guess we're getting ahead. We'll get
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: back to logistics. But I want to touch on this
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: first ball. We're here because you're mentioning that that section
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: may not be able to be done again, and I
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: want to dive into that. What did you see. I
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: know that you had some science projects going on. Yeah,
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: tell me a little bit more about the details of
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: why you think that section may not be doable again.
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that way we know. So we know that the
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: arcticas ice cap is getting smaller.
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: We've seen the data.
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: Emil has been tracking the data for fifteen plus years now,
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: every year on you and we have great friends a
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: German ice scientists who we work with a lot of
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: Christian haas who we work through their historical data with him.
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: And you can see it's getting smaller.
• 26:07
  Speaker 3: It breaks up earlier, the weather's changing, the migration patterns
• 26:10
  Speaker 3: of animals are changing. We've seen it with the indigenous
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: people we've spoken to, and I want to talk with
• 26:14
  Speaker 3: the indigenous peoplef we get a chance to let me forget.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: But yeah, wonderful. We could see it's getting smaller.
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: But one of the things, actually, to speak of our
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: science work, that is very difficult to analyze. So satellites
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: and radar from space are pretty good at showing us
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: the square kilometridge of ice cover in the Arctic right
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: every year it freezes so far, it melts so far,
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: REases so far, right, But it's very poor showing the
• 26:38
  Speaker 3: ice thickness. And of course if you want to understand
• 26:40
  Speaker 3: how much ice is up there, you crucially have to
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: know the ice thickness, and that is surveyed normally by
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: drilling holes in the ice by people and measuring how
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: thick the ice is. It's really hard and it's expensive
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: and dangerous. You might be able to fly a twin
• 26:53
  Speaker 3: oater onto an unknown piece of ice, or maybe take
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: a helicopter that's incredibly expensive, or guys of stride skiing
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: and somemobiliu and then you can take a few data
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: points or whatever. But with Christianahas, who had actually a
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: Canadian made a device, an electromagnetic resonant device, which basically
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: shoots a beam down into the ice and when it
• 27:12
  Speaker 3: hits salt water bouts back to the other side. If
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: you look in the back of one of our amphibious vehicles,
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: there's a long bar on the back of a plastic
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: bar on a manner of plywood because it can't be
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: tenured to metal. So we have this fancy plywood metal
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: and this plywood mount built it from pieces of wooded
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: Canadian tire and Yellowknife.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: But it gave us.
• 27:28
  Speaker 3: What it gave us was a constant reading and a
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: log of the ice thickness continuously as we went along.
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: And because we did three pre expeditions which I can
• 27:39
  Speaker 3: tell you about two tests to find new route, and
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: Emil can tell you too that we innovated a new
• 27:44
  Speaker 3: route that nobody had ever taken a wheeled vehicle from
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: the continental shelf to the Arctic Ocean. So we went
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: from the northernmost diamond mine north of Yellowknife on Contoido
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: Lake Diavic Diamond Mine, and we drove overland over the
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: thunder on a route that Emil figured out from space
• 28:00
  Speaker 3: to get to and relief maps to get to Bathurst
• 28:04
  Speaker 3: Inlet and the ocean in credit.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: It's the first ever.
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: It's like climbing Evarese with a car, and we were
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: able to do that. Anyway, the point of the story
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: is that we were able to get this ice thickness
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: measuring machine and the first day is that our first
• 28:17
  Speaker 3: pre expeditions we only had inReach communicators, so we're like
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: texting with one hundred and forty four character old bat
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: and phone stuff. But in the last two years we
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: had starlink. It's changed the game. So we hooked that
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: the data from the magnetic resident device up to the
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: starlink and we fed the data continuously to the ice
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: scientists in Germany. But the thickness of the ice and
• 28:35
  Speaker 3: that matters not the biggest thing there is that it matters,
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: not just for the actual path that we followed going
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: over the North Pole, but they're now able to take
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: that data and compare it to the satellite and radar
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: data that estimates how thick that ice is.
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: To do what's called ground truth thing.
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: So if you look at and I can show you graphs,
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: but if you look at how thick the satellites think
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: the ice is, and then you look at episodes where
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: they've actually go on and measure I think the ice is,
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: they can see that they're actually overestimating by quite a
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: large degree how thick the ice is. And so what
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: we've been able to do is give that constant data stream,
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: which they will now they're working on it now be
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: able to compare with the true thickness of the data
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: in the satellite in order to make refine further the
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: data from the satellite, which is really exciting to us.
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: And you could only do that if you had a
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: vehicle that's going to go all the way across our way,
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: to go all the way across the north Pole in
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: a continuous arc with power and with enough power to
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: haul it, and with electrical power right, it's hard as
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: a skier and a sled or it's impossible almost any
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: other way. So that was a unique thing that we
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: were able to offer on a science perspective. And then
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: the other thing is really coln I knew nothing about
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: cosmic rays like I know, Like I said, I studied physics,
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: so I have enough to be dangerous. But we were
• 29:42
  Speaker 3: linked up with scientists at CERN in Switzerland, the huge
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: Hadron collider of the particle accelerator outside of Geneva, and
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: they said, hey, we have this kind of cool project
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: if you're interested, and it was a skunk works project
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: for them, a few guys like Moonlighting, but they built
• 29:55
  Speaker 3: what are called scintillators, which are like, there's a huge
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: scentillator at.
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: The South Pole. There's one point.
• 30:00
  Speaker 3: Look, it's over here, as one in Chicago, there's one
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: at cern in Switzerland. And what they're doing is measuring.
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: So ninety five percent of the universe is dark matter.
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: We don't know what it is, we don't know where
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: it comes from, and the energy that comes from it
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: is not very well understood. Cosmic rays mouons, and it
• 30:16
  Speaker 3: hits the Ear's atmosphere and interacts with particles in the
• 30:20
  Speaker 3: Earth's outer atmosphere, which causes them to accelerate, and they
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: actually they take crazy paths on crazy angles, and you're constantly,
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: you are right now being barraged by cosmic rays and
• 30:29
  Speaker 3: you don't realize it's a little think of it like
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: ultra violet. But it goes through walls and anything but
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: thick lead, Yeah, thick lead, and congret In fact, we have.
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: One of the fun things is we have one of
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: our miniaturized scintillators and it has a little flashing green
• 30:39
  Speaker 3: all ed light on it, and you used to going
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: wink wink, and I hold it besides them and you say,
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: every time that goes off, a cosmic rays just hit
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: this thing. And people are like, oh, get crazy, But
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: it's true that and what's important about cosmic rays. Nobody
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: really understands what they do or why they matter, except
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: they know that they have a function in the formation
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: of clouds. We've been in the cloud chamber in cern
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: in Switzerland where the crazy haired English scientists you've got
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: for coming to cloud camera, just coming to walk to
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: your head to like create exactly who you want a
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: crazy scientist to be, like the doctor for the doc
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: from Back to the Future. And they're trying to figure
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: out how this has an effect on clouds, and one
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: that even blue may away. More so, cosmic rays follow
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: like a magnetic flux pattern around the Earth and they
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: curve inwards at the poles.
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: And the one correlation that.
• 31:22
  Speaker 3: Has been spotted with cosmic rays is seismic activity. With
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: a two week lead time, changes in cosmic ray patterns
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: can correlate to increase seismic activity on Earth earthquakes. Now
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: they can't tell you necessarily where the Earth three is
• 31:35
  Speaker 3: going to be, and it's probably because something in there
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: is magma is shifting and it's causing the pattern of
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: the cosmic rays to fluctuate. Two weeks later, they can
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: see it with two degrees of sanityvation of certainty. They
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: can see that there's a change in the Earth in
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: seismic activity. That's important and significant. Data on cosmic ray
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: penetration had never been collected north of eighty two degrees north,
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: and so we took three cosmic.
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: Ray detectors right across.
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: It was my job to mean so they were miniaturized
• 32:01
  Speaker 3: by these guys at CERN and then I had to
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: figure out the battery systems and stuff with them. And
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: then in the vehicle that I was in, the amphibious
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: people that I was in, I maintained these things like
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: all the time and was downloading the data and then
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: uploading it also through starlink to them, and we've continuous
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: we kept Also we're the first people ever to take
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: the same scentillators all the way around the Earth, so
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: we have consistent machinery reading that cosmic grade data all
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: the way around the planet. So that's exciting too. And
• 32:25
  Speaker 3: the folks back in Switzerland are like chewing on that
• 32:27
  Speaker 3: data now. And we have some other projects besides citizens
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: science projects which enable people to participate in their own
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: scientific experiments based on cosmic grade data, and some other
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: things besides. But in fact, these guys at CERN are
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: looking at guys and ladies at CERN are looking at
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: how to use a citizen science sort of crowdsourced team
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: to analyze the data that we brought.
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: Back a huge amount of data. So that was really
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: exciting for me.
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: And I'm the science the liaison officer because again I
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: have just enough science to be dangerous and I can
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: explain the stuff and run the machines. So that's been
• 32:53
  Speaker 3: exciting for me also to be able to contribute that
• 32:56
  Speaker 3: because look, all of us in the overlanding community are
• 32:59
  Speaker 3: in racing or whatever. We understand why we're doing this.
• 33:01
  Speaker 3: It's a challenge, it's really hard. It's something that we
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: really want to achieve. But if you're going to do
• 33:05
  Speaker 3: something like this, you want to be meaningful and have
• 33:06
  Speaker 3: a lasting effect too. And on the one hand, I've
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: met so many kids and we've done so many activations
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: at schools all the way from the Arctic all the
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: way to South Africa, and being able to go to
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: these small communities to talk to kids, talk to families
• 33:19
  Speaker 3: and make them excited about exploration, about overlanding, about hard
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: off road work, and then also about these science things
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: that we're doing. I really get a great satisfaction in that. So, yes,
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: I got to cross the North and South Poles, but
• 33:29
  Speaker 3: more important, ultimately we got to light up some kids'
• 33:32
  Speaker 3: eyes and we got to hopefully make some contributions to
• 33:34
  Speaker 3: the science data.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, I love that aspect. And on the I
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: believe the Transglobal website there's a link for we want
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: to If I wanted to go on there and contribute
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: to that, I can do so as well. Yeah.
• 33:48
  Speaker 3: So another tweak is that you can turn your phone.
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: It's not perfect, but incredibly if you steal off your
• 33:53
  Speaker 3: phone camera from all light with some block duck tape,
• 33:57
  Speaker 3: it can be turned into a reasonable approximation of as
• 34:00
  Speaker 3: my greade detector because those cosmic rays penetrate through the
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: tape and the lens and everything to the sensor inside.
• 34:06
  Speaker 3: And so one of the things we have is a
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: is a cosmic raye competition, a collection competition that you
• 34:12
  Speaker 3: can participate in. So, yeah, go to the Transglobal Car
• 34:14
  Speaker 3: dot com website and sign up for that. And there
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: have been teams we've had. We've had school teams from Lebanon,
• 34:20
  Speaker 3: from Africa, from the DRC, from Congo. At least these kids,
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: they actually came to Switzerland and they came and shared
• 34:26
  Speaker 3: the data with us and we did a big scientific
• 34:28
  Speaker 3: activation with them, really wonderful stuff. And it's been great
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: to see people participate in that because it's great that
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: we get to go around the world and collect all
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: this data, but why not enable people And as you say,
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: I've got two kids, Like, there's nothing like seeing a
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: kid go Really, I can do that too, And just
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: I got to say, really, I can do this with
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: a car. They're like, really, I can make you, I
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: can collect scientific data. I can log on and put
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: that information somewhere. Yeah, it's fun.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: It's awesome, very cool, very cool. I love that. So
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: you go up and do a few test trips you said,
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: a few test trips up north Yeah, okay, yeah, and
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: the data that you actually collected on the ice thickness
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: perhaps would have helped Is this an accurate statement during
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: one of those test trips because there were a few things. Yeah, yeah, so.
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: You're getting the vehicle fell through the ice.
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, I am, Yes, yeah for sure. So look,
• 35:28
  Speaker 3: we're all pretty experienced. Nobody's more experienced than Emil Grimson
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: and the Artic Trucks team driving on ice. Really, you
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: can always make mistakes and you can always learn more,
• 35:36
  Speaker 3: and we did. Technically speaking, we did two true full
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: test runs in the Arctic and then another trip besides.
• 35:42
  Speaker 3: Actually the third trip was an extraction trip in the end.
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: But on our first test expedition in twenty twenty losing
• 35:50
  Speaker 3: date twenty twenty two, we went up and innovated that
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: route that I told you about from Yellowknife to the
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: Bathrooston Let to the Arctic Ocean and right by the way,
• 35:59
  Speaker 3: right to the Northwest Passage, right to where the Franklin
• 36:02
  Speaker 3: ship sank. If you're a Northwest Passage nerd or yeah,
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: and it happens. This is completely random, but a friend
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: of mine from college was the guy who from Parks,
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: Canada was instrumental and finding those ships. He was the
• 36:12
  Speaker 3: guy actually on the radar sonar when they found Yeah,
• 36:16
  Speaker 3: and so we've had some fun like doctor Livingston, I
• 36:18
  Speaker 3: presum stuff where we've run into each other and Joe
• 36:20
  Speaker 3: Haven in Nunavut and.
• 36:22
  Speaker 4: Said, oh, I say, hey, look for the ships. All
• 36:25
  Speaker 4: you ow expeditions in Down. Oh you own expeditions in
• 36:26
  Speaker 4: Down And we like, oh, do you need any air tank?
• 36:28
  Speaker 4: So we do, We'll go out take alls. It's really
• 36:31
  Speaker 4: wonderful stuff. But anyway to back up, but I do
• 36:34
  Speaker 4: love that Explorers Club type stuff. The twenty twenty two
• 36:37
  Speaker 4: we went up with three artic trucks converted four F
• 36:39
  Speaker 4: one fifties and these four handbuilt Russian Humalia amphibious vehicles
• 36:43
  Speaker 4: by a real genius in Russian named Vassilia Lagan and
• 36:46
  Speaker 4: created these vehicles.
• 36:47
  Speaker 3: But we can talk more about that.
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: But we went up.
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: To test this route and innovated this overland route and
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: to test the vehicles to see how far they could
• 36:53
  Speaker 3: go and so on, and it was, on the face
• 36:55
  Speaker 3: of it, a total success. We got all the way
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: to Resolute, which is at seventy two seventy three degrees
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: north and the last civilian Inuit community in the north.
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: After that there's a military base, but that's it. And
• 37:06
  Speaker 3: this as far north as you can get with a
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: normal civilian traffic and we went over the ocean, so
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: we didn't take civilian traffic, but we got there and
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: it was a huge achievement. And that's actually where we
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: wanted to get there because we knew that from there
• 37:18
  Speaker 3: it was possible to go further north, because that's the
• 37:20
  Speaker 3: route that Email Grimson had innovated with top gear several
• 37:23
  Speaker 3: years previous or fifteen years previous, to get to a
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: place called Isaacson, which had been the magnetic North Pole
• 37:29
  Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety six.
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: Bedandnan North Pole moves because the Earth's.
• 37:32
  Speaker 3: Flux, but we wanted to connect that dot to make
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: sure that we could get from Yellowknife to Resolute and
• 37:36
  Speaker 3: we did. And then I stayed up there with the
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: Russian team with amphibious vehicles to test some more and
• 37:43
  Speaker 3: the actlenttic guy said, Okay, we're just going to drive
• 37:44
  Speaker 3: back Yellowknife and they literally turned back the next day
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: on the same route that we had driven north, and
• 37:50
  Speaker 3: they with two of the vehicles. We left one in
• 37:53
  Speaker 3: Cambridge Bay, but with two the vehicles they high tailed
• 37:55
  Speaker 3: back south. Very experienced guys, experience drivers with an Inuit
• 37:58
  Speaker 3: guide and with and with one of and with the
• 38:01
  Speaker 3: American technician I told you about the old rally technician
• 38:03
  Speaker 3: of mine.
• 38:04
  Speaker 2: I would help build the trucks.
• 38:05
  Speaker 3: They got down in the air in the time of
• 38:07
  Speaker 3: the setting sun, like nine pm at night, the sun
• 38:10
  Speaker 3: was going down. They got to an area near what
• 38:13
  Speaker 3: we call the Tasmanian Islands. This isn't a better indigenous
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: named for it, but they just to pair it to
• 38:19
  Speaker 3: shortened the story. One truck was ahead, the second truck
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: was following, and the second truck started cracking through the ice,
• 38:25
  Speaker 3: and the guy, totally very experienced, Ilindic guy, got on
• 38:29
  Speaker 3: the radio and said, we're going in, We're going in.
• 38:30
  Speaker 3: He realized the ice was cracking and already by that
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: time the left root wheel ripped off and he wasn't
• 38:35
  Speaker 3: able to get the driver's door open. They'd gone down
• 38:37
  Speaker 3: frontop of the icy. Our indigenous guy, great, great guy Brandon,
• 38:40
  Speaker 3: who we'd worked with the previous year too, or that
• 38:42
  Speaker 3: was the first year, I guess, but great guy, and
• 38:44
  Speaker 3: we've become great friends. He was able to jump up
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: the passer's side, totally climbed over, left his passport, left everything,
• 38:50
  Speaker 3: all the electronics stuff in the vehicle, and it started
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: to sink in. Incredibly, they were like soaked up to
• 38:56
  Speaker 3: their shins in their socks because they had their shoes
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: off driving. They were standing on the ocean ice now
• 39:01
  Speaker 3: in the most populated Polar Bear region of the world,
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: in the setting sun, with only one of the vehicle
• 39:05
  Speaker 3: on the surface that was a little further ahead of them,
• 39:06
  Speaker 3: but fortunately had stopped because of what Tortrive said on
• 39:09
  Speaker 3: the radio. And then Torve had for the further presence
• 39:11
  Speaker 3: of mind to say, oh my gosh, all our camp
• 39:13
  Speaker 3: equipments on the back of this truck. And he jumped
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: back on the sinking truck and started unstrapping stuff and
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: howking it to the ice. And they got off enough
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: to have a tent and some other equipment. And I
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: think now fortunately it sank in about forty feet of
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: water because they were between two islands.
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: And this is where it gets more interesting. So we
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: looked at the data.
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: It got exciting because I was I was still up
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: and resolute, and I was the last guy still awake
• 39:36
  Speaker 3: on the expedition, and I was on the very spotty
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: internet up there through one of the lodges, through the
• 39:39
  Speaker 3: only lodge you can say it, I got a message
• 39:41
  Speaker 3: from Emil who was back in Iceland, saying trucks through
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: the ice. And I looked at the trackers and sure enough,
• 39:45
  Speaker 3: one of them got dark, and I knew what that
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: meant that I knew it meant that four hundred colmeters
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: south of us, two four guys and two now one
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: truck were somehow out in the wild, four hundred klometers
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: from anybody like anything more maybe six hundred nobody camping
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: out on the land at that time of year, no
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: indigenous people. The nearest community would have been to look out,
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: and no way to mobilize anybody from there. So they
• 40:07
  Speaker 3: were on their own devices. Now we had as Sara's plan,
• 40:09
  Speaker 3: we had access to helicopters. We'd paid ken Borricare, which
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: is a specialist extraction team or under standby. But they
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: couldn't go at night, couldn't go there, and so we
• 40:17
  Speaker 3: had some satellite communication with them. This is before starling,
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: and they made it through the night. In the morning,
• 40:23
  Speaker 3: so they sat in the other vehicle sort of cooling
• 40:25
  Speaker 3: their heels and hoping they didn't fall through. During the night,
• 40:28
  Speaker 3: they started poking around with an ice pick that we
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: have and sure enough, all of the ice around them
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: was paper thin. And we looked at the data and
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: it turns out to five days. Previously it had been
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: over thirty or forty centimeters sick, which is plenty thick
• 40:41
  Speaker 3: for us, and five days had gone down to ten centimeters.
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: So there's a reason.
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: Turns out that unbeknownst to us, but no one to
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: a certain number of indigenous people, and we hadn't talked
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: to the right indigenous people. That is a place where
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: the ice melts really early in the season and is
• 40:56
  Speaker 3: known as a very good hunting ground because that's where
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: the ice melts and the seals start popping up to
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: the surface.
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: It turns out the current between.
• 41:03
  Speaker 3: The Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic Ocean flows through a
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: place called the Bellet Straight, which never freezes because the
• 41:07
  Speaker 3: current is so high, and then it turns south and
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: like a free train runs right between these islands just
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: south of the Bellot Straight, and so it melts really
• 41:15
  Speaker 3: fast and really early, And we had no idea. Now
• 41:19
  Speaker 3: we had hired indigenous guides, I had become so I'd
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: become very friendly with people in Cambridge Bay, which is
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: one of the which is the real core of the
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: central you know culture there to the extent that I
• 41:32
  Speaker 3: it's my incredible privilege and having spent time with the people,
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: especially like a family there that they blessed me with
• 41:39
  Speaker 3: an Indigenous name. They call me Omgoktok, which means man
• 41:42
  Speaker 3: with thin lips, which doesn't mean that I have particularly
• 41:44
  Speaker 3: It's not that I particularly thin lips.
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: It's not exactly dances with wolves.
• 41:48
  Speaker 3: But it's the name of an elder in their community
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: and a family in their community. It's a great honor
• 41:51
  Speaker 3: to have that name bestowed on me. Yeah, And I
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: mean I am still in constant contact with these people.
• 41:56
  Speaker 3: Like they've made clothes for me. They said, you're going north,
• 41:58
  Speaker 3: you're gonna need a beaver warmer on your neck. They
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: sowed it in my parkau. They made me gloves. So
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: it's incredible. The warmest, funniest people. And Bessie is my
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: wife there because she was married to the elder that
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: I'm named after. But she's a wicked sense of humor
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: and kind of naughty. Just they're so fun and so
• 42:13
  Speaker 3: interesting and it was unlocked for me this inroad into
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: this completely distinct culture. I grew up in Edmonton, which
• 42:20
  Speaker 3: is almost as close as you can grow up to
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: in people short of Yellinie or Dosa City or something.
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: I had no idea what I didn't know. And now
• 42:27
  Speaker 3: that we've learned more about the sort of shamanism and
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: some of the mysticism, and I've slept in Igloos with
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: them and who it's fascinating to me.
• 42:34
  Speaker 2: And I'm going back.
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: But anyway, the point of the story is that we've
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: made lots of friends in the Inuit community up there, right,
• 42:39
  Speaker 3: and we talked to them. But hey, this is where
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: we're going, and this is the room we're taken. Like, go, okay,
• 42:43
  Speaker 3: that sounds great. You should take one of our guides along.
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: It turns out that the hunting grounds they are very regionalized, right,
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: and not that many people from a community have traveled
• 42:51
  Speaker 3: that far in any particular direction, and that this so
• 42:54
  Speaker 3: we went from Cambridge Bay to Resolute.
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: There's a place over here.
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: There's Joe Haven in between, which is where the roll
• 43:00
  Speaker 3: downlands and who finally crossed the Northwest Passage left his boat,
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: the joy Gjoa, left it in the harbor until only
• 43:06
  Speaker 3: some decades ago and got repatriated in Norway. Incredible stuff.
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: But there's another community over here called Taalkoyok. Took me
• 43:11
  Speaker 3: a long time to say that correctly, and they still
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: correct me. But the hunters from Tolkook, hopefully one it
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: will be listening and say, oh like that, it's their
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: hunting ground. Around the area that we went in. We'd
• 43:22
  Speaker 3: never talked to any we'd never been to Talkalk and
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: we didn't even think of it wasn't anywhere near our route.
• 43:26
  Speaker 3: But they knew that around the Tasmanian Islands the ice
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: kitstand and so we know it now. And so the
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: truck dropped in and the guys got out, and they
• 43:33
  Speaker 3: made it through the night, and we got a helicopter
• 43:34
  Speaker 3: up there the next day and we chopped them out.
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: They left the other truck and they got managed to
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: get into the island right next to it. The next
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: summer we went and with an incredible effort got that
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: truck out. It was epic and as much as all
• 43:46
  Speaker 3: our winter antics are pretty hard, I could also tell
• 43:49
  Speaker 3: you that we flew up to Zodiac inflatables in a
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: Sashuno calicopter which had to be staged up from Southern BC,
• 43:54
  Speaker 3: and I was like the guy holding that vote against
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: a five million hour tiitle. Current well, Icelandic ice divers
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: were diving down to put air bags on the truck,
• 44:04
  Speaker 3: lift it up, drag it to shore, flip it over,
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: tow it up on shore, bring the chopper back, lift
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: it up, and take it back down to civilization. Just
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: not because there's any value in it, the thing's ruined,
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: but to get it out of the environment. And we
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: found that it only ended up leaking out a few
• 44:20
  Speaker 3: courts of diff oil and not very much at all,
• 44:22
  Speaker 3: so compared to what a tanker does going by, like
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: negligible effect at all. But we wanted to do that
• 44:26
  Speaker 3: because of our respect of thedigenous community. They were upset
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: when it went in there. That actually enabled us to
• 44:31
  Speaker 3: make much deeper relationships and get to know them better
• 44:34
  Speaker 3: and work with them and say, hey, we want to
• 44:35
  Speaker 3: do the right thing, we want to get this out.
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: And then we're like, and by the way, we want
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: to need the boats. Would you like the boats and
• 44:40
  Speaker 3: would you like the other equipment. And so it ended
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: up being a kind of a hope of wind for everybody,
• 44:44
  Speaker 3: and for me certainly a win because I got to
• 44:46
  Speaker 3: know so many more the Inuit up there and really
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: have learned some of the language and incredible anyway in
• 44:51
  Speaker 3: terms of we haven't made a big deal of it,
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: but we think it's probably the outside of I don't
• 44:55
  Speaker 3: know what the military's done. It's certainly the most difficult
• 44:58
  Speaker 3: and largest, really an extraction of anything from the ocean
• 45:01
  Speaker 3: floor in that part of the Arctic Circle, in the Arctic,
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: in the High Arctic, and it was incredible, but it
• 45:06
  Speaker 3: turned out to be all right, and we learned, and
• 45:09
  Speaker 3: then when we went back through the next year and
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: the next year, we didn't fall through those times. And
• 45:13
  Speaker 3: furthermore in crossing the Arctic. Then this past year in
• 45:17
  Speaker 3: early twenty twenty four, in the full Transgloble car expedition,
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: which is the point of the whole thing, we used
• 45:21
  Speaker 3: the Russian amphibious vehicles through that section also. But then
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: when we got up to the near the North Pole,
• 45:26
  Speaker 3: where we had to use the amphibious characteristics and also
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: the aluminum ice ladder characteristics and the ice picking and
• 45:31
  Speaker 3: the incredibly hard work to get through this stuff. We
• 45:33
  Speaker 3: were almost at a walking pace. Some days you have
• 45:35
  Speaker 3: to all get out in a half dozen of year
• 45:37
  Speaker 3: chipping ice while the other guys drive the vehicles through.
• 45:39
  Speaker 3: You have these big spears, you break up the ice
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: blocks with incredibly physical I lost ten kilos. And then
• 45:45
  Speaker 3: the vehicles are able to crawl over six wheel drive
• 45:47
  Speaker 3: fifty one in tires, crawl over these incredible gaps in
• 45:50
  Speaker 3: the ice. If there's a little crack in the ice
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: we can't cross. We have these aluminum bridging ladders that
• 45:53
  Speaker 3: we were able to put down drive across. The vehicles
• 45:55
  Speaker 3: are incredibly well engineered. And then when they have to float,
• 45:58
  Speaker 3: when we have a gap that we can't get across,
• 45:59
  Speaker 3: one of those we actually floated in the water. And
• 46:01
  Speaker 3: I could tell you, as somebody who does hard things
• 46:03
  Speaker 3: with cars, the first time you drive a handmade, amphibious
• 46:07
  Speaker 3: vehicle into ten thousand feet of frigid Arctic ocean water
• 46:11
  Speaker 3: and the blackness below your windscreen that dips below for
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: a second is an eye opener.
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 46:17
  Speaker 3: So it's you drive off the perfectly good ice into
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: the ocean, and I had there's a roof hatch and
• 46:21
  Speaker 3: I basically had my hand on the hatchland and while
• 46:23
  Speaker 3: I'm driving. But it was again an incredible experience, an
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: incredible challenge. That was the long answer to another question.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: Oh, all of these are going to be long answers.
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: It's all good. Yeah, it's great. I was curious about
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: the I guess response of the local community to like
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: the return. So when you were going up to carry
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: out the expedition after the truck went through the ice,
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: and it sounds like from what you've said, the relationship
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: is better because of it, perhaps, And I guess I'm wondering.
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: My question is like, how did they anticipate the actual expedition,
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: because you guys are like, oh, by the way, this happened,
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: but now we're coming back to do it again. And
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: they feel from the people you talk to, so.
• 47:07
  Speaker 2: The first time we showed up there, no, first time
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: we showed up there like who are you? This is
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: kind of crazy. But they're very curious.
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: I don't want to stereotype, but there's a lot of
• 47:17
  Speaker 3: curiosity and there's a lot of interest. But then when
• 47:19
  Speaker 3: it went wrong, essentially there was a little bit of
• 47:21
  Speaker 3: tension and anger. It's they're hunting grounds, so it's arguably
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: not environmentally responsible. But then with the relationships we had
• 47:27
  Speaker 3: to build and then we took people in the trucks
• 47:29
  Speaker 3: and we explained our thing, and we got to know
• 47:31
  Speaker 3: so many people in all of the communities in central
• 47:34
  Speaker 3: non of it that now I've got forty Facebook friends
• 47:37
  Speaker 3: who are leaders in the North. It's incredible and for
• 47:41
  Speaker 3: me it's a privilege like no other of anything in
• 47:44
  Speaker 3: the expeditions almost been the greatest privilege. And so the
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: answer is we were really received the open arms. When
• 47:49
  Speaker 3: I got to the North Pole, a ninety four year
• 47:51
  Speaker 3: old elder woman and her daughter.
• 47:55
  Speaker 2: Like FaceTime to eate and just wanted to see the
• 47:56
  Speaker 2: North Pole.
• 47:58
  Speaker 3: It's totally and we I'm tearing up, like the support
• 48:03
  Speaker 3: from the indigenous community has been terrific. In the end,
• 48:06
  Speaker 3: we have bumpy moments, but like any family or like
• 48:08
  Speaker 3: any relationship, it's how you develop them and what you do.
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: At the end.
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: For sure, I was going to say too, like that
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: area of the world is like this distant concept for
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: I would say most people in the world, and even
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: as Canadians, the majority of the population lives so far south.
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: That is totally like this concept that we're not necessarily
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: familiar with that all unless we've been there or been north. So, yeah,
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: what a privilege to be able to be in that
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: area that not many people get to go to and
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: speak with people that I would say, I don't know
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: the percentage, but I want to say maybe ninety nine
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: percent of Canadians probably will never get there.
• 48:44
  Speaker 3: I'm sure it's very different. It's expensive and difficult, logistically difficult.
• 48:47
  Speaker 3: There's hardly even places to stay. But you're talking about
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: culture that has three months of solid daylight in the
• 48:51
  Speaker 3: summer and three months of solid darkness in the winter,
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: and that have for many generation, for thousands of years,
• 48:57
  Speaker 3: was as sustenance existence on the land with wildlife and
• 49:00
  Speaker 3: eggs and berries and roots and incredible stuff. I'm eating
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: muscocks and seal and mucktuck and whale and like, he's
• 49:08
  Speaker 3: incredible what they there. And now there's it's a culture
• 49:11
  Speaker 3: in still in transition. They lived on the land and
• 49:14
  Speaker 3: they still call it the land of Nuna, like the mother.
• 49:16
  Speaker 3: The land is just part of the fabric and part
• 49:19
  Speaker 3: of what sustains them. And food from the land they
• 49:22
  Speaker 3: call land food, whereas food that comes from the south,
• 49:25
  Speaker 3: which is anywhere south of there, like Edmonton is the south.
• 49:27
  Speaker 3: Yellowknife's the south, yes, yeah, I know, right for us
• 49:31
  Speaker 3: growing up.
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: A Colonna British Columbia.
• 49:37
  Speaker 3: Colonna, yeah, I know, yeah, Like we think the Yellow
• 49:39
  Speaker 3: NIF's the north, right, the Yellowie the south that like
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: they go down to Yellowknife to have babies at the hospital.
• 49:43
  Speaker 3: It's all we're going south. It is you draw a
• 49:45
  Speaker 3: line above Yellowknife and it's like a whole different world.
• 49:48
  Speaker 3: And as a Canadian, as you say, we're both Canadians.
• 49:50
  Speaker 3: It's I knew in the abstract I was up there.
• 49:53
  Speaker 3: There's soaps on carvings and pictures from the sixties and things,
• 49:57
  Speaker 3: but it's like when you really see it, but truly
• 49:59
  Speaker 3: it called train transition. They'd lived on the land, they
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: were moved into communities in the nineteen fifties and sixties,
• 50:05
  Speaker 3: the whole residential school subject like they've seen it. They've
• 50:08
  Speaker 3: been there and they've been in cultured and not. And
• 50:12
  Speaker 3: there's still Christianity there, but there's still paganism underneath it. It's
• 50:16
  Speaker 3: really fascinating stuff just from a socio cultural angle. As
• 50:20
  Speaker 3: a Canadian, I feel fo both very proud and a
• 50:21
  Speaker 3: little bit machine also optimistic that this is this is
• 50:24
  Speaker 3: a distinct culture. And I've said this before and I'm
• 50:26
  Speaker 3: not afraid to say it. So that island that we
• 50:28
  Speaker 3: attracted the truck beside, nobody lives anywhere near there, right,
• 50:31
  Speaker 3: hundreds of klometers, but they go out hunting in that
• 50:34
  Speaker 3: area right, because it's still good hunting. Two indigenous underwater
• 50:37
  Speaker 3: drone operators from to help us on that expedition with
• 50:39
  Speaker 3: the filming. We were high here on the island and
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: one of them said, here's some ten circles and I
• 50:44
  Speaker 3: said what and so, oh, here's a meat cash excuse me?
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: And there are piles of rocks sure enough in a circle.
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: And then he said, oh, maybe it's a grave. And
• 50:52
  Speaker 3: he started playing. Oh no, it's probably meat cash. And
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: he said, but they're very old. Look how small they are,
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: and he laid down in it, curled up, said these
• 50:59
  Speaker 3: are much too these are too late. These are more
• 51:01
  Speaker 3: than a thousand years old. There's a cultural artifact of
• 51:05
  Speaker 3: stones on this island that we just ran across, and
• 51:10
  Speaker 3: so we reported that to the tick me At Heritage organization.
• 51:13
  Speaker 3: It's unsurprising because it's really good seal hunting grounds, but
• 51:15
  Speaker 3: people don't camp out there the same way that they
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: did a thousand years ago. But you know what can
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: is you don't walk around Colonna or Edmontons said oh hey,
• 51:21
  Speaker 3: here's a thousand year old artifact.
• 51:23
  Speaker 2: No happened to us.
• 51:26
  Speaker 3: Happened to us on what you would otherwise call a
• 51:28
  Speaker 3: desolate island in the way in the middle of the
• 51:31
  Speaker 3: Arctic Ocean.
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: Wow, yeah, incredible, incredible.
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: And so what I said then, and I'll say again,
• 51:40
  Speaker 3: it's their land, like they they are the only ones
• 51:43
  Speaker 3: who have been able to live there. We Southerners are
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: like the tourists who are like, oh, well, we'll bring you,
• 51:49
  Speaker 3: We'll bring your sugar and fresh fruit, and you must
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: need vite them and see from oranges. But it turns
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: out that you fought us scurrey for thousands of years
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: by seal blubber like, it's you can.
• 51:58
  Speaker 2: And you again.
• 51:58
  Speaker 3: People in the overland community, you running to people from
• 52:00
  Speaker 3: indigenous culture all around the world, in Central South America
• 52:03
  Speaker 3: and Africa and so on, and there's a lot of
• 52:05
  Speaker 3: cross pollination, a lot of learning and love of not learning. Regrettably,
• 52:09
  Speaker 3: there's so much exposure and so much understanding that you're like, oh, okay,
• 52:13
  Speaker 3: I kind of get what it's like in the maybe
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: not the Darien, get what it's like in the Amazon
• 52:16
  Speaker 3: or whatever, but in the Canadian hierarchtic and the end
• 52:19
  Speaker 3: of it, it's still rare. You don't get to really
• 52:21
  Speaker 3: connect with those people very easily. You got to spend
• 52:23
  Speaker 3: a lot of time there. That's again I'm coming back around.
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: It's great privilege and an incredible eye opener in terms
• 52:27
  Speaker 3: of as an overlander type, as an ex explorer. It's
• 52:30
  Speaker 3: a real surprise.
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: Thanks for sharing your experiences up there with us. That's
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: something a lot most people will never do. So it's
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: a privileged to be able to learn from somebody who's
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: been there. So yeah, maybe could you just give a
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: quick rundown of which trucks we're on the expedition. I
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: know there are multiple and multiple locations doing different things,
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: so yeah, just run down.
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: Of the it's horses for courses, you can't take the
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: same vehicle all the way around the word world on
• 53:00
  Speaker 3: the surface, turns out, so for the continental crossing portions
• 53:03
  Speaker 3: we used, and this is like anywhere where there's a
• 53:05
  Speaker 3: road used. Ford Expeditions twenty twenty two and twenty twenty
• 53:08
  Speaker 3: three lightly upfitted with BF Goodrich thirty five inch tires.
• 53:10
  Speaker 3: No lift necessary, actually just clearance the fenders a tiny
• 53:13
  Speaker 3: bit in ways you wouldn't notice. Bullbars on the front,
• 53:15
  Speaker 3: auxiliar lights, security stuff inside drawer in the back, on
• 53:18
  Speaker 3: board air, a bit of electronic upfit radios and a
• 53:22
  Speaker 3: couple of them with starlinks. And that's what has been
• 53:25
  Speaker 3: the bread and butter for Europe, Africa, South America, Central
• 53:27
  Speaker 3: American New back in New York and we started from
• 53:29
  Speaker 3: New York up to Yellowknife with them. Then we ended
• 53:32
  Speaker 3: up so one of the vehicles that we took, and
• 53:34
  Speaker 3: actually that I was lucky to drive in that first
• 53:37
  Speaker 3: ever route from Yellowknife to the Arctic Ocean that we pioneered,
• 53:40
  Speaker 3: was an F one fifty upfitted by Arctic Trucks owned
• 53:43
  Speaker 3: by the Way. Those expeditions built by Arctic Trucks, also
• 53:46
  Speaker 3: out of the American Shy and Wyoming facility relatively modest
• 53:49
  Speaker 3: upfits BFSUV, but the F one fifties are proper Arctic
• 53:53
  Speaker 3: trucks built trucks on forty four inch Nikiyan tires of
• 53:55
  Speaker 3: the Artic Trucks variety, co engineered by Artic Trucks, the
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: tires themselves with central tire inflation able to def We
• 54:00
  Speaker 3: run them as low as three psi and regularly run
• 54:02
  Speaker 3: them as low as seven eight psi, and I happened
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: to we had one of them that was an electric hybrid,
• 54:07
  Speaker 3: the power Boost de F one fifty power boost and
• 54:09
  Speaker 3: I was lucky to drive that vehicle. So the vehicle
• 54:11
  Speaker 3: that I drove over that first ever route from Yellowknife
• 54:13
  Speaker 3: to the Arctic Ocean was a hybrid, which I'm proud of. Also,
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: that vehicle actually we converted for use throughout the rest
• 54:18
  Speaker 3: of the expedition. Also, so that vehicle has gone further
• 54:21
  Speaker 3: than any of them, and it has accompanied the expeditions,
• 54:23
  Speaker 3: the Ford Expeditions through Europe, Africa, South America, Central America,
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: and America and further north than Yellowknife. And that's actually
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: a really amazing vehicle, and in fact, I think we're
• 54:32
  Speaker 3: going to be showing it at the New York Orders Show,
• 54:33
  Speaker 3: So I'm proud of that. So those are like the
• 54:35
  Speaker 3: continental and slightly large tireed vehicles. Then for Antarctica and
• 54:40
  Speaker 3: for a certain port of the Arctic, we used the
• 54:42
  Speaker 3: biggest Arctic trucks, which are six wheel drive Ford super
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: Duty six by six's with forty four Inchnikey entires, which
• 54:48
  Speaker 3: you may have seen from the Antarctica footage.
• 54:50
  Speaker 2: They are.
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: We have two of their utility decks, two their camper
• 54:53
  Speaker 3: types that we're able to sleep in. Not fancy camp
• 54:56
  Speaker 3: one's pretty fancy but the other's pretty basic worker accommodations,
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: a couple of benches, you can sleep on, tools and stuff.
• 55:02
  Speaker 3: But they are the ones who we used to cross
• 55:04
  Speaker 3: Antarctica edge to edge through the South Pole, and they
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: are the biggest, bfist, gnarliest things that Arctic Trucks has
• 55:11
  Speaker 3: ever built. They have built a lot like that, but
• 55:14
  Speaker 3: they're bigger units. And again we're running the tires on
• 55:17
  Speaker 3: central tire inflation as low as three psi and a
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: dire emergency, but four or five psi through the day,
• 55:21
  Speaker 3: and then seven psi for saving the tires.
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: And remember this is you talk.
• 55:24
  Speaker 3: About a vehicle dependent expedition, like when you have four
• 55:27
  Speaker 3: spare tires across Antarctica. We had a couple of tire
• 55:29
  Speaker 3: damages early. It's like you start to get really careful
• 55:32
  Speaker 3: about how you deal with your tires. And then for
• 55:34
  Speaker 3: the Arctic Ocean, where there would be open water or
• 55:37
  Speaker 3: where there's a real risk of breaking through, we use
• 55:39
  Speaker 3: these handbuilt amphibious vehicles by a famous Russian mountain climber
• 55:42
  Speaker 3: named Vasitia Lagan who climbed every mountain in the world
• 55:45
  Speaker 3: and then decided that he wanted to go to the
• 55:46
  Speaker 3: North Pole and so he looked at all the amphibious
• 55:48
  Speaker 3: vehicles built in Russia that you may have heard of,
• 55:49
  Speaker 3: shirps or some of the other large ones, and he
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: engineered basically what I call a race car for the Arctic.
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: It is incredibly light weight. It does one thing extremely well,
• 55:57
  Speaker 3: which is get to the North Pole. You wouldn't want
• 55:59
  Speaker 3: to dive in on a normal street, you wouldn't want
• 56:00
  Speaker 3: to take anywhere else. But it's like a Volkswagen Ausphelia
• 56:03
  Speaker 3: with fifty one inch floatation tires, also a central tire
• 56:06
  Speaker 3: inflation and a bilge pump, and they're able to float
• 56:08
  Speaker 3: in the Arctic Ocean. It's incredible and handbuilt like aluminum
• 56:12
  Speaker 3: angle aluminum space frame with a two liter Toyota diesel
• 56:17
  Speaker 3: motor longitudinally mounted with a transmission remote linkage. It's upside down,
• 56:22
  Speaker 3: so first year is over and back and everything's backwards.
• 56:25
  Speaker 3: You have to remember that, and then after the first
• 56:26
  Speaker 3: week you get the feeling poor. But Mitsubishi Pajero locking differentials,
• 56:30
  Speaker 3: three of them, and he himself was a he'd previously
• 56:32
  Speaker 3: had done a pre run for the Dakar and nine
• 56:34
  Speaker 3: eighty five incredibly competent vehicles insanely competent and locking along
• 56:41
  Speaker 3: the bilge pump. Every locking diff had incredibly lightweighted the
• 56:44
  Speaker 3: whole thing huge, rep looks huge, looks like a big
• 56:47
  Speaker 3: box you can sleep in the back, but it weighs
• 56:49
  Speaker 3: about the same as a Toya camera because one millimeter
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: thick aluminum body, fifteen thousand aluminum hand rivets on the
• 56:57
  Speaker 3: each vehicle, and the ability to float like sanity vehicles.
• 57:00
  Speaker 3: I'd love to have one, but I don't know what
• 57:02
  Speaker 3: it'd ever do with it except to go to the
• 57:03
  Speaker 3: Arctic again. And like the steering column handmade, drilled out
• 57:07
  Speaker 3: three pounds, the seat seven pounds plastic rush and bus seat,
• 57:12
  Speaker 3: like everything light weight because the guy's a climber, right,
• 57:14
  Speaker 3: Like these are people who cut their toothbrushes in half
• 57:16
  Speaker 3: and race cars for the Arctic, so were privileged to
• 57:18
  Speaker 3: use those to cross the Arctic.
• 57:20
  Speaker 2: We had moments.
• 57:21
  Speaker 3: There was a moment or two where it was questionable
• 57:23
  Speaker 3: whether we'd actually make it. So take the most refined
• 57:26
  Speaker 3: possible vehicle for doing a task and go right on
• 57:29
  Speaker 3: the edge of maybe not making it with it. That's
• 57:31
  Speaker 3: what the Artic crossing was like. We had some coming
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: down to Greenland, from the North Pole. Was getting late
• 57:35
  Speaker 3: in the season, things were trying to melt, and we
• 57:37
  Speaker 3: were having a hard time making headway with some bad
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: weather and bad weather up there. That's minus forty forty
• 57:41
  Speaker 3: million hour wind, zero visibility, and.
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: You have moving ice flows because the whole thing is moving.
• 57:46
  Speaker 2: That's the other thing. The whole Arctic isn't fixed.
• 57:48
  Speaker 3: It's all the moving ice float and grinding up against
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: each other and making minefields of pressure ridges and things
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: you have to crush down to get through. We got
• 57:55
  Speaker 3: down not too far from the coast of Greenland and
• 57:57
  Speaker 3: there was like a two kilometer gap of open water
• 58:00
  Speaker 3: which is too wide for us to cross, and we
• 58:01
  Speaker 3: tried for a couple of days to get across find
• 58:03
  Speaker 3: ways around. Fire drones up and down looked for a
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: way to get around, and we couldn't do it. And
• 58:07
  Speaker 3: we were we had search and rescue organized, but would
• 58:11
  Speaker 3: mean a heck of a thing to extract us, and
• 58:13
  Speaker 3: it wouldn't gotten the vehicles out, And we went tonight
• 58:15
  Speaker 3: at bed at night to despairing, maybe it's not going
• 58:17
  Speaker 3: to happen. Maybe we're gonna have to like figure out
• 58:18
  Speaker 3: how to swim out of here or something, and We
• 58:20
  Speaker 3: went to bed and the wind shifted overnight and woke
• 58:22
  Speaker 3: up in the two ice placed it hit each other
• 58:24
  Speaker 3: and we like were banging on each other's deep to
• 58:25
  Speaker 3: get out to your go and we just managed to
• 58:27
  Speaker 3: get across this just the ice. The whole Arctic ice
• 58:29
  Speaker 3: flow changed overnight. I can tell you more blood cribbling
• 58:32
  Speaker 3: stories that there's not just one thing like that. There's
• 58:34
  Speaker 3: lots of those that that we're darning close things. That's
• 58:37
  Speaker 3: one of the reasons I don't think anybody will do
• 58:38
  Speaker 3: it again. The ice is getting thinner. It's really hard.
• 58:41
  Speaker 3: You have to use these vehicles. They've twice been in
• 58:43
  Speaker 3: the North Pole before, but from the Russian side, and
• 58:46
  Speaker 3: never content to continent in this direction, and never part
• 58:49
  Speaker 3: of a global expedition. But this is what this guy
• 58:51
  Speaker 3: wants to do, right, and so he engineered how to
• 58:53
  Speaker 3: do it, and he became part of the expedition like
• 58:54
  Speaker 3: I did, and through a mail Grimson. Actually, anyway, the
• 58:57
  Speaker 3: point of the story is the logistics of it too.
• 58:59
  Speaker 3: We had to have a couple of fuel drops by
• 59:01
  Speaker 3: airplane at helicopter, which are expensive and logistically incredibly difficult
• 59:06
  Speaker 3: and incredibly beautiful, like until you've been. I was the
• 59:08
  Speaker 3: guy on the satellite phone navigating the Bazzler, which is
• 59:12
  Speaker 3: a modified decy beautiful plane, and we'd loaded it up
• 59:15
  Speaker 3: with so we need some extra radio gear and frozen fish.
• 59:18
  Speaker 2: We had a lot of frozen fish. We bought one
• 59:19
  Speaker 2: hundred kilograms or.
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: Frozen fish that because I I've never obviously, okay, so
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: I've never been to the Arctic. I've never been the Antarctic.
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: But I'm like, oh, they're probably just having dehydrated food.
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: And then I read something about the fish, and I'm like,
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: tell me more about the fish, and I this is
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: in aside.
• 59:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so you've become a connoisseur of the dried food.
• 59:37
  Speaker 2: For sure.
• 59:38
  Speaker 3: There's the American stuff, the Mountain and High or whatever
• 59:40
  Speaker 3: it's called. And then there's the Norwegian stuff Rio Tournamat,
• 59:43
  Speaker 3: which is a lot richer and you can only need
• 59:44
  Speaker 3: for so long. And then this Russian stuff dried food,
• 59:47
  Speaker 3: which is galagala. It's called very exotic. Also space food
• 59:51
  Speaker 3: by far the most nourishing and the easiest to deal
• 59:53
  Speaker 3: with for a long time. The Russian stuff is really good.
• 59:54
  Speaker 3: It's probably how their cosmonauts lasted so long. But the
• 59:58
  Speaker 3: quite rightly, these guys who look, there's a lot of
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 3: really sophisticated adorsement on the team, lot of mountain climbers
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 3: and vassili a log in. This guy, this legendary seventy
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 3: plus Russian guy, was like, Ambre, we will need some fish.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 3: Will you help us get some fish? I'm like, oh, okay.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 3: So we're in Yellowknife and I hooked up with a
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 3: local fishermen. No good, We will take one hundred and
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 3: ten kilograms what whitefish this long? I don't know how
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 3: many fish that was. It was like fifty fish or something,
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 3: or thirty forty fish. Anyway, wrapped them all in stran wrap,
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 3: walked them into barrels behind the vehicles. They all froze,
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 3: and so that led to three months three times up there.
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 3: But in the main expedition, three months of eating shavefish,
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 3: which is like sushi, and you dip it in salt
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: and pepper, soy sauce and just eat it raw, or
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 3: you take a saw and cut like filets of the
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 3: fish and you broil it or fry it. We ate
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 3: fish in every form and it was delicious and we
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: never got sick, and we were never wanting for energy.
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 3: It was Actually it was great and augmented with the
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: Russian stuff doesn't come with full meals. It's like you
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 3: have a little side of potato, you can have a
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 3: little side of beats. And that's how we survived for months,
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 3: big language gap. I had to learn some Russian, they
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 3: had to learn some English, and that was a challenge,
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 3: but it was also a great experience. What else, Znoski
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 3: had to solve a lot of issues logistically planning and
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: just made big commitments. The air drops were expensive. Everything
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 3: was expensive, and that's another reason I dont think it'll
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 3: happen again. And for example, is a North Pole, so
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 3: if you want to ski in the North Pole, I
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: wanted some ridiculous in the North Pole. There has for
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 3: the last number of years been a station that's established
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 3: seasonally quite near to the North Pole by air dropping
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 3: things in and then building up a little station there
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 3: and making it runway quite near to the North Pole.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 3: Barneyo Stations called and it used to be a Russian
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 3: station that I got bought by a Swede and then
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 3: it's like a co branded Swedish Russian thing which has
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 3: fallen apart thanks to the conflicts. And tell you what
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 3: Russia Ukrainian Ukraine conflicts has been a big thing, big
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 3: challenging thing for us because we have a lot of
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 3: Russians on the team. And then what I can tell
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 3: you is that the Russians aren't the bad people. It's
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 3: bad people within Russia that are the bad people. But
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 3: the Russians that we've worked with have always been princess
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 3: really great people. And you know, you've worked with tons
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 3: of people around the world. Right, we have Ukrainians on
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 3: our team, and we have on our first on our
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 3: Expedition North, the expedition leader Vasilio, his wife is Ukrainian.
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 3: He lives in Switzerland. One of our main one of
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 3: the main mechanics is Ukrainian. And that's when the war
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: broke out, when we were up there together and by satellite,
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 3: he arranged for that guy's family to be extracted from
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 3: Kiev and moved to his house in Switzerland where they
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 3: still live now, to get him out of the war
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 3: with his kid and his wife. And there's it's a
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 3: much more complicated thing than it's made out to be.
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 3: But all the Russians that I've worked with, including the
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 3: one hundred and seventy Russians on the ship that we
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 3: were on for three weeks getting to Antarctica, and they're
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 3: initially very leary of us on me in particularly, I
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 3: was the only English speaker on the boat, but they
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 3: ended up being princess And I've got a lot of
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: new friends there too, which is a huge eye opener.
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 3: You realize that we're all deep down, we're the same,
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 3: and that circumstances have pulled us in different directions. Right,
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 3: This is what you learn overlanding or traveling or whatever.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: It makes you much more open minded to everybody, into
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 3: stories on all sides. And I've learned a lot about
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: the Russian culture too, fascinating people anyway. At the point
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 3: of the story, Russians across the pole also very overlanding people.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 3: But like these guys are, they're tough. Like when there's
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 3: a blizzard on and you're like getting out to stand
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 3: on top of your vehicle to like look looks through
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 3: the forty mile an hour wind which way you can
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 3: possibly get over the next ice ridge, and then you
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 3: get out and chip ice. Like uncompromising people, they've already
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 3: summitted Everest, They've already done every hard thing you can imagine.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 2: It was a privilege to work with the team these people.
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 3: Yea, all the artic trucks, guys, like in Antarctica, you've
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 3: got not just a meal, but his whole crew also
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 3: were like, I don't know, tots fingers didn't fall off,
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 3: but we had to do some heavy work on one
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 3: of the vehicles and they had to rebuild the trailer
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 3: several times. Like just badass dudes, whether Icelandic or Russian
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 3: or Marcel from the US also a tough guy stealed
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 3: and rallying, but now in overlanding and expedition stuff. And
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 3: I like to think that I'm not as tough as
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 3: those guys, but I'm tough.
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 2: Ash.
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: It was hard work, what a crazy experience, all of
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: that unique bringing people together from all over the world
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: a common goal, working towards it as one is a
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: beautiful time.
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, exactly. And I don't think i've digested
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 3: it all yet. It's funny just talking about it again
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 3: with you, I'm like, Wow, it's like what I've learned
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 3: about Russia and the Ukraine, about Icelandics, like even Icelandic culture,
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 3: I've learned.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: So much about And yeah, yeah, look.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 3: Your your followers with the vehicles and so on. Obviously
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 3: this is from just a vehicle point of view. This
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 3: is the most incredible achievement. The vehicles are very exotic,
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 3: especially the Arctic trucks and the Humelia amphibious vehicles, but
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 3: it's for us. It's the everest of what we can
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: do with cars. And then it's hard to know what
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 3: to do next. That's I'm getting a robot cars.
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I was going to ask you if you have
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: any sort of dreams or projects on the horizon that
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: you can share or that you have been mined or yeah.
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 3: Look, I'm always up for a challenge. And the great
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 3: thing is I already knew Chris Caller and Chris Walker
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 3: and some of the folks and Jen Scott Brady from
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 3: previous Shenanigans that I was into, but said they're now
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 3: proposing to me, Hey, we should do this thing. We
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 3: got to go to Honduras, Syreeta is other thing like that.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 3: And then eventually was like, can I take my family too,
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 3: or can we do some crazy stuff together? So that'll
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 3: be that stuff. But I'll be honest and this maybe
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 3: your followers will find this interesting. I spent a lifetime
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: trying to do the harder The next thing, the harder thing,
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 3: the harder thing, right, And I had a moment that
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 3: I didn't expect, Like the North Pole was a huge satisfaction.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 3: I put a canean flag in the North Pole and
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 3: I was like, wow, it's like I really felt I
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 3: was staying on top of the world. I was like, oh,
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 3: it's really it felt like I was on top of
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 3: a big ball. Psycho was psychological, but still big deal.
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 3: But then crossing Antarctica a huge achievement, very hard anarchicallytoa
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 3: we haven't talked about. It's two thousand kilometers at three
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 3: kilometers of elevation, right, and you have to actually add
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 3: twenty two percent to that because of the magnetic pole.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 3: The polls actually the air thinner, so we were at
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 3: effectively a fourteen thousand feet of ealivation and we went
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 3: up very quickly from the coast. So we were like,
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 3: it was like minus thirty five with a thirty million
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 3: hour wind, but we're fourteen thousand feet with these vehicles,
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 3: like incredible. Well, underplay Antarctica, it's incredibly hard and that's
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 3: where we're working on the vehicles. And the cold too anyway,
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 3: so that was hard too. And we got to pole
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 3: it's like, oh, so pole, but there's a research station there,
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 3: there's as a camp there. It's not in some senses,
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 3: doesn't seem as exotic. But then we get down a
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 3: Uni glacier and if you've mean all these like glassy
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 3: eyed skiers who have a ten thousand foot gaze of
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 3: they just key to the South Pole.
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 2: And they're like just recovering.
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 3: And then but then we got down on the coast
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 3: and we finished the crossing, and I totally didn't expect it,
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: and I had this feeling of, oh, that's done. Like
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 3: I just achieved some really incredible stuff with cars, not
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 3: to be big about it, but across the whole North,
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 3: the whole north part of the world, the arcticap and
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 3: then across the whole of Antarctica with this team and
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 3: seven of us have done it. So seven of us
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 3: across the whole North, middle South, and I had a
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 3: moment like that's not done. Then there's nothing harder than
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 3: I can think of now, this individual harder thing, the Darien,
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 3: it would still be a dream, but it's so dangerous now.
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 3: As I said in the park, control of at least
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 3: you know who your enemy was, but you're the guy
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 3: you're paying off was but now with drug trafficking and
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 3: human trafficking and stuff, the Darien is terribly dangerous, so
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 3: I'm not sure when that could happen. It would still
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 3: be a dreamed across that. But I'm changing my goals
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 3: a little fifty three years old and my goal now
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: with the stunt driving and race driving and snow I'm driving.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 3: I was a big snow rallies to snow's kind of
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 3: my specialty. I'm hoping to distill some of that experience
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 3: and knowledge into making self driving cars drive better.
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 2: So that's a new challenge.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: Nice. I look forward to hearing more about that and yeah,
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: what your next steps are. But I also wanted to
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: ask you what do you do in your spare time
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: when you're doing all these expeditions and stunk driving and
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: self driving cars? What are your hobbies? Do you have
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: you have a great vacation in the last five years
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: you could speak to Do you have some what do
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: you you have a family? Yeah?
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so look, fair question. I'm really I feel very
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 3: lucky that I've been able to make something of a
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 3: career of just the stuff I really like to do.
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 3: So the answer is basically no, I do like to
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 3: fetdle with cars. I've got small cars. I've got a
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 3: nineteen nineteen Model t Forward that the kids help me
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 3: work on. And we used to pick up the Christmas
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 3: tree here in Hollywood, which to everybody delights go like
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 3: the Ouga horn and the whole thing. And I restored
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 3: that car. And I'm only fifty three years old, but
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 3: it's like I'm eighty or ninety years old. I'm I'm
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 3: talking about the Model Tea. So I like that enough.
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 3: But I love travel. I love I've been lucky to
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 3: travel a lot through my life, and not just on
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 3: this a recent space, but previously. And I now newly
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 3: love my family and kids and see things through their
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 3: eyes now, and I want to take them places. We're
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 3: going to take them on some traveling, some adventure traveling.
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 3: This spring, your goal shift and becomes less about you,
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 3: and you become the frame for the next generation that
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 3: they're in the middle of the picture. So I'm I'm
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 3: excited about that. Hobbies, It's look, it's probably always been
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 3: something to do with cars, like watches. I used to
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 3: build watches and like machine but I basically like adventure
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 3: and challenge and exploration. So everything I get to do
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 3: usually has something to do with that. And by the way,
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 3: they put a little smoke on Overlin positive smoke, smoke
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 3: up the bum of Overland Journal.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 2: Like I've been.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 3: I remember reading the glossies, like I used to have
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 3: many copies. I still have quite a few actually of
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 3: Overlain journals from the day, and I remember thinking, oh wow,
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 3: I wonder if some day this is twenty years ago.
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 3: I wonder someday I'd be one of those guys. And
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 3: sure enough, now I get to be one of those guys,
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 3: and now I get to talk with you. So it's
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 3: really it's exciting for me to have that achievement to
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 3: hopefully be in the pages or and then actually my
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 3: big help would be to like inspire the next people
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 3: coming after me, like people that I read about in
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 3: there are expeditions that I looked at in there saying,
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 3: oh wow, look at how far they are and look
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 3: at how hard that must be.
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 2: How did they do that? How did they have to
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 2: innovate it? What do they have to make up in
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 2: the field?
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 3: Yea, And we build plenty of stuff in the field
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 3: now to be able to hopefully contribute get back to
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 3: that tradition.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 2: I would love also, yeah.
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: Past the baton, and I think that when you touched
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: on self belief pretty much throughout the entire podcast, I
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: think that message of building those blocks of self belief, yeah,
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: that framework. Yeah, oh yeah, we work.
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 3: With other people. You can't do this kind of stuff
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 3: as a loner. I was giving an interview to CBC
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 3: in Canada. Actually I think on our first expedition, and
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 3: I said, and there's like, how do you know you're
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 3: gonna able to achieve this? I'm like, behind me are
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 3: like half the world's like, oh wait, all of the
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 3: world's experts driving on the polls are standing behind me
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 3: right now, literally between the City of Logins team and
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 3: amil Grimston's Icelandic Arctic Trucks team. All of the experts
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 3: were on this expedition and it's the miracle in sentences as
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 3: we succeeded, but it would have embarrassing we didn't succeed.
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 3: Nobody would have succeeded otherwise. This was the dream team
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 3: and I'm just I'm lucky I got to be in
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 3: the middle of that. Vasili Chechnovsky, the best thing about
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 3: our expedition leader is that he is a team builder,
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 3: and he's and he respects people's abilities. So he said
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 3: to Mmill Grahamson, Okay, you do the root, you do
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 3: Antarctica Vasia log and once once once emals who room
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 3: runs out, you do over the North Pole. You've been
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 3: there before. And so this is a guy who helped
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 3: decommission Chernobyl after the meltdown. He has a technician's mind
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 3: to build the team and that's what he did here. Fortunately,
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 3: I had a roll and we all pulled, put our
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 3: shoulder to the wheel and made it happen.
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for sharing all of this, these
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: great stories and taking its places that most of us
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: will never go. Yeah, just everything. It's been so great
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: chatting with you. I foresee another podcast in the future
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: because I feel like there were so many things that
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: we didn't touch on that I wanted to. Yeah, and
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: there will also be an article in Overland Journal about
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: the Transglobal Car Expedition too, so people can see it
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: in the pages as you mentioned earlier, but I.
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 3: Will frame that edition. That will be a very proud
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 3: thing for me to be in that magazine. And we
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 3: have a huge talk of super high quality photos and
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 3: video that we're happy to completely open up to you
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 3: and the expecions are quite done yet. We're still moving
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 3: up through South America, Central America now and we'll be
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 3: finishing in New York City roughly around April sixth. We
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 3: reckon our first week of April, maybe a little later,
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 3: and I'll be there for that.
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 2: It'll be a culmination.
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 3: We'll be back at the Explorers Club and that Times
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 3: Square where we drove out from, and we look forward
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 3: to that. But when we look forward to sharing you
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 3: and with all your readers. If you have any questions,
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 3: feel free to reach out to the Transglobe on social
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 3: media on Instagram, on Facebook and through the webpage and
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 3: you can ask any questions you have or see the
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 3: content there.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: Transglobal dot transglobalcar dot com kids. Yeah yeah, I was like,
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: is it org. Yeah, it's dot com, so transglobalcar dot com.
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 3: And then and I think the Instagram is Transglobal Car
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 3: and Facebook is Transgloble Car.
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: Fantastic. Thank you Andrew so much for joining me. It's
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: been an absolute pleasure chatting with you about all great
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: adventures you've been on. Yeah, thank you, thank you so
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: much for me here.
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 2: Thanks so much.
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 3: I really respect what you guys do and your whole team,
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 3: and Scott and you and all the stories that you
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 3: guys have too. I got to tell all the stories
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 3: this time, but I look forward to having a beer
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 3: sometime and you tell me all your stories too. I
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 3: got to have the podium this time, but let's have
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 3: a next one.
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: It's a date great. Thank you so much to the
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: Overland Journal podcast listeners for tuning in to this episode,
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: and we will catch you next time.