Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
21 published records
01 / recommendation
“You have to walk when the temperatures are congenial to your survival. Sometimes that means walking at night as opposed to the day.”
02 / preference
“Here’s a free plug for the Merrell company. But the honest answer is I wear whatever is available, anything from leather sandals to plastic galoshes that are made all over — Turkish ones, Chinese ones, you name it, sneakers, pretty much everything.”
03 / preference
“I try, Tyler, to live off the local economy as much as possible, not out of any sense of intellectual virtue or economic virtue, but simply because I have to.”
04 / uncertainty
“You eventually do, I’m told, wear out cartilage. I don’t know where that’s going to happen, but so far so good.”
05 / belief
“In pre-Conquest times, they carried salt around, I think, even through the late 18th century.”
06 / belief
“I don’t even remember exactly how I handled that, but I think I tried to merge those two stories in a way that was maybe more about us than about mountain gorillas.”
07 / uncertainty
“I don’t know how that really started, and I don’t do it for every country. It’s more using borders as a milestone — an emotional milestone even more than a geographical or political one.”
08 / belief
“There’s a good biography of him and his own book. I think you can even get it on Kindle, but that’s C-O-R-Y-A-T, Thomas Coryat.”
09 / uncertainty
“I don’t know too many projects like this that are longitudinally so far over the horizon, and I’ve been blessed to have partners who have that kind of over-the-horizon vision and who’ve stuck with me, such as National Geographic.”
10 / belief
“Me and my walking partners, Li Huipu and Geng Kun, have a big climb ahead of us, I think up above 3,000 meters.”
11 / belief
“How is it that you crossed the desert? You’ve been through some of the Gulf States, I think.”
12 / evaluation
“” And you go find it on foot, and you report it on foot. That’s a mechanism to slow people down, to get them off staring at their phones, grazing the internet for information, which is part of the process, but I think we rely on it too much.”
13 / evaluation
“I think the Walk’s difference, though, is — as opposed to one-off projects, even weighty projects, projects that ran really deep that I could spend a year on, whatever, following a Russian gunrunner through Africa or whatnot for months and months — the difference with the Walk, and it is really a significant one, is there’s an interconnectedness between the stories that appear before me and my walking partners.”
14 / evaluation
“Cape Town was the San Francisco of South Africa, the place that the tourists flock to, and Johannesburg the place they avoided. But the grit of Johannesburg, the very toughness of it, the very hardiness of it — it was one of these places that you admire because it is real.”
15 / evaluation
“Why is India such a good place to walk? Because Indians will certainly tell you that it is.”
16 / preference
“No doubt — I don’t know where I got it, but wherever I got it from, I’m sure I enjoyed it because the food was also quite extraordinary in Pakistan.”
17 / commitment
“The feet more or less take care of me. I think I’ve gotten one or two blisters over the last nine or so years.”
18 / preference
“I try. Whereas I love food, Tyler, I’m not a foodie myself. I’m very happy with whatever is shared.”
19 / evaluation
“You could ask somebody — and this is important if you’re walking horizon to horizon — for directions, and the directions would be accurate because the teller of the directions had paced off part of those landscapes.”
20 / prediction
“The way I would approach a big story in Africa back when I was based in Johannesburg is pretty much the way I continue to approach research on this project, the difference being that now, because I’ve slowed down and taken more time, I can access more indigenous systems of knowledge that I didn’t have the time to do before.”
21 / recommendation
“My career trajectory, which I wouldn’t recommend to anybody, has been very erratic, veering from fishing boats into newsrooms and into gold mines in Western Australia and cattle ranches in Chihuahua and everywhere else in between.”