Episode 120 – Richard Grant – American Nomads, Wanderlust, Van Life

welcome to the human experience podcast the only podcast designed to fuse your left and right brain hemispheres and feed it the most entertaining and mentally engaging topics on the planet as we approach our ascent please make sure your frontal temporal and occipital lobes are in their full upright position as you take your seat of consciousness relax your senses and allow us to take you on a journey we are there was just two guys that looked at me like I was a

big pork chop that had just landed on their plate and they said they said to me in Spanish they said are you here alone and unarmed there was about five years of my life where I didn’t have an address and was just get getting around the American West and going down into Mexico by various different means lived in my car a lot prevailed on the hospitality of strangers a lot I spent quite a lot of my life in dangerous situations wasn’t exactly a plan of mine

but I remember everything I got assigned by a magazine cover Snoop Dogg’s murder trial in LA this was what back there I guess and at perform kind of a sales act on my girlfriend I said listen I know this sounds crazy but I think we need to leave the throbbing heart of downtown Manhattan and we have to Pluto Mississippi population seven for the forty minute driver in the nearest grocery store in a state where you’ve never been before

and if heard many bad things about and I remember one time getting I basically got forced into doing a bunch of cocaine with three police officers in the inner in a cantina and they were trying to sell me drugs they thought whatever if a cleaner is down here in the sierra madre he must be here to buy a drug so these but for me it was him it worked really well i was very happy in my 20s and 30s just as a restless rootless wandering

male without any obligations i never had any money it was always flat broke but i had a lot of personal freedom and that was my goal in life and so i was satisfied what’s up folks Xavier katana here and you are listening to the human experience podcast our guest for today is mr. Richard grant Richard is a journalist and author whose interest in exploration and wandering has taken him on a number of riveting travel adventures this was a phenomenal episode

to do Richard has traveled like I said extensively all through the United States and we covered some of the stories that he had to share American nomads is the book and you are going to love this episode here is mr. Richard grant

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the human experiences in session my guest for today is mr. Richard grant Richard it’s a pleasure to have you here sir welcome to hxp than to be here Richard I I’ve fallen in love with your work I know you’ve written a bunch of books but for the people that don’t know who you are can you just give us a short brief introduction to what you do please well I’m a journalist and an author and a very occasional documentary film presenter I made a documentary for the

BBC called American nomads which was about all the different nomadic subcultures in North America past and present I’m done another another few TV things but mainly I write books and magazine stories yeah that’s that’s how I found you is by watching your documentary and then I got into your book and it’s such an amazing writing style I mean you you certainly have a way with the pen I mean it is it is a sword or something there for you well

it’s it’s been my sole source of sustenance for the last 25 years so you know a right to eat yeah I mean so we’re talking about nomads today I mean how do we define what a nomad is well for me and nomad is someone who doesn’t feel stable when they’re stationary they feel a sense of stability and comfort when they’re moving when they’re on a journey and that could apply to you know some guy in Africa herding goats on foot that could apply to a hobo riding a freight

train across America right now that could apply to somebody following her to cattle on a horse nomads have a different understanding of what a destination is a destination is just a pause in the journey in every arrive in a place with the same mindset as somebody who’s no no man that don’t attach much importance to the idea of home but the road is is the home and I would also say that nomads have a particular idea about what freedom is you know we talk a lot about

freedom in in this country and we think it has to do with you know liberal democracy the right to vote the rule of law or that kind of stuff but nomads have a completely different idea of what freedom is for nomads freedom is all to do with mobility and open space and the ability to travel unfettered and often uncovered nomads do not tend to get on well with government and I was while I was researching for this conversation I read an article about how 99% of our

history has been lived as nomads it’s only in the last 1% of the time that we’ve been here on this planet that we’ve developed this idea of one place the sedentary sort of lifestyle as you say I mean how do you feel this has changed over time why do you think this has changed over time so much well you really got to look at the the invention of Agriculture I mean I forget the exact numbers but you know for the as you say for the great majority of human history

we were kind of wandering unto gatherers you know we’d hold up in a cave here but you know if the game moved on we’d follow the game that we needed to survive and then once once agriculture was invented I think that was 9,000 years ago but I’m not certain about that you know then there was a then there was a good reason to stay put your food was stationary it wasn’t wandering away on the hoof and really sedentary society grew out of agriculture then you also

what you had at this after we’d domesticated crops we domesticated animals and then you had what’s called pastoral nomadism is in that term you know there would be people who take the sheep and the cattle and the goats out to gray and some of them as people would just stop coming back to the to the village they would just become full tat full-time nomads with the livestock so that was another form of nomadism you know some people say that we’re

hardwired for it I don’t I don’t know whether that’s true or not but it’s certainly an argument that people may hate that we’re wired to be nomads and that sedentary living is a recent experiment and it’s caused a lot of our social problems I’m not sure whether I go along with that I’m least willing to listen to that argument hmm Richard let me just I just want to check I’m getting some dropped dropped samples let me just make sure that the recording sounds good

just I’m gonna pause it right there okay on one second and so you talked about this it’s ingrained somewhere in our DNA that we are meant to be you know nomadic right I mean that’s that’s that’s an argument that you know a lot of people have made that since we did spend so much of our evolutionary development on the move that it’s kind of encoded in us that desire to move and explore and see what’s over the horizon that’s obviously

you know how the world got people out of Africa was that desire to of people to move on and experience new landscapes and a lot of it just a lot of it historically just came came down to following animals that were trying to get away from this yeah I mean you wrote an essay for Eon where you talked about the conflicts between nomads and this sedentary and and how this this conflict has played out on almost every continent why do you think the quote civilized

have one where you know we’re in this fixed position where we live okay so let’s just think about this y-you know this conflict between between farmers and nomads between city dwellers and nomads as crops up on like you say every continent except Antarctica which is more or less a uninhabited and it has it has to do with conflicting philosophies of land use you know nomads want land to be theirs there to be crossed you know grazing is

there to be reached whereas the farmers and civilized people they like fences they like roads they like taxes they like boundaries they’re like rectangles civilization comes over the land in a kind of a grid work you know people our buildings have corners nomads prefer yurts and teepees around and that don’t have any corners and prefer brown shapes and they want land to be smooth and to be able to be crossed easily that’s the root of the conflict I think the reason

why nomads have lost this conflict is that civilization has proved more effective at generating technologies at generating large populations and nomads have to live in balance with the natural environment if they start overloading it the resource runs out that you know there’s no more grass for the livestock or you know you over hunt the meat if you get too many people there’s nothing to eat the nomads live living kind of a lean balance with the natural

environment where a civilization found a way to increase its numbers you know through living in cities through practicing agriculture and and the other big thing is is literacy but most nomads in human history have not been literate and literacy as a way of storing knowledge is a much more effective system than oral history so that gave you know so the civilize had greater numbers they had more technologically advanced armies and they had this system

of knowledge to draw on you know you mentioned technology and I think this is an important part of it I mean it it seems that technology has helped us in many but in other ways it’s really hindered our progress I mean we with the advent of social media we’re so trapped on our phones it feels like this auspicious sort of way we are trapped in in this idea of using our cellphones to connect with others in this good-hearted way but

essentially we’re not doing that in real life we’re not connecting with people by looking at their face we’re connecting with them through Facebook updates and retweets and likes and you know so it’s frustrating yeah I mean when when digital technology arrived and anyone that criticized it was called a Luddite I don’t think if you if you criticize social media and smart phones now you get called a Luddite because I think awareness is now grown that this is this

is a major it’s food it’s made us more connected but those connections have become less valuable and less satisfying what is the biggest nomadic group in the 20th first century America numeric play the largest group of nomads that you’re looking at in America today would be retirees living in motor homes I think there’s a last last I checked there was a quarter million of them and a lot of them have sold their houses and put the

money in their motor home and they’ve just live on the road here and maybe stop in and visit the grandkids but I found it really fascinating subculture partly because I’m from Europe where grandparents do not do that they do not sell their houses and take to the road I think it’s a sort of manifestation of that wanderlust in the in the American tradition and they tend to travel in in in in clubs or groups or herds you could say and I remember seeing them in the

Arizona desert in the winter as a big congregation of him at a place called quartzite Arizona and they were circling their motorhomes like like like covered wagons on the Prairie and in the 1860s they’d have a Kemp four-hour in the middle of the motorhomes and they would get together and kind of drink cocktails and tell stories and very happy people on the whole it seemed to seem to be a very satisfying way of living to them why is

there why is there this idea of the Old West why does that appear in their lifestyle I mean I think it’s crossing the same landscape I think the idea of nomadic freedom is you know which is the thing that they’re after is was it was a big feature of the old wait I mean both cowboys and Indians were both horse nomads so I think I think they feel a part of that that nomadic tradition that was such a big part of things in the in the Old West

hmm a new city you know and their t-shirts that have sort of herds of Buffalo or wild horses or symbols of freedom and mobility you know I want to know why there is this sort of resurgence I’m not sure if you’ve heard of this trend that’s what’s happening on social media it’s called van life we heard of this I mean I’ve heard of it I’m no expert on it but tell me more it’s I mean it’s this romanticized version of living in this really small

van most of the pictures on Instagram show you know this really hot girl with this guy it sees ABS I mean it’s it’s nothing like what you would expect someone living out of their van would be whatsoever so I mean I mean is there an element of fakery to it at least on the Instagram purposes yeah I think yeah there is I mean I hate to say it but yeah it seems like a lot of it is orchestrated for that picture yeah they’re not showing the parts where you

have to pee in a bottle or in a poop in the woods they’re not they’re not displaying that part of it I mean there’s a grimy aspect to living out of your car but why do you think there is this romantic notion this idea of freedom aspect of being on the road I mean I think there is a genuine aspect to freedom there and I think there’s also you know it’s it’s it’s culturally imprinted on us as Americans you know through Jack Kerouac and Jack London

Road movies and you know there’s this there’s this alternative to the to the rat race that exists in America that you you know people people dream of living on the road getting out into the wide open spaces it’s it’s the kind of the other American dream isn’t it there’s there’s the American dream with the white picket fence and the two kids and sending them off to college and bettering that bettering the family over the generations but there’s also a kind

of subversive American dream which is you know burn down the house and saddle up the horse and get out on the road yeah I mean it I mean now in today’s culture it seems like you know you’re working your nine-to-five by the time that you you get home you’re so exhausted all you can do is watch TV you know maybe you throw something into the microwave it’s a dreary lifestyle and I think now with this this idea of living in your van at least you’ve paid or

you’re paying off something that you own it’s not being flushed away with rent and I think more people are are starting to identify that the system is flawed the current system is flawed well it’s just not very successful in producing satisfaction happiness the parents system so people look for alternatives and we know even the idea of living in your van sure it’s grimy and you have to subpoena maudlin and in it I know because I’ve done it but you

have a measure of freedom it’s not complete freedom but it’s more freedom than most people have and you have independence and you’ve got a feeling of adventure in your lives which if the nine-to-five version does not provide a venture right you know unless you let’s see get into weird drugs how long did you spend sort of traveling and driving around wandering around there was about five years of my life where I didn’t have an address and was just get getting

around the American West and going down into Mexico by various different means lived in my car a lot prevailed on the hospitality of strangers a lot and then it finally became inconvenient as I was starting to I started to write stories for the magazines and I needed a bank to catch the checks to get a bank account I needed an address so I rented a little $300 a month kind of cottage thing in Tucson Arizona and I used that as a as a

base but I basically you know I wasn’t there I think in for the next ten years I never spent more than three consecutive weeks at home why I was I would go home I would write story and then I would get back in my vehicle and go off to there you know what’s always for story sometimes it was for let’s gonna have a look at Montana or I wonder how so-and-so is doing in San Francisco it was just very restless in that phase in my life still and you know but I’m

trying to settle down now is there a location that that drew you to it that maybe you found yourself going back to more than once I’m in lots of lots of different locations go back to you I mean I’m living now in Mississippi which is kind of an odd place for a guy from London England to end up but I’ve already think Mississippi is kind of one of the best-kept secrets in America as this reputation was just being backwards and stuck in there you know stuck in the

past and nothing much going on but I’ve always had a I’ve always had a really good time in Mississippi that somewhere I’ve always come back to in the southwest I lived I sort of based myself in the Southwest for a long time Montana I’d go back to a lot I lived in I lived in New York before I moved to Mississippi and you know I Love New York I’m just I just don’t have enough money to live there yeah was there anywhere that or any time in which you felt like

this is a dangerous situation that I’m in right now I spent quite a lot of my life in dangerous situations wasn’t exactly a plan of mine but I remember I was I got assigned by a magazine to cover Snoop Dogg’s murder trial in LA this was brought back like in the nineties I guess and so I went down into his into his neighborhood in Long Beach you know the sort of bottom of South Central Air and I just started asking around you know what did people think of snoop in

the trial then I found out that there was all these young guys who were trying to get out of their gangs and into the rap business and I ended up writing a story about those guys and spending about four weeks riding around up South Central LA with these gangsters who were trying to become rappers so that was you know there was obviously moments of danger there but nothing happened you know people kept telling me how dangerous it was in South Central and

you know I saw some edgy moments but it was it was okay and so then what happens is you build up this probably full sense of confidence you know that I went to I did stories in Haiti people said oh Haiti’s like really dangerous you know went to Haiti nothing bad happen I found it really fascinating I went to cover the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico whereas at all you know don’t go it’s too dangerous I went you know nothing bad happened so you start so you

start to when people warned you about going to dangerous places you start to take their not take their warnings as seriously as you might because you’ve been in all these places that people have said oh my god don’t go there right but then I was living in southern Arizona and I started hearing stories about the Sierra Madre Mountains in northern Mexico and what you’ve what you’ve gotten Sierra Madre is just kind of Wild West that sits on America’s back

doorstep you can drive down to the border you can see this mountain range filling up the southern skyline and the mountains could go on for 900 miles they’re about 70 miles wide there’s only two paved roads there’s four canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon there are still Native American tribes living in caves and hunting with bows and arrows there are still people prospecting for gold with mules you know I’m talking about in the 21st century but the

economy of the Sierra Madre is growing drugs and it’s a very violent lawless place and everyone kept telling me well you can’t go up there it’s too dangerous but because I had built up this sense of confidence I decided to go into the Sierra Madre and try and travel the length to these mountains and write a book about it and it turned out to be you know very dangerous indeed in what sense was it dangerous traveling was difficult because when

where there’s no law you know that when there were some there were the occasional police officers but they were all working for the drug cartels and a member one time getting I basically got forced into doing a bunch of cocaine with three police officers in it in it in a cantina and they were trying to sell me drugs they thought well if a green noise down here in the sierra madre he must be here to buy a drug so these three cops kept chopping out lines

of cocaine and pretty much forcing me to snort them then telling me that they could get me great weed they could get me good cocaine straight from Colombia come in on a small plane I mean that’s that’s kind of how that was the extent of all so what happens were in lawless places is that the people have to vouch for you with their life essentially I mean I got to know people at the northern end of the mountains and they basically vouched for me I said look

this guy I vouch for him with my life he doesn’t work for the DEA he’s not gonna cause any problems and they would kind of they would kind of passed me down to the to the next Valley to the next village and I would have a name of somebody to look up to I would be physically brought into the next village and they’d say okay here’s this guy I take care of him he’s okay but a lot of it was just the social instability because these were these had been just

poor cattle ranchers farmers there was no electricity in a lot of these villages but they had money from drugs and the thing that they chose to spend their money on was cocaine alcohol an ak-47 that made for very volatile social mix that’s fascinating man I loved it I mean in cocaine the cell of a truck I know also that the you know that the kind of Mexican machismo is particularly strong in that part of Mexico up in those mountains so you got you got much

she smile you’ve got like a river of booze you got cocaine in and everybody’s armed we aka 47s so things can things can go wrong in a hurry yeah for sure several times I just had to sort of scranton out and hide and then so yeah I was talking about my system of travel here it’s all personal introduction uh-huh and it was working quite well for me I’ve got about two-thirds of the way down through the mountain range and just meaning my

notebooks were just filling up with what I thought was really fascinating material and then my kind of chain of human connections were ran out and I came out of the mountains into the city of Durango and I saw an advert for this new tourist resort that was up in the mountains it said it said there were cabins there were horses that were swimming and I thought to myself well I’ll go up to this place which is obviously it’s safe to go as a tourist

and then I’ll make some friends there and somebody will pass me down the mountain range to their cousin or introduce me to someone in the next Valley but I went up there and there was no tourist resort there was just two guys that looked at me like I was a big pork chop that had just landed on their plate and they said they said to me in Spanish they said are you here alone and unarmed and Iona and I said yes like why on earth do you be here alone and

unarmed and I said because you know I’m no I’m no threat to anybody I said well what is there to be afraid of and that the guy says to me I kill to police the trigger finger I was like oh no I’m in it now then he shook out some cocaine onto the palm of his hand and just gulped it down and chased it down with a beer anyway it was it was kind of a it was a long story in a long night but they ended up if you’d if you seen that movie no country for old measure yeah

you remember the scene where the two big trucks are chasing the guy for free yeah that was me they’re chasing me in two trucks through these mountains at night I was just never been so terrified in my life and I I learnt something about fear that I never particularly wanted to know in the first place but my body was functioning at its absolute peak I was just never felt so alert and athletic and terrified at the same time I kind of I was it made me

think of the way you know it like a like a deer that no knows it’s been hunted can execute these extraordinarily graceful bounds and achieve great speeds that was me I was there I was at hunted deer with these two trucks after me but so yeah very very frightening night and I was in a pickup truck they built a fire next to my truck and they stayed up most of the night and then eventually they passed out in their blankets and I had to sneak in the next morning and

jump in my truck and turn on the ignition and kind of peel out of there and that was that was I’ve never been back to those mountains since I got out and have never been back since I did get a book out of it called God’s middle finger yeah yeah that’s great I mean there’s something amazing about the currency of a story and not having to hold up your phone and press the button to create a memory you know like actually being able to relay this

experience that you have and and remembering it well it was a very vivid experience let me tell you and I also I mean I’m in that you know I write for a living so I’m in the habit of carrying around a notebook with me and you know anyone that anyone you know travels in order to learn and experience the world I mean I would I would recommend that the little fashion notebook I’m and I take some photographs as well but to record you know conversations that you

had to record how you felt about things at the time you were there a notebook is actually a very very good tool for that tool for that we are going to take a small break for a message from our sponsors

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I’m not sure he’s doing anymore no there’s this whole new generation of kind of sort of punky vagabond kids that are riding around on the freight trains and he was he was one of the US when he was she just turned out eighteen had kind of a tough home life like a lot of them and he was out on the rails and trying to protect himself trying to be tough but just a sweet sweet smart kid at the same time he was he was B receives very touching I’m still still

in intermittent contact with him yeah he’s uh he’s last I heard he was he was cowboying in Montana and doing some kind of environmental activism protesting the Bison slaughter that happens outside Yellowstone every year do you think there’s a certain time in your life where you you want to travel and learn as much as you can and maybe as you get older you’re like oh well you know I’m gonna chill out now maybe have some kids I mean that’s how I did it

I think there’s a lot of maybe more pressure now on young people to get started on their career and start paying back their student loans and whatever else but you know I emerge from college without any student loans and without any clear idea of what I will need to do or you know who I wanted to be you know I went to I grew up mainly in London England I knew I didn’t want to live in England and I knew I didn’t want to work in an office and I knew I wanted to see

the world or do some traveling so you know that the travel came first and then I started writing stories about some of the things I was encountering and then I started selling some of their stories to magazines and became this kind of roving freelance journalist you know frankly you know I’ve met lots of I’ve met lots of women that do it too but it is easier if you’re male you do have like less less to worry about than if you’re

female but for me it was it worked really well I was very happy in my twenties and thirties just as the Restless rootless wandering male without any obligations I never had any money I was always flat broke but I had a lot of personal freedom and that was my goal in life and so I was satisfied and you know now I’m now I’m uh I’m gonna be 55 next month and I have a three-year-old daughter I know and a wife and a mortgage and so I left it

late but it’s been hard the transition when you’re used to when you’re used to that much freedom in your life and suddenly if you’ve got a wife and a kid and a mortgage and an uncertain income stream sure I find it difficult to adjust I mean that’ll change the narrative for you right absolutely yeah no I mean having a having a young child change Mina changes everything you know what did you do before you got married what did you do if you fell in

love on the road did you stay there with them or was it like a goodbye type scenario um different strategies I had you know had some girlfriends who were who were very understanding and I would be gone and I would come back to them and I would spend some time with him when I would go and come back go and come back those were those were so long-term relationships I had this weird phase of my life where women hurry engaged wanted to have one last fling

with me it happened like five or six times women are about to get married and settle down just woman one more you know one more brief romance I’ve noticed that what happen I don’t know I was I was I was I was that guy for a while huh I mean that’s fascinating every night I find that really interesting that that will occur I mean have you traveled outside the states and I know you were in Africa for a little while yeah I’ve spent quite reveled quite extensively in

Africa I’ve been over there eight eight or nine times in western South Africa and a lot in East Africa and Kenya and Tanzania and Burundi and Rwanda and Congo and several other countries was it different was the the environment different or I mean did you did you feel that being nomadic was different when you were in Africa well the thing I’m I’d say about Africa is that the first few times that I went there it was it was magazine stories and I was you know

I was met at the airport sort of taken away and in a Land Rover – some lovely Bush camp maybe just a tent but I was always looked after and protected and a lot of those were kind of Safari type thing you know I did I did a story about a guy that was trying to Train captive Lions to get back into the wild I did I did a dugout canoe trip down the Zambezi River that was my first trip and I was really scared of things like crocodiles and

hippos and but it turned out to be you know a fantastic trip that I that I loved and that that was kind of what kept me going back to Africa then if I think that my fifth or sixth trip to Africa I decided I wanted to make the first descent of this river in Tanzania called the Malagasy which means his river of bad spirits because I love floating down rivers and I found out there was a river that no one had ever gone down in a boat before and I thought

well I’ll be that guy and write a book about it and have it have a have an adventure you know and but to get to the river you know I had to I had to kind of get there under my own steam there was no one to meet at the airport and I was traveling on the bus and I was trying to find my own my own accommodations and I realized that on those previous trips I’ve been inside the safari bubble but I hadn’t really been in Africa a proper

I’d just been in this Safari bubble where people were looking after me the whole time and once he once you step out of that Safari bubble into the rest of Africa it seems it seems really different I mean it’s a difficult place to travel I mean a lot of it it’s just the heat you know why is it called the river of bad spirit you know what I never found out that why it was called that nobody nobody seemed to know hmm okay we said we certainly had some bad

experiences in the river is it like a cursed River or something I’m assuming that that’s what it would it would it meant that there was bad spirits on the river huh interesting I mean you wrote you’ve wrote a bunch I mean you wrote dispatches from Pluto where it covers your decision to move from New York City to Mississippi the Mississippi Delta as you were saying what were you feeling when you moved from New York why’d you leave New York

so the plan with my my girlfriend Mariah who’s now my wife we for the first time in my life I finally had some money from that BBC documentary you know a lot of money but I said let’s take this money and just go live in New York for a year because it’s capital of the world and we both had good friends there and you know I think New York’s a great city and when we arrived there I had a commission from The New Yorker magazine I had another

documentary film in the works I had a regular gig for a British magazine I had another book project in the works within two weeks of arriving in New York all those plans had collapsed and my then girlfriend she couldn’t find a job doing anything and we were living in this tiny little half underground apartment and our dog was depressed and it’s just a just new you’re basically just chewed us up just chewed us up and spat us out you

know what I mean and then while we were there I got invited to do a book conference in Mississippi where I’d been you know 10 or 11 times and I’ve always enjoyed it and a friend of mine in Mississippi took me out for a picnic at a place called Pluto her family’s farm out in the Delta and she showed me this lovely old five bedroom farmhouse on nine acres of land next to a river with fruit trees and vegetable beds and views out over cotton fields and she said we

could probably have this five bedroom house on nine acres for about a hundred and thirty thousand dollars that’s my dad’s house and he’s selling it and you know they barely let you park in New York for that so you know then I then went back to New York we were living in Manhattan on 20th Street and 8th Avenue you know when and had to perform kind of a sales act on my girlfriend I said listen I know this sounds crazy but I think we need to leave the throbbing

heart of downtown Manhattan and moved to Pluto Mississippi population seven a 40-minute driver in the nearest grocery store in a state where you’ve never been before and of her many bad things about and and and to her credit she said well um things aren’t going well for us in New York I’ll at least go and have a look at the place and banach I had she fell in love with this beautiful old farmhouse and the location and we then was probably as

extreme a case of culture shock as I’ve had in all my travels was arriving in the Mississippi Delta not knowing anything really about how that how the culture worked how the landscape work dealing with dealing with incredible quantities of snakes and mosquitoes and swamps and and a very complicated system of race relations it really took us a couple of years just to figure out how race relations worked in that part of Mississippi

hmm tell us more what you heard a lot there was he head racial prejudice coexisting with love between the races and this was not an equation that I was used to I’ll give you an example on Pluto you know that the basic although all the white people belong to one family and there’d been a black family that had lived on this land for three generations and it worked for the white family and they’d become very very close and in previous

generations the black family had named their children after whoever the matriarch and patriarch of the white family were but now this process had gone into reverse and the white family we’re now naming their children after the heads of the black family like my friend Martha named her son Joe after a black man named Joseph who had basically been a kind of surrogate father to her own father so these two families were very very interlinked and they went

together each other’s funerals but they found it really hard to eat a meal together at the same table because the habit of segregation was so instilled and you know even though there was this deep love and respect from the white people for these black individuals they would also come out with racist generalizations about black people in general there were all these different complexities and contradictions and nuances in the race relations there that

took a lot of untangling have you seen any changes in that since you’ve been there it seems to be about the same I mean I would say that race relations in Mississippi yeah probably about 90% better than they than they were I would say that nowhere else has really come so far in it’s race relations as Mississippi but on the other hand nowhere else had so far to go and the place is still completely obsessed with race I would say I would it’s it’s hard

to make generalizations as well because there’s four types of racism I mean you’ve got your kind of n-word using racial hatred but that tends to be more associated with poor white people then you’ve got this kind of paternalistic racism which is more associated with the kinda upper crust and they I would say that the you know they they have a lot of these close loving relationships with black people but they’re not equal then they’re not necessarily looking at the

black friend even as it isn’t equal they don’t want their daughter to marry a black man I mean somebody put it to me to said there’s white people in Mississippi they would lay down their lives for you know the black person that they’re close to that they would take a bullet for that for the for their closest friend but they would also take a bullet to stop him marrying their daughter it’s just it’s just a lot more complicated than I was expecting because

it wasn’t the sort of racism I was used to from other places sure yeah it does sound very complicated I mean Pluto sounds like a very isolated pert place like in 40 40 minutes away from just a grocery store how did you deal with the isolation well I mean it sounds isolated but I was in fact had a very rich social life because we got basically adopted by the family down the down the road there was a neighbor three miles the other way he would be his

house a lot there was a lot of parties to go to and also you just you just start to think nothing and driving for 40 minutes I mean I would drive Oh drive 90 miles to go and play golf with Morgan free he Morgan I got to know Morgan Freeman he lives in the Mississippi Delta he belonged to this crazy little Country Club way out in the middle of nowhere where you’re allowed to carry a chainsaw in your golf bag to cut down trees that

gotten away and they’d turn the tennis courts into a dove feel because they preferred hunting doves to playing tennis very eccentric little country club that Morgan loves so yeah 90 miles drive 90 miles go to a party drive 90 miles to go to a juke joint there’s still a few of these little um you know kind of blues clubs left where you I mean they’re on the way out now but there’s a few left and then they were really fun that was another place where

it’s a it’s a black Club and he feel a little bit awkward when you first step in there but it was a kind of environment that that showed that black and white Mississippians actually know how to get along really really well like when sometimes you get these kind of magical nights there whether all the race stuff falls over the way and everyone just has the best time together and then but it doesn’t kind of stick afterwards that they’re what you think

is a friendship then tends to kind of slide it apart and the old habit of living separately reasserts itself I think I think I mean it’s just such a complicated topic I met so I see race relations here I mean it’s sometimes it just seems like a model for the rest of the country because black and white know how to get along so well here but most of the time they choose not to hmm it is a complicated subject and I’m wandering out of all of this traveling that you’ve

done was there any lesson that you learned that sticked with you I mean I think the lesson that I’ve learned from my travels is that I find it very hard to judge people you know I just automatically now think well who would I be if I’d grown up like them you know let’s say I’m some white guy Mississippi comes out out with you know some racially demeaning remark you know I can no longer just dismiss that person there’s a evil wrong person that should

be shunned because I think well what would I be like if I had if my father you know belong to the white Citizens Council and brought me up in a very racist environment and I’ve lived here my whole life Oh what did I think like that person I guess the lesson is that we’re all just we’re all just products of our environment and once you accept that about people it becomes very hard to judge them sure I don’t consider myself superior to other people because

of the beliefs that were instilled in me by my education and cultural background sure we were we were adopted by this family on Pluto who were you know fairly right-wing Republicans who watch fox news all the time and that was another lesson is that you know in our age of social media people tend to define themselves as belonging to one and political tribe or the other whereas if you’re actually meeting people face-to-face and your neighbors with

them you end up realizing that somebody’s political views are just just a small segment of who they really are I mean first and foremost they’re you know mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and sure they’ve got professions and hobbies and opinions about many other topics the more I travel and the older I get that the less keen I am to judge somebody and also think that the moment you judge somebody that that’s when you stop learning

anything else about them yeah yeah yes I think that’s an important lesson I think that you know there’s there’s so much life out there to be experienced that looking at your phone and to being concerned with the opinions of others or the way pede that people are judging you becomes more and more trivial you’ve been through enough problems to really understand that you have no room judging anyone else you know for how they handle

theirs yeah I’m the other thing I would say was that you know as our world becomes more digital more false in a way that the the more e-value sensory experience I feel like I feel like my five senses it can let the last honest things that I’ve got I kind of make a point of trying to experience life my senses as much as I can rather than have my experience of life mediated through through technology through somebody else’s idea of what I should be

experiencing whether it’s through entertainment I just encouraged myself and others to look hard to listen carefully to Joy your sense of smell food to savor what crosses of your palate the senses are kind of all we all we got left that are honest in our own no you just said it but you know whether it’s whether it’s through economic pressure or whether it’s because there’s a sense of wanderlust and you’re you’re for anyone listening to this if you’re

moving into this idea of being a nomad you know Richard is there any sort of tip that you would give someone that is thinking about becoming a nomad I don’t think it is you know I don’t think it’s for everyone I mean what what what kept me going was I’ve got a very active sense of curiosity curiosity and a thirst for experience that’s really what’s kind of kept me moving over the years and and that’s what that’s what enabled me to put up with the you know I

mean there’s this hardship and poverty associated with it to this it’s a difficult question a lot depends how much how much money they couldn’t bring to the to the Nomad game and I mean talking about living in a ratty old van or are you talking about living in a two hundred and fifty five thousand dollar motorhome or I guess you can get a million dollar motor home there I mean is is there something regarding being open to you mentioned curiosity and

that’s that’s what yeah going so maybe it’s an openness of experience and wanting to be you know on the road and experiencing life through your senses like you said yeah I mean I think that’s how you’d get most out of it but but you know there’s there’s nomads out there that are not living that way they they go around a little Club and they see the same people they live a very sort of regimented lifestyle on the road and they’re not

actually having that that much new experience think they’re traveling in the same little group and kind of doing the same things every day but I mean I would for me you know this is just just my personal outlook that you that you do need to be open to experience and at the point of travel is to learn and expand your your knowledge to expand your horizons to expand your tolerance to expand your understanding of how other people live that aren’t like you I mean

to me let’s that’s the whole point of the exercise sure man Richard phenomenal conversation my friend where can where can people find your book more on your work I’ve got a website that’s Richard grant dot us because I’m an American citizen there okay there’s there’s links to my articles that you can find out about my books there yeah and people can catch the documentary it’s a really really amazing documentary it’s called American nomads thank you so much

Richard for being here guys we are gonna get out of here my name is Xavier katana you’ve been listening to the human experience my guest Richard grant the book is called American nomads you can find it online and we will make the link for that available below you will hear from us next week thank you so much for listening