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The Current Transcript for December 28, 2016

Host: Piya Chattopadhyay

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a conqueror. And we recognize the central why of American race relations.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Richard Spencer has railed against Jews, ended speeches with a Nazi salute and said the United States belongs to white men. Now neo-Nazi groups are calling for white supremacists to march through the hometown of the leader of the so-called alt-right. First up this morning, we're talking about Whitefish, Montana, which has gone from picturesque to a site of protest. Also today..

SOUNDCLIP

I've walked with, you know, a retired judge, oil workers, wilderness guides, alpine club guides, I’ve walked with all sorts of people. And those are the people that basically helped me tell my stories.

PC: Paul Salopek has walked ten million footsteps on his journey around the world — and he's not done. He's currently on the ancient Silk Road on foot, hearing from people affected by migration, globalization and technological innovation. In half an hour, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist talks about why going slow is worth it. And let me ask you, what's the most disgusting thing you've seen your kid put in their mouth?

SOUNDCLIP

I would have to say a pair of my disgusting dirty underwear. You know, I freaked out, like, at first glance but I went well, it is what it is.

PC: [coughs in disgust] Don’t gag just yet. In an hour, you'll hear from a microbiologist who says one of the best ways to keep your kids healthy is to let them eat dirt. Hi, I'm Piya Chattopadhyay and this is The Current.

Residents of Montana town rally against 'alt-right' targeting Jewish community

Guests: Rachel Carroll Rivas, Gwen Florio, Mark Pitcavage

SOUNDCLIP

CROWD: We are the people.

PROTESTOR: The mighty mighty people.

CROWD: The mighty mighty people.

PROTESTOR: Fighting for justice.

CROWD: Fighting for justice.

PROTESTOR: Against the racists.

CROWD: Against the racists.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: The small town of Whitefish, Montana has a big problem on its hands. Mostly known for its natural beauty and excellent skiing, it's now become the latest target of white nationalists, which have sparked protests from some people in the town of 6,000. Whitefish is the part time home of a man named Richard Spencer. He is a white nationalist and figurehead of the self-professed alt-right movement. Spencer's rise to power has put him and his family under a microscope. Last week, his mother said she was being targeted because of her son's beliefs. In response to her alleged harassment, the founder of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer urged his followers to take action against Jewish residents and their supporters in Whitefish. Their names and addresses were published on a white supremacist website and they became the targets of a concerted campaign of online hate. Well, to help us understand this story and what happened next, we're joined by Rachel Carroll Rivas. She's the coordinator of the Montana Human Rights Network, which has been involved in this story from the beginning. And she joins us today from Helena, Montana. Hello.

RACHEL CARROLL RIVAS: Hello.

PC: Richard Spencer, the white nationalist founder of the so-called alt-right has lived in Whitefish, Montana and his parents still live there. Initially Rachel, what was your organization advocating for in terms of the community standing up against him?

RACHEL CARROLL RIVAS: Yeah, so our organization has local members and affiliates across the state. And in the Flathead Valley, the local group levels here has been doing work combating hate ideas and promoting human rights for years. And that's included the passage of a resolution with our city council and Whitefish in support of values that really point out the human rights of all and the welcomeness of the community and stand against the hateful ideology of folks like Richard Spencer, and in some cases specifically calling out him. But they've also done educational events and taken on Holocaust denial films and really done cultural events bringing folks together. They celebrated a lighting event for Hanukkah and Christmas this year.

PC: So you encourage the local council, sorry. You encourage the local council to take a formal position against him, but what did you want to hear specifically from Richard Spencer's mother Sherry?

RACHEL CARROLL RIVAS: You know, I just think local people were thinking about all kinds of avenues that they can address these issues. And in small towns, that means those conversations that happened on the street corner with people every day, and that included really thinking about ways that Sherry Spencer could take a position denouncing her son's hateful ideology, in which she did actually, unfortunately at the same time, she also made false accusations of being targeted by the community. But that statement denouncing his ideas was important as well and that did happen.

PC: She has said in her statement that she has been targeted, being harassed to sell a building that she owns, it's a townhouse facility in Whitefish, Montana. She says that people are trying to get her to sell now, that's what she says is happening to her.

RACHEL CARROLL RIVAS: Yeah, I mean, I think that there is some uncomfortableness in the local community that Sherry Spencer has profited off the people of the town who have taken a unified stance against her. And she’s profited off them while supporting her son's white supremacy. He claims the home address is the address for the National Policy Institute, the white supremacist organization and supported Richard's efforts in many ways. I think most importantly is that this community is thinking about all avenues to take on, using people's areas of expertise and thinking about where folks have connections and relationships. But really, always with nonviolent positive strategies for taking on hateful ideologies.

PC: And Rachel, after Richard Spencer's mother Sherry put out that statement, that's when there was specific targeting online attacks of people in the community. Who was behind that and who specifically was targeted?

RACHEL CARROLL RIVAS: Yeah, so, you know, white supremacists have long been experts at the Internet, which is interesting and Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer really took up this cause and targeted the Jewish community and human rights activists in that community. So specifically, members of the Jewish community of Whitefish, which is a small town that does have a substantial Jewish community, were targeted with their photos and their names, the names of their businesses, with Jude and the yellow star over pictures of their faces, and the threats and intimidation and harassment of those individuals and their businesses came flooding in. And since then, you know, they've updated those targets daily to include the local human rights organization, my organization statewide, the organization the Montana Human Rights Network, our government officials the local businesses that supported these things. You know, really just like white supremacists have a pretty large target of folks that include a lot of people, so did Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer. And it’s been pretty awful for the people there, but the support that's come because of those targets from the community, locally and worldwide, has been heartening as well.

PC: And as you say, the police have said they've stepped up patrols for certain people in their community, people who have been targeted by this online hatred, as well as, you know, the senators, the elected representatives of Montana have all denounced this. There is however, a march being called for early January by The Daily Stormer, calling for an armed march on Whitefish. Now it appears that they're backing down. To what extent would that help resolve this situation?

RACHEL CARROLL RIVAS: Oh I mean, I don't think armed violence or threats of violence or intimidation are ever the answer. And quite frankly, the short term tactics of intimidation and threats and armed threats are no match for a long term community building efforts for education, for human rights and relationship building that's really been happening on the ground in this community like so many communities across the country. But it's no surprise to me that the white supremacists have gone to these tactics, it's nothing new. The use of fear and intimidation, and especially the symbology and the use of guns to instill fear is nothing new. And it's unfortunate and we can't let the fear that comes with that stop us and, you know, it really won't, it never has. The local community has stood up to these things for a long time and--

PC: [interposing] Just before I let you go, I need to, do you have any regrets about asking Richard Spencer's mother to take a stand against her son's ideology?

RACHEL CARROLL RIVAS: Well, I mean, I don't think that it's ever regretful to work hard for human rights and to ask folks to take a stand against hatred. And that means folks close to these movements as well. So in terms of that, I think it's always important to continue forward and to do the hard work. And I really applaud the people locally, who've been on the frontlines of saying hey, hatred is not OK in our local community.

PC: Rachel, thank you for your time today, appreciate it.

RACHEL CARROLL RIVAS: Thank you so much.

PC: Rachel Carroll Rivas is the Co-Director of the Montana Human Rights Network, which has been involved in this story from the beginning. We reached her in Helena, Montana. Well, Montana has a history of white supremacist activity. A nearby town is home to believers in the Pioneer Little Europe movement, which aims to create local communities of white nationalists. So while neo-Nazis aren't new to the state, residents of Whitefish are saying this particular attack against specific members of the Jewish community is unprecedented. Gwen Florio is a city editor of the Missoulian newspaper and we reached her in Missoula, Montana. Hello.

GWEN FLORIO: Good morning.

PC: What is the latest from Whitefish, Montana?

GWEN FLORIO: The latest is, as Rachel said, they are planning a rally, I guess you'd call it, in Whitefish on January 7th for people to sort of stand up and say this is not something we agree with. They have faith leaders, they have a local musician, a Native American person, just a lot of different groups coming together to say that this is not what represents Whitefish.

PC: Gwen, as I said in your introduction, you know, white supremacist activities are familiar in Montana, not say that they're normal, but people to an extent are not surprised. Does this feel different?

GWEN FLORIO: It does feel different in the specifi, oh boy I can't say this, specificity, [laughs] thank you. In that they name the people who are targeted. We've had this going back 20, even 30 years in the inland northwest. These are really white states. And because of that, they seem to attract these groups, you know, thinking they can come to a white area and, you know, I guess by their lights, make it even whiter. What they've done this time though is again, they have singled out people by name, they've asked other people to come in and harass these people and intimidate them, people and businesses. And that we really haven't seen before.

PC: You know, for a long time, white supremacists were I guess quietly going about their business so to speak. But the recent election has changed that dynamic it seems. How has it changed in Montana, or has it?

GWEN FLORIO: You know, I'm not sure, I was thinking about this. Because I think that's one of the narratives here, that the election has emboldened them and kind of empowered them to speak out like this. But, you know, again, these are specifically white supremacists but when you look at sort of the troll storms involved in Gamergate, you know, this has been going on long before the election of Donald Trump and this is the same sort of thing.

PC: One of the surprising things, I think, for people and I hear you when you say this has been going on for a long time. But when we think of Whitefish, we think of, you know, beautiful ski hills and it's a tourist town, there's an Olympic medalist from there. Those are the images we have and I think the images that we wouldn't normally associate would be a place targeted by white nationalists. Is that just a stereotype we have?

GWEN FLORIO: Alas, yes.

PC: [laughs]

GWEN FLORIO: This has happened here before, in this same area of Montana, going back at least 20 years, if not more. We sort of have these periodic flare ups of this, oh gosh, back in the early 2000s, you had a group nearby that was busted with thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition and weapons and machine gun nests and that sort of thing. And they had a hit list of local officials that went all the way down to the dog catcher.

PC: Wow. As someone who runs a newspaper, there's always a struggle with how to cover these types of organizations. Do you give them coverage? Which can sometimes feel like giving them a platform. Or do you ignore them? Which can also be problematic. How do you approach this from a news perspective?

GWEN FLORIO: Sure, we do talk about this at the newspaper. There's that sort of fine line between, you know, you're giving ink to these people, to the fact that people need to know about this. And I do think it's really important. We can't just look away because it's unpleasant. And boy, when you look at The Daily Stormer website, it is deeply deeply unpleasant when you have a picture of a child with a Jewish star superimposed on him and the word yuda, you know, German for Jewish, brings back some pretty horrible imagery. And I think it is good to let people know this is happening. And what you see then is the response that you're seeing in Whitefish, is you have basically a national outpouring of support, you know, to people who are fighting this.

PC: And Gwen, in January, this march that is planned but they say they might call it down, by white nationalists. Do you see this as, if this goes ahead, the start, if I can put it that way, of something bigger? Or has the community really rallied and effectively shutting the target down?

GWEN FLORIO: You know, I went back and read about, there was a similar march 20 years ago on Coeur d’Alene, in Idaho next door, with Aryan Nations. And they attracted about 100 members of Aryan Nations and about a dozen Ku Klux Klansman just for good measure. And several hundred people showed up to protest that. And I think were this march to happen, you may see the same dynamic. After that march in Idaho 20 years ago, things did kind of settle down. A lawsuit basically brought Aryan Nations to its knees. And I think there will be similar efforts here if this, God forbid, continues to escalate, people will find a way to deal with it.

PC: Gwen Florio, thank you for your time.

GWEN FLORIO: Thanks.

PC: Bye. Gwen Florio is the city editor for the Missoulian newspaper. She was in Missoula, Montana. Well, to put what's happening in Whitefish, Montana into a national perspective, we're joined by Mark Pitcavage. He's a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism. And he joins us from Ohio. Hello.

MARK PITCAVAGE: Hello, thank you very much.

PC: Well, thank you for being with us. How would you characterize the gravity of the threat in Whitefish?

MARK PITCAVAGE: Well, at this point, I don't know that there's a threat in the sense of a physical threat. There are certainly people who are being harassed, which is a problem. But, you know, by and large they're not being physically harassed or threatened. And, you know, no one has come into town with guns to do anything. And so, you know, you’d have to say that at this moment at worst, you know, there's just a relatively mild threat level.

PC: Hmm. I imagine for the people who are under that mild threat though that this is pretty scary for them.

MARK PITCAVAGE: Well, it's never, I mean, it's always a horrible situation to be harassed in the fashion that some of the people of Whitefish are being harassed. I'm just, you know, there is a wide gradations of actual threat though, you know, in terms of physical, the possibility of physical harm, that's all I'm saying.

PC: Fair enough. Put this into context. How strong are white nationalist groups in the US right now? We've heard a lot about as we’re talking about with our last guest, the rise of them in the post-Trump election. You know, that we're seeing more of them, that they feel that they have more agency. How strong are they right now across your country?

MARK PITCAVAGE: Well, they're not very strong. White supremacists are still very much a fringe movement in the United States. When you look at the six main white supremacist movements in the US, several are floundering, several are stagnant and a couple are rising. I think the key difference is that one of the movements within the white supremacist movement that is rising is the so-called alt-right. Which has gotten, in large part due to the election, a tremendous amount of publicity and attention. And because the alt-right is largely an online phenomenon and because it operates a lot on Twitter, which journalists operate on Twitter a lot too, you know, it has gotten a tremendous amount of exposure over the past year.

PC: Too much attention from us journalists?

MARK PITCAVAGE: Probably so, I think so. It deserved attention, don't get me wrong but at this point there are journalists looking at every single thing that alt-right figures such as Richard Spencer say or do and write stories about them, even when those things are not remotely newsworthy.

PC: Richard Spencer, who you just mentioned is the figurehead of the alt-right, and we have heard quite a bit about him in these last months. But I want to ask you about someone else and this is the writer behind The Daily Stormer post that has taken on, so to speak, Whitefish, Montana. And that's a guy named Andrew Anglin. What do we know about him?

MARK PITCAVAGE: Andrew Anglin is a young man out of Ohio, who several years ago started The Daily Stormer website. Very blatant in-your-face neo-Nazi propaganda website. The name itself is a takeoff of the name of a very crudely anti-Semitic Nazi newspaper of the 1920s and thirties, Der Stürmer. And he, you know, he basically is a troll. He excels in pushing people's buttons and going over the top and trying to get attention. You know, and then he’s become kind of popular among white supremacists because of this.

PC: Before I let you go, in Whitefish there was a call to have Richard Spencer's mother Sherry publicly take a stand against her son's views and she did that, as we heard in the statement, and went further. What do you think of that push to have a mom of a white nationalist, a white supremacist take responsibility for their son's views?

MARK PITCAVAGE: Well, having spoken over the years to many people who were parents or spouses or children of people who got involved in extremist movements, they're in a very difficult position, where they don't necessarily agree with the ideas of their relative, but because they're a close relative they love them. And, you know, it's very hard to live that life.

PC: Hmm. How should citizens across the US deal with expressions of hate or people with white supremacist views within their own communities?

MARK PITCAVAGE: Well, you know, one of the things I firmly believe is that people of goodwill outnumber people of ill will. And when you encounter hate, when you encounter hateful harassment, when you encounter hateful speech, you've got to speak out against it. And the people, you know, the chorus of people who can rise up and show that they don't support those ideas, that they support positive ideas, that they support unity and diversity and tolerance, and just simply being nice to folks. You know, those voices are so much stronger when they're raised. And I just urge people to get together and collectively raise those voices.

PC: Mark Pitcavage, thank you for your time.

MARK PITCAVAGE: Thank you.

PC: Bye bye. Mark Pitcavage is a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism. And he joined us from Ohio. The CBC News is next. Then a journey of 8,000 kilometres begins with a single step. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Paul Salopek is walking the modern day Silk Road in his journey around the world. And he's doing it one step at a time. We'll check in with Paul Salopek when we're back, just after the news. I’m Piya Chattopadhyay, and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Extro]

Why Paul Salopek is walking the modern-day Silk Road to pursue 'slow journalism'

Guests: Paul Salopek

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Hi, I’m Piya Chattopadhyay and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

PC: Still to come, the next time your kids complain about bath time — let them skip it. A microbiologist says letting kids get dirty is good for their health. But first, why journalist Paul Salopek left behind the break neck speed of the 24 hour news cycle and is now walking the globe doing slow journalism instead.

[Music: Theme]

PC: Paul Salopek has been walking the globe for, get this, nearly four years. In 2013, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and fellow with National Geographic, set out to retrace our ancestor’s ancient migration out of Africa. This month, Paul Salopek reached a milestone in his walk — ten million footsteps on a journey that has taken him from Ethiopia to Djibouti, up the Arabian Peninsula, through the Middle East to Cyprus, across Turkey and the Caucasus to Central Asia. That's more than 8,000 kilometres traveled on foot. His end goal is not just a destination. He plans to go to the southern tip of South America, but his walk, dubbed Out of Eden, is also an exercise in slow journalism. It's an opportunity to meet, talk and spend significant amounts of time with people affected by some of the most pressing issues of our time, globalization, climate change and mass migration. We’ve checked in with Paul Salopek once a year since he set out. This morning. We've reached him in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Hello.

PAUL SALOPEK: Hi Piya.

PC: How are you?

PAUL SALOPEK: I'm well, thank you. Yes, four years in, still going and it's nice. I'm settling in for my winter riding retreat here in Central Asia.

PC: And you're in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. I think most people would have a hard time finding Bishkek on a map if I gave them a blank world map. So take us there. What does the city look like?

PAUL SALOPEK: Well, since yeah, it's the capital of a Central Asian republic, it has basically a mixture of old Soviet style buildings mixed in with new architecture from our globalized age. It's icy, it's cold here. This is a mountainous country with mountains up to, you know, almost 7,000 metres, 20,000 feet plus. So it's quite chilly here in the belly of Asia.

PC: Hm. The belly of Asia. Last year, we talked to you last December, and at that time you were in Baku, Azerbaijan. You've walked from there to Kyrgyzstan. So I'm asking you to kind of a wrap up 360 odd days in a nutshell. But tell us about your journey from Baku to Bishkek.

PAUL SALOPEK: Yeah, it's a good, actually and easier, than the past segment to encapsulate because basically it's a Silk Road segment. I left Baku, which is on the Caspian Sea, and when I hit big bodies of water Piya, I have a dilemma. How do you get across them or around them? And I allow myself, on rare occasions, to take a surface vessel to get across these big bodies of water. So I took a cargo ship across, loaded with Turkish trucks and Turkish truck drivers. And the next day landed in in Asia from the Caucasus. And there the world changed, the languages changed, people look different, history had taken on a different colour, a different tinge. Basically for the last year, I've followed what were the old Silk Roads that once laced together Asia and Europe using, you know, camels and pack animals and basically the trade routes that extended for thousands of kilometres, trading these very valuable luxury items between these two societies.

PC: And when you see it now, I mean, do you see that trade?

PAUL SALOPEK: Yeah and that's what's been fascinating. I'm actually working on a piece for National Geographic magazine right now about this issue. You know, looking back at the old fabled Silk Routes, which are more than 2,000 years old and trying to draw lessons from them for today's globalized age. Back thousand years ago, we were moving things like, of course silk, but also furs and precious metals, glass from Venice, technologies were being exchanged, ideas were being exchanged using these novel inventions called paper. And today it looks like a very modern landscape, except it's not that populated here, it's still rather under-populated. Big vast stretches of grasslands and steppe crossed by superhighways, built in some cases by national governments, in other cases by China or South Korea. Railways that are carrying cars loaded with goods from Russia from India from Iran from Europe. It's just this new template of globalization set over one of the earliest experiments in globalization in history.

PC: You know, it is fortuitous in a sense, that you're on the ancient Silk Road trail, because global trade is a bit of a dirty word nowadays. And so how do you cover that story? I appreciate that you're observing this and seeing things but how does a slow journalist cover global trade in Central Asia?

PAUL SALOPEK: Very much the old fashioned way, right? Which is very slowly on foot. So this is the irony, is that I see the whiz of global trade happening around me and over me but I have this luxury. I get to dip into people's lives affected by globalization in a way perhaps that a typical foreign correspondent who might be jetting in and out for a day or two does not. So the people I encounter are affected both positively and negatively by global trade, which as you know is kind of reeling now with a kind of a reaction against it by various governments around the world.

PC: And so who are and, you know, so I'm asking you to kind of generalize first of all, but like who are the people that are benefiting from global trade in the areas that you've been in?

PAUL SALOPEK: Well, think about it. So here in Central Asia, the kind of the stereotypical landscape and kind of human landscape is, you know, vast open steppes with, you know, horse nomads, economically disadvantaged area, historically sparsely settled. But suddenly there's a commodity here that is hugely valuable now the way silk was 2,000 years ago. And that's energy products — gas and oil. So this globalized commodity has spawned massive infrastructure projects where now instead of camel trails that have been grooved into the landscape by millions of camels feet over time, you've got pipelines, you know, crisscrossing the landscape taking heating fuel to Europe, taking transportation fuel to the Mediterranean and, you know, flows of gas and oil to China. And it's made some of these countries — not all of them — some of them much more wealthy, much more affluent. So there's like bursts of infrastructure building that would make American’s and head spin, you know, because infrastructure is decaying in North America and here new highways, new train lines, new buildings are going up like crazy.

PC: So the people that are benefiting are the people who are building those roads, building those train lines, building those pipelines? You know, we always hear here in North America, if we build a pipeline is going to create X thousand number of jobs, right? And it will benefit the kind of guy, not at the bottom, but that sort of labourer. So those are the types people that are benefiting there?

PAUL SALOPEK: That's right. I mean, you have people who are entrepreneurs, you have kind of the business class if you will, who are doing these contracts. It does trickle down to workers. And then the kind of added layer of people who benefit, and in a moment I'll talk about the people who don't, are sort of the intelligentsia. Sort of this kind of small but growing middle class whose children can now afford, maybe, to go to college overseas and join the globalized trading class of people, you know, the information age. The, you know, people getting computer degrees, you know, business manager degrees what have you, that's happening now for the first time ever in this part of world. Has been for, you know, better part of a decade.

PC: And so tell me about the people who have suffered, because it's always someone who is suffering in these stories.

PAUL SALOPEK: In every revolution there are winners and losers. And of course, people who don't have the social, political, economic leverage to get the benefits of this energy boom are doing a lot of the low paid jobs, in many cases they can't find jobs. And so countries that don't have these energy resources. And so the ones who are kind of doing well, for example Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan, they are magnets for the underemployed and unemployed of the surrounding Stans, other countries like Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, or Tajikistan. Poor workers, less skilled workers from these countries are now migrating across borders in large number to find work and including to Russia. And I've walked with both kinds of people, both the winners, the beneficiaries and the people who've sort of been left out. They've both accompanied me on my walk.

PC: Mm. And is there common ground between them?

PAUL SALOPEK: Well, you know, they speak the same language, they're from the same cultures, they share the same history but there's very much a perception of people who are benefiting from this and people who aren't. And any time that this happens, there there might be among the people who are not benefiting a sense of disenfranchisement, right? And that's happening in North America too of course. That's what's driving some of these movements against globalization.

PC: How many people you reckon you've met over the last four years?

PAUL SALOPEK: Thousands.

PC: OK. So I don't know if you do this but, like, is there someone who stands out for you from this part of the journey? The most memorable person you've met in the past year.

PAUL SALOPEK: Yeah, it's really hard. I'm not trying to hedge here, I'm not trying to get out of a incisive question. But there actually are many. And, you know, who do you think would be naturally the person that would be a candidate? It's often the people I walk with because I get to know them more, right? They become partners in the journey and that's the depth that I acquire in my reporting that I probably wasn’t able to do very often before. So I've walked with, you know, guys who were wolf hunters, I've walked with, you know, a retired judge, oil workers, wilderness guides, alpine club guides, I’ve walked with all sorts of people. And those are the people that basically helped me tell my stories.

PC: Do they just think you're, like, you know, crazy so to speak? Like, you must get a lot of reactions where people are like what do you mean you're walking around ten million steps over the last four years? You must get that everywhere you go.

PAUL SALOPEK: Yeah I do. And it's become kind of a imagine yourself doing this. You know, you walk into some place, a cafe in Aktau, Kazakhstan, or in Samarkand, the old Silk Road capital along the Silk Road in Uzbekistan. And people say hey, where are you from? And I say well, you know, I'm from North America, I'm born in California but I, you know, lived in Africa. And they said, you know, did you fly in? And I say no I walked here.

PC: [laughs]

PAUL SALOPEK: So that always, you know, there are like kind of five stages of, you know, amazement and, you know, hilarity and then kind of, there’s generally it winds up with genuine curiosity and that ends up making the bulk of the bond.

PC: That's the gateway, right? For any conversation, but for journalists, that curiosity is the gateway.

PAUL SALOPEK: Just say it's quite a conversation starter.

PC: Yeah. You know, I noticed on your website because when you started out, you're four years into what was initially you said would be a seven year trek. Your website now says multi year, which--

PAUL SALOPEK: [laughs] Yeah.

PC: Peaks the curiosity of this journalist. I imagine you’re relooking at your timeline, is that why you've done that?

PAUL SALOPEK: Yeah, I'm, you know, the idea in the abstract, before I started walking in December of 2012, was picking seven years based on a mathematical simple calculation on the back of a napkin frankly, about how many miles I could walk in a year, how many I had to stop to kind of do my job as a reporter. And that's proven to be laughably optimistic, but in a good way. I can report that I’m way behind schedule and I'm very thankful for it because I often think that I'm moving too fast still through stories by walking through them, because the stories are so interesting. I'm having, essentially, the time of my life.

PC: What's the general timeframe you think it might take to get to the southern tip of South America now?

PAUL SALOPEK: OK. Well I’m going to ask my editors to put their fingers in their ears if they're listening.

PC: [laughs]

PAUL SALOPEK: But basically, you know, I’d say a decade, maybe 11 years to get to the bottom of South America.

PC: Wow. I mean, I know this is your existence and you've probably gotten over the wow factor a little bit. But wow, like, do you ever think of yourself Paul, like, it's such an intense commitment. Why is this so important to you?

PAUL SALOPEK: Well, you know, some people find great joy raising honeybees and others find great satisfaction being a superb auto mechanic. Others are teachers, right? We all do things, hopefully, that bring us a measure of reward and happiness. Mine is storytelling. And this continues to compel me Piya, because it remains four years in one of the most amazing experiments in my life as a storyteller and it's making connections between stories that I was never really aware of before, when I was traveling around the world quickly, as most of us do.

PC: Hm.

PAUL SALOPEK: It's continuously surprising.

PC: You must make pretty strong bonds with some people along this journey of yours?

PAUL SALOPEK: Well, that's absolutely true. And I think it's I look back over my shoulder and there's a long, you know, a 5,000 mile or, you know, whatever it is 10,000 kilometre, you know, pathway behind me filled with community. And I don't call them sources. These are not my sources, these are now in many ways teachers. They are people who’ve taught me about how the world is wired together and how our lives are wired together and we stay in touch, many many of us do.

PC: And as you said Paul, you met thousands of people over the four years, hundreds in the last, perhaps, maybe more than that. And you talked a little bit earlier about, you know, you've walked with a judge, you've walked with wolf hunters on the Silk Road part of your journey. Paint me a picture of who your fellow walkers are and were.

PAUL SALOPEK: Well, I'll give you concrete examples. You know, one man who walked with me almost entirely across the country of Uzbekistan, Aziz Kalmuragof, you know, I met through the Internet, right? The ultimate post-modern Silk Road technology, right? You know, you put a word, a friend of a friend of a friend walking the Caucasus more than a year ago, I talked to a friend, a woman in Armenia who's a mountain guide. She knows a Russian friend in a town called Almaty in Kazakhstan, who knows somebody else who puts me in touch with somebody. You know, it's just this chain of friends, it's word of mouth. And I meet Aziz at the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and now I have to give you a little background here. Uzbekistan, especially in the West, is wilderness. It's this enormous wild plateau. Hundreds of kilometres across that nobody really in their right mind crosses on foot anymore. There's a lonesome highway and an industrial rail line and that's about it. And so who meets me is Aziz, and he's wearing, like, Bermuda shorts and wraparound sunglasses.

PC: [laughs]

PAUL SALOPEK: And top side of sneakers. And I'm saying does this guy realize that we're, you know, we're walking across, you know, a chunk of territory that’s the size of some countries, that's all grassland. And Aziz, who was an urbanite, grew into the walk and in a sense, again, took possession of it, the way most people I walk with do it. It's not my walk. I watch kind of in wonder, in awe, and this is what keeps me going, is that this idea grabs people and they make it their own. And Aziz didn't want to stop walking after walking 2,200 kilometres across his own country. You know, it was a melancholic parting at the Kyrgyz border a few weeks ago, because walking is addictive in a positive sense, it kind of wakes you up from your nap. It forces you to engage with people. You can't drive by people, you can't ignore them, you have to say hello. You have 20 or 30 conversations a day depending on the population density of the landscape you're walking through.

PC: You know, I don't want to sound like you should be a fraidy cat. Because people always say, like, how does Paul do this? Isn't he scared? You're obviously not scared because someone who's scared of doing something like this wouldn't embark on such a thing. That said, you’re in a part of the world, that's for Westerners anyways, pretty foreign. And as you said, you're you're walking through vast amounts of wilderness. Do you ever get a little bit nervous? Might be a little bit dodgy, especially, you know, the world’s a little bit feeling unsettled these days?

PAUL SALOPEK: Yes of course. And I think that fear is a good thing. Fear keeps you awake, keeps you alive. But, you know, with my project and my way of thinking about my project, the way I handled that is I manage fear, right? So I don't allow fear to dictate and, you know, close off avenues of exploration, if you will. But I allow it to form sort of which way I want to go, to move around dangerous, areas where there's trouble. But, you know, I'll tell you this, in the last four years, I've had some pretty tough scrapes as you might imagine. You know, there was an occasion in Turkey when I was ambushed. I walked into a dispute between Palestinians and Israelis on the West Bank where were rubber bullets were being fired and tear gas was in the air. But by and large it's pretty peaceful out here. By and large pretty easy going. And, you know, you walk through hundreds and hundreds of villages and towns where absolutely nothing happens to you and, you know, where people, if there is danger on the horizon, generally tend to warn you, right? Something you don't get when you're driving through quickly in a car because you're simply not interacting. And that goes back to my old experiences as a war correspondent. The times I got into trouble as a war correspondent was because I was rushing through the story and I made mistakes. I didn't stop to ask.

PC: As I like to say, when I lived in the Middle East and people would say aren’t you scared? I said, you know, I used to tell myself and I still do, and I believe this firmly, 99 per cent of people in the world are good and one per cent are bad. And it’s sometimes just luck if you run into them, you know?

PAUL SALOPEK: Well that's it. It sounds banal, it sounds kumbaya-ish, but Piya that is my experience. That's my empirical experience of walking through the world. This is not kind of wishful thinking, and obviously I wouldn't be here talking to you if it weren't in some measure true.

PC: I want to take us all back to four years ago when you set out. I’m going to play some tape. This is when you talked to Laura Lynch who was hosting The Current four years ago, just under four years ago, when you set out on this journey. And she asked you at the time, I’m going to play this for you Paul. What you were thinking about just before your departure?

SOUNDCLIP

PAUL SALOPEK: I think it's a sense of relief, to be honest. It's been so long, the run up to this and the preparations have been so heavy, they've been very, a lot of work as you might imagine. That the idea of setting out into the Rift valley in temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with camel pastoralists is very enticing at this point. So I'm very excited and ready to start producing, to begin the journey, begin the words.

PC: Paul, four years on, how's the experience compared to what you said four years ago just before you set out?

PAUL SALOPEK: Piya, just listening to that, it seems like only yesterday. It just seems like I just have had, you know, that was just last night's dream. That sense of relief at starting out, you know, basically has smoothed out into kind of a mellow appreciation of the whole process. Where it gives me a great sense of confidence, aware that I'm lucky, aware that I'm privileged by my passport, by my tremendous partners, National Geographic, you know, Harvard University, all these wonderful education partners. That I still have the confidence that I can pick up my rucksack, you know, in whatever room I happen to be talking to you from and set out walking and I'll be sort of OK, I'll be OK. It's not a dramatic gesture, there's no kind of operatic music swelling in the background as I set out. It's just another day of moving through the world the way we are designed to, which is on foot, right? For 200,000 years that's what we've been doing and it's very natural.

PC: I want to talk about your feet. You know we're obsessed with your feet, of course.

PAUL SALOPEK: [laughs]

PC: How many pairs of shoes you've been through? What kind of shoes do you wear when you do this?

PAUL SALOPEK: OK. So the shoe, let's get the shoe issue addressed.

PC: Yeah. I know you’re bored of these questions, but they’re fascinations for all of us.

PAUL SALOPEK: Look, it’s important, it’s important. You know, it’s the foundation as it were, the project. So I tend to wear hiking shoes, walking shoes. There's one brand called Merrells that I'm sort of using by default. I use them a lot. I have, when my friends and family come visit, I have them bring me replacements. And they're amazingly resilient. This is not a plug for Merrell, but I guess it is sort of. It's basically I've been through like four or five pairs of Merrells since Africa, so what is that? Like a 1,000 miles or 1.600 kilometres per pair of shoes. And in between when they fall apart, I generally go to the local bazaar market and then buy whatever is available, which is, you know, sneakers made in China, in one case flip flops, sandals. So but, you know, that kind of laissez-faire attitude to footwear is going to have to change, you know, in the next year or two when I start heading into Siberia.

PC: Mmhmm.

PAUL SALOPEK: I'm a subtropical guy. I've spent more than a decade living in Africa and I’m kind of, you know, cold blooded. So I don't know what I'm going to put on my feet. If anybody as recommendations, if they’re electric socks or anything like that, please let me know.

PC: I think you figure it out, you seem to have been doing just fine making your way in the world, so to speak. Do your friends and family come walk with you sometimes? They fly, meet you in some country and start walking with you?

PAUL SALOPEK: They do, yes. That's happened repeatedly. It's both friends and family and then even more interestingly old walking partners who have become family, right? Have actually leapfrogged ahead and met me outside of their countries to walk again. And that's nice.

PC: I bet. So you're in Bishkek now, tools down, as you write, other tools picked up to do that part of the gig. Where to next, when do you leave?

PAUL SALOPEK: Yeah. Well, right now I'm waiting for the mountains to thaw out a little bit. These are really high mountains. The Tian Shan between Kyrgyzstan and China, the highest mountain is Mount Lenin, I think it is about 20,000 feet plus, and the lowest pass will be about 14 or 15,000 feet to get over it. And so it will be hopefully western China, walking through kind of the southwestern corner of China, through a very big desert called the Taklamakan. And then taking a hop, leap and a jump over the Himalayas, south into Nepal.

PC: [laughs]

PAUL SALOPEK: I mean, it sounds surreal even to me now. But this is sort of my life but I get this wonderful opportunity to look at a map and say where do I want to walk? And go there. But kind of walk south over the Himalayas into Nepal, probably over winter there and then set out across Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Burma and then re-enter China for this epic walk. Truly a walk of a lifetime, through the belly of China, right across from Yunnan up to the Siberian border.

PC: I have to say, and I'm sure you've heard it from your friends back home in North America and your family, a lot of people describe 2016 as a tough year and a lot of people want to turn their back to this year, and it's just so nice to talk to you and remind us all of this wonderful planet that we live in and all the exploration that you're doing. Thank you Paul.

PAUL SALOPEK: Thank you Piya. You know, I think as Diogenes says Solvitur ambulando. It is resolved by walking.

PC: Hear hear. Happy New Year. Take care.

PAUL SALOPEK: Thanks again, bye bye.

PC: Bye bye. Paul Salopek is 8,000 kilometres into a 33,000 kilometre walk around the world. We reached him in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. You can see more about his journey by going to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Alright. Coming up next, we're asking if keeping our kids too clean in Western societies is problematic. We’ll have that discussion coming up. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay and you're listening to The Current.

ENCORE: Kids need to get dirty to ward off disease, says microbiologist

Guests: B. Brett Finlay

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Hi, I'm Piya Chattopadhyay and you're listening to The Current. We're revisiting some of our favourite stories over the holiday season, including this next one that had some parents reaching for the hand sanitizer and sheepishly putting it back. B. Brett Finley is a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia. He says parents in North America need to lay off the obsession with keeping their kids super clean because it's actually bad for children's health. Anna Maria Tremonti spoke with him in November and that segment began with The Current’s producer Karin Marley visiting a kids model train ride in Toronto, where she asked parents a simple question that got some cringe worthy answers.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Train bell ringing]

KARIN MARLEY: What is the most disgusting thing your child has ever picked up off the ground and put in her mouth?

VOICE 1: A feather? Like five minutes, I watched her put a feather in her mouth, yes.

VOICE 2: Bubblegum. It was under the bleachers at the Rogers Centre. We scooped it out and I tried to wipe his mouth as much as I could and rinse it out. [laughs]

VOICE 3: They eat food off the floor all the time.

VOICE 2: Yeah, we don’t honestly—I don't stress about it—in our house anyway, I don’t stress about it. [laughs] Outdoors would be a different matter. I would probably shriek before they got a chance to get their hands on it, to be honest.

VOICE 4: It was something like a fly on the ground which was maybe had a wing broken or something. So he thought it's kind of a little candy thing.

VOICE 5: I would have to say a pair of my disgusting, dirty underwear. You know I freaked out like at first glance but I went well, it is what it is, you know? So it's pretty bad. [chuckles]

AMT: Eww. You might be inclined to go “Eww,” at those stories. Yuck. But there's a growing body of research showing that maybe we should not be so disgusted and that a little more dirt is actually good for kids. B. Brett Finlay is a professor of microbiology at UBC. He's also the co-author of wait for it, Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World and he joins us from Vancouver. Hello.

B. BRETT FINLAY: Hi, Anna Maria.

AMT: What did you think of those?

B. BRETT FINLAY: I loved it. I just loved it. [laughs]

AMT: So pre-chewed gum, insects, dirty underwear.

B. BRETT FINLAY: Oh, there you go. Yum. [laughs]

AMT: What do you think of all these things going into a kid's mouth?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Well, I mean it's kids being kids, right? You know they have a strong resemblance to Hoovers and they try and put everything in their mouth. I think it's the parental reaction that's even more interesting. You know the eww kind of factor. We’re starting to realize these kids do need this microbial exposure early in life and they're just doing what kids do and so maybe this isn't so bad.

AMT: But aren’t germs what make children sick?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Germs are certainly. I mean germs is a name for microbes that usually cause disease in people but not all microbes are germs and actually there's only 100 different microbes that cause diseases in humans and we have thousands of microbes living all over us on our skin, in our intestine. They don't cause disease normally, so they're actually part of us and this is where the real mind shift had to occur that we've in this assault on germs to kill everything, we're also killing the good ones off and we're not getting these good ones and that's affecting us later in life.

AMT: So parents shouldn't be as fearful about what their young children are being exposed to when it comes to germs.

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah. I mean it's a balance you know we say let them play in a sandbox but if that sandbox has says cat feces in it for example, which carries parasites, maybe they shouldn't do that or lick the floor in your own house but maybe not in the subway stations. The good thing is that we've really cleaned up our world and the chance of getting an infection if you pick up a handful of dirt or a stone or something now is way less than it used to be say 100 years ago.

AMT: So how do the good microbes help us and help children especially?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah, this is where science has taken a major turn. So you know ever since Antonie van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope 330 years ago and he saw there were microbes in his mouth, that's when microbiology was born. You know we’ve known there are microbes there and then Pasteur and Koch and others showed that there were germs that caused disease so we went on this huge sanitation kick to clean the world up. And we just thought any good microbe’s a dead microbe kind of thing and so we brought in vaccines and antibiotics and sanitation and clean food and water. And it’s the last under a decade we now realize that oops, these microbes actually do something and so the areas we’re finding these microbes help our bodies develop is they train the immune system. If you don't have microbes early in life, you can affect diseases such as asthma and allergies. If you don't feed them right, you can push yourself towards obesity and weight issues for example. And even more stunningly, a really exciting area is how they actually affect brain development. We know animals that don't have microbes in them, their brains don't develop normally. And so we have to rethink this whole concept. We realize that you know yes, we're homo sapiens, but we're filled with at least 10 trillion microbes. You know there's equal number of microbes as human cells in the entire body and these things are just part of this and we're depriving that part of our bodies so we don't develop normally.

AMT: So talk to me a little bit more about this. What emerging evidence is there linking the rise in certain illnesses to the microbes that live in our guts?

B. BRETT FINLAY: If you look at you know curves of infectious disease the last 50 years, they all go down. If you look at curves of let's say Western society diseases—so I'm including things like asthma, like allergies, like obesity, like type two diabetes, like inflammatory bowel disease, like depression, like stress, like anxiety, like autism—these things actually all have microbial links and only recently we started to realize this. And studies in both using animals that don't have microbes in them or studies that say look at antibiotic exposure you know the simple fact if you get courses of antibiotics in first year of life, you're at a much higher risk for getting asthma, allergies and becoming obese later in life, just because you shift your microbes.

AMT: Is it we’re shifting microbes or we're getting rid of microbes that would have helped us?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Well, what we're doing is we're decreasing the different numbers of them. And it's kind of like an ecosystem a rainforest you know that you want a bunch of species in there. And as we clean up our world and you know eating the refined white flour, white sugar type diets for example and not exposing kids to many things, we don't have the diversity of microbes that we now realize we actually need to have a healthy body.

AMT: How definitive is the science on how microbes and diseases are linked? Is it cause and effect?

B. BRETT FINLAY: There's a lot of correlations. The actual cause and effect is coming in some diseases more than others. Work we did with asthma, we found that if we looked in the feces of a three-month-old child, we can identify four microbes. If they had those four microbes, they were at a much less risk of getting asthma than if they didn't have these things. But the experiments when we actually took a child’s feces that had asthma and lacking these four microbes and put into animals that didn't have any microbes in them—so we're just putting human feces in plus or minus four bugs. If you put those four bugs in, you actually decrease asthma. So now we're starting to get in the world of well, maybe those microbes are actually doing something. We think they're training the immune system so you don't get asthma. So it's coming. You know things like if you take antibiotics in the first year of life, you have 20 per cent higher rates of asthma. If you're born by Caesarian section instead of vaginal delivery, you have a 20 per cent higher rate of asthma. If you live on a farm, you have 20 per cent less asthma rates. If you have a dog in the house, there's 20 per cent less asthma rates. So there's all these correlations but now it's just starting that we’re actually realizing these microbes actually do something in terms of how the immune system develops and basically how the body works.

AMT: How do the microbiomes of children today compare with those of their parents or grandparents?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah, that's a terrific question. They live very differently. I mean I jokingly say that the world is coated in a veneer of feces. It’s full of microbes. And so you know if you're playing outside on a farm, if you're you know working outdoors all the time, you know you get very different microbes than if you're playing on an iPad or a screen for seven hours a day. There's a lot of concern that maybe these things are actually endangered species and if you want to go back to have the microbes minus the infectious diseases your great grandparents did, that maybe we can't go there.

AMT: That's why you called your book Let Them Eat Dirt. [laughs]

B. BRETT FINLAY: Exactly.

AMT: We'll get to that though. But now in terms of our health, what's the difference between hygiene and cleanliness?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah, that's a tricky one. And often they're blurred. And hygiene is really you know cleaning up, getting rid of the germs, the bad bugs. Clean is just making sure that there's no mold in the corners and things and they are related. It's a balance between you know something is putrid and rotting in a corner and things, that's probably not good, but just because there's dust on the floor that doesn't necessarily mean that there's germs there.

AMT: Well, what are some examples of when parents go overboard on cleanliness?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah. I think hand sanitizer is a terrific example and the FDA has actually just banned some of the anti-microbial components that go in it because they've shown they don't do any different than soap and water. So you don't need to wipe your child's hands 100 times a day every time they you know change swings on the playground. Once with soap and water before dinner, you know throw out the hand sanitizer. There's no studies to show that actually improves it and there are some studies show that might be detrimental. You know and I jokingly say we grew up in an acreage, we were playing in the dirt all the time and you know my brother and I would have a competition how big a ring of dirt around the bathtub could get that night? And if you got greater than an inch, that was a good day's play. Getting dirty is one thing but being supposed to you know nasty microbes is another. If someone is sick and sniffling, for sure wash their hands. But under most normal circumstances, the germs are actually not that prevalent and so let the kids get microbial exposure.

AMT: How early does the microbiome develop in humans?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Very early. It actually starts to get shaped when the mother is in the third trimester of pregnancy. And you know what she eats will actually affect which microbes the kid gets when the kid is born and that will then affect the kid later in life.

AMT: Well, you mentioned C-sections for a reason then, right?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah, absolutely. So when you're born, vaginal delivery has—any woman who's done it knows it's a messy business—but you're exposed to both vaginal and fecal microbes. Ironically those are actually good for the kid. And those are the microbes that are actually involved in breaking down breast milk that the kid knows is going to get. If you're born by Caesarian section, you actually—your microbe’s more like the mother's skin because that's what it’s xposed to. And we know that a Caesarian section puts you at higher rates for allergies, for asthma, for obesity just because of the simple fact you didn't have when I call your very first birthday present, you know the big gulp on the way out where you acquire your microbes.

AMT: So is there anything parents can do to give an infant the microbes they missed?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah, so that's a really interesting area. And in the book we're very careful to say that you know 10 per cent of all women are medically going to need a Caesarian section. It will save your life. So some women do need a C-section and we discuss various things in there. There's probiotics, there's diet and there's other things you can do. There are even things being considered now which is a vaginal swab—before the kid is born, you swab out the vagina and then when a kid is born by Caesarian section, you then colonize with that swab, that kid, on their mouth and their nose and other things with his mother's microbes.

AMT: And as they get older, what about diet? What should babies and children eat to develop the most diverse ecosystem in their gut?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah, you hit the word right on the diverse concept. They should eat diverse. So you start introducing solid foods now at about four months while you're breastfeeding and it used to be we said you know avoid all allergens till three years of age. That's now been debunked and you want to start them fairly early in life. The idea is you can then experience these things early in life and won't react to them later. Now the other thing is that if you're eating white sugar and white flour, that's already pre-digested and so it’s absorbed very quickly in the upper intestine and yet down in the large intestine where all these microbes are, you're actually starving them. So it's another reason you have to eat your fruits, your vegetables, your you know your high fibres, your nuts, because these are the things that actually the microbes then chew on and they actually break these things down to provide us energy. It's not just the nutrients of these healthy foods you're supposed to be getting, now we realize these are actually microbial foods that actually help feed the kids through their bugs.

AMT: Hmm. And when it comes to the environment kids are living in, how do you figure out which ways of getting dirty are good and which are dangerous?

B. BRETT FINLAY: It is common sense and you know if you think how we live as a society if you're living on the 22nd floor of a condominium and you know the kids never you know never actually experienced a playground, you know I think you've got to worry about this. So some common ways, you know for example having a dog in the house, that actually decreases the incidence of allergies by about 20 per cent because dogs do what dogs do. They run around, they roll into everything and then come lick the kid. Cat lovers, I'm sorry. Cats don't do anything for you. They sit in a corner and snub their noses at you.

AMT: Those are fighting words. I hope you can scientifically back that up.

B. BRETT FINLAY: I know. I’m sorry. [chuckles] I can. The studies show that dogs improve things but cats—they don't—cats are not bad, they're just not good. They just don't do anything because I think they interact less with the kid than a dog does.

AMT: Now you're not telling people to actually eat dirt.

B. BRETT FINLAY: No, this is a tongue-in-cheek title. I'm not saying shovel dirt on a newborn infant. I think you know if I could really put the title right is you know let them eat the microbes that one normally finds in the environment, but that would never sell any books.

AMT: Let Them Eat Dirt sounds a lot catchier.

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah, yeah.

AMT: But of course as you point out, we see everything as dirt. And that's your point. We have to stop seeing everything as dirt.

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah, I think we have to stop seeing everything as you know as potentially infectious and it's going to kill you because this is a hangover for the last century of hygiene we've had. And I think we have to realize that dirt is not necessarily bad. It can be, you know if it's from a cesspool or something, of course it's bad. But I guess the idea is you know we realize that these kids need microbial exposure. Bubble wrapping them and keeping them perfectly clean is probably not the best thing for you and for the poor germaphobe mothers out there, I mean I feel sorry for them because they're trying to do the very best, keep their—you know we've been told keeping our kids clean is the best thing you can do for it, but unfortunately the science is now telling us that that's actually not the best thing you do and these poor mothers have to ease off a bit. And you know get over the eww factor and realize that kids are going to be kids, they're going to put a lot of strange things in their mouth. And this is part of them sort of experiencing the world and sort of tasting the world we live in, as well as replenishing these microbes that they need to develop.

AMT: When children do get sick, parents often turn to doctors who give them antibiotics. What have scientists been finding out about the harm antibiotics can do to the microbiome?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah. So first of all, let me state that antibiotics, these are wonder drugs. I think they were the best medical discovery in the last 100 years. They have saved countless millions of lives. If you have a bacterial infection that is susceptible to antibiotics, they will save your life. Now that being said, like most good things, we will overuse them and we use them for all sorts of things that perhaps we shouldn't and this is causing problems. So everyone has heard of anti-microbial resistance. We all know the more you use antibiotics, they become resistant, they don't work. What we're now realizing though is that antibiotics are not harmless. They carpet bomb the microbes. They kill germs nicely, great, but they also kill good microbes equally well. And when you take antibiotics, you upset your microbes hugely. And the reason this is a big problem in kids is because early in life, kids’ microbes are bouncing around and putting in an antibiotic is a major assault on microbial population. And we realized this actually disturbs them and they can't sort of become normally. So early use antibiotics, as I've said, are linked to increased rates in pretty much all the Western diseases including asthma and obesity, et cetera. And so with antibiotics, you know I urge caution, we should use them if needed. But if it's say a viral infection, which antibiotics don't work for, like pediatricians are now going sort of to a watch and wait type thing. If a kid has an ear infection, they will perhaps wait 24 hours to see whether antibiotics are really warranted or not in that case. Perhaps the biggest crime of antibiotics is 80 per cent of our antibiotic use is used as growth supplements and agriculture. Canada and the US do this. Europe has banned this. And we are dumping millions of pounds of these antibiotics straight on the environment and that yes, they cause an increase in growth in pigs, sheep, cattle, whatever. But you know kids are animals too and there's some thought that this is actually contributing to childhood obesity, this huge antimicrobial exposure.

AMT: And that's worth mentioning and really paying attention to because obviously it's not solely then about what goes in their mouths when they're sick.

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah, very much so.

AMT: And also, but there are parents who will be listening whose children have had severe illnesses who have needed antibiotics. What can they do as that child gets older in order to equip them in a better way because the antibiotics may have actually now had you know, have an effect that was unintended?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah. And what we're learning about antibiotics is one dose, one course of antibiotics is probably okay but the more courses of antibiotics you take, the worse off your microbes get. And so in the book and on our website, we actually discuss ways you can actually replenish these things. Diet is a major way. There are some probiotics, especially for post-antibiotic diarrhea. There's some probiotics that seem to work fairly well on that, which are just live microbes that help replenish the population. So there are things you can do about it. Don't beat yourself up if your kid has to have antibiotics, I mean like I said these are wonder drugs. But also think okay, I've hurt my kids’ microbes. What can we do to help them get back to normal?

AMT: Do probiotics do everything the packages claim they do?

B. BRETT FINLAY: [chuckles] The problem with probiotics is you can claim whatever you want on that package. They’re not regulated like drugs. Some probiotics work sometimes. They're not as spectacular as antibiotics. So I think in the future, we're going to see much better probiotics that will be 10 or 20 microbes that we know have a certain role to play and you will take say a pill of this whole ecosystem. Again on the website, we linked to a study that links all the clinical double blind placebo-controlled trials that have been done with probiotics that which ones work and which ones don't work because it's bewildering when you go to the probiotic shelf and say which one do I take for what?

AMT: Now since we have been talking about things that make people say eww, let's talk fecal transplants.

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yahoo. [laughs]

AMT: What has the research been showing about their use in treating diseases that have been linked to the microbiome?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Now okay, let's get the eww factor out of the way because this is definitely there. I mean one gram of feces which is one centimetre by one centimetre, it’s sort of the size your little finger. That contains more microbes than the entire population of people. So feces is filled with microbes. And what we realize—

AMT: How exciting. Keep going.

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yeah. [chuckles] Sorry for the people eating breakfast now. Yeah. So where we learned fecal transfers really seem to work is there’s disease which Ontario and Quebec have experienced a lot of is Clostridium difficile. This is a bacterial pathogen you get when you take antibiotics and they wipe out your microbes and these microbes actually fend off and keep the place safe from pathogens. When C. difficile crawls in, it can be a fatal disease. It's a terrible disease which is caused basically by getting antibiotics. So then they started treating it with antibiotics and of course it causes these so it didn't really fix it very well. It had maybe a 20 per cent cure rate. So then they reasoned well, let's put some good bugs back in there and let's push the C. difficile that way. And so there's really terrific studies out there now that saying if you do a fecal transfer, you can cure 95 per cent of these people. So plug your nose but it worked and so that says that we can now actually change the intestinal microbes. So now they're trying these things and all sorts of different diseases like inflammatory bowel disease and autism and various other things to see is there hope in that area?

AMT: Autism as well.

B. BRETT FINLAY: They’re trying it. It's a scary area right now but there are some—well, we know that autistic children, their intestinal microbes are different but maybe because they eat differently. But the problem with fecal transfers, the reason it works so well with C. diff is that it's a terrible pathogen if you have it, but it's kind of a wussy pathogen and it gets displaced by pretty much any microbes. In inflammatory bowel disease, you're doing fecal transfer, your gut is inflamed so that basically it's on fire already and you’re asking these microbes come in, put the fire out and then boot the other bugs out and then actually set up a healthy population. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And it's really dependent on the donor. So the science is going well, what does that donor have that the other one doesn't? And once we identify those microbes, you know we'll be able to, as the expression goes, “repopulate” people with the correct microbes that actually will do something. So that's where the future of that’s going.

AMT: And we've talked about some of this in the past, it is quite extraordinary that this can actually address some of these diseases. But now, there are YouTube videos that demonstrate how to do fecal transplants at home. I'm guessing you shouldn't be doing DIY fecal transplant?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Do not. Yeah. They say all you need a blender. Don't do it. I mean if you perforate the guy, you will cause sepsis and you can kill yourself. I mean do this under medical conditions. And the other thing is I mean feces is a body fluid transfer, I mean you learn from hepatitis and HIV and all these other blood borne things that when you transfer body fluids, there's sometimes things in there we just don't know about yet. And there actually was one study where they did fecal transfer from an obese sister to a lean sister and the lean sister actually became obese even though they cured the disease sort of thing. So there may be side effects to this. So it's early stages and this is not a DIY thing.

AMT: Okay. Do not do this at home, yes. What promise do you see in the future of microbial science?

B. BRETT FINLAY: I think the future is huge. I honestly think it's causing a biological revolution in biomedical science. So what we're realizing, I took a list of the top 10 reasons why Canadians and Americans die. Nine of those 10 reasons have a microbial linkage. And the fact that you can do things like fecal transfers or prebiotic, probiotics, antibiotics type things, you can shift the microbes pretty easily. It's much easier to do that than it is to do you know correct a person’s gene because we still can't do that yet. Personalized medicine, for example, I mean you and I are 99.99 per cent genetically identical. Well, minus a chromosome difference. But we have at best 50 per cent of the microbes the same. So when people are taking drugs like chemotherapy, we now realize that there's a major microbial component and sometimes chemotherapy works in some and doesn't work in others. And there's been two beautiful studies out now showing that you know depending on which, you know what their microbial composition is, they can actually predict whether they respond to chemotherapy or not. So it's impacting on so many areas of biomedical health that we just never even dreamt about a few years ago.

AMT: It's extraordinary. So you know we began talking about letting children eat dirt—metaphorically speaking—but like get them away from the oversanitized world. What should adults be doing?

B. BRETT FINLAY: Eat more dirt. [laughs] Or keep eating dirt. I don’t know, what could be the sequel to—no, I think early in life, there's no doubt microbes play a major role in setting it up, but we now realize throughout your life they play a major role in obesity and things. There’s some very exciting stuff coming out now on personalized diets. So we've all been on diets, now they kind of work but don't work and look around the world you know that it's not working so well. So what these Israeli researchers did is they actually characterized what everyone ate and what microbes they had and which foods caused a glucose spike which then leads to obesity and diabetes. And now based on that, for $300 you can mail in a fecal sample, they will analyze your microbes and they will say well, you can eat ice cream and pizza but you definitely cannot eat lasagna. And so they personalize these diets and then when they compare that head to head with the standard diets, they’re just blown away because they're now tailoring the diet from the microbes that are in you and that are digesting your food, which I think is a profound step forward in the whole dieting business.

AMT: So interesting, huh? We search outward to find out so many things about our world and it's all inside of us. [chuckles]

B. BRETT FINLAY: Yes, it's absolutely amazing.

AMT: It's been great to talk to you. Thank you for your insights. Thank you for your work.

B. BRETT FINLAY: Thank you, Anna Maria.

PC: That was Anna Maria Tremonti’s interview with B. Brett Finlay, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia. And he's the co-author of Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from an Overly Sanitized World. You can find out more information about his research on microbes and kids on his website. It is letthemeatdirt.com or find the link on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Alright, well as 2016 draws to a close, we're continuing an annual tradition here on The Current. We’re reconvening our panel of satirists to sit down and take stock of the year that was and look to the year ahead. Amanda Barker is a comedian and comedy writer. Terry Fallis is a two-time winner of Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Tune in to hear them tomorrow, reflecting on 2016. But here's a bit of a preview.

SOUNDCLIP

TERRY FALLIS: Glad to see it in the rearview mirror, dark and difficult for so many people.

AMANDA BARKER: Yeah. The theme of this year was boooo.

TERRY FALLIS: It's tough. I mean, when you look back at all the things that happened, you've got Brexit, you’ve Trump and I promise we won't say Trump for every answer, though that will be hard. Aleppo and Zika and the refugee crisis, we had the fire in Fort McMurray and the pipeline standoff. I mean, it was a year that was filled with conflict and we hadn't even talked about, yet, although I'm sure we will, the celebrity deaths. This was, every one died this year. [chuckles]

AMANDA BARKER: Hmm. Yup.

TERRY FALLIS: And it's, you know, it's tough to find too many nice things that happened. And when you do find something that was good, it's a small little thing, it's not something that affects the world quite like these tragedies have.

AMANDA BARKER: I definitely would call it the year of death and the Donald.

TERRY FALLIS: [laughs]

AMANDA BARKER: You know, they were the most edited Wikipedia pages of 2016 — death and Donald. When you're quoting the president-elect and that could have you, you know, in a war with your HR department or kicked out of school, that might be a bit of an issue. I don't know. We'll have to see what 2017 [chuckles] brings. But yeah, we all learned that death isn't going anywhere.

PC: I promise you, we won't dwell solely on death and the Donald when I speak with the satirists tomorrow. I'll ask them about highlights of 2016 as well. It’s on The Current tomorrow. That is the program for today. Remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. Lets you browse through past episodes of our show and start listening in just a few seconds. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Well, it really does feel like everyone died this year and yesterday, the latest in the list of notable names we lost in 2016 got a heartbreaking addition with Carrie Fisher. Best known for her role as Princess Leia in Star Wars, she was also a writer and a mental health advocate who is very very outspoken about her journey with bipolar disorder. She captured some of the tumultuousness of her life in Wishful Drinking, the memoir turned stage show turned HBO documentary that questioned what really is normal. Our last word today goes to Carrie Fisher. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay, thank you for lending us your ear here on The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

CARRIE FISHER: I heard someone say recently that many of us only seem able to find heaven by backing away from hell. And you know, while the place I've arrived at in my life isn't precisely everyone's idea of heaven. I could swear sometimes if I'm quiet enough, I can hear the angels sing. Either that or I f--ked up my medication.

[crowd laughter]

[sirens blaring]

CARRIE FISHER: F--k there’s my ride.

[crowd laughter]

CARRIE FISHER: Before I go though, I wanted to share with you some of the wisdoms that I have acquired, you know, from going through all this s--t, OK? First one, resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

[crowd laughter]

CARRIE FISHER: Now, some of the wisdoms that I have, I got from my grandmother, my mother's mother the closet locker.

[crowd laughter]

CARRIE FISHER: Who taught me a fly is as likely to land on s--t as it is on pie.

[crowd laughter]

CARRIE FISHER: That’s true. [laughs] She also said cry all you want, you’ll pee less.

[crowd applause]

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December 28, 2016 full episode transcript

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