EPISODE 45
Pedaling for Peace: How a World Bike Trip led to a new Visual Language
Imagine setting out on a bicycle tour for world peace, only to be chased by machine-gun-toting militias in Syria, get dangerously ill from rancid kidney beans in the Sahara, and be forced by border guards to take a huge detour to Jerusalem, only to get tear gassed upon arrival. That was Alan Stillman’s reality. In the late ‘80s, Alan embarked on a wild 15,000-mile journey that was less about quiet reflection and more about surviving incredible mishaps and adapting to foreign cultures. Hear how Alan’s chaotic life-or-death experiences sparked an idea for a universal picture language that would later help doctors, travelers, and even the US military. This isn’t your average bike trip; it’s an adventure that proves that sometimes the bumpiest road leads to the most unexpected destination.
Episode Transcript
Alan: The newspapers said, “No, thank you” and that was disappointing, but then I had this idea, which we’ll get to, and that changed my life. And I’ll tell you, it changed the world, actually. So yes, I do think it was incredibly successful in that it seeded something very meaningful and gave me a perspective on the world I hold to this day.
Gabriel: You just heard Alan Stillman, who had a lifetime of stories to tell after completing a 15,000-mile bicycle tour for world peace in the late 1980s. Imagine knocking on the door of a militant group in Damascus in the hopes of interviewing the ringleader. Or becoming desperately ill in Algeria after eating a batch of rancid kidney beans. Or staring down the barrel of a machine gun… twice. When he returned to the United States, Alan was surprised to discover that no magazines or newspapers wanted to publish his proposed articles. The rejections, however, helped Alan recast his life-or-death moments on the road into an idea that would become his next great venture. Kwikpoint, a universal visual language designed to help people connect, whether it’s ordering stuffed cabbage in Hungary, or identifying an explosives factory in Afghanistan. Nearly four decades later, Alan is still at the helm of Kwikpoint. This is the story of the world bicycle tour that laid the foundation for a new way to communicate.
Sandra: You’re listening to The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about the most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello, cycle touring enthusiasts! Get ready for another wild episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. In 1988, today’s guest, Alan Stillman, was aiming to cycle around the world. He stayed at a youth hostel in Istanbul, where he met Claus Andersen, the guest on our previous episode, “The Biking Viking.” Here is what Claus had to say about meeting Alan.
Claus: This was very important for me, I think, to connect with him and realize, yes, it’s actually doable to do it all the way around the world. He was actually a very interesting character, who since then built a multinational business around his cycling career.
Gabriel: It’s always fun when we get to see both sides of a meeting between two bicycle travelers. Nowadays, social media enables people to meet virtually first and only later in person. However, in 1988, there’s no doubt that the meeting between Claus and Alan was completely accidental. So, Alan Stillman, thank you for being a guest on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
Alan: Well, you’re welcome.
Gabriel: My first question is obvious. Do you remember meeting Claus in Istanbul in 1988?
Alan: I do not. I remember being at that youth hostel and I remember meeting a number of people there. There was one man that sort of saved me that I remember there, but I don’t think that was Claus. Could’ve been Claus, but I don’t think that was his name.
Gabriel: What do you mean he saved you?
Alan: Well, it’s sort of a funny story. I was about 50 miles out from Istanbul, you know, biking there, and my crank arm broke. I mean, like it literally broke, the metal broke. And I’m like, yikes, I need a new crank arm. I don’t know where I could even get one. But I had to pedal on one pedal. I had the, you know, the cages, not the clip-ons. And I literally had to pedal on one pedal approximately 50 miles to get to Istanbul. On a 100-pound bicycle, you know, that was not easy. At times I had to walk it. But in any case, when I got there, I figured out that I could not get that part in Turkey. I could not get that part in Greece, which was the closest country. I’d have to go back to like Italy or something to get to the part. And I’m like, holy shit, this isn’t good. But before I got to the youth hostel in Istanbul, there was a man from Switzerland who went mountain biking from Switzerland and ended up in Turkey. He met a man from Holland at this youth hostel and decided that he’d rather continue to travel to Turkey by donkey. So he just gave his Swiss mountain bike to this Dutch man, like for free, like, ah, you know, at the time probably a 500-dollar bike, today would be like a 2,000-dollar bike. The Dutch man got this free bike, and he bicycled around Turkey for a while, checked into the youth hostel. Since he got the bike for free, he didn’t want to take it back to Holland. So he chained it in the courtyard of the youth hostel. Okay, so that was two years before this happened. I now go to this youth hostel two years have passed. I’m checking in and I bump into this Dutch man who I don’t think was named Claus, but might have been. And this person bumps into me and I say, “Excuse me.” And he looks at me and his first sentence was, “Would you like to buy a bicycle?” And I said, “Well, what do you mean?” And he goes, “Well, I’ve got this bike in the courtyard,” and it takes me in there and it’s all rusty, right? It’s been outdoors for two years, chained in a courtyard, all rusty, all gunky. But I look at it and it’s got the right crank arm on it. So I say, “How much?” He goes, “Ah, ten dollars.” I say, “Sold,” hand him 10 dollars, pull off my part, and my bike’s working again. So whoever that man was, Claus or not Claus, just saved me and it was quite a coincidence.
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s incredible. Well, Claus is from Denmark. So it was not Claus because you met a Dutch man. So not Claus, but same place, same time. Why was that crank arm the right one? I’m trying to think, I mean, the crank arms come in different lengths, but was it the fitting?
Alan: Yeah. So, you know, it’s like a square hole, right? And then there’s the diameter of my crankshaft, I believe is the term. And it has to perfectly fit and be the correct length to balance the other one.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Alan: It was the exact same crank arm I would have needed had I gone to a bike store. My bike was an American Trek 720 and having to bike 50 miles on one pedal, that was an experience.
Gabriel: I’ve actually had a similar experience, but I can tell you, I did not last 50 miles. I thought maybe if I duct tape my shoe to the pedal – I didn’t have the cages – so if I duct tape my shoe to the pedal, maybe I could do it. But pedaling on one leg, it is the weirdest thing ever.
Alan: It is, it really is.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Alan: And at times, I would scoot with the other leg, if it was uphill, I push it.
Gabriel: Yeah, you don’t know what to do with the other leg. So yeah, you sometimes scoot with it or, ah, yeah. So that’s what happened in Istanbul. We’ll get back to your trip, but let’s back up a little bit all the way to the beginning. And how did you even get this idea? How did you think you would bike around the globe?
Alan: So there was two things that ran through my head. One was I loved to bicycle and I wanted to see the world. And the second one was I wanted it to be a trip of world peace. I wanted to promote peace. And so what does that mean, right? To have a little flag, right? And the idea there was basically two parts. One was to go to parts of the world where there was incredible conflict and hate, and sit down and try to understand why there was so much hate. And there were two areas I focused on. One was Eastern Europe, where you remember there was the Cold War, the Soviet Union in America, we hated each other, we have nuclear missiles pointed at each other. We still do. But I wanted to go into Eastern Europe and understand what their worldview was. Why do they think and feel what they do? What is life really like in East Germany, in Bulgaria, Romania, Ceaușescu, rural Romania, Yugoslavia had the Tito lineage. You know, I wanted to really sit down with the people and interview them. So that was one area, Eastern Europe. The other area was the Middle East. Why was it the Arabs and Jews been fighting for God knows how long. So I met with really extreme groups. I spent four months in Syria. Very few people spent four months in Syria, and I’m Jewish, not religious, but Jewish. So very few Jews spent four months in Syria, particularly at that time in history under Hafez al-Assad. And I interviewed like the PLO, I interviewed like government officials in the Syrian government, and I would say to them, “Why is it you’d like to kill every Jew?” I mean, I literally interview people who are actively planning and doing terrorism, which would call terrorism from our point of view, they would call it liberation. And then I went into Israel, then I went to the West Bank, and I talked to settlers who were extreme right-wing, kind of the Netanyahu types. And I said, “Tell me your views.” So part of this peace trip was to just understand why people hated each other by talking to them and hearing their stories. So that was like part one of why it was a peace trip. The second part was I wanted to carry a message of peace. I wish I actually had it in front of me. But I wrote up a statement that kind of just came to me when I was bicycling that said in essence, there’s two basic problems that I think are destroying the world. One is tribalism. We just think that my religion, my culture, I guess these are two reasons to fight each other because we’re in different tribes. I’ll call it tribes or clusters. And that if people would get at the deepest level, right, we all have hearts and minds and bodies, we’re all humanity. If they would transcend their individual sense of tribalism to a shared global identity, that would be a key piece of bringing peace to the world. And the other piece of it was the excessive consumption of the planet. That we use too much energy. We pollute. We destroy the water, the air, the land, and that the planet is what we live off of. Why do we do that? Because we’re focused on just wanting more, the obsession of more, and we exploit the planet. So I wrote up basically the most thoughtful statement. It was funny too, because it came to me as a stream of consciousness. And I wrote it up. I found a typewriter. I typed it up. I got it translated into different languages, photocopied on little pieces of papers about that big. Then I would go to newspapers and places and say, consider printing this, consider printing this. Some did, most didn’t honestly. So that was how in my world it was my trip of peace.
Gabriel: Well, that is a much higher calling, I think, than most bicycle tours. Tell me about where you grew up and what influenced you to come up with this idea for a peace tour.
Alan: Well, I grew up in New York City. I don’t think that was really a factor. I think mostly I read the newspaper every day, like maybe many people do, hopefully. I would always read and see on the news about this hate and war. I’ll tell you what really, when it really hit me. I went to Cornell. I was good at school, you could say. When Reagan started the Star Wars system in 19… I think it was early ’80s, ’82, maybe ’84, Reagan said, let’s build these missiles that can knock out the missiles. I learned that Russia had hundreds, thousands of nuclear warheads. We had thousands of nuclear warheads. Any one of these could vaporize a city. All of them would vaporize the planet. We’d have nuclear winter. Literally, we would kill at the time, maybe 6 billion people on the planet. We would all be dead and all life if this thing really went nuke. And it was on a hair trigger. And I was like, wait, this is how the world works? These horrible weapons of mass destruction? And if one leader of America or Russia has a bad hair day, he might push the button and we’d all fucking be dead? It was like the shock. I didn’t know that. Like somehow I did not learn that until I was about 20. This isn’t right. And MAD, right, mutually assured destruction. It seemed like a problem. So I thought I need to do something about it, which was maybe a little overly ambitious, and candidly, it failed. World peace did not happen as a result of my trip. But I tried.
Gabriel: You did your best. You did your best, for sure. How far along were you on your around-the-world trip by the time you reached Istanbul?
Alan: So I left America on July 5th, 1986, which was a big deal. Because what was it? Is it the bicentennial? America was founded in 1776. I think it was maybe 210 years, or something, past our birthday. So it was a big deal for America. I remember watching the fireworks on July 4th, 1986. Landed in Sweden July 5th, 1986. So by Turkey in ’88, it had been around two years.
Gabriel: But OK, wait a minute, Alan. If you were in Sweden in ’86 and Turkey in ’88, either you bicycled very slowly or you took a long break somewhere.
Alan: Oh no, I went through Africa. I came down into Morocco.
Gabriel: OK.
Alan: Yeah, coming down, it was Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France.
Gabriel: Got it.
Alan: Well, I purposely took the route I wanted to take. I mean, my big thing in Africa was I crossed the Sahara desert on a bicycle, which is not common.
Gabriel: No, definitely not common.
Alan: And not advised.
Gabriel: Not advised. Maybe that’s why it’s not common.
Alan: I mean, it’s hot. It’s wind. It’s… sandstorms are horrible for bicycles.
Gabriel: Yeah, for sure. So why did you want to cross the Sahara?
Alan: It just seemed kind of cool, you know. Plus, if you’re in Morocco and you want to get to Tunisia and you don’t want to go along the coast, the Sahara is the way to go.
Gabriel: Right, right. If you’re in Morocco and you go to Tunisia and you don’t go along the coast, then yeah, you’re basically in the Sahara.
Alan: And you want to go through Algeria. Algeria was one of those countries. No one bicycles in Algeria. I didn’t see another bike in Algeria.
Gabriel: No. How was it?
Alan: Well, people were, like, so nice. You know, when you’re on a bicycle, you’re incredibly unintimidating. My bike was like 100 pounds. Had bags and tents and water. It’s this big concoction of a bicycle, really slow because it’s so big and heavy. People were like very curious. You know, it’s Islamic culture, Arab culture. They’re very friendly to guests. So I’m having tea here and lunch here and spending the night there and just making friends all over Algeria. So in terms of the people, it was wonderful, with one exception. Some people threw rocks at me because I was wearing bike shorts and it’s considered immodest, particularly during Ramadan, which is their holy month, to show skin, to show leg skin. I didn’t know they’d care about men, like shorts and stuff, but they dress head to toe. So a few times I had rocks thrown at me for my partial nudity, if you want to call it that, but I don’t think they hit me. It became Ramadan, you know, the Islamic holiday of fasting. And I wasn’t going to fast. That’s actually a funny side story. I wanted to experience what fasting was like, but they do it like sunrise to sunset for 30 days, and that wasn’t going to work for me. So I actually decided to do pure fasting. So I went four days, 96 hours, with nothing but water, bicycling into the Sahara, just to see what would happen. And what happened was by day two, I had lost all hunger, like all hunger. You know, it just went away. But by day four, I started to feel kind of weak, you know, which makes sense. With no food in the Sahara Desert. It wasn’t the smartest idea, honestly. I had a lot of less than smart ideas on my trip. But I’m 24. I’m just like, oh, let’s see what it’s like to fast and bike in the desert. But I do remember when I finally started to eat food, like on day four, it was very weird. Like, what’s this thing called food? My mouth wasn’t used to it. It was just an experience that was like a new experience. I wouldn’t recommend bicycling in the Sahara Desert, not eating food for four days with sandstorms and wind. It’s just not smart.
Gabriel: Did you hallucinate at all?
Alan: No, and I didn’t see any mirages either, you know, when you see water in the distance. I also got severe food poisoning in Algeria, and almost died. But it’s sort of an interesting story if you want to hear it.
Gabriel: Yes, okay.
Alan: So, you know those big red kidney beans we eat? In Algeria, they sell them like on hot dog stands. Like you go into a town and they sell you kidney beans on the street in these hot cookers. I was living on a super-low budget. You could imagine I averaged $10 US a day for the whole trip. The kidney beans were like a nickel a pound or something ridiculous. So, you know, it was Algerian money. So I bought my pound of kidney beans. Maybe two pounds because they were so cheap. And I ate as much as I could, but couldn’t finish them. So I just put them in my bike bag and the next morning, I said, oh, I’ll have kidney beans for breakfast. But they smell kind of funny, you know? Like, of course, they were rancid in 100-degree temperature overnight.
Gabriel: Oh, no.
Alan: But, you know, I was like a cheapskate living on my $10 a day. So I said, damn it, I’m going to eat them. They weren’t that yucky tasting. Some hours later, I got food poisoning. And I started throwing up profusely, like profusely. And I’m literally sitting on a sand dune, my bicycle laying down. I think it was about 115 degrees. Throwing up, dehydrating, thinking, I’m going to die on this sand dune. I really could have died. Being a dehydrated with food poisoning in the middle of Sahara Desert. You know, the sand will blow over you. They won’t even find you, right? You’d just be blown over in a windstorm. I didn’t want to go out that way. By the way, a friend of mine joined me in North Africa. I was concerned to bicycle across the Sahara alone. So I had a friend, which was really smart, because he saved my life. So he was figured out what went on. And he flagged down a truck. It was a Russian truck. You know, like, and you think all the Russians are not our friends, but that day they were my friends. And they took my bike and put it on the truck and they were heading to Tunisia. And they dropped me off at the Tunisian border. They went their way. And now I have to go clear customs to go from Algeria to Tunisia. The security guard, you know, whatever border customs guy asks to see my passport and my papers. You need a visa as well. And I threw up again. And literally I projectile vomited on the man. I threw up on the freaking customs guy. Not a good thing to do for a white person dressed inappropriately, like such a bad set of choices, particularly during Ramadan. Maybe I’m like hungover or something like that. Well, at the time in Algeria, I believe was 15 years in prison for drinking or possessing alcohol. So I’m about to get arrested. And my friend, who didn’t speak any French or any Arabic, was pulling out our little dictionaries and looking for, like, food and sick and poisoned. And finally, he was able to convince the guy that it was food poisoning and not alcoholism. And the guy was really pissed, you know, because he has vomit on him.
Gabriel: Well, yeah.
Alan: And he finally just says, “Get the fuck out of my country.” So I cross into Tunisia, and people can tell I’m deathly sick. So they want to take me to a hospital. But this is Tunisia in the Sahara. And the hospital there is a Bedouin desert hospital. Some clinic where they’re not even going to speak Arabic. They’re going to speak, like, Bedouin dialects. And I’m like, holy shit, I do not want to go to a Bedouin hospital in the middle of the Sahara. It just seemed scary. So I got out of the sun. I found, like, you know, they have these awnings. They make buildings out of, like, corrugated aluminum in some of these developing countries. And there was one where it came out, where I could get out of the sun. And I just sat there, and all I could drink was little sips of tea. People came to check me out as I continued to have dry heaves and throw up, but they brought me tea. And after 24 hours, really thinking I was going to die. I mean, I was in deep pain, couldn’t hold down a glass of water. I’m perspiring, I’m dehydrated. But somehow I lived. And the next day, I could bicycle very slowly. I took a week to fully recover. But I lived. Boy, that was probably the closest I’ve ever come in my life to being pretty convinced I was going to die. That’s not a fun experience. The moral of the story is, don’t eat rotten food in places where you can easily die.
Gabriel: Good tips for our listeners. What did your friend think? He stayed your friend this whole time.
Alan: He actually, he had a couple of bites of the beans himself, because we brought the beans together. And he said, “I don’t know, these taste a little bit off.” He just had like one or two bites and got mildly stomach upset, very mild. But I was like, “Damn it, I’m going to eat it.” And he’s looking at me like, I think you’re doing something pretty stupid. I’m like, hey, I paid seven cents for these beans. Damn it, I’m living on 10 bucks a day. I’m going to eat it. He realized that he didn’t want to see his friend die in the Sahara Desert of food poisoning. So he was very supportive.
Gabriel: Well, that’s a true friend then, Alan.
Alan: Yeah, saved my life, literally, and kept me out of an Algerian prison. You know, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.
Gabriel: Definitely not. That’s how life goes sometimes. Okay, so I’m trying to, in my mind, trace your route. So you said you flew to Sweden, you made your way through Europe to Morocco, then crossed over the Northern African countries.
Alan: Yes.
Gabriel: And that’s how you got to Istanbul.
Alan: Yeah, so then I ended up in Tunisia. I took a ferry to Sicily. I went up through the boot of Italy. And then I, let’s see, I believe I went, what is it? It’s Switzerland or Austria that’s on the top of Italy, or is it Germany?
Gabriel: From Italy, you have either Switzerland to the west, or you have Austria to the east.
Alan: Yeah, so I went to Switzerland for a while, and went to different parts of Switzerland. Then I went into Austria. Then I wanted to do my Eastern Europe leg before the wall fell. You know, it was like 1988, the wall fell in ’89. So then I needed to get a lot of visas in Vienna, because I was in Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia. I wanted to get into Albania. I tried so hard to get into Albania. There hadn’t been an American there since World War II. And I wanted to be the first one. And the State Department said to me, if somehow you get your ass into Albania, we don’t think you will. We don’t want you to. We just want you to know, if you get in trouble, you are on your own. We have no relations. We will not help you. You can rot in a prison. We highly advise you to not try to get into Albania. You know, again, you could tell my childhood, adolescent thinking wasn’t that good, and I really tried. But thankfully, I didn’t. I got into all those other countries. But finally, I believe it was, let’s see, Bulgaria borders Greece, doesn’t it? I went south through Bulgaria, north of Greece. And then from Greece, I made it to Turkey.
Gabriel: Okay.
Alan: Let me clarify something. Originally, I wanted to circumnavigate the planet, but I realized at the rate I was going, it was going to take about eight years. I kept detouring too much and getting sick and getting in trouble. And I met a woman in the middle. I fell in love with her. I spent a few months with her. It was a bit of a zigzag.
Gabriel: That’s perfect.
Alan: Actually, I fell in love with two women, one in Israel, one in France. Spent months with each of them.
Gabriel: Was that the very start of the trip in France?
Alan: Yes. I was visiting newspapers. They were doing stories. And she actually was the secretary at one newspaper. And the journalist got delayed and couldn’t come till the next day. Actually, she invited me over for dinner. And then it was a long dinner that spanned weeks and months eventually.
Gabriel: We’re filling in the two years now that were between landing in ’86 and Istanbul in ’88.
Alan: I finally ended up traveling on four continents, 28 countries, 15,000 miles. And 15,000 miles is about the land circumnavigation of the planet, not counting oceans. So I did not circumnavigate the planet. So I call it a world bike trip, not an around-the-world bike trip.
Gabriel: Ah.
Alan: The other piece of it, a little awkward, embarrassed to say, but I weighed over 300 pounds, which I guess is over use. I have lost literally over 50 kilos, over like 100 pounds, using something called the Lifecycle, which was an indoor exercise bike.
Gabriel: Long before there was Peloton or Zwift, there was Lifecycle, a stationary exercise bike invented in 1968 by Keene P. Dimick to improve his own physical condition. Lifecycle was the first electronic exercise bike, featuring a console that monitored heart rate, calories burned and distance traveled. Of all the iterations of the Lifecycle that followed, and they are still in production today, my favorite is the Lifecycle Exertainment 3500X, launched in 1994 as a joint partnership with Nintendo. According to the promotional video for Mountain Bike Rally, one of two video games that worked with the system, “What you see in the game is what you feel on the bike… You can steer, jump hazards, even punch your opponents.” Now that’s exertainment!
Alan: And so I contacted the company that made these bikes and said, hey, I lost 100 pounds on your bike. I’m going to ride around the world. What do you think? You want to sponsor me? You want to get involved? They sent a photographer out and took these before and after pictures, you know, and they posted them and did whatever they did with them. I said, “Okay, well, you’re going to give me some money and sponsor me?” And they said, “Oh, no, no, we just want these pictures helpful. Have a nice bike ride.” That was like disappointing, you know. But in any case, in the beginning of the trip, my first country was Sweden, my second country was Norway. And I met someone in Norway and they said, “You’re bicycling around the world for peace. That’s kind of cool. I bet our local paper would like to do a story about it.” So they take me in a little village in Norway and the local gazette. In the course of the interview, I just happened to mention that I lost weight on a Lifecycle. And the article comes out the next day and it has the words “life” and “cycle” in Norwegian. And I go, this is kind of interesting. So when I get to the next town, I seek out the newspaper office and I said, “Hey, read this article in your sister paper down the street. Would you like to make a story like this?” They said, “Sure, it is a cool story.” And this time when they interview me, I emphasize Lifecycle. Lifecycle, Lifecycle, Lifecycle. And of course, the article comes out. And now I have two articles that mention Lifecycle in Norwegian. And I said, wow, I’m going to see if this company will change their mind. I mailed this stuff to their headquarters in California. And said, “Look, I’ve got your name in two newspapers. I can get your name all over the world. I’m going to call you collect at this time in this state. And if you are interested, accept the collect call.” They accepted the call and they became my sponsor. Every time I could get their name in the newspaper, they also give me like a t-shirt, a hat, a little thing to hang on the back of the bike. All said Lifecycle, Lifecycle. If you can get any reference, we’ll pay you. I asked for $100. They wanted to give me $50. We compromised at $75. I got written up about 100 times all over the world. So now I had two reasons to talk to newspapers, my little peace statement, and take a photo with my Lifecycle t-shirt. And that paid for maybe half my trip. And they gave me a Lifecycle and I came home.
Gabriel: Oh, Alan. Just saying you are making a collect call, I think a lot of our audience has no idea what a collect call means.
Alan: This was before cell phones, right? There’s no such thing as internet. There’s no such thing as email. And phone calls from Europe to America are like $5 a minute. They’re crazy expensive, crazy expensive. So a collect call is when you tell the operator, and they can make a collect call, the person agrees to pay for it. That they would collect the money from them, not from you. So the operator says, “I have a collect call from Alan Stillman in Norway. Will you pay it? Will you accept it?” They say, “Yes.” And then that $5 a minute goes on their tab, not mine. So that’s what a collect call is. For them to give me the $75, I needed to send them the article. They needed to see I did. I can’t just say, “Oh, I’ve been written up.” They needed proof. But the thing is, when you get interviewed in a newspaper, they may not publish it the next day. They might publish it in two days or three days, or who knows. But I didn’t want to stay in every little town all over the world hanging out for this article to come out. So I would often go to the journalist and say, “Hey, when it comes out, would you mail it to me?” Which they would do, you known, a courtesy. But where the heck would they mail it to me, right? So I had to estimate where I might be then, and you can mail things to post offices, and post offices will hold mail for you. And so they would mail it like a country ahead, then I’d have to go to that post office, and then hope it would be there, which it was, most of the time. Then I had to go find like a photocopy machine, and then I had to go mail it to California, and then of course they had to send a check to my family in New York, and then I had to see if it came. So imagine no email, none of this stuff, you’re just hopping across the world. Even bicycle parts. So this was kind of funny and sort of interesting story. You know your bike parts are going to burn out after so many miles. What do you do if you’re in Turkey and you need tires, and they don’t have your tire size? So I needed places where I could buy parts in America, mail them ahead and know it’d be there. But who did I know around the world? There was a friendship organization called SERVAS, S-E-R-V-A-S, great organization. I joined it. It was sort of like almost like couch surfing, but it was a peace organization. It was more for people who cared about peace. And I would like write people letters and say, “Hi, you don’t know me, but I’m going to be in your country in about a year or so. Can I mail you some parts to keep in your house?” And they would write back and say, “Yes.” I would mail them along the road and say, “I think I’ll be there then, but respond back to me, not here, but in that country, because I hope you’re in town.” And it was like letters across the world, just to make sure I got my damn tires. Logistics were… you can’t imagine how much more challenging they were with no tech to communicate.
Gabriel: Yeah. And you were really working so many different angles, with corporate sponsorship and the parts and the friends and the newspaper articles. Well, then let’s talk about Eastern Europe. That was one of your target areas. You wanted to see how it was before the fall of the Iron Curtain. And what were your impressions?
Alan: One of the ones that really stuck out was Romania under Ceaușescu. And maybe you know the name, he was a particularly brutal dictator and exploited the population in so many ways. One of my strongest memories, really two or three stand out. One was, you know, in the Old West, they had the covered wagons, you know, that the horses would pull like in John Wayne movies? Well, I’m basically in Romania, and I see all these covered wagons there, like out of the freaking 1800s. And I look and it’s people living in their wagons, hand-tilling and hand-gardening the soil; they’re farming. Turned out that they had tractors, right? But Ceaușescu took all the crude oil that Romania had – I think at the time it was like the biggest producer in Europe – and he exported it for the hard dollars. So there was no gasoline to run the tractors. So these people had to sit there and use farming techniques from the 1800s because they didn’t have fossil fuel, because he wanted the money for his own wealth. So that was one thing that was pretty scary and concerning. Second was, they only had one TV channel. It was like the Ceaușescu TV channel. It was like, Ceaușescu’s opening a factory. He’s cutting a ribbon. He’s make out as a great grand leader. Well, I went to one of his rallies and I learned that all the people that were there cheering him on had to be there. We’re told to get out of their houses and line up and cheer. There wasn’t that many there. There was maybe like 100 or 200, but they were really clever with the camera angles and they would like play games. So if you were watching on TV, you would think 10,000 people were there. Very manipulative. So he was really not the best man. And then my other experience was, I wanted to interview students to hear their views on the politics and stuff. So I went to a university, I think it was in Craiova. I met some students. They took me into the room and they said they would talk with me. And then I found out it was illegal for students to talk to foreigners, like literally illegal. But they were talking to me anyway and I was kind of foolish, so I didn’t care that it was illegal. And then they said to me, they need to see my passport and I can be officially authorized to do interviews. I was like, oh, that’s kind of cool. I gave them my passport. They’re gone or somebody’s gone for like several hours. And I’m getting nervous. I’m talking to a couple of students in this room, but like my passport’s not there. Not a thing you want to lose in Romania during communist rule. Finally, two people knock on their door. It’s soldiers with machine guns. And they tell me that my ability to interview them has been denied. And they give me back my passport and at gunpoint, escort me off the campus. And the rest of my time in Romania, I’m tracked and followed.
Gabriel: What an experience. Wow.
Alan: I’m not telling you fun stories, am I?
Gabriel: Oh, they’re interesting for sure.
Alan: I also learned that Romania had a bribe system. Lucky Strike cigarettes were the unofficial currency, a pack of Lucky Strikes. It had to be Lucky Strikes. It had to be open. You want to cross the border? It’s five packs. You want to do this? It’s six packs. Like that was their way to gamble. I don’t think anyone ever even smoked them. And I was told that. Someone said, before you go into Romania buy a shitload of Lucky Strike cigarettes. So I had like packs and packs of it.
Gabriel: Wow, okay.
Alan: And I don’t smoke.
Gabriel: You were well prepared. You had to lug those cigarettes on your bike. Part of your 100 pounds.
Alan: My bike was the heaviest in the Sahara, because I always tried to keep five to ten gallons of water on me. What is a gallon of water weight, eight pounds?
Gabriel: Yeah.
Alan: No, I think it’s four pounds. No, eight pounds, right?
Gabriel: It would weigh four kilos. So that’s roughly eight, nine pounds.
Alan: Yeah. And so if I had of water. Yeah. Yeah. So it was over 100 pounds when I was fully watered up in Algeria.
Gabriel: Watered up. Wow. Crazy. So far we’ve looked back from Istanbul, and then you said that from Istanbul you went to the Middle East, which was your other hot spot for your peace travel.
Alan: Yes. I crossed into Syria from Turkey. Southern Turkey has a border with Syria. I bicycled to beautiful spots, some history, some culture in Syria. And then I got to Damascus. And I was fascinated by Damascus. It’s the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. I think it’s got, I forget, several thousand years of continuous habitation. I rented a room from a family in downtown Damascus. It was the heart of the old city. In the Bible there’s a spot where Saul got his vision back and became Paul. He had this mystical experience and then he went to Rome or whatever. So I was like down the street from the spot where they claimed that exactly happened. So it was really interesting. I learned that all these interesting groups are based in Damascus, particularly the PLO.
Gabriel: The Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, was founded in 1964. As the name implies, the PLO’s core ideology is to fight for Palestinian independence. You might remember the name Yasser Arafat. He was chairman of the PLO from 1969 to 2004.
Alan: PLO had different factions and the most radical factions could not be in Cairo or Tunisia. They didn’t want to have anything to do with them. They were in Damascus, where they could be very extreme. At the time, what they were doing is they were taking hang gliders based in, I think it was like the Golan Heights or Quneitra, and they would hang glide into Israel, the terrorists and land in Israeli military bases, carrying machine guns, and start shooting at Israeli soldiers to kill as many as they could. And of course, the soldiers fought back and hang glider person was killed. They knew they were going to die. It was a martyrdom thing. I interviewed family members of people who had been martyred, just to sort of hear their stories. And I interviewed the faction that was planning these things, like their boss, you know, so to speak, their ringleader. I remember talking to this guy and he’s like got a radio in the next room and he’s like radioing in to do attacks or something like that or whatever. I’m just, you know, asking him, “So tell me your life story.”
Gabriel: Wow, how did you even get in contact with these people?
Alan: I pretty much just knocked on the door. They have offices, you know, like, places like Damascus where they’re openly part of the culture. You know, you knock on the door and say, “Hi, I’m bicycling around the world for peace.” Well, I’ll tell you what helped me, though. I was written up in the Damascus newspaper as doing this trip for peace and this and that, and I had it in Arabic. So I’d always show them this article, because if I just showed up, they’d think I’m a spy, might not go well. If they figured out I was a Jewish American, totally wouldn’t go well. So I would share this article and they go, okay, and then I say, “I want to hear your world view. I want to understand why you think and feel the way you do.” They said, “Sure.” I remember listening to one of the PLO leaders for like a solid hour. He spoke reasonable English and told me his whole life story, how he went from a six-year-old living in Israel. Well, it was before Israel got its independence in May 1948. When it was a colony, he lived in Palestine and he started telling you the story of one day – he called them Zionist aggressors – they surrounded the school and they marched him over the Jordan River, and he told me everything from age six to here he’s now in his fifties running a unit of the PLO. And so it was fascinating, just to hear how someone went that. And honestly, when you hear a story, it’s very heartfelt. He wasn’t a six-year-old who just wanted to kill every Jew in the world. He was a six-year-old that wanted to finger paint and play games. And a bunch of things happened to shape that, that he was now telling people to take hand gliders and kill people. But there was a lot of stories. So it was fascinating. He was missing his pants. He had a stump. And he told me how his hand got shot off in battle with the Israelis. You hear this guy and you want to cry with him and hug him, because you hear what happened to this little innocent six-year-old that he’s now a guerrilla fighter. But I’ll tell you, I think what was rare is, I just listened. I wasn’t trying to tell him he was right or he was wrong. I just said, “Tell me your story.” And I think he was happy to have an American really listen deeply.
Gabriel: And it’s not a point of view that is often heard in American media. It’s very easy to portray Palestinians as terrorists, in the movies or in the media. So that’s a different side of it. Somebody who is shaped by these unfortunate incidents in their lives. That’s not what they set out to do, as you said.
Alan: He went through a bunch of events through history, the different wars, right, the ’56, the ’67, the Yom Kippur War, Six-Day War and explained how each thing happened, people he knew died, he joined PLO, blah, blah, blah. Tell you another thing, a little bit interrelated to this, I think you’ll find interesting. So after I left Damascus, I was bicycling to Jordan. I guess I think I was near the Lebanese border and a truck pulls up and three guys get out with machine guns and they point them at me. And first, I think while they’re soldiers, but they have no insignia. They’re just in normal fatigues. And I realized these are not soldiers. These are terrorists. This is some faction of the PLO. There were so many different groups at that time in history. And they asked for my passport. I think, holy shit, if you show them a U.S. passport and they figure out that your name is Jewish, you will be a hostage or killed. It just won’t go well. I spoke French at the time, because I lived with that woman in France for a few months. I learned some French. In my not-so-good French (yeah, you know, pays to fall in love with an only French-speaking woman). And inmy not-so-French, which was a little better than their not-so-good French, so they thought I was French. I start speaking to them in French and rather than pull out my passport, I pull out that same article in Arabic in the Damascus newspaper, which says on a peace trip, trying to understand the Syrian world and the Syrian culture. So they see the article. They put their guns down. They stop asking me for my passport. And they’re like, calm, “Okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.” And they said, “You can go.” So I get back on my bike. They get back in the truck, and then they start to follow me. Now imagine, my bike’s about 100 pounds. It’s a gravel road. I’m biking maybe 10 miles an hour. And they’re just right behind me, 20 feet behind me, driving the truck, 10 miles an hour. And I’m thinking to myself, they’re still considering what to do. Maybe they’re radioing their headquarters, like, “Do we pick them up anyway? What do we think? What do we believe?” And I’m like, I can still end up being kidnapped and being a hostage. I didn’t want that at all. I thought the best way, I remember when I heard this, to not get kidnapped or killed is to be in a public space. Because if there’s witnesses, they’re less likely to abduct you, because there’s witnesses. So I see this kind of like a truck stop, falafel stand on the side of the road. I think pull on in, there’s lots of people there. Maybe that will protect you. So I pull in. They pull in, they get out of the truck, and they brandish their machine guns again. They don’t point them at me. They point them at the restaurant owner.
Gabriel: Oh, geez.
Alan: And they point at the restaurant owner, three machine guns. And they say that, “We’d like some food. We don’t want to pay. Feed him, too. He shouldn’t pay either.” And they sit down at one table. I sit down at another table. I remember actually it was like those, like it was like hummus and those little falafels. So it was actually a good meal. I get my falafel meal. They get their meal. And I realized I wanted them to leave first. And normally I was on a bicycle, I was a fast eater. But I ate so slow. I was like, you know, let’s have a bite. Let’s rest a minute or two, till they were completely done. And then they got up. They pointed their guns at the owner and said, “Remember, it’s on the house for him, too.” And they got back in their truck and they drove off. I was alive. And I’m always going to say, hell of a way to get a free lunch.
Gabriel: Wow, Alan. That is probably the craziest story yet, out of all of them. You’ve already mentioned twice having machine guns pointed at you during the trip. I hope that was it?
Alan: I think so. Yeah. I think those are the only ones. I mean, I saw them all over the place. In terms of like being directly pointed at me, like…
Gabriel: Yeah.
Alan: That only happened twice. But it was five machine guns in total, two in Romania, three in Syria.
Gabriel: Wow. I want to figure out how the rest of your trip went on the map. So you were in the Middle East. You definitely got to see firsthand how it is. And then where did you go from there?
Alan: I went into Syria. I went into Jordan, spent quite a bit of time in Syria and Jordan. And then from Jordan, this is sort of an interesting aside, I wanted to go into Israel. And there’s a famous bridge called the Allenby Bridge. It goes from Jordan to Israel. When I got to the bridge, they wouldn’t let me cross. My tires were really bald, bald, bald. I knew I had a new set of tires in Jerusalem. And I was 50 miles away from Amman, the capital of Jordan. But I couldn’t cross. And so instead, I had to go bicycle to the southern tip of Jordan, which I think it’s called Aqaba? The southern port of Jordan.
Gabriel: Yeah, Aqaba.
Alan: I had to take a ferry to the Sinai in Egypt. And then I had a bicycle cross the Sinai. I think it was called the Taba Crossing into Eilat, the southern tip of Israel. And then bicycle through like around the Dead Sea, I think it was. I think that was the West Bank, to Jerusalem. Long story short, what would have been a 50- mile thing from Amman to Jerusalem became a 500-mile route because of all this detouring. And my tires were completely bald. And when I was not far from the Dead Sea, my tires, not only did I get a flat, but the actual tires split, like the rubber split, like a big hole in the rubber, you know? Yikes. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I took every single thing in my bicycle and I kind of dumped it out looking, is there a solution here? I had like a bunch of tooth floss, which is a very strong thread. And I had bits of rubber from my patch kit. And then of course I had the, you know, the glue that you use to, was is it, rubber cement, that you use to patch tires? And then I also had a lot of chewing gum. And so I made this concoction of like chewing gum, bits of rubber, glue and tooth floss and a needle. And I threaded up the tire. So it like held like a big lump at work. It held the air, it held the air. And I went with this lumpy tire during the Intifada. I lumped on to Jerusalem, made it to Jerusalem. And then as I was entering, there was an uprising going on there, like the Dome of the Rock. They always have these uprisings there and the, you know, the mosque? And so I got tear gassed, literally, walking into Jerusalem. And I now know what it’s like to be tear gassed, which is not fun, but I made it to Jerusalem.
Gabriel: Well, that was a real MacGyver moment to put together this tire again with chewing gum, literally.
Alan: Yeah, yeah. It was like, I hope this holds, but it did.
Gabriel: Wow. You said that in Israel is where you met the second woman.
Alan: Yes. So I met the second woman, and we fell in love. I started living with her. I think we lived together for two months. And we went through three ideas. One was go live on a kibbutz together. And we were thinking about that. The second was, let’s let her bicycle with me. And I was going to continue into Egypt. And I wanted to go down into Sudan and Yemen. And from Yemen, I was going to take a ferry to Oman. And I was going to go around the Gulf. And eventually I’m trying to end up in Pakistan, then continue east into India. And then eventually go into Nepal. And I wanted to the across the Himalayas and go into China. So I had this like elaborate plan, but mind you, I’m now two-and-a-half years in. And at this pace, what I described would have been years more. So this woman seriously thinks about getting a bike and doing this trip. But she’s not a cyclist. The idea of bicycling across Sudan and Yemen and there’s wars going on in famines. It was concerning to her. And instead she said, “Why don’t you just come with me back to Michigan?” She lived in Michigan, “And we’ll just like make a life in Michigan together.” And I really loved her. I said, “Okay.” So we flew to Michigan and I lived with her and her mother for a while. It was outside of Detroit, one of the suburbs. And then we didn’t get along so well after a few months. You know, it was kind of weird, but it was like an infatuation kind of affair. So then I left her and I got back on my bike, and I bicycled up into Canada. And then I crossed the southern edge of Canada, you know, like Ontario, Montreal, like around that. Came back in, I believe was through New York, like around the Niagara Falls area, and then bicycled back down through New York. And then eventually ended up back in D.C. where I started. And that’s when my trip ended, about 28 months, 15,000 miles.
Gabriel: You said there was zigzagging and that was an unexpected twist.
Alan: Yeah, total zigzag.
Gabriel: I guess that would be, yeah, you got Europe. You got a bit of Asia. You got Africa and you got North America.
Alan: And I thought about, when I was in Michigan, I said, why don’t you get back on a plane and go to Egypt and Sudan? And then I also learned that bicycling alone in Sudan wasn’t the smartest idea either. And having almost died a few times other places like that, that kind of got me thinking I wanted to live.
Gabriel: Yeah. Looking back on it now, how would you characterize your trip and do you feel it was successful in any or all of the ways you had hoped it would be? It was such amazing stories that you’ve shared. You’re now looking back on it think?
Alan: So I thought I was going to write articles. I’d had these experiences, how many American Jews interviewed the PLO, right? So I started querying like Jewish journals and newspapers. No one had much interest. Back then I was like handwriting letters. Probably weren’t the best querier letters. I didn’t know what I was doing. The newspapers said, no, thank you. And I was disappointing. But then I had this idea, which we’ll get to, and that changed my life. And I’ll tell you, it changed the world actually. So yes, I do think it was incredibly successful in that it seeded something very meaningful and gave me a perspective on the world I hold to this day.
Gabriel: That’s the perfect intro then to hear about your business. Claus mentioned a little bit about it, but let’s hear how it even came about doing your trip.
Alan: When I was in France with this woman I met, I was going to be heading into Hungary later in the trip. I was concerned that Hungarian is a very difficult language and that if I happened to be in the country on a Sunday and stores were closed, how would I get food? I was a big eater. I can eat a lot when bicycling like that. And she said, “You know, Alan, I’ll pick a magazine and cut out a couple of pictures of like tomato and cheese and bread and you can just hold up those pictures and somebody will feed you.” We never actually did that, but it was an interesting idea. Well, some time later I was in Turkey and you carry extra spokes on a bike they break and I ran out of spokes. They’d all broken. And I had my little Turkish dictionary – it was actually a phrase book – and they didn’t have the word for spoke there. And I was like, you know, this is annoying. I’ll have to bring my broken bike to the bike store, you know. And then I thought, you know, I should make a diagram of all the bike parts. And I said, you know, I could print it and I’m sure other cyclists going around the world would want this thing. I started to think, well, you know, I thought about the first story of the foods. And I said, you could really every single element that a traveler might want to communicate and make a picture of it, put it on like a folding card, like a map, whether you want to certain kinds of food or a hotel or a train or a single bed or a double bed or bottle water versus tap water, whatever it is. And so I came back and put together 600 pictures. I called it Kwikpoint, because you quickly point to get your point across quickly. And made these travel cards. And for a bunch of years, I did that. And it was used in four different Olympics, as like a giveaway. It was used by companies for branding. It was in stores. It was used by the Rail Europe system, with Eurail Passes. They gave them out. You know, I sold hundreds of thousands of these things. I pretty much was focusing on travel. And then I thought, wait a second, what about health care? What if somebody got sick while traveling and they needed to go to a doctor? How would they tell the doctor where it hurt? What happened? What their symptoms were? How would the doctor tell them what the treatment’s going to be? If they were in, let’s just say Tunisia, in a Bedouin desert hospital.
Gabriel: Yeah. And had eaten some rotten beans.
Alan: Exactly. And then I thought, there’s all these things called like Doctors Without Borders, you know, Médecins Sans Frontières. Doctors traveling overseas, around the world to do good, but they don’t speak the local languages. So the doctors could use it too. And I had a friend who was a physician who did something similar to Doctors Without Borders. And she said, “Oh, I’ll help you think through the medical dynamics of it.” And realized that the main application was not people basically and are traveling overseas, getting sick and obscure places, but actually in the United States, because roughly 10% of America doesn’t speak English as their first language. And so when they call 911 for an ambulance or they walk into an ER, it’s an issue. They can’t explain why they’re there. So it turned out it was very useful to sell to hospitals and ambulance departments. In fact, every ambulance in New York City for the last 20 years has carried this on their ambulances.
Gabriel: Yeah. So those are two different seeds during your trip, your illness in North Africa and then the fact you went through Hungary, which I can definitely agree, Hungarian is an impenetrable language. Just to be clear, you never actually used the cutouts in Hungary. You made it through without them.
Alan: The woman I was dating, she never actually did that. She never really cut out the pictures for me.
Gabriel: Okay, but did you do it?
Alan: No. The only thing I did with pictures was in Greece, I needed to catch a ferry. Let’s just say 6 a.m. And there was no alarm clock in the room. And so I drew a series of like cartoons showing like the owner of the hotel or lodge or whatever was hostile that there was a boat and I drew a clock at 6 a.m. then I had to be on it. And then it was like 5 a.m., me in bed, and then these series of diagrams. And he understood, please get me up at 5 a.m. and it worked. He got me up. That was like the closest to that.
Gabriel: Oh, cool.
Alan: There’s a lot of interesting pieces, but the one I think that’s perhaps most relevant was on September 11th, 2001, you know, 9/11 happened that changed the world. And I was selling to travelers. And you can imagine very few people were traveling internationally right after that happened. Everyone was scared of terrorism and whatnot. Three days later, I get an email from a major in the Marine Corps. Said, “Alan, you know, I’ve been using your travel cards. They’re quite helpful. I use them all over the world. But it would be nice if you could put some military imagery on it because we now have a lot of soldiers going places where we need to communicate and we don’t speak the languages.” Namely eventually Arabic, Pashto and Dari for Afghanistan. And that led to me developing a product for the military. And then it led to the military realizing it was a great idea and they made it standard issue for every soldier going into Iraq and Afghanistan. Particularly, we did many different variations of it, the ones that were most important in terms of making a difference were the ones for, you know, the term IED, improvised explosive device? The thing about IEDs is that once they’re deployed, once they’re great or hidden, wherever they’re hidden, they’re very hard to stop because you can’t see them. There isn’t necessarily a way to counter that or detonate them. It’s very difficult. IEDs were the number one cause of death and disability for both the Americans and everyone, like whenever they went off. Whoever was there, got killed. And this is a simplification of a long story. I basically went to the military and said, you know, why don’t we see if we could help soldiers find the IEDs, whether they’re being made. And if you catch them before they’re made, then they can’t be deployed. And they were like, well, how do you do that? Cause there’s not big signs like “IEDs made here, please come raid us,” right? To be MacGyver-like, they’re improvised. They’re made all sorts of strange ways. And I said, well, what if I design a card that has all the telltale signs of a possible IED being made? For example, often the thing that sets off the triggers is bicycle springs from seats. You know, the springs we have under our seats sometimes, particularly, like, you know, more classic leather seats?
Gabriel: Yeah.
Alan: So they would use these springs to help make the bombs. And then sometimes they would use pens, like Bic pens. They would hollow them out and they would use that to help do a detonator. And then there were certain kinds of smells in these places where they’re making it, ’cause certain smells are the chemicals. And so there was a whole bunch of indicators. So if you walk into what’s supposed to be a warehouse or a garage or a shed, you see a pile of bicycle seat springs and a bunch of Bic pens and it has kind of a lemon fishy smelling room? You just found a bomb factory. In the early stages, we found 500 IEDs in a basement, I think it was, in Iraq. And they were like, holy crap. So they then gave these materials to every soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we found thousands of IED components all over these areas, which led to thousands of IEDs never being made, deployed or harming people.
Gabriel: Wow, that’s incredible. It’s amazing that bicycle seats played a role in this. I had no idea.
Alan: Yeah. It was like, go figure, ’cause it was an easy place to get springs. And you know, when you think about compression, you think of like a classic booby trap, right? You step on it, the spring hits a trigger, boom. There was actually more than 200 different indicators of IED fabrication. And we literally took every single one of them and put them in a card and organized it so that you could either ask a local, you know, have you seen this? ‘Cause a lot of the locals were friendly to our troops, or you could just look for these things as you looked in buildings.
Gabriel: And so these cards that you did, the Kwikpoint cards, they’re always laminated and weatherproof and can be folded out and has all these graphics?
Alan: Yeah. If you’re curious, that’s Kwikpoint, K-W-I-K-Point. Some of them I make with just a lamination. They fold kind of like, have you ever seen those guides to like look at birds or spot trees and they’re laminated and they fold nicely?
Gabriel: Sure.
Alan: The ones for the military overseas are made on kind of a synthetic substrate. It’s kind of like a plastic synthetic substrate. It’s very thin. It’s super thin, but it’s insanely strong. It won’t tear. Like you couldn’t tear it if you tried, and it’s waterproof and tear proof. Literally, it’ll last for decades. It’s the strongest material I think you can print on. And so the ones for the military were printed on a synthetic substrate.
Gabriel: It also folds down into some kind of little pocket-sized…
Alan: They all fold to pocket-sized. The military is something called cargo pockets, which imagine a little pocket on somebody’s arm kind of like by their bicep or shoulder and they can pop things in there. So they would typically keep them in their cargo pockets. In fact, I tell you an interesting aside, the local Afghanis knew that every American soldier carried these cards. In fact, eventually like NATO and other soldiers carried them. So if they wanted to talk to a soldier like they had something to report, because if they thought there was an IED in their village, they wanted it removed. They didn’t want their child to walk over it, right? Because it was the Taliban who was doing this stuff, not the Afghan population. It became a gesture, I’m told in Afghanistan, that if somebody tapped their shoulder, that means they had something to say. “Take out the card, I want to talk to you.” And that became, like, a gesture for “I have something to say to you.”
Gabriel: Incredible. And you’ve been at this more or less since your trip concluded. So in the late ’80s, so yeah, more than 30 years.
Alan: Yeah, I came back with the idea in my head in ’88, started it in ’89, and now I’ve been doing it for, what is it, 36 years, right?
Gabriel: Yeah, 36, 37.
Alan: It also led to another thing. I think you’ll find this interesting. A little backstory. I was raised by my mother and grandmother. I lost my dad as an infant. When I was 12, my grandmother had a stroke, and we didn’t know what was happening. And we waited four days before calling for an ambulance. And she had a horrible outcome. She never spoke for the rest of her life. She never moved. There’s a term called locked-in syndrome, where you just locked in your body. And she lingered like that. She had raised me and she died that way. It was horrible. Then my mother, who had depression issues to begin with, got super depressed and she overdosed on sleeping pills. Lost her as well. And because of that, I went into a foster home, where I was raised. And then as an adult, I realized that strokes are treatable, but they’re only treatable in the hospital, if you can get there within the first few hours. After that, the treatment doesn’t work. And that roughly only 10% of the population gets treated. And the reason is they don’t know what to look for for strokes, and they don’t know how to remember them. When I thought about it, it was kind of like the IEDs. The soldiers didn’t know what to look for. You know, like bicycle springs. And they couldn’t remember everything, because there were many things to remember. And I said, you know, I could design a card to teach people how to spot strokes and to remember to spot strokes. And so I started doing this in my city of Alexandria, Virginia. And that eventually led to about 100,000 people being trained in my city of 150,000. And more people were being treated for strokes. And then the state of Virginia learned about it, and they adopted my model. The governor endorsed it in a proclamation. And now there’s 30 cities and counties in Virginia doing this. Then Maryland learned about it. They started doing it. Then New Jersey and Michigan are getting ready to do it. And now more than a million people have been educated on how to recognize strokes and the importance of calling 911 immediately.
Gabriel: All of these stories make me think that it’s incredible in this day and age, and I’m sure you’ve reflected on this, of apps and social media and everything that we said that was not available when you were on the road, you’ve stayed with this old-time method, which is posters and pocket guides and so forth. What are your thoughts about that?
Alan: You know, there’s places where paper works better and there’s places where digital works better. For example, take stroke recognition. We mostly just make magnets that go on your refrigerator. By the way, the stroke signs, just so you know, is one, a facial droop, like your smile droops down on one side. The second one is one-sided arm weakness. If you put your arms straight out, like just dead straight, one of them droops, just one of them droops. And the third most common one is garbled speech. Just blurring, garbled old speech. And any one of those, it was a stroke sign, you should call 911. For something like that, a magnet’s perfect because you need to see it many, many times. If I tell you to put it on an app, you’re not going to think, “Oh, my grandfather’s got a funny face. Let me check my app and see if some app tells me what it is.” You’re not going to think that. But if you, on your refrigerator every day for the last two years, you saw that picture of a droopy face, you’re going to go, “Oh, my God, my grandfather’s having a stroke.” There’s places where paper or imagery that’s static versus digital better serves the application.
Gabriel: And you’ve stuck You’re not going into the digital realm.
Alan: I did make digital versions of my Kwikpoint stuff, not for the stroke, but for everything else. Often they still preferred the paper, because if you’re communicating with somebody, you don’t necessarily want to hand them your iPhone and have them touch it. And they’re not going to understand the interface to scroll and zoom in and stuff. I think the whole thing that unfolds like a map, can just look through together, let the eyes navigate it rather than a graphical user interface on a device. I call it spatial adjacency. If everything’s right next to each other, like on a big map, it’s much easier to see than having to go through a little three-by-five device.
Gabriel: Oh, yeah, spatial adjacency. So that meant that things that are related to each other are close to each other.
Alan: Yeah, everything’s grouped and categorized. All the fruits are in one category. All the vegetables are in a category. All the meats are in a category. Everything related to transportation. Like boat, plane, car is in the transportation category. They’re color-coded. So very quickly, say you’re looking for food, you figure out that the orange panel is where the food is. And then there’s like light orange for where the proteins are and dark orange for where the starches are, your breads and pancakes and cereal. So in a matter of seconds, your eyes can find the right thing, which is actually faster than using a device where you have to interface with swipes and zooms and pinches and clicks.
Gabriel: I love it. Obviously the success of the company speaks for itself, in terms of people adopting it and getting use out of it.
Alan: There’s over 10 million of them out there. Eventually I had 400 different publications printed and there are in all sorts of places. They focus honestly on the stroke stuff because of the card which is a charity that came out of the ID thing, which came out of the travel thing, which came out of the bike ride.
Gabriel: The transcript for this episode is available on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife, Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you
Alan: What do you think would be a good title?
Gabriel: I don’t know.
Alan: How about “Pictures for world peace?”
Gabriel: Yeah, something like that.
Alan: Maybe something, you know, pedaling and pictures alliterates well. But yeah, let’s both think about it.