Abstract Essay, in its Fifth Season, features Chip Walter, an intensely curious author, traveler, and National Geographic Explorer, as a featured guest. In this episode, Chip Walter brings a global perspective shaped by exploration and inquiry, reflecting on curiosity as a driving force behind discovery, storytelling, and human understanding. The conversation explores how travel, science, and narrative intersect to deepen our perception of the world, offering thoughtful insights into curiosity, exploration, and the pursuit of meaning across cultures and disciplines.

Chip Walter

Intensely Curious Author, Traveler, and National Geographic Explorer

Contrary to what Disney says, it's not a small world. It’s enormous, deep, rich and complex beyond all reason. I’ve been privileged to travel a good deal as a journalist and documentary filmmaker producing the PBS documentaries I have and researching the six books I‘ve written. My article, "The First Artists," a feature article for National Geographic magazine, allowed me to spend the better part of two years traveling to locations in South Africa, Germany, France, Spain and Portugal to track down the roots of human creativity – two continents, five countries, over 60,000 miles. I explored rare sites that very few get to see. I've learned a lot about places all around the globe, and about the humans that inhabit them.

Thanks to my newest project, a Vagabond-Adventure, my wife and I are now getting the opportunity to see and learn even more. Why travel all seven continents, never by jet when I am over 70 years-old? I'm deeply curious about what makes us the strange and fascinating creatures we are. There is really no animal on this planet as unusual as us. The way I see it, my job is to discover and then reveal the strange, unique and unexpected cultures and people that connect us. by By sharing what I'm doing online and through the books I have written or will write, I aim to reveal what makes us tick. In the end, I think that’s what every artist tries to do. Can we cover the WHOLE world. No, but, dammit, we can sure try!

Something About My Books ...

In "Last Ape Standing,” I tell the tale of how, against all odds and despite nature's capricious ways, we stand here today as the only surviving humans on earth, and the planet's dominant species. Scientists have revealed at least 27 known human (or hominin) species that evolved over the past 7 million years. Why are we the only ones who made it. Last Ape examines the traits that evolutionary scientists have found enabled our success and explores how we developed a new kind of mind that became self-aware, creative, and moral, while the mysterious "others" who evolved with us and helped shape us, somehow failed.

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