The People

Who’s Tom? That would be me, Thomas McAlevey, and I am your guide on this adven­ture, dri­ving and film­ing. I was born and raised in New York. After earn­ing the title of “fam­ily delin­quent” in a big fam­ily, I even­tu­ally grad­u­ated from NYU with a degree in film pro­duc­tion. In the mid 80s I spent two years rid­ing a motor cycle around the world. In the late 80s I lost my left arm in a motor­cy­cle acci­dent in Los Ange­les. Since the early 90s I lived pri­mar­ily in Stock­holm with my two daugh­ters. I’m best known as founder of “Ban­dit 105.5 the Rock Home of Stock­holm” which was a pop­u­lar Swedish rock sta­tion before I sold it. I’m in Los Ange­les now and CEO of Radical.FM. I have a black belt in Tae-Kwon-Do, drive any­thing with a motor, and speak flu­ent Swedish and pass­able Span­ish. Ani­mals and kids tend to like me (grown-ups know bet­ter), and I am an expert mechanic.

Yoshiko will be film ing and co-driving. Raised in Kobe, Japan (“earthquake-city”, also famous for its gourmet beef) she is a Judo expert and com peted until knee injuries forced her to slow down. She is also trained in the art of Japan­ese mas­sage. Lately she has been work­ing as a PADI cer­ti­fied Dive Instruc­tor and has lived and trav­eled in Asia, Aus­tralia, and the US. She is an avid pho­tog­ra­pher and dis­likes peo­ple assum­ing that she car­ries a cam­era at all times sim­ply because she is Japan­ese. She was in Swe­den learn­ing why you should man­u­ally white bal­ance a broad­cast cam­era, three-point light­ing, and the dif­fer­ence between lava­liere and shot­gun micro­phones before we left. Yoshiko and I had only known each other a few months at the start, which added an ele­ment of unpre­dictabil­ity to the trip. But she had her Inter­na­tional Dri­ving License and an adven­tur­ous spirit. The rest – as they say – is history.