“We live in a culture that is incredibly deathphobic. … We don't want to see the animals that we kill for our food. We don't want to see people die and they die away in hospitals. On battlefields, soldiers are killed miles away. You never have to see the people that you're killing or bombing. We're extremely deathphobic.”

…don't make any sense. It was mostly that I was just, it was just this sort of weird excitement that I had come so close to death. And now everything kind of felt different and everything felt kind of light and buoyant and exciting to me. That was sort of the initial moments after the stroke.

What do you think the average person can draw from that? The fact that you came to the Edge, pull back, and then you're laughing, elated.

Yeah, that makes sense. So on the ambulance ride home, you're deciding now's the time to write this book. Book is out November 10th, Law of the Sublime. But you had had this idea for this book since the early 2000s. So I'm curious to know where the idea for the book first germinated.

Well, one thing that I can say about my mental life is I'm always craving different ways of looking at the world, different thought processes, different cultures. That's why I took a lot of drugs when I was 18, 19, 20 years old. I wanted to experience the world from a different side, a different…

So readers understand the topic. When you say sublime, how do you define that? And how do we sort of understand that in a practical sense?