Michael Scott Moore

00:00nice to meet you good to meet you oh yeah boom and we're live so just to give everybody a good way to start this you have a book the book is called the desert in the sea and you have one of the most disturbing and craziest stories I think I ever read you were kidnapped by Somali pirates and you were held hostage for more than two years what the was that like and what does it feel like to be a free man now after all that are you kidding it feels great in America yeah wandering around the valley the valley where I was born and raised by the way were you yeah this is the first time I've been back in the valley for a couple of years now what what what happened and how how did it happen long story so I went to Somalia in the first place to write a book a very different books about Somali pirates and I so I'm a journalist I was working in Berlin at the time and I had followed

01:08the very long trial of ten Somali pirates in Germany in Hamburg for about a year all of 2011 and before that I had already thought about going to Somalia because the pirate story it was interesting in all sorts of ways that I thought other writers weren't getting to and I had met another journalist a documentary maker named Ashwin Ramon who also wanted to go to Somalia for his own project and so we talked about going for a long time and by the end of 2011 in the middle of the trial we all our plans came together and we wound up going in January of 2012 and we had about ten days of good research we both got pretty good material and we were in a part of Somalia where other journalists had gone so we weren't doing something that was totally off the map you know and on the tenth day Ashwin flew off to Mogadishu and I went with him to the airport we saw him off and it was on the way

02:07back from the airport that truck was waiting for our car and the truck which is actually a technical so a battle wagon with a cannon in the back stopped us aim the cannon through the windshield overpowered my guard and 12 guys with Kalashnikovs pulled me out of the car so I was put me in another car and we drove off so from that moment on I was a captive Jesus Christ and so they were obviously trying to get some hostage money yeah oh yeah no it was about money and I think they were hoping for both of us by the way Ashwin feels very lucky that he didn't get captured so they had planned this yeah and they were probably waiting for our car earlier in the morning it was just Ashwin's good luck that we took a different route to the airport how much money were they asking for yeah but for well so the first thing they asked for me was 20 million dollars but that was

03:01after the first week so that I went for a week without having a phone call home and in that period seals rescued two other hostages from another part of central Somalia including Jessica Buchanan an American and I think nine Somali guards died in that raid and they had some clan relationships as some of the guys holding me and so the guys holding me were very upset and I think that's why they asked for 20 million in hell more importantly held on to that demand for so long what they held on to it for almost a year that specific number they wouldn't budge yeah so they were in negotiations yeah there were negotiations but they were you know phony negotiations in some sense because the Somalis weren't really negotiating so for some background for people that are unfamiliar with the situation in Somalia Somalia if correct me if I'm wrong that area was traditionally

04:00fishermen and yeah that's wrong it's okay so that's actually the point to the book that's actually one level of the title the desert in the sea so that's a you you get the idea from the things that Somali pirates like to say oh look that they're just frustrated fishermen that's only part of the story and so that's a that's a very important premise in the book they they there are you know fishing communities on the coast and they're being hard-hit definitely by illegal ships that come in just to just steal the fish you know but that's a problem up and down Africa and because of that problem once Somalia had no government there was no Navy Navy to defend the coastline local sort of clan leaders would send out militia boats with militiamen and hold fishing boats for you know fifty thousand dollar ransoms over 24-hour periods you know really nothing very much and they called

04:59a license fee and that's how you did business in Somalia in the 90s we didn't hear about that it was too small time we started to hear about it when they graduated to capturing cargo ships but I had heard was that there was illegal dumping there wasn't just fish also mm-hmm yeah yeah and that they initially called themselves the People's Coast Guard of Somalia or the voluntary Coast Guard yeah one or two pirate gangs tried to call themselves that and you know they had a point there was no one else patrolling the coast but that wasn't really what was going on no um I was captured on land first of all every other hostage I met was a fisherman a poor fisherman captured hundreds of miles from the Somali coast so that's not protecting the coast so what role does this stuff called cat KH eighty this is uh it's a plant that they chew mm-hmm and it has like stimulant effect

05:57yeah it's a little bit like coca leaf but I think actually it's a narcotic you know gets you high at first and then you crash and you wake up depressed and you need more but these guys every single pirate I met was addicted and they wound up having to sit in front of these piles of cut every afternoon just to get high enough for their addiction and then like I said they would they would crash at night and then do it again in my case there were there were guards 24 hours a day which meant there was also a shift that slept during the day to cot at night and then and then crashed in the morning did you try any that stuff yeah I mean they they kept offering it to me it wasn't like they I you know it takes like two or three stems or three or four stems not much but it changed your mood you know you could be depressed and you'd feel better or you could be a

06:49little bit sick and you just wouldn't feel it anymore but I didn't want to get addicted to it so I didn't I didn't keep pushing them is it's that addictive yeah well I saw it I saw how addictive it could be with the guards you know a little bit on an afternoon didn't make me want to keep doing it necessarily but every every now and then I did it just for the sake of my mood yeah that's always in the narrative this cat stuff that there's somehow another unhinged because they're on this stuff all the time yeah I mean you can get really unhinged in the sense that you're once you're wired on it you're easily sort of upset and these guys would have sometimes have fistfights in front of me and that kind of thing not all the time but yeah they would get the they would get hopped up they would just get jittery and that's it's very dangerous with Kalashnikovs lying around so their culture

07:38somehow or another has evolved to this point where it's insanely common to kidnap people to the point where if you if you talk about Somali pirates they're there very few countries where pirates go after their name so easily yeah the the kidnapping became part of the culture that's true but pirate bosses which are not so active now off the coast also have other businesses that they get involved in and so I've written about this in the meantime too they they get involved in gun smuggling and also even people smuggling on the Horn of Africa so whatever takes that kind of equipment you know SUVs Kalashnikovs cheap food when you say people smuggling what do you mean it's a good story I found out I mean I'm the person that proved that on the route between Somalia to Libya some former pirate bosses were active in moving people so in other words Somalis who want to go to Libya will put

08:41themselves in the hands of some traffickers and some of those traffickers might be ex pirates but go there as far as just being transported willingly willingly at first and then there's always a place in Sudan where it shifts from being willing to being unwilling well this is an issue that's been going on in Libya recently I'm sure you saw the most recent slave auctions that were videotaped and put on YouTube which was the stories are awful I've heard this firsthand yeah insanely disturbing that you're watching a videotape of slave auctions in 2018 it's well it's more than disturbing it's a revival of what was going on when slavery was legal so in other words okay where the where the Somalis are involved up to the to the Libyan border is one story and that's a story I've covered what happens in Libya is a different story the clans and the routes that migrants take through Libya the clans

09:43they put themselves in the hands of are still the same as the clans and the routes that we use during the slave trade so there's a there's almost like a you know there's a there's a historical memory there of what what went on and it's the same thing happening so so I suspect a lot of migrants don't quite know how bad it can get the route up until Libya is probably easier than Libya itself Alivia itself sounds like a horror show for the migrants well it's particularly it's one of those bizarre things we have a horrible dictator like Muammar Qaddafi and you say well it's probably a good thing get rid of that guy right mm-hmm but no when you get rid of them then you have this power vacuum and apparently it's a failed state now and it's gotten even worse yeah it's it's going in the direction of Somalia right now in there a couple of rival governments I think it's a little bit

10:39more stable then that Somalia was after their dictator fell but it's there's similar there's a similar thing going on I it's true Gaddafi was a bad guy and but he was also a bulwark and he knew that and he used that to his advantage bulwark a bulwark against against migration paths I've never heard that expression bulwark a bulwark no what does that mean a road block okay um when you were there when you decided to take ten days and you done all this research or what what did you expect when you went there and what was different well so we we were careful about finding security we found a Somali elder in Berlin who could offer the protection of his clan in Somalia and he had done it with another journal journalist a German journalist and he took us out from Galkayo which is a town in central Somalia out to the coast to Hobie which is a pirate town you might

11:41have heard of and pirate town actual pirate town yeah so it's all pirates well it's in it's in the control of pirates so in other words the the government that sits in Galkayo has no influence there the Pirates are the ones with who can have the say-so so what is their business like I mean when you say it's like a pirate town so the Pirates are essentially in control but like what else is going on there if you've got pirates in Rome no normal Somali life is going on there but the the you know let's say the police force would be pirates yeah I mean when we got there it was pretty quiet and we didn't see much normal life and we had a very organised interview and lunch one afternoon with a with a guy who turned out to be a real pirate you know that wasn't a joke and then we left around sundown and that was it we didn't spend a whole lot of time in hope you when you

12:41were there and you you eventually got captured and taken hostage what what was the initial experience like well so when that happened with this with the technical with the truck at first my mind actually recoiled from what was going on I mean I actually was in denial for a couple of seconds I thought okay just a roadblock you know but once they captured me I thought this is gonna be really hard on my family Jesus and they they they beat me with their guns they broke my wrist they bloodied my my scalp and they broke my glasses so that's the other thing I noticed right away it was that I'm gonna be blind how about your eyes I'm nearsighted it's not not not good and this is like initial like right away yeah oh yeah it happened in that first skirmish yeah so your your wrist was broken right away yeah because I was trying to hold the car door closed and they they pounded on it with their gun

13:43barrels Wow and is it hard to talk about this no because now I've written a book I wouldn't been able to do this before writing the book but writing the book familiarized myself with my own memories you know it made me fluent with this material but your physical state seems to shift when you discuss it like you oh maybe yeah your your your shoulders have risen short you're like yeah I mean it's a question of you know it's not pleasant I couldn't imagine yeah I mean it must have been just insane mm-hmm um so you said there was a long period of time before your your before they contacted anybody who do they contact okay so it was a week and they so I had a grant a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting I should have called them but I had all my notes stolen which means all my phone phone numbers too and so when they finally brought me up to a

14:46bluff with a little cell phone and said call somebody I said we'll bring me my notes I need to you know find the right phone number I said no just call someone so I called my mom Jesus and and that's what happened by that by that time the FBI had informed her had actually come to her door and briefed her a little to say on the phone so she was ready for the phone call you know she'd been sitting around for days wondering when she was gonna hear from me so but that was also true about the Pulitzer Center was also true about my colleagues that should be Ghulam line in Berlin I was also true about my family in Germany everyone had been briefed a little bit now were they waiting for a specific reason why did they wait a whole week until I do it's a really good question I kept asking for a phone call I mean I was seeing there kind of in a panic too you know what were they saying do you're

15:43doing this week said oh yeah okay you have a broken arm right no you're you're obviously you're in pain you can't see anymore yeah I was in a the first first they took me to a bush camp then they took me with a couple of other hostages to a prison house and yeah it my wrists in a sling and it just was it was painful and was it was confusing I really didn't know what was going on and then slowly they brought a doctor in to look at the wrist and then slowly they took us out into the bush and then finally they gave put me on the phone so you you got medical treatment for your wrist sort of yeah the guy who's probably a livestock doctor but the the guy was he was a very sympathetic old older man but he said your wrist is not broken and he put a splint on it and that was it it was broken hmm not broken in half definitely cracked I felt I felt bones moving around in there yeah it's been real

16:43rearranged it's been reshaped did you eventually get medical treatment when you get home oh yeah what no two years and eight months later it was it was okay functioning right yeah it's it's set wrong but it's a functioning risk did you get an x-ray just so you can see how weird it looks didn't even bother Wow now when you're there once you get the initial phone call what is what is the process like after that are they there are they talking to you about what they want yeah they said okay you have to demand twenty million dollars from your mother well I think I must have smirked or something they said it's not funny said yes it actually it is that's not a serious demand but that was their opening gambit 20 million what why specifically 20 million it's a good question they the first two hostages I was held with to say schoois fishermen the ransom for them was also

17:3820 million but that's 10 million each so maybe they were just doubling it for the American there was a time where they told you that if people showed up for you that you were gonna be killed oh sure they said that right away because by the time the phone call it happened the the raid for Jessica Buchanan and palta stet had already happened too so they even mentioned that to me and of course I had no idea what they were talking about I had no news you know so I mentioned it to my mother on the phone I said they're talking about a raid and they're saying if somebody else comes for me I'm gonna get shot dead but you know those are already the terms of a kidnapping right you know that was not a big change in my situation and my mom could tell me very little on the phone about about the rescue but she had something positive in her voice she said oh yeah the rescue

18:30and I thought that doesn't sound like the Pirates of course told me the hostage that had been killed like that doesn't sound like it went bad but it was still another month and a half or something before I found out the full story two and a half years I would yeah two years and eight months god no you ate with them you got used to them mm-hmm did you almost become friends with them sure I became friends with you know half friends with it with about half the pirate guard group that was with me at at that point so I was held in other places they also placed me on a tuna ship I was placed on a ship hijacked by Somali pirates for about five months and I think I'm the only Western writer to no life on a ship like that five months yeah for the full spring and summer of 2012 Wow and then it was it was after that that I was held on land alone with the guards and that's when I

19:31got to know the guards you must have had this feeling like they're never gonna find me they're moving me around they're putting me on that was a problem once the especially when they put me on the ship I've I felt like any progress the military had made and in finding my location would have been completely reset you know I was terribly depressed when they first put me on the ship oh I mean and you were there for five months yeah but once I was on the ship I felt better because there were 28 other hostages the crew of the ship and they were great it was it's always better to have company when you're a captive yeah so the the other people that were running the ship when they captured it they were there as well yeah and that was a crew of 28 guys from East Asia and Southeast Asia did they speak English only five of them so five of them were from the Philippines and we

20:25got along with them really good everyone else we had to get to know somehow and the ship they couldn't speak to each other either because they had who's a like a Tower of Babel on the ship and so they developed their own pigeon which is what sailors have done for centuries you know it was a pidgin mixture of English and Chinese and a few other words Wow yeah that was fascinating yeah I could imagine now as a writer you had to be sort of like halfway torn like God if I get out of here what a story yeah yeah I knew I was you know living through interesting things and gathering good material but after at least a year or so in captivity I stopped hoping that I was gonna get out alive I mean things were going so badly as far as the negotiation was concerned that I thought this is really I'm really in deep now is that standard for them to hold people for that long yeah yes and no I

21:24think I was held longer than any Westerner but the men on that ship didn't get out for Anna for a total of five years just under five years they were held but they did get out eventually they did get out in 2016 and I was privileged enough to go to Nairobi and see them there I took him by surprise Wow so you flew out to meet them well I was still living in Berlin and I was following the the case very closely and the I helped raise some money the the lawyers who were running it let me down there and that was really nice and it was nice for the guys too because they were obviously confused it was nothing but very well-meaning but completely anonymous people around them you know and then they were they kind of came out of the terminal in Nairobi and they were still obviously still sort of a little bit confused and I tapped one of them on the shoulder and he

22:18recognized me and it was pandemonium Wow it was wound upon Reuters video I think it's available now how did you eventually get freed they so my mom raised her ransom she raised it with help from family and friends and also some magazines I'd worked for I had some institutions in the US and Germany and when she talked the Pirates down to 1.6 million and I got out for some reason at the very end the Pirates came down like precipitously the very end after 30 years they were holding on for like I think they went down to four or five million or something like that and then at the very end that came down to what was on offer no explanation not really except that from my point of view there were labor there was a labor unrest stirring among the guards so in other words the guards were sick and holding me Oh and so I one day towards the very end but you know a few weeks before I got

23:24out one of the guards actually said Michael we might go on strike right she's right do you need some help with that I can go on a hunger strike if you want slow slow now there was one thing that I read where a guard had left you alone with a loaded rifle and happened more than once what is the what's the thought process there in your mind yeah that was so especially after the first year so and until how many guards you talking about we're talking about seven to fifteen at any given point in how many boats are in the gun well it was a Kalashnikov so a minimum of 16 that's not enough it's not enough and there were there were there were always a few guards who were asleep a few guards who awake and so you go through this thing in your head you think well I can grab the gun I can kill a few guys but it would be suicidal but I went through various scenarios in

24:30my head all the time you know that was a that was a very big temptation because the guns just lay around like junk you know and that was that was a dark period because the question was not just can I blast my way out and live but also should I just take care of it right and kill myself now because I knew that I was causing a whole lot of trouble for my family at home and that were probably military plans to come get me which would put you know seals at risk or special operators at risk and so it's better to just check out and so that was on my mind often especially during the second year were they sympathetic characters in any way I mean did you when you were around them for long periods of time and you're taking into consideration this life that's been thrust upon them mmm-hmm this is the environment they grew up in and this is their I mean you had to have at least in some way God to

25:29know them sure and I went there thinking well you know I'm gonna tell their story somehow yeah did you tell them that yeah but by the time I was captured that didn't matter you know yes of course they they were especially the ones who wanted to talk to me of course they were sympathetic they're they're poor people so the even if it's not true that most Pirates are frustrated fishermen probably only about 20% of them are all of them report all of them need jobs and that's why they became pirates you have to layer on top of that the fact that it cat habit is extremely ruinously expensive Indra in Somalia where does cat come from cut comes from Highlands so it has to be grown in the mountains of Ethiopia Kenya and flown in fresh can't be grown in you know flat hot desert region like like Somalia or Yemen but that's where it's popular especially among Muslims who can't drink

26:25alcohol so it's there's a whole trade in that region of the world and most of most of the time it's legal they only Ilya legalized it in Britain for example in 2014 really yeah I think it's illegal here but um the trade it just flows like water in that in in Somalia and the Arabian Peninsula so the voluntary Coast Guard of Somalia what we've been led to believe that this is how it all started out how did that narrative get established so once they started to capture big ships they fell back on that story which had been true up till then which was which is defending our coastline from fishing so it started that way started started that's not right it's true than the roots of it okay so that's what I'd heard what I had heard as I did was it started because not just because people were fishing out there because they were dumping toxic waste also yeah and that

27:22was that's also true the Mafia was dumping what had a had a the mafia yeah there was there were actual it's been sort of uncovered by Italian journalists but the Italian mafia had found a way to bring waste for you know a certain amount of money down to someplace where they thought nobody would see it again and that some of it washed ashore in 2004 with the Indonesian tsunami that actually reached that part of East Africa so some of those big things that the the Italians dumped over the side of their boats will end up on the beach in Somalia oh so an actual physical VAT or something that they can see what it was and I saw one of them yeah really yeah what was in it I don't know but it was a great big orange great big like weirdly shaped cube how large taller than me so at least eight feet square and it had been used to contain some sort of toxic waste that's what my fixer told me so

28:27but I had seen pictures similar pictures in documentaries so I think it was probably true it's described in the book just briefly but I that's the kind of thing that happened certainly the the Italians were not or the Mafia was not being very you know they were being criminals too so yeah that's that's their business miss your business did you watch the Tom Hanks movie I watched 45 minutes of the Tom Hanks movie in Somalia in Somalia while you were captive yeah holy yeah what is that like well I so I knew that I knew captain Phillips was gonna be a movie when I left that was already clear so they announced it when you left and you got to watch it when I'm in Somalia yeah because by the time this was towards the end of my captivity I had a shortwave radio so I was listening to the radio by the time it came out and went to the Oscars it was all over the BBC so I knew

29:30about it I knew it was out like okay so I'm missing captain Phillips whatever wonder what that's like and then one day all the guards got new smartphones pretty fancy smartphones and they were apparently loaded with a new collection of films and music and whatever to keep them occupied one afternoon I saw two guards just completely wrapped by some sort of film on the phone and I heard some American voices and I wonder what this film is and finally I said me that's Tom Hanks so I knew what they were watching and two weeks later one of the guards actually handed me the phone and said you know Michael look so I saw about 45 minutes of it Wow and of course when he handed me the phone the first thing I went that went through my mind is like okay I'm gonna call mom and I think you find her later turn down the volume and and and call California he took the phone

30:24away before I did that but I had a whole plan I developed a whole plan while I was watching captain Phillips you know get on the plane and Boston Logan or whatever Wow it was so atmospherically it was a pretty good pretty well-done movie but there are a couple of scenes where that would it just wouldn't happen in real life I didn't watch the movie yeah so what was inaccurate about it there was one scene where there was some selection of pirates on the beach so in public and I thought gosh how did they get that that's that's I've never even heard of that before and then uh then I thought about it and thought and realized whoa that yeah I actually wouldn't happen like that in public that was just for dramatic purposes you know I was I was envious of their material at first and then I realized oh they made that up so things like that but the Pirates were

31:14fascinated to see people like them and in some cases their friends portrayed on screen even though we all know how it you know the movie ends very badly for Somali pirates so they knew about the story hope that was based on yeah no question not only that but one of them said that he was friends with one of the Pirates involved and I believe him actually he had the right clan affiliation for that so it's quite possible what was it like to see them watching their story being depicted on the other side of the planet well that's what was weird is that they they were so fascinated by it but we you know otherwise they didn't necessarily like to talk about bad news for pirates or you know like I said when the hostages were released or rescued in the first few days of my captivity I kept hearing that the hostages had been killed so they like to spin things in a good way

32:12for for pirates in general so I just would have assumed they would just ignore captain Phillips because it end so badly they were just fascinated they really were and so what was daily life like for you like you do you ate with them well I separately but sometimes in the same room they made very bad food boiled beans and flavorless boiled goat and that kind but they would eat from a communal platter sort of elsewhere within sight I didn't have to eat from the same planet as the by hand yeah by hand yeah yeah that's very common in that part of the world yeah it really is because utensils just aren't aren't that common and they really like spaghetti so they sort of wrapped the spaghetti around your fingers and I had done that as a free man you know I sort of sat with somalis and and ate that way but as a hostage I was in no mood to be that you know that friendly yeah they

33:14they gave me a fork and I could eat my on my own so how what kind of physical state were you in after two and a half years of this yeah it was pretty bad I was my my immune system had started to fall apart so I don't go into detail too much about this in the book but I had a staph infection of my skin and some other kind of infection my ear and I was just something in my lungs I was just not very I was sick and I was sick constantly for several months before I got out so I knew something had really changed and I think the Pirates were aware of that too slowly I think that probably possibly contributed to them lowering your ransom possibly but but I you know the not they were sympathetic but I it's possible they saw me sort of reaching reaching my physical limit slowly yeah slowly so it's not it's actually can get you pretty quickly no yeah I mean they it wound up just being

34:15that but it was raising boils on my skin and they knew about that so that's not that long ago 2012 to 2014 was when you were really was released and had the infection I mean four years ago that's nothing I'm pushing four years now yeah what is what does it feel like now to be free do you do you still have do have PTSD from it do you get well now I can be happy about it I think the I was released I was sort of I felt better in stages but I wasn't a sudden you know euphoria now I can be really be happy about it I took me about a year to get back to full strength and the symptoms of PTSD that I showed when I first got out which included like hyper hyper vigilance went away slowly as I got physically strong hyper vigilance being like wake up in the middle of the night nightmares that well that nightmares only happened within the first year waking up in the

35:19middle of night that still happens I still don't sleep too well hyper vigilance I mean out in public too many people around you know like you here with vets and I was aware of that as a symptom and I felt at first when we were out in public in Nairobi and I turned to this FBI psychologist who was with me and I said you know am i hyper vigilant he said maybe then I said are you here because you know I might have PTSD he said we don't like to put a label on anything and that was his attitude towards me that was the tack he took and in my case at least it was right eventually he said I said shouldn't I be treated for PTSD or shouldn't I be going to regular talk therapy or something like that and he said you know you don't want to pathologize anything mm-hmm in other words you don't want to create mentally another condition for you for you to recover from you know it's enough

36:09work for your mind and your body to recover quite naturally they know how to do it from all that trauma that's very interesting because I've heard people talk about that with other things particularly with war that you're you're better off not deciding what you have or not being told what you have mhm in my case that's true I mean who knows I think PTSD can be so complicated they're you know they're pharmaceutical solutions yeah that kind of thing for some people the body and mind know how to recover so you have to eat you have to let them do they give you techniques to recover as in instead of explaining or discussing what the issue is do they give you techniques to feel better or to establish more normal existence I know I mean I didn't get a checklist but the psychologist would say you know if something's bothering you write it down but he knew I was a writer

37:07he they made sure they knew that I had a loving family around me when I got back and a great circle of friends in Berlin that's really important I think everybody finds their own way I mean I I knew I was weak I mean I was just physically like a wraith you know when I got out how much weight did you lose no I lost about 40 pounds and when I when I first came out and walked around in Berlin Berlin's a walking City so I tried to lead like a normal day my knees swelled up and my ankle swelled up and they were really painful so I was like I just played a game of football or something you weren't moving while you were there yeah not enough I did yoga but I I didn't go for a jog around the room or something like you sometimes hear from prisoners if I'd done that I think they would have been so startled though they would have shot me but I was not in any kind of shape for a normal

38:07life when I got out and in fact one day when I got back from Berlin I tried to run for a streetcar I just didn't have the musculature for it I simply didn't have a stride to run I could not run well I thought that was really weird but one of the doctors who tested me said well you have a protein deficiency and once I starts to take care of that and I went consciously to the gym and made sure I got stronger and also put on more muscle the mental thing sort of took care of themselves too so there's that body-mind connection was really important and when they're telling you this you have a protein deficiency that you need you know you should exercise and and take care of your body and this is in improving as are they giving you guidelines like this is this is probably a good idea to try to do this I mean are there any strategies that people have to deal with coming out of long-term

39:02incarceration no not specific ones I think it was clear to everyone that I was easily overwhelmed so you know at one point my family sat down with me with all the paperwork that had to be taken care of but I could only deal with that for like an hour at a time so and the debrief a little work Oh Bank things to sign and that sort of thing how so well just let all my affairs were in somebody else's hands when I was for the two and a half or the two and a half years and so we had to sort of rectify a lot of that you know I couldn't plow through it in an afternoon or in a week I had to do it in stages and it was the same thing with like a debriefing with the FBI which I did for three weeks I couldn't always do it for an entire day what would happen my brain would actually seize up I mean I actually would just I got I mean you said earlier when I talk about it I go like this

40:01my whole body would like constrict and I would I would simply part of me would just shut down hey you've you've leveled off now physically like your shoulders but I'm looking at you right now from the our conversation yeah but I don't know when you started talking about it your shoulders it seemed like started it almost visibly rise up probably yeah um but I'm saying when I first got out I would must have been with much more exert was paralytic no I mean I just something inside me just shut down yeah so it you're it just wouldn't you you just didn't have the capacity to sit down and concentrate on anything it wasn't concentration it was a sense of overwhelm yeah yeah well concentrating on too many things at once I think it was also I was also overwhelmed by too many friends you know too many people in the room because too many social cues to read I didn't have

40:53that with the pirates it was real clear I was the hostage they were the guards in some sense we were enemies and that was it and we had real simple things to say to each other and that was it and that was my life for a couple of years after the after the ship it was not complex and so when I got out the complexities of you know a more comfortable life but am you know more elaborate life we're really difficult yeah obviously you were where the time that you were struggling with us you were where the oh it was difficult real clear but what were you confused by that difficulty no not confused I wasn't sure how I was gonna recover but I knew to take it slow and taking it slow was important and how did you ultimately recover yeah one one day at a time like that I mean I've consciously got better physically when I consciously did yoga I went to go into the gym consciously eight well my um my

41:50doctor said don't follow a vegetarian diet but eat a full diet and make sure you get enough protein why not have a vegetarian diet did you need protein but you need a lot of protein a lot you need animal protein specifically yeah yeah now what is your situation now is that you said you still you still have a hard time sleeping and what is it a nightmare issue or is it an anxiety issue no not nightmares but for some reason when it gets so in Somalia when it came time to go to bed at least for a long period they would chain up my feet and I would have to lie on a mattress under a mosquito net and that was it for 12 hours so now when it comes time to sleep instead of time tired I get anxious and then it's possible that I I might wake up you know fully awake after only four hours so I take melatonin it's nothing it's not you know I don't take hard drugs to sleep but I take a little

42:52assistance yeah Wow now this book that you wrote of the desert in the sea how how difficult was it to sit down in front of a computer and sort of recapture these thoughts and transcribed them yeah so that was also sort of blood and sweat the research was blood sweat and tears and so was the writing but I did know at least this the facts of the story so I put those down first and then we went back and did how it felt so the putting everything down which a writer likes to do you know all at once and one sort of great act of creation that would that would have been a little overwhelming so I did it in layers and that was the way to go what were you like before this and what do you like now and what's different I think my my basic self is the same but I I'm more patient I'm more grateful so just getting out alive made me certainly grateful to be around it

44:03was great to see my family and friends again and if I ever start to feel ungrateful for something I have this well of memory that can go back to that's essential and I think in Somalia I also learn to forgive which was you know not an easy process and it's something but I think it's something very essential how so how did you learn to forgive so we talked about picking up a Kalashnikov I was gonna do that I thought about doing that and it was an internal debate for really long time until one point where I actually heard something on the radio from the Pope the new pope I'd never you know even seen before and he gave a very good homily about what forgiveness meant and that resonated and at some point I made a conscious decision to forgive the guards who were around me you know these are the law lowest-ranking guys but they were making my life miserable and I made a conscious

45:00decision to forgive them and I had to do that over and over and that made my mind a whole lot more more stable and so settled which means that unless I had done that I probably would have picked up a gun and killed myself if not them or both that's fascinating that a speech by the Pope could resonate so strongly with you while you're in captivity mhm just forgiveness forgiveness it wouldn't have had to be by the Pope but he was pretty good that's something that people play pay lip service to and you know you hear people saying you should live a life of forgiveness and it's healthier for you but no one can really understand that the way you have for me it was life and death Wow and it's I mean I can't wait to read your book this is a crazy story your don't mean this it's just such an insane experience was that you're you're just you're well of experiences like what you

46:07can draw upon is so different from most people that you're interacting with you must almost feel like you're going through life interacting with privileged children sometimes but the so first of all which is very happy to be back in yeah in the world I grew up in so that's the main thing um but yeah that comes up sometimes you know when people complain about things for example oh it's so horror right or you know you should try hot in Somalia prison where you're shackled to a bed right exactly yeah we're you know idiots in traffic I'm a much more patient driver and so is my mother by the way oh I'm sure I'm so happy to get her son back right yeah she's the heroine of this story I mean she really she really took you know an enormous amount of what was it like to see her after two years oh it was incredible no I mean it was obviously she was on my mind and all my friends and family were

47:03on my mind while it was in Somalia and just to see somebody that I'd been thinking about all this time in a sort of hypothetical way again in you know real life and the way that I really thought I wouldn't overwhelming it was really really fantastic now had you gone to dangerous places for journalism before yes Amalia yeah where'd you gone so for the my second book sweetness and blood I surfed in Gaza Wow and I'd been to northern Iraq and some other places but this was easily the most dangerous what did you do in Gaza I went to see the Gaza surf club and I actually went surfing with him the Gaza surf club this exists what is that so it's a group of Palestinians who like to surf but who don't have enough surfboards and so they organized into a club first to share a couple of surfboards that they had found and managed to manage to buy and also to receive donations from a group of

48:06surfers in Tel Aviv who thought these guys should have boards and so their relationship grew up between a group in Tel Aviv called surfing for peace and the Gaza surf club so Jews in Tel Aviv are donating surfboards to Palestinians Wow it's completely wonderful it's a it's a grassroots peace initiative you know it's been going out for years now but one of the eloquent things that the leader of the surfing for peace group said was you know we're not getting anywhere on an official level so we better do something on sort of a grassroots level I think it's marvelous Wow what do you do now oh right so seeking out danger was never the point you know I tried not to shrink from it but that was not you know I'm not a thrill seeker and that's not the what I'm trying to base my career on or anything like that right now I'm writing a novel so that should keep me seated for a

49:00while what's it about it's about drones drones oh that doesn't sound peaceful it's not but I'm not going to say any more about it yeah I get it um do you ever anticipate yourself traveling for journalism again sure Oh travel yeah but just nothing like this yeah no I don't need to do dangerous travel anytime soon no no yeah some people just want to jump right back into the fire yeah that's not but that was not the point in the first place right what was the point what did you hope to get out of this trip to Somalia well so one one thing that I noticed while I was watching the trial in in in Hamburg was this clash between a modern liberal state which is what Germany is and so it's America by the way and an archaic crime and Germany in fact is newer than the United States in the sense that its Constitution was written in 1949 when nobody was thinking about piracy so the

50:07laws against piracy are extremely lenient and in German law in a way that they're not in Spanish or American law we have laws that date back to when it was a capital crime and basically the Germans didn't know how to deal with these guys and I thought it was fascinating in the first place that this ancient crime had revived after a couple centuries of relative quiet you know and so I that tension on its own was interesting and that was worth the book because nobody was quite approaching it that way you know so that tension is still interesting and that tension is still alive so there are certainly threats to modern liberal states going on around the world so what were the trials in Berlin there was a trial in Hamburg and I was going back and forth from Berlin it was ten guys from Somalia who I tried to hijack a cargo ship that belonged to a a German ship ship company

51:04and that was based in Hamburg I think they were overpowered by the Dutch Navy but the Dutch handed him over to the Germans in fact the Dutch said okay we'll do this as long as we don't have to try them because everyone knew from the outset that there was going to be a problem trying Somalis well in what way in Europe in general but especially in Germany I think there's a actually a law against shipping them back to Somalia because it's considered not a safe place for them for them even for them and I think that's nuts once they were convicted I think they should have been deported after they served their - that's so bizarre but but if they were shipped back to Somalia how would they be treated like what is the government like in Somalia man good question sanely corrupt I asked some my parents about that it is corrupt it's a it's either corrupt or non-existent so

51:57the the government is Somalia is are focused around Mogadishu and it just doesn't have that much power and the provinces and I was in one of the one of the provinces and because the provinces don't get a whole lot of money from Mogadishu so that they run their own businesses wins in some cases piracy I asked one of my guards what would happen if a pirate went and got thrown into jail in some other country and then came back and tried to you know set up friendships again with his old pirate buddies or whatever you know would he be killed would he be in in dangerous no no no problem they probably let you right back in no problem yeah yeah I mean is there any sort of punishment for them when they get back to Somalia is there any penal system potentially there is yeah so that's not considered a crime there are yes it is so there there are laws on the books especially in the regions and even

52:54prisons for pirates the problem is that clan relationships are a lot more important than newly written laws and so even pirate to go to jail this was true about one boss in my case might get out again so this guy this guy who was a pirate boss in my case wound up in jail while I was still captive for one month in Mogadishu and wound up walking Wow and he was captive for piracy I think for having weapons that the government didn't expect to see in one of his houses so something off to the side but it's this really sketchy system of bartering and payoffs and let's who you know and who you're related to and the there are other prisons for you know low ranking pirates and Puntland and also in Galkayo where I was it's a crapshoot how much time those guys are gonna spend in jail and what happened with the people in Germany they got a total of seven years I think or an average in German in

54:00Germany and then what happened when they were released nothing Wow yeah that's a whole separate story which I haven't even you know started started to address but as it turned out a few of them went back to Somalia anyway and probably went right back into the business uh well or something else you know illicit or profitable or whatever yeah and there's a wide variety of people that they target right they target people in individual crafts they target large boats commercial vessels yep they they did all of that I mean in fact I met hostages from all of those you know from the whole range so how many hostages did you meet over the two years and eight months a total of 30 so the the crew on the fishing ship the tuna vessel was 28 and then I met to say Xiaohua hua fishermen the two guys from the Seychelles were small-time so they were just on a small craft would

54:54it say shells the Seychelles is a chain of islands off Africa it's it's a country that belongs to Africa but it has a French name the the guys on the tuna vessel were from a you know relatively big ship the guys from the Seychelles were from a small private craft and I was an example of someone captured on land and these people that were from the small private craft who were they trying to get money from just anyone who knows them is that how they do this yeah whoever anybody I mean of course they ask from the government but the government doesn't always pay you know the given government yeah just it's just the whole system seems so insane that they've got I mean they keep people for years and years yeah but they have just a whole collection of them oh they're trying to extract money from people that know them yeah as it turns out they're not very good at it so

55:56pirates are in the kidnapping business but they don't always know what they're doing the the bosses I think got used to demanding a lot of money from shipping companies and finding out that if you hold a ship stubbornly for a long time you get a lot of money from the insurance company or whatever I that that calculation doesn't work with human beings so in other words everyone else on earth who negotiates for a human being expects that the person's price to go down as the time you know wears on and it took a while for pirates to understand that Wow what is it I mean when you're Dee you're dealing with all this like what what is it like on your psyche when you're getting two years in two and a half years in and you you have some sort of light at the end of the tunnel what what is it what does it feel like well I didn't know there was light at the end of the tunnel so two years in that's

56:57where you know it was either forgive the guards or my self-destruct it was also by then I had also deliberately given let go of having any kind of hope so that was the second survival strategy I had to I'm not hope that I was gonna get out because hoping was had a downside that cycle of hope and despair was extremely damaging to my mental well-being so the after going through that cycle a few times I'm like I have to find a different way one of the things that I've gotten out of travel is I think your view of the world changes when you see the way people are living in different places you you your spectrum expands you start recognizing I go I might be used to Southern California but this is not how they do things in Ohio this is not how they do things in Italy this is not when you go as far as being a captive in Somalia your your spectrum is massive I mean

58:12your view of the world being entrenched in that life and being with those people while they're chewing this narcotic and carrying around coalition of coughs and yelling at each other in a foreign language and watching fistfights and realizing like they don't have anything either what how much has that changed you as a human being and your your view of human life on earth well I think enormous ly I mean I you're right it expanded my range and my my understanding of what other people think they obviously come from a completely different perspective in Somalia not only are they Muslim and African but they're also very isolated so Somalia as a as a rule has always been difficult to penetrate for outsiders that was true when Richard Burton was there in the 19th century - it's it's a closed culture and they have their own way of thinking and also the also the language

59:13is not related to most other languages you've heard unless you you're familiar with languages in Ethiopia did you learn any of it yeah a little bit mm-hmm but I resisted learning it from the guards I when I was there I thought about it like um in in Berlin you realized that a lot of East Germans when during the Communist era were taught Russian in school and a lot of them hated it and I was not in a mood to learn somalia somali once i was a captive mm-hmm it was similar to that I I learned a few words but I never had a good teacher and of course when I was a journalist I was relying on translators I would imagine that as a writer that spectrum the expansion of the spectrum although there's no way you would ever barter it off or bargain to have those experiences to broaden your spectrum it has to have changed the way you put pen to paper mm-hmm and view the world and your your

60:16ability to describe things mhm yeah I think it you you realize that each individual has certain certain boundaries you know and and certain certain self definitions and those self definitions can be the the the distance between one individual and another can be enormous but is since also their superficial distinctions so yeah but they're inescapable reality is so alien in comparison to someone who lives in Bel Air mm-hmm oh absolutely just this this is just that contrast between this world that you were so deeply entrenched in for two and two years and eight months mhm like that has got to change the way you look at human life yeah because the gulf and wealth is so enormous I mean they can't imagine the amount of money it takes to live in Bel Air and the other way around I mean I think it's very difficult for someone in California to imagine how little you can

61:22get by on and how close to the earth some most people on the planet live yeah there's a statistic that I read once that I repeat all the time because it still baffles me that if you make more than thirty four thousand dollars a year you're in the 1% of the world of the world you know possibly yeah and that is probably magnified many fold in Ethiopia yeah in Ethiopia and Somalia I mean it's it's very you know in some ways although they want money all the time especially if they're criminals the money that we're used to sort of greasing our path through life around here it's just not available it's just not not part of the reality what do they do with money when they get it well it depends if if they're pirates they splash out on a fancy car or cot you see fancy cars sure oh yeah no I was placed in fancy cars I mean only ya know so the Pirates had great cellphones

62:26expensive SUVs weapons that they had bought you know from abroad and maybe a weapons bazaar in Mogadishu or something like that but that's not cheap either they bragged about how the the bullets cost like a dollar each you know and one of them might might have been wearing a band of five hundred bullets and the cut is expensive so lots of things cost an enormous amount of money in Somalia but if you're you know if you're a very ordinary Somalia Molly you you're getting by on you know less than a dollar a day so there's the ordinary Somalis who are not criminals or not pirates at least and then and that's the majority the majority and then you have these pirates that are essentially running through the streets and mercedes-benz Alexa DS they're like gangsters and that's that's actually how once Somali who had some connection to Germany described him to me he you know

63:23he he was wandering around and got Kyle because it was his hometown in some way hers in ancestral town and he he had met some this was before I got captured it was like they were you know they had wrapped thumping from the SUV stood there really American rap who knows who knows there's lots of actually good African ramp really oh yeah senegalese rap if you ever because I love music that I don't understand the words to oh yeah yeah I can send you some band names please do well yeah oh yeah when I write I like to listen to stink things I don't understand yeah cuz it I can still write and now think about their words right when you're around these gangsters and you do you get this sense of like oh god like they this is they need this money like this month they want to keep this going they're gonna need more money funnel this is just a never-ending cycle that's

64:17that's obviously how it seemed yeah and that's true I think some of the guards some of the lower ranking and maybe some of the gentler guards the ones who got along with me did not necessarily want to be gangsters for the rest of their lives so I think for some people the plan was got a bunch of money and get out you know but as of as an operation yeah it just needed there was no limit to the money they needed or wanted and so that so in the end the the real motivation is not you know illegal fishing but greed and do they have any sort well it but it initially started with an illegal fishing though right yeah absolutely do they have any sort of ultimate goal like one day I'm gonna retire I'm gonna be have a mansion in the hills yes I think individually they do and some bosses get a mansion and a big compound and and live large and then they they try and

65:14hire younger younger pirates and that kind of thing the thing about piracy and also terrorism so al-shabaab is the al Qaeda aligned group in Somalia al-shabaab and pirates are the two main corporate structures in Somalia so in other words if you're a young man and you know how to use a gun those are the places you join up with if you want to be upwardly mobile if you want to impress somebody and and get promotions and make money and and marry a wife those were the most available options otherwise you know you had scarce jobs maybe some frustrating sheep herding or fishing more interesting jobs in the cities but not very many and then maybe a pretty well-paid UN job you know if you're lucky so these things are very tempting for young young Somalis and even if the pirate bosses are no longer capturing ships on the water it's fallen off quite a bit in the last few years

66:14they've still got other businesses going on including like I said human smuggling and gun smuggling does anybody have aspirations to get out did you any did you run into anybody that understands that the rest of the world like there are opportunities to live in a place where you don't have this kind of systemic violence and crime and yes definitely I mean I think they don't necessarily understand the rest of the world very well but they know that Somalia is in trouble and so a lot of people wanted to get out and some of the guards to talk to me about wanting to go to Europe but one of them who did and I described him in the book he wound up getting married in Mogadishu I found it so I you know I wound up with a wedding photograph from him so he wound up not going which was smart get in touch with them not exactly one guy found me on Facebook and course Jesus

67:08Christ one of your captors one of the guards that one of the gently guys was that like when you get a message on facebook from someone who held a gun to you at first I didn't want to answer him but slowly I realized that I could get good information from him Facebook we're not friends I mean I've explained this before but we're not we didn't become I don't let him you know into my life on Facebook but no we message each other it's okay hmm you set limits so yeah still do you when you said that you you had forgiveness mm-hmm that was very important d-did you express that to him yes at least in my tone I mean he's he was one of the easiest people to forgive you he was he was never ignore us or violent towards me I mean except for belonging to this violent violent gang I think he was personally never you know as obnoxious as some of the other guards could be did you try to communicate to

68:17him that the rest of the world is different did you try to communicate to him what it's like where where you grew up and then your experience as a human being is so wildly different no his no that wasn't that wasn't our topic of conversation so did you ever think of introducing that I got some of that information from him let's put that way he told me a little bit about his background and it was military as a matter of fact which I think is typical so in other words a lot of them are trained gunman I I wasn't anxious to share a lot of information with him but you know if he reads my book he'll learn it there's a lot of personal background in the book Wow it's it's so hard to even imagine you know there's some people that tell you things you know like I can kind of imagine that but your story is so up it's almost impossible to even imagine and so unique in that

69:19you grew up in this incredibly western world this this you know first world you're in Germany and then you go to Somalia and get captured and stay there and it alters your reality yeah it did it really did and it was it's a lot more up than I expected it to be in other words I didn't you know I wouldn't have wished for this I wouldn't have wished for this on my family either I couldn't imagine no deep do you think about Somalia do you think about what what it must be like to be a person that's stuck there that lives there I had plenty of opportunity to think about that you know that's that was obviously behind what what my guards were doing so that was on my mind quite a lot and that's that's where you realized that actually most of the world lives quite poor the Somalia is one of the poorest countries so it's even under you know the average line for the for the rest of

70:16the world but no it's clear that most of the world doesn't live like like we do in the West what was a day like there like what did you typically do other than be shackled to sleep and yeah well it depended where I was if I was on the ship then there was a we slept I slept in a cabin along with ten other hostages and then we came out to the deck in the morning and had instant coffee and something for breakfast and the food was not bad because it was still an operating fishing vessel and we got piles of rice and basically Chinese food from the kitchen as long as supplies last it you know once I was on land and then I just woke up alone under a mosquito tent and wondered what to do that day you know I had to live in my head quite a bit if I didn't have paper and pen to write with which I didn't for at least a year and a half I had to sort of write in my head I mean I actually

71:16composed paragraphs in my head and went through them and memorized them and eventually I had a two hour routine in the morning where I just lay lay still and went through these words in my head that was one way to keep saying so you remembered the individual paragraphs and you put them in an order mm-hmm I was revising books in my head so I would go through and say okay this needs work you know might as well get to it and then I would compose a paragraph refine it memorize it all in my head you know I have friends that do comedy that way they don't really write you only write in their head yeah and but they still call it writing uh-huh and I found that interesting they said well this is the best way for me to constantly remember it that's interesting yeah well yeah I mean that's what I had to do commit it to memory and so you sat down there and when you were going over the material

72:06this was a purposeful strategy in order to keep your sanity give yourself some some order and keep my mind occupied and when I and I would memorize that and then I also had like a list of names from the ship to memorize so I had written all their names down with the proper spellings right I was still optimistic when I when I was on the ship and so I I had an incredibly complex list of names from the crewmen which I lost and so Oh lost them I lost the list between the ship and land so remembering their names became part of my morning routine too and this is obviously fanatic right because you're dealing with Asian language I had learned to spell them though luckily when I got out I got a list of the crewmen's names from the FBI Wow when did this book come out it just came out last week and it's been a few years in the making is it difficult to do conversations like this no like I

73:12said it's it's easier now that I've written it so I'm fluent with this material now but when I first got out I wouldn't have been been able to talk about it like this I would have I would have just bummed up I wouldn't have known where to start what do you anticipate doing once this is once the dust is settled and this is you know firmly established and you're done with the promos well I'm I'm working on a new book so I'm you know the novel the drone working on the novel and I'm following the story a couple of stories in the meantime to some some journalism and I work for hostage us at the moment - which is a good nonprofit that supports families that might have somebody in in captivity somewhere and the US government as it turns out helps families in in really good ways but in the ways that they can't in terms of just letting the families know what you

74:11know what to expect and what might be going on with their their people hostage u.s. can step in and help I think your story's really important and I think it's not just important in terms of like your that the fact that you've had an incredibly deep view of what it's like to live there but that you you've got your life back yeah and in in this experience of no hope and sorrow and captivity and all the the various struggles that you went through you've experienced something that just very very few human beings even in the 7 billion people on this planet and all their struggles and trials and tribulations there's what what small handful have been held captive by Somali pirates and then managed to live well there's a there's a network of former captives and that's what hostage us is about but you know how many people have been held captive Oh more than you realize

75:14but they're you know and they're several of us are still alive and so it's the best people for me to talk to when I first got out was other people who've been captive David Rohde who was held hostage by the Taliban when he was working for the New York Times was also on the board of the Pulitzer Center when I got captured so he followed my story talking to him after I got out was fantastic it was better than a psychologist and I was aware of that he escaped you know so I was aware of his story when I was there so we were thinking about each other in a way you know and we're friends no it's great the the talking to someone who's been through it is psychologically the best thing now what are the numbers in terms of how many people who've been held captive by some of the Somalis Oh Myles okay currently yeah it's down to about four Iranian fishermen that's it write an ad

76:04set and then a couple of who are actually captured by pirates and then a couple of Kenyans who I think were handed over to a pirate gang so it's much reduced you know and in fact the Nahum three crew when they got out was the last big crew that was being held by pirates they got out in 2016 so the pirate era you might say sort of tapering off but why is that oh because while so was while I was there pirates stopped being so active on the water and I slowly gleaned that from from the BBC or whatever I was listening to thanks I came here to write a story about pirates and now it's not even a story you've become the staff I became the story that's not good but it fell off in 2013 maybe even a little earlier late 2012 partly because the boss has shifted their focus to other businesses and they found it less profitable to hold people probably also because in my case I mean my my case

77:06wasn't moving along and but mainly because and this is this still has to be true to keep piracy down cargo ships sail now with with armed teams you know contractors and it turns out a spatter of gunfire in the water can keep a skiff from coming on that's enough and it should be enough and that that's really the main the main defense the naval teams that still cruise off Somalia there it's the it's a very important formality but I don't think they practically stopped individual cases the way an armed team does and there was a lot of fear about that beforehand a lot of fear about putting weapons on a civilian cargo ship you know a merchant ship somebody thought a few people thought there would be like an arms race in the water and then you know pirates would come on with heavier weapons or whatever turns out not to be the case now what did the bosses shift their attentions to like I

78:06said probably some human smuggling drug and weapons smuggling you know they have they have portfolios they have other businesses and they just roll it over into something else if if piracy becomes too difficult and that's what the precautions that the shipping industry now takes have been enough to make it too difficult for the bosses did you take any consideration or do you anticipate in any way a cure for what ails them yeah in fact that was another idea you know that sent me there I wanted to investigate the possibility of just ginning up legitimate business in Somalia because America went through the same cycle three three hundred years ago you know we had pirates when we were Colonials we had pirates very savage ones who sailed from the eastern seaboard out to Africa actually out to the Horn of Africa and they were very brutal to Muslims so it was reversed and

79:01we recovered from by becoming a country and becoming responsible for our own economy you know what's going on in Somalia now it's a lot of illicit business activity but it's business activity you turn it into something licit and give people jobs they're not going to be pirates anymore and there there are ways to do that and I think slowly people who have power and Somalia are figuring that out but it's still a lot of criminals that have too much power in Somalia well listen Michael I didn't want to touch your book until I met you I wanted to I wanted to somehow another have a fresh conversation and get your perspective on this but I think your your view of the world is very valuable and it's just very very different and I'm so happy that you got out and I'm so happy I'm so happy you wrote this book and I can't wait to check it out it's available now the

79:57Desert Inn the sea and just thank you thank you for being here really really appreciate it yeah thanks for having me all right