Travis Barker

After some opening talk about a young child who resists being put down after several days together in Utah, the conversation moves to a documentary that, according to the speaker, "came out today." Work on it began shortly after the speaker's book was released. At that point the speaker was sober and had survived a plane crash, but was still struggling with the idea of ever flying again and with survivor's guilt.

The directors wanted an ending in which the speaker would simply look at a plane, act as if about to board one, or walk toward one. The speaker refused even to stage it. Over time the speaker came to accept being afraid to fly, and says the fear dictated how touring worked: days on a bus to New York, and crossings to England on the Queen Mary 2. The band could reach England in about 10 hours, while the speaker needed three weeks. Some crossings ran into 30-foot waves and 170 mile per hour winds, which made the speaker ask whether the ship was really any safer than a plane.

The fear also shaped the speaker's family. The children grew up without flying and, in the speaker's words, came to associate a plane with "a metal container where people die," because that is what happened to the speaker's two best friends and the two pilots. The speaker saw flying again as a way to show the children they could do it too, and possibly to break "the trauma and the spell" left by the accident.

The speaker describes the recovery as a list of things people said would never happen again, such as running and playing the drums, each crossed off in turn. Never flying again was the one limit the speaker had set personally, and it was the last to fall. Asked how long it took to board a plane again, the speaker answers: 20 years.

I lost 20 years with this thing having power over me. But it just, it was like a monster. It kept getting bigger and bigger.

The other side of the conversation makes a probability argument: surviving one plane crash is extremely unlikely, and the chance of being in a second one is very low. It also acknowledges that someone who has lived through a crash will not think about it in those terms. The same speaker mentions a 22-year-old son who dislikes flying and drove 16 hours round trip instead of flying back from Utah, which the speaker calls "way more dangerous." When flying privately, that speaker says they check that the pilot is good and the plane has been maintained, and sometimes fly on a plane owned by someone they know. They add that in the end "I just got to have faith."

The first flight after 20 years "was nothing like I'd imagined it." The speaker made a deal with their wife, who had gone along on tour buses and kept trips close to home. If there was ever a place she wanted to go that required flying, she should not mention it until the night before, and they would leave the next morning. That is how the flight happened. According to the speaker, it "contained none of the awful nightmares" imagined over the years, and a good experience was needed to cancel out the last bad one.

The speaker also credits coming to terms with the families of the dead, including a godson who was the speaker's assistant's son and died in the crash, and that godson's mother and Che's mother. The speaker says there were "no hard feelings," and that the survivor's guilt was the speaker's own. The speaker imagined the roles reversed and asked whether the others would have wanted the speaker to stop flying and let the fear take over, and concluded "of course not."

The fear has not fully gone. The speaker contrasts a wife and bandmates who fly easily, and who can look forward to a trip such as rock climbing, with the speaker's own thoughts before travel: "am I going to make it?" The speaker has interrupted that pattern "to the best of my ability," but it still happens a little, and booking flights without those thoughts is still hard.

The other speaker praises doing this in public so others can take inspiration. The speaker who survived the crash adds that other people's version might be a car or bus accident, and that they too can keep moving.

One person, AM, survived the crash along with the speaker but lived only about another year before dying of a drug overdose. After leaving the burn center and getting through most of the recovery, the speaker struggled to find anyone else who had been in a plane crash, been severely burned, and lost people. The speaker found many support groups for people grieving someone lost in a plane crash, but none for this combination, and calls trying to navigate it "kind of just lonely."

A few days before the documentary came out, someone kept tagging the speaker in posts about a young woman named Riva. She had been in a plane crash, had 50% of her body burned, and lost her mother in the crash. The speaker says they had never met anyone with even a roughly similar experience, so they flew her out to attend the premiere and told her that meeting her meant as much to the speaker as it did to her. The other speaker calls it "a very cool human experience": two people who had been through something horrible and came out the other side finding comfort in each other.

The closest earlier version of this, the speaker says, came right after the accident. At a dinner, Sully, the pilot who landed a plane in the river, came over and shook the speaker's hand without saying a word. The two speakers note that birds brought that plane down, and that even "the smallest error" matters in flying.

Even so, the speaker prefers flying to the ship. The speaker describes the Queen Mary 2 in detail. It has a morgue, because many passengers are around 80 years old and taking their one transatlantic crossing. The speaker believes someone dies on every crossing, and says the speaker's crew, assistant and tour manager would hear when "someone passed." The ship also has a jail and police for its thousands of passengers. The speaker found it strange that the crossing almost celebrates passing the spot where the Titanic lies: the movie plays on board and the crew announces it.

The crossings also had good sides. The speaker says they would practice all day, run miles around the outside of the ship, and play drums four hours a day and run two hours a day. By arrival they felt fully ready for tour. The ship moves so slowly it hardly looks like it is moving, and for 10 days there is nothing to see but water, until birds show up near land. The speaker has made the trip seven times.

The other speaker says they would rather fly, because if something goes wrong in mid-ocean there is nowhere to land a helicopter and no way for anyone to reach the ship. The speaker who made the crossings describes one storm. They believe the ship lost a couple of windows, and passengers were mostly confined to their rooms. Four or five days into the trip, in the middle of the crossing, the ship would rise and then come crashing down. The internet usually went out, and the speaker would watch something in the room and wait for things to calm down. The waves were about 35 feet, the speaker thinks. On the positive side, they once saw the northern lights from the ship and found them beautiful.

The speaker also considered a cargo ship as a way to reach Australia. The idea came from KRS1, who the speaker says was on the Queen Mary 2 twice at the same time. When asked whether something had happened to make him avoid planes, KRS1 reportedly said he simply doesn't like flying. He had mentioned cargo ships for places that have no passenger cruises. The speaker thinks a boat to Australia would take about a month but never went. The other speaker says even the 20-plus-hour flight is hard enough.

This leads to a discussion of Polynesian voyagers who reached Hawaii by boat with no internet, no newspapers, and no weather forecasts. The two speakers ask where those voyagers got water, how they survived for what must have been months, and whether they ever returned. One answer offered is "Plan B is making Plan A work." The exchange ends on how far human ingenuity and the will to survive can go "when pushed to the limits."

Building on that point, the speaker describes a friend, chef Edo, a plant-based raw chef who took a vow of silence 30 years ago. According to the speaker, Edo fasts 160 days a year on juice and water, for reasons described as cleansing and disease prevention. He gets very thin, then returns to his normal weight in the second half of the year. Neither speaker is convinced. One asks who told him it was good, and both say they doubt it is. The speaker grants it "might not even be good."

The other speaker gives their own view on fasting, framed as their belief rather than established fact. They say fasting is easier on a ketogenic diet, because the body turns to burning fat and appetite is weaker. They say "a lot of data" shows fasts of three to five days are beneficial and cause autophagy. They also say many doctors tell people with cancer to fast and follow a ketogenic diet because "cancer cells want glucose." They suggest that on a plant-based diet heavy in carbohydrates, skipping a day of food is harder because of what they call the "insulin dump." They still say they cannot see why anyone would fast for six months. No source for these claims is cited in the conversation.

The speaker, who says fasting even a day before surgery is hard, replies that they eat a lot of protein from lentils, beans and other whole foods rather than mock meats, and that their blood work shows top-notch protein. The speaker adds that there are "a lot of junk food meat eaters, a lot of junk food vegans" and that the point is getting your diet dialed in.