Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Ray Galen. Today, I'm joined by

New York Times bestselling author Sebastian Yoke. In addition to his books, he's an award-winning

journalist, Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker, and has worked as a contributing

editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News. Earlier this year, he released his

latest book Freedom, which is available wherever fine books are sold. Sebastian, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much for having me. So I asked you this question before we started recording, but I'm

going to ask you again because there are probably a lot of folks who know you probably first and most

for your book The Perfect Storm, which is a great read, it's subsequently made into a movie. I asked

you how often does it sort of make you scratch your head that the expression a perfect storm is now

utilized in every aspect of like the English lexicon. There must have been a sort of hole in the

language and need for that phrase. I got it from a meteorologist. I didn't come up with it. A

meteorologist I was interviewing about this crazy storm I was writing about. He was tearing his

hair out trying to explain to me why it was so bad. And you finally, he was like, look, it was like

a perfect storm. Like every variable that could make a storm bad was in this storm. And so, of

course, being a writer journalist, I was like, oh, it's a cool phrase. That's definitely going

in the book. And then my editor convinced me to make it a title of the book. I was reluctant to

because people had died in that storm. They're families that lost loved ones. And I didn't want to

say it was perfect. I mean, that felt kind of insulting. But my editor convinced me that there was a

way to work around that that it was respectful. And so we went ahead with that. And there's probably

a lot of folks listening for home. Maybe that's the only book of yours they've ever read. But you've

written subsequent ones that really I think dive much deeper into this idea of camaraderie,

of comradeship, of brotherhood and sisterhood. A lot of it around combat, obviously in Afghanistan,

...