Welcome to Karen Hunter is awesome.

And in the United States of America, we seem addicted to violence.

We're definitely addicted to guns.

And there is a cost to that.

There's a consequence.

And so I had a discussion with the author of A Thousand Ways to Die, the true cost of violence on Black Life in America. He is a Pulitzer Prize award-winning journalist. Tremaine Lee. This is his new book. And this is our conversation. So welcome back to the show, Tremaine Lee. Thank you. It's always an honor. It's

an honor and a pleasure. It's not just an honor and a pleasure. It's a privilege. So thank you. Thank you. Thanks for coming through. What was the impetus to writing this? This book in so many ways, and I don't say it hyperbolicly, but it's like my life's work. The actual seed of this book began more than 20 years

ago when I was intern in Philly at the Daily News. And I met a young brother named Kevin Johnson,

who was shot and wounded, left the quadriplead during a robbery. And when I met him in his hospital

room, he was full of life and full of buoyancy, despite the fact that he couldn't feel anything

below his neck. And he talked about his dreams of walking again and running, and he was just full of life.

And I looked across his bed and saw his mother in the pain in her eyes.

And she knew how much he lost.

She knew what he paid.

But then she started telling me about the actual price it would cost just to get him home.

She talked about needing a special van for his wheelchair, the wheelchair itself, will cost just to get him home. She talked about needing a special

van for his wheelchair, the wheelchair itself, a new ramp to get into the crib, the doors needed

to be widened so we can get in there, new outlets needed to be fixed so that his breathing

machine could work properly. And so I started to realize that people might not care about

young black men like Kevin Johnson, but maybe they care that we're all paying a price, right? That society pays a price for this gun violence in actual dollars because they don't have private insurance. My cynical approach where I said, you know what, but I'm not going to tell this story. But then two years into writing this story finally, in 2017, I had a heart attack and almost died. And I was just

38 years old. And my daughter then, who was six years old, was asking me, Daddy, how and why?

And I, with no preexisting conditions, no family history, nothing, I had to engage what was really

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