At age 38, Tremaine Lee turned in the rough draft of his first book. It was about the cost of violence on black life in America, and that's when the unthinkable happened. A massive heart attack that almost took his life.

But there was another weight on my heart that I had never fully engaged with. As a journalist for,

you know, my entire career, operating on the edge of death and survival, black death and

survival in particular, and a family history pocked with early death and violence. I had to

engage with that in a way that I had never expected to fully.

Coming up on more to the story, part one of a very personal conversation about life, death, and navigating journalism as a black man in America.

Stay with us.

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This is more to the story. I'm Al Letson. Tremaine Lee is a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning

journalist. He's an MSNBC contributor and hosts the Into America podcast about the intersection

of blackness, power, and politics. And after surviving a massive heart attack,

Tremaine began to think deeply about the weight he's been carrying. All the stories he's reported

over the years about violence, all the trauma that generations of black men and his family have endured.

That story became his book, A Thousand Ways to Die, the True Cost of Violence on Black

Life in America. Tremaine and I have so much to talk about that we're going to split this up into

two episodes and just a heads up. It's going to get pretty personal. Tremaine, man, thank you so

much for coming on. Brother, it's an honor and a pleasure to be here with you, man. So thank you. Yeah, man, thank you so much for coming on.

Brother, it's an honor and a pleasure to be here with you, so thank you.

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