This year’s Aspen Ideas Festival fellows — astute 20- and 30-somethings running up-and-coming nonprofits and innovative business start-ups from the U.S. and some 12 different countries — salute their attendance.
(Editor’s note: In this two-part story, The Aspen Institute’s annual capstone event renders reflections on the potency of the 2024 Aspen Ideas Health and Aspen Ideas Festival. Part I sets the scene and frames Ideas Health; Part II takes readers through the Ideas Fest.)
While attending the linked Aspen Ideas Health and Aspen Ideas Festival between June 20-29, the collegial atmosphere coalesced gradually as if aboard a cruise ship as journalists, volunteers, security, donors, patrons, scholars, celebs, chattering class, pundits, world leaders and diverse corporate catalysts all ebbed and flowed like dice-cast critters into various tide-pool venues about the idyllic, 40-acre Herbert Bayer-designed Aspen Institute campus. Like any assembly, whether at a watering hole on the Serengeti, around a pool table, or attending a think tank conference, kinetic energy alters the status quo.
As attendees became accustomed to each other’s faces, urban armor dropped away and spontaneous conversations erupted through proximity. Here, as opposed to a monastery where everything is stripped away to find the divine nut, the summer mountains embraced the attendees as comfort blended with the minimalist Bayer milieu, so achievers might yield a festival-prodded conscience into bettering the world. This, of course, is the hopeful perpetuation of the model for the original Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, conceived by Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke in 1949.
Guided bird watching or yoga options commenced early each day. Thus fortified, selecting between a buffet of analytical ventilations stuffed into the same time slots throughout the day became the regular chitchat under the breakfast and lunch big-top, followed by hustling between seminar rooms, tents and auditoriums. Choosing between a panel of heavy hitters dissecting “U.S. and China: Edging toward the Brink” or “Draw Away Your problems: A Workshop” with a rarified New Yorker cartoonist became a quandary.
A luncheon of hearty salads, seared tuna, tofu or chicken breasts fueled comingling opportunity, while originalists could opt for grass-fed wieners from a lawn cart. Throughout the day, an espresso bar or the juice stand renewed, along with organic snack stands punctuating ubiquitous sitting nooks.
Attendees amble about and under artists-brothers Mike and Doug Starn’s “Will U Won’t U” bamboo sculpture over the Anderson Park walkway at the Aspen Ideas Health and Aspen Ideas Festival 2024.
When viewed from outside today’s privileged event, with venture capitalists and CEOs populating the multi-faceted panels, skepticism can arise; yet, few other conference locales can match such a disarming Shangri-La for crosspollination. At the same time, an observer could see that about 20% of all audiences at the institute’s annual headliner were scrolling non-germane phone habits during presentations. An app that allowed strollers to look at their phones and alert when others were about to collide with them might have helped.
All this amidst the cognoscenti-studded global affairs panels and topical interviews, which this year drew upon 165 Ideas Health and 341 Ideas Fest speakers, interposed with intriguing under-the-radar subjects — such as the mind of a sociopath, roundworms curtailing autoimmune disease and wolves at our doorstep — is available to those with access and a lanyard-draped pass.
For paying customers, a Patron Pass cost $14,000 for the full nine-day event, while some purchased $5,000 passes for the smaller blocks of one of the two Ideas Fest sessions, slightly less for the preceding Ideas Health. Aspen Public Radio reported on June 24 that selected public events “mostly ranged from $100 to $200,” while a June 29 Saturday pass cost $750. For the retail pilgrim, lodging costs in Aspen, if available, added thousands more. Festival organizers provided Aspen Journalism with a press pass.
Though the ambience of placing one elbow to elbow with luminaries may be unaffordable for many, the Aspen Institute posts a video library of many past and current discussions within the labyrinthian aspenideas.org/sessions. For your phone, the institute offers the 2024 Aspen Ideas app of video replays bordering on entirety, mini-bios and blogs of the extensive presenters. The app and all content are free.
After being clinically diagnosed as a sociopath as a tween, author Patric Gagne talked about her life struggle to learn emotions, as detailed in her book “Sociopath: A Memoir.”
First smitten with the backwater town of Aspen in 1945, Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke envisioned a potential cultural and intellectual center, based upon the ideal of body, mind and spirit coupled with an international ski destination. This they dubbed the “Aspen Idea.”
Walter Paepcke, the framer of Aspen tourism, then founded the Aspen Ski Corp. (today’s Aspen Skiing Co.), the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (today’s Aspen Institute), the Aspen Music Festival and the International Design Conference (IDCA). Hatched in 1951 as a follow-up to the institute’s first think-in — the 1949 Goethe Festival — the institute’s IDCA premiered from 1951 to 2004, gathering bohemian attention in the 1970s with its accessible pre-Burning Man vibe.
The long-running IDCA was based upon the Bauhaus philosophy of an alliance between modern art, design and commerce. Paepcke initially enlisted Bayer, the former Bauhaus master teacher whom Paepcke had recruited to Aspen, to curate the annual event, which attracted businessmen, graphic artists and industrial designers. This narrowed with time into a largely design-oriented group of speakers and attendees.
In 2003, when Walter Isaacson came on board as Aspen Institute CEO, he conceived his mission to broaden the scope of the institute’s annual hood ornament event beyond design, creating the Aspen Ideas Festival. In 2005, Isaacson launched the first iteration to examine global and social issues and new ideas, headlining Jane Goodall, Toni Morrison, Jim Lehrer and Arthur Schlesinger.
Today, the depth and breadth of the evolving festival attracts a growing number of influential attendees from around the world. Along with multiplying other high-profile Aspen events, great skiing and the post-pandemic diaspora that highlighted Aspen as a safe place for wealth, the evolution of Paepcke’s Aspen Idea has wrought an industrial tourism machine in the Roaring Fork Valley the likes of which he may have never imagined.
This year’s Aspen Ideas Health Festival (June 20-23) preluded the red-meat diet of topical dialectic to come during the two-part Aspen Ideas Festival (June 23-29). Added as the opener to the Ideas Fest in 2014, Ideas Health brings together “a global community of over 1,000 attendees, including healthcare and public health practitioners, researchers, business leaders, policymakers and advocates,” the Aspen Institute’s website states. The Ideas Fest draws some 3,000 attendees.
That said, the exploration of our wellbeing made health topics a fitting prequel that marinated throughout the nine-day stretch. Enigmatic in the political discourse during the two Ideas Fest sections was the gravity of point and counterpoint, which sometimes left one feeling straddled across a paradox of contradictions that rendered solutions moot. Nevertheless, many presentations, along with open dialogue, offered the explorer bones of optimism.
Ideas Fest attendees do the “downward dog” in Anderson Park at the daily 8 a.m. yoga.
Brave new world
At the opening reception on June 20 of the dual festivals, artist and promoter Wendy MacNaughton of “Drawtogether Strangers” — a global portrait project connecting strangers through the simple act of looking and drawing, two people at a time — yanked Health Fest attendees from left brain to right when she encouraged a drawing exercise. Introduce yourself to the person next to you, she commanded. Next, with paper and pencil passed out, look at each other’s faces for 60 seconds and draw portraits without lifting the pencil from paper and without looking down at your work. Macnaughton declared “time’s up.” To a chorus of chuckling, the results were a hodgepodge of Picasso-esque visages.
Jumping ahead in the syllabus to June 27, while virtually framing today’s momentous times — wherein artificial intelligence (AI) arose in most discussions — Harvard economics professor and former treasury secretary Larry Summers put a clock in a bag and nailed it to the wall when he offered his “60-second history of economics” to interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin in the packed Doerr-Hosier auditorium.
Using interest basis points (one bp equals .01%) as a measure of growth domestic product, Summers said: “Let’s step back. There was zero economic growth from the beginning of time until 3000 B.C.; three or four basis points — or about 3% per century — of economic growth from 3000 B.C. to 1500 A.D.; 25 basis points from 1500 to 1800-something; and since then, 180 to 200 basis points of GDP.” He called these the four great step-changes in man’s economic history.
Summers extrapolated that the present liminal era of AI will unspool in future history telling as an even greater step-change than the former four together. Unlike the lasting benefits of the invention of the wheel and electricity, Summers said, AI has the capacity to make better AI exponentially. As a current board member of OpenAI, the quasi-nonprofit AI darling of Silicon Valley run by Sam Altman, Summers hesitated to write off Altman’s prediction that GDP would double in the next 10 years with AI.
In his wrap, Summers characterized his lifetime of economic change as ho-hum, even with the internet and cell phone, when compared to the lifetime of his grandmother from 1900 to 1970, who saw electricity, planes, phones, TV, two world wars, nukes and modern medicine — all “technology driven.” He speculated that because of AI’s potential to improve itself that his granddaughter may live to be 100 and would experience profound technological change that outpaces his grandmother’s life span. He finished with an unexplained mike-drop prediction that electricity will be free in 20 years.
Soft-spoken Surgeon General Vivek Murthy talks about his bout of loneliness after being fired by President Trump in 2017 for advocating for vaccines and gun safety.
Paying it forward
While big picture ruminators cast long shadows throughout the combined festivals, astute 20- and 30-somethings running up-and-coming nonprofits and innovative business start-ups are included. Through the Aspen Institute’s scholarship program, called The Aspen Ideas Festival Fellowship, funds raised from foundations and patrons support the cost of a festival pass, lodging and/or transportation for those chosen through institute network vetting.
With 130 fellows from the U.S. and some 12 different countries who attended this year, endowment focuses on young “entrepreneurial leaders at an inflection point, willing to take action,” who can “make a difference in society,” the institute website reads.
From public policy to the performing arts, from climate to immigration, the range of hopeful possibilities for the common good is broad based. In any case, fellows find exposure to the pillars of international influence where connections are made. Among this year’s class was local fellow Kelly Medina, director of Roaring Fork Schools Family Resource Center.
Medina, who is pursuing a masters degree in public health from the University of Colorado while managing her family and living near Parachute, said she gained “inspiration from connecting with leaders my age and who are people of color,” because “we share aspirations for the kind of world we want to see and are committed to support children and families in thriving and achieving economic mobility.”
She highlighted learning budget skills from Shalanda Young of the Office of Management and Budget at the session “Biden’s Secret Weapon: Shalanda Young” and how to navigate politics in a private fellows meeting with CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria. But, she said, the ability for local leaders as fellows to attend from downvalley may diminish without financial support for lodging and childcare. “About six of us had to make our own arrangements,” she said, whereas fellows from afar may get financial assistance and lodging.
A comprehensive listing of 2024 fellows and their projects can be found on the Aspen Institute website. They include Danielle Nicholson, chief operating officer of A Call to Men, dedicated to “creating a world where men and boys are loving and respectful and all women, girls and those at the margins are valued and safe”; Robert Harvey, president and co-CEO of FoodCorps, which promotes quality food equity in schools; and Kushal Gurung, founder and CEO of WindPower Nepal.
In addition, since the Bezos family — yes, Jeff Bezos’ parents — while attending the inaugural Ideas Festival in 2005 asked “where are the young people,” high school seniors have paired with an educator from their school to attend the Ideas Fest every year as members of the “Cohort of the Bezos Scholars Program.” This past June, 30 students and educators from across the United States and Africa joined the Ideas Health and Aspen Ideas festivals. Exuberant and multi-ethnic, they populated events wearing black hoodies with “scholar” emblazoned on the back.
The scholars program has 465 alums in its network who have launched 215 funded projects. The student teams have spawned home-community ventures that address climate crisis, gender and education equity, financial literacy and opportunity access in marginalized and underrepresented communities.
Though many are seminal without websites, they plant hope. Some examples of Bezos student community change projects are: Civics Delivered, for eighth- through 12th-grade students in California’s San Fernando Valley; Lead, Read, Achieve, a literacy pairing of high schoolers with fourth-grade students in Richfield, N.C.; Dewasters of Seaside in California and Kats Together, a disability awareness program in Kokomo, Ind.
Magnetic cellist Joshua Roman recounted his struggle since 2021 as a long-covid sufferer before nearly bringing the whole audience to tears with his cello while singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
Paths less traveled
Before looking at some topically themed panels and high-wattage guests, a few presentations stood out for the seeker of tangential subjects during both the Ideas Health as well as the two-part Aspen Ideas Fest proper.
At a crossroad of busy paths, attracting few passersby, a provocative installation in a small, walk-in A-frame illustrated comparative incarceration practices around the world, from rehabilitation to revenge. In 1862, Dostoevsky neatly summarized that the “degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons,” in his roman à clef imprisonment novel “The House of the Dead.”
At the same time, pithy quotes of countless notables, printed on triangular uprights here and there about the campus gave pause to pondering peripatetics. Sponsor Mount Sinai Health System stationed a free walk-in dermatology exam pod, with medical professionals and a private examination room. All about the campus, sponsor banners flew. Small, polished rocks imprinted with the logo of the financial services and insurance firm Prudential mixed into the moat of river stones east of the Paepcke Memorial Building showcased the depth of festival branding.
Live-feed animal habitat cameras featured in the chill “Zen Den” room by explore.org put over-loaded minds into present wonder, by teasing consciences back to the vast natural world trying to exist around our mortal dramas. Seven large screens alternated between grizzlies in Alaska grabbing salmon, cavorting puffins in Maine, a wolf den in Minnesota, dozing river turtles and a playful rescue-kitten room in Los Angeles — among others.
During the dual festival, artist/brothers Mike and Doug Starn erected their “Will U Won’t U” bamboo sculpture over the Anderson Park walkway. Using 800 bamboo shafts, “We start with three tripods and grow organically and spontaneously up from there,” Doug said. Under the brothers’ direction, 17 mountaineers scrambled over the rising, crisscrossing tower, lashing overlaps with climbing-cord knots. Aspen’s was the eighth such installation; the first was at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010.
Upon completion, the unique bamboo tower stands as an exercise in “interdependence that highlights the beauty of people working in unity to create something remarkable,” the display marquee reads. The Starn brothers’ towers are soon deconstructed and the bamboo is ground into fertilizing mulch for other plants. Uniquely high in regenerative silica, bamboo mulch boosts chlorophyll production, a critical component in plant processing of carbon dioxide into oxygen for the planet.
Artist Doug Starn hoists one of 800 bamboo poles used to erect his “Will U Won’t U” bamboo sculpture over the Anderson Park walkway.
Health festival takes aim
Guest festival curator Tina Brown — a famed magazine editor and author — said in her opening remarks on June 20 that she’d put together this year’s overarching theme “Bight Minds in Dark Times” for the full festival agenda and speakers as if compiling a magazine issue. Following MacNaughton’s ice-breaking drawing exercise, Brown remarked how the cartoonists at the New Yorker magazine — which she modernized amidst fusty backlash — “were the gloomiest bunch I’d ever worked with.” As she reshuffled the mossback magazine, she acquired the nickname “Stalin in high heels,” but she owned it, later saying in the Oct. 16, 2023, Financial Times, “It’s probably true, stomping around in my Manalo Blahniks.”
While still holding hope in Pandora’s box, the Ideas Health crowd, made up largely of health care workers, leading-edge researchers and relevant nonprofit allies, felt accessible and personable, whereas the attending pharma CEOs and circling venture capital reps sketched themselves at times as good Samaritans.
In the registration and lounge tent around the device-charging table, conversations flowed. Zubaida Bai, CEO of the Grameen Foundation, dedicated to “dismantling the economic and social barriers that hold women back,” has offices in Africa, the Philippines, India and Washington, D.C. “We pursue capital for women by working at the intersection of financial inclusion, gender and climate,” she said. After the festival she added, “I met over a dozen potential donors and partners. … The emphasis on climate action resonated strongly with our mission.”
Dr. Malcolm Bruce Parker, a 40-year emergency room physician in the agricultural belt of Delano, California, said he was at the festival advocating for understanding “not only gun injury as a public health problem,” but that he was preparing to “propose traffic injuries and domestic abuse as public health problems” to the American College of Emergency Physicians at their next summit, and “as a topic for [Aspen Ideas Health] 2025.”
For the many advocates of dialogue leading to good outcomes at Ideas Health, success might be chalked up by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who declared gun violence “a public health crisis” this past June 24, several days after speaking at the Ideas Health closing. Days before, a panel that included Gregory Jackson of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention at the White House and former ER doctor Megan Ranney of Yale School of Public Health presented the case in detail.
In juxtaposition, weeks after the surgeon general’s announcement, the company American Rounds installed always-open ammo vending machines in participating 24-hour grocery stores in Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas, with Florida next in their sights. AI technology scans the customer’s ID and facial recognition software verifies them. “Our machines are as easy to use as an ATM,” their website says.
Tangible outcomes
A healthier ammo to fight allergies and autoimmune diseases is on the horizon. Andrea Choe, M.D., PhD, and founder of Holoclara Inc., presented her research into molecules secreted by roundworms that routinely reside in the gut of sub-Saharan Africans at “Taking on Autoimmune Diseases with Worms.” There she found the incidence of asthma, allergies and autoimmune diseases to be few. Research has shown that the many parasites humans routinely lived with in earlier days also induced protective residency benefits in their hosts. Think of the concept as intensive probiotics, in a medical world today where fecal transplants are an accepted procedure and synthesized hormones to make Ozempic mimic appetite-suppressing peptides discovered in gila monster venom.
Choe said her company is a year out from clinical trials, wherein a tablet containing the distillation of the roundworm’s molecular secretions would be tested, and about five years out from a commercial pill to protect against auto-immune diseases. Anecdotally, she referenced Jasper Lawrence, a Brit who made international news in 2010 when he traveled to Africa and walked barefoot around outdoor latrines to catch hookworms, which he claimed cured his severe asthma.
Always on the hunt for such innovative medical ideas is venture capital. At “Venture Capital Places Its Bets,” health tech reporter Erin Brodwin interviewed three capital firm stalwarts looking for action. They concluded that as competition for underwriting is fierce, startups need to be built to propel medicine forward, with profit in mind. Deena Shakir of Lux Capital outlined what underwriters need to see before supporting an innovative company: “a big market, a big problem, and the ability to pay.” In otherwards, will insurance companies, governments and/or individuals pony up for the product?
Two of these fastest horses are currently CRSPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, i.e., precision DNA alteration by cut and paste gene-scissors) and medical AI, which looms everywhere like a storm promising moisture with a chance of devastation. While Choe’s worm company, Holoclara, has eager backing, some of the possible CRSPR cures cause the for-profit medical system to balk, first because of cost and second because a simple gene alteration might retire too many existing pharmaceutical products. Suppose, for example, if the vast cancer treatment industry became obsolete with the snip of a gene.
A gene-editing sickle cell disease treatment was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2023, costing $2.2 million per person, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians. And, Benjamin Oates — the CEO of the CRSPR startup Scribe Therapeutic, also on the June 21 “CRISPR 2.0, The Next Generation” panel — said “the buzz is around in vivo gene editing,” now that genome mapping can target a predisposition to future conditions.
Common as stethoscopes
In this new genetic arena, the paradox of contradictions gridlocks again. Can the world sustain so many medical advances that keep people alive for decades more than their previous natural shelf life? Moderator of the CRISPR 2.0 panel and Nobel laureate in chemistry Jennifer Doudna, widely credited for first targeting changes to the genome, addressed this puzzle when she asked the audience how many people would like to live to be 150 years old, to which less than a third raised their hands.
A clinical nurse sitting nearby whispered, “the only people who want to live to be 100 are people who are 99.”
In another panel, “Genomic Revolution,” Justin Brueck of Endeavor Health group in Illinois and one of the first health care groups to offer genomic, polygenic risk score (PRS) testing for a broad range of conditions, predicted that genomic testing “will be part of primary care,” providing patients and their physicians with assessment of lifetime genomic risks for conditions and diseases. With that, life changes and available therapies might ward off future health problems.
At the “Harnessing AI for Equitable Healthcare” panel, Gabrial Ricca of Takeda Pharma predicted that AI in health care algorithms “would be as common as stethoscopes,” and that “AI won’t replace your doctor, but doctors who use AI will replace doctors who don’t.” Yet, according to the panel, at this early stage of AI, Chat GPT makes too many errors formulating comprehensive medical exams.
But AI aspirations look to take over time-draining data management, diagnose x-rays quickly without radiologists, assist in prenatal care, make skin diagnosis and create personalized health agendas, to name a few. Not soon off, one may even consult a personal AI doctor aware of your total physical being using a phone app. What remains unsolved is the question of who would own so many individualized AI algorithms and how to protect people from misuse of their health data, let alone the health equity challenge.
Earlier on the syllabus, on the psychological front, U.S. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania shed light on the twisting hallway of depression and author Patric Gagne talked about her life struggle to learn emotions, as detailed in her book “Sociopath: A Memoir,” which the Aug. 8, 2024, New York Times panned as “more committed to revel in her naughtiness than to demystify the condition.”
Fetterman outsized his chair while man-splaying in his signature hoodie, shorts and big business sneakers. He described his depression bouts as induced by cruel social media threats on his family after winning his senate seat, which left him feeling “as if you’ve won, you’ve really lost.” Depression, he said, “feeds on self, by gaslighting our self.”
Gagne, on the other hand, learned how to “charm, manipulate and compensate” for her “sociopathic vacuum of feelings,” from empathy to fear to guilt. Happily married with young children now, she said she “learned to love” after generating “minor acts of deviance” as a girl, such as breaking into houses and stealing little trophies so that she might induce feelings.
Ideas Health closing
Soft-spoken Surgeon General Murthy, who transmits comforting sentience and unmistaken wisdom, closed out Ideas Health with some antidotes. As a Yale Medical School trained MD, former internist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the U.S. Surgeon General who served under the last three presidents, only a snakebit cynic would be unable to sense his healing compassion.
Among his initiatives to care for America, his resume lists such curatives as “get America walking again” for better health, discussion of the food industry, taking on vaping, Ebola, opioids, and the Flint, Michigan water crisis. Of late, he’s addressed the epidemic of loneliness, which he puts on par with the epidemics of tobacco use and obesity in our country.
However, in 2017, three months after his inauguration, Trump fired Murthy for political reasons. Among those are that he recognizes climate change, is a vaccine advocate and views gun violence as a public health issue. Murthy earlier had refused to resign, saying that in his oath he’d promised the country a “healthier and more compassionate America.”
During that interim between Obama and Biden, Murthy said at the Ideas Health closing that he felt deep loneliness after losing his dream job, wherein he was just finding meaningful traction, while the conveyor belt of private sector offers that followed left him feeling spiritless. In 2021, Biden called on him to serve on the COVID-19 advisory board, and then reinstated him as the surgeon general.
Under Biden, Murthy has tackled youth screen time, recommending that parents keep children off social media until after middle school. Now, he is bringing attention to the loneliness created by the general loss of national community because of division and polarity.
He recommended three daily practices: spend 15 minutes reaching out to someone you care about, especially ones having difficulties; perform small acts of service for others; and focus your attention when communicating with people. Murthy said that five minutes of centered attention to another person is more powerful than 30 minutes of distracted attention. In this way, he observed, “your undivided attention has the ability to stretch time,” and he concluded, “we are all healers, because we have the ability to love.”
With the ice thus broken, young and magnetic cellist Joshua Roman, who has played with numerous orchestras, recounted his struggle since 2021 as a long-covid sufferer. During that time he abandoned his cello because of acute fatigue and malaise, later to redefine himself through acceptance of his chronic condition and the healing power of his cello. “Being human is better than being perfect,” he said. After a pause, with his bow teasing a familiar tune, he brought the assembled to near tears as he played and sang Leanard Cohen’s redemptive “Hallelujah.”
This included combat journalist Sebastian Junger, who closed out the health series with reflections on his newest book, “In My Time of Dying,” which explores his near-death experience from a sudden aneurysm. Still visibly shaken by the cello, Junger began with, “in this moment in human history, I find it enormously heartening that music makes people cry, and that’s an enormously good sign for our future.”
After his aneurysm, he remembered in his stupor hearing the doctors in the emergency room nearly give up. Infused with eight units of blood, he vividly recounted how an “unfathomable black abyss appeared below on his left,” and how he “felt the deepest loneliness in the vast universe.” Just then “my late father appeared and said he would accompany me.” A last-ditch medical procedure brought Junger back and he awoke in critical care.
Famous for his 2010 “Restrepo” film about his year-long embedment with an Army platoon in the Korengal Valley — known as the deadliest valley during the Afghanistan war — Junger had the hooded eyes of someone who was “almost killed many times, but only once did I almost die.” He recalled when a bullet hit a sandbag inches from his head. A self-professed atheist and rationalist, he said he never felt alive until after his brush with the grim reaper, and that previously he’d surmised that “adrenaline junkies are really seeking meaning.”
In a choking voice, Junger said that Murthy’s talk on loneliness and Cohen’s cello music had reignited his “blessed knowledge of how life, beauty, music and aliveness is so precious to us all.” In a fitting conclusion to the Ideas Health, he supposed, “Without death, life would be an extraordinary stunt that lasts forever.”
Just off the stage, Junger connected with Roman and they exchanged cell numbers. Perhaps a collaboration may result.
