an amazing book called when your life depends on it and subtitled extreme decision making from the arctic and i really found this book so fascinating so interesting and i'm going to let him tell you about it so why does the book about and why did you decide to do it for this is i'm sorry brad borken is the is the author i joined thanks very much for  to to be on your show and sort of great honor but privilege to be here and the book came about for a number of reasons as almost starts with looking at this photograph this wonderful photograph taken almost exactly one hundred five years ago to the day and it's looking at a photograph like this taken into and arctic a picture of robert scott and some of his members of his expedition and looking at the store work that they're doing which is pulling the sledge and they all used these british term sledge from basically british and when i look at that photograph think about my modern life and my modern life working for a large software company addition to being an author and thinking that isn't this what our modern lives feel like stories to modern life and develop some lessons for modern living based on what they did one hundred years ago you know what did you discover so well but basically quite a number of things which was the interesting thing about their decision making and we really focused on their decision making is that they weren't perfect decision makers in fact they're very flawed human beings and flawed decision makers and there are many interesting things about how they approach decisions and dealt with life and death situations because this is the frigid climate of the antarctic and the extreme cold and and they have frostbite and they also get scurvy so this a lot of threat li threats going on it's true it's a tremendously adverse situation that they're in there's no win for it when you look at a picture like that there's no communication the only communication they really had was the ability to shout to one another and in strong winds even that's quite limited and there's no as you said there's no natural resources you can't even eat the snow if i think oh well at least they had snow they could get water and you can't you know you can't if you put snow in your mouth it and to melt it for  water two things will happen one is you won't get very much water for about a mouthful of snow and second of all you can start lowering your core body temperature and which can that fatal consequences all right so everything they had even the fuel f snow to turn turn into water how to carry with them and and their destination you can see in the photograph as their goal is to get towards the south pole in the south all right and no one had been there yet no one is and this was an exciting thing they were adventurous but also survivors as you point out and also you show how they survive or some cases didn't survive in that you said they didn't have food they couldn't grow food they can't do agriculture winters is genuine and arctic winter this under her eyes is above the horizon that's as you get further further south and and so with not only they're dealing with colder temperatures in the winter but also the challenges of living in an environment where there's no sunlight whatsoever which is psychologically challenging right and so it's no way to reach for help no one that you could communicate with because after all they don't have cell phones and who knows if cell phones would even work there anyway that's right and they are fundamentally on their own yeah and i think and i think that they the way they cope with these challenges and probably know the best stories when the first stories we open with the book is a story of three men and they're coming back from a journey they've been going out seven hundred fifty miles pulling sledge as late as show the picture and they're coming back and one of the three men is coming down with scurvy and they still have about two hundred miles to go and scurvy is fundamentally fatal in those conditions and as they're just to evans says to them just leave me behind on the ice to die you have got the scurvy up to stop us survive and just hopefully you two can survive without me and and they hesitate and he said to them i'm your commanding officer i command you to leave me on the behind on the ice to die and they don't and they don't but it's a poignant story because we ask the reader what would you do yes and i think this is one of the really interesting things we try to put the reader into these various life and death situations and say what would you do how would you make this is and if you had to make that right is with your own what would be your ethical and moral guidance and in that question there and also  should point out that scurvy is the deprivation of certain fresh vegetables and the can actually harm you enough that you may eventually die and this was often the problem with sailors  liners and it took them a long time took science to answer the question of what is the scurvy and why does it happen exactly exactly and and they didn't understand the cause of scurvy but that the but the fact that they had to make this decision and and the interesting thing is that as we explain the book that they actually don't leave behind yeah and that the end he does ultimately survive he survives because one of the team members ends up they get about thirty five miles to go in there point him along on top of the sledge and they get to say they realize they running out food running out of everything they just can't move forward any more and one of the team members tom crean does a walk thirty five or so think of of this is  distance from princeton to philadelphia is like forty five miles or walking almost a distance from princeton to philadelphia one man in the snow already on starvation rations for two weeks and he's got only carrying his in his pocket three biscuits and two sticks of chocolate and as he so he does this walk he does eventually survive the walk if he if he sat down for any moment during that walk and fell asleep  hypothermia and then the other two would die and died as well and so he does what takes sixteen or twenty hours here arrives a blizzard hits and so the minute he are in the hut that he gets to can't go out and rescue to say what do we learn from that what do we learn from crean's walk yeah and what we learn is that actually all of us have this very strong mental and physical strength that we don't give ourselves credit for always but that crean they will pull out in numerous situations dear in the antarctic where he was just able and other men did as well pull out this this incredible strength mental strength physical strength to do things that seemingly seemed impossible they  the other thing that we learn from these sorts of situations that we bring to the book is that the teams are not balanced in that we're days i think in work and i know it in the come network for we think of teams as being you put five people into a team and i was going to twenty percent of work and that's to a team should work in what they proved as actually sometimes in a team someone has to be hero and in this case or screen being the hero and the other team members have to step back and say yes we need to let this guy be the hero and the team survives and i think that one of the great lessons is that teams are never balanced and somehow in business somehow we come along the way i think team should be balanced but in reality teams were remarkably effective in the antarctic and they were effective because they were never balanced and they let certain people be heroes and people the strong people really pulled all of the weak people you know you do a wonderful analysis of not only teams and teamwork but also leadership yes and you talk about leadership and then you talk about the second in leadership and how important that lieutenant or that second person in leadership is and i think many people don't understand how groups work how teams work and we all are required to because we're living in a modern society but we don't yes but the interesting thing when you compare this to the arctic or to other expeditions where teams did become fractured that and what caused them to be fractured the remarkable thing here was the teams stayed together partly because they're very strong leadership and partly because they have very strong bias for survival they were there they had a purpose and why they were there they were there to discover the south pole they're there to do science and they had a very fixed idea of what they were achieving for their country for themselves and and for for the world which was to be the first to the south pole who had some motivating factor is the higher purpose exactly it's not just i'm doing it for myself exactly  and that helps push you on it helps you keep on focus and beyond even your insurance because some of the trips you described they go in for white days hours weeks and it's exhausting and it's freezing cold and they don't have enough food and you know the fact that they survived at all was was really questionable so something needs to keep you going yes something needs to push you on and you did compare  who seemed to have less that the higher purpose well and from in a different sense he wasn't interested in the science he wanted to do something for his country for norway who had recently separated from sweden and they wanted to establish themselves independent country and you point that out but allman since focus was not on science it was just getting there and saying hey i got here this is mine and the others had other interests other purposes and that's what kept them going and you think about your own life and you think about other people's lives what kind of higher purpose do we have and if we don't have that how do we go on you see so it's a wonderful thing that you've done with the book you actually taken two levels you've taken the history of the antartica exploration you've looked at what happened to them and what they did and why they did it and then you've applied it to today's life was very much current you know what do we do what decisions do we make how do we make decisions and you talk about planning ahead and thinking things through and even then it's imperfect right if you don't have all the answers you don't know that's right i think well there are a number of things that they were remarkably good at even though they didn't always make perfect decision when things are really good at which we differ they came to a decision point they made a decision they didn't procrastinate right you said and i think that that we have a tendency nowadays to procrastinate and write and part of our research for us nation is because we think we can collect more and more information and the thinking of it with the internet and with google you can very easily collect more efficient buying a house or buy a car changing jobs or even founding finding the right person to date you  have so many choices dalla days and and you can cut keep collecting more and more and more information and there reality is that when they had had situations they just made a decision and then when they made that decision they said what's if it's not the right decision if it's turned out to be a bad decision how do we make the very best outcome from that bad decision and how do we bind together as a group or as a team and make and and have a very good outcome from a bad decision you know and i mean you don't always get to the goal snow storm and they didn't expect the snowstorm and that's certainly a case with severe weather you know i told you i was a cross country skier and a hiker and i had a few sort of survival experiences of my own and also understood the need for good leadership that became very clear to me also the other night i told you after i read your book i woke up during the night and remembered as a little tiny girl in a little public school in new york  we had a guest speaker at one time and he was the explorer from the snow off of the south pole and i said i remember that he was wearing this heavy fur parker he was dressed you know and i was staring at him and i'm just a little girl looking at this hero and i said oh his face is so red it must be from all the coal you know and i couldn't think of his name and i said brad an email and he knew exactly who i was talking about right that's right richard then he did come back well that's right that was his name it's the bird so they were our heroes yes they were our heroes and this is an interesting book you for using in for students and you said you're interested in pursuing making this into more of a book for teenagers who face all these choices and decisions in life and could use this as a help and i'm going to use this book and when i'm teaching my sociology course my social problems of course i'm going to use this book with my students as well i think yeah that's great that's very exciting to hear that yeah well i think it's very well written and i love the way you turn in each chapter you present the situation and then you to the reader what would you do you always include the reader in the in the decision making question it's not external it's within us all that you're challenging us yes that's right we're not trying to be for a script of us a this is what almost everything that we did on the book we were had saw things exactly the same but there's an interesting little little story there we disagreed what would happen what we would have done had we been there and there was a story that i'm missing got to the south pole first and when he arrived at the south pole he left the tent to mark this is where i think the south pole is and he left two letters and inside the tent because he knew scott was coming he scott would arrive sooner as well which is that scott kept the letter but scott didn't survive coming back he and his men perished on the journey back and so when his remains were found found scott's ten and scott and his colleagues in d that work how did that happen was actually quite an interesting collaboration because but with modern technology between sky and email and took and just training documents back and forth and we spent three months working on the table contents will be in the book will not be in the book and we eventually agreed on the on the table contents and then it sort of naturally fell into who would write which chapter and we work quite closely with an editor to help us make sure a dave it's more of a antartica story and and i'm more focused on the decision making and the decision sciences of which i have my backgrounds and decision making decision theory not so so combining our two interests made for a very good collaboration you know that's a good scene and it's a good team with one brings their own together but you both agreed you were pretty much on the same page about what you wanted to do and what you wanted to explore and it was a very very successful  captured that climate that severity of the at the arctic and and all of the deprivation that go even if you had your laptop there that wasn't going to help you get food that was going to help you stay know and these sort of very bare bones survival issues were very important so i i i love the book and i love the way you organized it and you sort of tell david i felt that way too you said you're going to go on to do people saying what are you going to do next friday right and so what have you thought you're going to do next well david i've talked about this quite a bit and there's there's two alternative things that we're going to do with the book one is to write a book for teenagers because a survivalist you mentioned the survival stories are just amazing and teenagers face various types of adversity so the survival stories and how those explores dealt with adversity and overcame  and overcame this battle to battle up that could feel like those bad looks are going on for ever and ever and ever and and yet they were over to overcome them and and i think they're wonderful stories and lessons for teenagers and the other is is to make it much more of a business book or to write a version that is very specifically geared towards businesses and and businesses for making and you can almost think of these expeditions as many startups oh and i mean how to raise money they had to go out and buy equipment my troop ships and  undertake various initiatives and set goals and then reimbursed their investors and so there's a lot to look a lot of things that you can gain from looking at them at the expeditions as as giving lessons for f small businesses and just business of making in general yeah i'm going back to scott the interesting thing was finding their diaries they knew they were dying they knew they were not going to survive and they spend whatever time they had left keeping journals and diaries and they were found yes and what and what did what came out of them what those who've read and review these diaries what the things are but the most remarkable statements of know scott writes about bravery and camaraderie and and respects and he and his words are just very very moving a very touching and they all did this and the and the interesting thing i've met a number of polar explorers over the years and and they all say the same thing which is after a day's work in the antarctic or in the arctic regions you're so bone tired you can barely pick a pencil and say that was a hard day and that's about all you could although they can read their diaries are so tired and scott and his men are writing the wonderful prose about about their adventures and about their challenges and even when they're when they're dying they're they're just amazing letters to loved ones oh and letters home the letters to to some of their financial backers and things like that just just talk about their adventures and and and they were not filled with blame and anger and everyone should just accept it in situations as they were and also wasn't there one trying to remember which one you wrote about he's struggling he's hanging over a curve ass he's not going to to base camp at his base camp and on and on on his expedition and he falls in a crass and the only thing that saves him from falling pointing to his death to his death is the sledge is stuck at the top yeah and he's hung by this harness the hear to harness as you're seeing in the photograph that and he's hanging there and trying to climb up in his wet frozen clothing boots and everything imagine how heavy and and that clothing would be is already been on starvation rations for a long time and hauling stuff up and just as he's getting over the edge the edge of the crib ass breaks away and he falls back down again and luckily the sledge doesn't come down on top of him and still stay stuck where it was and he tries and he's just like what do i do now like do it you know to just give up because there was no some here you know it's going to rescue me and even if he climbs up he knows that he may not get back to civilization alive anyway because achieve great things yes i love that where he and mary is hanging by a literally by a harness yes anything close to death and he thinks of a poem and this poem gives him the strength to say ok i'm going to try one more time down but they don't want get stuck on the ice so mawson ship was going to be heading back to australia and he knew all the ok we'll climb up this harness but then we still have to get back to my base camp because i know my ship's going to be leaving soon back for australia if i miss my ship and i end up wintering over for another whole season and go through another harsh antarctic winter and he missed the ship by five hours and you know and and it's just these sorts of things there's every so every story to every story is a so remarkably tense and i think that makes the book fun is that you're reading about these situations and for the most part people survive but they survive through very very tough