brian: brian gruber, your book. party," what is it about? mr. gruber: it is about whether we achieve the mission when we go to war. all my life we have been in one military intervention or another. in business, when you look at a project, you look to see whether you have achieved your objectives, and at what cost. i wanted to see through this

last half-century of military interventions, partisan politics aside, morality aside what , happens after the party is over? what are the after affects of war and what are the human and financial costs on both sides? brian: when did this idea start? mr. gruber: my birthday is august 4. two years ago on august 4, 2014, was the 40th anniversary of the gulf of tonkin incident. at that time isis was marauding across northern iraq. it seemed to me as look ends that was odd that the cost of the vietnam war and the outcome of the vietnam war 50 years after the gulf of tonkin incident, which as you know, president johnson went on national television that day in 1964 to ask congress to approve his ability to accelerate our intervention in vietnam. it was a claim that north vietnamese patrol boats attacked the uss maddox.

based on that, we escalated the war in vietnam. years later, secretary mcnamara and many others admitted the attack never happened. similarly in going to iraq, there were supposed to be weapons of mass destruction. there was supposed to be an imminent threat from iraq. we know what the outcome was there. i was curious again not whether we should or should not have a strong military or grow to war, -- or go to war but what are the , actual outcomes. living in this country, you get a certain narrative and a certain spectrum of ideas. i thought it would be interesting to strap on the backpack and go around the world and through serendipity and just showing up in places and trying to find out if there are other narratives to have a fresh look at what the real outcomes of these conflicts were. brian: we have something of a list of places where you went.

it is not the complete list, but reflects the chapters in your book. let me just start with the first one. it is guatemala. i want you to just give us some quick reaction. we will go through the list. what do remember most from guatemala? mr. gruber: serendipity and the idea of six degrees of separation. i did this kickstart her campaign where i raised money through crowdfunding for the project. it was a $10,000 campaign. once i did, i basically traveled with a backpack, flew from san francisco airport to guatemala city with no interviews, no plans, and just arrived there. guatemala was fascinating, first of all because of the story. it informed most of the covert operations that were to come in the years after. that was a situation in which my airbnb host happened to be a

former congressman in guatemala who happened to be there when the cia supported overthrow happened. his friends fled into the jungles to become guerillas. withs part of a coalition president serrano am through him , through this whole series of introductions made through him, i ended up sitting for four hours with the former president of guatemala. the idea in guatemala at in that specific country where you can show up and learn just by being in the right place at the right time and pushing for interviews was a fascinating experience. brian: nicaragua? mr. gruber: an example there, i stayed just a week.

there was one day that the three types of interviews happened. one where pedro -- who was assassinated and really launch the sandinista revolution and the overthrow of the long standing dictatorship. i showed up there and a security guard said get out of here. the second time i showed up, this young woman came up and i asked to see an editor to get and interview with someone who might have some interesting information. finally she came out with a card of the editor in chief. him him a got in to see the editor in chief. a second interview was through the daughter of the woman of the man who i met and stayed at in guatemala. there was a series of interviews that ended up with a former

sandinista and democracy activist. that was completely serendipitous interview. the third interview i got through stephen kinzer. he is probably the most respected broadcaster in nicaragua. that one day was reflective of the different ways that i was able to get into see people, and also to understand the costs of that contra war which i had no idea how widespread the damage was. brian: what was the relationship between the two? mr. gruber: he is her daughter.

sorry he is her son. he took the other side and actually was part of the sandinista group that close them down in favor of the newspaper of the sandinista party. brian: panama. mr. gruber: panama was fascinating because i have a friend who is a jazz musician. his cousin is a pilot on the panama canal. in panama, through the meeting with the exiled president of guatemala, jose serrano, i met someone at lunch who is a psion of panamanian political families. he has two great grandfathers who were presidents of panama. through repeated attempts, i finally got to get on a midnight ride with him down the panama canal.

the whole story of panama and our intervention there under president george h w bush has to do with the canal and with our desire to keep the canal. actually physically seeing how that canal threads through the country and what means to the country, interviews with the most important way to do that. one interview was with this black panamanian who years before could never have had that job when it was under u.s. control. a chance to get a physical sense of what the canal meant to panama was valuable. brian: serbia. mr. gruber: serbia was supposed to be a humanitarian intervention. i think serbia was one place where you can look at both sides of that and come up with your own conclusions. i talked in belgrade to a lot of serbians, all of whom felt that the intervention in 1999 in a major european city was indefensible.

many of the places i went to in virtually every military conflict we have, there is some humanitarian veneer over what our purposes are. specifically in belgrade, there was genocide that happened there. there was potential additional genocide. in the kosovo area. that was an interesting case of trying to see whether humanitarian interventions are defensible, and what people on the other end of the gun barrel think. brian: pause here for a second. did you find people -- did you try to find people in all these places that thought we were terrible with our intervention and people who thought we had done the right thing? mr. gruber: i went with a completely open mind. first of all, try to get interviews through contacts and making contact. serendipitously through places i was staying or people i met.

and then getting interviews. there was a wide cross-section in all of these places. in serbia, all of the serbians i talked to said milosevic was terrible. and a year after our own invasion he was thrown out of office. and in panama as well, people .anted noriega out there is a spectrum of opinion whether they welcomed us in order to accelerate that event or if we were infringing on their sovereignty. i went to all these places with an open mind, trying to -- trying not so much to understand what a partisan point of view might he or be validated, but to look at was the mission accomplished?

what were the costs on both ends of the gun barrel? brian: we need to tell the audience we know each other rather well. you are now 61 years old and when you walked in this place, you were 28 years old as our first director of marketing. you did some on-air work for us. i have never known what you think politically. this is all new to me. so we can share this with the audience, somebody maybe my age or around there might remember your face and you when you are a host here on our call-in show. >> recently, congressman weiss said private groups are now constantly breaking neutrality laws in central america and we're overlooking it i providing privately funded aid to the contras. are you violating neutrality laws? >> it is our view we are not violating neutrality laws. the aid we are providing is primarily humanitarian aid.

we are providing not just medical supplies, but we are supplying money to buy food, food items, clothing items, things that they are unable to get with their he limited funding that they have now that congress has cut them off. brian: you interviewed him. i don't know if you even remember that. if you were with him today, what would you tell him that you learned about his premise about humanitarian aid versus what you saw in nicaragua? mr. gruber: first of all, it is very generous to hire 14-year-olds on your network. [laughter] i look very young there. i'm sure the congressman was a fine legislator. he was lying. brian: he is a retired general. mr. gruber: that was not the case. brian: did you feel that way then? did you know that?

mr. gruber: back during the interview? no, i did not feel that way or know. there was clearly an agenda where jimmy carter was trying before president reagan was elected to support the new government. it was clear they were helping salvador rebels. the sandinistas turned out to be a lot more authoritarian and repressive than they promised. ultimately it came to be people who did not like the contras, but who actively opposed the sandinista government. it was not a humanitarian mission. it was a mission basically to fight the sandinistas at any cost. from the very beginning, there was military aid given to groups in honduras that were extending that conflict for 10 years. brian: as you did this trip, do you consider yourself a

journalist? mr. gruber: that is interesting. i have had some training in university and i hosted some call-in shows. i have done a lot of interviews through products i have done. i was a citizen who was sort of doing an audit of his own government. trying to get a fresh narrative to see if there were new perspectives i could aim from people who were actively there. the word journalist can describe a number of things. in terms of being a paid professional journalist working for an editorial organization, no. i was there as my own citizen. i do not necessarily like the term citizen journalist. i was trying to understand what happened and whether the mission was accomplished. brian: i read that you raised $10,000 from 62 people. was that enough money to send

you around the world for two years? mr. gruber: it was a four-month trip. that was a little over $2000 a month. that was enough traveling very simply to travel for four months. after that, when i wrote, i did that on my own. basically for $2000 a month, travel, food, lodging, transport. brian: were you buy yourself all the time? mr. gruber: i was. i had friends once in a while who met up with me in the cities i was in. it was me and a backpack. brian: how often did you take a bus between countries? mr. gruber: pretty often. i remember one time i was in guatemala, and i had to get to nicaragua.

i got on the bus at about 6:00 in the morning on a monday morning. my ipad that i was going to write and edit on was losing power. i asked right plug it in, and she said they do not have that. i said they have it in your brochure. she said we have it on our brochure, we just don't have it on a bus. that was the longest bus trip i remember. otherwise i pretty much flew. in southwest asia from vietnam to cambodia to laos, those were bus rides. flew to serbia, flew to afghanistan. iraq happened after the initial four months. i wanted to go to erbil as my entry point. that was surrounded by jihadi's. they just to go over mosul the.

time. the cost to get it would have been too high. my editor this january said you didn't go to iraq. we talked about going, and i ended up going this january as an extension of the trip. brian: how did you dress? mr. gruber: i tried to stuff as much of the backpack as i could. when i got to afghanistan, my winter clothes i just left behind. i was just like a backpacker, very simply. there were a few rei type travel adventure close that i was wearing. i think i had one dress shirt. actually, no. that was an rei shirt as well. so i could go into a meeting with an ex-president looking respectful, but not even anything like this. i had to explain that to people up front.

brian: what was the average cost of nightly lodging? mr. gruber: cheap. often in the teens. average cost, maybe $20 or so. brian: what was it like? mr. gruber: there were three types of lodging i had. one finding really good discounts on expedia for lodging. the second through airbnb. the third through something called couch surfing. the kindness of strangers was extraordinary. brian: explain couch surfing. mr. gruber: it's a website. when i first use it, the guy was a flake. couch surfing is a website where tens of thousands of people around the world they if you're traveling through my town stay , in my home for free. brian: why? mr. gruber: why do people allow

that? sometimes they want to learn english, sometimes they like helping travelers. sometimes they want to make friends. they can then decide after looking at your profile and seeing you vetted on the site. why is a good question. it is not as reliable as getting airbnb listed. but in the end i got extraordinary stays the couch surfing. brian: why would you want to take a chance with someone you don't know? who knows what they are like? mr. gruber: good question. that could be asked about a lot of things i did. if you look at someone who had been on the site for a long time and there are a lot of reviews about them, you feel a bit more comfortable. if they have no reviews or what -- or one or two dodgy reviews, you do not stay there. if 11 people have stayed with them the last 18 months, and they stay with a couple people and you read the reviews, then

you feel comfortable. when you show up, if you do not like what you see, then you can go. brian: did you ever go? mr. gruber: i did. in cabo, i could not find a place to stay. after assuring my daughters i have everything set up, two days before going i could not find , lodging. needless to say, there is not a lot of airbnb lodging in cabo. on couch surfing a fellow who used to do translations for the u.s. army and whose father was an officer in the army said i cannot give you lodging, but i will take you up at the airport and take you to a guesthouse and will negotiate for you and that i will help you get interviews. then a second guy based on a second outreach responded. he was the ceo of an i.t. firm which serviced the defense department and the department of

the interior. he said we have a villa in downtown cabo. we have converted it into an office, but we kept to en suite rooms. you can stay here if you want to. love what you are doing. you can have three meals a day here. it is secure. basically after the initial guesthouse for a week, i stayed for three weeks in this villa for free and went out with them at night and he made all these introductions and served their employees food three times a day. anytime i wanted a free meal i got it. that was a nice situation. brian: were you surprised by the way people treated you? mr. gruber: i never felt in danger during my trip. guessed that people would be kind and generous and supportive.

i'd involve people's advice because it was better to provoke people and get honest reactions from people. people would tell me not to tell people that i was american and i'll must always did. brian: you say you also told people you were jewish. mr. gruber: there was a scene as a pool in cabo where this fellow was screaming that americans were murderers and occupiers. and then i walked up to him to engage him. he asked where i am from, and i remember my story that i was born in brazil, but grew up in canada. then i said i am an american jew. tell me, what do you think about jews. and then we had a long conversation about religion. i never felt in harms way while i was traveling. people in the end were extraordinarily kind and helpful. brian: did you have anybody that confronted you during this process that were angry? mr. gruber: i think there were people who were politically angry like the fellow in the

pool. when you engage with people sincerely, after the first few seconds it is like who are you? if you say this to someone and, oh that you are writing a book and they ask who you work for and you say you are independent, 100% of them will think you work for the cia or you are not telling the truth. it's outside of their frame of reference to think that you are just there with a backpack traveling through the country. i think on two scores, if you want an interview with someone, at first they may be skeptical. in the first 90 seconds or so, they get a sense you are really there for that reason and you want to hear their story, then people open up and they want to tell their story and that they introduce you to other people who want to tell the story.

similarly, when you meet people, if they oppose u.s. policy and think the u.s. should be out. if in a few seconds they come to believe that you are there because you are curious and open and you want to hear their story and they process that and they accept that, then they might still argue with you aggressively but they will want to share their point of view and want to hear what you have to say. brian: you have a picture of you and your two daughters. where do they live and how old are they? mr. gruber: older than they were when you saw them last. jenny is 33 years old and lives in new york. andrea is 30 years old and she lived in oregon. she is a trained paramedic and emt and works in a medical facility. she moved back to auburn. she's living close to her mom. brian: as you travel around the

world, were you constantly in touch with your daughters? mr. gruber: all the time. i think that is one of the things about skype and email and all of the apps that you use is you are able to engage and communicate constantly. once and a while, specifically bbo -- specifically in ca bo in that situation with , andrea, i excitedly said in communicating with this afghan housewife over facebook and she invited me to her home and went -- and andrea said you are not going there. and i argued with her, and she said no, you do not understand come you're just not going. so i didn't go. brian: why didn't she want you to go? mr. gruber: there were some people while i was in cabo who would friend me on facebook, and i would kind of look on their feed and see and ask them how they found out that i existed

before i would agree to befriended. at one point, there was a woman called zahra and had a plausible sounding reason as to how she knew what was. we engaged in this two week long conversation over facebook talking about what it is like to be an afghan housewife, to have three children. to have the taliban cut of her education as a young girl. her husband worked at the bagram air force base. it was fascinating for me. my daughter andrea didn't believe that she was who she said she was. ultimately, she invited me to her home for dinner, and andrea did not let me go. brian: let's go back to the list of where you have been. also on this list as you just mentioned is afghanistan. below that is indochina. where'd you go inside indochina?

mr. gruber: i spent most of my time in vietnam and cambodia, where i wound up living eight. later i went to laos briefly. i flew from cabo to hanoi. my original plan was to fly into delhi, take a bus through christmas week northern india the border crossing is difficult unless you set it up well in advance. we flew to hanoi, and then took buses all the way down into ho chi minh city, and then from ho chi minh city into cambodia. brian: why did you spend eight months in cambodia? mr. gruber: at the end of the trip, i wanted to write the book and i was tired and wanted to be by the beach. i went to the cambodian coast and went to a beach and rented a bungalow and started writing their, that i had a yoga center there and lived in a yoga center

for two months a block from the beach, which was a great experience. it was good for me to live in one of the places that i wrote about and learn more about it. before i returned home, i wanted to get a good part of the book written and really enjoy the cambodian coast and enjoy cambodian culture and a get some consulting gigs from the fall on and so i stayed there a while. brian: consulting what? mr. gruber: first amendment jim brooke-- first i met jim running a newspaper there, a , former new york times bureau chief. he needed someone to poke around his newsroom. i came and worked with him for three months. when i first completed the trip, i did some volunteer work at an orphanage. i met a young fellow who worked for the european journalism center some months later, an

italian fellow. we kept in touch on facebook. he texted me one day that the european journalism center wanted to take a group of 12 senior eu journalists and show them cambodia and take them to projects funded by the eu and meet with the civil society activists and with journalists, and what i be willing to be the fixer and organizer for the project. after that, they want to do the same thing in myanmar. when i did the project in cambodia, there was an extraordinary factory run by a dutch fellow who wanted to create working conditions and treat employees the way you would if the factory was in the netherlands. just casually i told them about

the book project. he was doing all of this extraordinary work and needed someone to help tell his story. he hired me to help him tell his story and develop a communications plan. >> things like that were very serendipitous. >> if you can make a list of things he can go back to because you enjoy their company, how long would that list be? mr. gruber: ever a lot of the be long. conversations i had didn't make their way into the book. brian: 20-25 people they felt comfortable going back to and say, let's spend an evening together? socially probably 40 , or 50. in terms of doing research for follow-up, about 20 people. brian: when did this project to get underway from a book standpoint? you said two years ago you began to raise began

money and all that. mr. gruber: i did a novel five years ago, coincidentally, on the island where i'm living now and did it all myself. did the whole publishing process from was great to do concept to completion. really enjoyed that. wanted to write more. took a travel writing course in san francisco. the advice if i wanted to become a better writer was to write more. i wrote a lot as i was traveling. ultimately hired a couple of wonderful interns who transcribed the interviews because it overwhelmed me to do it myself. while i was traveling, someone on my thesis committee at pepperdine university while i was going for my masters there and studying broadcast

journalism, he kept reposting things i was posting on facebook. ultimately he volunteered to be a pro bono editor for the project and be a partner through the whole thing. we worked on it together and he has edited three books and had a hard stop because i was invited by one of my kick starters to be another project that we funded at the film festival of this year. i had to get done by then. all of the preproduction work and selecting and putting it all together i did myself. brian did i read correctly that : your father was a taxi driver? mr. gruber: that's right. brian when was that and where

: was that? mr. gruber: for about 25 years in new york city. he was born in 1917 so that would been in the 40's and 50's. he moved to las vegas and loved talking to people. he took a part-time job in las vegas to continue it well into his 70's. >> how much of your father are you? mr. gruber: a bit. he loved hearing people's stories and loved engaging with people. i think this is a complement. my daughter andrea once set poppa loved being a taxi driver, he could tell the same story over and over again to new people every time he picked up a fare. he was natural about engaging with strangers. with this project, the biggest challenge and unknown i had was being able to find people who could tell their story in a way

that could illuminate an international story. a lot of people wouldn't talk to me in places where there is some -- thatnt that will would have been difficult. brian why did you decide to live : in thailand? mr. gruber: i love living by the beach. i enjoy the travel experience a lot. it was a vivid life experience. i'm single and my doctors are both well along on their own. -- my daughters are both well along on their own. i thought it was going to live overseas again -- i thought if i was going to live overseas again, this was the time to do it. i really enjoy yoga and living by the beach. i enjoyed southeast asian

culture. i don't know how long i will do it. i traveled to 70 places that i -- to so many places that i wanted to settle in one place for a while. eventually i might like to be back here in a month or year. particularly the island i am on, it is a place where it is mostly thai so you are part of the thai culture. it is beautiful and you have all of the ex-pats you want. you can fly to neighboring countries and it is a wonderful quality of life. brian have you afford to do : this? have you saved your money? are you making money as you go? is it expensive to live in thailand? mr. gruber: that is a very personal questions, brian. there is the points to that. at what point are comfort and familiarity more important than

exploration and experience. if you're willing to adjust your western standards of comfort and decide what do i really need and want and what kind of overhead can i live on just the freedom that i want. that is the most important thing. if you want an air-conditioned, two-bedroom western furnished condo is there for you in places a bit cheaper than alexandria or san francisco. that is the first thing. the second, you have to be wealthy -- do you have to be wealthy? y and i choose to

do it anyway. do you want to focus on security and on making as much money, putting as much money away as you possibly can? kind of a suitable choice many people make, but do you want to balance that where on the spectrum compared to following your passions and doing what you want. the third is that you couldn't do this very thing easily years ago. now with the web there are travel websites that allow you to find inexpensive places and communicate back home. and from a safety point of view, if i get ill i can be in bangkok in an hour and san francisco in 24 hours. you don't have to be rich to do it, but you do have to make certain decisions about your life. one final factor is obligations and dependence.

if i had three kids who were in their teens who were dependent on me or a wife who said you're not go to do this or parents who are ill i wouldn't be doing this . but if you're in a situation where you have to felt certain obligations you can make that choice more easily. on the way life is said, you are not going to do this, or parents or ill. how long did you stay in vietnam? mr. gruber: there is an attitude of forgiveness. i don't know if it is a buddhist thing or a time thing or whether said, whetherman there is an attitude that if you

and you associate the united states with economic opportunity. i kept looking for people who were more angry. like some of the interviews in the book. people were fully aware of the horrors that were unleashed from unexploded ordinance to the whole way the conflict took place. among the people there is zero negativity. they want to engage with the world. they had a state-controlled media. any 14-year-old girl in hanoi in 45 seconds can show you how to get around state-controlled on the internet. they are well traveled and they want to engage with westerners and americans. it was surprising to me the lack

of resentment that i encountered through my travels and southeast asia. brian iraq, how long were you : there and when? mr. gruber: i was there in january. my editor had the iraq chapter . i thought it was rather good. nick said, you did not go to iraq and i told that come here of the reasons i did not go and he said why don't you go now and i said why don't you go now. it's not significant idea. out of spite i went on the web and looked up all the reasons why couldn't go and instead i found it is bloggers in error bill -- bloggers were saying it is completely safe. last march incident

or april the besides that really safe pleased to be. even though it's 80 kilometers from mosul. and terms of cost i think what be very expensive going to iraq. a round-trip flight from dubai for $250, not very expensive. the kurdistan regional authority allows americans to go there without a visa for 14 days. some excuses ran out. i plotted a course and went there and i was there for 10 days. brian: what did you see? mr. gruber: it was a profound experience. another experience where a fellow by the name of sameer, 31-year-old surgeon, saw my information on couch surfing, electric -- also have trouble hotel. a recently priced i read my profile and what

was doing and he said he hears is going to pick you up at the airport, taken to a guesthouse, i'm going to negotiate for you, draghi wherever you want to go can introduce you to my friends and give you whatever interview you want and i speak arabic and kurdish and i will be a translator. he's a doctor. he wanted no money. he simply wanted the kurdish story to be told and thought what i was doing was worthy of support. he took me to extraordinary places. the citadel is the oldest place onsly inhabited the planet. he took me to the citadel. he took me to the scene of the chemical bombardment in 1988 of the kurds by saddam hussein.

that was a powerful experience. beautiful mountain drive. we were sitting in the mariana hotel interviewing a peshmerga fighter who is auto mechanic for his day job or during the interview he said my brother is a commander on the front lines outside between here and mosul. would you like to interview him ?we were sitting in the marriott and i said of course i would. he called and talked to the base commander. they called and said be ready tomorrow morning. we drove through the checkpoints. we went over the tigris river. by that point we are probably a half hour drive from also. so --m also -- morals

mosul. samir turned to me and said we just we just passed the checkpoints and we're going to take you as a present to isis. a little kurdish humor there. i went to a army base and to be -- i had been an afghan army base rented interview and met a lot of army officials through my travels. to be there on the base and to talk to the soldiers who were there about how isis formed and their attitudes for sunni and shia and their experience through the two goforth was a coronary. brian: who do they play prices? mr. gruber: a lot of these , sort of like the movie -- iton where you get helped to give you a broader picture. in iraq there were no different perspectives on isis. whether you were sunni or shia

or kurd or hated the americans. i went to one dinner at this peace activist's apartment. a young fellow who lived in damascus who started the meeting by saying he hated americans. he turned out to be very charming and his father is a civil society activists. they all say the same thing. when you invade iraq and fire all the bath officers, you have tens of thousands of sunni officers who before were the elite in the society, most of mosulived in muscle -- in . they knew everything about army logistics and where weapons were stored. they had a lot of money.

when 11 years later those people are selling pencils or unemployed and they are sent home with their weapons there humiliated. shia militia marauding through their neighborhoods. a shia kleptocratic government. all of them say you all created isis by doing that. of course before one saddam hussein was in power if you were an islamist you would be mercilessly repressed and tortured. there was no al qaeda and iraq while hussein was in power. by taking a hussein, there were jihadi's who came from other countries who formed a small core particularly when the syrian civil war started. the reason why isis became successful in iraq is because you have former baath party members and sunni army officers who know the country and who have weapons and money for running military logistics.

brian: there's an enormous amount of material in this book we are not talking about. if somebody wants this book and all of the interviews you did how did they get it? mr. gruber: it is on amazon. just do a search for "war: the after party." it is paperback and it is on kindle as well. brian: how much? mr. gruber: $19.95 for the paperback. i published the paperback first for the book events that i did when i came back for this event in april. i had an extra two to three weeks to do a little more cleaning up of certain things, aesthetic cosmetic things. in the that and then next several weeks, what don't have in the kindle is photos.

by the time this interview airs the kindle will probably have another edition with photos and bonus content. otherwise it is the same book. brian: your facebook, twitter and all of that. if people want to get in the middle of all of this, what else can they do? mr. gruber: on twitter the handle would be the grube. i use facebook a lot more. they can just do a search for brian gruber on facebook. i post a lot on facebook. post a lot on their feet and also i have a website grubermedia.com where i blogged while i was doing the trip.

brian your sense of humor came : through more than once, the one i most remember was on the streets of nicaragua. i think you were out wandering around 19 and the young lady that came up to you. she offered her services. would you tell that story? and you walk a lot. you constantly talk about walking. mr. gruber: i don't always listen to people. people would tell me in the people coming in cities like guatemala city you can't just walk around. ultimately the way that i found people was most often by walking around and engaging with people and that person would introduce you to someone else. there were two

walkabouts that i did. the first one i walked out the front door the morning after i arrived, turned right and walked through the city. i think it was the 35th of the nicaraguan police and daniel ortega drove his car right in front of me and spoke. another was an experience of those three interviews i talked to you about. i had to go to granada. i took a bus there and did my two interviews and when i was sitting there in the all-time -- alhambra hotel, it is been there for half a century. my interviewee was late.

a young woman kept coming up to me and she kept lowering her price. my girlfriend at the time, i kept texting her the price, saying i'm trying to do expense control, you can't resist an offer like that brian:. what did lee anne think? mr. gruber: she thought those funny. brian: funny? mr. gruber: yeah. brian: how to do do this? how did you do the interviews physically and all of that? what did you use? mr. gruber: i wanted to do video. from the very beginning in guatemala, to make them feel comfortable, if i was messing with equipment, it made them feel more self-conscious.

it was also a production challenge. it was overwhelming to get the right audio and video in every place. i had an i-pad 2, a macbook pro and an iphone. i would record the interview on all three and i would have a device i put over the bottom of my ipad that was a stereo microphone input that is close to the interviewee -- a stereo microphone and put that is close to the interviewee as possible. most of the interviews were serendipitous. as long as it could be transcribed or i could hear it well, and that was good enough. if i have an iphone that was close to them, that was enough. that was a real difference, using it for transcribing versus

using it for broadcasting. i tried to transcribe it all on my own. i had a friend and then these two interns who transcribed everything. brian: have you saved on the interviews? mr. gruber: they are on the clouds and a couple of devices. almost all of them are transcribed. i have the written transcriptions as well. brian: somebody comes to you and they say, this looks like it was really a lot of fun and you learned a lot, able to make some conclusions i want to do this what would you tell them to do and not to do? mr. gruber: i would tell them to do it. if you have a compelling instinct and you are doing it, even for yourself and you want to do it you probably can and probably a lot dangerous than

you think. brian: a lot more dangerous? mr. gruber: a lot less dangerous, i'm sorry. and a lot cheaper than you think. crowdfunding, you need a community of people that you already know if you're going to do a successful crowdfunding campaign unless you are lucky. most of the things you see on kickstarter, people have a network of people that might want to support the project. two thirds of the money i got were from people i knew and the rest was from people on the website. travel tools are easier than they have ever been. travel costs are easier. tools.ent creation what to do, what not to do. i would encourage people to do it. i think if i were to do it again i might spend a few months in

advance plotting out the logistics and not having to do the content creation editorial part of it with the travel part and visa part and lodging part. brian: how do you avoid the huge airline costs? mr. gruber: because if you are there are be flexible so many discount airlines knew carriers particularly in the middle east and places that were to get into these markets. you can get very low-cost travel. at a certain point you need some money. the bench mark i gave you if you want to spend $200 a month instead of $2000 a month and travel internationally is going to be difficult. it's a lot less expensive than you think if you're willing to wait for the right fares or travel at 2:00 in the morning or have a long layover somewhere or

taken airline you might not have in lodging stay where you decide what are your baseline needs for new travel. if you're going to go somewhere on vacation you're going to have a certain baseline. when you are traveling if you're willing to do a project and if your baseline is relatively secure, a bed and functioning plumbing in the bathroom, you can be very flexible wherever you go. had was foodys i was really cheap. the only two times i got sick during the trip were from airplane food. i won't name the airline. eight a lot of street food. vietnamhave a feast in sitting on a small plastic chair in ho chi minh city for a dollar or two. if you're willing to adjust your travel standards.

brian: if you had to pick a place, not can podia or taiwan where you spent a lot of time, all the rest of the places you've been read live, which one would you pick? mr. gruber: i think that is tough. i loved afghanistan. not sure i would live there even though the mom who i interviewed told me you must convert islam and come back and live in afghanistan. probably would not live in afghanistan but nicaragua has a beautiful and developing coastline. also with low overhead. a lot of people like costa rica might want to nicaragua. brian: the name of this book "war: the after party, a global walkabout through a half-century military interventions

." thank you very much for joining us. mr. gruber: thank you, brian. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] >> if you enjoyed this weeks q and a interview with brian gruber here are other programs you might like, steve james and jack bassi talking about the document refill the war tapes.

andtimber on blue-eyed boy his expenses in vietnam as a journalist. kinzer on his book. search our entire video library at c-span.org. next, your calls and comments on washington journal. -- a 10:15, anti-poverty policies in their trump administration. at 3:00 p.m., staffers from the obama and george w. bush administrations talk about the presidential transition. ,onight, on the communicators verizon's executive vice president of public policy talks about the company's changes over recent years including the purchase available and the

proposed acquisition of you who. mr. silliman discusses the need for massive cyber buildout which could be part of the infrastructure program being considered by president-elect trump in congress. he's interviewed john mckinnon, technology reporter for the wall street journal. >> we are building the fiber deeper into the network so that the wireless signals travel and assorted distance -- a shorter distance. we talk about wireless networks 90% of that is exley fiber. you mentioned the internet of .hings and smart city you need a massive fiber infrastructure to develop that. >> watch the communicators tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span 2. this morning and discussion on the future of the health with sd amy goldstein of the washington post. later discussion on the future of medicare and medicaid with tom scully, former administrator

of medicare services and resplendent, former administrator of the health care financing administration. we will take your calls. you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. "washington journal" is next. ♪ host: good morning. it is monday, december 12, 2016. president obama prepares to sign a new medical research bill into law this week. president-elect donald trump is already looking ahead to january when republicans promised to make repealing the affordable care act one of their top priorities. as discussions continue about how to repeal and replace the law that they refer to as obamacare, democrats are vowing to fight these efforts every step of the way. we are hosting this program on