Steven Callahan should have died at sea. In early 1982, roughly a week out of the Canary Islands, something — he’s convinced it was a whale — holed his self-built 21-foot sloop Napoleon Solo in the middle of the night. What followed became one of the most famous survival stories ever told: 76 days adrift in a five-and-a-half-foot inflatable raft, alone, crossing nearly the entire Atlantic before a handful of fishermen found him off Marie Galante.

In this conversation, Steven walks us through all of it — diving into the flooded, pitch-black cabin to grab his ditch kit, coaxing a single pint of fresh water a day out of a temperamental solar still, spearfishing the dorado that became both his food and his “spiritual companions,” and the Day-43 disaster when his spear gun punctured the raft a thousand miles from land. But this is less a blow-by-blow than a master class in the psychology of survival from a philosophy major who treats reality as something to be accepted exactly as it is. We get into the divided self, the brutal “recoil” of giving up, why denial is the number one enemy, and how an ocean nearly killed him and gave him a life.