Where is the most violent place you have ever been?

Chechnya 1999. I was with the rebels under siege in Grozny. They counted 6,000 impacts an hour in the city of Grozny. And they were killing mostly civilians. But it was an extraordinary amount of violence and death, old people and children and people who couldn’t escape the city.

And was there something specific about the politics of that situation that made it so much more violent than the all of other places you’ve been?

Well, nobody was there. That’s the reason I was there. I was the only person inside Grozny with the rebels. The Russian government had taken great pains to frighten people off. There had been a number of very gory kidnappings, etc. I went in at the same time as a French journalist tried to get in. He was kidnapped, and later killed himself.

You’ve been writing the Dangerous Places series since 1993. What have been the most surprising changes to the list of countries that have made the list of the “most dangerous”?

What’s changed the list is that there are so few real wars anymore, when you think about what most people consider to be a “war zone” — two armies lining up and banging away at each other — that’s virtually disappeared today. You don’t even see that in Iraq anymore or Afghanistan. The entire world has turned into what they call fourth-generation warfare, in which the entire world is a war zone and everybody in it is a potential victim or supporter or accomplice, and you are just as likely to get blown up on a subway in London as you are in a marketplace in Baghdad. So it’s taken all the fun out of it (laughs).

It used to be that war zones were very specific places and battlefields were clearly marked lines. I remember sitting up on the front lines with the Taliban as they shelled the Northern Alliance, and then, a while later, I was back on the front lines with the Northern Alliance and I was giving the commander a hard time saying that I was up on the hill a few months ago and you couldn’t hit me. And he essentially unleashed a barrage of artillery to prove me wrong. But I mean those kinds of wars are gone.

And yet you still have these lists of dangerous places. Is there any one that’s on the list now that you never thought in 1993 you’d see there?

New York City. It would be hard to believe that 3,000 people could die in a bomb in downtown Manhattan. People used to make fun of me for including the USA, but I always pointed out that, in terms of violence, most people are terrified of the US from the outside because they view it as a very violent place. And now that Americans are legitimate targets of terrorists, it’s something that you have to think about. There’s a difference between danger and fear, of course. The book is written as a travel guide, but what it really tries to do is point out that the things you fear are not necessarily the things that might kill you.

You often say you are not a journalist, or in the book sometimes you apologize for having to temporarily act as a journalist. But wouldn’t you agree that the words on the page would qualify as journalism by most people’s standards?

No, because journalism is kind of a voyeuristic activity. You are not allowed to get involved if you are a journalist, because it somehow affects your objectivity. And I say bullshit, because either you admit that you are a human being and that you are affected by what you see and do, or what — if a bunch of people get blown up in front of you, are you just going to sit there and watch them die just because it’s a great story? I think that’s my problem with journalism. At some point, you have to pass the point of journalism and become a human being.

And a lot of people do embeds – I’ve never done an embed – but the idea that you would do an embed and watch people kill people because it’s your job, without actually getting involved is to me kind of sad.

Anybody could get access, because people want to show you something. Today people have confirmed that the media is part of warfare, and the image that you represent can be just as powerful as what you do or don’t do. Journalists become tools in that event, and when you look at how many journalists operate in Iraq outside of the official structure, it’s almost zero. If there are people out there, you are going to get more coverage by sending someone to do an embed, and sort of a six-day tour, than you are by some poor Iraqi guy who’s been working there for 20 years. The funny thing is, a lot of my friends are journalists, and they get a little uppity when you smack ‘em around, but they do admit that journalism is not what they thought when they went into it. That’s not necessarily their fault, because most mainstream journalism is owned by entertainment companies. But the idea of somebody going to a region, spending two or three months there to try to figure things out, going on both sides of the conflict and coming back with a fairly clear idea of what’s going on there has almost vanished. They call it “enterprise journalism” now instead of journalism.

It’s too expensive, and people don’t give a shit. The idea being that, the less people are exposed to the world and the problems in that world, the less they care about it. People wonder why Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are the most popularly downloaded or viewed stories. It is because people are exposed to that kind of entertainment. They don’t have any experience in combat, they don’t know what it’s like to be bombed in a village. You have to remember that America has not been directly involved in a war probably since WWII. It’s always been something that happened somewhere else. And 9-11 I think really snapped people to attention, but it’s just something about the American psyche, they get bored, you know? What I try to do is encourage people to go to these places and understand what’s going on and then you become part of the world. In other words, when you read about people suffering in Darfur, you know what it’s like to starve in Darfur. You know how hot it is, and you know what it looks like and smells like. And that’s what’s missing I think. Because the media is only doing what people tell it to do.

Your risk-assessment company – the combination of Praedict, IraqSlogger, and Iraq SafetyNet – raised a lot of attention when it was announced last year because it seemed like such a unique model of information gathering and access. But Iraq has gotten a lot safer since then – at least it appears to be for those of us who read the New York Times. Has the downturn in violence hurt your business model at all?

No, no. Our business model is something that’s quite simple but very unique and that’s that we help people understand what’s going on there. And that actually has more relevance when you are in the reconstructive phase of a war than when you are in the combat phase. When you are attacking somebody, all you have to do is kill them, you don’t need to know a whole lot about that person, and what they think or where they eat or what they grow. But when you are now inside the country and you are trying to stabilize it, you really, really need to know as much as you can about those people because if you back the wrong people or do the wrong thing, that can be very destructive. As you’ve seen, [Gen. David H.] Petraeus’s whole focus has really become more of an intelligent approach to understanding problems. And you have to also understand that the US military has a very, very short institutional memory. People go in for 90 days, or six months, and vanish. So the next person who comes in has to start from scratch. There’s a huge demand for things that get you up to speed. If you’ve read DP, you know that it’s not a thousand-page book on the anthropological relationship, but it helps you learn about a place.

Has the Internet made the adverturist’s life more or less adventurous?

I’d have to say it’s more boring because there used to be places that were just so unknown, like Afghanistan in the 80s. If you can imagine trying to figure out anything about Afghanistan, or Central African Republic, or those countries that were just sort of off the map. Now you can just read the daily newspaper every day. You can write emails to people who are working there and living there. So it’s very funny that the Internet has reduced a lot of the barriers and taken a lot of the romance and fun about visiting places that other people haven’t been to.

Check out RYP’s story in May’s Men’s Journal about his efforts to get his friend out of jail in Equatorial Guinea.