AI transcript
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0:05:45 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode
0:06:14 of the Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every
0:06:19 field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and
0:06:24 test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one and that’s because the podcast recently hit its
0:06:31 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and past one billion downloads. To celebrate,
0:06:38 I’ve curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over
0:06:44 the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally,
0:06:49 we’ve been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes,
0:06:54 enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people
0:07:00 I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do
0:07:06 the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode.
0:07:12 Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together.
0:07:17 And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.log/combo.
0:07:24 And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
0:07:28 First up, Jaco Willink, retired U.S. Navy SEAL officer, recipient of both the Silver and Bronze
0:07:38 Stars, number one, New York Times bestselling co-author of Extreme Ownership, host of the
0:07:44 top-rated Jaco podcast and co-founder and CEO of Premier Leadership Consulting Company,
0:07:51 Echelon Front. You can find Jaco on Twitter and Instagram @jacowillink.
0:07:57 What have you observed and learned about what makes a good leader versus a good or
0:08:05 a mediocre or a bad leader? The immediate answer that comes to mind is humility
0:08:09 because you’ve got to be humble and you’ve got to be coachable.
0:08:14 We would fire guys. Later, when I was running training, we would fire a couple leaders from
0:08:20 every SEAL team because they couldn’t lead. And 99.9% of the time, it wasn’t a question of their
0:08:25 ability. It was a question of their ability to listen and their ability to step outside and see
0:08:30 that maybe there’s a better way to do things. That’s number one. And number two, I would say
0:08:35 is an individual who is balanced. And I talk about there’s a phrase that I use. It’s the
0:08:43 dichotomy of leadership. So in a leadership situation, you’re constantly balancing these
0:08:48 opposing forces. So do you have to be aggressive? Absolutely. Can you be too aggressive? Yes,
0:08:54 you can. Do you need to be courageous? Yes, you do. Can you be foolhardy and get people killed?
0:08:59 Absolutely. So there’s all these balances. Can you be too close to your men? Yes, you can.
0:09:05 Can you be not close enough? Yes, you can. Can you be too robotic? Yes, you can. Can you be too
0:09:11 emotional? Absolutely. So what I find the best leaders, they have this ability to balance all
0:09:18 those opposing forces. And usually when you do find a problem, if you realize that your leadership
0:09:24 isn’t working, generally you can look and say, oh, I’m going too far in one direction on this
0:09:29 particular force, this dichotomy of leadership, I’m going too far. I’m being overbearing. I’m
0:09:34 micromanaging. Micromanaging is a great one, right? You can obviously micromanage your people.
0:09:39 They won’t do anything on their own. They won’t take any initiative. And that’s horrible. The other
0:09:43 end is you cannot give them the guidance that they need and not pay close enough attention to them.
0:09:48 And now they don’t know what the mission is or what they’re doing. So there’s all these dichotomies
0:09:52 that you have to balance as a leader. And I think that between being humble and balancing all those
0:09:58 dichotomies of leadership is what makes a good leader. And how would say the ability to listen
0:10:04 and be coachable? What would be an example of how that manifests itself? Just how you would observe
0:10:10 that and say, that’s a guy who’s good at being humble and coachable or the opposite. So I’m
0:10:15 looking for the things that you would observe or hear where you’d be like, you know what,
0:10:18 I think we might have to let that guy go. Again, now we’re going back to training. We put these
0:10:22 guys through very realistic and challenging training to say the least. And I know if there’s
0:10:27 any guys that went through training when I was running it right now, they’re chuckling because
0:10:30 it was very realistic, psychotic. And we put so much pressure on these guys and overwhelm them.
0:10:36 And a good leader would come back and say, I lost it. I didn’t control it. I didn’t do a good job.
0:10:45 I didn’t see what was happening. I got too absorbed in this little tiny tactical situation
0:10:50 that was right in front of me. Either they’d make those criticisms themselves about themselves,
0:10:55 or they’d say, what did I do wrong? And when you told them, they’d nod their head,
0:10:59 they’d pull out their notebook, they’d take notes. And that right there, that’s a guy that’s going
0:11:03 to make it. That’s going to do it right. And then you get the guy that comes in and he’s immediately
0:11:07 saying, you know, you say, well, what’d you think of the operation? And if it was a disaster,
0:11:12 you’d say it was a disaster. And you go, well, what went wrong? And immediately it’s,
0:11:16 well, my assault team leader didn’t do X, and my mobility commander didn’t do Y. And I told those
0:11:23 guys I wanted them to do over there and they didn’t go there. Fingerpointing. Immediately
0:11:27 fingerpointing. And that’s just a telltale sign. You’ve got a guy that’s not humble enough and
0:11:31 coachable. It’s an awful thing. You can try and change people. And sometimes they would change,
0:11:36 but it’s difficult to get them to change. You know, that’s some people are born with that
0:11:40 characteristic. And it’s a bummer to see if you can’t fix them, you can’t fix them.
0:11:44 Right. And they’re not going to listen to anybody.
0:11:46 Well, it sounds like self-awareness is also a big component of that, to have
0:11:50 the awareness to kind of step outside and objectively evaluate yourself.
0:11:54 I call it detachment. And, you know, that’s one of the things that early on in my leadership career,
0:12:00 I actually remember when it happened. I was probably 20 something years, 22 or 23 years old.
0:12:08 I was in my first SEAL platoon and we come up, we’re on an oil rig in California doing some
0:12:14 training. And we come up on this level of this oil rig and it’s never been on an oil rig before.
0:12:18 They’re very complex. There’s gear and boxes and just stuff everywhere on these levels.
0:12:23 And they’re see-through. You can see through the floors and you can see it’s complex environment.
0:12:28 We come up and we all get on this platform on this level and everybody freezes.
0:12:35 And I’m kind of waiting and I’m a new guy. So, you know, I don’t feel like I should be doing
0:12:39 anything. But then I said to myself, you know, somebody’s got to do something.
0:12:41 So I just, what’s called, high ported my gun. So I just lifted my gun up towards the air.
0:12:47 Like I’m not, I’m not a shooter right now. And I took one step back off the line and I looked
0:12:51 around and I saw what the picture was. And I just said, you know, hold left, move right.
0:12:57 And everybody heard it and they did it. And I said to myself, hmm, that’s what you need to do.
0:13:03 And so I realized that detaching yourself from the situation so you could
0:13:06 observe it so that you can see what’s happening is absolutely critical.
0:13:10 And now, you know, when I talk to executives or mid-level managers, I explain to them that I’m
0:13:17 doing that all the time. It sounds horrible, but it’s almost like sometimes I’m not a participant
0:13:22 in my own life. I’m an observer of that guy that’s doing it. So if I’m having a conversation with you
0:13:27 and, you know, we’re trying to discuss a point and I’m watching and saying, wait,
0:13:32 are you being too emotional right now? Or, you know, wait a second, look at him.
0:13:35 I’m not reading you correctly if I’m seeing you through my own emotion or ego. I can’t really
0:13:41 see what you’re thinking. But if I step out of that, I can see the real you. And if you are getting
0:13:46 angry, if your ego is getting hurt, if you’re about to cave because you’re just fed up with me.
0:13:51 Whereas if I’m, you know, raging in my own head, I might miss all of that. And so that detachment
0:13:57 that takes place as a leader is critical. And you’re 100% right on that.
0:14:01 How do you instill that or try to teach that? Is that something people… I feel like that maybe
0:14:08 more than the humility seems to be a coachable skill. Part of the reason I say that is because
0:14:15 I’ve found that whether it’s a cognitive behavioral therapy or stoic philosophy for that matter,
0:14:21 you can, in small increments, condition people to have less of an extreme emotional response and
0:14:28 to try to observe themselves. And I suppose that there’s some Buddhist thought that would
0:14:32 translate to that as well. But how do you help teach someone that ability to detach?
0:14:36 So what we did to teach them was put them under extraordinary pressure where to fail to detach
0:14:44 from the situation and step up and away from the problem would result in failure. I had a great
0:14:51 experience where the guy that actually took my job over as the troop commander and a very close
0:14:57 friend of mine, he was going through the training now. And I was running the training. And we were
0:15:03 going out to a place called Nyland, California to do land warfare. And again, this is desert
0:15:08 operations, you’re patrolling in long distances, you’re hitting targets, and we have high level
0:15:15 laser tag guns that we use to shoot. And it’s very, we put a lot of pressure on people,
0:15:21 there’s helicopters, there’s smoke, there’s bombs, there’s all kinds of stuff happening.
0:15:24 And this guy, this buddy of mine, he was supposed to be commanding and all,
0:15:29 but he had broken his neck about, I don’t know, six weeks prior to this.
0:15:34 Was that on like a ropes course or?
0:15:35 It was climbing a ship. And the guy above him fell and broke his neck.
0:15:40 And so this guy, who had been in Ramadi with me, and, you know, did an outstanding job and amazing
0:15:47 effort, and was brave to a fault, you know, we’re luckies here. So the land warfare training takes
0:15:54 place. And he comes out and I said, Hey, just come out and watch with me. And so he comes out and,
0:16:01 you know, we’re watching, and we’re out on one of these field training exercises. So all this
0:16:05 mayhem starts and there’s bad guys up in the hills and there’s bombs going off and there’s smoke
0:16:10 everywhere. But from our position, which we were standing next to the guys that were in it,
0:16:15 and he looks at me and he says, you know, it’s so easy when you’re not in it. And I said,
0:16:21 this is how it was for me when we went through. I was up here and he was like a light bulb went
0:16:27 off, you know, he said, I saw you, he kind of saw me like that and said, how does he know what’s
0:16:32 happening right now? So the ability easy in so much as when you’re the outsider looking in,
0:16:36 you can see what to do, what’s going exactly. And when you did it, you were not necessarily
0:16:41 physically removing yourself, but sort of mentally, yes, pulling the perspective back so you could
0:16:47 observe it. So if you take someone like your friend who has this realization like, Oh, holy
0:16:51 shit, okay, that explains a lot. Because if you could create this perspective, you would have a
0:16:56 huge tactical advantage. What type of exercise would you put someone through, or the consequences
0:17:04 were so significant that they would be forced to detach in that way? I mean, these are just
0:17:08 exercise that we do. So we would use lasers. We have this advanced laser tag system where
0:17:15 you can get shot at 300 meters. If you get shot at an island and your beeper goes off and says
0:17:20 you’re dead, then you’re dead. And you’re going to have to get carried out by your buddies,
0:17:24 which is awful. They’re going to get hurt, sprained ankles, everything else. It’s a nightmare.
0:17:28 And they’re also now they can’t maneuver as well. So now what happens when they get attacked again,
0:17:32 which they’re going to, because it’s going to be Murphy’s law out there. And the problems compound.
0:17:38 And if the leaders get bogged down in those problems and don’t step back, we would kill all
0:17:42 of them. And they’d come back with their heads down and say, you know, what the hell just happened?
0:17:48 And what can we do better? And then, you know, we’d have this talk with them. And, you know,
0:17:52 it’s one of those things. It’s like when you’re growing up and you don’t listen to anybody,
0:17:56 not that you don’t listen to people, but some lessons you have to learn through life and through
0:18:01 experience. And so that happened. And the guys would, you know, guys at varying levels, some of
0:18:06 them would would be able to go, Oh, I just saw it. Okay, now I can make this happen. And that would
0:18:10 happen as well, where I would see their, you know, when in like a terminator, when the beginning
0:18:15 of the terminator said on August 27, 2016, the machines became aware, you could see their leadership
0:18:22 switch happen. And all of a sudden they’d go, boom. And then I know my job was done.
0:18:27 And they’d step up, they’d take a step back from the situation. They would look around,
0:18:31 they’d observe, they’d make good decisions and good calls, and then watch them progress out of it,
0:18:37 and finish the problem and do well. And then I knew that I had done my job.
0:18:43 They’d become aware.
0:18:44 They became aware as leaders. Yeah.
0:18:45 What do your morning routines look like on an ideal day? What is the first 90 minutes of your
0:18:50 day look like? When do you wake up? What does that look like?
0:18:52 So I wake up early, I wake up at 445. I like to have that psychological win over the enemy.
0:19:00 And, you know, for me, when I wake up in the morning and I don’t know why I’m thinking about
0:19:07 the enemy and what they’re doing, and I know I’m not active duty anymore, but it’s still in there,
0:19:13 that there’s a guy that’s in a cave somewhere, and he’s rocking back and forth,
0:19:20 and he’s got a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other hand, and he’s waiting
0:19:28 for me, and we’re going to meet. And when I wake up in the morning, I’m thinking to myself,
0:19:36 what can I do to be ready for that moment, which is coming, which is coming? So that propels me
0:19:45 out of bed, and I work out early in the morning. So you wake up at 445. What’s the next thing,
0:19:51 aside from like brushing your teeth and doing the usual?
0:19:54 Do the usual, start working out. Ideally, I like to get done with my workout by the time the sun
0:19:58 comes up. And so now if there’s waves, you know, I live by the ocean, so I’ll go surfing and get
0:20:04 done with that. What does a typical morning workout look like? I do a lot of pull-ups, push-ups,
0:20:08 and dips. I deadlift and do squats. I do sprints. It’s everything that everybody does. I swing
0:20:14 kettlebells. I do burpees. It’s all that. And it’s like a 60-minute workout. How long is the workout?
0:20:20 It depends. It depends on what’s going on. I’ll try and do some strength movements to be strong,
0:20:25 you know, deadlifts, cleans, clean and jerk, something like that, to make myself stronger,
0:20:30 or even if it’s something like just dead hang pull-ups and I’m just maxing out. But I’ll do
0:20:34 something like that to make myself stronger. And sometimes that can take a while, you know,
0:20:37 because I’ll just want to relax and hit singles or doubles on deadlifts or cleans or whatever.
0:20:42 And then when I get done with that, I’ll do some kind of metabolic conditioning of some kind,
0:20:47 you know, I’ll be sprinting or rowing or swinging a kettlebell or lighter weight, cleaning jerks
0:20:53 for reps or something like that. So that’s what it looks like for me. When you think of the word
0:20:58 successful, who are the first people or the first person who comes to mind?
0:21:02 The part of the world that I’ve seen is a very dark place. It’s a dark place. That’s what war is.
0:21:10 And when your job, which my job was, was to expand that darkness in many ways,
0:21:21 I mean, it’s war is about killing people. And so for me, when I look to someone
0:21:29 that’s successful, it’s someone that brings some light into that darkness.
0:21:40 So for me, the first people that come to my head are Mark Lee, who is one of my guys,
0:21:51 first seal killed in Iraq. Mike Montsour, one of my guys, second seal killed in Iraq,
0:21:57 posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. And Ryan Job, one of my guys, wounded in Iraq,
0:22:03 blinded in both eyes, made it home, medically retired from the, from the Navy, married his
0:22:12 high school sweetheart, got her pregnant and finished his college degree. And after his 22nd
0:22:22 surgery to repair the damage that was done to his, his head and face, there were complications
0:22:28 and he died as well. But all of those guys in all that darkness, they did things, they made a sacrifice
0:22:45 that was completely selfless. And to do that and to live and fight and die like a warrior,
0:23:02 that to me is success. And those guys are my heroes.
0:23:12 Are there any books that you’ve gifted to other people?
0:23:15 I think there’s only one book that I’ve ever given, and I’ve only given it to a couple people.
0:23:21 And that’s a book called About Face by Colonel David Hackworth. And it is huge. So Colonel David
0:23:30 Hackworth was the tail end of World War II. He was in Korea. He was highly decorated in Korea.
0:23:37 He joined the, like joined the Merchant Marines or something when he was 15,
0:23:41 got into the Army again, right after World War II. So he kind of got raised by those World War II
0:23:46 veterans. And then he was in Korea, he was in Vietnam, and he was just absolutely borderline
0:23:54 worshipped by the men that he led, and by some of the senior leadership. And just a great book.
0:24:02 And he was a rebel. And he did question the way we were doing things. And what’s controversial
0:24:07 about him is that he’s the guy that said to Walter Cronkite, or he said he’s the first guy in Vietnam
0:24:16 that said, we’re not going to win this thing. And so he’s kind of blacklisted by much of the Army.
0:24:23 But, you know, as you dig into that, what he was really saying was, we’re not going to win this
0:24:27 thing if we keep fighting how we’re fighting. He recognized that we needed to do a significant
0:24:32 paradigm shift in the strategy that we were executing over there. And it’s like, you’ve
0:24:38 heard, we never lost a tactical battle in Vietnam. You’ve heard that, right?
0:24:41 Yep. And there’s plenty of people that will say that all day long. But if you and I are
0:24:45 leading a platoon, and we take our platoon out, and we hit a booby trap, and it kills three of
0:24:51 our guys or two of our guys and wounds another three, and there’s no one to shoot at. And we
0:24:56 medevac those guys and we come back to base, who won that? Right. And, you know, he recognized that.
0:25:01 So the metrics that were being used were sort of not a smoke screen, but they were at best
0:25:07 the wrong metrics. I had that book next to my bed in Ramadi, and I literally read it every night.
0:25:13 I would, you know, that’s how I’d fall asleep. I’d go up, read a couple of pages,
0:25:16 you know, just open it, and you’d find something in every, it was very comparable. You know, they
0:25:21 were working with the South Vietnamese Army, and guess what? They were corrupt, and they were
0:25:26 scared, and they weren’t the best soldiers. And we were working with Iraqis, and guess what? They
0:25:29 were corrupt, and they were scared, and they weren’t the best. There were so many parallels
0:25:33 between the two. So that’s the book that I’ve given to a couple close friends of mine that
0:25:38 I wanted them to have. About face. The other book that I’ve read multiple times is Blood Meridian.
0:25:43 Blood Meridian. Yeah. I don’t know that. Okay. So it’s written by Cormac McCarthy.
0:25:51 Oh, fantastic writer. So this is his best book. And, you know, I was an English major in college,
0:25:56 and so, you know, I was forced to read all kinds of books. And, you know, obviously Shakespeare is
0:26:02 kind of the pinnacle in my mind. And Cormac McCarthy is the guy that I think actually has that.
0:26:08 And if you read Blood Meridian, then there it is. Right. And I think what I find so gripping about it
0:26:16 is, you know, I talked earlier about the darkness of the world. And this is a historical novel
0:26:24 based on a group called the Glanton Gang that were killing Indians. And they ended up killing
0:26:33 everybody. If you had black hair, your scalp was going to be taken. And that’s what it’s about.
0:26:39 And it’s completely epic. But for me, it communicated to me, a guy Cormac McCarthy
0:26:45 was able to show the darkness in humanity. And there’s nothing pleasant in any way,
0:26:51 shape or form in that book. But that’s, in many ways, the world that I lived in.
0:26:57 What would you put on a billboard? If you could have one billboard
0:27:00 anywhere, what would you put on it?
0:27:02 One of my kind of, I guess my mantra is a very simple one. And that’s discipline equals freedom.
0:27:10 I’ve found that as an individual, the more disciplined you are, and it’s counterintuitive,
0:27:17 right? The more disciplined you are, the more freedom you actually have. And you and I both
0:27:22 know if you wake up early, you get more done and you end up with more free time. So the more you
0:27:26 manage your time, the more disciplined you are with your time management, the more free time you
0:27:31 end up having, the more disciplined you are physically with your diet, the more freedom you
0:27:36 have, because you can do more stuff, you have more freedom. So the more disciplined you are,
0:27:41 the more freedom you have. And what’s interesting is how that transfers over to both military units
0:27:46 and the civilian sector, that when an element or an unit or when a company is a disciplined group,
0:27:53 they actually end up with more freedom. So, you know, I had a sealed troop, we were highly
0:27:57 disciplined. We had standard operating procedures for just about everything that we did. And you’d
0:28:04 think that that would restrain your creativity, but it actually doesn’t. The more disciplined you are,
0:28:10 the easier I could say, Hey, you four, go take down that building. And they knew what to do
0:28:14 because they were highly disciplined. I knew what they were going to do because they were highly
0:28:18 disciplined. We understood what parameters they were going to stay within because we had standard
0:28:23 operating procedures to follow. So that discipline, both on an individual level, and as a group,
0:28:30 equals freedom. And just like anything else with leadership, you can take that too far.
0:28:36 You can discipline an element or a person so much that they break down and they no longer have
0:28:40 creativity. So just like the dichotomy of leadership, you can go too strong with discipline and they
0:28:46 end up breaking down or you can give them too much freedom and they break down in the other
0:28:49 direction. I’m really glad that you mentioned that because I’ve realized in a way that my,
0:28:55 when I struggle the most kind of existentially or really just creatively, it’s when I have the
0:29:01 fewest constraints. I want positive constraints. I need boxes, not so that I have to stay within
0:29:07 the box, but that I can start at least coloring inside the box. And that’s part of the reason
0:29:13 that I’ve been so excited to adopt this rescue puppy, Molly, because it forces me to regiment
0:29:19 and structure my day in such a way that I can then plan around fixed objects. And I think that
0:29:26 whether it’s in the military, at least in my experience in business, you want to reserve your
0:29:30 creativity for the things that require creativity, not for what should the steps be when I’m doing
0:29:36 a room clearance. It’s like, no, no, no, you want a standard operating procedure
0:29:39 so that your brain cycles are allocated to the places where you need those brain cycles.
0:29:46 That’s 100% right. So I’ve realized in the last few months for myself that what I thought I wanted,
0:29:52 which is freedom in the form of infinite options, is not actually what I want at all. It’s very
0:29:57 stressful and you end up, you know, you burn 10 calories in a million directions, you’re fatigued
0:30:02 and you didn’t get shit done. So I’m actually in a way trying to figure out how I can say no
0:30:07 to a thousand things so that I can be fully creative on one or two things. It’s one of the
0:30:12 reasons I enjoy doing this podcast so much is that when you talk to people who’ve operated the
0:30:15 highest levels in any field, this kind of stuff comes up. And after a while, it’s like, Ferris,
0:30:20 idiot, do you get the message yet? You’ve heard meditation from 80% of the people who’ve been
0:30:25 on your podcast. Maybe you should chill the fuck out and like sit down for 20 minutes every morning.
0:30:29 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:31:32 Visit livemomentus.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout for 20% off. That’s livemomentus.com/tim
0:31:44 and code TIM for 20% off. And now, Sebastian Younger, P-Body award-winning journalist,
0:31:55 author of five New York Times bestsellers, including The Perfect Storm and War and Documentarian,
0:32:02 whose films include Restrepo, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
0:32:08 Sebastian’s new book is In My Time of Dying. You can find him on Twitter at Sebastian Younger.
0:32:15 Sebastian, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It’s nice to be here.
0:32:21 It’s so exciting to finally get a chance to hang because we have a mutual friend in Josh
0:32:25 Waitskin who’s been on the podcast twice. For those who don’t know, the basis for searching
0:32:30 for Bobby Fisher with the book and the movie, but a lot more than that. I mean, a real masterful
0:32:34 and kind soul who’s really taught me a lot. But the first encounter we had was at Josh’s
0:32:41 wedding. And I guess we were piecing it together and that was 10 years ago, something along those
0:32:46 lines. And this is the first chance that we’ve had to really kind of dig in and get to know each
0:32:51 other. Let’s start with some mundane stuff. But you have a book here on your backpack.
0:32:57 Could you tell us what you’re reading at the moment? I’m reading the biography of Thomas Paine,
0:33:02 one of the intellectual fathers of American independence from Britain in the 1770s.
0:33:09 And somehow, this is maybe TMI for people listening, but
0:33:13 Sebastian arrived before I got back to my place. I was doing some acro yoga long story.
0:33:19 And then you had picked up the letters from a Stoic. And did the Stoics come up in the book
0:33:26 about pain? Yeah, the Greek Stoics were greatly abired by pain. I didn’t know much about them.
0:33:31 I knew the word. And I’d heard of Seneca, but I’m incredibly, I’m sort of half illiterate or
0:33:38 untutored. And what the book said about the Stoics was amazing. And, you know, I’m not religious.
0:33:44 I didn’t grow up going to church. I don’t believe in God. And so if you’re like me, you’re always
0:33:47 looking for a way to sort of order the universe that’s inspiring or reassuring and sort of makes
0:33:55 sense of things. And so what they said about the Stoics, I really identified with, I’m like,
0:33:59 oh, I got to learn more about the Stoics. And then here I was before I took a nap on your couch,
0:34:04 I sort of pawed through your book collection over there. And there was the letters of Seneca,
0:34:09 and I grabbed it and sat down and I almost started whooping with pleasure. I mean,
0:34:14 the things that he was writing 2000 years ago were so modern, so amazing, so essential. I just
0:34:22 thought I’d have to get this book immediately. You seem to be a Stoic without calling yourself
0:34:29 such in a lot of respects, but I want to bring up something that I know nothing about,
0:34:33 but a fan had asked me to inquire about, which is chainsaw. Ask him about the chainsaw.
0:34:40 Let’s talk about your career with chainsaws. Can you give us some context?
0:34:45 Yeah, absolutely. So I studied anthropology in college because it interested me.
0:34:50 That was on the East Coast? Yeah, Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
0:34:53 I had no interest in being an anthropologist, but it actually helped me throughout my career
0:34:57 as a writer. After I got out of college, I sort of wandered around, I waited tables, I did various
0:35:03 things to earn money while I was trying to become a writer. And I was very slowly getting into
0:35:09 journalism, but it didn’t pay very well. And I got a job eventually as a climber for tree companies.
0:35:14 And I would work 80, 90 feet in the air with a chainsaw on a rope, taking trees down in pieces,
0:35:22 bringing branches and lowering them as I cut them and taking off the tops of trees and taking
0:35:26 them down all the way to the ground. It was extremely dangerous work. Or I should say,
0:35:30 it’s dangerous if you make a mistake. There isn’t any random danger in the top of a tree.
0:35:34 And I realized at one point, if I get killed doing this, and plenty of people do, if I get killed
0:35:39 doing this, it will be because I killed myself by accident. It’s not a situation where something
0:35:44 random will kill me. That was very reassuring. And it also trained me to really focus on being in
0:35:50 the present moment. Well, at one point, I wasn’t in the present moment. And the chainsaw hit the
0:35:56 back of my leg and tore open the back of my leg. And I had been a marathon runner and stuff. And
0:36:00 I was super worried about my Achilles tendon. So it hit your lower leg, your entire back?
0:36:04 I managed to drag it across the back of my ankle, right where the Achilles is.
0:36:10 I turned the chainsaw, and I was way up in a tree on a rope. And I turned the chainsaw off
0:36:15 and I clipped it to my belt and looked down. And I pulled the wound open because I wanted,
0:36:19 you know, you go into shock and you get very clinical immediately, right?
0:36:23 I pulled the wound open. And I wanted to see if the Achilles was intact. Indeed, it was,
0:36:29 by the way, an Achilles is about the thickness of a number two pencil and it’s white. Just in
0:36:34 case you ever wanted to know what your Achilles looks like. And I was so relieved to see it intact,
0:36:40 but I was still pretty messed, had a pretty messed up leg. And I repelled down to the ground and
0:36:43 my crew took me to the hospital. And as I was recovering, I had this thought that people die
0:36:49 all the time doing dangerous jobs in this country. They’re mostly work less men. They work in industries
0:36:55 that are very dangerous, drilling for oil, logging, commercial fishing, that the nation needs done.
0:37:00 And they die in numbers comparable to soldiers and war, actually. But they don’t get acknowledged,
0:37:06 they don’t get honored. And I thought, maybe I’ll write about dangerous jobs. And that set me on
0:37:10 course to write my first book called The Perfect Storm about a huge storm that, among other things,
0:37:16 like a commercial fishing boat at sea. You know, I was lamenting the fact it’s not really the right
0:37:22 way to put it. I was saying that we could probably talk for seven hours. There’s so many things I
0:37:26 want to ask you about and so many things that Josh wanted me to ask you also. But let’s go back to
0:37:30 the repelling down trees for a second. How did you get that job? I mean, what qualified you or
0:37:36 did not qualify you? How did that come to pass? Like many good stories that started in a bar.
0:37:41 I was broke and I was at a bar one evening and I was sitting next to this guy and we just started
0:37:49 talking. And he said he owned a tree company and he said he was looking for a climber. And you know,
0:37:53 I was a pretty athletic kid. And he said, “Listen, I’ll train you to climb if you’ll work for me,
0:37:58 but I can’t give you full-time work. Only occasional work is all I got.” And I was like,
0:38:02 “Yeah, absolutely.” So he sort of trained me how to climb. And the great thing about climbing was
0:38:07 that I could make, I mean, for an unemployed freelance writer in the late 80s, I could make a
0:38:13 couple hundred dollars a day cash. I could make 500 bucks a day, even a thousand dollars a day,
0:38:17 depending on the job. So I could work one day a week and sort of live off it. And it was the
0:38:21 perfect job for someone who was trying to do something else and needed some time.
0:38:27 The athleticism, we were talking about this when we were having lunch together,
0:38:31 what did your running times look like when you were at your peak?
0:38:35 My running times were almost fast enough. That’s what they looked like from my perspective.
0:38:39 What was your mile?
0:38:41 I ran 412 for the mile.
0:38:43 That’s a fucking fast mile. I mean, from my perspective, that seems extremely fast. And
0:38:48 then you got into marathons after that. Yeah, I ran 904 for the two mile,
0:38:54 2405 for five miles and a 221 marathon. Those are my sort of set of distance records that I had.
0:38:59 So the perfect storm, I heard you described or read you being described as based on that work.
0:39:07 I’m paraphrasing here, but the next Hemingway along those lines. And Josh had also observed,
0:39:12 I think the way he put it was to quote, “One of the leanest writers I know,
0:39:17 so little bullshit between the muscle.” How did you develop your writing style?
0:39:24 And if that’s a bad question, feel free to rephrase it, but
0:39:27 how did you develop that leanness at that point in your life?
0:39:31 I never studied English and I never studied writing in college or after, but I read a lot.
0:39:38 I grew up in a household with a lot of books. My father was educated in Europe. He grew up in
0:39:42 Europe and reading was this sort of imperative. You don’t not read. And I read John McPhee,
0:39:53 Joan Didion, Peter Matheson, Ernest Hemingway, of course, a little bit of Faulkner. I mean,
0:39:59 I could go on. But I gravitated towards language that was efficient and lean and innovative. And
0:40:10 when I would read a book that I liked, I would think about John McPhee. I would think about,
0:40:15 why isn’t I like it? What is it about the writing that appeals to me? And even more importantly,
0:40:20 when I read books I didn’t like, I tried to figure out what was it about that sentence,
0:40:24 about that paragraph that repels me. And that was how I learned to write. It’s a sort of process
0:40:31 of natural selection. I just kept reading things that reinforced the style that I was drawn to
0:40:37 you anyway. And I kept writing more and more in that style. And I think if you know those writers
0:40:41 and you read me, you can see my literary ancestry pretty clearly.
0:40:46 What drew you to writing? So you weren’t taking classes explicitly focused on turning you into
0:40:52 a journalist. It doesn’t sound like no writer. So what drew you to writing?
0:40:57 It happened quite suddenly. I was a good distance runner in college. And I had to write a thesis.
0:41:02 And I’d heard that the Navajo had this very strong ancient tradition of running. They were
0:41:09 sort of still at it in a kind of traditional way. And they were amazing track and cross-country
0:41:14 athletes. And they had blended the two disciplines. And so I did my fieldwork on the Navajo Reservation.
0:41:20 I spent a summer there. I trained with their best runners. It was up at 6, 7,000 feet. I lived in
0:41:24 Fort Defiance, Arizona. And I wrote a thesis about Navajo long distance running. That was the name
0:41:32 of the thesis. Apparently, thesis titles are supposed to have a colon in them. And I didn’t
0:41:36 know that. I just called it Navajo long distance running. And I just came alive academically
0:41:40 doing that. I mean, I was a pretty indifferent student. I was much more of an athlete than a
0:41:44 student. I just came alive. And the idea that you could go out into the world and gather information,
0:41:50 gather research, interview people, and bring it back, and then turn it into words that people
0:41:56 will read and be moved by, informed by, and moved by, and maybe changed by. That, to me, was just
0:42:02 such an extraordinary idea. And so I thought, maybe I’ll be a journalist. This sounds like
0:42:07 journalism. Maybe I’ll try to be a journalist. And I literally graduated with my graduation plan,
0:42:14 post-graduation plan, was maybe I’ll try to be a journalist. That was literally the plan I had in
0:42:19 my head. Seems to have worked out. Eventually, in between, I was a pretty bad waiter in Washington,
0:42:24 D.C., and in Cambridge. It took a while. My first book came out when I was 35,
0:42:31 and I had virtually no income from writing before that.
0:42:34 So the first book was The Perfect Storm, or no?
0:42:37 Yes, that’s right.
0:42:37 Yes, it was. So was that your first, aside from the thesis, long form piece of writing?
0:42:44 I mean, it’s just, that’s incredible.
0:42:46 That was the next long thing that I wrote, yeah.
0:42:48 You know, I wrote some articles with Boston Phoenix, and then I got into a couple of magazines,
0:42:52 but I couldn’t even come close to stitching together an income I could live on.
0:42:56 Did you sell the book before you wrote it or right before you sold it?
0:43:00 I worked on the story for about a year, and just sort of on my own dime. I wrote a magazine piece
0:43:09 that Outside Magazine took, and then I got a book contract from W.W. Norton, a very,
0:43:15 very modest book contract. But it got me going.
0:43:18 Based on the magazine piece.
0:43:19 Yeah, and then I ginned up some outline that sort of showed how I was going to
0:43:24 expand the story.
0:43:25 And you already had quite a bit in your back pocket, then, at that point?
0:43:28 Yeah, I already had a Bill Craig full of notes and whatever.
0:43:31 I mean, I already done, you know, years worth of work on this.
0:43:34 I was used to, I mean, everything I’d ever written, I’d written on my own time,
0:43:39 and then tried to sell it. I was constantly sort of peddling finished pieces of writing.
0:43:43 Spelling.
0:43:44 Yeah, I never got an assignment. The first assignment I did,
0:43:48 I mean, the first story that I placed in the Boston Phoenix, which when I was 23,
0:43:52 was like a big deal, was about tugboats in Boston Harbor.
0:43:56 And they didn’t commission that. Why would they, right?
0:43:58 But I just, I moved to Boston, and I just thought, what’s the coolest thing in Boston?
0:44:03 Maybe it’s tugboats, you know, like, so I just started hanging out on tugboats,
0:44:07 and I sent them a pretty nice piece of writing. And it was my first published
0:44:10 piece up there, and it was called Towing the Line.
0:44:13 And that was my sort of entry into journalism.
0:44:16 What was your writing process like after the magazine piece comes out?
0:44:21 You get the book contract. Did you continue taking other jobs,
0:44:25 or did you buckle down to focus full-time on the writing?
0:44:28 Oh, I did tree work throughout. I mean, I didn’t, my advance was pretty small,
0:44:32 and as was appropriate, I mean, I was totally unknown writer,
0:44:35 and it was a totally bizarre topic at the time, right?
0:44:37 So I’m not complaining, but the advance was quite small.
0:44:40 So I did tree work a couple of days a week. I’d be up in the trees.
0:44:43 But I also, after I finished my book proposal, by some miracle,
0:44:47 I had an agent, by the way. I hadn’t made a dime for him for 10 years, right?
0:44:51 But he liked my writing, right? God bless him.
0:44:53 How did he get in touch with, have you guys connected?
0:44:56 I met him, his name’s Stuart Krzebski, and where he’s still my agent,
0:44:59 we’re really good friends. And he said it was, the way he met me was sort of the
0:45:04 ultimate sort of agents nightmare. A client of his who wrote academic papers,
0:45:09 in other words, not a big paying gig. But he sort of handled the academic
0:45:13 career of this guy who was a Shakespeare scholar. It took him three hours a year,
0:45:17 you know, whatever. That guy’s college roommate was my father.
0:45:22 And he got the message that his arguably smallest clients,
0:45:28 college roommate’s son wanted to be a writer and would he read some stuff?
0:45:33 And Stuart was like, that’s about as bad as it gets.
0:45:37 That is about as unpromising as it gets in the agent world.
0:45:41 But he’s a great, you know, Stuart’s a great guy, and he has an open mind.
0:45:45 And he read some stuff that I’d written and really liked it.
0:45:47 He took another 10 years from to make any money off me, but he saw something.
0:45:50 Long term investment.
0:45:51 It was, he saw something there and, and I’m eternally grateful to him.
0:45:55 But I, so I gave him my book proposal based on the article.
0:45:59 And then I went off to Bosnia, I wanted to be a war reporter.
0:46:02 In case the author thing didn’t work out when there was no reason to think it
0:46:05 was going to work out. And I didn’t want to tree work my whole life.
0:46:08 So I went off, it was a civil war in Bosnia.
0:46:11 And I went off to learn how to be a war reporter.
0:46:13 And I was there, you know, I finally came home in 94,
0:46:16 because Stuart sent me a fax saying, I managed to sell your book.
0:46:20 You got to come home.
0:46:21 And I came up during the period that you were up in the trees a few days a week.
0:46:26 Once you’d sold the book, I’m not sure I’m mixing up my chronologies a little bit.
0:46:30 But what did your writing process, your daily or weekly schedule look like at that point?
0:46:36 How do you write?
0:46:36 I know it’s a very boring, maybe often asked question,
0:46:40 but I’m fascinated by this.
0:46:41 And Josh wanted me to dig into it.
0:46:43 So it’s, well, you know, really, there’s two kinds of writing.
0:46:46 There’s fiction and there’s nonfiction.
0:46:48 And the first step, if you’re a journalist,
0:46:50 which I consider all nonfiction should be journalism is,
0:46:54 should be considered journalism.
0:46:56 There aren’t other rules for literary nonfiction or anything.
0:46:59 It’s all journalism as far as I’m concerned.
0:47:00 If you’re a journalist, the first thing you have to do is do your research.
0:47:04 Because you need something, you’re writing about the real world and you need facts
0:47:08 and quotes and interviews and all that.
0:47:10 So my writing process really starts out in the world as I’m researching a story
0:47:17 or in a library or on the internet or whatever as I’m researching a story.
0:47:19 Fiction writers, they depend on this weird sort of pipeline to God, right?
0:47:25 I mean, they’re trying to reimagine the world in a way that’s never been done before
0:47:31 and reproduce it on the page and to have people enter this fictional world and be riveted by it.
0:47:35 And that’s where inspiration comes in.
0:47:38 And that’s where you have to really be at your desk every morning
0:47:41 because you never know when God’s going to talk to you.
0:47:43 And I mean God figuratively, I don’t believe in God, but the creative gods.
0:47:46 But for a journalist, it’s much more like carpentry.
0:47:49 You get the lumber, you get the bricks, you build the basement, you start putting it together.
0:47:53 I mean, it is a process and there’s a lot of inspiration in the actual language that you use.
0:47:58 But it’s much more procedural than I think fiction writing probably is.
0:48:02 You mentioned McPhee.
0:48:04 So the only or the most impactful writing class I ever took was with McPhee.
0:48:08 It was a small seminar about 12 to 15 students at Princeton.
0:48:13 And so you’ll appreciate this, just as a side note.
0:48:17 So I still have to this day downstairs an entire three ring binder full of all of my notes from
0:48:23 that class. And I would say three quarters of them are all about structure and how he thinks
0:48:28 about structure, which is extremely visual in a lot of cases.
0:48:32 And he would map out just like an architect with a blueprint,
0:48:35 the structure of his piece based on what he had gathered.
0:48:38 And all of these elaborate forms and some would be like a seesaw.
0:48:43 Others would be a circle.
0:48:44 Others would be in some kind of weird like cylindrical abstract piece of art.
0:48:48 But there’s a visual representation of how he saw the story in its visual structure
0:48:54 or visual representation.
0:48:55 And this is going to segue somewhere.
0:48:56 But I remember we had to apply to get into the class.
0:49:00 And I don’t think and I still don’t think I’m a particularly good writer.
0:49:02 There are much better writers there.
0:49:04 But we had to do short assignments every week.
0:49:08 And they would be on the most boring topics possible deliberately to try to make us
0:49:13 force us to make them interesting.
0:49:16 And when we got our first assignments back, the routine was we’d have one group seminar a week.
0:49:21 And then we each got to spend I think an hour one on one with him going over our writing assignments
0:49:26 throughout the week.
0:49:26 And he handed our assignments back and he goes now.
0:49:30 But as I’m handing these out, I want you guys to remember you’re all good writers.
0:49:34 So don’t get demoralized.
0:49:35 And there was more red ink than black ink on the page.
0:49:39 I mean, he just eviscerated everyone and not in a malicious way.
0:49:43 But he took out all of the bloat, all of the redundancy, all of the ambiguity.
0:49:48 For those people interested, there are a number of interviews he did for,
0:49:51 I think the Paris review on the art of nonfiction, which are just fantastic.
0:49:57 But what I wanted to ask you was, and then we’re certainly going to spend a lot of time
0:50:01 talking about your experiences in war and with warriors and veterans of different types.
0:50:05 Who were some of the most influential mentors or influences you had, say, before the age of 30?
0:50:15 Let me just say, McPhee, I mean, you’re very lucky to have taken the test with him.
0:50:19 Oh, so lucky.
0:50:19 He was a mentor that I didn’t personally know for me through his works, he was.
0:50:25 And it’s very interesting to hear what you said about him mapping out structure because
0:50:29 I think good structure is an extremely visual thing.
0:50:33 I think when people who are good at structure, I’d like to think I am, he definitely is.
0:50:39 I think they arrive at the structure with the visual part of their brain.
0:50:44 I mean, I think you’ve probably mapped his brain while it was at work.
0:50:48 You would see that part light up.
0:50:49 That’s just what I’m guessing.
0:50:50 When I write out structure, it looks more like a diagram to a circuit board or something.
0:50:55 It’s not quite architect, like geometric shapes, but it’s very visual.
0:51:00 It represented completely visually.
0:51:01 And I feel it.
0:51:02 Like when I get at the right shape to something, I feel it.
0:51:06 It’s a very interesting process that for me is it’s something that feels like the divine spark
0:51:12 that is finally sort of like, bless me with its presence.
0:51:17 So let’s say you have your box full of notes.
0:51:19 So you’ve dug into a given topic, you’ve gone out in the field, and we can use the perfect storm
0:51:26 for this example because perhaps it’s evolved or changed over time.
0:51:29 What then?
0:51:32 Like you sit down and go through and highlight certain pieces and then
0:51:36 number them and order them in some fashion.
0:51:40 What’s the process of turning that heap of information into something that might become a book?
0:51:46 I read through all my interviews with a red magic marker and I red line the stuff, the good quotes.
0:51:52 And I read through all of the research material and I underline the stuff that’s interesting to
0:51:58 me.
0:51:58 And then I go through everything I’ve underlined and I just write lists of what I consider the assets
0:52:04 that I have to work with.
0:52:05 And once I have those lists that they cover many pieces of paper, then I’ll start to clump them
0:52:13 into sort of general topics, history of fishing in New England and the physics of wave motion,
0:52:20 referencing topics in the perfect storm, nightlife in Gloucester, whatever.
0:52:25 And then once I have those big chunks, I start to, and this is where the visualness comes in,
0:52:32 visuality comes in, I start to try to picture how could I arrange those in a way where the
0:52:40 energy and the interest in the reader gathers and builds and then achieves some sort of catharsis
0:52:47 towards the ends.
0:52:48 And it’s a very intuitive process, but I got to say I could never do it without writing it down.
0:52:53 I’m literally moving ideas around on a piece of paper until they look right.
0:52:57 And that’s the part of writing that to me is almost closer to art than a sort of intellectual
0:53:02 pursuit.
0:53:03 So I used to do this physically and then I ended up using a piece of software called
0:53:06 Scrivener, which is originally for playwrights that allows you to move pieces around like
0:53:11 this.
0:53:12 And so I’ve done my last three books using this software called Scrivener, which allows
0:53:16 me to move these pieces around without separate files for each document.
0:53:20 So I can actually see sort of the table of contents as I rearrange it.
0:53:23 I can resection things.
0:53:25 It’s proven really helpful for me.
0:53:28 Now McPhee, just to talk about daily routine.
0:53:32 So he is one of those guys in the nonfiction world.
0:53:35 I can’t do this because I want to slam my head in a car door if I try this for one day
0:53:39 or like jump out a window.
0:53:40 He literally sits down and once he has his information, 8am to 6pm, come the hell or
0:53:46 high water.
0:53:47 He’s like staring at the blank page with a break for lunch and swimming as I remember it.
0:53:52 And it just drove me to madness to do that.
0:53:54 It was so depressing.
0:53:55 So I tend to do my best writing and I wish this were different honestly,
0:54:00 but my best synthesis, I can do interviews, research, all that throughout the day.
0:54:05 But in terms of piecing it together into some type of narrative,
0:54:08 it’s like 10 or 11pm to like 5am.
0:54:12 That’s just my window for whatever reason.
0:54:14 Do you write throughout the day?
0:54:15 Do you tend to do your best writing in the mornings at night?
0:54:18 What does that look like?
0:54:19 I do my best writing when something’s due.
0:54:21 Spoken as a real journalist who’s actually worked for papers and whatnot.
0:54:26 Yeah, and that feeling of urgency might come 6 months out if it’s a book deadline,
0:54:31 or it might be the next morning if you’re trying to finish up a magazine piece.
0:54:35 But that intensity, you know, it’s like athletes.
0:54:38 Athletes in the big game or the big race or whatever.
0:54:40 I mean, that intensity can bring out something that you didn’t even know you had access to,
0:54:45 much less embodied.
0:54:46 You know, I have a cup of coffee and I sit down and I write for a couple hours till I get bored.
0:54:52 If I feel that I’m blocked in my writing, usually with that block meaning I can’t write the next
0:54:58 section, I keep rewriting and it doesn’t work and it’s stuck.
0:55:00 It’s not that I’m blocked.
0:55:03 It’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic.
0:55:08 It’s not that I can’t find the right words.
0:55:10 It’s that I don’t have the ammunition.
0:55:12 Right, the words aren’t there in the first place.
0:55:13 Yeah, because I don’t have the ammo.
0:55:14 I don’t have the goods.
0:55:15 I have not gone out into the world and brought back the goods that I’m writing about.
0:55:20 And you never want to solve a research problem with language.
0:55:23 You never want to be such a fine writer that you can sort of thread the needle and get through a
0:55:28 thin patch in your research just because you’re such a great prose artist.
0:55:31 You use some linguistic smoke and mirrors to gloss over the fact that you don’t have the research.
0:55:36 Yeah, it’s just bullshit.
0:55:37 And you know, literary writers, and I like to think of myself as a literary writer,
0:55:41 I think sometimes think that language is so magical and so powerful
0:55:46 that you should be able to sort of do almost anything with it.
0:55:49 In this, it’s not true and it shouldn’t be true.
0:55:51 What do you think is the, if you were, say,
0:55:55 giving a, this would be an odd place to give a commencement speech,
0:55:58 but commencement speech to graduating seniors in high school.
0:56:03 I’ve done that.
0:56:04 You have, great, perfect.
0:56:06 Well, then let me not ask the question I was going to ask.
0:56:08 What did you talk about?
0:56:09 I was speaking at a very kind of elite school, private school in New York City.
0:56:13 These kids were going off either to college or to high school.
0:56:17 I can’t remember.
0:56:18 And anyway, these are very, very privileged, very smart, very educated children
0:56:24 and exceedingly accomplished parents.
0:56:28 And I said to them, something like, the hardest thing you’re ever going to do,
0:56:32 I was like, you’re programmed to succeed.
0:56:34 You guys are programmed to succeed.
0:56:36 The hardest thing you’re ever going to do in your life is fail at something.
0:56:39 And if you don’t start failing at things, you will not live a full life.
0:56:43 You’ll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work.
0:56:49 That’s not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in.
0:56:55 You have to do the hardest thing that you’ve not been prepared for in this school or any school.
0:57:00 You have to be prepared to fail.
0:57:01 And that’s how you’re going to expand yourself and grow.
0:57:05 And then you will really, as you work through that process of failure and learning,
0:57:10 then you will really deepen into the human being you’re capable of being.
0:57:14 Matt, four years ago, who knows how it’s going for them.
0:57:16 Well, we were chatting about this before we started recording a little bit, which is,
0:57:21 I was commenting on how accidental my career, and I’d kind of put that in air quotes, is.
0:57:28 I mean, I couldn’t have possibly planned this path and you echoed something to a similar effect.
0:57:34 And on the failure point, I mean, we were talking since you’re now training and boxing,
0:57:39 made me think of, it’s Customado, who was the most formative trainer of Mike Tyson, who said,
0:57:44 “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
0:57:46 So along those lines, the question I was going to ask was specific to journalism.
0:57:50 So if people came to you, these kids, graduating seniors, and they said,
0:57:54 “I want to be a journalist. It’s 20 of these kids, and they’re about to go off to college.
0:57:59 What should I study? What should I do? What should I avoid? What would your advice be to them?”
0:58:03 I mean, the path that I took is the one I know best, obviously.
0:58:07 And I would say, “What worked for me?” I mean, as a journalist, I’m very hesitant to actually
0:58:12 give advice to people. In my book Tribe, I really try not to tell the country what I think we all
0:58:17 should do. I might try to pry bar that out of you. Well, I think there’s other language you can use
0:58:24 where you’re not issuing a directive, but you’re saying you’re giving some wisdom.
0:58:29 So what I would say to someone like that is, “What worked for me was to read an enormous
0:58:35 amount to think about what I read and why I liked it or didn’t like it. Anthropology is an amazing
0:58:41 discipline that gives you tools to understand almost every cultural social situation in the world.
0:58:49 And mostly, you must have an enormous appetite for humanity and for life and for the world.
0:58:55 I mean, you really have to feel like you cannot fill yourself up enough with this amazing place
0:59:01 that we live in. Like, if you have that feeling and sincerely have it, you’ll do okay, if not at
0:59:07 writing at something. And that hunger for humanity, that interest in humanity,
0:59:14 is that what drove you to want to go into a war-torn country or territory and observe
0:59:22 and write and capture? Or was it something else? Why did that come about specifically?
0:59:26 There’s a few things. I grew up in a pretty affluent suburb of Boston. I grew up in a very
0:59:32 physically protected way. I got to 18. I felt like I’d never really been challenged. I’d never
0:59:40 been faced with a situation that I didn’t know I could survive. And having studied a lot of
0:59:45 anthropology through college, as I moved through my 20s, I thought, “This is ridiculous. I’m not
0:59:49 an adult yet. I’m not a man yet.” I mean, you cross that threshold into adulthood in a manhood
0:59:55 by facing something that could destroy you. And initiation rights around the tribal societies,
1:00:01 around the world, their main purpose is to confront young men, and young women have a different
1:00:07 challenge that they have to face. It’s equally daunting. But young men face this challenge of,
1:00:11 in these initiation rights, of sort of demonstrating that they will face the most painful, scariest
1:00:18 things possible for their community, for their people. And that’s adulthood, and that’s manhood.
1:00:24 And I’d hit 30, and other than a chainsaw injury here or there, I hadn’t really been tested in a
1:00:32 real way. And my father grew up in Europe during World War II. And war is this sort of archetypal
1:00:39 ordeal. It’s a sort of ancient, in some ways, ancient thing. And in a lot of societies,
1:00:47 it is the game, for better or worse, I mean, I know there’s a political conversation here
1:00:50 that we can have, but for better or worse, it’s many societies sort of see it as the gateway to
1:00:56 adulthood, to manhood, specifically for men. And I went off to Bosnia, partly because I wanted to
1:01:02 become a war reporter, and I was sort of at a loss as to how to make a living and live an adult life,
1:01:08 and partly because I felt like I was still a child, and that war would transform me in some
1:01:12 ways that nothing else could. This is jumping around, of course, but there are a couple of
1:01:18 stories that I’d love to talk about that are in the book I’m holding in my hand, which is Tribe,
1:01:23 Subtitle on Homecoming and Belonging. So I get sent a lot of books, and I very rarely read them.
1:01:27 This one, of course, because of the background that the shared friendship that we have with Josh,
1:01:34 and my familiar with your work, maybe more inclined to read it, I’d read this in a day and a
1:01:40 half. And for those who have seen my examples of my note-taking, I just have an index of notes
1:01:46 that spans all of the front matter of the book, basically. There are some fantastic stories in
1:01:51 this book. I had follow-up questions, even if we weren’t recording this over a bottle of wine that
1:01:56 I wanted to ask you. So can you please explain what skin walkers are? You mentioned the Navajo
1:02:02 earlier, and why they’re in this book, because I wanted to hear more about this. So skin walkers
1:02:09 were this thing that I’d never heard of that I first encountered when I was on the Navajo Reservation
1:02:15 in 1983, as a 19-year-old, 20-year-old, whatever I was. And basically, the Navajo believed in
1:02:23 something that other cultures would call werewolves. The belief was that there were certain Navajo,
1:02:27 mostly men, who had basically turned. They’d lost their humanity, and they’d become
1:02:34 animals. But animals are a source of power in a lot of Native societies. They became animals in
1:02:40 the sense that they had no human affiliation. And they did this by putting on the hide of a wolf,
1:02:48 and that gave them the powers of a wolf, the powers of being able to run very,
1:02:54 very fast for a long distance, the powers of being invisible, of being very, very ferocious when
1:02:59 need be, being incredible hunters. They were called skin walkers, and that these skin walkers,
1:03:04 they were basically adopting the skills and powers of a warrior, except they were using it
1:03:13 against their own people, and that they would kill their fellow Navajo and eat them in the middle
1:03:17 of the night. And the Navajo in 1983, on the reservation where I lived, were absolutely terrified
1:03:25 of this phenomenon, as terrified as they, I’m sure they were 100 years prior. And I got to say,
1:03:30 the desert out there is a big, lonely place, and I started to feel their terror. You know,
1:03:37 I didn’t literally believe that these things exist, but the belief system that was around me
1:03:44 still made me deeply, deeply scared of them. It was an extraordinary experience for a
1:03:48 rationalist like myself, my father’s a physicist, and I don’t believe in God. He didn’t believe
1:03:53 in anything but what he could measure and observe. And all of a sudden, there I was in my trailer,
1:03:59 very, very scared at certain moments of these things, and of these skin walkers. And as I wrote
1:04:06 about it in my thesis, I said, you know, the skin walkers are basically the universal human fear
1:04:12 that you can defend yourself as a society, as a community, you can defend yourself against
1:04:18 all outside enemies, but you’re completely vulnerable to one madman in your midst. You
1:04:24 know, one psychopath, one sociopath, basically, that has no feeling of protectiveness, of humanity
1:04:31 towards his neighbors can kill more people than the enemy can. And that made me think of the
1:04:38 awful spate of mass shootings in this country that have suddenly become so commonplace in the last
1:04:45 10 or 15 years. And it gave me the idea that the mass shooters in Aurora, Colorado, and at
1:04:52 Sandy Hook, and we all know the names, that they are our society’s version of the skin walkers.
1:05:00 Part of what I enjoy about your writing, and specifically in this book, is your
1:05:06 frank writing about concepts that we tend to very cleanly separate in a binary way.
1:05:14 And it’s really, I think, a discussion that I hunger for that is hard, I feel hard to have
1:05:20 in many different. I’m struggling for language here because it’s a feeling that I get very
1:05:27 frustrated by, and that is like a discussion of manhood and rights of passage and the clear
1:05:33 historical importance of some of these bonds forged in extreme circumstances between men,
1:05:40 that in the safety of these sort of cocoons that we have in various cities or elsewhere,
1:05:46 do not exist, but problems manifest nonetheless, or perhaps to an even greater extent.
1:05:51 And in the current climate of a lot of political correctness, that’s sort of
1:05:55 verboten, like a lot of these topics just don’t get broached. But I’d love for you to talk a
1:05:59 little bit about your experience with, I think this was in Spain with the Viking helmet.
1:06:04 Because I think it illustrates a very important point. If you remember the story,
1:06:10 I’d love for you to describe what happened exactly with this Viking helmet.
1:06:16 Yeah, and I think our society, which really I feel really does strive, I mean just to address
1:06:21 your earlier point about political correctness, I think we really are in a very righteous way
1:06:26 striving for fairness and equality throughout our society. I think we really are.
1:06:31 But we’re also the product of our biology and our evolution. And the two are not easy partners.
1:06:39 I mean, throughout the mammalian world, males and females are built differently and do different
1:06:44 things and are good at different things. That’s just a fact of nature. If we want the sexes to be
1:06:50 equal in our society, those inherent differences become potentially problematic.
1:06:55 And as a result, instead of trying to figure out how to reconcile those very real differences
1:07:01 in an equitable system, people and well-meaning people, that some of them are good friends of mine,
1:07:07 would just rather you not acknowledge the differences. There’s a short-term logic to that,
1:07:12 but there’s a long-term loss. And eventually, we won’t have really quality in the society
1:07:18 until those unnegotiable differences are actually incorporated into our equality.
1:07:24 And anyway, that’s what you brought up about sort of PC thinking. It can be very infuriating,
1:07:28 but it’s a funny thing. It’s infuriating, even though it’s trying to do the right thing,
1:07:32 but it’s still infuriating. I’m going to hit pause on the Viking helmet,
1:07:36 which you’re going to get to. But there’s another… I have so many notes in this book. It’s just
1:07:40 unbelievable. Because you brought up these, what most people would consider gender-based
1:07:46 differences. Could you talk for a second? And this is something I’d never really considered,
1:07:50 but gender role switching, if this makes any sense. And this was even in same-sex groups.
1:07:58 I found this very thought-provoking, but if you could perhaps describe what I’m very
1:08:03 clumsily trying to allude to. Well, one of the things that’s interesting is that if you
1:08:07 take passers-by in a moment of crisis, I mean, everyone will jump into a burning building to
1:08:13 save their child, maybe to save their spouse, possibly their parents-in-law, but whatever,
1:08:19 you have sort of familiar relations and people will risk their lives to help the people that
1:08:24 they love. It makes sense. But if you look at situations in public, in this anonymous society
1:08:31 that we have, and someone’s in danger, who goes to their aid? It happens all the time in New York.
1:08:37 Someone falls onto the subway tracks and the train is coming. Who jumps down onto the tracks
1:08:43 to help them? Almost invariably, it’s a man. Now, I feel like I’m very sexist in saying that,
1:08:50 but statistics aren’t sexist, and they’ve done studies of this. And men are, for a number of
1:08:57 physical and psychological reasons, very, very prone towards that kind of impulsive risk-taking
1:09:02 that’s sort of on the spot in the moment decision to jump onto some railroad tracks while the train
1:09:07 is coming. It’s not that they’re braver. It’s that they have psychological and physical predispositions
1:09:12 and capacities that allow them, in fact, promote them to do that. So if you look at these stories,
1:09:17 in something like 95% of bystander rescues are performed by men. So when you have a society
1:09:27 that’s encountering a difficulty, and that can either be the Blitz in London, which I write about,
1:09:32 or that could be a group of coal miners who were trapped in a coal mine disaster in the 1950s in
1:09:37 Canada, you need people who are in the “male role” of rescuing and risk-taking. But then this other
1:09:47 thing is important, and it’s a kind of moral courage. And it does not require spontaneous muscular
1:09:55 action with complete disregard for your own life. That’s not what’s required. As important as that is,
1:10:02 there’s something else, moral courage. You basically are like providing the moral fiber
1:10:09 for the group, and you act as a kind of conscience for the group. And women are very, very good at
1:10:15 that. And they did a study during World War II of who helped hide Jewish families who were fleeing
1:10:21 the Nazis, Gentiles who helped Jewish families who were fleeing the Nazis. That’s not something
1:10:26 that takes muscular action in the moment. But if you’re busted, if you’re a Dutch farmer and you
1:10:31 have a Jewish family in your basement, you’re dead. You’re executed. Women were considerably
1:10:37 more likely to make that decision than men were. So what happens is that if you have, say, a group
1:10:43 of coal miners who are stuck in a coal mine for a week, the first kind of spontaneous leaders you
1:10:48 get are the classically male sort of action-oriented grab a pickaxe and start digging. When those
1:10:55 efforts fail, another kind of leader takes over. They’re way more empathic. They’re way more
1:11:02 affiliative. They reach negotiated solutions. They try to make people feel good. They’re in the
1:11:07 classically female role. And what’s so interesting about that is that the male and female roles will
1:11:13 be filled regardless of the sex. So a group of women with no men around, a woman will jump in,
1:11:21 will jump onto the railroad tracks and to save the kid if there are no men around. If there are no
1:11:26 women around, a man will step forward and act in that wonderfully moral empathic way that women
1:11:32 are known for. And so society sort of needs both of these gender roles, and it doesn’t really care
1:11:39 if an actual man or an actual woman fills them. We don’t have to cover this one at length, but I
1:11:44 also found it fascinating to read about the Iroquois peacetime leaders versus war time leaders and
1:11:49 how they switched between the two and how they were so clearly delineated, right? I mean, when
1:11:54 circumstances changed, it’s like, okay, there’s almost like a football game. It’s like, okay,
1:11:58 offense, you’re off the field, defense you’re in. And how does this, and I’m not much of a policy
1:12:04 or politics wonk, but I struggle with trying to assess political candidates. How do you think of
1:12:12 assessing political candidates, presidential or otherwise, when you have to vote for one person?
1:12:17 It’s a very interesting question. The Iroquois sort of figured it out. As he said, in peacetime,
1:12:21 they had sages who were partly elected by women. So the female voice was found in the selection
1:12:28 of sages. They ran peaceful society. When war started, the sages stepped down and war leaders
1:12:34 took over. And if the people they were fighting sued for peace, it was not the war leaders who
1:12:40 considered the deal. It was the sages. And if peace was accepted, the war leaders stepped down
1:12:46 immediately. And it’s really interesting because the US Constitution, parts of it are based on
1:12:51 the Iroquois law of peace. And Thomas Paine did a lot of work sort of incorporating the natural
1:12:59 rights of man, as were exemplified by Iroquois society, into the intellectual basis for American
1:13:07 governance. But as soon as the British surrendered, George Washington was basically the supreme
1:13:13 leader. He was the military leader in the colonies when they were fighting the British.
1:13:16 And as soon as the British surrendered, he formally gave up power, gave up control
1:13:23 to the civilian government. It was a very, very important thing to do because otherwise he could
1:13:28 have continued on as “king” and that would not be a democracy. And my guess is that he took
1:13:34 that idea from the Iroquois. Military thinking and peace thinking require very different
1:13:40 sensibilities, very different calculations of cost and benefit. And the conundrum for us right now
1:13:47 is we elect a president who in time of war is also the military leader. And I think in a democracy,
1:13:56 the idea that you have a non-military person at the top of the chain of command is very,
1:14:01 very sensible. You do not want a society run by the military. That’s a military dictatorship.
1:14:06 We do not want that. But it does call for very, maybe even conflicting traits in a single person.
1:14:14 You know, the wisdom and the gentleness of a peacetime leader, the empathy of a peacetime
1:14:19 leader, and the capacity for violence and effectiveness and decisiveness in a wartime
1:14:25 leader. You’re asking someone to be almost schizophrenic if they can do both of those well.
1:14:29 Yeah, equally well. So you mentioned a couple of historical figures. Why did Ben Franklin
1:14:34 complain that settlers along the frontier were constantly absconding
1:14:38 with the Indians, but that the opposite almost never happened? Why is that?
1:14:43 Well, it was this sort of strange phenomena, right? I mean, the Christian society settled
1:14:47 the Eastern seaboard of the New World in the 1600s, 1700s, and beyond the treeline were the
1:14:54 savages, right? They weren’t Christian. They weren’t civilized. They ran about almost naked,
1:14:59 and they hunted wild animals and fornicated and everything else, right? I mean, it’s sort of
1:15:03 Satan’s den, right? Sounds pretty fun, right? Sounds pretty great. Maybe that’s just me.
1:15:08 So for the Christian, sort of sort of civilized Christian society of that era,
1:15:14 they clearly felt that they were the superior godly society. But what happened was that superiority,
1:15:21 that very quality of civilization and Christianity, was also quite stifling, right? We didn’t evolve
1:15:27 to live, we didn’t evolve as the human animals that we are, social animals that we are, to live
1:15:33 in within the strictures of sort of Puritan society. So young men, particularly, but young
1:15:38 women as well, were constantly, the frontier was constantly sort of bleeding young people
1:15:44 who went off, drifted off to live with the Indians. I mean, the movement, the sort of societal movement,
1:15:49 I mean, it was a trickle, but it was significant, constantly towards the tribes. And the Indians
1:15:54 were never running off to join white society, right? And then there were even weirder cases.
1:16:01 This is, you’re talking about the people who were kidnapped, right? That was the part that
1:16:04 surprised me the most. I was like, okay, I can kind of see the appeal of being off in the woods,
1:16:09 free of certain constraints and fornicating. That sounds, that’s probably a pretty appealing daydream
1:16:14 to Puritan, you know, farmer, you know, youngest son. But the number of people who were kidnapped,
1:16:23 taken as supposedly slaves who then refused or very unwillingly, refused to come back to
1:16:31 white society or very unwillingly came. And my book tribe starts with the story of Pontiac’s
1:16:36 rebellion in Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio. And Chief Pontiac fought the colonial powers for
1:16:42 years very effectively, but eventually they sued for peace. And one of the deals was,
1:16:47 the main part of the deal was that he’d give up 200 and some white captives that had been
1:16:53 taken from the frontiers. And a significant number of the captives did not want to be returned to
1:17:01 their home, to their homes, to their society. And they actually weren’t slaves. And what’s
1:17:07 interesting about, I mean, the people thought that that’s what happened to them. In fact,
1:17:10 what happened to them is that the captives who weren’t killed, and some were killed out of revenge
1:17:15 for losses that the Indians had taken on the battlefield, but the ones who weren’t killed
1:17:20 were adopted. And as soon as you were adopted, you were considered absolutely one of the tribe.
1:17:27 There was no distinction whatsoever, you were given to a family that had lost someone on the
1:17:32 battlefield, and you were the replacement for that person’s son or daughter. And these people,
1:17:40 I mean, there were two young women who were repatriated because of this peace accord
1:17:46 after Pontiac’s rebellion. And two young women actually managed to escape and make their way
1:17:53 back to their adopted families. And this happened over and over and over again.
1:17:58 As the frontier marched across America, there were constantly these stories of people who were
1:18:04 taken by the Indians and didn’t want to come home. And the reason that was given was that it was an
1:18:09 egalitarian society. It was not stratified by class, by income, by inherited wealth, by inherited
1:18:16 power. Everyone was equal. There were leaders, but there were leaders who were followed voluntarily.
1:18:22 And if you didn’t like the leadership style of Chief Pontiac, well, you know, you could just
1:18:27 take your family and move up Muskegon Creek and move in with your wife’s cousin’s family
1:18:32 with this other group. And so authority was never imposed. Authority was accepted. And
1:18:39 that led to a really basic equality in Native societies. And I should say, as an anthropologist,
1:18:45 the sort of hominid groups that we evolved from, that we were for hundreds of thousands of years,
1:18:52 all of the evidence that anthropologists, archaeologists have been able to assemble is that
1:18:57 they were extremely egalitarian groups. Currently, you can’t carry much wealth, right? If you’re a
1:19:01 mobile, nomadic society, how much wealth can you really carry? And a society that lives in groups
1:19:07 of 40 or 50 that is mobile, it’s extremely hard to accumulate differences of wealth and therefore
1:19:14 status. How does that relate to your experiences in war and interviewing people who have been subjected
1:19:23 to war, not necessarily as soldiers? I mean, you mentioned the Blitz and so on. But how does this
1:19:27 relate to those experiences? Well, one of the many ironies of war is that it’s savage and is violent
1:19:34 and it’s completely anti-human. But it produces an intensity of human connection that you really can’t
1:19:41 be hard pressed to find in peacetime. So during the Blitz, and I looked a lot at the Blitz in London,
1:19:47 and 30,000 people were killed by German bombs in around six months, in and around London. The
1:19:55 society didn’t collapse, but it contracted sort of into itself. People were sleeping shoulder to
1:20:02 shoulder with complete strangers in the tube stations. Fire brigades were rushing around,
1:20:07 trying to put out fires after the bombing raids. It was a brutal time and the government was prepared
1:20:13 for mass psychiatric casualties. Forget about the physical casualties, mass psychiatric casualties.
1:20:20 But what happened was admissions to psychiatric wards actually went down from pre-war levels
1:20:27 during the bombings and then went back up after the bombings stopped. One official said,
1:20:32 you know, it’s amazing, we have neurotics driving ambulances. What it seems to be is that the communal
1:20:38 life that is often forced upon people by hardship, by danger, by calamity, that communal life
1:20:48 is so psychologically beneficial to people that there’s a net gain in psychological well-being.
1:20:54 So what you find is that in countries that war, Emil Dirkheim, the famous sociologist,
1:20:59 found that in European countries that were at war in the 1800s, the suicide rate immediately went
1:21:05 down. The murder rate went down. All that kind of antisocial behavior was mitigated by the sort of
1:21:14 monumental task that the country was engaged in. In New York, I live in New York City, New York
1:21:20 after 9/11, a massively traumatized population. You would think a lot of psychological problems would
1:21:26 come out because of this psychological trauma that the entire city experienced after 9/11.
1:21:31 That’s not what happened. The suicide rate went down after 9/11. The violent crime rate went down.
1:21:39 Even Vietnam vets who were struggling with PTSD in New York City said that their symptoms
1:21:46 improved after 9/11 because they were needed. They had this sense like, “Oh my god, there’s a crisis.
1:21:51 I’m needed. Time to stop thinking about myself. Time to think about the group, about us.”
1:21:57 And that feeling of us is what not only does it make people feel good, but it buffers
1:22:03 many people from their psychological demons. And it’s kind of a relief.
1:22:07 One of the recurring themes that you write about and also that we spoke about after your
1:22:14 TED Talk from a few years ago, some of the feedback from vets from different wars was
1:22:21 that they missed the war. And from civilians as well in this book, it’s like there are certain
1:22:27 aspects of the wartime, maybe a perceived greater level of humanity even, oddly enough,
1:22:34 that was lost once peace was regained or achieved. How can one potentially go about,
1:22:41 and this is sort of a multiple choice question, like manufacturing
1:22:45 catastrophe, if that makes any sense? Simulating the characteristics that drive that increased
1:22:53 cohesion, community, or sense of mental well-being, or just increase cohesion in a way that you think
1:23:01 we’ve evolved to find very healthy or healthful. Because we were discussing, for instance, boxing,
1:23:06 and I had the same experience in jujitsu, even though I know it’s terrible for me. I mean,
1:23:10 I get injured every time I try to do this for any period of time. It’s not good for your physical
1:23:14 health if you count all the collateral damage. But one of the appeals was, and we were both
1:23:19 talking about the shared experience of it being completely egalitarian. It’s like, “Oh, that’s
1:23:24 the guy who’s really good at armor. That’s the guy who’s really good at a stiff jab. That’s the
1:23:28 guy’s footwork is really good.” It’s like, “You don’t have the time. Don’t even know what they do.
1:23:31 Don’t even know necessarily their real name.” I remember when I was training at this place
1:23:36 called Aka in San Jose, it was like, “Everybody was given some insulting nickname.” And looking back
1:23:41 on it, I was like, “Wow. That actually sounds a lot like, and I’ve never been in the military,
1:23:44 but it kind of makes me think of full metal jacket and snowball and so on.” But how can someone
1:23:51 simulate that? Or what can we do focusing for now on the personal well-being? Do you have
1:23:57 any thoughts on how we might try to improve things? That was a long fucking question. I think
1:24:01 you get the idea. Yeah. I mean, the nickname thing is really interesting. Groups of men give
1:24:05 each other nicknames. Women, as far as I know, don’t. It’s a really interesting thing. And I think
1:24:10 it’s a signal of tribal affiliation, of group affiliation. The male group in our evolutionary
1:24:17 past was extremely important in hunting and in defense. And the more cohesive and internally
1:24:24 committed all the males were to the group, to everyone else, the more effective they would
1:24:29 be at fighting and at hunting. And the survival of the community depended on them doing that job,
1:24:35 as well as on the women doing other things. But it depended on that and cohesion. Cohesion is
1:24:40 increased, among other things, by hardship, by nicknames, by humor. I mean, all these things
1:24:46 that you see men in groups do. I mean, any construction crew in New York City, you walk
1:24:50 past them and half the time they’re doubled over laughing. I mean, one of the things men do in
1:24:54 groups is make each other laugh. And they give each other nicknames. So it’s a really, really
1:24:58 ancient that what you experience is a very common thing and I think quite ancient and serves a
1:25:03 real purpose. We evolved as a species in a sort of experience of sort of ongoing moderate crisis.
1:25:10 I mean, we’re hunter-gatherers. We evolved in a pretty harsh environment. And we’ve survived in
1:25:16 the harshest of environments, in the Arctic and the Kalahari Desert, for example. And
1:25:21 normal life, for most of human history, was a moderate ongoing crisis. What’s very fortunate
1:25:28 and beautiful and wonderful and also in a weird way tragic about modern society
1:25:33 is that crisis has been removed. When you reintroduce a crisis like in the Blitz in London
1:25:38 or an earthquake that I wrote about in Avizzano, Italy, early in the 20th century,
1:25:44 in Avizzano, something like 95% of the population was killed, something like that. I mean, just
1:25:48 horrific. I’m going from memory, but unbelievable casualties, just like a nuclear strike. And
1:25:53 one of the survivors said that what happened afterwards, because people had to rely on each
1:26:00 other. And so upper-class people, lower-class people, you know, peasants and nobility, whatever,
1:26:04 everyone sort of crouched around the same campfires, right? And what this guy said was the earth,
1:26:09 I’ll try to do it by memory, I almost got it. The earthquake gave us what the law promises,
1:26:16 but does not in fact deliver, which is the equality of all men. I think one of the things
1:26:23 that people like about crisis is that suddenly everybody’s equal. And you’re evaluated like
1:26:28 in a boxing gym, you’re evaluated for your actual conduct in the moment, not for who your father was,
1:26:34 not for the clothing that you’re wearing, the boxing gym that I work out at,
1:26:39 you could be a suit from Midtown, you know, with a fancy job and a big bank,
1:26:42 or you could be like a really tough poor kid from the bowels of Brooklyn.
1:26:47 There’s no bias in either direction. There’s no bias against the dude in the suit.
1:26:52 And there’s no bias against the ghetto kid. I mean, you’re judged for how you act within that
1:26:58 almost sacred space of the gym. And what happens in a crisis, in a war or an earthquake or whatever,
1:27:05 is that people suddenly are judged for how they act. And that is, I think one of the things that
1:27:11 the, what we’re called the white Indians, the white captives of the American Indians,
1:27:15 I think that is one of the things that appealed to them. They were no longer in this incredibly
1:27:19 stratified, frankly, unfair colonial society. They were in a place where they were totally
1:27:25 self-determining in terms of how they were seen. Let’s talk about the sea train and your return to
1:27:35 New York City. I’m missing, so I’m trying to recall from memory the timing on this,
1:27:40 but it leads into a conversation of PTSD. Can you take us through that story?
1:27:45 One of the topics of this book is PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. I had this idea,
1:27:51 because of my work on the Navajo reservation, that the huge rates of PTSD that we’re experiencing
1:27:57 in America right now are maybe anomalous. And then if you live in a tribal society, the rates
1:28:02 would might be quite low. So that was the sort of genesis of my book. So I talked about my own
1:28:06 experience with PTSD. I have been a war reporter since the early 90s. I stopped after one of my
1:28:12 best friends was killed in combat a few years ago, but the first really traumatic assignment that I
1:28:19 had was in Northern Afghanistan a year before 9/11. In the fall of 2000, I was with Ahmad Shah
1:28:24 Massoud, who was the leader of the Northern Alliance. He was fighting the Taliban. He was
1:28:28 completely outnumbered, outgunned. Back then, the Taliban had fighter planes. The Taliban had
1:28:33 tanks. They had artillery. They had all the toys. And Massoud, his forces, were the sort of gorillas.
1:28:39 Well, it’s great to be with the gorillas until you start getting shelled, right?
1:28:43 Or bombed or whatever. So we had a tough, I was up there for two months, and we saw and went through
1:28:50 some very tough things. And I got back to New York. A young man, you know, your age,
1:28:55 the late 30s. And I just felt completely like that nothing would ever affect me, right? I just
1:29:00 assumed complete invulnerability to everything. And I got back to New York and a little shaken up,
1:29:07 but all right. And then one day, I went down into the subway and says something I did every day.
1:29:13 And it was rush hour. There are a lot of people. And I was seized with this incredible panic attack.
1:29:21 I’d never had one in my life. Everything I was looking at seemed like a mortal threat.
1:29:27 You know, actually, I knew it wasn’t. But it felt like it was. And I was way more scared than I’d
1:29:33 ever been in Afghanistan. I had been plenty scared in Afghanistan. The trains were going too fast,
1:29:39 and they were going to jump the tracks and leap up onto the platform and kill me. The crowds
1:29:44 were suddenly going to turn on me and beat me to death. The lights were too bright. The lights
1:29:48 were going to somehow are going to kill me. It was too loud. The noise was going to,
1:29:51 everything was a mortal threat. And I backed up against the iron support column and just sort
1:29:55 of waited for it. Then I finally sprinted out of there and took a taxi. And that kept happening.
1:30:01 Anytime I was in a small, like an enclosed place with too many people, too much going on,
1:30:05 I would just panic. I just thought I was going crazy. I had no idea that he was in any way connected
1:30:12 to the combat that I’d been in. Until a couple of years later, I was talking to a woman who was
1:30:18 a psychologist. It was her friend of a friend. It was at a picnic, actually. And she asked about
1:30:21 my war reporting and if I had any suffered any consequences from it. I was like, no, of course,
1:30:26 no, I’m fine. And for some reason, I thought to sort of mention, but once in a while, I have a weird
1:30:31 panic attack. And she nodded in that way. The trinks do. Hmm, interesting. You know, and she said,
1:30:38 well, it was the spring of 2003. And she nodded and she said, well, that’s interesting. She said,
1:30:46 that’s called PTSD. And, you know, we just invaded Iraq, right? And she said, you’re going to be
1:30:52 hearing quite a bit about that in the coming years, as indeed we have. And are the rates of PTSD in
1:30:59 the US anomalous? Are they unusually high compared to other cultures or other countries? And if so,
1:31:06 why is that? Well, the truth about PTSD is that if you almost 100% of people who have been traumatized,
1:31:14 either seen something gruesome or feared for their own life, and I should add that the
1:31:20 witnessing of harm to others is more traumatic than danger is. It’s interesting. But almost 100%
1:31:26 of people who have been traumatized get short term PTSD. That’s what I got. Less weeks, less
1:31:32 than months, goes away, therapy helps, whatever, but we’re humans, right? I mean, we’re adapted to
1:31:37 survive danger and stress and hardship and all that, all that stuff. We wouldn’t be here. So trauma,
1:31:43 if the trauma was psychologically crippling to humans, humans wouldn’t exist. Around 20% of
1:31:50 people get long term PTSD. So they pass the point where they should have recovered and they’re stuck
1:31:57 in this trauma loop and they can’t get out of it. That’s around 20% of people. Now you look at the US
1:32:02 military. Every war, the casualty rate, thank God, has gone down because the intensity of the combat
1:32:09 has gone down. As bad as World War One was, it wasn’t as bad as the Civil War. World War Two was
1:32:13 not as intense. The combat was not as intense. There were not the mass casualties of World War
1:32:17 One. Korea, Vietnam, the war on terror has the lowest casualty rates of any war the US has fought.
1:32:23 Major war. But as the casualty rates have gone down and the level of trauma has gone down,
1:32:28 disability claims have gone up. They’re going the wrong directions. Right now,
1:32:35 about 10% of the US military actually experiences any combat at all. One out of 10 soldiers.
1:32:41 The rest of them are very, or they’re crucial. They’re necessary. They’re not getting directly
1:32:45 traumatized. But something like 50% of the US military has filed for some form of PTSD disability.
1:32:54 So there’s 40% in there that are a bit of a mystery. They come home and they’re deeply,
1:33:01 dangerously alienated, depressed. They don’t fit in. Something gravely wrong. And
1:33:08 my theory is that what they’re experiencing isn’t a reaction to trauma. They couldn’t be because
1:33:15 most of them weren’t traumatized. But they’re experiencing is the sort of radical readjustment
1:33:21 from platoon life. A platoon is 40 or 50 people. You’re sleeping, depending on what kind of base
1:33:27 you’re on, shoulder to shoulder in the dirt, or cot to cot in some kind of bungalow or whatever.
1:33:32 But it’s all group living. You’re eating meals together, doing missions and patrols together,
1:33:37 doing everything together for over a year. That is exactly how humans evolve to live.
1:33:42 That is exactly our prehistory. So you experience that incredible tight cohesion
1:33:48 with your platoon. Now, there might be people you have conflicts with. It doesn’t mean it’s one
1:33:52 big love fast, but it is close. And it’s close with people that you know your life depends on.
1:33:58 And then suddenly you’re sprung from that. And you’re back in modern society.
1:34:03 And I think what’s affecting a lot of these vats isn’t a response to trauma. It couldn’t be.
1:34:10 It’s a response to the sudden aloneness and loneliness that modern society is known for,
1:34:19 unfortunately. And you also have talked about how, for instance, returning Peace Corps volunteers
1:34:26 also suffer from depression, for the similar, maybe not identical, but related reintegration issues.
1:34:32 Yeah. I mean, you can see that, I mean, to the extent that, you know, this is proof or whatever,
1:34:36 it’s an interesting example. I mean, so you spend two years in Cameroon, incredibly poor country in
1:34:42 Africa, Central Africa, in a really poor village. I mean, that’s a tough way to live for a couple
1:34:46 of years for American who grew up in modern society. And then after two years, you come home and the
1:34:51 depression rate for people coming back from Peace Corps service is astronomical. It’s something like
1:34:56 50%. 25%, 50% is enormous. It’s akin to soldiers. So there you have this common theme, you know,
1:35:03 that Peace Corps volunteers are not traumatized, but they experience, like soldiers, this radical
1:35:08 transition from closeness, literally village life back to the American suburb or whatever.
1:35:15 I mean, this is the first society, I mean, modern Western society is the first society
1:35:19 in human history where people live alone in an apartment, unheard of. Children have their own
1:35:25 bedrooms. They’re locked in a room by themselves at night, terrifying to young children. I mean,
1:35:29 we’re primates, right? Baby primates, if they’re alone in the jungle are incredibly vulnerable.
1:35:33 And, you know, human infants know this, of course, so they don’t want to be
1:35:37 put in a room by themselves. They know it’s in an evolutionary sense, they know it’s dangerous,
1:35:41 and they cry and they scream. Was it 90% contact? I might be pulling that out of my ass,
1:35:47 but you talked about the sort of contact. Yeah, the skin-on-skin contact for infants
1:35:53 and young children in tribal societies is as high as 90% of the time. Skin-on-skin contact.
1:36:01 And this study looked at skin-on-skin contact in American society. I think it was in the 70s,
1:36:08 the study was done, and it was as low as 17%, something like that. Now, you could say, okay,
1:36:15 well, people have to work, they have jobs, you know what, I’m all true. But that doesn’t mean
1:36:19 that that radical shift in child rearing doesn’t have consequences.
1:36:25 So PTSD is very interesting to me for a number of reasons. One is that I have quite a few friends
1:36:31 now who are either active military or were active for a period of time. But most of my
1:36:37 exposure has been to guys in, say, the SEALs or Marine Force Recon and so on. I have quite a
1:36:43 few questions related to this, but that’s part one of the interest. Part two of the interest
1:36:47 is that I’ve been involved with research and funding research related to the use of psychedelics
1:36:55 to address untreatable or treatment-resistant depression at places like Johns Hopkins. And
1:37:00 when you dig into that scientific community, you find a lot of people using, for instance, MDMA
1:37:05 with vets to try to address PTSD. So this has been a sort of recurrent topic that has popped up for
1:37:12 me. A couple of questions for you. The first is the fact of the matter is I don’t have perfect
1:37:17 transparency into these folks’ lives, nor should I. But the guys who I’ve spent a lot of time with
1:37:25 in some of these special operations units do not seem to exhibit any symptoms of PTSD. And I’m sure
1:37:31 that’s not true across the board, but do you see a lot of differences in terms of those types of
1:37:37 units versus, I don’t know, the proper terminology here, but just like basic infantrymen or support
1:37:44 units? I mean, what it seems to be is that unit cohesion is a buffer for psychological struggles,
1:37:51 including PTSD. So the more highly trained the soldier, the more highly trained the unit,
1:37:58 the more psychologically resilient they are, even though they might be taking higher casualties.
1:38:04 And what’s so interesting about trauma is that it’s not necessarily related to the level of
1:38:11 danger. It’s related to the level of control that you feel that you have. So if you’re a sort of
1:38:20 standard issue support unit rear base soldier, you know, one of the huge bases that the American
1:38:29 military has or the Israeli military has, for example, in previous wars in Israel, the random
1:38:35 mortar round comes in. Strangely, that is, causes more, a greater proportion of psychiatric casualties
1:38:42 than frontline units doing very intense fighting, but they’re, they’re taking higher casualties,
1:38:48 but they’re incredibly well trained. So they have a sense of mastery over their environment.
1:38:54 Yeah, they also have a very high degree of perceived agency, I would imagine, just because
1:38:59 they’re on offense, right? If you’re in a commando unit, you get dropped behind enemy lines in a
1:39:02 black helicopter and you have a go command. Absolutely. I mean, you know, it’s game on,
1:39:07 right? The big game, the football game or whatever. I mean, we’re, you know, humans are wired for
1:39:13 action and war when need be. And, you know, your, your neural circuitry just lights up and there’s
1:39:17 all kinds of hormonal stuff going on. I mean, you’re, you have an enormous agency,
1:39:22 but it even is true. I read a studies on my previous book called war. I saw this study where
1:39:27 some army psychiatrists, they like two unluckiest army psychiatrists in their whole military,
1:39:33 probably at that time, were at some, I saw like remote outposts with special forces soldiers along,
1:39:38 like, you know, the DMZ and they were dropped in there. They were just doing some standard study
1:39:45 psychological assessment of these guys, right? And these guys are real badasses. They were like SF,
1:39:50 you know, like the real deal. And so these psychologists, they found out that the base,
1:39:57 it was a 20 man position, something like that. The base was about to be attacked by a battalion
1:40:02 of NVA, like 500 men, right? And there was 20 guys there, something like that. So the psychologist
1:40:09 thought, Oh, perfect. This is a perfect moment to measure stress and soldiers, right? So definitely
1:40:14 looking at the silver lining. That’s right. Yeah, exactly. So they started taking cortisol levels
1:40:20 hourly from the soldiers. And the officers, the lieutenant, the poor lieutenant, he’s probably
1:40:26 22, his cortisol levels, he’s not, he’s young, he’s not very well trained. And he has a huge amount
1:40:31 of responsibility as the officer, the commanding officer, his cortisol levels are through the roof
1:40:36 right up until the point where the attack was supposed to begin because they had intel that
1:40:42 these guys were coming, right? And then after that time passed, his cortisol levels steadily
1:40:46 declined and then turned out there was no attack. And then he went returned to normal.
1:40:50 This special forces guys were the opposite. As soon as they heard that they were about to
1:40:55 experience an overwhelming attack, their cortisol levels dropped. They got super calm. The reason
1:41:01 their cortisol levels dropped, it was stressful for them to wait for the unknown. But as soon as
1:41:07 they knew they were going to be attacked, they had a plan of action. They started filling sandbags,
1:41:12 they started cleaning their rifles, they started stockpiling their ammo, getting the plasma bags
1:41:17 ready, whatever they do before an attack. All of that busyness gave them a sense of mastery and
1:41:22 control that actually made them feel less anxious than them just waiting around on an average day
1:41:29 in a dangerous place. Coming back to you, and I really didn’t think about this until now, but
1:41:35 when we’re talking about PTSD and potential causes, right? So you have going from a very
1:41:40 unified sort of tribal existence that we’ve evolved to be part of to this very unusual
1:41:48 isolated modern existence. You also have, what strikes me at least, is we’re looking at the
1:41:55 agency versus lack of agency, the sense of a clear purpose and a task. If the towers get hit at 9/11
1:42:02 and there’s a call for blood drives and everybody’s standing online, every different race, color,
1:42:07 or creed, it’s like you have a very clear, concrete purpose in front of you, as opposed to what I
1:42:13 think a lot of us experience, and I’m not immune to this, certainly, there are like weeks and months
1:42:17 where I’m like, “What the fuck am I doing? Like, I really just like don’t know what I should be doing
1:42:22 in life, but a crisis or perceived crisis is a forcing function.” It’s like, you have a very clear
1:42:27 directive of some type or another. And then a third, which could be is related, certainly, but
1:42:32 might be independently addressable, is when you come into an isolated existence, you’re in an
1:42:37 apartment by yourself, which quite frankly, I am a lot of the time, and I don’t think it’s healthy
1:42:40 for me, is a focus on me, like a focus on I is just a breeding ground for neuroses and mental
1:42:48 illness, I think. And when you take, for instance, certain types of psychedelics, it disrupts the
1:42:56 default mode network, has very particular neurological effects that increase the sense of
1:43:02 oneness and unity with others. It in some ways mitigates that focus on the first person. What
1:43:08 can we do to better support troops, particularly, and this is a question from another friend who’s
1:43:15 a big fan of your work, but he views himself quite proudly as sort of a bleeding heart liberal,
1:43:22 and he feels very conflicted because he wants to support troops at the same time he wants to
1:43:27 ask, “Well, did you find the WMDs?” And so he’s conflicted as to how to support the troops without
1:43:32 feeling like he’s supporting senseless wars. How would you answer that or talk to that?
1:43:37 Countries go to war through a political process that’s run by the government, and the troops have
1:43:45 nothing to do with the war in that sense. I mean, guys who are drilling for oil in North Dakota
1:43:51 really don’t have anything to do with global warming. They’re providing something that our
1:43:55 society has decided at once, including a lot of environmentalists. Frankly, they’re driving
1:43:59 around in cars, they’re running gasoline. So with the proper stickers that say no blood for oil.
1:44:04 Yeah, exactly, right? So there’s a massive hypocrisy, even though it’s well-meaning.
1:44:08 So you can’t mistake the soldiers for the war. If you’re upset about the wars that the U.S. gets
1:44:14 into, you have to address that to the government. The soldiers themselves have simply volunteered
1:44:21 to do anything. Think about how profound this is. They have volunteered to do anything that the
1:44:28 nation asked them to do for very, very low amounts of money. Anything, right? And if we told them to
1:44:35 plant trees in Canada, they’d go do that. And if we told them to go invade Canada, they’d do that.
1:44:41 They were like, “Whatever you want, we’re going to do.” So there’s no conflict between
1:44:46 disagreeing with a war and honoring people who have said, “For $40,000 a year, I will do whatever
1:44:54 you think this nation needs done.” That’s an incredibly honorable thing. And if you want to
1:45:01 create a sense of unity of purpose in this country, which I think would be enormously
1:45:07 psychologically beneficial to soldiers, I mean, soldiers experience unity of purpose in their
1:45:13 platoon, then they come back to a country, to this country, which is basically a war with itself.
1:45:18 I mean, we live in racially divided communities. The gap between rich and poor is bad and growing
1:45:23 worse. The political parties speak with incredible contempt for one another. If you’re a soldier
1:45:29 and you fought for this country and you come back to this mess, I mean, of course they’re messed up.
1:45:33 Come on guys, we fought for you and you can’t even get along in peacetime. I mean, you guys are
1:45:37 experiencing peace and you’re not, you can’t even get along. So you want unity of purpose in this
1:45:42 country. One way to get there is to make, 50 years ago, racist speech was acceptable socially.
1:45:48 Now it’s unacceptable. It’s protected under free speech, but it’s politically and socially
1:45:54 unacceptable. Contemptuous speech for your fellow citizens, for your political adversary. Likewise,
1:46:02 it’s protected under the First Amendment, but it should be considered so damaging to the social
1:46:09 fabric and to the interests of this nation that it’s effectively banned from society by common
1:46:14 consensus. That would help soldiers. It would help all of us. National service would be amazing.
1:46:20 I think it’s morally wrong to force people to fight a war they don’t want to fight, but national
1:46:25 service with a military option where every 18 year olds or every young person had to do a year or
1:46:32 two of national service would be, I mean, that would truly create the melting pot that this country
1:46:37 is and should be. The classes, the races get mixed in this very egalitarian way.
1:46:43 It would create a comet like in Israel, which has a PTSD rate, by the way, of 1%.
1:46:48 It would create this sort of common experience and this unity of purpose, which is so profoundly
1:46:55 helpful psychologically. What might some of the non-military options look like for that year or
1:47:00 two of service? I mean, what’s the nation need done? I mean, we need help in the inner cities.
1:47:06 We need infrastructure repair. I don’t know. It could resemble like a Teach for America or a
1:47:12 Peace Corps type of capacity. Yeah, anything, whatever. I mean, for us,
1:47:18 collectively, to use our imagination, and we have two things. We have this incredible resource
1:47:22 for our young people and we have a nation that’s deeply, deeply in crisis. One thing that unifies
1:47:29 us is being attacked. We’re attacked by terrorists and suddenly we’re a unified country. We don’t
1:47:35 want to have to wait for tragedy to unify us. We want to beat it to the punch and actually
1:47:43 unify our country for positive reasons instead of as a reaction to a horrible attack.
1:47:47 I promised I’d come back to the Viking helmet. I want to address the Viking helmet.
1:47:52 Let me try to, this is from memory, let me try to give a sketch. You’re in Spain,
1:48:00 correct? You go out to a bar with some of your buddies and you know what? I’ll let you tell it
1:48:05 because I think you’ll do it more justice, but it underscores a point that I want to ask you
1:48:10 about. Yeah, of course. They weren’t even my buddies. They became my buddies. I was 22 years
1:48:16 old. My father grew up in Spain and in France and I grew up going to those countries and when I
1:48:22 was after college, I decided I’d read a lot of Hemingway. This is all pretty predictable, right?
1:48:27 I read a lot of Hemingway, I wanted to go to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls,
1:48:31 to see or participate in the running of the bulls, right? So the festival of San Fermin in
1:48:38 Pamplona is this big city-wide freak show basically for a week and I was sleeping on
1:48:45 someone’s couch and one night I slept on a park bench. I mean, it’s just a free-for-all. It’s
1:48:49 amazing time, right? And I went out to this bar in preparation for the running of the bulls next
1:48:55 morning. No one who’s within the barricades, whether they run the bulls, they fire the cannon
1:49:00 off at seven in the morning to release the bulls from the arena and they charge through town to
1:49:04 these barricades and no one who’s within those barricades at seven a.m. woke up at six a.m. to do
1:49:09 it. I mean, everyone’s been up all night. Anyone who’s in that thing has been up all night. Well,
1:49:13 I was going to be one of them. So I go to this stupid little bar, saw us on the floor. I spoke
1:49:17 pretty good Spanish at the time. I immediately started talking to these two young Spaniards who
1:49:22 were just completely shit-faced, right? And one of them has a leather sort of drinking bag around,
1:49:30 I don’t know how to describe it, a leather drinking bag called a bota around his neck,
1:49:34 which is filled with red wine and he keeps trying to get the red one, squirt the red wine to his
1:49:38 mouth, but he keeps missing it’s all over his white t-shirt. And these guys are having the
1:49:42 best time in the world and we just become friends instantly when you’re talking and one of them,
1:49:47 the drunkest of the two, has a cheap plastic viking helmet on his head. And I didn’t really
1:49:55 think about it much. We’re talking and suddenly these three very tough looking North African
1:49:59 kids walk in and I had lived in France for a while with my family when I was 12, 13. So I spoke French
1:50:04 also. These really tough looking Algerian or Moroccan kids walk in and they’re tough looking
1:50:11 guys, right? And they walk into the bar and the biggest of them walks right up to my new friend.
1:50:16 I’ve known him for maybe half an hour and grabs the viking helmet off his hand and says,
1:50:21 “That’s mine, you stole it.” So I’m the only one who speaks both languages. So now I’m translating,
1:50:26 right? And my friend, my Spanish friend, new Spanish friend says, tries to grab it back and says,
1:50:32 “No, that’s mine. I don’t know who you are.” And the Moroccan guys and the two Spanish guys,
1:50:37 everyone suddenly has a hand on the viking helmet and they start pulling at it and it’s
1:50:41 rapidly devolving into a pretty good bar fight. And the helmet starts to rip. It’s just cheap
1:50:48 plastic, right? And one of them shouts, it’s sort of King Solomon’s judgment almost like one of
1:50:53 themselves, “Stop, stop. We’re ripping it.” You know? And they stop. Everyone stops because no one
1:50:58 wants to destroy the thing they’re all fighting over. And one of the two Spanish guys, I think the
1:51:05 less drunk of the two, turns to me and says, “I have an idea. Will you take my place at this
1:51:12 helmet? And will you defend it?” I mean, this wonderful, elegant way that Spaniards have of
1:51:17 speaking, particularly when they’re drunk. Will you defend it upon the honor of your ancestors
1:51:22 and your good name and blah, blah, blah? And I’m thinking like, “How long do you have to know a guy
1:51:27 before you have to back him up in a bar fight?” I mean, is it under an hour really? Is that it?
1:51:33 So I’d say, “Yes, I’ll defend the helmet,” et cetera. And I’d take my place at the helmet.
1:51:37 And he goes to the bartender. And now the whole bar is watching this. This is high theater,
1:51:42 right, at this point. So me and the Spanish kid are glaring at the Moroccans and they’re glaring
1:51:47 back and we’re faced off around this helmet. I’m really hoping it doesn’t go to where, you know,
1:51:52 it looks like it’s headed. So that the Spanish guy goes to the bar and has a quick conference
1:51:58 with the bartender who produces a big jug of cheap Spanish red wine and cracks the
1:52:03 top open and hands it to him. And the guy comes back and fills the Viking helmet to the brim
1:52:09 with red wine. Now, no one wants to be the asshole who spills the red wine, right? It’s the festival
1:52:15 of San Fermin. The whole thing’s running on red wine. Like, you know, no one wants to spill it,
1:52:20 right? It just looks bad. So he fills the helmet to the brim with red wine and he puts his hand
1:52:26 under it. And he says, “Okay, now everyone let go.” And no one wants to be the idiot who spills the
1:52:31 wine. So everyone, let’s go. And he presents it to the biggest, toughest-looking Moroccan kid.
1:52:37 It says, “You’re a guest in our country, so you drink first.” And the guy drank and he passed it
1:52:45 to his left and it went around the circle. And then when it was empty of red wine, it got filled up.
1:52:50 And then eventually they just got another jug and started passing the jug around. An hour later,
1:52:56 I’m talking to this like some girl, an hour later, like I eventually extricate myself from this.
1:53:00 And I look over and the five of them who are ready to carry each other to pieces, right?
1:53:06 The five of them are hanging off each other, singing in unison in two different languages,
1:53:11 and the Viking helmet has been completely forgotten and is under a table in the corner.
1:53:15 So I underlined this and put a bunch of stars next to it. There are a lot of underlines in
1:53:20 this book for me. What I liked about the encounter was that it showed how very close the energy of
1:53:24 male conflict and male closeness can be. So I want to get your thoughts and advice on this
1:53:30 on something very closely related, which is I’ve felt for a long time, and this is completely
1:53:34 unsubstantiated. I mean, it’s just a pet theory that a lot of the societal issues that we see
1:53:39 are a direct result of male misbehavior from those who do not have an outlet for
1:53:46 innate capacity for violence and force. And it’s just a great story because it shows how
1:53:54 that can be, in some cases, directed, right? So you’re like, “Oh, shit, these guys are about to
1:53:59 turn into meatheads pounding each other’s brains out.” But with a little finesse and
1:54:06 enough red wine, that’s all diffused, and now they’re best buddies. And I heard a story very
1:54:10 much like this where there’s a, I’m not going to name him, but this very cantankerous, outspoken,
1:54:17 abrasive billionaire walked up to this huge Argentine guy at a party that I was in a different
1:54:24 room at the time for and pushed the guy because they were both drunk. And he pushed this huge
1:54:29 Argentine guy because he assumed I’m the billionaire here. I’m the tough guy who’s the alpha male.
1:54:34 What’s this guy going to do? And what the guy did was turn around, picked him up like a professional
1:54:38 wrestler over his head and slammed him on top of a folding table and shattered the table.
1:54:43 Everyone’s assuming, “Holy shit, this guy’s going to get his life destroyed. This guy’s going to
1:54:49 sue the shit out of him.” But he couldn’t because of the reputational stakes. It would be a response
1:54:56 so forever shame him if that was the response because he clearly instigated it. And then
1:55:00 a half hour later, they’re best of friends doing shots together. But it doesn’t always end that
1:55:06 neatly. And do you have any thoughts on how the society in which we live, let’s just say in this
1:55:12 case in the US, we can end up with more male closeness and less male violence? Do you have
1:55:18 any thoughts on that? Well, it’s tricky. I mean, how do we have less heart disease in the society
1:55:23 that where people drive and they have plenty, most people have plenty of food and a lot of fats
1:55:27 and sugars? I mean, the very safety of this society, the very thing that makes us lucky,
1:55:33 also creates a danger. The diseases of affluence. That’s right. So the wonderful thing about the
1:55:39 society is that we don’t have to organize groups of young men and put weapons in their hands
1:55:46 and send them out to the edge of town to fight off an incursion from the young men of an enemy
1:55:53 town, a hostile town. That’s not happening anymore. I mean, wars are big formal things
1:56:00 that for the United States almost always happen elsewhere. But in terms of our communities and
1:56:04 our society at home, we no longer have to organize young men and prepare them for group violence
1:56:11 so that we can survive. That’s been the human norm for two million years, either from predators
1:56:17 or from other humans. Young men function in groups and functioned selflessly in groups
1:56:24 extremely well. You can organize 20, 30, 40, 50 young men and give them a task, a dangerous task,
1:56:32 and they perform, not only do they perform it very, very well, the heart of the task is the
1:56:36 closer they get. Women are used for incredibly important… I mean, I’m talking in sort of human
1:56:41 evolution and across the span of human history. Women are used for equally important tasks,
1:56:47 but usually not group tasks like that. It’s really the boys that are told to either hunt or fight in
1:56:52 groups. And so they get very good at it. And in modern society, what young men want to do is
1:56:59 achieve honor by defending the community. I mean, it’s just wired. It’s just wired into the male
1:57:04 brain to do that. If you don’t give young men a good and useful group to belong to,
1:57:10 they will create a bad group to belong to. But one way or another, they’re going to create a group
1:57:18 and they’re going to find something, an adversary, where they can demonstrate their prowess and their
1:57:23 unity. That thing that they find is often the law. It’s the police. It’s society itself. In some
1:57:31 ways, they turn into skinwalkers. They have no outside enemy. So they create an enemy out of
1:57:35 society. They don’t want to be doing this. It’s one of the risks of wartime leaders being all the
1:57:41 time leaders. Yeah, that’s right. And young men, like young women, for the most part, are well
1:57:46 intentioned and want to do right by their community and their society. But if you have a society which
1:57:50 is so safe and protected and removed from the rest of the world as we are, in some ways,
1:57:55 there’s sort of nothing useful for the young men to do. And then in their own ad hoc way,
1:58:00 they create their own trials, right? So they take a lot of risks. They do stupid stuff. They
1:58:05 jump off of stuff that’s too high to jump off of. They drive too fast. They get into fights.
1:58:09 I’ve never done any of that. Young men die at six times the rate of young women from accidents
1:58:17 and from violence. There’s a reason for that. They’re wired to demonstrate their prowess and
1:58:23 it often gets them killed. This is not really something that needs a ton of commentary because
1:58:28 I’m not sure we can resolve millennia and millions of years of evolution. But I highlighted this
1:58:32 part and we talked about it before we started recording because it was surprising yet completely
1:58:37 unsurprising at the same time. And this is to read a short section here. I once asked a combat vet
1:58:42 if he’d rather have an enemy in his life or another close friend. He looked at me like I was crazy.
1:58:45 “Oh, an enemy?” 100%, he said. Not even close. I already got a lot of friends. He thought about
1:58:51 it a little longer. Anyway, all my best friends I’ve gotten into fights with knocked down drag
1:58:55 out fights. Granted, we were always drunk when it happened, but think about that. He shook his head
1:59:00 as if he couldn’t believe it. Strange creatures we are. Absolutely. Absolutely. I want to segue
1:59:06 to a couple of listener questions because there were some good ones. This one is from Kip Makinuni.
1:59:13 I’m going to abbreviate it a little bit, but how does he feel about veterans being victims
1:59:17 in society after they return home and get out? General James Mattis, who you should definitely
1:59:21 interview. This has actually been recommended a few times, gave a speech in 2014 about post-traumatic
1:59:26 growth, as he called it, and how those experiences should be considered a precious commodity,
1:59:30 one that cannot be simulated or taught in a classroom. How would you comment on that?
1:59:35 The status of victimhood is not a psychologically healthy place to be in. And I think our society
1:59:43 takes people who are unfortunate, who have experienced something difficult, and in a kind
1:59:48 of misguided attempt to make the world right again for them, they classify them as victims.
1:59:53 Now, they may call them survivors, and they may call them whatever they want, but actually,
1:59:58 the role that the person is being asked to play is one of a victim. Victims are taken care of.
2:00:03 So after World War II, which saw casualties that completely eclipse
2:00:10 even these terrible wars of our current day, soldiers came back. They didn’t do multiple
2:00:15 deployments. They signed up, and they were in the army until the war was done. Some of them were in
2:00:20 for three, four years. Straight. And they came home, and basically, the society said to these men,
2:00:28 and it was almost all men in the combat unit, society said to these men, “All right, you’re
2:00:32 done fighting. Now we need you at home. It’s time to get to work. We have a country to rebuild.”
2:00:37 And they definitely were not thought of as victims of the war or of anything.
2:00:42 They were thought of much like, I’m sure, the Cheyenne and the Comanche and the Apache and the
2:00:48 Sioux and the Kiowa warriors who came back from the war path. They were thought of as essential
2:00:52 and functioning members of society. Now, maybe they were missing a limb, or maybe they had some
2:00:57 trauma to process, but they were needed back home in the towns and cities of this great country,
2:01:04 just as badly as they were needed in the Pacific, in the fields of Europe. And the problem with
2:01:11 victimhood is that it perpetuates the psychological state of passivity and trauma that you want the
2:01:21 person to escape from. Right. It’s the sort of perceived lack of agency that helped produce
2:01:27 the PTSD in the first place, potentially. Exactly. And you think about what the official London
2:01:32 officials said about the blitz. Now we have neurotics driving ambulances.
2:01:35 And also, I mean, one thing you wrote about, which was the presence of fraud, of course,
2:01:40 within disability claims and how some vets who really suffer from severe PTSD don’t want to
2:01:48 go to these meetings because they’re afraid they’re going to beat the living shit out of
2:01:50 some guy who’s clearly just doing it to receive a check or some type of payment.
2:01:54 Yeah. You know, it’s a very politically delicate thing to bring up, but all I’m doing is repeating
2:01:59 the accounts of soldiers and veterans. I mean, the best thing a journalist can do is convey
2:02:04 information. And that’s what I’m doing. They’re veterans I’ve talked to who said they just,
2:02:08 they won’t go to these group therapy sessions because, you know, one out of 20 is some guy
2:02:13 who really didn’t see any combat and is trying to milk the system and pretending to have trauma,
2:02:18 pretending to have PTSD and he really doesn’t. You know, one of the tricky things, the VA in
2:02:21 trying to speed up the massive bureaucracy that they created over the last decades,
2:02:26 and trying to speed that up, speed up disability claims, they said to soldiers,
2:02:31 if you self-diagnose, think about this, if you self-diagnose with PTSD, you do not have to
2:02:40 give us proof that anything traumatic happened. You do not have to describe the incident that
2:02:48 you were traumatized in. You just have to tell us that you believe that you were traumatized
2:02:54 and that you have PTSD and that’s enough for a disability check. So humans being what they are,
2:02:59 some number of people are going to take advantage of that and we’re a wealthy country,
2:03:04 we can easily absorb those costs. So I have zero opinion about whether we should inquire further,
2:03:09 but I should say that the data show that having that kind of dishonesty in a process
2:03:18 is actually psychologically detrimental not only to those specific people who are being dishonest,
2:03:24 but to everybody. It’s actually quite corrosive.
2:03:27 How many photographs have you taken on your wartime deployments? Probably not the right word,
2:03:32 but assignments. I carry a video camera and I shoot a lot of footage, but I’ve never taken
2:03:39 still photos. Okay. So with the video footage that you’ve shot, and by the way, I haven’t told you
2:03:44 this, when Restrepo was first shown, like very, very first shown in the Northern California area,
2:03:51 I tracked it down and drove out to see one of the very first showing. So really, I did. Thank you.
2:03:56 And I have some questions about that, but what footage that you captured, if any come to mind,
2:04:03 this is related to a question from Yasmin Hayat. If you had to choose, I’m going to substitute
2:04:08 here because it was one photo, but I’m going to say one clip of footage that impacted him the most,
2:04:13 which one is it and why? What did he experience while taking, in this case, the video?
2:04:17 I mean, the things that have impacted me, I didn’t necessarily shoot video of. Sometimes,
2:04:25 it’s at night. Well, we can talk about, I would say, feel free to answer that. Yeah.
2:04:30 When I was in Northern Afghanistan in 2000, there was a big nighttime battle going on,
2:04:36 and there was a mass infantry assault against entrenched Taliban positions through minefield.
2:04:42 The Northern Alliance, sort of World War I style. And it was at night, and we were
2:04:47 right behind the front lines, and a wave of soldiers sort of took the wrong route and went
2:04:54 through this minefield, and a lot of them got messed up, and they were pulled out of there.
2:04:58 And we saw them immediately afterwards. They’d sort of been piled onto the back of a flat, but
2:05:02 pick up track. They’re alive. They had lost legs and traumatic amputations. I mean,
2:05:06 they were extremely messed up. They’re alive. Most of them probably survived. They’re anti-personnel
2:05:10 ones. So we were there when they were brought into this sort of forward, ill hospital tent
2:05:16 that was lit with kerosene lanterns, right? I mean, this is rough. This is World War I era.
2:05:21 It’s anti-medicine. Yeah. And in the very bright light of these sort of propane lanterns,
2:05:25 kerosene lanterns, they brought these poor guys in. And you know, there was 12 guys, you know,
2:05:31 where their bodies ended at their knee, their bodies ended at their hips. You don’t realize
2:05:37 it’s psychologically incredibly deranging to see the human body rearranged. And I’ve found later
2:05:44 in my research that one of the most traumatizing things in terms of PTSD is to see dismemberment,
2:05:52 to see the coherence of the human form rearranged in an odd way that you’ve never seen before.
2:05:58 And it’s just, it really tweaks people. And I had a moment of crisis. I went a little crazy.
2:06:04 It felt like I went a little crazy. I mean, I just, my brain just sort of stopped functioning.
2:06:10 And I don’t even have very clear memories of it, but I left the tent. I couldn’t take it. I could
2:06:15 not bear to see what I was seeing. And I left the tent and I went outside into the cold African night
2:06:22 and lit a cigarette. And I thought, you know, war is exciting and it’s dramatic and it’s important
2:06:27 and it’s meaningful and it’s all this other stuff. But if you’re not also prepared to
2:06:34 look unblinkingly, unflinchingly at the worst aspects of war, dismembered people, you really
2:06:40 have no business covering the quote good parts. And by good, I mean the parts that are, are traumatic.
2:06:45 If you can’t face what’s in that tent, you have to get out of the business completely.
2:06:49 And you can’t be selective about your experience of war. But you have a job to do and it’s to
2:06:54 communicate to your readers back in the United States, everything about what war looks like,
2:06:59 including that. So grab your damn notebook and grab your pen and walk in there and just write
2:07:04 down what it is like to behold such a thing. And as soon as I, this is interesting, right,
2:07:12 as soon as I had a purpose, I was okay. My self given purpose was document this thing that you
2:07:19 can barely bear to look at. But as soon as I had a job to do, and I’m sure that’s how the medics
2:07:25 dealt with it too. So as I had a job to do, I was okay. And I wrote it all down. And it was
2:07:32 one of the most powerful parts of this piece that I wrote. And I, you know, I passed through the
2:07:37 gateway, through the threshold. And I, at that moment, I’ve been in plenty of wars until then.
2:07:42 But in that moment, I became a war recorder. You mentioned not by name, but Tim earlier.
2:07:50 Yeah. Can you tell us who he was, what happened and how it impacted you?
2:07:56 Yeah, Tim Heatherington was a wonderful, brilliant English photographer who I was lucky enough to
2:08:03 work with on my project in the Coral and Gold Valley. I wanted to document the experience of one
2:08:08 platoon, 30, 40, 50 men throughout one deployment. And I wound up at a little outpost called Restrepo.
2:08:15 And on my second trip in there, that’s when I started shooting video and thinking about movies.
2:08:21 And on my second trip in there, I started working with Tim. He was assigned to me by
2:08:25 Vanity Fair Magazine. And he quickly realized that this film project that I had was a pretty good
2:08:30 idea. And we became partners. And we went through a very intense, amazing, difficult year together
2:08:38 out there in the Coral and Gold Valley. And we both got hurt. We both came very close to getting
2:08:44 killed out there. It was an extraordinary experience. And we became brothers really.
2:08:48 And we made a film called Restrepo. It won a lot of awards. And then it was nominated for an Oscar.
2:08:55 And we went off to Los Angeles and this amazing world of, you know, Los Angeles during the Oscars.
2:09:01 And I was married at the time. And he had, you know, he had a girlfriend and we were all out there
2:09:05 together. It was an incredible experience. We didn’t win. It didn’t really matter. And we had an
2:09:10 assignment to, the Arab Spring was exploding all around us during the Oscars, right? And so
2:09:15 we had an assignment to go back overseas and document the Civil War in Libya from Vanity Fair.
2:09:21 After the Oscars, we all went home and we were going to head to Libya. And the last moment I
2:09:25 couldn’t go for personal reasons. And Tim went on his own and he was killed on April 20 in the
2:09:31 city of Misrata in Libya by a mortar round, 81 millimeter mortar that was fired by Qaddafi’s
2:09:37 forces outside Misrata. And he bled out in the back of a rebel pickup truck racing for the
2:09:42 Misrata Hospital. And, you know, I got the awful phone call in New York City. And very, very quickly
2:09:52 decided I would never cover war again. It wasn’t that I was scared of getting killed. That’s a
2:09:58 fear that you have to confront early on. And I’d sort of resolve my feelings about it. It’s that
2:10:03 in watching the news of his death, and he was beloved by people, including my wife,
2:10:08 Daniela, I just loved him. I mean, he just, everyone loved him. And I watched the news of
2:10:14 his death ripple, ripple outwards from my apartment, because I got the news first from my apartment
2:10:21 outwards through all the people that he knew that he loved on out into people that he didn’t even
2:10:28 know who loved him on out through his country and my country. And I just thought, I don’t want to
2:10:34 risk doing that to the people I love. I mean, I’m dead, right? My problems are over, but I’m
2:10:40 giving them a lifetime of pain and sorrow. And that’s not an honorable thing to do. And so I got
2:10:47 out of the business. What was the date on that again? April 20. Yep. Coincidentally, the anniversary
2:10:55 of Columbine, Hitler’s birthday. Oh, there’s all kinds of awful things that happened on April 20
2:11:00 for some reason. What do you think your writing future will look like? Tribe is a really different
2:11:07 book from my other books. It’s an inquiry into something. It’s not a story. It doesn’t take
2:11:13 place on a fishing boat or in an outpost. It’s a meditation and an inquiry about my society,
2:11:20 my country that I love very much and something feels very, very wrong in our country right now.
2:11:26 And I think if you look at the political discourse right now in this country, it is completely toxic
2:11:34 and actually more dangerous to our nation than ISIS is. I mean, really in real terms of how do we
2:11:41 keep this country together for the next 250 years, ISIS is not going to be able to prevent us from
2:11:48 doing that. I’m sorry. But we ourselves can. And it’s happening right now. And my book
2:11:54 is partly an attempt to make people think about what it means to belong to a group.
2:12:01 And this country is a group. So viewing ourselves that way, this relates to a question from Bobby
2:12:08 Richards. Working so closely with service members and vets, what would be the one thing he would
2:12:13 recommend that an American civilian could do for our vets? Not necessarily as a country,
2:12:17 but as individuals. The main thing that I can think of is drawn from some of my research into
2:12:23 American Indian ceremonies or returning warriors in the 17th, 18th centuries or vets from the current
2:12:30 wars, 19th centuries. One of the common themes in these ceremonies is that the warrior gets to
2:12:36 recount in front of his community what he did for them on the battlefield. And, you know, often it’s
2:12:44 a heroic sort of boasting of how brave he was and how he killed the enemy and how, you know,
2:12:50 whatever. But it’s this cathartic description of a warrior’s, a warrior discharging his duties
2:12:58 for his community. There’s something about doing that for the people you did it for
2:13:03 that seems to be very, very psychologically healthy to put it in modern terms,
2:13:09 because it’s almost a universal in these ceremonies. And so I had the idea, I mean,
2:13:15 we’re not going to go back to a tribal society. I mean, we can’t. We can’t, you know, you’d have
2:13:19 to get rid of the car, you know, whatever, whatever. It’s not happening. But we might be able to take
2:13:24 certain structures of tribal life and incorporate them into modern society so we get the best of
2:13:30 both worlds. And the way to do that in terms of returning veterans is to turn the town hall,
2:13:36 the city hall and every community in this country on Veterans Day into an open forum for veterans.
2:13:41 I have this idea, Veteran Town Halls, where on my website, SebastianYounger.com,
2:13:46 there’s a page devoted to this. You open up the town hall and a veteran from veterans from any war
2:13:53 have the right to stand up and speak for 10 minutes to their community. And I know veterans,
2:13:59 right? Some of them are going to be incredibly proud of their service, and they’re going to say
2:14:05 they missed the war, and it’s going to make liberals uncomfortable. And some of them are…
2:14:10 Just to be clear, you would consider yourself liberal.
2:14:12 Oh, I’m totally liberal. Yeah. Yeah. But as a journalist, I’m neutral. I mean,
2:14:16 it’s really important, as a private person, I’m liberal, but as a journalist, I really
2:14:18 try to be completely neutral in my analysis and in my evaluation of things.
2:14:25 Conservatives will be made uncomfortable by veterans standing up and being incredibly
2:14:29 angry about the war that they had to fight. And everyone’s going to be uncomfortable when
2:14:33 someone stands up and just starts crying and can’t even talk because they’re crying too hard.
2:14:37 But all of that is war, right? We sent these people to do a job for us that we deem necessary,
2:14:43 collectively deem necessary. And the emotional fallout for it is okay as long as we process it all
2:14:51 collectively. It’s not okay if we just make them deal with it. It’s not their war. It’s our war.
2:14:57 So all of us need to deal with it, much like the American Indian tribes did in these ceremonies,
2:15:02 an amazing thing. So we did this once in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and Seth Moulton is a Democratic
2:15:09 representative from Massachusetts, who was a Marine Lieutenant in Ramadi, I believe it was.
2:15:14 Saw some very, very tough fighting. He helped me organize it. We did it together. And
2:15:21 last Veterans Day in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, if you were a civilian and you
2:15:25 like to say, “I support the troops,” what that literally meant on that day last year in Marblehead,
2:15:32 Massachusetts was that you really then should go down to the town hall and listen to what the
2:15:38 veterans had to say about what it was like for them. There’s no Q&A. There’s no debate. This is
2:15:42 not an evaluation of the war. It’s not a patriotic thing. It’s not an anti-war thing. It’s just,
2:15:48 this is what the experience was like. And I really, really think that if we could do this
2:15:52 in every town across the country, that it would be enormously therapeutic for veterans,
2:15:57 but even more important in some ways, it would start to bind the country together again. I think
2:16:03 the veterans are suffering because the country is suffering. And if we can heal ourselves as a
2:16:08 nation, the veterans are going to be fine. Could not agree more. Let’s shift gears just to my
2:16:18 perhaps somewhat typical series of rapid fire questions and then we’ll wrap up and have some
2:16:23 more coffee. Oh, and I didn’t look at those in advance. So now I’m in trouble. All right. All
2:16:28 right. I’m ready. Let me get ready. Here we go. All right. I’ll let you limber up. Okay. I’m doing
2:16:33 a little shadow boxing. All right. So the first is when you hear the word successful, who’s the
2:16:39 first person who comes to mind and why? Martin Luther King. Why? Because he transformed society
2:16:44 in an incredibly courageous way. How do you define courage or bravery? Courage is risking or
2:16:50 sacrificing your life for others. What is the book or books that you have given to others most
2:16:55 often as a gift? At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matheson. I also recently read
2:17:02 Sapiens by a guy named Harari, which is just phenomenal. That’s a good book. I’m going to
2:17:06 give that thing over and over again to everyone I know. There’s a friend of mine who’s also been
2:17:10 on the podcast named Naval Ravikant who you have to meet at some point. You guys would get along
2:17:14 famously. Also, one of his favorites of the last couple of years. At Play in the Fields of the Lord.
2:17:19 It’s a novel by Peter Matheson. It takes place in the jungles of South America and it’s about
2:17:24 a Sioux Indian named Louis Moon who grew up on a reservation in the 1970s and he goes down to
2:17:31 Brazil to meet what he considers his forebears and it doesn’t go very well.
2:17:36 And now, am I getting this right? Matheson also wrote In Search of the Snow Leopard,
2:17:42 am I getting that? That’s right. Fantastic writer. What would your close friends say you’re
2:17:48 exceptionally good at if I had two drinks in each of them? I think they would say that I’m really
2:17:56 good at not reacting to things and seeming like I’m unaffected when actually I’m deeply affected.
2:18:04 But on the surface, you’re not emotionally reactive. That’s right.
2:18:09 Sounds like you’re definitely a closet stoic.
2:18:12 This is actually not one of my typical questions when I’m going to throw this one. This is from,
2:18:19 I think it’s Robbie Frye. It looks like a very Dutch name. If you could combine three different
2:18:25 writers into one Super Saiyan, that’s a Dragon Ball Z reference, don’t worry about that. If you
2:18:29 could combine three different writers into one writer, right, to create the ultimate writer for
2:18:35 you, who would they be? I think I would have to pick Cormac McCarthy, Peter Matheson, and Joan
2:18:43 Dillion. Good choices all. Let’s see here. Where were you? So your first commercial book success,
2:18:52 The Perfect Storm, how old were you when that came out? I was 35 years old. Okay. So when the book hit,
2:19:00 before it was made into a movie, you now, what advice would you give to yourself at that point
2:19:05 in time? The movie part of it didn’t affect me very much, but the sudden public attention that I
2:19:13 got when the book became a bestseller affected me enormously. And I was very anxious about all that.
2:19:19 I think I would say to myself, the public is not a threat. The public is actually waiting to hear
2:19:25 someone, anything, say something that’s helpful and makes sense, because we’re all trying to get
2:19:31 through this life together. And everyone wants some guidance. And if there’s anything I can say
2:19:39 through my work, or just on a stage that gives some comfort or guidance to people, they’re enormously
2:19:46 receptive. And when you realize that we all need each other and we all learn from each other,
2:19:52 your stage fright goes away. And I had a terrific case of stage fright when my book came out.
2:19:56 How do you feel now when you’re getting ready for a talk, like your TED Talk?
2:20:00 Oh, I don’t think twice about it. I mean, it just doesn’t affect me at all. I think my heart rate
2:20:05 goes up a little bit. What purchase of $100 or less? And we don’t have to stick to that exactly,
2:20:11 but recent purchase that has most positively impacted your life?
2:20:14 I think Sapiens. Sapiens. Yeah, I mean, that book. It’s a fun book to read. It’s amazing. I mean,
2:20:21 I just started looking at everything differently. Like, I mean, I love that book. And books are,
2:20:26 I mean, a book is a kind of thing of magic. It contains a whole universe of information. So,
2:20:30 and it’s cheap at the price. So maybe it’s unfair to use a book, $100 or less.
2:20:36 I mean, I think one of the best values you can buy for $100, you can get for $100 is an ax, a good
2:20:42 ax. Good ax. You can do almost anything with a good ax. Any particular type of ax? What are the
2:20:47 characteristics of a good ax? It can’t be cheap wood in the half. It’s got to be good steel. I
2:20:53 mean, you know, I don’t even know how to evaluate this. Basically, the more you pay for an ax,
2:20:56 the better quality it is and the longer the last and the better we’ll cut. And you keep it really,
2:21:00 really sharp. And you can cut not as fast as chainsaw. I’ve used chainsaws a lot in my life.
2:21:06 But you can basically do anything with it, given a little bit of time. And I’ve spent a lot of
2:21:11 time in the woods. If I had to take one thing to take into the woods with me, it would be an ax.
2:21:16 I was just thinking like, how would you open a tuna can with an ax?
2:21:19 Oh, that’s so easy, man. You can definitely open it.
2:21:21 Oh, yeah. Yeah. I remember when I was a young man in my 20s and I was living just stupidly in
2:21:28 some stupid apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. And I had a date with this girl, this beautiful
2:21:33 girl. And I invited her over and I was going to make spaghetti. I mean, I’m like 23, right? I’m
2:21:37 going to make spaghetti. And I like an idiot. I mean, I got like, and I had cans of tomato sauce
2:21:43 and pasta, right? And she came over and I realized I didn’t have a can over there.
2:21:47 But I knew the answer and I went into my room and I got a hatchet that I had. And I opened the
2:21:51 cans of tomato sauce with a hatchet. And I hit it pretty hard and completely splattered her with
2:21:58 tomato sauce. And here’s the amazing part. She still went out with me. Very memorable at the
2:22:06 very least. Yeah, yeah. So then he pulled out a hatchet. That’s right. Yeah, exactly. Right.
2:22:11 She probably sort of relieved that you weren’t a serial killer was going to take your head off.
2:22:14 That’s right. Oh my God. What is something you believe, even though you can’t prove it?
2:22:20 I believe I’m a good person. What are some of the habits or common practices of journalists that
2:22:29 you dislike? I really dislike laziness. And if you read a phrase or a sentence that’s familiar,
2:22:35 I mean, there are these cliches, these sort of sort of linguistic tropes like the mortars slammed
2:22:40 into the hillside. I just don’t want to read that again. You know, like just say it in an original
2:22:45 way or don’t say it, but you’re wasting everybody’s time, including your own, if you write and rely on
2:22:51 these sort of linguistic tropes. I really dislike that. And also, the point of journalism is the
2:22:57 truth. It’s not, I was talking about this on the phone earlier and, you know, maybe you overheard
2:23:02 me, but the point of journalism is the truth. The point of journalism is not to improve society.
2:23:08 And there are things, there are facts, there are truths that actually
2:23:11 feel regressive. But it doesn’t matter because the point of journalism isn’t to make everything
2:23:18 better. It’s to give people accurate information about how things are. And I think journalists
2:23:23 really confuse those two things. Advocates are what we need for improvement, but not journalists.
2:23:30 Journalists provide information like doctors provide information when they look at your,
2:23:34 the x-ray of your lungs after you smoke for 10 years. Yeah, you need accurate forensics.
2:23:38 That’s right. What do you think your 70-year-old self would give to your current self as advice?
2:23:45 I think I would say to myself, the world is this continually unfolding set of possibilities
2:23:52 and opportunities. And the tricky thing about life is on the one hand, having the courage
2:24:01 to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but to also have the wisdom to stop exploring
2:24:10 when you’ve found something that’s worth sticking around for. I mean, that’s true of a place, of a
2:24:14 person, of a vocation. In balancing those two things, the courage of exploring and the commitment
2:24:22 to staying, it’s very hard to get the ratio, the balance of those two things right. And I think
2:24:28 my 70-year-old self would say, just really be careful that you don’t care on one side or the
2:24:34 other because you have an ill-conceived idea of who you are. It’s this fine line. It’s a tough
2:24:40 balance. Yeah, it is a tough balance. I find it tough personally. Yeah, I mean, yeah, absolutely.
2:24:44 I mean, there’s a lot of unhappy people because they’re struggling to find that balance.
2:24:47 What are the symptoms of knowing that you should pursue a given project? Because you’ve got Navajo
2:24:55 long-distance running. You have the perfect storm. You have quite a bit of terrain that you cover.
2:25:00 How do you know? And I’ll just throw it out there as an example. For me, I find writing so difficult
2:25:09 personally, and I’m so plotting, and I have to go into isolation. It makes me very mentally
2:25:15 unhealthy. I only write a book, certainly, if it’s less painful to write it than to not write it.
2:25:22 Like, you generally manifest itself as a lot of insomnia, in my case. And I’m just like,
2:25:26 okay, this idea that’s been pestering me, I just need to get it out of my head and on the paper,
2:25:30 or I won’t be able to get to sleep. But the insomnia could also be excitement. I’m excited
2:25:34 about the possibilities of something, and I just can’t sleep. That’s usually one of the symptoms
2:25:39 that I might have. I might have a live one. This might be something I can run with. What is it like
2:25:44 for you? I think I’ve only written five books. What was the collection of? I’m not sure who you’re
2:25:50 comparing yourself to. Well, the writers are writing 20, whatever. You can always be insecure,
2:25:56 right? No, and I’ve written… You don’t have to be James Batters. You’re fine.
2:25:59 I’ve really written only four books. One’s a collection of short form journalism. So,
2:26:03 you know, they’re all books that, had I not written them, I would have wished that someone else had,
2:26:07 so I could read it. One of the things I loved about Harari Sapiens is I finished it, and I just
2:26:13 thought, thank God someone wrote that book. Like, the world really needed it. And the books that
2:26:18 I write, maybe I’m flattering myself, but it feels to me like the world needs this book.
2:26:25 And I know that sounds horribly grandiose, but I have to say it’s the feeling I’m looking for
2:26:32 when I’m choosing a topic. I really don’t want to write a book that I’m not sure the world needs.
2:26:37 Jeff, if you look at… I mean, we’re sitting in Silicon Valley. If you look at some of the,
2:26:43 some, probably all of the biggest successes I know personally, they were scratching their own
2:26:48 itch. And it was something they felt needed to exist. Absolutely. If you had one billboard
2:26:56 anywhere and could put anything you want on it, what would you put on it? I think I would put the
2:27:00 word read. Read. It’s the only, I was talking about this recently with some people. You know, we don’t
2:27:07 live in small groups anymore. We evolved to live in groups of 30, 40, 50 people, and you could gather
2:27:12 50 people around and have a communal discussion about how to live, what to do, who you are,
2:27:18 what you want to be. You could do that. We live in a country of 400 million. There’s no more gathering
2:27:24 around the campfire to figure out who we are, how we want to live, what are our values. We can’t do
2:27:29 that anymore, but we still need to. And in some ways, in a country as advanced as ours with nuclear
2:27:36 weapons and everything else is even more important than when we lived in groups of 50. I mean, it’s
2:27:39 vital that we have that conversation. And the only real way, I think the only real way to have,
2:27:44 collectively have that conversation is through books, is the only thing that’s cheap enough,
2:27:49 accessible enough to everybody that contains enough information that can be shared and commonly
2:27:54 understood. It’s the only thing that we can have a group conversation, even in a group of 400 million
2:28:00 people. But if people don’t read, that will never happen. I really feel that it makes books a kind
2:28:08 of sacred object and sacred in the sense that our society, I don’t think will survive without them.
2:28:14 And that to me is, as an atheist, one definition of sacredness is something that humanity needs in
2:28:20 order to survive. Sebastian, this has been so much fun. I could go on and on. Those of you who
2:28:26 don’t have a visual, which is all of you, can’t see the many, many, many pages I’ve printed out and
2:28:31 highlighted and sketched out by hand. But I’m going to tell people where they can find you. And
2:28:38 I’m also going to put this in the show notes, of course, for everyone. But is there anything that
2:28:42 just as a parting comment, you would like my listeners to meditate on, consider, do?
2:28:50 Well, one of the questions I ask in my book is, who would you die for? What ideas would you die for?
2:28:58 The answer to those questions for most of human history would have come very readily to any person’s
2:29:03 mouth. Any Comanche could tell you instantly who they would die for and what they would die for.
2:29:09 And in modern society, it gets more and more complicated. And when you lose the ready answer
2:29:14 to those ancient human questions, you lose a part of yourself. You lose a part of your identity.
2:29:19 And I think what I would ask people is, who would you die for? What would you die for? And what do
2:29:23 you owe your community? And in our case, our communities are a country. What do you owe your
2:29:26 country other than your taxes? Is there anything else you owe all of us? There’s no right answer
2:29:32 or wrong answer, but it’s something that I think everyone should try to ask themselves.
2:29:36 This is a great book, folks. I read a lot. So I have a high bar. I really enjoyed this book. It has
2:29:42 a ton of notes. And next time that we hang out, probably in New York City, and have some wine,
2:29:48 I’ll bring this with me because I have 20, 30 other questions I’d like to ask you. But for
2:29:53 those people who might reflect back on some of your reads and writing and wonder if this is a
2:29:58 book about war, it doesn’t strike me that it is a book about war. It’s a book about human nature
2:30:04 and what we’ve evolved to be and what we are in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
2:30:08 And war just happens to be a very helpful circumstance in which we can find some illumination
2:30:15 into those subjects. But I really enjoyed this book. So I encourage everybody
2:30:20 to check it out. And Sebastian, thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
2:30:23 It’s been a real pleasure talking with you. Thank you.
2:30:26 And everybody listening, as always, you can find links to everything that we discussed
2:30:30 in the show notes. And that includes Sebastian’s website, all the social and whatnot,
2:30:36 and all the various resources that came up. And you can find that at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast,
2:30:43 all spelled out. And as always, and until next time, thank you for listening.
2:30:49 Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet
2:30:55 Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun
2:31:00 before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter,
2:31:04 my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is
2:31:10 basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve found or
2:31:16 discovered or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
2:31:20 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos,
2:31:26 all sorts of tech tricks and so on. They get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast
2:31:32 guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share
2:31:38 them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before
2:31:44 you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to
2:31:49 tim.vlog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.vlog/friday. Drop in your email and you’ll
2:31:55 get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep.
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0:01:39 doesn’t matter what you’re doing. Their clothing is so comfortable and looks so good, and it’s
0:01:46 non-offensive that you don’t have a huge brand logo in your face. You’ll just want to be in them
0:01:50 all this time. They’re Men’s Core Short, K-O-R-E. The most comfortable lined athletic short is your
0:01:57 one short for every sport. I’ve been using it for kettlebell swings, for runs, you name it,
0:02:01 the Banks Short. This is their go-to-land to see short is the ultimate versatility. It’s made from
0:02:07 recycled plastic bottles. What I’m wearing right now, which I had to pick one to recommend to
0:02:13 folks out there, or at least to men out there, is the Ponto Performance Pant. You’ll find these at
0:02:19 the link I’m going to give you guys. You can check out what I’m talking about, but I’m wearing them
0:02:22 right now. They’re thin performance sweat pants, but that doesn’t do them justice. You’ve got to
0:02:27 check it out. P-O-N-T-O Ponto Performance Pant. For you ladies, the Women’s Performance Jogger
0:02:32 is the softest jogger you’ll ever own. Viori isn’t just an investment in your clothing,
0:02:38 it’s an investment in your happiness. For you, my dear listeners, they’re offering 20% off your
0:02:42 first purchase. Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet.
0:02:47 It’s super popular. A lot of my friends I’ve now noticed are wearing this, and so am I.
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0:05:45 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode
0:06:14 of the Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every
0:06:19 field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and
0:06:24 test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one and that’s because the podcast recently hit its
0:06:31 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and past one billion downloads. To celebrate,
0:06:38 I’ve curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over
0:06:44 the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally,
0:06:49 we’ve been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes,
0:06:54 enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people
0:07:00 I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do
0:07:06 the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode.
0:07:12 Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together.
0:07:17 And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.log/combo.
0:07:24 And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
0:07:28 First up, Jaco Willink, retired U.S. Navy SEAL officer, recipient of both the Silver and Bronze
0:07:38 Stars, number one, New York Times bestselling co-author of Extreme Ownership, host of the
0:07:44 top-rated Jaco podcast and co-founder and CEO of Premier Leadership Consulting Company,
0:07:51 Echelon Front. You can find Jaco on Twitter and Instagram @jacowillink.
0:07:57 What have you observed and learned about what makes a good leader versus a good or
0:08:05 a mediocre or a bad leader? The immediate answer that comes to mind is humility
0:08:09 because you’ve got to be humble and you’ve got to be coachable.
0:08:14 We would fire guys. Later, when I was running training, we would fire a couple leaders from
0:08:20 every SEAL team because they couldn’t lead. And 99.9% of the time, it wasn’t a question of their
0:08:25 ability. It was a question of their ability to listen and their ability to step outside and see
0:08:30 that maybe there’s a better way to do things. That’s number one. And number two, I would say
0:08:35 is an individual who is balanced. And I talk about there’s a phrase that I use. It’s the
0:08:43 dichotomy of leadership. So in a leadership situation, you’re constantly balancing these
0:08:48 opposing forces. So do you have to be aggressive? Absolutely. Can you be too aggressive? Yes,
0:08:54 you can. Do you need to be courageous? Yes, you do. Can you be foolhardy and get people killed?
0:08:59 Absolutely. So there’s all these balances. Can you be too close to your men? Yes, you can.
0:09:05 Can you be not close enough? Yes, you can. Can you be too robotic? Yes, you can. Can you be too
0:09:11 emotional? Absolutely. So what I find the best leaders, they have this ability to balance all
0:09:18 those opposing forces. And usually when you do find a problem, if you realize that your leadership
0:09:24 isn’t working, generally you can look and say, oh, I’m going too far in one direction on this
0:09:29 particular force, this dichotomy of leadership, I’m going too far. I’m being overbearing. I’m
0:09:34 micromanaging. Micromanaging is a great one, right? You can obviously micromanage your people.
0:09:39 They won’t do anything on their own. They won’t take any initiative. And that’s horrible. The other
0:09:43 end is you cannot give them the guidance that they need and not pay close enough attention to them.
0:09:48 And now they don’t know what the mission is or what they’re doing. So there’s all these dichotomies
0:09:52 that you have to balance as a leader. And I think that between being humble and balancing all those
0:09:58 dichotomies of leadership is what makes a good leader. And how would say the ability to listen
0:10:04 and be coachable? What would be an example of how that manifests itself? Just how you would observe
0:10:10 that and say, that’s a guy who’s good at being humble and coachable or the opposite. So I’m
0:10:15 looking for the things that you would observe or hear where you’d be like, you know what,
0:10:18 I think we might have to let that guy go. Again, now we’re going back to training. We put these
0:10:22 guys through very realistic and challenging training to say the least. And I know if there’s
0:10:27 any guys that went through training when I was running it right now, they’re chuckling because
0:10:30 it was very realistic, psychotic. And we put so much pressure on these guys and overwhelm them.
0:10:36 And a good leader would come back and say, I lost it. I didn’t control it. I didn’t do a good job.
0:10:45 I didn’t see what was happening. I got too absorbed in this little tiny tactical situation
0:10:50 that was right in front of me. Either they’d make those criticisms themselves about themselves,
0:10:55 or they’d say, what did I do wrong? And when you told them, they’d nod their head,
0:10:59 they’d pull out their notebook, they’d take notes. And that right there, that’s a guy that’s going
0:11:03 to make it. That’s going to do it right. And then you get the guy that comes in and he’s immediately
0:11:07 saying, you know, you say, well, what’d you think of the operation? And if it was a disaster,
0:11:12 you’d say it was a disaster. And you go, well, what went wrong? And immediately it’s,
0:11:16 well, my assault team leader didn’t do X, and my mobility commander didn’t do Y. And I told those
0:11:23 guys I wanted them to do over there and they didn’t go there. Fingerpointing. Immediately
0:11:27 fingerpointing. And that’s just a telltale sign. You’ve got a guy that’s not humble enough and
0:11:31 coachable. It’s an awful thing. You can try and change people. And sometimes they would change,
0:11:36 but it’s difficult to get them to change. You know, that’s some people are born with that
0:11:40 characteristic. And it’s a bummer to see if you can’t fix them, you can’t fix them.
0:11:44 Right. And they’re not going to listen to anybody.
0:11:46 Well, it sounds like self-awareness is also a big component of that, to have
0:11:50 the awareness to kind of step outside and objectively evaluate yourself.
0:11:54 I call it detachment. And, you know, that’s one of the things that early on in my leadership career,
0:12:00 I actually remember when it happened. I was probably 20 something years, 22 or 23 years old.
0:12:08 I was in my first SEAL platoon and we come up, we’re on an oil rig in California doing some
0:12:14 training. And we come up on this level of this oil rig and it’s never been on an oil rig before.
0:12:18 They’re very complex. There’s gear and boxes and just stuff everywhere on these levels.
0:12:23 And they’re see-through. You can see through the floors and you can see it’s complex environment.
0:12:28 We come up and we all get on this platform on this level and everybody freezes.
0:12:35 And I’m kind of waiting and I’m a new guy. So, you know, I don’t feel like I should be doing
0:12:39 anything. But then I said to myself, you know, somebody’s got to do something.
0:12:41 So I just, what’s called, high ported my gun. So I just lifted my gun up towards the air.
0:12:47 Like I’m not, I’m not a shooter right now. And I took one step back off the line and I looked
0:12:51 around and I saw what the picture was. And I just said, you know, hold left, move right.
0:12:57 And everybody heard it and they did it. And I said to myself, hmm, that’s what you need to do.
0:13:03 And so I realized that detaching yourself from the situation so you could
0:13:06 observe it so that you can see what’s happening is absolutely critical.
0:13:10 And now, you know, when I talk to executives or mid-level managers, I explain to them that I’m
0:13:17 doing that all the time. It sounds horrible, but it’s almost like sometimes I’m not a participant
0:13:22 in my own life. I’m an observer of that guy that’s doing it. So if I’m having a conversation with you
0:13:27 and, you know, we’re trying to discuss a point and I’m watching and saying, wait,
0:13:32 are you being too emotional right now? Or, you know, wait a second, look at him.
0:13:35 I’m not reading you correctly if I’m seeing you through my own emotion or ego. I can’t really
0:13:41 see what you’re thinking. But if I step out of that, I can see the real you. And if you are getting
0:13:46 angry, if your ego is getting hurt, if you’re about to cave because you’re just fed up with me.
0:13:51 Whereas if I’m, you know, raging in my own head, I might miss all of that. And so that detachment
0:13:57 that takes place as a leader is critical. And you’re 100% right on that.
0:14:01 How do you instill that or try to teach that? Is that something people… I feel like that maybe
0:14:08 more than the humility seems to be a coachable skill. Part of the reason I say that is because
0:14:15 I’ve found that whether it’s a cognitive behavioral therapy or stoic philosophy for that matter,
0:14:21 you can, in small increments, condition people to have less of an extreme emotional response and
0:14:28 to try to observe themselves. And I suppose that there’s some Buddhist thought that would
0:14:32 translate to that as well. But how do you help teach someone that ability to detach?
0:14:36 So what we did to teach them was put them under extraordinary pressure where to fail to detach
0:14:44 from the situation and step up and away from the problem would result in failure. I had a great
0:14:51 experience where the guy that actually took my job over as the troop commander and a very close
0:14:57 friend of mine, he was going through the training now. And I was running the training. And we were
0:15:03 going out to a place called Nyland, California to do land warfare. And again, this is desert
0:15:08 operations, you’re patrolling in long distances, you’re hitting targets, and we have high level
0:15:15 laser tag guns that we use to shoot. And it’s very, we put a lot of pressure on people,
0:15:21 there’s helicopters, there’s smoke, there’s bombs, there’s all kinds of stuff happening.
0:15:24 And this guy, this buddy of mine, he was supposed to be commanding and all,
0:15:29 but he had broken his neck about, I don’t know, six weeks prior to this.
0:15:34 Was that on like a ropes course or?
0:15:35 It was climbing a ship. And the guy above him fell and broke his neck.
0:15:40 And so this guy, who had been in Ramadi with me, and, you know, did an outstanding job and amazing
0:15:47 effort, and was brave to a fault, you know, we’re luckies here. So the land warfare training takes
0:15:54 place. And he comes out and I said, Hey, just come out and watch with me. And so he comes out and,
0:16:01 you know, we’re watching, and we’re out on one of these field training exercises. So all this
0:16:05 mayhem starts and there’s bad guys up in the hills and there’s bombs going off and there’s smoke
0:16:10 everywhere. But from our position, which we were standing next to the guys that were in it,
0:16:15 and he looks at me and he says, you know, it’s so easy when you’re not in it. And I said,
0:16:21 this is how it was for me when we went through. I was up here and he was like a light bulb went
0:16:27 off, you know, he said, I saw you, he kind of saw me like that and said, how does he know what’s
0:16:32 happening right now? So the ability easy in so much as when you’re the outsider looking in,
0:16:36 you can see what to do, what’s going exactly. And when you did it, you were not necessarily
0:16:41 physically removing yourself, but sort of mentally, yes, pulling the perspective back so you could
0:16:47 observe it. So if you take someone like your friend who has this realization like, Oh, holy
0:16:51 shit, okay, that explains a lot. Because if you could create this perspective, you would have a
0:16:56 huge tactical advantage. What type of exercise would you put someone through, or the consequences
0:17:04 were so significant that they would be forced to detach in that way? I mean, these are just
0:17:08 exercise that we do. So we would use lasers. We have this advanced laser tag system where
0:17:15 you can get shot at 300 meters. If you get shot at an island and your beeper goes off and says
0:17:20 you’re dead, then you’re dead. And you’re going to have to get carried out by your buddies,
0:17:24 which is awful. They’re going to get hurt, sprained ankles, everything else. It’s a nightmare.
0:17:28 And they’re also now they can’t maneuver as well. So now what happens when they get attacked again,
0:17:32 which they’re going to, because it’s going to be Murphy’s law out there. And the problems compound.
0:17:38 And if the leaders get bogged down in those problems and don’t step back, we would kill all
0:17:42 of them. And they’d come back with their heads down and say, you know, what the hell just happened?
0:17:48 And what can we do better? And then, you know, we’d have this talk with them. And, you know,
0:17:52 it’s one of those things. It’s like when you’re growing up and you don’t listen to anybody,
0:17:56 not that you don’t listen to people, but some lessons you have to learn through life and through
0:18:01 experience. And so that happened. And the guys would, you know, guys at varying levels, some of
0:18:06 them would would be able to go, Oh, I just saw it. Okay, now I can make this happen. And that would
0:18:10 happen as well, where I would see their, you know, when in like a terminator, when the beginning
0:18:15 of the terminator said on August 27, 2016, the machines became aware, you could see their leadership
0:18:22 switch happen. And all of a sudden they’d go, boom. And then I know my job was done.
0:18:27 And they’d step up, they’d take a step back from the situation. They would look around,
0:18:31 they’d observe, they’d make good decisions and good calls, and then watch them progress out of it,
0:18:37 and finish the problem and do well. And then I knew that I had done my job.
0:18:43 They’d become aware.
0:18:44 They became aware as leaders. Yeah.
0:18:45 What do your morning routines look like on an ideal day? What is the first 90 minutes of your
0:18:50 day look like? When do you wake up? What does that look like?
0:18:52 So I wake up early, I wake up at 445. I like to have that psychological win over the enemy.
0:19:00 And, you know, for me, when I wake up in the morning and I don’t know why I’m thinking about
0:19:07 the enemy and what they’re doing, and I know I’m not active duty anymore, but it’s still in there,
0:19:13 that there’s a guy that’s in a cave somewhere, and he’s rocking back and forth,
0:19:20 and he’s got a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other hand, and he’s waiting
0:19:28 for me, and we’re going to meet. And when I wake up in the morning, I’m thinking to myself,
0:19:36 what can I do to be ready for that moment, which is coming, which is coming? So that propels me
0:19:45 out of bed, and I work out early in the morning. So you wake up at 445. What’s the next thing,
0:19:51 aside from like brushing your teeth and doing the usual?
0:19:54 Do the usual, start working out. Ideally, I like to get done with my workout by the time the sun
0:19:58 comes up. And so now if there’s waves, you know, I live by the ocean, so I’ll go surfing and get
0:20:04 done with that. What does a typical morning workout look like? I do a lot of pull-ups, push-ups,
0:20:08 and dips. I deadlift and do squats. I do sprints. It’s everything that everybody does. I swing
0:20:14 kettlebells. I do burpees. It’s all that. And it’s like a 60-minute workout. How long is the workout?
0:20:20 It depends. It depends on what’s going on. I’ll try and do some strength movements to be strong,
0:20:25 you know, deadlifts, cleans, clean and jerk, something like that, to make myself stronger,
0:20:30 or even if it’s something like just dead hang pull-ups and I’m just maxing out. But I’ll do
0:20:34 something like that to make myself stronger. And sometimes that can take a while, you know,
0:20:37 because I’ll just want to relax and hit singles or doubles on deadlifts or cleans or whatever.
0:20:42 And then when I get done with that, I’ll do some kind of metabolic conditioning of some kind,
0:20:47 you know, I’ll be sprinting or rowing or swinging a kettlebell or lighter weight, cleaning jerks
0:20:53 for reps or something like that. So that’s what it looks like for me. When you think of the word
0:20:58 successful, who are the first people or the first person who comes to mind?
0:21:02 The part of the world that I’ve seen is a very dark place. It’s a dark place. That’s what war is.
0:21:10 And when your job, which my job was, was to expand that darkness in many ways,
0:21:21 I mean, it’s war is about killing people. And so for me, when I look to someone
0:21:29 that’s successful, it’s someone that brings some light into that darkness.
0:21:40 So for me, the first people that come to my head are Mark Lee, who is one of my guys,
0:21:51 first seal killed in Iraq. Mike Montsour, one of my guys, second seal killed in Iraq,
0:21:57 posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. And Ryan Job, one of my guys, wounded in Iraq,
0:22:03 blinded in both eyes, made it home, medically retired from the, from the Navy, married his
0:22:12 high school sweetheart, got her pregnant and finished his college degree. And after his 22nd
0:22:22 surgery to repair the damage that was done to his, his head and face, there were complications
0:22:28 and he died as well. But all of those guys in all that darkness, they did things, they made a sacrifice
0:22:45 that was completely selfless. And to do that and to live and fight and die like a warrior,
0:23:02 that to me is success. And those guys are my heroes.
0:23:12 Are there any books that you’ve gifted to other people?
0:23:15 I think there’s only one book that I’ve ever given, and I’ve only given it to a couple people.
0:23:21 And that’s a book called About Face by Colonel David Hackworth. And it is huge. So Colonel David
0:23:30 Hackworth was the tail end of World War II. He was in Korea. He was highly decorated in Korea.
0:23:37 He joined the, like joined the Merchant Marines or something when he was 15,
0:23:41 got into the Army again, right after World War II. So he kind of got raised by those World War II
0:23:46 veterans. And then he was in Korea, he was in Vietnam, and he was just absolutely borderline
0:23:54 worshipped by the men that he led, and by some of the senior leadership. And just a great book.
0:24:02 And he was a rebel. And he did question the way we were doing things. And what’s controversial
0:24:07 about him is that he’s the guy that said to Walter Cronkite, or he said he’s the first guy in Vietnam
0:24:16 that said, we’re not going to win this thing. And so he’s kind of blacklisted by much of the Army.
0:24:23 But, you know, as you dig into that, what he was really saying was, we’re not going to win this
0:24:27 thing if we keep fighting how we’re fighting. He recognized that we needed to do a significant
0:24:32 paradigm shift in the strategy that we were executing over there. And it’s like, you’ve
0:24:38 heard, we never lost a tactical battle in Vietnam. You’ve heard that, right?
0:24:41 Yep. And there’s plenty of people that will say that all day long. But if you and I are
0:24:45 leading a platoon, and we take our platoon out, and we hit a booby trap, and it kills three of
0:24:51 our guys or two of our guys and wounds another three, and there’s no one to shoot at. And we
0:24:56 medevac those guys and we come back to base, who won that? Right. And, you know, he recognized that.
0:25:01 So the metrics that were being used were sort of not a smoke screen, but they were at best
0:25:07 the wrong metrics. I had that book next to my bed in Ramadi, and I literally read it every night.
0:25:13 I would, you know, that’s how I’d fall asleep. I’d go up, read a couple of pages,
0:25:16 you know, just open it, and you’d find something in every, it was very comparable. You know, they
0:25:21 were working with the South Vietnamese Army, and guess what? They were corrupt, and they were
0:25:26 scared, and they weren’t the best soldiers. And we were working with Iraqis, and guess what? They
0:25:29 were corrupt, and they were scared, and they weren’t the best. There were so many parallels
0:25:33 between the two. So that’s the book that I’ve given to a couple close friends of mine that
0:25:38 I wanted them to have. About face. The other book that I’ve read multiple times is Blood Meridian.
0:25:43 Blood Meridian. Yeah. I don’t know that. Okay. So it’s written by Cormac McCarthy.
0:25:51 Oh, fantastic writer. So this is his best book. And, you know, I was an English major in college,
0:25:56 and so, you know, I was forced to read all kinds of books. And, you know, obviously Shakespeare is
0:26:02 kind of the pinnacle in my mind. And Cormac McCarthy is the guy that I think actually has that.
0:26:08 And if you read Blood Meridian, then there it is. Right. And I think what I find so gripping about it
0:26:16 is, you know, I talked earlier about the darkness of the world. And this is a historical novel
0:26:24 based on a group called the Glanton Gang that were killing Indians. And they ended up killing
0:26:33 everybody. If you had black hair, your scalp was going to be taken. And that’s what it’s about.
0:26:39 And it’s completely epic. But for me, it communicated to me, a guy Cormac McCarthy
0:26:45 was able to show the darkness in humanity. And there’s nothing pleasant in any way,
0:26:51 shape or form in that book. But that’s, in many ways, the world that I lived in.
0:26:57 What would you put on a billboard? If you could have one billboard
0:27:00 anywhere, what would you put on it?
0:27:02 One of my kind of, I guess my mantra is a very simple one. And that’s discipline equals freedom.
0:27:10 I’ve found that as an individual, the more disciplined you are, and it’s counterintuitive,
0:27:17 right? The more disciplined you are, the more freedom you actually have. And you and I both
0:27:22 know if you wake up early, you get more done and you end up with more free time. So the more you
0:27:26 manage your time, the more disciplined you are with your time management, the more free time you
0:27:31 end up having, the more disciplined you are physically with your diet, the more freedom you
0:27:36 have, because you can do more stuff, you have more freedom. So the more disciplined you are,
0:27:41 the more freedom you have. And what’s interesting is how that transfers over to both military units
0:27:46 and the civilian sector, that when an element or an unit or when a company is a disciplined group,
0:27:53 they actually end up with more freedom. So, you know, I had a sealed troop, we were highly
0:27:57 disciplined. We had standard operating procedures for just about everything that we did. And you’d
0:28:04 think that that would restrain your creativity, but it actually doesn’t. The more disciplined you are,
0:28:10 the easier I could say, Hey, you four, go take down that building. And they knew what to do
0:28:14 because they were highly disciplined. I knew what they were going to do because they were highly
0:28:18 disciplined. We understood what parameters they were going to stay within because we had standard
0:28:23 operating procedures to follow. So that discipline, both on an individual level, and as a group,
0:28:30 equals freedom. And just like anything else with leadership, you can take that too far.
0:28:36 You can discipline an element or a person so much that they break down and they no longer have
0:28:40 creativity. So just like the dichotomy of leadership, you can go too strong with discipline and they
0:28:46 end up breaking down or you can give them too much freedom and they break down in the other
0:28:49 direction. I’m really glad that you mentioned that because I’ve realized in a way that my,
0:28:55 when I struggle the most kind of existentially or really just creatively, it’s when I have the
0:29:01 fewest constraints. I want positive constraints. I need boxes, not so that I have to stay within
0:29:07 the box, but that I can start at least coloring inside the box. And that’s part of the reason
0:29:13 that I’ve been so excited to adopt this rescue puppy, Molly, because it forces me to regiment
0:29:19 and structure my day in such a way that I can then plan around fixed objects. And I think that
0:29:26 whether it’s in the military, at least in my experience in business, you want to reserve your
0:29:30 creativity for the things that require creativity, not for what should the steps be when I’m doing
0:29:36 a room clearance. It’s like, no, no, no, you want a standard operating procedure
0:29:39 so that your brain cycles are allocated to the places where you need those brain cycles.
0:29:46 That’s 100% right. So I’ve realized in the last few months for myself that what I thought I wanted,
0:29:52 which is freedom in the form of infinite options, is not actually what I want at all. It’s very
0:29:57 stressful and you end up, you know, you burn 10 calories in a million directions, you’re fatigued
0:30:02 and you didn’t get shit done. So I’m actually in a way trying to figure out how I can say no
0:30:07 to a thousand things so that I can be fully creative on one or two things. It’s one of the
0:30:12 reasons I enjoy doing this podcast so much is that when you talk to people who’ve operated the
0:30:15 highest levels in any field, this kind of stuff comes up. And after a while, it’s like, Ferris,
0:30:20 idiot, do you get the message yet? You’ve heard meditation from 80% of the people who’ve been
0:30:25 on your podcast. Maybe you should chill the fuck out and like sit down for 20 minutes every morning.
0:30:29 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:31:32 Visit livemomentus.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout for 20% off. That’s livemomentus.com/tim
0:31:44 and code TIM for 20% off. And now, Sebastian Younger, P-Body award-winning journalist,
0:31:55 author of five New York Times bestsellers, including The Perfect Storm and War and Documentarian,
0:32:02 whose films include Restrepo, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
0:32:08 Sebastian’s new book is In My Time of Dying. You can find him on Twitter at Sebastian Younger.
0:32:15 Sebastian, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It’s nice to be here.
0:32:21 It’s so exciting to finally get a chance to hang because we have a mutual friend in Josh
0:32:25 Waitskin who’s been on the podcast twice. For those who don’t know, the basis for searching
0:32:30 for Bobby Fisher with the book and the movie, but a lot more than that. I mean, a real masterful
0:32:34 and kind soul who’s really taught me a lot. But the first encounter we had was at Josh’s
0:32:41 wedding. And I guess we were piecing it together and that was 10 years ago, something along those
0:32:46 lines. And this is the first chance that we’ve had to really kind of dig in and get to know each
0:32:51 other. Let’s start with some mundane stuff. But you have a book here on your backpack.
0:32:57 Could you tell us what you’re reading at the moment? I’m reading the biography of Thomas Paine,
0:33:02 one of the intellectual fathers of American independence from Britain in the 1770s.
0:33:09 And somehow, this is maybe TMI for people listening, but
0:33:13 Sebastian arrived before I got back to my place. I was doing some acro yoga long story.
0:33:19 And then you had picked up the letters from a Stoic. And did the Stoics come up in the book
0:33:26 about pain? Yeah, the Greek Stoics were greatly abired by pain. I didn’t know much about them.
0:33:31 I knew the word. And I’d heard of Seneca, but I’m incredibly, I’m sort of half illiterate or
0:33:38 untutored. And what the book said about the Stoics was amazing. And, you know, I’m not religious.
0:33:44 I didn’t grow up going to church. I don’t believe in God. And so if you’re like me, you’re always
0:33:47 looking for a way to sort of order the universe that’s inspiring or reassuring and sort of makes
0:33:55 sense of things. And so what they said about the Stoics, I really identified with, I’m like,
0:33:59 oh, I got to learn more about the Stoics. And then here I was before I took a nap on your couch,
0:34:04 I sort of pawed through your book collection over there. And there was the letters of Seneca,
0:34:09 and I grabbed it and sat down and I almost started whooping with pleasure. I mean,
0:34:14 the things that he was writing 2000 years ago were so modern, so amazing, so essential. I just
0:34:22 thought I’d have to get this book immediately. You seem to be a Stoic without calling yourself
0:34:29 such in a lot of respects, but I want to bring up something that I know nothing about,
0:34:33 but a fan had asked me to inquire about, which is chainsaw. Ask him about the chainsaw.
0:34:40 Let’s talk about your career with chainsaws. Can you give us some context?
0:34:45 Yeah, absolutely. So I studied anthropology in college because it interested me.
0:34:50 That was on the East Coast? Yeah, Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
0:34:53 I had no interest in being an anthropologist, but it actually helped me throughout my career
0:34:57 as a writer. After I got out of college, I sort of wandered around, I waited tables, I did various
0:35:03 things to earn money while I was trying to become a writer. And I was very slowly getting into
0:35:09 journalism, but it didn’t pay very well. And I got a job eventually as a climber for tree companies.
0:35:14 And I would work 80, 90 feet in the air with a chainsaw on a rope, taking trees down in pieces,
0:35:22 bringing branches and lowering them as I cut them and taking off the tops of trees and taking
0:35:26 them down all the way to the ground. It was extremely dangerous work. Or I should say,
0:35:30 it’s dangerous if you make a mistake. There isn’t any random danger in the top of a tree.
0:35:34 And I realized at one point, if I get killed doing this, and plenty of people do, if I get killed
0:35:39 doing this, it will be because I killed myself by accident. It’s not a situation where something
0:35:44 random will kill me. That was very reassuring. And it also trained me to really focus on being in
0:35:50 the present moment. Well, at one point, I wasn’t in the present moment. And the chainsaw hit the
0:35:56 back of my leg and tore open the back of my leg. And I had been a marathon runner and stuff. And
0:36:00 I was super worried about my Achilles tendon. So it hit your lower leg, your entire back?
0:36:04 I managed to drag it across the back of my ankle, right where the Achilles is.
0:36:10 I turned the chainsaw, and I was way up in a tree on a rope. And I turned the chainsaw off
0:36:15 and I clipped it to my belt and looked down. And I pulled the wound open because I wanted,
0:36:19 you know, you go into shock and you get very clinical immediately, right?
0:36:23 I pulled the wound open. And I wanted to see if the Achilles was intact. Indeed, it was,
0:36:29 by the way, an Achilles is about the thickness of a number two pencil and it’s white. Just in
0:36:34 case you ever wanted to know what your Achilles looks like. And I was so relieved to see it intact,
0:36:40 but I was still pretty messed, had a pretty messed up leg. And I repelled down to the ground and
0:36:43 my crew took me to the hospital. And as I was recovering, I had this thought that people die
0:36:49 all the time doing dangerous jobs in this country. They’re mostly work less men. They work in industries
0:36:55 that are very dangerous, drilling for oil, logging, commercial fishing, that the nation needs done.
0:37:00 And they die in numbers comparable to soldiers and war, actually. But they don’t get acknowledged,
0:37:06 they don’t get honored. And I thought, maybe I’ll write about dangerous jobs. And that set me on
0:37:10 course to write my first book called The Perfect Storm about a huge storm that, among other things,
0:37:16 like a commercial fishing boat at sea. You know, I was lamenting the fact it’s not really the right
0:37:22 way to put it. I was saying that we could probably talk for seven hours. There’s so many things I
0:37:26 want to ask you about and so many things that Josh wanted me to ask you also. But let’s go back to
0:37:30 the repelling down trees for a second. How did you get that job? I mean, what qualified you or
0:37:36 did not qualify you? How did that come to pass? Like many good stories that started in a bar.
0:37:41 I was broke and I was at a bar one evening and I was sitting next to this guy and we just started
0:37:49 talking. And he said he owned a tree company and he said he was looking for a climber. And you know,
0:37:53 I was a pretty athletic kid. And he said, “Listen, I’ll train you to climb if you’ll work for me,
0:37:58 but I can’t give you full-time work. Only occasional work is all I got.” And I was like,
0:38:02 “Yeah, absolutely.” So he sort of trained me how to climb. And the great thing about climbing was
0:38:07 that I could make, I mean, for an unemployed freelance writer in the late 80s, I could make a
0:38:13 couple hundred dollars a day cash. I could make 500 bucks a day, even a thousand dollars a day,
0:38:17 depending on the job. So I could work one day a week and sort of live off it. And it was the
0:38:21 perfect job for someone who was trying to do something else and needed some time.
0:38:27 The athleticism, we were talking about this when we were having lunch together,
0:38:31 what did your running times look like when you were at your peak?
0:38:35 My running times were almost fast enough. That’s what they looked like from my perspective.
0:38:39 What was your mile?
0:38:41 I ran 412 for the mile.
0:38:43 That’s a fucking fast mile. I mean, from my perspective, that seems extremely fast. And
0:38:48 then you got into marathons after that. Yeah, I ran 904 for the two mile,
0:38:54 2405 for five miles and a 221 marathon. Those are my sort of set of distance records that I had.
0:38:59 So the perfect storm, I heard you described or read you being described as based on that work.
0:39:07 I’m paraphrasing here, but the next Hemingway along those lines. And Josh had also observed,
0:39:12 I think the way he put it was to quote, “One of the leanest writers I know,
0:39:17 so little bullshit between the muscle.” How did you develop your writing style?
0:39:24 And if that’s a bad question, feel free to rephrase it, but
0:39:27 how did you develop that leanness at that point in your life?
0:39:31 I never studied English and I never studied writing in college or after, but I read a lot.
0:39:38 I grew up in a household with a lot of books. My father was educated in Europe. He grew up in
0:39:42 Europe and reading was this sort of imperative. You don’t not read. And I read John McPhee,
0:39:53 Joan Didion, Peter Matheson, Ernest Hemingway, of course, a little bit of Faulkner. I mean,
0:39:59 I could go on. But I gravitated towards language that was efficient and lean and innovative. And
0:40:10 when I would read a book that I liked, I would think about John McPhee. I would think about,
0:40:15 why isn’t I like it? What is it about the writing that appeals to me? And even more importantly,
0:40:20 when I read books I didn’t like, I tried to figure out what was it about that sentence,
0:40:24 about that paragraph that repels me. And that was how I learned to write. It’s a sort of process
0:40:31 of natural selection. I just kept reading things that reinforced the style that I was drawn to
0:40:37 you anyway. And I kept writing more and more in that style. And I think if you know those writers
0:40:41 and you read me, you can see my literary ancestry pretty clearly.
0:40:46 What drew you to writing? So you weren’t taking classes explicitly focused on turning you into
0:40:52 a journalist. It doesn’t sound like no writer. So what drew you to writing?
0:40:57 It happened quite suddenly. I was a good distance runner in college. And I had to write a thesis.
0:41:02 And I’d heard that the Navajo had this very strong ancient tradition of running. They were
0:41:09 sort of still at it in a kind of traditional way. And they were amazing track and cross-country
0:41:14 athletes. And they had blended the two disciplines. And so I did my fieldwork on the Navajo Reservation.
0:41:20 I spent a summer there. I trained with their best runners. It was up at 6, 7,000 feet. I lived in
0:41:24 Fort Defiance, Arizona. And I wrote a thesis about Navajo long distance running. That was the name
0:41:32 of the thesis. Apparently, thesis titles are supposed to have a colon in them. And I didn’t
0:41:36 know that. I just called it Navajo long distance running. And I just came alive academically
0:41:40 doing that. I mean, I was a pretty indifferent student. I was much more of an athlete than a
0:41:44 student. I just came alive. And the idea that you could go out into the world and gather information,
0:41:50 gather research, interview people, and bring it back, and then turn it into words that people
0:41:56 will read and be moved by, informed by, and moved by, and maybe changed by. That, to me, was just
0:42:02 such an extraordinary idea. And so I thought, maybe I’ll be a journalist. This sounds like
0:42:07 journalism. Maybe I’ll try to be a journalist. And I literally graduated with my graduation plan,
0:42:14 post-graduation plan, was maybe I’ll try to be a journalist. That was literally the plan I had in
0:42:19 my head. Seems to have worked out. Eventually, in between, I was a pretty bad waiter in Washington,
0:42:24 D.C., and in Cambridge. It took a while. My first book came out when I was 35,
0:42:31 and I had virtually no income from writing before that.
0:42:34 So the first book was The Perfect Storm, or no?
0:42:37 Yes, that’s right.
0:42:37 Yes, it was. So was that your first, aside from the thesis, long form piece of writing?
0:42:44 I mean, it’s just, that’s incredible.
0:42:46 That was the next long thing that I wrote, yeah.
0:42:48 You know, I wrote some articles with Boston Phoenix, and then I got into a couple of magazines,
0:42:52 but I couldn’t even come close to stitching together an income I could live on.
0:42:56 Did you sell the book before you wrote it or right before you sold it?
0:43:00 I worked on the story for about a year, and just sort of on my own dime. I wrote a magazine piece
0:43:09 that Outside Magazine took, and then I got a book contract from W.W. Norton, a very,
0:43:15 very modest book contract. But it got me going.
0:43:18 Based on the magazine piece.
0:43:19 Yeah, and then I ginned up some outline that sort of showed how I was going to
0:43:24 expand the story.
0:43:25 And you already had quite a bit in your back pocket, then, at that point?
0:43:28 Yeah, I already had a Bill Craig full of notes and whatever.
0:43:31 I mean, I already done, you know, years worth of work on this.
0:43:34 I was used to, I mean, everything I’d ever written, I’d written on my own time,
0:43:39 and then tried to sell it. I was constantly sort of peddling finished pieces of writing.
0:43:43 Spelling.
0:43:44 Yeah, I never got an assignment. The first assignment I did,
0:43:48 I mean, the first story that I placed in the Boston Phoenix, which when I was 23,
0:43:52 was like a big deal, was about tugboats in Boston Harbor.
0:43:56 And they didn’t commission that. Why would they, right?
0:43:58 But I just, I moved to Boston, and I just thought, what’s the coolest thing in Boston?
0:44:03 Maybe it’s tugboats, you know, like, so I just started hanging out on tugboats,
0:44:07 and I sent them a pretty nice piece of writing. And it was my first published
0:44:10 piece up there, and it was called Towing the Line.
0:44:13 And that was my sort of entry into journalism.
0:44:16 What was your writing process like after the magazine piece comes out?
0:44:21 You get the book contract. Did you continue taking other jobs,
0:44:25 or did you buckle down to focus full-time on the writing?
0:44:28 Oh, I did tree work throughout. I mean, I didn’t, my advance was pretty small,
0:44:32 and as was appropriate, I mean, I was totally unknown writer,
0:44:35 and it was a totally bizarre topic at the time, right?
0:44:37 So I’m not complaining, but the advance was quite small.
0:44:40 So I did tree work a couple of days a week. I’d be up in the trees.
0:44:43 But I also, after I finished my book proposal, by some miracle,
0:44:47 I had an agent, by the way. I hadn’t made a dime for him for 10 years, right?
0:44:51 But he liked my writing, right? God bless him.
0:44:53 How did he get in touch with, have you guys connected?
0:44:56 I met him, his name’s Stuart Krzebski, and where he’s still my agent,
0:44:59 we’re really good friends. And he said it was, the way he met me was sort of the
0:45:04 ultimate sort of agents nightmare. A client of his who wrote academic papers,
0:45:09 in other words, not a big paying gig. But he sort of handled the academic
0:45:13 career of this guy who was a Shakespeare scholar. It took him three hours a year,
0:45:17 you know, whatever. That guy’s college roommate was my father.
0:45:22 And he got the message that his arguably smallest clients,
0:45:28 college roommate’s son wanted to be a writer and would he read some stuff?
0:45:33 And Stuart was like, that’s about as bad as it gets.
0:45:37 That is about as unpromising as it gets in the agent world.
0:45:41 But he’s a great, you know, Stuart’s a great guy, and he has an open mind.
0:45:45 And he read some stuff that I’d written and really liked it.
0:45:47 He took another 10 years from to make any money off me, but he saw something.
0:45:50 Long term investment.
0:45:51 It was, he saw something there and, and I’m eternally grateful to him.
0:45:55 But I, so I gave him my book proposal based on the article.
0:45:59 And then I went off to Bosnia, I wanted to be a war reporter.
0:46:02 In case the author thing didn’t work out when there was no reason to think it
0:46:05 was going to work out. And I didn’t want to tree work my whole life.
0:46:08 So I went off, it was a civil war in Bosnia.
0:46:11 And I went off to learn how to be a war reporter.
0:46:13 And I was there, you know, I finally came home in 94,
0:46:16 because Stuart sent me a fax saying, I managed to sell your book.
0:46:20 You got to come home.
0:46:21 And I came up during the period that you were up in the trees a few days a week.
0:46:26 Once you’d sold the book, I’m not sure I’m mixing up my chronologies a little bit.
0:46:30 But what did your writing process, your daily or weekly schedule look like at that point?
0:46:36 How do you write?
0:46:36 I know it’s a very boring, maybe often asked question,
0:46:40 but I’m fascinated by this.
0:46:41 And Josh wanted me to dig into it.
0:46:43 So it’s, well, you know, really, there’s two kinds of writing.
0:46:46 There’s fiction and there’s nonfiction.
0:46:48 And the first step, if you’re a journalist,
0:46:50 which I consider all nonfiction should be journalism is,
0:46:54 should be considered journalism.
0:46:56 There aren’t other rules for literary nonfiction or anything.
0:46:59 It’s all journalism as far as I’m concerned.
0:47:00 If you’re a journalist, the first thing you have to do is do your research.
0:47:04 Because you need something, you’re writing about the real world and you need facts
0:47:08 and quotes and interviews and all that.
0:47:10 So my writing process really starts out in the world as I’m researching a story
0:47:17 or in a library or on the internet or whatever as I’m researching a story.
0:47:19 Fiction writers, they depend on this weird sort of pipeline to God, right?
0:47:25 I mean, they’re trying to reimagine the world in a way that’s never been done before
0:47:31 and reproduce it on the page and to have people enter this fictional world and be riveted by it.
0:47:35 And that’s where inspiration comes in.
0:47:38 And that’s where you have to really be at your desk every morning
0:47:41 because you never know when God’s going to talk to you.
0:47:43 And I mean God figuratively, I don’t believe in God, but the creative gods.
0:47:46 But for a journalist, it’s much more like carpentry.
0:47:49 You get the lumber, you get the bricks, you build the basement, you start putting it together.
0:47:53 I mean, it is a process and there’s a lot of inspiration in the actual language that you use.
0:47:58 But it’s much more procedural than I think fiction writing probably is.
0:48:02 You mentioned McPhee.
0:48:04 So the only or the most impactful writing class I ever took was with McPhee.
0:48:08 It was a small seminar about 12 to 15 students at Princeton.
0:48:13 And so you’ll appreciate this, just as a side note.
0:48:17 So I still have to this day downstairs an entire three ring binder full of all of my notes from
0:48:23 that class. And I would say three quarters of them are all about structure and how he thinks
0:48:28 about structure, which is extremely visual in a lot of cases.
0:48:32 And he would map out just like an architect with a blueprint,
0:48:35 the structure of his piece based on what he had gathered.
0:48:38 And all of these elaborate forms and some would be like a seesaw.
0:48:43 Others would be a circle.
0:48:44 Others would be in some kind of weird like cylindrical abstract piece of art.
0:48:48 But there’s a visual representation of how he saw the story in its visual structure
0:48:54 or visual representation.
0:48:55 And this is going to segue somewhere.
0:48:56 But I remember we had to apply to get into the class.
0:49:00 And I don’t think and I still don’t think I’m a particularly good writer.
0:49:02 There are much better writers there.
0:49:04 But we had to do short assignments every week.
0:49:08 And they would be on the most boring topics possible deliberately to try to make us
0:49:13 force us to make them interesting.
0:49:16 And when we got our first assignments back, the routine was we’d have one group seminar a week.
0:49:21 And then we each got to spend I think an hour one on one with him going over our writing assignments
0:49:26 throughout the week.
0:49:26 And he handed our assignments back and he goes now.
0:49:30 But as I’m handing these out, I want you guys to remember you’re all good writers.
0:49:34 So don’t get demoralized.
0:49:35 And there was more red ink than black ink on the page.
0:49:39 I mean, he just eviscerated everyone and not in a malicious way.
0:49:43 But he took out all of the bloat, all of the redundancy, all of the ambiguity.
0:49:48 For those people interested, there are a number of interviews he did for,
0:49:51 I think the Paris review on the art of nonfiction, which are just fantastic.
0:49:57 But what I wanted to ask you was, and then we’re certainly going to spend a lot of time
0:50:01 talking about your experiences in war and with warriors and veterans of different types.
0:50:05 Who were some of the most influential mentors or influences you had, say, before the age of 30?
0:50:15 Let me just say, McPhee, I mean, you’re very lucky to have taken the test with him.
0:50:19 Oh, so lucky.
0:50:19 He was a mentor that I didn’t personally know for me through his works, he was.
0:50:25 And it’s very interesting to hear what you said about him mapping out structure because
0:50:29 I think good structure is an extremely visual thing.
0:50:33 I think when people who are good at structure, I’d like to think I am, he definitely is.
0:50:39 I think they arrive at the structure with the visual part of their brain.
0:50:44 I mean, I think you’ve probably mapped his brain while it was at work.
0:50:48 You would see that part light up.
0:50:49 That’s just what I’m guessing.
0:50:50 When I write out structure, it looks more like a diagram to a circuit board or something.
0:50:55 It’s not quite architect, like geometric shapes, but it’s very visual.
0:51:00 It represented completely visually.
0:51:01 And I feel it.
0:51:02 Like when I get at the right shape to something, I feel it.
0:51:06 It’s a very interesting process that for me is it’s something that feels like the divine spark
0:51:12 that is finally sort of like, bless me with its presence.
0:51:17 So let’s say you have your box full of notes.
0:51:19 So you’ve dug into a given topic, you’ve gone out in the field, and we can use the perfect storm
0:51:26 for this example because perhaps it’s evolved or changed over time.
0:51:29 What then?
0:51:32 Like you sit down and go through and highlight certain pieces and then
0:51:36 number them and order them in some fashion.
0:51:40 What’s the process of turning that heap of information into something that might become a book?
0:51:46 I read through all my interviews with a red magic marker and I red line the stuff, the good quotes.
0:51:52 And I read through all of the research material and I underline the stuff that’s interesting to
0:51:58 me.
0:51:58 And then I go through everything I’ve underlined and I just write lists of what I consider the assets
0:52:04 that I have to work with.
0:52:05 And once I have those lists that they cover many pieces of paper, then I’ll start to clump them
0:52:13 into sort of general topics, history of fishing in New England and the physics of wave motion,
0:52:20 referencing topics in the perfect storm, nightlife in Gloucester, whatever.
0:52:25 And then once I have those big chunks, I start to, and this is where the visualness comes in,
0:52:32 visuality comes in, I start to try to picture how could I arrange those in a way where the
0:52:40 energy and the interest in the reader gathers and builds and then achieves some sort of catharsis
0:52:47 towards the ends.
0:52:48 And it’s a very intuitive process, but I got to say I could never do it without writing it down.
0:52:53 I’m literally moving ideas around on a piece of paper until they look right.
0:52:57 And that’s the part of writing that to me is almost closer to art than a sort of intellectual
0:53:02 pursuit.
0:53:03 So I used to do this physically and then I ended up using a piece of software called
0:53:06 Scrivener, which is originally for playwrights that allows you to move pieces around like
0:53:11 this.
0:53:12 And so I’ve done my last three books using this software called Scrivener, which allows
0:53:16 me to move these pieces around without separate files for each document.
0:53:20 So I can actually see sort of the table of contents as I rearrange it.
0:53:23 I can resection things.
0:53:25 It’s proven really helpful for me.
0:53:28 Now McPhee, just to talk about daily routine.
0:53:32 So he is one of those guys in the nonfiction world.
0:53:35 I can’t do this because I want to slam my head in a car door if I try this for one day
0:53:39 or like jump out a window.
0:53:40 He literally sits down and once he has his information, 8am to 6pm, come the hell or
0:53:46 high water.
0:53:47 He’s like staring at the blank page with a break for lunch and swimming as I remember it.
0:53:52 And it just drove me to madness to do that.
0:53:54 It was so depressing.
0:53:55 So I tend to do my best writing and I wish this were different honestly,
0:54:00 but my best synthesis, I can do interviews, research, all that throughout the day.
0:54:05 But in terms of piecing it together into some type of narrative,
0:54:08 it’s like 10 or 11pm to like 5am.
0:54:12 That’s just my window for whatever reason.
0:54:14 Do you write throughout the day?
0:54:15 Do you tend to do your best writing in the mornings at night?
0:54:18 What does that look like?
0:54:19 I do my best writing when something’s due.
0:54:21 Spoken as a real journalist who’s actually worked for papers and whatnot.
0:54:26 Yeah, and that feeling of urgency might come 6 months out if it’s a book deadline,
0:54:31 or it might be the next morning if you’re trying to finish up a magazine piece.
0:54:35 But that intensity, you know, it’s like athletes.
0:54:38 Athletes in the big game or the big race or whatever.
0:54:40 I mean, that intensity can bring out something that you didn’t even know you had access to,
0:54:45 much less embodied.
0:54:46 You know, I have a cup of coffee and I sit down and I write for a couple hours till I get bored.
0:54:52 If I feel that I’m blocked in my writing, usually with that block meaning I can’t write the next
0:54:58 section, I keep rewriting and it doesn’t work and it’s stuck.
0:55:00 It’s not that I’m blocked.
0:55:03 It’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic.
0:55:08 It’s not that I can’t find the right words.
0:55:10 It’s that I don’t have the ammunition.
0:55:12 Right, the words aren’t there in the first place.
0:55:13 Yeah, because I don’t have the ammo.
0:55:14 I don’t have the goods.
0:55:15 I have not gone out into the world and brought back the goods that I’m writing about.
0:55:20 And you never want to solve a research problem with language.
0:55:23 You never want to be such a fine writer that you can sort of thread the needle and get through a
0:55:28 thin patch in your research just because you’re such a great prose artist.
0:55:31 You use some linguistic smoke and mirrors to gloss over the fact that you don’t have the research.
0:55:36 Yeah, it’s just bullshit.
0:55:37 And you know, literary writers, and I like to think of myself as a literary writer,
0:55:41 I think sometimes think that language is so magical and so powerful
0:55:46 that you should be able to sort of do almost anything with it.
0:55:49 In this, it’s not true and it shouldn’t be true.
0:55:51 What do you think is the, if you were, say,
0:55:55 giving a, this would be an odd place to give a commencement speech,
0:55:58 but commencement speech to graduating seniors in high school.
0:56:03 I’ve done that.
0:56:04 You have, great, perfect.
0:56:06 Well, then let me not ask the question I was going to ask.
0:56:08 What did you talk about?
0:56:09 I was speaking at a very kind of elite school, private school in New York City.
0:56:13 These kids were going off either to college or to high school.
0:56:17 I can’t remember.
0:56:18 And anyway, these are very, very privileged, very smart, very educated children
0:56:24 and exceedingly accomplished parents.
0:56:28 And I said to them, something like, the hardest thing you’re ever going to do,
0:56:32 I was like, you’re programmed to succeed.
0:56:34 You guys are programmed to succeed.
0:56:36 The hardest thing you’re ever going to do in your life is fail at something.
0:56:39 And if you don’t start failing at things, you will not live a full life.
0:56:43 You’ll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work.
0:56:49 That’s not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in.
0:56:55 You have to do the hardest thing that you’ve not been prepared for in this school or any school.
0:57:00 You have to be prepared to fail.
0:57:01 And that’s how you’re going to expand yourself and grow.
0:57:05 And then you will really, as you work through that process of failure and learning,
0:57:10 then you will really deepen into the human being you’re capable of being.
0:57:14 Matt, four years ago, who knows how it’s going for them.
0:57:16 Well, we were chatting about this before we started recording a little bit, which is,
0:57:21 I was commenting on how accidental my career, and I’d kind of put that in air quotes, is.
0:57:28 I mean, I couldn’t have possibly planned this path and you echoed something to a similar effect.
0:57:34 And on the failure point, I mean, we were talking since you’re now training and boxing,
0:57:39 made me think of, it’s Customado, who was the most formative trainer of Mike Tyson, who said,
0:57:44 “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
0:57:46 So along those lines, the question I was going to ask was specific to journalism.
0:57:50 So if people came to you, these kids, graduating seniors, and they said,
0:57:54 “I want to be a journalist. It’s 20 of these kids, and they’re about to go off to college.
0:57:59 What should I study? What should I do? What should I avoid? What would your advice be to them?”
0:58:03 I mean, the path that I took is the one I know best, obviously.
0:58:07 And I would say, “What worked for me?” I mean, as a journalist, I’m very hesitant to actually
0:58:12 give advice to people. In my book Tribe, I really try not to tell the country what I think we all
0:58:17 should do. I might try to pry bar that out of you. Well, I think there’s other language you can use
0:58:24 where you’re not issuing a directive, but you’re saying you’re giving some wisdom.
0:58:29 So what I would say to someone like that is, “What worked for me was to read an enormous
0:58:35 amount to think about what I read and why I liked it or didn’t like it. Anthropology is an amazing
0:58:41 discipline that gives you tools to understand almost every cultural social situation in the world.
0:58:49 And mostly, you must have an enormous appetite for humanity and for life and for the world.
0:58:55 I mean, you really have to feel like you cannot fill yourself up enough with this amazing place
0:59:01 that we live in. Like, if you have that feeling and sincerely have it, you’ll do okay, if not at
0:59:07 writing at something. And that hunger for humanity, that interest in humanity,
0:59:14 is that what drove you to want to go into a war-torn country or territory and observe
0:59:22 and write and capture? Or was it something else? Why did that come about specifically?
0:59:26 There’s a few things. I grew up in a pretty affluent suburb of Boston. I grew up in a very
0:59:32 physically protected way. I got to 18. I felt like I’d never really been challenged. I’d never
0:59:40 been faced with a situation that I didn’t know I could survive. And having studied a lot of
0:59:45 anthropology through college, as I moved through my 20s, I thought, “This is ridiculous. I’m not
0:59:49 an adult yet. I’m not a man yet.” I mean, you cross that threshold into adulthood in a manhood
0:59:55 by facing something that could destroy you. And initiation rights around the tribal societies,
1:00:01 around the world, their main purpose is to confront young men, and young women have a different
1:00:07 challenge that they have to face. It’s equally daunting. But young men face this challenge of,
1:00:11 in these initiation rights, of sort of demonstrating that they will face the most painful, scariest
1:00:18 things possible for their community, for their people. And that’s adulthood, and that’s manhood.
1:00:24 And I’d hit 30, and other than a chainsaw injury here or there, I hadn’t really been tested in a
1:00:32 real way. And my father grew up in Europe during World War II. And war is this sort of archetypal
1:00:39 ordeal. It’s a sort of ancient, in some ways, ancient thing. And in a lot of societies,
1:00:47 it is the game, for better or worse, I mean, I know there’s a political conversation here
1:00:50 that we can have, but for better or worse, it’s many societies sort of see it as the gateway to
1:00:56 adulthood, to manhood, specifically for men. And I went off to Bosnia, partly because I wanted to
1:01:02 become a war reporter, and I was sort of at a loss as to how to make a living and live an adult life,
1:01:08 and partly because I felt like I was still a child, and that war would transform me in some
1:01:12 ways that nothing else could. This is jumping around, of course, but there are a couple of
1:01:18 stories that I’d love to talk about that are in the book I’m holding in my hand, which is Tribe,
1:01:23 Subtitle on Homecoming and Belonging. So I get sent a lot of books, and I very rarely read them.
1:01:27 This one, of course, because of the background that the shared friendship that we have with Josh,
1:01:34 and my familiar with your work, maybe more inclined to read it, I’d read this in a day and a
1:01:40 half. And for those who have seen my examples of my note-taking, I just have an index of notes
1:01:46 that spans all of the front matter of the book, basically. There are some fantastic stories in
1:01:51 this book. I had follow-up questions, even if we weren’t recording this over a bottle of wine that
1:01:56 I wanted to ask you. So can you please explain what skin walkers are? You mentioned the Navajo
1:02:02 earlier, and why they’re in this book, because I wanted to hear more about this. So skin walkers
1:02:09 were this thing that I’d never heard of that I first encountered when I was on the Navajo Reservation
1:02:15 in 1983, as a 19-year-old, 20-year-old, whatever I was. And basically, the Navajo believed in
1:02:23 something that other cultures would call werewolves. The belief was that there were certain Navajo,
1:02:27 mostly men, who had basically turned. They’d lost their humanity, and they’d become
1:02:34 animals. But animals are a source of power in a lot of Native societies. They became animals in
1:02:40 the sense that they had no human affiliation. And they did this by putting on the hide of a wolf,
1:02:48 and that gave them the powers of a wolf, the powers of being able to run very,
1:02:54 very fast for a long distance, the powers of being invisible, of being very, very ferocious when
1:02:59 need be, being incredible hunters. They were called skin walkers, and that these skin walkers,
1:03:04 they were basically adopting the skills and powers of a warrior, except they were using it
1:03:13 against their own people, and that they would kill their fellow Navajo and eat them in the middle
1:03:17 of the night. And the Navajo in 1983, on the reservation where I lived, were absolutely terrified
1:03:25 of this phenomenon, as terrified as they, I’m sure they were 100 years prior. And I got to say,
1:03:30 the desert out there is a big, lonely place, and I started to feel their terror. You know,
1:03:37 I didn’t literally believe that these things exist, but the belief system that was around me
1:03:44 still made me deeply, deeply scared of them. It was an extraordinary experience for a
1:03:48 rationalist like myself, my father’s a physicist, and I don’t believe in God. He didn’t believe
1:03:53 in anything but what he could measure and observe. And all of a sudden, there I was in my trailer,
1:03:59 very, very scared at certain moments of these things, and of these skin walkers. And as I wrote
1:04:06 about it in my thesis, I said, you know, the skin walkers are basically the universal human fear
1:04:12 that you can defend yourself as a society, as a community, you can defend yourself against
1:04:18 all outside enemies, but you’re completely vulnerable to one madman in your midst. You
1:04:24 know, one psychopath, one sociopath, basically, that has no feeling of protectiveness, of humanity
1:04:31 towards his neighbors can kill more people than the enemy can. And that made me think of the
1:04:38 awful spate of mass shootings in this country that have suddenly become so commonplace in the last
1:04:45 10 or 15 years. And it gave me the idea that the mass shooters in Aurora, Colorado, and at
1:04:52 Sandy Hook, and we all know the names, that they are our society’s version of the skin walkers.
1:05:00 Part of what I enjoy about your writing, and specifically in this book, is your
1:05:06 frank writing about concepts that we tend to very cleanly separate in a binary way.
1:05:14 And it’s really, I think, a discussion that I hunger for that is hard, I feel hard to have
1:05:20 in many different. I’m struggling for language here because it’s a feeling that I get very
1:05:27 frustrated by, and that is like a discussion of manhood and rights of passage and the clear
1:05:33 historical importance of some of these bonds forged in extreme circumstances between men,
1:05:40 that in the safety of these sort of cocoons that we have in various cities or elsewhere,
1:05:46 do not exist, but problems manifest nonetheless, or perhaps to an even greater extent.
1:05:51 And in the current climate of a lot of political correctness, that’s sort of
1:05:55 verboten, like a lot of these topics just don’t get broached. But I’d love for you to talk a
1:05:59 little bit about your experience with, I think this was in Spain with the Viking helmet.
1:06:04 Because I think it illustrates a very important point. If you remember the story,
1:06:10 I’d love for you to describe what happened exactly with this Viking helmet.
1:06:16 Yeah, and I think our society, which really I feel really does strive, I mean just to address
1:06:21 your earlier point about political correctness, I think we really are in a very righteous way
1:06:26 striving for fairness and equality throughout our society. I think we really are.
1:06:31 But we’re also the product of our biology and our evolution. And the two are not easy partners.
1:06:39 I mean, throughout the mammalian world, males and females are built differently and do different
1:06:44 things and are good at different things. That’s just a fact of nature. If we want the sexes to be
1:06:50 equal in our society, those inherent differences become potentially problematic.
1:06:55 And as a result, instead of trying to figure out how to reconcile those very real differences
1:07:01 in an equitable system, people and well-meaning people, that some of them are good friends of mine,
1:07:07 would just rather you not acknowledge the differences. There’s a short-term logic to that,
1:07:12 but there’s a long-term loss. And eventually, we won’t have really quality in the society
1:07:18 until those unnegotiable differences are actually incorporated into our equality.
1:07:24 And anyway, that’s what you brought up about sort of PC thinking. It can be very infuriating,
1:07:28 but it’s a funny thing. It’s infuriating, even though it’s trying to do the right thing,
1:07:32 but it’s still infuriating. I’m going to hit pause on the Viking helmet,
1:07:36 which you’re going to get to. But there’s another… I have so many notes in this book. It’s just
1:07:40 unbelievable. Because you brought up these, what most people would consider gender-based
1:07:46 differences. Could you talk for a second? And this is something I’d never really considered,
1:07:50 but gender role switching, if this makes any sense. And this was even in same-sex groups.
1:07:58 I found this very thought-provoking, but if you could perhaps describe what I’m very
1:08:03 clumsily trying to allude to. Well, one of the things that’s interesting is that if you
1:08:07 take passers-by in a moment of crisis, I mean, everyone will jump into a burning building to
1:08:13 save their child, maybe to save their spouse, possibly their parents-in-law, but whatever,
1:08:19 you have sort of familiar relations and people will risk their lives to help the people that
1:08:24 they love. It makes sense. But if you look at situations in public, in this anonymous society
1:08:31 that we have, and someone’s in danger, who goes to their aid? It happens all the time in New York.
1:08:37 Someone falls onto the subway tracks and the train is coming. Who jumps down onto the tracks
1:08:43 to help them? Almost invariably, it’s a man. Now, I feel like I’m very sexist in saying that,
1:08:50 but statistics aren’t sexist, and they’ve done studies of this. And men are, for a number of
1:08:57 physical and psychological reasons, very, very prone towards that kind of impulsive risk-taking
1:09:02 that’s sort of on the spot in the moment decision to jump onto some railroad tracks while the train
1:09:07 is coming. It’s not that they’re braver. It’s that they have psychological and physical predispositions
1:09:12 and capacities that allow them, in fact, promote them to do that. So if you look at these stories,
1:09:17 in something like 95% of bystander rescues are performed by men. So when you have a society
1:09:27 that’s encountering a difficulty, and that can either be the Blitz in London, which I write about,
1:09:32 or that could be a group of coal miners who were trapped in a coal mine disaster in the 1950s in
1:09:37 Canada, you need people who are in the “male role” of rescuing and risk-taking. But then this other
1:09:47 thing is important, and it’s a kind of moral courage. And it does not require spontaneous muscular
1:09:55 action with complete disregard for your own life. That’s not what’s required. As important as that is,
1:10:02 there’s something else, moral courage. You basically are like providing the moral fiber
1:10:09 for the group, and you act as a kind of conscience for the group. And women are very, very good at
1:10:15 that. And they did a study during World War II of who helped hide Jewish families who were fleeing
1:10:21 the Nazis, Gentiles who helped Jewish families who were fleeing the Nazis. That’s not something
1:10:26 that takes muscular action in the moment. But if you’re busted, if you’re a Dutch farmer and you
1:10:31 have a Jewish family in your basement, you’re dead. You’re executed. Women were considerably
1:10:37 more likely to make that decision than men were. So what happens is that if you have, say, a group
1:10:43 of coal miners who are stuck in a coal mine for a week, the first kind of spontaneous leaders you
1:10:48 get are the classically male sort of action-oriented grab a pickaxe and start digging. When those
1:10:55 efforts fail, another kind of leader takes over. They’re way more empathic. They’re way more
1:11:02 affiliative. They reach negotiated solutions. They try to make people feel good. They’re in the
1:11:07 classically female role. And what’s so interesting about that is that the male and female roles will
1:11:13 be filled regardless of the sex. So a group of women with no men around, a woman will jump in,
1:11:21 will jump onto the railroad tracks and to save the kid if there are no men around. If there are no
1:11:26 women around, a man will step forward and act in that wonderfully moral empathic way that women
1:11:32 are known for. And so society sort of needs both of these gender roles, and it doesn’t really care
1:11:39 if an actual man or an actual woman fills them. We don’t have to cover this one at length, but I
1:11:44 also found it fascinating to read about the Iroquois peacetime leaders versus war time leaders and
1:11:49 how they switched between the two and how they were so clearly delineated, right? I mean, when
1:11:54 circumstances changed, it’s like, okay, there’s almost like a football game. It’s like, okay,
1:11:58 offense, you’re off the field, defense you’re in. And how does this, and I’m not much of a policy
1:12:04 or politics wonk, but I struggle with trying to assess political candidates. How do you think of
1:12:12 assessing political candidates, presidential or otherwise, when you have to vote for one person?
1:12:17 It’s a very interesting question. The Iroquois sort of figured it out. As he said, in peacetime,
1:12:21 they had sages who were partly elected by women. So the female voice was found in the selection
1:12:28 of sages. They ran peaceful society. When war started, the sages stepped down and war leaders
1:12:34 took over. And if the people they were fighting sued for peace, it was not the war leaders who
1:12:40 considered the deal. It was the sages. And if peace was accepted, the war leaders stepped down
1:12:46 immediately. And it’s really interesting because the US Constitution, parts of it are based on
1:12:51 the Iroquois law of peace. And Thomas Paine did a lot of work sort of incorporating the natural
1:12:59 rights of man, as were exemplified by Iroquois society, into the intellectual basis for American
1:13:07 governance. But as soon as the British surrendered, George Washington was basically the supreme
1:13:13 leader. He was the military leader in the colonies when they were fighting the British.
1:13:16 And as soon as the British surrendered, he formally gave up power, gave up control
1:13:23 to the civilian government. It was a very, very important thing to do because otherwise he could
1:13:28 have continued on as “king” and that would not be a democracy. And my guess is that he took
1:13:34 that idea from the Iroquois. Military thinking and peace thinking require very different
1:13:40 sensibilities, very different calculations of cost and benefit. And the conundrum for us right now
1:13:47 is we elect a president who in time of war is also the military leader. And I think in a democracy,
1:13:56 the idea that you have a non-military person at the top of the chain of command is very,
1:14:01 very sensible. You do not want a society run by the military. That’s a military dictatorship.
1:14:06 We do not want that. But it does call for very, maybe even conflicting traits in a single person.
1:14:14 You know, the wisdom and the gentleness of a peacetime leader, the empathy of a peacetime
1:14:19 leader, and the capacity for violence and effectiveness and decisiveness in a wartime
1:14:25 leader. You’re asking someone to be almost schizophrenic if they can do both of those well.
1:14:29 Yeah, equally well. So you mentioned a couple of historical figures. Why did Ben Franklin
1:14:34 complain that settlers along the frontier were constantly absconding
1:14:38 with the Indians, but that the opposite almost never happened? Why is that?
1:14:43 Well, it was this sort of strange phenomena, right? I mean, the Christian society settled
1:14:47 the Eastern seaboard of the New World in the 1600s, 1700s, and beyond the treeline were the
1:14:54 savages, right? They weren’t Christian. They weren’t civilized. They ran about almost naked,
1:14:59 and they hunted wild animals and fornicated and everything else, right? I mean, it’s sort of
1:15:03 Satan’s den, right? Sounds pretty fun, right? Sounds pretty great. Maybe that’s just me.
1:15:08 So for the Christian, sort of sort of civilized Christian society of that era,
1:15:14 they clearly felt that they were the superior godly society. But what happened was that superiority,
1:15:21 that very quality of civilization and Christianity, was also quite stifling, right? We didn’t evolve
1:15:27 to live, we didn’t evolve as the human animals that we are, social animals that we are, to live
1:15:33 in within the strictures of sort of Puritan society. So young men, particularly, but young
1:15:38 women as well, were constantly, the frontier was constantly sort of bleeding young people
1:15:44 who went off, drifted off to live with the Indians. I mean, the movement, the sort of societal movement,
1:15:49 I mean, it was a trickle, but it was significant, constantly towards the tribes. And the Indians
1:15:54 were never running off to join white society, right? And then there were even weirder cases.
1:16:01 This is, you’re talking about the people who were kidnapped, right? That was the part that
1:16:04 surprised me the most. I was like, okay, I can kind of see the appeal of being off in the woods,
1:16:09 free of certain constraints and fornicating. That sounds, that’s probably a pretty appealing daydream
1:16:14 to Puritan, you know, farmer, you know, youngest son. But the number of people who were kidnapped,
1:16:23 taken as supposedly slaves who then refused or very unwillingly, refused to come back to
1:16:31 white society or very unwillingly came. And my book tribe starts with the story of Pontiac’s
1:16:36 rebellion in Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio. And Chief Pontiac fought the colonial powers for
1:16:42 years very effectively, but eventually they sued for peace. And one of the deals was,
1:16:47 the main part of the deal was that he’d give up 200 and some white captives that had been
1:16:53 taken from the frontiers. And a significant number of the captives did not want to be returned to
1:17:01 their home, to their homes, to their society. And they actually weren’t slaves. And what’s
1:17:07 interesting about, I mean, the people thought that that’s what happened to them. In fact,
1:17:10 what happened to them is that the captives who weren’t killed, and some were killed out of revenge
1:17:15 for losses that the Indians had taken on the battlefield, but the ones who weren’t killed
1:17:20 were adopted. And as soon as you were adopted, you were considered absolutely one of the tribe.
1:17:27 There was no distinction whatsoever, you were given to a family that had lost someone on the
1:17:32 battlefield, and you were the replacement for that person’s son or daughter. And these people,
1:17:40 I mean, there were two young women who were repatriated because of this peace accord
1:17:46 after Pontiac’s rebellion. And two young women actually managed to escape and make their way
1:17:53 back to their adopted families. And this happened over and over and over again.
1:17:58 As the frontier marched across America, there were constantly these stories of people who were
1:18:04 taken by the Indians and didn’t want to come home. And the reason that was given was that it was an
1:18:09 egalitarian society. It was not stratified by class, by income, by inherited wealth, by inherited
1:18:16 power. Everyone was equal. There were leaders, but there were leaders who were followed voluntarily.
1:18:22 And if you didn’t like the leadership style of Chief Pontiac, well, you know, you could just
1:18:27 take your family and move up Muskegon Creek and move in with your wife’s cousin’s family
1:18:32 with this other group. And so authority was never imposed. Authority was accepted. And
1:18:39 that led to a really basic equality in Native societies. And I should say, as an anthropologist,
1:18:45 the sort of hominid groups that we evolved from, that we were for hundreds of thousands of years,
1:18:52 all of the evidence that anthropologists, archaeologists have been able to assemble is that
1:18:57 they were extremely egalitarian groups. Currently, you can’t carry much wealth, right? If you’re a
1:19:01 mobile, nomadic society, how much wealth can you really carry? And a society that lives in groups
1:19:07 of 40 or 50 that is mobile, it’s extremely hard to accumulate differences of wealth and therefore
1:19:14 status. How does that relate to your experiences in war and interviewing people who have been subjected
1:19:23 to war, not necessarily as soldiers? I mean, you mentioned the Blitz and so on. But how does this
1:19:27 relate to those experiences? Well, one of the many ironies of war is that it’s savage and is violent
1:19:34 and it’s completely anti-human. But it produces an intensity of human connection that you really can’t
1:19:41 be hard pressed to find in peacetime. So during the Blitz, and I looked a lot at the Blitz in London,
1:19:47 and 30,000 people were killed by German bombs in around six months, in and around London. The
1:19:55 society didn’t collapse, but it contracted sort of into itself. People were sleeping shoulder to
1:20:02 shoulder with complete strangers in the tube stations. Fire brigades were rushing around,
1:20:07 trying to put out fires after the bombing raids. It was a brutal time and the government was prepared
1:20:13 for mass psychiatric casualties. Forget about the physical casualties, mass psychiatric casualties.
1:20:20 But what happened was admissions to psychiatric wards actually went down from pre-war levels
1:20:27 during the bombings and then went back up after the bombings stopped. One official said,
1:20:32 you know, it’s amazing, we have neurotics driving ambulances. What it seems to be is that the communal
1:20:38 life that is often forced upon people by hardship, by danger, by calamity, that communal life
1:20:48 is so psychologically beneficial to people that there’s a net gain in psychological well-being.
1:20:54 So what you find is that in countries that war, Emil Dirkheim, the famous sociologist,
1:20:59 found that in European countries that were at war in the 1800s, the suicide rate immediately went
1:21:05 down. The murder rate went down. All that kind of antisocial behavior was mitigated by the sort of
1:21:14 monumental task that the country was engaged in. In New York, I live in New York City, New York
1:21:20 after 9/11, a massively traumatized population. You would think a lot of psychological problems would
1:21:26 come out because of this psychological trauma that the entire city experienced after 9/11.
1:21:31 That’s not what happened. The suicide rate went down after 9/11. The violent crime rate went down.
1:21:39 Even Vietnam vets who were struggling with PTSD in New York City said that their symptoms
1:21:46 improved after 9/11 because they were needed. They had this sense like, “Oh my god, there’s a crisis.
1:21:51 I’m needed. Time to stop thinking about myself. Time to think about the group, about us.”
1:21:57 And that feeling of us is what not only does it make people feel good, but it buffers
1:22:03 many people from their psychological demons. And it’s kind of a relief.
1:22:07 One of the recurring themes that you write about and also that we spoke about after your
1:22:14 TED Talk from a few years ago, some of the feedback from vets from different wars was
1:22:21 that they missed the war. And from civilians as well in this book, it’s like there are certain
1:22:27 aspects of the wartime, maybe a perceived greater level of humanity even, oddly enough,
1:22:34 that was lost once peace was regained or achieved. How can one potentially go about,
1:22:41 and this is sort of a multiple choice question, like manufacturing
1:22:45 catastrophe, if that makes any sense? Simulating the characteristics that drive that increased
1:22:53 cohesion, community, or sense of mental well-being, or just increase cohesion in a way that you think
1:23:01 we’ve evolved to find very healthy or healthful. Because we were discussing, for instance, boxing,
1:23:06 and I had the same experience in jujitsu, even though I know it’s terrible for me. I mean,
1:23:10 I get injured every time I try to do this for any period of time. It’s not good for your physical
1:23:14 health if you count all the collateral damage. But one of the appeals was, and we were both
1:23:19 talking about the shared experience of it being completely egalitarian. It’s like, “Oh, that’s
1:23:24 the guy who’s really good at armor. That’s the guy who’s really good at a stiff jab. That’s the
1:23:28 guy’s footwork is really good.” It’s like, “You don’t have the time. Don’t even know what they do.
1:23:31 Don’t even know necessarily their real name.” I remember when I was training at this place
1:23:36 called Aka in San Jose, it was like, “Everybody was given some insulting nickname.” And looking back
1:23:41 on it, I was like, “Wow. That actually sounds a lot like, and I’ve never been in the military,
1:23:44 but it kind of makes me think of full metal jacket and snowball and so on.” But how can someone
1:23:51 simulate that? Or what can we do focusing for now on the personal well-being? Do you have
1:23:57 any thoughts on how we might try to improve things? That was a long fucking question. I think
1:24:01 you get the idea. Yeah. I mean, the nickname thing is really interesting. Groups of men give
1:24:05 each other nicknames. Women, as far as I know, don’t. It’s a really interesting thing. And I think
1:24:10 it’s a signal of tribal affiliation, of group affiliation. The male group in our evolutionary
1:24:17 past was extremely important in hunting and in defense. And the more cohesive and internally
1:24:24 committed all the males were to the group, to everyone else, the more effective they would
1:24:29 be at fighting and at hunting. And the survival of the community depended on them doing that job,
1:24:35 as well as on the women doing other things. But it depended on that and cohesion. Cohesion is
1:24:40 increased, among other things, by hardship, by nicknames, by humor. I mean, all these things
1:24:46 that you see men in groups do. I mean, any construction crew in New York City, you walk
1:24:50 past them and half the time they’re doubled over laughing. I mean, one of the things men do in
1:24:54 groups is make each other laugh. And they give each other nicknames. So it’s a really, really
1:24:58 ancient that what you experience is a very common thing and I think quite ancient and serves a
1:25:03 real purpose. We evolved as a species in a sort of experience of sort of ongoing moderate crisis.
1:25:10 I mean, we’re hunter-gatherers. We evolved in a pretty harsh environment. And we’ve survived in
1:25:16 the harshest of environments, in the Arctic and the Kalahari Desert, for example. And
1:25:21 normal life, for most of human history, was a moderate ongoing crisis. What’s very fortunate
1:25:28 and beautiful and wonderful and also in a weird way tragic about modern society
1:25:33 is that crisis has been removed. When you reintroduce a crisis like in the Blitz in London
1:25:38 or an earthquake that I wrote about in Avizzano, Italy, early in the 20th century,
1:25:44 in Avizzano, something like 95% of the population was killed, something like that. I mean, just
1:25:48 horrific. I’m going from memory, but unbelievable casualties, just like a nuclear strike. And
1:25:53 one of the survivors said that what happened afterwards, because people had to rely on each
1:26:00 other. And so upper-class people, lower-class people, you know, peasants and nobility, whatever,
1:26:04 everyone sort of crouched around the same campfires, right? And what this guy said was the earth,
1:26:09 I’ll try to do it by memory, I almost got it. The earthquake gave us what the law promises,
1:26:16 but does not in fact deliver, which is the equality of all men. I think one of the things
1:26:23 that people like about crisis is that suddenly everybody’s equal. And you’re evaluated like
1:26:28 in a boxing gym, you’re evaluated for your actual conduct in the moment, not for who your father was,
1:26:34 not for the clothing that you’re wearing, the boxing gym that I work out at,
1:26:39 you could be a suit from Midtown, you know, with a fancy job and a big bank,
1:26:42 or you could be like a really tough poor kid from the bowels of Brooklyn.
1:26:47 There’s no bias in either direction. There’s no bias against the dude in the suit.
1:26:52 And there’s no bias against the ghetto kid. I mean, you’re judged for how you act within that
1:26:58 almost sacred space of the gym. And what happens in a crisis, in a war or an earthquake or whatever,
1:27:05 is that people suddenly are judged for how they act. And that is, I think one of the things that
1:27:11 the, what we’re called the white Indians, the white captives of the American Indians,
1:27:15 I think that is one of the things that appealed to them. They were no longer in this incredibly
1:27:19 stratified, frankly, unfair colonial society. They were in a place where they were totally
1:27:25 self-determining in terms of how they were seen. Let’s talk about the sea train and your return to
1:27:35 New York City. I’m missing, so I’m trying to recall from memory the timing on this,
1:27:40 but it leads into a conversation of PTSD. Can you take us through that story?
1:27:45 One of the topics of this book is PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. I had this idea,
1:27:51 because of my work on the Navajo reservation, that the huge rates of PTSD that we’re experiencing
1:27:57 in America right now are maybe anomalous. And then if you live in a tribal society, the rates
1:28:02 would might be quite low. So that was the sort of genesis of my book. So I talked about my own
1:28:06 experience with PTSD. I have been a war reporter since the early 90s. I stopped after one of my
1:28:12 best friends was killed in combat a few years ago, but the first really traumatic assignment that I
1:28:19 had was in Northern Afghanistan a year before 9/11. In the fall of 2000, I was with Ahmad Shah
1:28:24 Massoud, who was the leader of the Northern Alliance. He was fighting the Taliban. He was
1:28:28 completely outnumbered, outgunned. Back then, the Taliban had fighter planes. The Taliban had
1:28:33 tanks. They had artillery. They had all the toys. And Massoud, his forces, were the sort of gorillas.
1:28:39 Well, it’s great to be with the gorillas until you start getting shelled, right?
1:28:43 Or bombed or whatever. So we had a tough, I was up there for two months, and we saw and went through
1:28:50 some very tough things. And I got back to New York. A young man, you know, your age,
1:28:55 the late 30s. And I just felt completely like that nothing would ever affect me, right? I just
1:29:00 assumed complete invulnerability to everything. And I got back to New York and a little shaken up,
1:29:07 but all right. And then one day, I went down into the subway and says something I did every day.
1:29:13 And it was rush hour. There are a lot of people. And I was seized with this incredible panic attack.
1:29:21 I’d never had one in my life. Everything I was looking at seemed like a mortal threat.
1:29:27 You know, actually, I knew it wasn’t. But it felt like it was. And I was way more scared than I’d
1:29:33 ever been in Afghanistan. I had been plenty scared in Afghanistan. The trains were going too fast,
1:29:39 and they were going to jump the tracks and leap up onto the platform and kill me. The crowds
1:29:44 were suddenly going to turn on me and beat me to death. The lights were too bright. The lights
1:29:48 were going to somehow are going to kill me. It was too loud. The noise was going to,
1:29:51 everything was a mortal threat. And I backed up against the iron support column and just sort
1:29:55 of waited for it. Then I finally sprinted out of there and took a taxi. And that kept happening.
1:30:01 Anytime I was in a small, like an enclosed place with too many people, too much going on,
1:30:05 I would just panic. I just thought I was going crazy. I had no idea that he was in any way connected
1:30:12 to the combat that I’d been in. Until a couple of years later, I was talking to a woman who was
1:30:18 a psychologist. It was her friend of a friend. It was at a picnic, actually. And she asked about
1:30:21 my war reporting and if I had any suffered any consequences from it. I was like, no, of course,
1:30:26 no, I’m fine. And for some reason, I thought to sort of mention, but once in a while, I have a weird
1:30:31 panic attack. And she nodded in that way. The trinks do. Hmm, interesting. You know, and she said,
1:30:38 well, it was the spring of 2003. And she nodded and she said, well, that’s interesting. She said,
1:30:46 that’s called PTSD. And, you know, we just invaded Iraq, right? And she said, you’re going to be
1:30:52 hearing quite a bit about that in the coming years, as indeed we have. And are the rates of PTSD in
1:30:59 the US anomalous? Are they unusually high compared to other cultures or other countries? And if so,
1:31:06 why is that? Well, the truth about PTSD is that if you almost 100% of people who have been traumatized,
1:31:14 either seen something gruesome or feared for their own life, and I should add that the
1:31:20 witnessing of harm to others is more traumatic than danger is. It’s interesting. But almost 100%
1:31:26 of people who have been traumatized get short term PTSD. That’s what I got. Less weeks, less
1:31:32 than months, goes away, therapy helps, whatever, but we’re humans, right? I mean, we’re adapted to
1:31:37 survive danger and stress and hardship and all that, all that stuff. We wouldn’t be here. So trauma,
1:31:43 if the trauma was psychologically crippling to humans, humans wouldn’t exist. Around 20% of
1:31:50 people get long term PTSD. So they pass the point where they should have recovered and they’re stuck
1:31:57 in this trauma loop and they can’t get out of it. That’s around 20% of people. Now you look at the US
1:32:02 military. Every war, the casualty rate, thank God, has gone down because the intensity of the combat
1:32:09 has gone down. As bad as World War One was, it wasn’t as bad as the Civil War. World War Two was
1:32:13 not as intense. The combat was not as intense. There were not the mass casualties of World War
1:32:17 One. Korea, Vietnam, the war on terror has the lowest casualty rates of any war the US has fought.
1:32:23 Major war. But as the casualty rates have gone down and the level of trauma has gone down,
1:32:28 disability claims have gone up. They’re going the wrong directions. Right now,
1:32:35 about 10% of the US military actually experiences any combat at all. One out of 10 soldiers.
1:32:41 The rest of them are very, or they’re crucial. They’re necessary. They’re not getting directly
1:32:45 traumatized. But something like 50% of the US military has filed for some form of PTSD disability.
1:32:54 So there’s 40% in there that are a bit of a mystery. They come home and they’re deeply,
1:33:01 dangerously alienated, depressed. They don’t fit in. Something gravely wrong. And
1:33:08 my theory is that what they’re experiencing isn’t a reaction to trauma. They couldn’t be because
1:33:15 most of them weren’t traumatized. But they’re experiencing is the sort of radical readjustment
1:33:21 from platoon life. A platoon is 40 or 50 people. You’re sleeping, depending on what kind of base
1:33:27 you’re on, shoulder to shoulder in the dirt, or cot to cot in some kind of bungalow or whatever.
1:33:32 But it’s all group living. You’re eating meals together, doing missions and patrols together,
1:33:37 doing everything together for over a year. That is exactly how humans evolve to live.
1:33:42 That is exactly our prehistory. So you experience that incredible tight cohesion
1:33:48 with your platoon. Now, there might be people you have conflicts with. It doesn’t mean it’s one
1:33:52 big love fast, but it is close. And it’s close with people that you know your life depends on.
1:33:58 And then suddenly you’re sprung from that. And you’re back in modern society.
1:34:03 And I think what’s affecting a lot of these vats isn’t a response to trauma. It couldn’t be.
1:34:10 It’s a response to the sudden aloneness and loneliness that modern society is known for,
1:34:19 unfortunately. And you also have talked about how, for instance, returning Peace Corps volunteers
1:34:26 also suffer from depression, for the similar, maybe not identical, but related reintegration issues.
1:34:32 Yeah. I mean, you can see that, I mean, to the extent that, you know, this is proof or whatever,
1:34:36 it’s an interesting example. I mean, so you spend two years in Cameroon, incredibly poor country in
1:34:42 Africa, Central Africa, in a really poor village. I mean, that’s a tough way to live for a couple
1:34:46 of years for American who grew up in modern society. And then after two years, you come home and the
1:34:51 depression rate for people coming back from Peace Corps service is astronomical. It’s something like
1:34:56 50%. 25%, 50% is enormous. It’s akin to soldiers. So there you have this common theme, you know,
1:35:03 that Peace Corps volunteers are not traumatized, but they experience, like soldiers, this radical
1:35:08 transition from closeness, literally village life back to the American suburb or whatever.
1:35:15 I mean, this is the first society, I mean, modern Western society is the first society
1:35:19 in human history where people live alone in an apartment, unheard of. Children have their own
1:35:25 bedrooms. They’re locked in a room by themselves at night, terrifying to young children. I mean,
1:35:29 we’re primates, right? Baby primates, if they’re alone in the jungle are incredibly vulnerable.
1:35:33 And, you know, human infants know this, of course, so they don’t want to be
1:35:37 put in a room by themselves. They know it’s in an evolutionary sense, they know it’s dangerous,
1:35:41 and they cry and they scream. Was it 90% contact? I might be pulling that out of my ass,
1:35:47 but you talked about the sort of contact. Yeah, the skin-on-skin contact for infants
1:35:53 and young children in tribal societies is as high as 90% of the time. Skin-on-skin contact.
1:36:01 And this study looked at skin-on-skin contact in American society. I think it was in the 70s,
1:36:08 the study was done, and it was as low as 17%, something like that. Now, you could say, okay,
1:36:15 well, people have to work, they have jobs, you know what, I’m all true. But that doesn’t mean
1:36:19 that that radical shift in child rearing doesn’t have consequences.
1:36:25 So PTSD is very interesting to me for a number of reasons. One is that I have quite a few friends
1:36:31 now who are either active military or were active for a period of time. But most of my
1:36:37 exposure has been to guys in, say, the SEALs or Marine Force Recon and so on. I have quite a
1:36:43 few questions related to this, but that’s part one of the interest. Part two of the interest
1:36:47 is that I’ve been involved with research and funding research related to the use of psychedelics
1:36:55 to address untreatable or treatment-resistant depression at places like Johns Hopkins. And
1:37:00 when you dig into that scientific community, you find a lot of people using, for instance, MDMA
1:37:05 with vets to try to address PTSD. So this has been a sort of recurrent topic that has popped up for
1:37:12 me. A couple of questions for you. The first is the fact of the matter is I don’t have perfect
1:37:17 transparency into these folks’ lives, nor should I. But the guys who I’ve spent a lot of time with
1:37:25 in some of these special operations units do not seem to exhibit any symptoms of PTSD. And I’m sure
1:37:31 that’s not true across the board, but do you see a lot of differences in terms of those types of
1:37:37 units versus, I don’t know, the proper terminology here, but just like basic infantrymen or support
1:37:44 units? I mean, what it seems to be is that unit cohesion is a buffer for psychological struggles,
1:37:51 including PTSD. So the more highly trained the soldier, the more highly trained the unit,
1:37:58 the more psychologically resilient they are, even though they might be taking higher casualties.
1:38:04 And what’s so interesting about trauma is that it’s not necessarily related to the level of
1:38:11 danger. It’s related to the level of control that you feel that you have. So if you’re a sort of
1:38:20 standard issue support unit rear base soldier, you know, one of the huge bases that the American
1:38:29 military has or the Israeli military has, for example, in previous wars in Israel, the random
1:38:35 mortar round comes in. Strangely, that is, causes more, a greater proportion of psychiatric casualties
1:38:42 than frontline units doing very intense fighting, but they’re, they’re taking higher casualties,
1:38:48 but they’re incredibly well trained. So they have a sense of mastery over their environment.
1:38:54 Yeah, they also have a very high degree of perceived agency, I would imagine, just because
1:38:59 they’re on offense, right? If you’re in a commando unit, you get dropped behind enemy lines in a
1:39:02 black helicopter and you have a go command. Absolutely. I mean, you know, it’s game on,
1:39:07 right? The big game, the football game or whatever. I mean, we’re, you know, humans are wired for
1:39:13 action and war when need be. And, you know, your, your neural circuitry just lights up and there’s
1:39:17 all kinds of hormonal stuff going on. I mean, you’re, you have an enormous agency,
1:39:22 but it even is true. I read a studies on my previous book called war. I saw this study where
1:39:27 some army psychiatrists, they like two unluckiest army psychiatrists in their whole military,
1:39:33 probably at that time, were at some, I saw like remote outposts with special forces soldiers along,
1:39:38 like, you know, the DMZ and they were dropped in there. They were just doing some standard study
1:39:45 psychological assessment of these guys, right? And these guys are real badasses. They were like SF,
1:39:50 you know, like the real deal. And so these psychologists, they found out that the base,
1:39:57 it was a 20 man position, something like that. The base was about to be attacked by a battalion
1:40:02 of NVA, like 500 men, right? And there was 20 guys there, something like that. So the psychologist
1:40:09 thought, Oh, perfect. This is a perfect moment to measure stress and soldiers, right? So definitely
1:40:14 looking at the silver lining. That’s right. Yeah, exactly. So they started taking cortisol levels
1:40:20 hourly from the soldiers. And the officers, the lieutenant, the poor lieutenant, he’s probably
1:40:26 22, his cortisol levels, he’s not, he’s young, he’s not very well trained. And he has a huge amount
1:40:31 of responsibility as the officer, the commanding officer, his cortisol levels are through the roof
1:40:36 right up until the point where the attack was supposed to begin because they had intel that
1:40:42 these guys were coming, right? And then after that time passed, his cortisol levels steadily
1:40:46 declined and then turned out there was no attack. And then he went returned to normal.
1:40:50 This special forces guys were the opposite. As soon as they heard that they were about to
1:40:55 experience an overwhelming attack, their cortisol levels dropped. They got super calm. The reason
1:41:01 their cortisol levels dropped, it was stressful for them to wait for the unknown. But as soon as
1:41:07 they knew they were going to be attacked, they had a plan of action. They started filling sandbags,
1:41:12 they started cleaning their rifles, they started stockpiling their ammo, getting the plasma bags
1:41:17 ready, whatever they do before an attack. All of that busyness gave them a sense of mastery and
1:41:22 control that actually made them feel less anxious than them just waiting around on an average day
1:41:29 in a dangerous place. Coming back to you, and I really didn’t think about this until now, but
1:41:35 when we’re talking about PTSD and potential causes, right? So you have going from a very
1:41:40 unified sort of tribal existence that we’ve evolved to be part of to this very unusual
1:41:48 isolated modern existence. You also have, what strikes me at least, is we’re looking at the
1:41:55 agency versus lack of agency, the sense of a clear purpose and a task. If the towers get hit at 9/11
1:42:02 and there’s a call for blood drives and everybody’s standing online, every different race, color,
1:42:07 or creed, it’s like you have a very clear, concrete purpose in front of you, as opposed to what I
1:42:13 think a lot of us experience, and I’m not immune to this, certainly, there are like weeks and months
1:42:17 where I’m like, “What the fuck am I doing? Like, I really just like don’t know what I should be doing
1:42:22 in life, but a crisis or perceived crisis is a forcing function.” It’s like, you have a very clear
1:42:27 directive of some type or another. And then a third, which could be is related, certainly, but
1:42:32 might be independently addressable, is when you come into an isolated existence, you’re in an
1:42:37 apartment by yourself, which quite frankly, I am a lot of the time, and I don’t think it’s healthy
1:42:40 for me, is a focus on me, like a focus on I is just a breeding ground for neuroses and mental
1:42:48 illness, I think. And when you take, for instance, certain types of psychedelics, it disrupts the
1:42:56 default mode network, has very particular neurological effects that increase the sense of
1:43:02 oneness and unity with others. It in some ways mitigates that focus on the first person. What
1:43:08 can we do to better support troops, particularly, and this is a question from another friend who’s
1:43:15 a big fan of your work, but he views himself quite proudly as sort of a bleeding heart liberal,
1:43:22 and he feels very conflicted because he wants to support troops at the same time he wants to
1:43:27 ask, “Well, did you find the WMDs?” And so he’s conflicted as to how to support the troops without
1:43:32 feeling like he’s supporting senseless wars. How would you answer that or talk to that?
1:43:37 Countries go to war through a political process that’s run by the government, and the troops have
1:43:45 nothing to do with the war in that sense. I mean, guys who are drilling for oil in North Dakota
1:43:51 really don’t have anything to do with global warming. They’re providing something that our
1:43:55 society has decided at once, including a lot of environmentalists. Frankly, they’re driving
1:43:59 around in cars, they’re running gasoline. So with the proper stickers that say no blood for oil.
1:44:04 Yeah, exactly, right? So there’s a massive hypocrisy, even though it’s well-meaning.
1:44:08 So you can’t mistake the soldiers for the war. If you’re upset about the wars that the U.S. gets
1:44:14 into, you have to address that to the government. The soldiers themselves have simply volunteered
1:44:21 to do anything. Think about how profound this is. They have volunteered to do anything that the
1:44:28 nation asked them to do for very, very low amounts of money. Anything, right? And if we told them to
1:44:35 plant trees in Canada, they’d go do that. And if we told them to go invade Canada, they’d do that.
1:44:41 They were like, “Whatever you want, we’re going to do.” So there’s no conflict between
1:44:46 disagreeing with a war and honoring people who have said, “For $40,000 a year, I will do whatever
1:44:54 you think this nation needs done.” That’s an incredibly honorable thing. And if you want to
1:45:01 create a sense of unity of purpose in this country, which I think would be enormously
1:45:07 psychologically beneficial to soldiers, I mean, soldiers experience unity of purpose in their
1:45:13 platoon, then they come back to a country, to this country, which is basically a war with itself.
1:45:18 I mean, we live in racially divided communities. The gap between rich and poor is bad and growing
1:45:23 worse. The political parties speak with incredible contempt for one another. If you’re a soldier
1:45:29 and you fought for this country and you come back to this mess, I mean, of course they’re messed up.
1:45:33 Come on guys, we fought for you and you can’t even get along in peacetime. I mean, you guys are
1:45:37 experiencing peace and you’re not, you can’t even get along. So you want unity of purpose in this
1:45:42 country. One way to get there is to make, 50 years ago, racist speech was acceptable socially.
1:45:48 Now it’s unacceptable. It’s protected under free speech, but it’s politically and socially
1:45:54 unacceptable. Contemptuous speech for your fellow citizens, for your political adversary. Likewise,
1:46:02 it’s protected under the First Amendment, but it should be considered so damaging to the social
1:46:09 fabric and to the interests of this nation that it’s effectively banned from society by common
1:46:14 consensus. That would help soldiers. It would help all of us. National service would be amazing.
1:46:20 I think it’s morally wrong to force people to fight a war they don’t want to fight, but national
1:46:25 service with a military option where every 18 year olds or every young person had to do a year or
1:46:32 two of national service would be, I mean, that would truly create the melting pot that this country
1:46:37 is and should be. The classes, the races get mixed in this very egalitarian way.
1:46:43 It would create a comet like in Israel, which has a PTSD rate, by the way, of 1%.
1:46:48 It would create this sort of common experience and this unity of purpose, which is so profoundly
1:46:55 helpful psychologically. What might some of the non-military options look like for that year or
1:47:00 two of service? I mean, what’s the nation need done? I mean, we need help in the inner cities.
1:47:06 We need infrastructure repair. I don’t know. It could resemble like a Teach for America or a
1:47:12 Peace Corps type of capacity. Yeah, anything, whatever. I mean, for us,
1:47:18 collectively, to use our imagination, and we have two things. We have this incredible resource
1:47:22 for our young people and we have a nation that’s deeply, deeply in crisis. One thing that unifies
1:47:29 us is being attacked. We’re attacked by terrorists and suddenly we’re a unified country. We don’t
1:47:35 want to have to wait for tragedy to unify us. We want to beat it to the punch and actually
1:47:43 unify our country for positive reasons instead of as a reaction to a horrible attack.
1:47:47 I promised I’d come back to the Viking helmet. I want to address the Viking helmet.
1:47:52 Let me try to, this is from memory, let me try to give a sketch. You’re in Spain,
1:48:00 correct? You go out to a bar with some of your buddies and you know what? I’ll let you tell it
1:48:05 because I think you’ll do it more justice, but it underscores a point that I want to ask you
1:48:10 about. Yeah, of course. They weren’t even my buddies. They became my buddies. I was 22 years
1:48:16 old. My father grew up in Spain and in France and I grew up going to those countries and when I
1:48:22 was after college, I decided I’d read a lot of Hemingway. This is all pretty predictable, right?
1:48:27 I read a lot of Hemingway, I wanted to go to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls,
1:48:31 to see or participate in the running of the bulls, right? So the festival of San Fermin in
1:48:38 Pamplona is this big city-wide freak show basically for a week and I was sleeping on
1:48:45 someone’s couch and one night I slept on a park bench. I mean, it’s just a free-for-all. It’s
1:48:49 amazing time, right? And I went out to this bar in preparation for the running of the bulls next
1:48:55 morning. No one who’s within the barricades, whether they run the bulls, they fire the cannon
1:49:00 off at seven in the morning to release the bulls from the arena and they charge through town to
1:49:04 these barricades and no one who’s within those barricades at seven a.m. woke up at six a.m. to do
1:49:09 it. I mean, everyone’s been up all night. Anyone who’s in that thing has been up all night. Well,
1:49:13 I was going to be one of them. So I go to this stupid little bar, saw us on the floor. I spoke
1:49:17 pretty good Spanish at the time. I immediately started talking to these two young Spaniards who
1:49:22 were just completely shit-faced, right? And one of them has a leather sort of drinking bag around,
1:49:30 I don’t know how to describe it, a leather drinking bag called a bota around his neck,
1:49:34 which is filled with red wine and he keeps trying to get the red one, squirt the red wine to his
1:49:38 mouth, but he keeps missing it’s all over his white t-shirt. And these guys are having the
1:49:42 best time in the world and we just become friends instantly when you’re talking and one of them,
1:49:47 the drunkest of the two, has a cheap plastic viking helmet on his head. And I didn’t really
1:49:55 think about it much. We’re talking and suddenly these three very tough looking North African
1:49:59 kids walk in and I had lived in France for a while with my family when I was 12, 13. So I spoke French
1:50:04 also. These really tough looking Algerian or Moroccan kids walk in and they’re tough looking
1:50:11 guys, right? And they walk into the bar and the biggest of them walks right up to my new friend.
1:50:16 I’ve known him for maybe half an hour and grabs the viking helmet off his hand and says,
1:50:21 “That’s mine, you stole it.” So I’m the only one who speaks both languages. So now I’m translating,
1:50:26 right? And my friend, my Spanish friend, new Spanish friend says, tries to grab it back and says,
1:50:32 “No, that’s mine. I don’t know who you are.” And the Moroccan guys and the two Spanish guys,
1:50:37 everyone suddenly has a hand on the viking helmet and they start pulling at it and it’s
1:50:41 rapidly devolving into a pretty good bar fight. And the helmet starts to rip. It’s just cheap
1:50:48 plastic, right? And one of them shouts, it’s sort of King Solomon’s judgment almost like one of
1:50:53 themselves, “Stop, stop. We’re ripping it.” You know? And they stop. Everyone stops because no one
1:50:58 wants to destroy the thing they’re all fighting over. And one of the two Spanish guys, I think the
1:51:05 less drunk of the two, turns to me and says, “I have an idea. Will you take my place at this
1:51:12 helmet? And will you defend it?” I mean, this wonderful, elegant way that Spaniards have of
1:51:17 speaking, particularly when they’re drunk. Will you defend it upon the honor of your ancestors
1:51:22 and your good name and blah, blah, blah? And I’m thinking like, “How long do you have to know a guy
1:51:27 before you have to back him up in a bar fight?” I mean, is it under an hour really? Is that it?
1:51:33 So I’d say, “Yes, I’ll defend the helmet,” et cetera. And I’d take my place at the helmet.
1:51:37 And he goes to the bartender. And now the whole bar is watching this. This is high theater,
1:51:42 right, at this point. So me and the Spanish kid are glaring at the Moroccans and they’re glaring
1:51:47 back and we’re faced off around this helmet. I’m really hoping it doesn’t go to where, you know,
1:51:52 it looks like it’s headed. So that the Spanish guy goes to the bar and has a quick conference
1:51:58 with the bartender who produces a big jug of cheap Spanish red wine and cracks the
1:52:03 top open and hands it to him. And the guy comes back and fills the Viking helmet to the brim
1:52:09 with red wine. Now, no one wants to be the asshole who spills the red wine, right? It’s the festival
1:52:15 of San Fermin. The whole thing’s running on red wine. Like, you know, no one wants to spill it,
1:52:20 right? It just looks bad. So he fills the helmet to the brim with red wine and he puts his hand
1:52:26 under it. And he says, “Okay, now everyone let go.” And no one wants to be the idiot who spills the
1:52:31 wine. So everyone, let’s go. And he presents it to the biggest, toughest-looking Moroccan kid.
1:52:37 It says, “You’re a guest in our country, so you drink first.” And the guy drank and he passed it
1:52:45 to his left and it went around the circle. And then when it was empty of red wine, it got filled up.
1:52:50 And then eventually they just got another jug and started passing the jug around. An hour later,
1:52:56 I’m talking to this like some girl, an hour later, like I eventually extricate myself from this.
1:53:00 And I look over and the five of them who are ready to carry each other to pieces, right?
1:53:06 The five of them are hanging off each other, singing in unison in two different languages,
1:53:11 and the Viking helmet has been completely forgotten and is under a table in the corner.
1:53:15 So I underlined this and put a bunch of stars next to it. There are a lot of underlines in
1:53:20 this book for me. What I liked about the encounter was that it showed how very close the energy of
1:53:24 male conflict and male closeness can be. So I want to get your thoughts and advice on this
1:53:30 on something very closely related, which is I’ve felt for a long time, and this is completely
1:53:34 unsubstantiated. I mean, it’s just a pet theory that a lot of the societal issues that we see
1:53:39 are a direct result of male misbehavior from those who do not have an outlet for
1:53:46 innate capacity for violence and force. And it’s just a great story because it shows how
1:53:54 that can be, in some cases, directed, right? So you’re like, “Oh, shit, these guys are about to
1:53:59 turn into meatheads pounding each other’s brains out.” But with a little finesse and
1:54:06 enough red wine, that’s all diffused, and now they’re best buddies. And I heard a story very
1:54:10 much like this where there’s a, I’m not going to name him, but this very cantankerous, outspoken,
1:54:17 abrasive billionaire walked up to this huge Argentine guy at a party that I was in a different
1:54:24 room at the time for and pushed the guy because they were both drunk. And he pushed this huge
1:54:29 Argentine guy because he assumed I’m the billionaire here. I’m the tough guy who’s the alpha male.
1:54:34 What’s this guy going to do? And what the guy did was turn around, picked him up like a professional
1:54:38 wrestler over his head and slammed him on top of a folding table and shattered the table.
1:54:43 Everyone’s assuming, “Holy shit, this guy’s going to get his life destroyed. This guy’s going to
1:54:49 sue the shit out of him.” But he couldn’t because of the reputational stakes. It would be a response
1:54:56 so forever shame him if that was the response because he clearly instigated it. And then
1:55:00 a half hour later, they’re best of friends doing shots together. But it doesn’t always end that
1:55:06 neatly. And do you have any thoughts on how the society in which we live, let’s just say in this
1:55:12 case in the US, we can end up with more male closeness and less male violence? Do you have
1:55:18 any thoughts on that? Well, it’s tricky. I mean, how do we have less heart disease in the society
1:55:23 that where people drive and they have plenty, most people have plenty of food and a lot of fats
1:55:27 and sugars? I mean, the very safety of this society, the very thing that makes us lucky,
1:55:33 also creates a danger. The diseases of affluence. That’s right. So the wonderful thing about the
1:55:39 society is that we don’t have to organize groups of young men and put weapons in their hands
1:55:46 and send them out to the edge of town to fight off an incursion from the young men of an enemy
1:55:53 town, a hostile town. That’s not happening anymore. I mean, wars are big formal things
1:56:00 that for the United States almost always happen elsewhere. But in terms of our communities and
1:56:04 our society at home, we no longer have to organize young men and prepare them for group violence
1:56:11 so that we can survive. That’s been the human norm for two million years, either from predators
1:56:17 or from other humans. Young men function in groups and functioned selflessly in groups
1:56:24 extremely well. You can organize 20, 30, 40, 50 young men and give them a task, a dangerous task,
1:56:32 and they perform, not only do they perform it very, very well, the heart of the task is the
1:56:36 closer they get. Women are used for incredibly important… I mean, I’m talking in sort of human
1:56:41 evolution and across the span of human history. Women are used for equally important tasks,
1:56:47 but usually not group tasks like that. It’s really the boys that are told to either hunt or fight in
1:56:52 groups. And so they get very good at it. And in modern society, what young men want to do is
1:56:59 achieve honor by defending the community. I mean, it’s just wired. It’s just wired into the male
1:57:04 brain to do that. If you don’t give young men a good and useful group to belong to,
1:57:10 they will create a bad group to belong to. But one way or another, they’re going to create a group
1:57:18 and they’re going to find something, an adversary, where they can demonstrate their prowess and their
1:57:23 unity. That thing that they find is often the law. It’s the police. It’s society itself. In some
1:57:31 ways, they turn into skinwalkers. They have no outside enemy. So they create an enemy out of
1:57:35 society. They don’t want to be doing this. It’s one of the risks of wartime leaders being all the
1:57:41 time leaders. Yeah, that’s right. And young men, like young women, for the most part, are well
1:57:46 intentioned and want to do right by their community and their society. But if you have a society which
1:57:50 is so safe and protected and removed from the rest of the world as we are, in some ways,
1:57:55 there’s sort of nothing useful for the young men to do. And then in their own ad hoc way,
1:58:00 they create their own trials, right? So they take a lot of risks. They do stupid stuff. They
1:58:05 jump off of stuff that’s too high to jump off of. They drive too fast. They get into fights.
1:58:09 I’ve never done any of that. Young men die at six times the rate of young women from accidents
1:58:17 and from violence. There’s a reason for that. They’re wired to demonstrate their prowess and
1:58:23 it often gets them killed. This is not really something that needs a ton of commentary because
1:58:28 I’m not sure we can resolve millennia and millions of years of evolution. But I highlighted this
1:58:32 part and we talked about it before we started recording because it was surprising yet completely
1:58:37 unsurprising at the same time. And this is to read a short section here. I once asked a combat vet
1:58:42 if he’d rather have an enemy in his life or another close friend. He looked at me like I was crazy.
1:58:45 “Oh, an enemy?” 100%, he said. Not even close. I already got a lot of friends. He thought about
1:58:51 it a little longer. Anyway, all my best friends I’ve gotten into fights with knocked down drag
1:58:55 out fights. Granted, we were always drunk when it happened, but think about that. He shook his head
1:59:00 as if he couldn’t believe it. Strange creatures we are. Absolutely. Absolutely. I want to segue
1:59:06 to a couple of listener questions because there were some good ones. This one is from Kip Makinuni.
1:59:13 I’m going to abbreviate it a little bit, but how does he feel about veterans being victims
1:59:17 in society after they return home and get out? General James Mattis, who you should definitely
1:59:21 interview. This has actually been recommended a few times, gave a speech in 2014 about post-traumatic
1:59:26 growth, as he called it, and how those experiences should be considered a precious commodity,
1:59:30 one that cannot be simulated or taught in a classroom. How would you comment on that?
1:59:35 The status of victimhood is not a psychologically healthy place to be in. And I think our society
1:59:43 takes people who are unfortunate, who have experienced something difficult, and in a kind
1:59:48 of misguided attempt to make the world right again for them, they classify them as victims.
1:59:53 Now, they may call them survivors, and they may call them whatever they want, but actually,
1:59:58 the role that the person is being asked to play is one of a victim. Victims are taken care of.
2:00:03 So after World War II, which saw casualties that completely eclipse
2:00:10 even these terrible wars of our current day, soldiers came back. They didn’t do multiple
2:00:15 deployments. They signed up, and they were in the army until the war was done. Some of them were in
2:00:20 for three, four years. Straight. And they came home, and basically, the society said to these men,
2:00:28 and it was almost all men in the combat unit, society said to these men, “All right, you’re
2:00:32 done fighting. Now we need you at home. It’s time to get to work. We have a country to rebuild.”
2:00:37 And they definitely were not thought of as victims of the war or of anything.
2:00:42 They were thought of much like, I’m sure, the Cheyenne and the Comanche and the Apache and the
2:00:48 Sioux and the Kiowa warriors who came back from the war path. They were thought of as essential
2:00:52 and functioning members of society. Now, maybe they were missing a limb, or maybe they had some
2:00:57 trauma to process, but they were needed back home in the towns and cities of this great country,
2:01:04 just as badly as they were needed in the Pacific, in the fields of Europe. And the problem with
2:01:11 victimhood is that it perpetuates the psychological state of passivity and trauma that you want the
2:01:21 person to escape from. Right. It’s the sort of perceived lack of agency that helped produce
2:01:27 the PTSD in the first place, potentially. Exactly. And you think about what the official London
2:01:32 officials said about the blitz. Now we have neurotics driving ambulances.
2:01:35 And also, I mean, one thing you wrote about, which was the presence of fraud, of course,
2:01:40 within disability claims and how some vets who really suffer from severe PTSD don’t want to
2:01:48 go to these meetings because they’re afraid they’re going to beat the living shit out of
2:01:50 some guy who’s clearly just doing it to receive a check or some type of payment.
2:01:54 Yeah. You know, it’s a very politically delicate thing to bring up, but all I’m doing is repeating
2:01:59 the accounts of soldiers and veterans. I mean, the best thing a journalist can do is convey
2:02:04 information. And that’s what I’m doing. They’re veterans I’ve talked to who said they just,
2:02:08 they won’t go to these group therapy sessions because, you know, one out of 20 is some guy
2:02:13 who really didn’t see any combat and is trying to milk the system and pretending to have trauma,
2:02:18 pretending to have PTSD and he really doesn’t. You know, one of the tricky things, the VA in
2:02:21 trying to speed up the massive bureaucracy that they created over the last decades,
2:02:26 and trying to speed that up, speed up disability claims, they said to soldiers,
2:02:31 if you self-diagnose, think about this, if you self-diagnose with PTSD, you do not have to
2:02:40 give us proof that anything traumatic happened. You do not have to describe the incident that
2:02:48 you were traumatized in. You just have to tell us that you believe that you were traumatized
2:02:54 and that you have PTSD and that’s enough for a disability check. So humans being what they are,
2:02:59 some number of people are going to take advantage of that and we’re a wealthy country,
2:03:04 we can easily absorb those costs. So I have zero opinion about whether we should inquire further,
2:03:09 but I should say that the data show that having that kind of dishonesty in a process
2:03:18 is actually psychologically detrimental not only to those specific people who are being dishonest,
2:03:24 but to everybody. It’s actually quite corrosive.
2:03:27 How many photographs have you taken on your wartime deployments? Probably not the right word,
2:03:32 but assignments. I carry a video camera and I shoot a lot of footage, but I’ve never taken
2:03:39 still photos. Okay. So with the video footage that you’ve shot, and by the way, I haven’t told you
2:03:44 this, when Restrepo was first shown, like very, very first shown in the Northern California area,
2:03:51 I tracked it down and drove out to see one of the very first showing. So really, I did. Thank you.
2:03:56 And I have some questions about that, but what footage that you captured, if any come to mind,
2:04:03 this is related to a question from Yasmin Hayat. If you had to choose, I’m going to substitute
2:04:08 here because it was one photo, but I’m going to say one clip of footage that impacted him the most,
2:04:13 which one is it and why? What did he experience while taking, in this case, the video?
2:04:17 I mean, the things that have impacted me, I didn’t necessarily shoot video of. Sometimes,
2:04:25 it’s at night. Well, we can talk about, I would say, feel free to answer that. Yeah.
2:04:30 When I was in Northern Afghanistan in 2000, there was a big nighttime battle going on,
2:04:36 and there was a mass infantry assault against entrenched Taliban positions through minefield.
2:04:42 The Northern Alliance, sort of World War I style. And it was at night, and we were
2:04:47 right behind the front lines, and a wave of soldiers sort of took the wrong route and went
2:04:54 through this minefield, and a lot of them got messed up, and they were pulled out of there.
2:04:58 And we saw them immediately afterwards. They’d sort of been piled onto the back of a flat, but
2:05:02 pick up track. They’re alive. They had lost legs and traumatic amputations. I mean,
2:05:06 they were extremely messed up. They’re alive. Most of them probably survived. They’re anti-personnel
2:05:10 ones. So we were there when they were brought into this sort of forward, ill hospital tent
2:05:16 that was lit with kerosene lanterns, right? I mean, this is rough. This is World War I era.
2:05:21 It’s anti-medicine. Yeah. And in the very bright light of these sort of propane lanterns,
2:05:25 kerosene lanterns, they brought these poor guys in. And you know, there was 12 guys, you know,
2:05:31 where their bodies ended at their knee, their bodies ended at their hips. You don’t realize
2:05:37 it’s psychologically incredibly deranging to see the human body rearranged. And I’ve found later
2:05:44 in my research that one of the most traumatizing things in terms of PTSD is to see dismemberment,
2:05:52 to see the coherence of the human form rearranged in an odd way that you’ve never seen before.
2:05:58 And it’s just, it really tweaks people. And I had a moment of crisis. I went a little crazy.
2:06:04 It felt like I went a little crazy. I mean, I just, my brain just sort of stopped functioning.
2:06:10 And I don’t even have very clear memories of it, but I left the tent. I couldn’t take it. I could
2:06:15 not bear to see what I was seeing. And I left the tent and I went outside into the cold African night
2:06:22 and lit a cigarette. And I thought, you know, war is exciting and it’s dramatic and it’s important
2:06:27 and it’s meaningful and it’s all this other stuff. But if you’re not also prepared to
2:06:34 look unblinkingly, unflinchingly at the worst aspects of war, dismembered people, you really
2:06:40 have no business covering the quote good parts. And by good, I mean the parts that are, are traumatic.
2:06:45 If you can’t face what’s in that tent, you have to get out of the business completely.
2:06:49 And you can’t be selective about your experience of war. But you have a job to do and it’s to
2:06:54 communicate to your readers back in the United States, everything about what war looks like,
2:06:59 including that. So grab your damn notebook and grab your pen and walk in there and just write
2:07:04 down what it is like to behold such a thing. And as soon as I, this is interesting, right,
2:07:12 as soon as I had a purpose, I was okay. My self given purpose was document this thing that you
2:07:19 can barely bear to look at. But as soon as I had a job to do, and I’m sure that’s how the medics
2:07:25 dealt with it too. So as I had a job to do, I was okay. And I wrote it all down. And it was
2:07:32 one of the most powerful parts of this piece that I wrote. And I, you know, I passed through the
2:07:37 gateway, through the threshold. And I, at that moment, I’ve been in plenty of wars until then.
2:07:42 But in that moment, I became a war recorder. You mentioned not by name, but Tim earlier.
2:07:50 Yeah. Can you tell us who he was, what happened and how it impacted you?
2:07:56 Yeah, Tim Heatherington was a wonderful, brilliant English photographer who I was lucky enough to
2:08:03 work with on my project in the Coral and Gold Valley. I wanted to document the experience of one
2:08:08 platoon, 30, 40, 50 men throughout one deployment. And I wound up at a little outpost called Restrepo.
2:08:15 And on my second trip in there, that’s when I started shooting video and thinking about movies.
2:08:21 And on my second trip in there, I started working with Tim. He was assigned to me by
2:08:25 Vanity Fair Magazine. And he quickly realized that this film project that I had was a pretty good
2:08:30 idea. And we became partners. And we went through a very intense, amazing, difficult year together
2:08:38 out there in the Coral and Gold Valley. And we both got hurt. We both came very close to getting
2:08:44 killed out there. It was an extraordinary experience. And we became brothers really.
2:08:48 And we made a film called Restrepo. It won a lot of awards. And then it was nominated for an Oscar.
2:08:55 And we went off to Los Angeles and this amazing world of, you know, Los Angeles during the Oscars.
2:09:01 And I was married at the time. And he had, you know, he had a girlfriend and we were all out there
2:09:05 together. It was an incredible experience. We didn’t win. It didn’t really matter. And we had an
2:09:10 assignment to, the Arab Spring was exploding all around us during the Oscars, right? And so
2:09:15 we had an assignment to go back overseas and document the Civil War in Libya from Vanity Fair.
2:09:21 After the Oscars, we all went home and we were going to head to Libya. And the last moment I
2:09:25 couldn’t go for personal reasons. And Tim went on his own and he was killed on April 20 in the
2:09:31 city of Misrata in Libya by a mortar round, 81 millimeter mortar that was fired by Qaddafi’s
2:09:37 forces outside Misrata. And he bled out in the back of a rebel pickup truck racing for the
2:09:42 Misrata Hospital. And, you know, I got the awful phone call in New York City. And very, very quickly
2:09:52 decided I would never cover war again. It wasn’t that I was scared of getting killed. That’s a
2:09:58 fear that you have to confront early on. And I’d sort of resolve my feelings about it. It’s that
2:10:03 in watching the news of his death, and he was beloved by people, including my wife,
2:10:08 Daniela, I just loved him. I mean, he just, everyone loved him. And I watched the news of
2:10:14 his death ripple, ripple outwards from my apartment, because I got the news first from my apartment
2:10:21 outwards through all the people that he knew that he loved on out into people that he didn’t even
2:10:28 know who loved him on out through his country and my country. And I just thought, I don’t want to
2:10:34 risk doing that to the people I love. I mean, I’m dead, right? My problems are over, but I’m
2:10:40 giving them a lifetime of pain and sorrow. And that’s not an honorable thing to do. And so I got
2:10:47 out of the business. What was the date on that again? April 20. Yep. Coincidentally, the anniversary
2:10:55 of Columbine, Hitler’s birthday. Oh, there’s all kinds of awful things that happened on April 20
2:11:00 for some reason. What do you think your writing future will look like? Tribe is a really different
2:11:07 book from my other books. It’s an inquiry into something. It’s not a story. It doesn’t take
2:11:13 place on a fishing boat or in an outpost. It’s a meditation and an inquiry about my society,
2:11:20 my country that I love very much and something feels very, very wrong in our country right now.
2:11:26 And I think if you look at the political discourse right now in this country, it is completely toxic
2:11:34 and actually more dangerous to our nation than ISIS is. I mean, really in real terms of how do we
2:11:41 keep this country together for the next 250 years, ISIS is not going to be able to prevent us from
2:11:48 doing that. I’m sorry. But we ourselves can. And it’s happening right now. And my book
2:11:54 is partly an attempt to make people think about what it means to belong to a group.
2:12:01 And this country is a group. So viewing ourselves that way, this relates to a question from Bobby
2:12:08 Richards. Working so closely with service members and vets, what would be the one thing he would
2:12:13 recommend that an American civilian could do for our vets? Not necessarily as a country,
2:12:17 but as individuals. The main thing that I can think of is drawn from some of my research into
2:12:23 American Indian ceremonies or returning warriors in the 17th, 18th centuries or vets from the current
2:12:30 wars, 19th centuries. One of the common themes in these ceremonies is that the warrior gets to
2:12:36 recount in front of his community what he did for them on the battlefield. And, you know, often it’s
2:12:44 a heroic sort of boasting of how brave he was and how he killed the enemy and how, you know,
2:12:50 whatever. But it’s this cathartic description of a warrior’s, a warrior discharging his duties
2:12:58 for his community. There’s something about doing that for the people you did it for
2:13:03 that seems to be very, very psychologically healthy to put it in modern terms,
2:13:09 because it’s almost a universal in these ceremonies. And so I had the idea, I mean,
2:13:15 we’re not going to go back to a tribal society. I mean, we can’t. We can’t, you know, you’d have
2:13:19 to get rid of the car, you know, whatever, whatever. It’s not happening. But we might be able to take
2:13:24 certain structures of tribal life and incorporate them into modern society so we get the best of
2:13:30 both worlds. And the way to do that in terms of returning veterans is to turn the town hall,
2:13:36 the city hall and every community in this country on Veterans Day into an open forum for veterans.
2:13:41 I have this idea, Veteran Town Halls, where on my website, SebastianYounger.com,
2:13:46 there’s a page devoted to this. You open up the town hall and a veteran from veterans from any war
2:13:53 have the right to stand up and speak for 10 minutes to their community. And I know veterans,
2:13:59 right? Some of them are going to be incredibly proud of their service, and they’re going to say
2:14:05 they missed the war, and it’s going to make liberals uncomfortable. And some of them are…
2:14:10 Just to be clear, you would consider yourself liberal.
2:14:12 Oh, I’m totally liberal. Yeah. Yeah. But as a journalist, I’m neutral. I mean,
2:14:16 it’s really important, as a private person, I’m liberal, but as a journalist, I really
2:14:18 try to be completely neutral in my analysis and in my evaluation of things.
2:14:25 Conservatives will be made uncomfortable by veterans standing up and being incredibly
2:14:29 angry about the war that they had to fight. And everyone’s going to be uncomfortable when
2:14:33 someone stands up and just starts crying and can’t even talk because they’re crying too hard.
2:14:37 But all of that is war, right? We sent these people to do a job for us that we deem necessary,
2:14:43 collectively deem necessary. And the emotional fallout for it is okay as long as we process it all
2:14:51 collectively. It’s not okay if we just make them deal with it. It’s not their war. It’s our war.
2:14:57 So all of us need to deal with it, much like the American Indian tribes did in these ceremonies,
2:15:02 an amazing thing. So we did this once in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and Seth Moulton is a Democratic
2:15:09 representative from Massachusetts, who was a Marine Lieutenant in Ramadi, I believe it was.
2:15:14 Saw some very, very tough fighting. He helped me organize it. We did it together. And
2:15:21 last Veterans Day in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, if you were a civilian and you
2:15:25 like to say, “I support the troops,” what that literally meant on that day last year in Marblehead,
2:15:32 Massachusetts was that you really then should go down to the town hall and listen to what the
2:15:38 veterans had to say about what it was like for them. There’s no Q&A. There’s no debate. This is
2:15:42 not an evaluation of the war. It’s not a patriotic thing. It’s not an anti-war thing. It’s just,
2:15:48 this is what the experience was like. And I really, really think that if we could do this
2:15:52 in every town across the country, that it would be enormously therapeutic for veterans,
2:15:57 but even more important in some ways, it would start to bind the country together again. I think
2:16:03 the veterans are suffering because the country is suffering. And if we can heal ourselves as a
2:16:08 nation, the veterans are going to be fine. Could not agree more. Let’s shift gears just to my
2:16:18 perhaps somewhat typical series of rapid fire questions and then we’ll wrap up and have some
2:16:23 more coffee. Oh, and I didn’t look at those in advance. So now I’m in trouble. All right. All
2:16:28 right. I’m ready. Let me get ready. Here we go. All right. I’ll let you limber up. Okay. I’m doing
2:16:33 a little shadow boxing. All right. So the first is when you hear the word successful, who’s the
2:16:39 first person who comes to mind and why? Martin Luther King. Why? Because he transformed society
2:16:44 in an incredibly courageous way. How do you define courage or bravery? Courage is risking or
2:16:50 sacrificing your life for others. What is the book or books that you have given to others most
2:16:55 often as a gift? At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matheson. I also recently read
2:17:02 Sapiens by a guy named Harari, which is just phenomenal. That’s a good book. I’m going to
2:17:06 give that thing over and over again to everyone I know. There’s a friend of mine who’s also been
2:17:10 on the podcast named Naval Ravikant who you have to meet at some point. You guys would get along
2:17:14 famously. Also, one of his favorites of the last couple of years. At Play in the Fields of the Lord.
2:17:19 It’s a novel by Peter Matheson. It takes place in the jungles of South America and it’s about
2:17:24 a Sioux Indian named Louis Moon who grew up on a reservation in the 1970s and he goes down to
2:17:31 Brazil to meet what he considers his forebears and it doesn’t go very well.
2:17:36 And now, am I getting this right? Matheson also wrote In Search of the Snow Leopard,
2:17:42 am I getting that? That’s right. Fantastic writer. What would your close friends say you’re
2:17:48 exceptionally good at if I had two drinks in each of them? I think they would say that I’m really
2:17:56 good at not reacting to things and seeming like I’m unaffected when actually I’m deeply affected.
2:18:04 But on the surface, you’re not emotionally reactive. That’s right.
2:18:09 Sounds like you’re definitely a closet stoic.
2:18:12 This is actually not one of my typical questions when I’m going to throw this one. This is from,
2:18:19 I think it’s Robbie Frye. It looks like a very Dutch name. If you could combine three different
2:18:25 writers into one Super Saiyan, that’s a Dragon Ball Z reference, don’t worry about that. If you
2:18:29 could combine three different writers into one writer, right, to create the ultimate writer for
2:18:35 you, who would they be? I think I would have to pick Cormac McCarthy, Peter Matheson, and Joan
2:18:43 Dillion. Good choices all. Let’s see here. Where were you? So your first commercial book success,
2:18:52 The Perfect Storm, how old were you when that came out? I was 35 years old. Okay. So when the book hit,
2:19:00 before it was made into a movie, you now, what advice would you give to yourself at that point
2:19:05 in time? The movie part of it didn’t affect me very much, but the sudden public attention that I
2:19:13 got when the book became a bestseller affected me enormously. And I was very anxious about all that.
2:19:19 I think I would say to myself, the public is not a threat. The public is actually waiting to hear
2:19:25 someone, anything, say something that’s helpful and makes sense, because we’re all trying to get
2:19:31 through this life together. And everyone wants some guidance. And if there’s anything I can say
2:19:39 through my work, or just on a stage that gives some comfort or guidance to people, they’re enormously
2:19:46 receptive. And when you realize that we all need each other and we all learn from each other,
2:19:52 your stage fright goes away. And I had a terrific case of stage fright when my book came out.
2:19:56 How do you feel now when you’re getting ready for a talk, like your TED Talk?
2:20:00 Oh, I don’t think twice about it. I mean, it just doesn’t affect me at all. I think my heart rate
2:20:05 goes up a little bit. What purchase of $100 or less? And we don’t have to stick to that exactly,
2:20:11 but recent purchase that has most positively impacted your life?
2:20:14 I think Sapiens. Sapiens. Yeah, I mean, that book. It’s a fun book to read. It’s amazing. I mean,
2:20:21 I just started looking at everything differently. Like, I mean, I love that book. And books are,
2:20:26 I mean, a book is a kind of thing of magic. It contains a whole universe of information. So,
2:20:30 and it’s cheap at the price. So maybe it’s unfair to use a book, $100 or less.
2:20:36 I mean, I think one of the best values you can buy for $100, you can get for $100 is an ax, a good
2:20:42 ax. Good ax. You can do almost anything with a good ax. Any particular type of ax? What are the
2:20:47 characteristics of a good ax? It can’t be cheap wood in the half. It’s got to be good steel. I
2:20:53 mean, you know, I don’t even know how to evaluate this. Basically, the more you pay for an ax,
2:20:56 the better quality it is and the longer the last and the better we’ll cut. And you keep it really,
2:21:00 really sharp. And you can cut not as fast as chainsaw. I’ve used chainsaws a lot in my life.
2:21:06 But you can basically do anything with it, given a little bit of time. And I’ve spent a lot of
2:21:11 time in the woods. If I had to take one thing to take into the woods with me, it would be an ax.
2:21:16 I was just thinking like, how would you open a tuna can with an ax?
2:21:19 Oh, that’s so easy, man. You can definitely open it.
2:21:21 Oh, yeah. Yeah. I remember when I was a young man in my 20s and I was living just stupidly in
2:21:28 some stupid apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. And I had a date with this girl, this beautiful
2:21:33 girl. And I invited her over and I was going to make spaghetti. I mean, I’m like 23, right? I’m
2:21:37 going to make spaghetti. And I like an idiot. I mean, I got like, and I had cans of tomato sauce
2:21:43 and pasta, right? And she came over and I realized I didn’t have a can over there.
2:21:47 But I knew the answer and I went into my room and I got a hatchet that I had. And I opened the
2:21:51 cans of tomato sauce with a hatchet. And I hit it pretty hard and completely splattered her with
2:21:58 tomato sauce. And here’s the amazing part. She still went out with me. Very memorable at the
2:22:06 very least. Yeah, yeah. So then he pulled out a hatchet. That’s right. Yeah, exactly. Right.
2:22:11 She probably sort of relieved that you weren’t a serial killer was going to take your head off.
2:22:14 That’s right. Oh my God. What is something you believe, even though you can’t prove it?
2:22:20 I believe I’m a good person. What are some of the habits or common practices of journalists that
2:22:29 you dislike? I really dislike laziness. And if you read a phrase or a sentence that’s familiar,
2:22:35 I mean, there are these cliches, these sort of sort of linguistic tropes like the mortars slammed
2:22:40 into the hillside. I just don’t want to read that again. You know, like just say it in an original
2:22:45 way or don’t say it, but you’re wasting everybody’s time, including your own, if you write and rely on
2:22:51 these sort of linguistic tropes. I really dislike that. And also, the point of journalism is the
2:22:57 truth. It’s not, I was talking about this on the phone earlier and, you know, maybe you overheard
2:23:02 me, but the point of journalism is the truth. The point of journalism is not to improve society.
2:23:08 And there are things, there are facts, there are truths that actually
2:23:11 feel regressive. But it doesn’t matter because the point of journalism isn’t to make everything
2:23:18 better. It’s to give people accurate information about how things are. And I think journalists
2:23:23 really confuse those two things. Advocates are what we need for improvement, but not journalists.
2:23:30 Journalists provide information like doctors provide information when they look at your,
2:23:34 the x-ray of your lungs after you smoke for 10 years. Yeah, you need accurate forensics.
2:23:38 That’s right. What do you think your 70-year-old self would give to your current self as advice?
2:23:45 I think I would say to myself, the world is this continually unfolding set of possibilities
2:23:52 and opportunities. And the tricky thing about life is on the one hand, having the courage
2:24:01 to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but to also have the wisdom to stop exploring
2:24:10 when you’ve found something that’s worth sticking around for. I mean, that’s true of a place, of a
2:24:14 person, of a vocation. In balancing those two things, the courage of exploring and the commitment
2:24:22 to staying, it’s very hard to get the ratio, the balance of those two things right. And I think
2:24:28 my 70-year-old self would say, just really be careful that you don’t care on one side or the
2:24:34 other because you have an ill-conceived idea of who you are. It’s this fine line. It’s a tough
2:24:40 balance. Yeah, it is a tough balance. I find it tough personally. Yeah, I mean, yeah, absolutely.
2:24:44 I mean, there’s a lot of unhappy people because they’re struggling to find that balance.
2:24:47 What are the symptoms of knowing that you should pursue a given project? Because you’ve got Navajo
2:24:55 long-distance running. You have the perfect storm. You have quite a bit of terrain that you cover.
2:25:00 How do you know? And I’ll just throw it out there as an example. For me, I find writing so difficult
2:25:09 personally, and I’m so plotting, and I have to go into isolation. It makes me very mentally
2:25:15 unhealthy. I only write a book, certainly, if it’s less painful to write it than to not write it.
2:25:22 Like, you generally manifest itself as a lot of insomnia, in my case. And I’m just like,
2:25:26 okay, this idea that’s been pestering me, I just need to get it out of my head and on the paper,
2:25:30 or I won’t be able to get to sleep. But the insomnia could also be excitement. I’m excited
2:25:34 about the possibilities of something, and I just can’t sleep. That’s usually one of the symptoms
2:25:39 that I might have. I might have a live one. This might be something I can run with. What is it like
2:25:44 for you? I think I’ve only written five books. What was the collection of? I’m not sure who you’re
2:25:50 comparing yourself to. Well, the writers are writing 20, whatever. You can always be insecure,
2:25:56 right? No, and I’ve written… You don’t have to be James Batters. You’re fine.
2:25:59 I’ve really written only four books. One’s a collection of short form journalism. So,
2:26:03 you know, they’re all books that, had I not written them, I would have wished that someone else had,
2:26:07 so I could read it. One of the things I loved about Harari Sapiens is I finished it, and I just
2:26:13 thought, thank God someone wrote that book. Like, the world really needed it. And the books that
2:26:18 I write, maybe I’m flattering myself, but it feels to me like the world needs this book.
2:26:25 And I know that sounds horribly grandiose, but I have to say it’s the feeling I’m looking for
2:26:32 when I’m choosing a topic. I really don’t want to write a book that I’m not sure the world needs.
2:26:37 Jeff, if you look at… I mean, we’re sitting in Silicon Valley. If you look at some of the,
2:26:43 some, probably all of the biggest successes I know personally, they were scratching their own
2:26:48 itch. And it was something they felt needed to exist. Absolutely. If you had one billboard
2:26:56 anywhere and could put anything you want on it, what would you put on it? I think I would put the
2:27:00 word read. Read. It’s the only, I was talking about this recently with some people. You know, we don’t
2:27:07 live in small groups anymore. We evolved to live in groups of 30, 40, 50 people, and you could gather
2:27:12 50 people around and have a communal discussion about how to live, what to do, who you are,
2:27:18 what you want to be. You could do that. We live in a country of 400 million. There’s no more gathering
2:27:24 around the campfire to figure out who we are, how we want to live, what are our values. We can’t do
2:27:29 that anymore, but we still need to. And in some ways, in a country as advanced as ours with nuclear
2:27:36 weapons and everything else is even more important than when we lived in groups of 50. I mean, it’s
2:27:39 vital that we have that conversation. And the only real way, I think the only real way to have,
2:27:44 collectively have that conversation is through books, is the only thing that’s cheap enough,
2:27:49 accessible enough to everybody that contains enough information that can be shared and commonly
2:27:54 understood. It’s the only thing that we can have a group conversation, even in a group of 400 million
2:28:00 people. But if people don’t read, that will never happen. I really feel that it makes books a kind
2:28:08 of sacred object and sacred in the sense that our society, I don’t think will survive without them.
2:28:14 And that to me is, as an atheist, one definition of sacredness is something that humanity needs in
2:28:20 order to survive. Sebastian, this has been so much fun. I could go on and on. Those of you who
2:28:26 don’t have a visual, which is all of you, can’t see the many, many, many pages I’ve printed out and
2:28:31 highlighted and sketched out by hand. But I’m going to tell people where they can find you. And
2:28:38 I’m also going to put this in the show notes, of course, for everyone. But is there anything that
2:28:42 just as a parting comment, you would like my listeners to meditate on, consider, do?
2:28:50 Well, one of the questions I ask in my book is, who would you die for? What ideas would you die for?
2:28:58 The answer to those questions for most of human history would have come very readily to any person’s
2:29:03 mouth. Any Comanche could tell you instantly who they would die for and what they would die for.
2:29:09 And in modern society, it gets more and more complicated. And when you lose the ready answer
2:29:14 to those ancient human questions, you lose a part of yourself. You lose a part of your identity.
2:29:19 And I think what I would ask people is, who would you die for? What would you die for? And what do
2:29:23 you owe your community? And in our case, our communities are a country. What do you owe your
2:29:26 country other than your taxes? Is there anything else you owe all of us? There’s no right answer
2:29:32 or wrong answer, but it’s something that I think everyone should try to ask themselves.
2:29:36 This is a great book, folks. I read a lot. So I have a high bar. I really enjoyed this book. It has
2:29:42 a ton of notes. And next time that we hang out, probably in New York City, and have some wine,
2:29:48 I’ll bring this with me because I have 20, 30 other questions I’d like to ask you. But for
2:29:53 those people who might reflect back on some of your reads and writing and wonder if this is a
2:29:58 book about war, it doesn’t strike me that it is a book about war. It’s a book about human nature
2:30:04 and what we’ve evolved to be and what we are in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
2:30:08 And war just happens to be a very helpful circumstance in which we can find some illumination
2:30:15 into those subjects. But I really enjoyed this book. So I encourage everybody
2:30:20 to check it out. And Sebastian, thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
2:30:23 It’s been a real pleasure talking with you. Thank you.
2:30:26 And everybody listening, as always, you can find links to everything that we discussed
2:30:30 in the show notes. And that includes Sebastian’s website, all the social and whatnot,
2:30:36 and all the various resources that came up. And you can find that at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast,
2:30:43 all spelled out. And as always, and until next time, thank you for listening.
2:30:49 Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet
2:30:55 Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun
2:31:00 before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter,
2:31:04 my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is
2:31:10 basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve found or
2:31:16 discovered or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
2:31:20 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos,
2:31:26 all sorts of tech tricks and so on. They get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast
2:31:32 guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share
2:31:38 them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before
2:31:44 you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to
2:31:49 tim.vlog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.vlog/friday. Drop in your email and you’ll
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2:34:24 clothing spelled V-U-O-R-I, Viori. I’ve been wearing Viori at least one item per day for the last
2:34:32 few months and you can use it for everything. It’s performance apparel but it can be used for
2:34:39 working out, it can be used for going out to dinner, at least in my case. I feel very comfortable
2:34:45 with it. Super comfortable, super stylish and I just want to read something that one of my
2:34:50 employees said. She is an athlete, she is quite technical, although she would never say that.
2:34:56 I asked her if she had ever used or heard of Viori and this was her response. I do love their stuff,
2:35:02 been using them for about a year. I think I found them at REI first for my partner, t-shirts that
2:35:07 are super soft but somehow last as he’s hard on stuff and then I got into the super soft cotton
2:35:12 yoga pants and jogger sweatpants. I live in them and they too have lasted. They’re stylish enough,
2:35:17 I can wear them out and about. The material is just super soft and durable. I just got their
2:35:22 Clementine running shorts for summer and love them. The brand seems pretty popular. Constantly
2:35:26 sold out in closing and I’m abbreviating here but in closing with the exception of when I need
2:35:30 technical outdoor gear they’re the only brand I’ve bought in the last year or so for yoga,
2:35:35 running, loungewear that lasts and that I think look good also. I like the discrete logo. So that
2:35:41 gives you some idea that was not intended for the sponsor read. That was just her response to be a
2:35:47 text. Viori, again spelled B-U-O-R-I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility. You can wear
2:35:54 running, you can wear their stuff training, doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands or in my case again
2:36:00 going out to dinner. It really doesn’t matter what you’re doing. Their clothing is so comfortable
2:36:05 and looks so good and it’s non-offensive. You don’t have a huge brand logo in your face.
2:36:12 You’ll just want to be in them all this time. They’re Men’s Core Short K-O-R-E. The most comfortable
2:36:17 lined athletic short is your one short for every sport. I’ve been using it for kettlebell swings,
2:36:21 for runs, you name it. The Banks Short, this is their go-to-land to see short is the ultimate
2:36:28 versatility. It’s made from recycled plastic bottles and what I’m wearing right now,
2:36:32 which I had to pick one to recommend to folks out there or at least to men out there, is the
2:36:38 Ponto Performance Pant. You’ll find these at the link I’m going to give you guys. You can check
2:36:42 out what I’m talking about, but I’m wearing them right now. They’re thin performance sweat pants,
2:36:48 but that doesn’t do them justice. You got to check it out. P-O-N-T-O, Ponto Performance Pant.
2:36:52 For you ladies, the Women’s Performance Jogger is the softest jogger you’ll ever own. Viori
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2:37:36 B-U-O-R-I, clothing.com/Tim and discover the versatility of Viori clothing.
This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #107 “The Scariest Navy SEAL Imaginable… And What He Taught Me” and episode #161 “Lessons from War, Tribal Societies, and a Non-Fiction Life (Sebastian Junger).”
Please enjoy!
Sponsors:
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Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off)
Timestamps:
[00:00] Start
[06:27] Notes about this supercombo format.
[07:30] Enter Jocko Willink.
[07:59] What separates good leaders from mediocre or bad leaders?
[10:01] Identifying good leadership candidates.
[11:46] Teaching the skill of detachment.
[16:58] Jocko’s grueling workout that made platoons “tap out.”
[18:46] Jocko’s morning rituals.
[20:57] People Jocko associates with success.
[23:12] Recommended reading.
[26:57] How does discipline equal freedom?
[31:50] Enter Sebastian Junger.
[32:21] Thomas Paine and Stoic philosophy.
[34:25] The “chainsaw story” and its impact on Sebastian’s writing career.
[38:27] Athleticism and long distance running.
[39:00] Developing a writing style.
[40:46] Sebastian’s attraction to journalism.
[46:22] Sebastian’s writing style and the importance of structure.
[55:51] Commencement speech advice for high school graduates.
[59:09] Sebastian’s inspiration to visit war-torn countries.
[1:01:14] Explanation of “skin walkers.”
[1:05:00] Striving for political correctness in gender.
[1:11:43] The Iroquois’ peace process and its relevance to modern politics.
[1:19:15] Psychiatric effects of war.
[1:22:07] Bringing primitive, war-time cohesion into modern society.
[1:27:28] PTSD, the C-Train, and returning to New York City after war.
[1:32:24] The lonely nature of society.
[1:36:24] PTSD prevalence in elite special forces units vs. support units.
[1:41:30] How to “support the troops.”
[1:47:47] How a Viking helmet started — and stopped — a barfight in Spain.
[1:53:16] Developing male closeness while decreasing violence.
[1:59:05] Veterans becoming victims in society after returning from war.
[2:03:27] Photography/videography habits and Sebastian’s start as a war reporter.
[2:07:45] Tim Hetherington’s story and Sebastian’s decision to stop war reporting.
[2:11:02] Sebastian’s future writing plans.
[2:12:04] One thing anyone can do for a military veteran.
[2:16:14] Who comes to mind when Sebastian hears the word “successful?”
[2:16:46] Defining courage.
[2:16:52] Most gifted books.
[2:17:46] What close friends say Sebastian is exceptionally good at.
[2:18:09] Combining three writers to create the ultimate writer.
[2:18:47] Advice to Sebastian’s younger self.
[2:20:07] Recent purchase with the most positive impact on Sebastian’s life.
[2:22:16] Something Sebastian believes, despite being unable to prove it.
[2:22:23] Disliked habits and common practices of journalists.
[2:23:39] Advice from Sebastian’s 70-year-old self to his current self.
[2:24:48] Knowing when to write a book.
[2:26:53] Sebastian’s billboard.
[2:28:22] Final requests for the audience and parting thoughts.
*
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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.
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