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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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0:00:00 This episode is brought to you by 8 Sleep.
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0:04:08 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:04:14 Can I ask you a personal question?
0:04:16 No, I would have seen it in a perfect time.
0:04:18 What if I did the opposite?
0:04:20 I’m a cyber-nerdy organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton.
0:04:23 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs.
0:04:34 This is Tim Ferriss.
0:04:35 Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with
0:04:39 world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books,
0:04:44 and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.
0:04:48 This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary,
0:04:54 which is insane to think about, and past one billion downloads.
0:04:58 To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites
0:05:03 from more than 700 episodes over the last decade.
0:05:06 I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes.
0:05:10 And internally, we’ve been calling these the super combo episodes
0:05:14 because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks,
0:05:19 but to also introduce you to lesser-known people I consider stars.
0:05:24 These are people who have transformed my life,
0:05:26 and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.
0:05:29 Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.
0:05:34 Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together.
0:05:39 And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.log/combo.
0:05:46 And now, without further ado, please enjoy, and thank you for listening.
0:05:51 First up, Dr. Jane Goodall, English primatologist and anthropologist,
0:05:57 considered the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees,
0:06:00 and founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots and Shoots program,
0:06:05 building a better tomorrow by empowering young people
0:06:09 to affect positive change in their communities.
0:06:11 You can find Dr. Goodall on Twitter and Instagram @janegoodallinst.
0:06:19 I would love just to spend a moment, and we don’t have to spend a lot of time on this,
0:06:23 but discussing Louis Leakey.
0:06:26 And I’ve read various accounts of how you connected with him,
0:06:31 but I’d like to hear it directly from you.
0:06:34 And perhaps you could describe what it was that he saw in you,
0:06:37 but that initial contact and how that came to be is of great interest to me.
0:06:41 So if you could speak to that, I would appreciate it.
0:06:44 Okay, well, I’d been staying with my friend for about, I suppose, a couple of months.
0:06:50 And somebody said to me at a party,
0:06:53 if you’re interested in animals, you really should meet Louis Leakey.
0:06:57 He was curator at that time of the Natural History Museum,
0:07:01 but of course, he’s best known as a very eminent paleontologist.
0:07:06 He spent his life with his second wife, Mary Leakey,
0:07:10 searching for the fossils of Stone Age ancestors across Africa.
0:07:15 I was very shy back then that I rang the museum and said,
0:07:20 I’d love to make an appointment to meet Dr. Leakey.
0:07:24 And a boy said, I’m Leakey, what do you want?
0:07:26 But anyway, you know, I was so passionate about animals.
0:07:30 Anyway, I went to see him and he took me all around.
0:07:33 He asked me many questions about the stuffed animals that were there.
0:07:38 And I think he was impressed that because I’d read everything I could about Africa,
0:07:43 I could answer so many of his questions.
0:07:46 Well, I mentioned earlier that boring secretarial course that I did.
0:07:51 Two days before I met Leakey, his secretary had suddenly quit.
0:07:56 He needed a secretary, and there I was.
0:07:59 We never know in this life.
0:08:00 So I’m suddenly surrounded by people who can answer all my questions
0:08:06 about the mammals and the birds and the reptiles, the amphibians,
0:08:10 the insects, the plants, it was heaven.
0:08:13 Oh, you asked Leakey, what did he see in me?
0:08:16 He had a feeling that women made better observers.
0:08:20 He thought they were more patient.
0:08:22 He also wanted somebody to go and study chimpanzees
0:08:28 because of his interest in human evolution.
0:08:31 So the fossils of early man that he was uncovering
0:08:35 can tell a lot from our fossil.
0:08:37 But whether the creature walked upright and muscle attachments,
0:08:41 the wear of the tooth shows you roughly the kind of diet,
0:08:45 but behavior doesn’t fossilize.
0:08:47 So he reckoned there was an ape-like, human-like common ancestor
0:08:52 about six million years ago, just now generally accepted.
0:08:56 And that he thought, well, if Jane finds behavior in chimps and humans today
0:09:02 that is similar or the same, maybe it came directly from the common ancestor
0:09:09 and has been with us through our long separate evolutionary journeys,
0:09:13 in which case he could have a better way of imagining
0:09:16 how his early humans used to behave.
0:09:19 So he wanted a mind uncluttered by the reductionist thinking
0:09:26 of the animal behavior people at the time.
0:09:29 It was a very new science.
0:09:31 They were anxious to make it a hard science, which it shouldn’t be.
0:09:35 And so the fact I hadn’t been to college was a plus,
0:09:38 and the fact that I was a woman was a plus.
0:09:41 So I would just fish it nucky.
0:09:43 He seems to have picked the winning lottery ticket,
0:09:46 or at least a very formidable combination of traits.
0:09:51 And if we take that mention of patience or his belief
0:09:55 that in part women make better observers because of more patience,
0:10:00 if we flash forward then to you landing in Gombe,
0:10:06 Stream National Park, Tanzania, if I’m getting the pronunciation correct,
0:10:09 I was watching the first Nat Geo,
0:10:12 or maybe not the first, but one of the more recent Nat Geo
0:10:15 documentaries about you titled Jane.
0:10:18 And in that, and also in your writing,
0:10:21 I believe it took something like five months of constant effort
0:10:27 and having chimpanzees flee from your presence
0:10:32 to finally be what we might call accepted.
0:10:36 And I have two questions related to that.
0:10:38 The first is, what do you think made the difference?
0:10:43 Why did they go from fleeing to accepting?
0:10:45 And second is, when you first really had the opportunity
0:10:50 to look deeply into a chimpanzee’s eyes,
0:10:54 what did you see, and just as importantly, what did you feel?
0:10:57 Well, the acceptance in the movie,
0:11:00 it sort of looked as though they suddenly accepted me.
0:11:03 It wasn’t like that.
0:11:04 It was very gradual.
0:11:05 And it was partly thanks to this one male
0:11:08 who began to lose his fear much ahead of the others.
0:11:12 I called him David Greybeard because he had a lovely white beard.
0:11:15 And because he began to let me get closer and closer,
0:11:21 I think if I came to a group in the forest and he was with that group,
0:11:26 because they separate into separate small groups and sometimes alone,
0:11:31 but if he was there, then the others were ready to run,
0:11:34 but he was sitting calmly.
0:11:35 And I suppose that made them feel, well,
0:11:38 she can’t be so dangerous after all.
0:11:40 So gradually I could get closer.
0:11:43 And the first time I came close to a group that didn’t run away,
0:11:48 I think was one of the proudest moments of my life.
0:11:51 You know, it made it just in time for the six months money ran out.
0:11:55 So the fact that I’d seen David Greybeard use and make tools to pitch the termites
0:12:02 thought to be something only humans were capable of.
0:12:06 That’s what brought the geographic in right at the beginning.
0:12:09 Six months after the study began, they agreed to go on funding it.
0:12:14 Was David Greybeard the first chimpanzee that you were able to
0:12:20 get close enough to to sort of connect eye to eye with?
0:12:24 Definitely.
0:12:26 What did you see and feel when you had that opportunity?
0:12:29 Well, I saw that I was looking to the eyes of a thinking feeling being.
0:12:35 And it was not so surprising as you might think,
0:12:40 because I’d always felt that animals were thinking feeling beings.
0:12:46 But with a chimpanzee, they’re so like us, behaviorally and biologically,
0:12:52 that it’s not like looking at another human.
0:12:56 It’s different.
0:12:56 And I can’t explain how it’s different.
0:12:59 But it was a very magical moment because he looked back.
0:13:04 That was the thing.
0:13:04 He didn’t run.
0:13:06 He just sat there and looked back at me.
0:13:09 I would love to ask questions about what we might learn and what perhaps you’ve learned
0:13:18 about human nature or even questions that have been raised in your
0:13:22 interactions and observations of chimpanzees.
0:13:25 And you mentioned it briefly, but it’s hard to overstate just how incredible
0:13:33 and shocking and world-shattering for many people.
0:13:37 It was that you observed chimpanzees not just using tools,
0:13:42 but constructing tools for, in this case, consuming termites.
0:13:47 I mean, it made news around the world.
0:13:50 You had many other observations.
0:13:52 I believe also that the belief that chimpanzees were purely vegetarians.
0:13:56 Also, you observed not to be the case with their consumption of other primates, exactly.
0:14:03 You noted, and I know this was a real, in some eyes, a faux pas at the time,
0:14:10 real personalities.
0:14:12 And you might have been accused of anthropomorphism and all of these things.
0:14:14 But you observed different personalities in different chimpanzees.
0:14:20 And I thought perhaps we could just start with a story.
0:14:25 And that is the story of Old Man and Mark Cusano, if I’m getting the pronunciation right.
0:14:31 And then I have questions about a few other chimpanzees you personally
0:14:35 had quite a bit of interaction with.
0:14:37 Mark Cusano and Old Man.
0:14:40 So it’s on an island in Lyon Country, Safari in Florida.
0:14:44 And Old Man had been in a medical research lab.
0:14:50 He’d been captured from the wild.
0:14:52 His mother was shot.
0:14:53 And he was called Old Man because an infant chimp who’s distressed and frightened,
0:14:59 they have wrinkled faces and they huddle and they don’t look very old.
0:15:03 And he was lucky.
0:15:05 It was about 12.
0:15:07 And for some reason, he was now more used to the lab.
0:15:11 And he was put on an island with three females.
0:15:14 Two of them from medical research, one from a searches.
0:15:18 And Mark Cusano was employed to look after them.
0:15:22 And he was told, don’t go anywhere near them.
0:15:24 They’re vicious.
0:15:25 They hate people.
0:15:26 They might stronger than you.
0:15:27 They’ll kill you.
0:15:28 So he threw food from his little paddle boat onto the island
0:15:33 and began watching the man.
0:15:36 The baby was born.
0:15:37 So Old Man was the father.
0:15:39 And he felt, you know, these are such amazing beings.
0:15:43 I must have some kind of relationship with them, if I’m to look after them.
0:15:47 So he began going closer and closer.
0:15:50 And one day he held out a banana in his hand.
0:15:53 When Old Man took it, he said, I know how you felt when David took a banana from you.
0:15:58 One day he went onto the island.
0:16:02 One day he groomed Old Man.
0:16:03 One day they played an Old Man laugh.
0:16:09 And they became basically, it was a friendship.
0:16:14 And then one day Mark slipped into being reigning, fell flat on his face.
0:16:20 Unfortunately, frightened this infant who was another Old Man’s life.
0:16:26 Old Man needs to protect him and carry him and share food.
0:16:29 Well, the mother, hearing her child scream, raced and attacked Mark, biting into his neck.
0:16:36 The other two females to support her ran in one bit his wrist, one bit his leg.
0:16:42 And Mark thought, well, how am I going to get away from them?
0:16:45 Because they’re much stronger than us.
0:16:47 He looked up.
0:16:48 He saw Old Man thundering across the island with a furious scull on his face.
0:16:53 And he thought his time had come to die and come to protect his precious infant.
0:16:59 But what Old Man did was to pull those three screaming, rowed females off Mark
0:17:06 and keep them away while Mark dragged himself to safety.
0:17:10 And I met Mark when he came out of hospital.
0:17:12 He said, no question, Old Man saved my life.
0:17:16 And so, you know, I always think if a chimpanzee who’s been abused by people
0:17:22 can reach out to help a human friend in time of need,
0:17:25 then surely we, with our greater capacity for compassion,
0:17:30 can do the same to the chimpanzees in that time of need.
0:17:34 Thank you for telling that story. To what extent, if we take an example
0:17:40 from your personal experience, and I know very little about Frodo,
0:17:45 but Frodo seems to have been amongst the chimpanzees you had exposure to,
0:17:51 one of the more aggressive, but I’d love to hear you speak to this.
0:17:56 And how would you explain the variants among chimpanzees?
0:18:01 Was it also in appear to be innate?
0:18:04 Did it seem to stem from some type of trauma?
0:18:06 How did you think about that and perhaps Frodo specifically?
0:18:11 Well, they’re all different.
0:18:12 Some are much more aggressive than others, just like we are.
0:18:16 And Frodo was spoiled.
0:18:19 He was a spoiled brat.
0:18:21 His mother was the highest ranking female at the time, pee-pee.
0:18:27 He had one older brother who always came to his defense
0:18:31 as did pee-pee, and so he always got his own way.
0:18:34 And he was a real bully.
0:18:37 So it was two young ones playing, same age as him perhaps,
0:18:42 and he came to join them.
0:18:44 They would stop playing immediately because they knew if he entered the game,
0:18:48 he’d suddenly become rough and cause one of them to be hurt.
0:18:52 So it wasn’t just humans field assistants,
0:18:56 and especially me that he targeted with his displays, hitting over, dragging.
0:19:02 I got it worst of all, I was stamped upon them.
0:19:05 But he was not trying really to hurt me.
0:19:08 He was trying to assert his dominance.
0:19:10 And I guess they don’t realize quite how strong they are.
0:19:14 I mean, if he wanted to kill me, I wouldn’t be speaking to you now, that’s for sure.
0:19:19 Is the assertion of dominance, and I don’t know how much of this is conscious,
0:19:24 and I don’t know how one would even know.
0:19:26 But is that a conscious or potentially conscious political maneuver
0:19:34 to get better access to resources and so on?
0:19:36 Or is it really just a conditioned behavior based on, as you said, being spoiled,
0:19:42 and that just being some type of primitive drive that they have, and perhaps even we have?
0:19:49 No, because Frodo’s brother, before him, became the top-ranking male,
0:19:54 and Freud had a very different character, he was reflective.
0:19:58 He became dominant not through aggression, but through being smart.
0:20:03 Some of the males get to the top by sheer aggression, by bullying,
0:20:07 by swaggering about, waving their arms.
0:20:10 They remind me so much of some human politicians, it’s not true.
0:20:14 But there are other males who get to the top by skillfully forming alliances,
0:20:21 and they only tackle a higher-ranking male when their ally is there to support them.
0:20:26 And then there are some who just persist.
0:20:29 They persist in charging towards groups of superior males who are grooming each other,
0:20:35 startling them so that they run away.
0:20:37 And in the end, this was goblin, and in the end, I think the other male thought,
0:20:41 “Well, he’s just going to go on doing this. All right, let’s just let him get to the top.
0:20:46 We don’t care anymore.” That’s how it seemed.
0:20:49 And he ran ten years, and he was small, and he wasn’t very aggressive at all.
0:20:55 I recall a few years ago speaking with a friend of mine, who I consider to be a good father,
0:21:01 a good parent, and I asked him what advice he would have for someone like me,
0:21:05 considering having children. I have none of my own yet. And his advice, he had a number of
0:21:13 pieces of advice, but his first was, “Teach your children to be optimists.”
0:21:18 And it seemed like a precursor or a prerequisite for so many other things.
0:21:25 And I’m looking at a time article, time magazine article, that is, that you wrote in 2002.
0:21:31 And I just want to read one paragraph and then ask you to elaborate or speak to it.
0:21:38 Here’s the paragraph. “The greatest danger to our future is apathy.
0:21:41 We cannot expect those living in poverty and ignorance to worry about saving the world.
0:21:45 For those of us able to read this magazine, and my side note or listen to this podcast,
0:21:51 it is different. We can do something to preserve our planet.
0:21:54 You may be overcome, however, by feelings of helplessness.
0:21:56 You’re just one person in a world of six billion. How can your actions make a difference?
0:22:01 Best you say to leave it to decision makers, and so you do nothing.
0:22:05 Can we overcome apathy? Yes, but only if we have hope.”
0:22:08 And I’d love to hear you speak to that and also just to how you cultivate hope,
0:22:14 whether that’s in yourself or the people you speak to.
0:22:16 Well, you know, I have my reasons for hope, which I’m always sharing with people.
0:22:21 But this thing of people feeling helpless because they don’t know what to do,
0:22:27 this message of our youth programs that every individual makes a difference.
0:22:32 And, you know, if it’s just you picking up trash, if it’s just you saving water,
0:22:39 then it wouldn’t make slightest bit of difference.
0:22:43 But because people are becoming more aware all around the world,
0:22:47 then there’s not just you, but thousands, millions of people picking up trash and saving water.
0:22:55 So the message again being think about the consequences of the small choices you make every
0:23:01 day. Where do you eat? Where did it come from? Did it harm the environment?
0:23:06 Was it cruel to animals like the intensive farming?
0:23:09 Is it cheap because of child slave labor somewhere?
0:23:12 Make ethical choices. And because millions of people are making ethical choices,
0:23:17 we’re moving in the right direction. All of our young people, you know,
0:23:22 they’re influencing their parents and their grandparents. I know that because the parents
0:23:26 tell me. So, you know, my reasons for hope number one is the youth, as I’ve said,
0:23:32 because they’re just so inspiring. And secondly, to start by saying it’s very
0:23:39 bizarre that what makes us more different from chimps and other animals is this explosive
0:23:46 development of our intellect. I mean, look at what’s happening now with just social media.
0:23:51 It’s one example. You and I talking went far apart. We’re reaching millions of people. I mean,
0:23:57 it’s quite amazing, isn’t it? When you think about it. So how art that this most intellectual
0:24:02 creature is destroying its only home? So there seems to be this disconnect between the clever
0:24:09 brain and the human heart, which is love and compassion. And, you know, we’re thinking about
0:24:15 how does this help me now, instead of how does it affect future generations? So now we’re beginning
0:24:23 to use our brains or scientists to come up with more and more sophisticated technology
0:24:29 that will help us live in more harmony with the natural well. If governments would sponsor
0:24:37 clean green energy rather than that, succumbing to their ties with the oil and gas industry,
0:24:44 we could be more or less off the grid in many countries today. China and India are moving in
0:24:50 that direction rapidly and the UAE as well. But each one of us can use our brains to think about
0:24:57 the environmental footprint we make each day. And then there’s the resilience of nature. I tell
0:25:03 people stories about areas that were totally destroyed, rivers, lakes. Lake Erie was so polluted
0:25:11 that it caught fire. It was so polluted. And now there’s fish swimming in it because people cared.
0:25:18 Animals on the brink of extinction are being given another chance. We just have to save the
0:25:24 habitats. We have to change the mindset of those companies that want to destroy tourists to make
0:25:32 money out of wood or destroy forests to get minerals out of the ground to make more money.
0:25:40 But then we’ve got to solve poverty because as you quoted earlier, if you’re really poor,
0:25:48 what can you do except cut the last tree down because you’re desperate to grow food,
0:25:52 to feed your family, eat the cheapest junk food because you’ve got to do it to live.
0:25:57 So we have to solve poverty and the unsustainable lifestyle of the rest of us. But my last reason
0:26:04 to hunk is this indomitable human spirit, the people who tackle what seems impossible
0:26:11 and won’t give up. And they may die as a result of their conviction, but in the end they succeed.
0:26:18 You also seem to be, aside from an expert storyteller, very good at using imagery or
0:26:28 symbols, and sometimes stories themselves are symbols. But could you describe Mr. H? Who is
0:26:35 Mr. H? Mr. H was given to me 28 years ago by a man called Gary Horn, which is why he’s Mr. H.
0:26:45 Gary went blind when he was 21, decided to become a magician. Everybody said,
0:26:51 “But Gary, you can’t be a magician if you’re blind.” He does shows for children. I’ve watched him
0:26:58 three or four times now. And of course he sets his props up ahead of time. Children don’t know
0:27:05 he’s blind and at the end he’ll tell them and he’ll say something might go wrong in your life,
0:27:11 you can’t tell. If it does, don’t give up the small ways away forward. And he does scuba diving,
0:27:18 cross country skiing, skydiving. But I think most amazing, he’s taught himself to paint.
0:27:24 And when he gave me Mr. H, he thought he was giving me a stuffed chimp. But Mr. H has a tail
0:27:31 and I made him hold the tail. He said, “Never mind, take him with you and you know I’m with you in
0:27:37 spirit.” So he’s one of those examples of the indomitable human spirit doing skydiving when
0:27:45 you’re blind. Teaching yourself to paint. And there’s a picture in this, he’s done a little
0:27:50 book called Blind Artist, which you can only get on Amazon. And there’s a portrait of Mr. H.
0:27:58 He’s never seen him. He’s only felt him. And it’s unbelievable. And Mr. H, if I’m not mistaken,
0:28:07 has been many places with you. I don’t know if you still have Mr. H, but…
0:28:13 Me, do I have? He’s in this room with me. If I forget to take him to a lecture,
0:28:20 sure to be a child who bursts into tears. I wanted to touch Mr. H because I tell them the
0:28:24 inspiration rubs off. You said that your friend told you to teach your children to be optimistic.
0:28:30 It’s really, you can’t teach them that. But you can tell stories and tell stories about people
0:28:39 and encourage them and support them. I mean, so many parents have set views on
0:28:44 what they want their child to be. And the lesson they get from your mother is nobody was thinking
0:28:50 about going to Africa and living with animals when I wanted to. Shipped a few explorers, you know,
0:28:56 wanted to shoot them and put them in museums. But when everybody laughed at me and said,
0:29:02 “I’d never get there. I was just a girl. There was a war. We didn’t have money.”
0:29:06 Mom said, “If you really want something like this, you’re going to have to work really,
0:29:10 really hard. But take advantage of every opportunity. And if you don’t give up,
0:29:16 you’ll find a way to do that or something else that you really, really want to do.”
0:29:21 That wisdom I take and share with young people everywhere, especially in disadvantaged communities.
0:29:29 And I wish mom knew how many people have said, “Jane, thank you. You taught me that because you
0:29:35 did it, I can do it too.” I’d be curious to ask if you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking,
0:29:42 that could get a message out to billions of people. It could be a word, a phrase, a question,
0:29:51 an image, really anything. What might you put on that billboard?
0:29:58 Remember that you make a difference every single day.
0:30:02 Perfect. That could not be more perfect.
0:30:06 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:31:16 by Wealthfront. And now, Cal Fussman, New York Times bestselling author, writer at large at Esquire,
0:31:27 international speaker, and host of the Big Questions with Cal Fussman podcast.
0:31:32 Find Cal on Twitter and Instagram @CalFussman. Cal, welcome to the show.
0:31:39 Thank you. I have arrived. You have arrived. And I’m so excited to have you here because we’ve
0:31:45 gotten to know each other a bit over the last however many months. And it’s been such a joy
0:31:51 because as I’ve tried to delve into this craft of asking questions and crafting conversation,
0:31:57 I’ve realized there’s a lot to it. And I’ve been a fan of your work for so many years.
0:32:04 And the subtleties are just so powerful. And I thought that this time we could turn the tables
0:32:11 and I could interrogate you in public. I love asking you questions about your process. And
0:32:17 you’ve been so generous with your time in terms of reviewing some of my episodes,
0:32:21 providing feedback. So first and foremost, thank you for your work and for all of the help.
0:32:26 I’m delighted. You’re good. You’re good. I think I have a lot of room to improve. And so this is
0:32:35 one of these episodes where I’m a little self-conscious because I know that I have a very
0:32:42 unusual, memento-like, sometimes non-chronological approach to interviews. And for that, I’ll
0:32:51 apologize in advance. But we can do a post-game analysis afterwards. So perhaps we could just
0:32:58 start with something that we were discussing before we hit record. So we were talking about
0:33:02 the live event that was here in LA at the Troubadour. And we were doing a bit of analysis,
0:33:08 what went well, what didn’t go as well as planned, and so on. And I mentioned that I suppose due to
0:33:14 also some insecurities of a sort that I try to, when I do these rare live events, if it’s say,
0:33:20 two hours long, I’ll stay for an additional two or three hours and do Q&A or something like that.
0:33:25 And you said that’s straight out of Quincy Jones’ book. And so I know this is an unusual place
0:33:29 to start, but maybe you could just provide that anecdote because it seems like you have an endless
0:33:34 true of these types of anecdotes. But why Quincy Jones? Quincy Jones will go to a book signing.
0:33:40 There will be long lines of people. And he will not sign his name and move them on next. He will
0:33:50 stop, ask everyone who they are, engage in a conversation, and then write a personal note
0:33:59 in his book to them. And the line may be around the block, he’ll be there till three in the morning,
0:34:05 keeping the people of Barnes & Noble open, because he wants to make it a joyous experience
0:34:13 for everybody. So bravo, you’ve followed the master.
0:34:16 Inadvertently. This story, of course, if we rewind the clock, begins at the beginning. And
0:34:23 where did you grow up? I actually am ashamed to admit I don’t know the childhood background.
0:34:29 Where did you grow up? I’m born in Brooklyn and moved to Yonkers, New York, where I did
0:34:38 second grade and third grade. And that’s where I had, when I think back on it, like a pivotal moment
0:34:48 asking questions. Because that time, second grade, was the time that I was sitting in Ms. Jaffe’s
0:34:56 classroom, and she came into the room, she was out for some reason. When she came in,
0:35:03 you could look at her and know something just happened that I don’t know, but it’s different
0:35:13 from anything I’ve ever seen before. And this was November 1963. And it was Ms. Jaffe who told the
0:35:22 class that President Kennedy had been shot. And so we all got sent home, found out that he had died.
0:35:32 And I really would love to see myself on videotape, like that night, because I knew, man, something
0:35:45 is going on here. They explained to me that Lyndon Johnson was a vice president, and he was now
0:35:51 going to become the new president. And I’m thinking, man, what must it be like to be that guy? What is
0:36:01 he feeling? Here he was. I know he probably wanted to be the president, but he couldn’t be the president.
0:36:08 And then he was a vice president, and now the president gets killed, and he gets to be the
0:36:13 president. So I picked up a piece of paper and a pencil, and I just wrote to Lyndon Johnson.
0:36:20 You wrote a letter to Lyndon Johnson. I wrote a letter to Lyndon Johnson and said,
0:36:24 “What does it feel like?” And about six months later, I got a letter back.
0:36:31 That’s incredible. And it was from his personal secretary, Juanita D. Roberts. And the cool thing
0:36:37 about it was, the first sentence was, “Thank you for the friendly thought in writing.” So I don’t
0:36:43 know what I wrote him, but somehow I must have tried to make him feel comfortable that this question
0:36:50 was coming. And then the second question was, “In answer to your query.” And what that said was,
0:37:01 she was treating me like I was legit. Yeah. You know, I had just turned seven.
0:37:06 Donified adult. Exactly. And you know, when you did the interview with Ed Norton, he talked about
0:37:13 having a mentor in high school who treated him like an adult. That’s right.
0:37:20 And that is what that letter felt like to me. And only now, when people are starting to ask me
0:37:28 questions, did this come to me. But that’s when I realized that asking questions is kind of natural
0:37:36 for me. So that was in second grade. Second grade. Now, I have to ask, when you wrote the letter,
0:37:41 something came back to second grade, and was it written on paper that had the dotted line
0:37:47 in between the intact lines for the lowercase letters? Do you recall the kind of paper it was
0:37:54 on? I don’t know. It’s probably on loose leaf paper if I was making a guess. I wish, you know,
0:37:59 I was talking to the historian, Robert Caro, who wrote volumes about Lyndon Johnson.
0:38:05 Also wrote The Power Broker. Am I right? That’s right. Incredible book. Exactly.
0:38:09 And here, this guy has spent decades knowing everything about Lyndon Johnson as possible.
0:38:17 And I’m telling him this story, and he’s like getting goosebumps when I say, Juanita D. Roberts,
0:38:23 you got a letter from Juanita D. Roberts. And he started asking me all these questions about
0:38:32 the letter and where it could be and how I sent it. And I realized as he was doing it, yeah,
0:38:39 he was made to be a historian. Nobody else in the world would have gotten that high over the words
0:38:49 Juanita D. Roberts. But some people are just born with the proclivity to do certain things.
0:38:55 What do you think, even if it’s God-given talent, what makes you or gives you a gift for
0:39:03 questions? I think part of that has to do with the evolution as an interviewer, as a journalist,
0:39:11 because as we talk it through, you’ll see that I interviewed differently when I was, say, 18
0:39:21 than when I was 24, and differently in my 40s than I was when I was 25. So it really is like
0:39:31 a lifelong voyage of learning about questions and reactions. It’s only when I started to think
0:39:38 back on that first letter that I realized, okay, this is, I guess it would sort of be like
0:39:44 being a basketball player, and you know that you’re born with big hands. If I go up for a dunk,
0:39:52 I can grip the ball with one hand. Carmelo Anthony can’t. It’s like a big secret. He can’t get his
0:39:58 hands around the basketball. He’s great, but some people are just born with big hands,
0:40:05 some people don’t have big hands. And I’m only now starting to realize, okay, I was kind of born
0:40:14 to do this. Did your parents facilitate that and cultivate that in any way, or was it not,
0:40:22 it was a nature more than nurture in the household? Maybe they did in that my dad loved
0:40:30 sports. You know, I grew up in the 60s at a time where Muhammad Ali came into play. He was my
0:40:38 childhood hero, and in some sense, that was the start of it, because he was more than my hero
0:40:47 just because he was the heavyweight champ of the world. And he could dance and make sure nobody
0:40:54 ever hit him. And then when he wanted to hit you, he could hit you 16 times before you even blinked.
0:41:00 And it was more than the fact that he could make predictions with poetry and make you always laugh.
0:41:08 His actions made you ask questions. He would take his Olympic gold medal and throw it in the
0:41:17 Ohio River. And it would make you wonder, hold it, how is it that a black guy can go when a gold
0:41:26 medal in Australia and come back after representing his country and not be able to sit at a lunchroom
0:41:35 counter at a Woolworths next to white people? He would defy the government and refuse draft
0:41:43 injunction, wouldn’t go into the army, and basically say, hey, I ain’t got nothing against
0:41:49 no Viet Cong. And he would make you think, hey, what is going on over there in Vietnam?
0:41:56 So that was a huge, huge part of my childhood. Did you have any particular career aspiration?
0:42:05 What do you want to be when you were a kid, say, from second grade onward? Were there any particular
0:42:10 professions that you knew you wanted to go after? Two things. I wanted to see my face
0:42:17 over a column in a big city newspaper, and I wanted to write a magazine story about Muhammad Ali.
0:42:26 Wow, very prescient. No, I knew what I wanted to do. Only later, after I’d done it so quickly,
0:42:37 did I realize, what am I going to do now, which we can get to.
0:42:42 So you mentioned 18 and 24, so two very specific ages. Take me to, say, 18 and then 24,
0:42:50 and contrast your two styles. But if you could tell us where you were at those two points also.
0:42:57 Sure. So when I grew up, I grew up thinking interview was Meet the Press. I grew up thinking it was
0:43:03 what happened in a locker room after a sporting event. So I knew, in order to achieve my dreams,
0:43:10 I need to go to journalism school. I asked around and found out University of Missouri had one of
0:43:18 the best. So that’s where I went. And I learned to ask who, what, when, where, and why, and went
0:43:27 through the whole journalism cycle. This was also an interesting time. It was a time of Watergate.
0:43:33 So journalists were seen at the highest point that maybe they’ve ever been. It was really
0:43:42 cool to be a journalist. A journalist actually brought down the president when they caught him
0:43:48 lying. So it was a great time. And I went into sports. So basically, after I graduated, four months
0:43:57 after I graduated, I was sitting ringside when Muhammad Ali won the heavyweight championship
0:44:02 for the third time. A year after that, if you lived in St. Louis and you opened the post-dispatch
0:44:07 sports section, you saw my face over a column. And a year after that, I went to the big time,
0:44:15 New York, an amazing magazine called Inside Sports got started up. How old were you at the time?
0:44:21 I was 22 by then. And basically, this magazine was really unique. It was set up in the day that
0:44:32 Sports Illustrated was as big as it gets. And it was set up to compete with Sports Illustrated.
0:44:38 And it brought in all these great writers. And so I’d be going to the bar at night and sitting
0:44:45 next to Hunter Thompson, the Gonzo journalist would be throwing back shots. The next morning,
0:44:50 I’d be getting up and going on a plane to Pittsburgh. Wait, hold on one second. You did
0:44:55 shots with Hunter Thompson? Yeah, yeah. Okay, we’re going to come back to that. Please continue.
0:45:00 Oh, man. So this magazine attracted all these writers. And the guy who started it was a guy
0:45:10 named Johnny Walsh, who went on to start Sports Center for ESPN. So he just had one of the most
0:45:19 amazing things I’d ever seen at the time. I didn’t really even know what a Rolodex was.
0:45:24 And I walked into Inside Sports for the first time. It was a Friday afternoon. And I called him
0:45:33 up. And I said, Hey, like, if I come into New York to work, I’m not asking for a job, just
0:45:42 make sure I don’t starve. And he says, Come on in. So I showed the office at like four o’clock.
0:45:48 And there was two guys with a dolly stacked with beer.
0:45:55 A case after case of beer. And I got in the elevator right behind the dolly. They hit the same
0:46:04 floor number that I needed to go to. And they just rolled it out into the offices of Inside
0:46:10 Sports. And I said, This is where I need to be. And this magazine attracted guys like David
0:46:18 Halberstam, who was a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, the best of the best. And basically,
0:46:24 I got to sit next to all the miles. Only a kid. I was 22. And every night, everybody would go
0:46:30 across the street to a bar called the Cowboy. Tony the bartender was behind the bar. And
0:46:37 at the time, I had like I had no money. So they would put out these little hors d’oeuvres
0:46:42 for people that that was like where my dinner would be if the guys would expense accounts
0:46:49 weren’t going out later, the mixed nuts and olives. That was their happy Maraschino cherries.
0:46:54 But it was great because you’re sitting next to Frank de Ford, who was like the big sports
0:47:00 writer of his day. Guy named Gary Smith came to work there. He was a national magazine award
0:47:06 winner for many, many years. And it was just a blast. It was the best time. Sounds incredible.
0:47:15 And then like a lot of artistic successes, it was not a commercial success. And like a lot of
0:47:22 startups, it went belly up. Sounds like the Paris Review and many, many others. There you go.
0:47:26 And so here I am in New York. And basically, I’ve now achieved everything I set out to achieve
0:47:34 when I was a kid. And I’m looking around saying, what am I going to do now? Where am I going to go?
0:47:40 I had no idea. Inside sports was not a job. It was an experience. It was an event every evening.
0:47:49 Who was coming tonight? And I didn’t know what to do. So I called up my mom and dad.
0:47:54 And I said, you know, I think I’m going to take some time off and travel.
0:48:00 My mom, who’s always really supportive, said, oh, Cal, that’s wonderful. And little did she know
0:48:06 when I said it that I wasn’t coming back for 10 years, but I didn’t know it either. I just bought
0:48:13 a ticket to go over to Europe, left with a few guys. And that started a 10-year odyssey of Cal
0:48:22 going around the world. Okay, let’s let’s say pause for a second. I want to do some backtracking here.
0:48:28 Okay. So the first question, and I have not forgotten about Hunter S. Thompson, but
0:48:33 when you said, please correct me if I’m getting this wrong, but I don’t need a job,
0:48:38 I just don’t want to starve. And he said, come on in. Why did he give you such a warm welcome?
0:48:41 He had actually reached out to me. And again, this went back to University of Missouri Journalism.
0:48:48 That’s where he had gone to school. So I found all through my travels, this school and its network,
0:48:57 I was always linked to them in some way. And you knew who was really good from that school.
0:49:05 Everybody knew it. And so if I found out that somebody was doing really good work and they
0:49:13 were an editor and I knew they went to the University of Missouri, it’s an easy phone
0:49:17 call for me to make. And it’s interesting because I didn’t make those calls often because there
0:49:24 was like a nexus. People bumped into people and you wereverted to the right place. And so
0:49:34 when Inside Sports folded, ultimately one of the editors there got the job at the Washington Post
0:49:42 Sunday Magazine. But when I was traveling around the world, I basically, I didn’t really write.
0:49:48 And I have so many questions about the travel, the proceeding contrast. So if we looked at, say,
0:49:55 how you interviewed and asked questions when you were at the tail end of your first
0:50:02 professional gig and then at the tail end of Inside Sports, what changed?
0:50:09 Nothing really changed there. Basically, the idea was to get the information you needed
0:50:14 for a story, to fill out a story. And so back in that day, I know it’s hard for sports writers
0:50:24 to believe it because they asked me to speak at colleges in front of journalism schools.
0:50:29 And in the 70s, women’s sports got no coverage at all. They would beg you to go into, to go to
0:50:42 their games, go into their locker rooms, whatever you wanted. I was talking to University of Nebraska
0:50:48 Journalism School. They can’t even interview women’s volleyball players in a very relaxed
0:50:56 fashion. They have to go through the sports information office and they won’t be able to
0:51:02 ask like personal questions. So it’s a completely different time when I would go out to do a story.
0:51:09 I might spend like a week, two weeks with somebody. And now that just doesn’t happen because of all
0:51:17 the proliferation of media and everybody’s asking for that time. So it’s pretty much shut down.
0:51:24 So basically you got to hang with people and the questions basically filled out the story.
0:51:33 But for me, it was very different than the next stage because that first stage was very
0:51:39 who I went where and why and what might have been underneath, what was your childhood like.
0:51:45 And it filled out a sports story. The next step that started when I was about 23 or 24
0:51:52 was completely different. And that was just to place it in the timeline. That was before you
0:52:00 left. Oh no, this was the moment I left inside sports shut down. And there was actually like a
0:52:08 run on the bank to go over. Seems pretty common. People to get their last checks. And right after
0:52:16 that was when I decided to start traveling. And that’s where interviewing changed for me forever.
0:52:23 Two quick questions before we get there. So the first is what was it like doing
0:52:28 shots and having drinks with Hunter S. Thompson? It was fantastic. He was a very funny guy.
0:52:33 And it was all anecdotes. There were a bunch of people in the bar. Everybody was telling stories.
0:52:41 It’s completely natural. What’s kind of interesting about my memory of it is later on I interviewed
0:52:49 Johnny Depp, who played Hunter Thompson. And he just reached into this vegetable plate
0:52:59 that was in front of a hotel. And pulled out a carrot and put it in his mouth the way Hunter
0:53:08 Thompson had like he was smoking like those long cigarettes. And he became Hunter S. Thompson.
0:53:14 It was wild. And he said, yeah, it comes out in me every now and then. The thing about Hunter S.
0:53:20 Thompson, you think about him almost as a caricature. But like at the bar, he was like a
0:53:25 regular guy just telling stories. I remember him telling stories of like being a bowling writer
0:53:31 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. And we’d be laughing about things like that. So it was very human.
0:53:38 The conversation wasn’t with the caricature of Hunter Thompson. It was with the guy.
0:53:43 And when you went out to drink with the guys, hopefully with the expense accounts,
0:53:49 what was your drink of choice? Did you have a go to drink?
0:53:51 Back then was before I knew anything about wine. Back then it was like Guinness or Black and Tan
0:54:01 or maybe Gin and Tonic. Those were the three things. You know, one time I remember this
0:54:09 really crazy. You want to know why Inside Sports went out of business. They had one of the photographers
0:54:15 who had worked with Sports Illustrated in the past. And so I was sent out on a story with this guy.
0:54:23 And this guy was saying, oh, I got to show you how to use an expense account. I could see you’re
0:54:28 young novice here. And like before we do any work, he was straight to the bar. And I’m saying like,
0:54:35 are you sure? Like maybe we should go out and interview with him. No, no, no. And he starts to
0:54:40 say, you know, I think we need to have some green chartreuse. Oh, Lord. What? And like this guy must
0:54:50 have knocked the bar bill. And his point was, look, this is how we do it at Sports Illustrated.
0:54:56 Like if you don’t run up a bar bill like this, you know, nobody’s going to think you’re big time.
0:55:04 Sounds like fear and loathing in Las Vegas. Yeah, it was a little like that. It was all,
0:55:08 I guess, day to day event. And I was like meeting the athletes that I grew up watching on TV and
0:55:20 talking to these sports writers. And it was one of those times that comes around once in a life.
0:55:26 And then when it’s gone, you can never really have it again. Because part of it is your naivete
0:55:32 making it so grand. And then it was over. The magazine was dead. And oh, man, like at the
0:55:40 time I thought I got another like 50, 60 years of live. What am I going to do? So how did you
0:55:45 start on travel? I didn’t know what to do. And I had met when I was in St. Louis, a woman from France.
0:55:55 She came from Mont-Pasier. And she says, oh, like you have to come visit Mont-Pasier and pick the
0:56:02 grapes. So in my mind, I always thought I’ve got to get to Mont-Pasier. And so we bought a ticket,
0:56:10 I bought a cheap ticket to Iceland Air. They would land you in Iceland and then fly you into
0:56:18 Luxembourg. And the idea, I guess, was to get you to somehow stay in Iceland. It still is.
0:56:24 They still sell it. It’s like the stopover destination. Stay for a few days, please.
0:56:30 And you know what? People should, because one of the Playboy centerfold photographers told me
0:56:37 that that was one of the best places that he’d ever been to in terms of like meeting women.
0:56:45 He said it was like outrageous. You’d go there on a Saturday night and everybody knew everybody.
0:56:52 But by four in the morning, people were naked doing cartwheels on top of the bar.
0:56:56 Like, who would have thought of it from Iceland? Iceland, you know, it’s a limited number of
0:57:01 activities if you’re there depending on the time of the year. But I actually went to Iceland for
0:57:07 the first time with my family to see the Aurora Borealis about two winters ago. Just glorious,
0:57:14 fantastic, entirely mystical, word-defying experience. It really was fantastic. So that’s
0:57:21 maybe the other more brochure-friendly side of Iceland. But yeah, a lot of booze. A lot of booze.
0:57:29 A lot of booze. If you’re telling me. And elves. They like elves and gnomes also.
0:57:33 No, that sounds like a magical moment in your life. It was. It was.
0:57:39 Did you have like a notion of what it would be and then did it top it like by 10 times?
0:57:46 Well, the backstory, not to turn this into, well, I guess it is the Tim Ferriss show.
0:57:51 Here we are. But the digress into my own stuff for a minute is my mom had always talked about
0:57:57 wanting to see the Northern Lights before she passed on. And this came up many, many times.
0:58:03 And eventually I was like, fuck it. Why haven’t we gone to see the Northern Lights? Let’s figure
0:58:07 it out. And that’s how the trip came about. And in my mind, of course, the image was informed by
0:58:14 the photos that I’d seen. And it turns out that the colors that are captured by
0:58:20 all of the photographs or the equipment that I’ve seen are very different
0:58:24 when you see the phenomenon in real life with your own eyes. And it’s just the most ghostly,
0:58:30 fantastic, meaning like phantasm like experience that I’ve ever had visually without
0:58:38 any of plants. We really just got the Willy Wonka golden ticket because we showed up and
0:58:48 we were there for, I want to say, 10 days, which is important because you could have
0:58:52 a few days of cloud cover. And if you’re only there for a night or two nights,
0:58:56 you could go all the way out to the middle of nowhere in Iceland or Norway, for that matter,
0:59:00 or other places and never see it. But we saw it, I want to say, like seven out of 10 nights,
0:59:06 it was unbelievable. So it exceeded all expectations. It was really, really a trip to remember.
0:59:11 I just got to ask you one more question now. What was your mom’s,
0:59:17 what does your mom’s face look like when she got the view that she wanted to have?
0:59:23 Kid in a candy store or the description that came to mind first was
0:59:29 like a baby who opens their eyes and sees like their favorite mobile above them,
0:59:34 like just that completely dazzled look where there’s nothing else in the world that exists
0:59:41 for them in that moment, but just the pure joy of that experience. It was great. I mean,
0:59:46 one of the most gratifying things for me, certainly that I’ve ever done for my family,
0:59:49 which makes me feel like a bad son. But for saying it, well, that it took me that long,
0:59:54 but it was a great experience. I will say for those people listening who are thinking about it,
0:59:59 when I say they’re very limited activities, I really mean it in Iceland. And we stayed at this
1:00:03 place called Hotel, I think they pronounce it, but it’s oranga, R-A-N-G-A, which is in the middle
1:00:10 of nowhere. And if you do go, two things to note, it’s dark all the time. And number two,
1:00:17 there are activities that you can pay for, but they tend to be on the expensive side.
1:00:22 So you can take like a helicopter over live volcanoes, which actually was phenomenal,
1:00:27 or you can go say snowmobiling, et cetera, but they all tend to be on the pricey side. So you do
1:00:32 need to check your budget before you sign up for something like that. And yeah, it was glorious,
1:00:36 but the, so Iceland. So you got a cheap ticket on Iceland Air.
1:00:40 Cheap ticket on Iceland Air and landed in Luxembourg. And I was with a bunch of friends.
1:00:45 And how many friends? Let’s see, there were very interesting. I had, I mentioned one,
1:00:53 his name was Gary Smith. But for these purposes, I’m just going to say there was a friend who was
1:00:59 very skinny. Can’t wait to see where this is going. And a friend who was portly. Such an underused
1:01:08 adjective, portly. And I am completely, like these are my best friends, okay? The skinny guy,
1:01:17 the portly guy. And the skinny guy was just coming off a divorce and had basically felt
1:01:26 like his whole life had been constricted in this box around Wilmington, Delaware,
1:01:32 and wanted to go out and just see the world, see whatever, whatever was out there. And of course,
1:01:40 my eyes are open to this because I didn’t know what I was going to do, where I was going to go,
1:01:47 but I wanted to see the world too. Montposier, let’s go pick the grapes. And then the portly
1:01:54 friend was a guy who was kind of like the mayor of his job. And the mayor of his city in terms of if
1:02:05 you go to the bar in St. Louis, he’s the fixture. Everybody loves him, knows him. And it’s the bar,
1:02:15 the restaurant, everything is very kind of fixed. The mic was always his or he could hold court.
1:02:21 Holding court, but even more than that, it was, you knew if you were in St. Louis, you knew if
1:02:28 you went to Llewellyn’s Bar at 830, you were going to see him. And accordingly, you know,
1:02:36 where he was going to have dinner is only one of a few places. If he wasn’t at one, you can go to
1:02:41 another. You know, the bookstore he walked into, the place across the street where we got chocolates.
1:02:48 So he lived on sort of a ritual. So now the three of us are let loose in Europe.
1:02:56 Now the portly guy’s only got like 10 days. He’s on vacation from his job. The skinny guy who’s been
1:03:04 working at Inside Sports with me, he’s got some time now. And I’m just kind of walking around with
1:03:11 my eyes open wondering where this is all going to take me. So we go to this mountainous town.
1:03:19 We end up in a mountainous town in Italy. It had two names because these countries would get involved
1:03:27 in wars. And then sometimes they would be wherever the winner was, they were named. So I remember
1:03:35 the the German sounding name was Dorf Tirol. And it had a huge mountain. And we found out that on
1:03:43 this mountain, Ezra Pound, the poet, had lived in this castle. So the skinny guys like all except
1:03:50 got to go see Ezra Pound’s castle. So we got to take a hike up to this mountain. And the portly
1:03:57 guys coming along and we’re having a great time. We’re talking and the breathtaking scenery. And
1:04:04 we get to this castle when we meet some people may say, oh, if you would just keep going over this
1:04:11 mountain, you will have an unforgettable experience. There is a farmer there that is living. You
1:04:19 literally will go back to the 18th century. That’s how this farmer’s living. Just keep on going over
1:04:26 the mountain and just walking down this trail. Not many people go over the mountain. But if you do,
1:04:32 you will find this farm, it will put you up for the night. Sounds like the beginning of a dirty joke.
1:04:37 And so we start to get up to the top of the mountain. And now it’s like getting darker and
1:04:45 darker and darker. And maybe it’s eight o’clock, I don’t know what time it is, but we’ve reached
1:04:51 like the peak. And now we almost can’t even see where we’re walking. But the skinny guy knows
1:04:59 if we get down this mountain, we’re going to have an experience like no other. And that’s
1:05:04 what he was wired to do. And the poorly guy is saying, hey, like, better Chinese is being served
1:05:10 down in the restaurant. And they both look at me and say, okay, what are we doing?
1:05:19 And what do you think I did? Oh, this is a toughie. I want to say that you that you went for the
1:05:26 village. But by the very fact that you asked me, what would you do? And you love both of these
1:05:33 guys. And you know that one guy really wants to go over the mountain. The other guy really wants
1:05:39 to bet. I say you can always get fettuccine. It’s not going away. But easy to say is the armchair
1:05:45 listener of stories, as is the case right now. What did you do? Well, I looked at them both.
1:05:50 And then I just realized, look, if something were to happen, like going down, I’m going to regret it.
1:05:58 And I knew in that moment, you know what, there’s going to be a lot of those moments where I’m
1:06:05 heading over the mountain. That was the moment I knew I’m going over the mountain. Not tonight.
1:06:11 I’m going to make sure my poorly friend is taken care of. He eats his fettuccine.
1:06:16 In a few days, he’s getting on a plane. He’s going to go back home. But after that,
1:06:20 I’m going over the mountain. And that’s what set off the trip. And it became completely addictive.
1:06:31 Because I woke up every morning not knowing what was going to happen. And then you asked before,
1:06:41 okay, well, where does the interviewing shift? So what happened was I had hardly any money.
1:06:49 And I would go to a bus station or train station. And I would just walk up, say,
1:06:57 where’s the next train leave out of? Where’s it headed? And they would say a name. I’d say,
1:07:02 okay, I want a ticket. So I would buy the ticket. Destination had no meaning to me whatsoever.
1:07:08 What had meaning to me was I never been there before. And I’m going to take this trip down the
1:07:16 aisle. The trip down the aisle was where all the stakes were. Because as I’m going down that aisle,
1:07:24 I’ve got to look for an empty seat next to somebody who seems interesting. Somebody I can trust.
1:07:33 Somebody who might be able to trust me. And the stakes are high. Because I know
1:07:39 that at the end of that ride, wherever it was going, that person had to invite me to their home.
1:07:47 Because I had no money to spend night after night in a hotel.
1:07:51 I was going to ask you how you paid for the trip. So it was just savings based until
1:07:57 it was extinguished? Well, there was very little money. I’m trying to let you know that the stakes
1:08:03 that were involved when I got on that train were very high. It was like an athletic event
1:08:09 where you were going out and you had to get a roof over your head that night. And I’ll tell you
1:08:16 how seriously I took this. And I’m going to tell you a story after this, which shows you
1:08:20 what I learned. I’m walking down that aisle and I see an empty seat next to a beautiful woman.
1:08:28 Right? I look at her hands. No rings. She’s looking at me. She’s smiling at me.
1:08:34 She could be a supermodel. I swear I walked right on by.
1:08:40 Why? Because there was no way she was taking me home.
1:08:42 There was no way she was taking me home. Now, nobody can see me, but if you saw me,
1:08:49 you would know the supermodel was not taking me home.
1:08:53 Hey, you know, in fairness, Billy Joel got Christy Brinkley. That’s right.
1:08:57 Not another no offense to Billy Joel, but he and I’m not comparing you to Billy Joel. I think
1:09:02 you’re a very handsome man. But just to say, I’ll tell you a story about this. These things happen.
1:09:07 I’ll tell you a story about this that I came to later regret that. All right. So this is years
1:09:14 later and I get set up working at Esquire where I do this, what I’ve learned column. And I get set
1:09:21 up doing an interview with Petra Nemkova, the supermodel. And I’m waiting for her. It’s supposed
1:09:27 to arrive at like eight o’clock or something. And she’s late. So I’m sitting there waiting for her.
1:09:35 And then she sits down and we start talking. We had this amazing conversation that people may not
1:09:41 know, but she was in Thailand when that tsunami hit in like a bungalow with her best friend who
1:09:49 basically lost his life. And she was swept away by the tsunami and narrowly survived. This is an
1:09:55 amazing story. It took an hour and a half just to tell the tsunami story. And she’s telling me
1:10:01 these great stories and we’re really hitting it off. And the interview is supposed to go for an
1:10:05 hour and a half. Like we’re at four hours. And it’s not an interview anymore. I feel like completely
1:10:11 connected to her the way I would have been had I met her on a bus or train. And I said to her,
1:10:18 I said, Petra, I really, I’m going to tell you something. I apologize. And she said, what for?
1:10:25 And I said, because all those years, those 10 years I was traveling around the world,
1:10:30 if the empty seat was next to you, I would have walked right on by you just because she
1:10:38 were good looking. And she had a very amazing reaction. She grabbed me by the hand and squeezed
1:10:45 my hand. And she said, well, don’t worry, Cal. Tonight, I sat next to you, which is very cool.
1:10:52 But it made me realize, and this is a, this is really, if you’re a good guy, who’s a little
1:11:00 scared to approach that woman, you should remember that story because they want to be treated normally.
1:11:07 And I was talking to another actress about this and she really started writing me. She said, okay,
1:11:15 so you don’t take that seat and now some asshole takes it. And I got to put on that asshole for
1:11:21 the next hour and a half. Thank you very much, Cal. So you walked by this woman when you got on
1:11:29 the train, walked down the aisle, you choose survival and housing over the prospective
1:11:36 walk by the supermodel. And I’m looking, looking down the car and, okay, that grandmother
1:11:44 with no teeth, eating the crackers out of her purse. There’s the winner. So I walk up,
1:11:54 sit down next to the grandma. Let’s say we’re in Hungary. And this happened in many cultures. But
1:12:01 for the sake of the story, and this happened in Hungary. I sit down next to her and
1:12:06 I’ll ask her about goulash. Now, of course, she can’t speak English. My Hungarian at that point
1:12:13 is, hi, how are you? I need to go to the bathroom. And some of the younger people on the train are
1:12:19 watching me and grandma try and talk to each other. And naturally they come over and they
1:12:28 start to translate. He wants to know what makes a great goulash. This grandma’s chest just bursts
1:12:38 with pride. And now she’s talking about her grandmother making goulash, her mom making goulash,
1:12:45 all the ingredients that go into goulash, how they got to be put together just the right way.
1:12:52 And then she looks at all these young Hungarians said, you know, I’ve been riding on this train
1:12:57 for decades. Not one of you has asked how I make my goulash. This American,
1:13:05 he asks, you tell him he has to come to my house because I am going to prepare him goulash. So he
1:13:13 knows what it’s like to eat goulash in Hungary. All the people on the train come along. Now I’m
1:13:21 staying with grandma. Not only does she invite the people on the train, all her neighbors,
1:13:25 all her friends, her relatives. Now I’m at the table room full of people. They’re all surrounding me.
1:13:33 The goulash is in front of me. And I slowly lift it to my lips. I taste it. My eyes shut.
1:13:41 And I smile. And there’s just a roar from this place. He loves grandma’s goulash.
1:13:49 So the party goes on for like four days. And during the party, one of the neighbors says,
1:13:57 well, you know, have you ever tasted apricot brandy? Because nobody makes apricot brandy
1:14:05 like my father. He lives a half an hour away from me. You got to come to taste the apricot brandy.
1:14:11 That weekend, we’re tasting apricot brandy, having a great time. Another party starts.
1:14:17 Another neighbor comes over to me. Have you ever been to Kishkenhalis,
1:14:21 the paprika capital of the world? You cannot leave Hungary without visiting Kishkenhalis.
1:14:28 Now we’re off to Kishkenhalis. I’m telling you a single question about goulash could get me
1:14:35 six weeks of lodging and meals. And that’s how I got passed around the world.
1:14:42 That’s incredible.
1:14:43 10 years. So what else did you learn about asking questions? Or if you want to tackle it a different
1:14:53 way, feel free to take it in any direction. But what are some common mistakes that people make
1:14:59 in asking people questions, whether it’s on a train or otherwise, but feel free to tackle either.
1:15:06 You know what? That’s a good question for a little later, because that’s what I discovered
1:15:11 later on at the time. And I’ll bring it directly toward hiring people, where questions are being
1:15:21 asked of job candidates, like, what’s your biggest weakness? Which they’ve already prepared like two
1:15:29 hours on how to answer that question. You’re not going to get a spontaneous good response to that.
1:15:36 I work too hard. Sometimes I get accused of being too detail oriented.
1:15:41 You got it. You got it.
1:15:43 They’ll do.
1:15:43 That is the wrong question. But we’ll get to that because I wasn’t there yet.
1:15:49 I didn’t even know what I was doing other than, okay, you’ve got to figure out a way to make people
1:15:59 trust you through your questions. And I no longer had to fill out a story.
1:16:06 I didn’t need a who, what, when, where, and why. It was just pure curiosity.
1:16:12 And then it zoned into this basic fact. People want to talk about their lives.
1:16:21 And often, especially if you go to a small town somewhere, people, they may not be able to talk
1:16:30 so much about their lives because everybody talks about everybody in these little towns.
1:16:37 And everybody knows the gossip. Everybody knows the feelings. And you have to keep
1:16:43 some things to yourself. But if this guy comes into your house and he’s from 7,000 miles away,
1:16:52 you can open up in ways and tell him things you would never tell people close by knowing
1:17:00 he’s going to leave. And keep in mind, this was a day, there were no cell phones.
1:17:04 There was no social media. There was no Facebook. There was no going on the Internet and finding
1:17:12 out what this person just told me. It was like a secret.
1:17:16 It was a safe haven.
1:17:16 Yeah, I was completely safe for these people, not only that, but I was a safe haven for a lot of
1:17:24 women because if they were in a small town and they are meeting somebody from their small town,
1:17:33 everybody’s going to know about it. But if you meet this traveler, your eyes are going to be
1:17:40 open to this new world. Plus, you can go over to the next town and have a meal and start talking
1:17:48 and get to know each other. And you are kind of free of all the constrictions of where you live.
1:17:55 And so, in a way, I became handsome. It’s like, I can remember in college going into a bar in
1:18:07 Colorado. And all the guys were like six foot… I don’t know what it was at night, but everybody
1:18:13 was like six foot four or taller. And the girls were over six, but I’m just kind of walking around.
1:18:20 I’m like much smaller. And I just realized there was… I don’t fit in here. It’s just a different…
1:18:26 I’m not handsome here.
1:18:28 It’s like every Dutch or Swedish part I’ve ever been to.
1:18:31 Okay, similar feeling.
1:18:34 Okay, so here’s… There you go. I’m traveling around, right? And I meet a six foot two Dutch girl.
1:18:42 And I want to share a room as we’re traveling. Okay, fantastic. It was so easy because we were
1:18:50 in a different place. And once you’re traveling, you’re a much different person than you are when
1:18:57 you’re at home. People see you differently and they treat you differently.
1:19:02 You see people differently too. Wouldn’t you say? I mean, in a sense that… I don’t recall who said
1:19:07 this initially, but people will travel to the other side of the world to pay attention to
1:19:11 things that they routinely ignore at home. Bingo. Yeah. And it seems like a modern day,
1:19:17 or I should say a different manifestation of this is sitting down on an airplane next to someone.
1:19:23 And you can get people to open up or they’ll volunteer to open up in ways that they might not
1:19:28 to other people because they assume rightly in most cases they’re never going to see you again.
1:19:33 That’s it, 100%. And when you talk about seeing people differently, when you’re waking up in the
1:19:40 morning and you don’t know what’s going to happen and then you meet somebody, the person becomes
1:19:46 like the most fascinating person on the world in that moment. And they feel that because you don’t
1:19:53 know their life, so you’re starting to ask some questions, they’re getting this attention. It’s
1:19:58 like you’re… I don’t want to say you’re making them into a rock star, but they’re getting the
1:20:03 same kind of attention, the questions that are coming. Why did you do that? What kind of friends
1:20:09 do you have? What’s this culture like here? And all of a sudden they’re feeling like they’re in the
1:20:15 spotlight and it feels good. And for women, it feels great because also now, and I’m sure,
1:20:22 if you’re feeling boxed in and you meet somebody from afar, oh, I wonder what it’s like in America.
1:20:28 Maybe you’ll like me. Maybe you’ll take me home with them. Maybe I can visit. And so all of these
1:20:35 conversations are just filled with possibilities and potentials. It’s beautiful. In both directions,
1:20:42 too, I think. I mean, I remember just in some of my travels, I mean, you come across not just the
1:20:48 natives, but you meet other people who are traveling from distant lands and finding their
1:20:53 own way in the same way that you are. And you start to wonder, well, maybe I should visit Turkey.
1:20:57 Maybe I should visit the paprika capital of Hungary. And it’s just that the endless possibilities
1:21:03 when divorced from the routine of your life at home that are so exciting.
1:21:08 It’s that. And also, I remember that the skinny guy were in Yugoslavia. And this was right before
1:21:16 the Olympics in Sarajevo, and it was cold. And I remember we looked at each other and just,
1:21:23 you know, it’s like too cold here. We didn’t have winter clothing. And I said to him,
1:21:31 you know, there are camel races induced Tunisia. And like a day later, we were in Tunisia.
1:21:43 We just got on a flight and flew to Tunisia and headed to Douz. We missed the races. But you know,
1:21:53 the next thing you knew was like, we’ve got pictures of us in like the middle of the Sahara
1:21:57 desert. And so there was just the possibility of, look, it’s even more like that now where
1:22:04 you got the internet to help you connect with somebody you can get on a plane and be in a
1:22:11 different world. Sure. Couchsurfing. I mean, there are cost-free options out there.
1:22:16 If couchsurfing was here when I was going around the world, I don’t know. I might still be going.
1:22:24 I might still be going. I’ll tell you that it was the end of the trip that changed my style of
1:22:28 interviewing again. But if I could have been couchsurfing, I can’t even imagine the potential
1:22:35 I would have had because from what I’m told, like you get raided, isn’t it? It’s sort of like Uber.
1:22:41 You rate the driver. That’s right. So you rate the place you stay and they rate the guest.
1:22:46 So basically, I’m coming in with all these stories to regale you from these different parts of the
1:22:54 world. I’d get ratings across. I’d get five stars across the board. And then everybody would want,
1:23:00 “Come to my place. Please come to my place.” But there was none of that. And every day,
1:23:07 you had to get on the train or the bus unless people were passing me around. After a while,
1:23:14 it became easier and easier because it was, “Well, you know, I got a cousin here and then
1:23:20 I’d get off the train and the cousin would be waiting for me.” And a party would be waiting
1:23:25 for me at his house when I got there. So really, it was like a 10-year party.
1:23:29 I do want to get to the end of the trip and the impact on the interviewing. But first,
1:23:36 and I can’t believe I haven’t asked you this before, but how did you hone your ability to tell
1:23:43 stories? Because you’re very good at asking questions, but that doesn’t automatically make
1:23:47 one good at telling stories. Maybe part of that is through writing because that’s what I was doing.
1:23:56 I would interview people and then I would have to put what I got down in a specific order or a
1:24:04 non-specific order in order to manipulate people into leaning closer what’s going to happen, what’s
1:24:09 going to happen, what’s going to happen. Meaning like an in-media arrest sort of in the middle of
1:24:13 the action type of start to pull them in. Yeah, something exactly. You start it to pull them in
1:24:19 and then you wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. Now you have to go back to the beginning.
1:24:23 I suckered you in here. But then there are other more complicated ways where you don’t
1:24:31 start that way in the beginning and you save it for the end, but you do it in a more nuanced way.
1:24:37 It’s almost like, “Okay, I’m reading, but what is something?” Could you give me an example?
1:24:43 I’m so curious because for people who aren’t writers, maybe, and I’m not going to lose track
1:24:48 here, but I haven’t been to journalism school, but when I’ve taken some writing classes that
1:24:53 talk about the lead and you get at least for non-fiction stuff, you get a couple of statistics.
1:24:59 You need a couple of quotes. Three people is a trend and then you sort of piece it together.
1:25:03 Don’t bury the lead, meaning bring this sort of attention grabbing piece to the top and so on.
1:25:09 We talked about briefly the in-media rest. What would be a more subtle way to approach an opener?
1:25:14 Okay, so just say you had a murder story and you were operating by that principle in journalism,
1:25:21 like put it right at the top and then, “Okay, this horrible thing happened. Let’s go back
1:25:27 to the beginning and then now you’ve got to add everything up to see why that moment happened.”
1:25:33 Another option is to start it in a very ordinary way with just a twist
1:25:40 that tells you, “Something’s going to go on here. I don’t know,” and you just keep reeling them in
1:25:51 slowly. Just give a little more, “Oh man,” and then they met this person. “What’s going to happen now?”
1:25:59 And then you save it till near the end of the story. Part of the problem is when you do that in
1:26:06 the magazine, they’ll give it away in the headline. I was going to ask about the headline.
1:26:10 Yeah, but you can still use that tactic of telling a story that slowly grabs you and then it just puts
1:26:26 out a little bait and gives you that smell of something interesting here and then you’re dragging
1:26:31 the line so that they’ve got to keep following it and they’re feeling, “You know what? Something big
1:26:37 is behind here and make them get to the end.” And then if you can deliver, I don’t want to say it’s
1:26:43 orgasmic, but… You know, it’s funny. I was thinking of like this sexual analogy, though. It’s like
1:26:47 instead of the wham-bam, “Thank you, ma’am.” Quick fix. It’s like, “Okay, I didn’t think that I needed
1:26:53 some tantric sex in two hours of this.” Turns out it’s pretty great. And then you get the payoff
1:26:57 you’re like, “You know what? That was totally worth it.” You just named it. It’s the tantric sex,
1:27:03 the tantric structure storytelling. That’s it. Sting would love it. You know, six hours.
1:27:10 So at the end of your travels, what happened that affected your…
1:27:18 Okay, so I’m going around. I’m going, having a great time. And after 10 years, I mean,
1:27:23 I get a pretty good network of people. So I don’t really even have to rely on meeting somebody.
1:27:32 Your grandmother’s eating selfies. Yeah, because enough people know me and when you’re in Brazil,
1:27:38 “Oh, there’s this fazende de cacao, this farm where they grow the cocoa beans.”
1:27:45 Like, “Great couple, just go there. We’ll send the letter in advance. They’ll be expecting you.”
1:27:50 So I am, at this point, it’s almost like I’m a guest that’s now expected.
1:27:56 Part of the family. Really, I’m part of the family before I even arrive. And a friend,
1:28:04 the skinny guy, the skinny guy, got married. And he decided to take a year and spend it in
1:28:14 Cochabamba, Bolivia. So I hear that. And I’m thinking…
1:28:19 Hope his wife did be and knew that plan before signing up.
1:28:22 Oh, she did. I mean, that was it. Let’s do something. We don’t have any kids.
1:28:28 Let’s do something outrageous that nobody expected. And so naturally, I hear Cochabamba,
1:28:35 Bolivia, “Hey, I was in Peru. Now, skinny guys moving to Cochabamba. Hey, I’ll spend a few
1:28:44 months in Cochabamba.” So I’m there. And I get a call from the Washington Post Sunday Magazine.
1:28:52 And again, going back to this nexus, the guy in charge had worked at Inside Sports, and now he
1:28:57 was in charge of his own magazine. And he called me up and he said, “You know what? We’re doing an
1:29:02 issue about great beaches around the world. We know you’ve been to Brazil before. Is there a
1:29:10 story about a beach in Brazil that you could write up for us?” And at the time, I said, “Look,
1:29:18 I’m in Cochabamba, Bolivia.” You would think it’s crazy. But I was really getting into Cochabamba,
1:29:24 Bolivia. It’s a completely different culture. And there’s an Altiplano that it’s a landlocked
1:29:30 nation. You really are experienced in something different as a traveler. But I said, “Okay. You
1:29:38 know what? I actually heard of a beach in Brazil. You might not want me to go there because you’re
1:29:45 probably doing this as a travel issue to basically hook up with travel agents and airlines so people
1:29:53 can go to these destinations. This beach that I heard of is on the north of Brazil. From what I
1:29:59 heard, you can’t even get there unless you go on a crude sailing vessel and on muleback and
1:30:07 any other saying, “You know, why don’t you just check this place out?” So I said, “Okay.” And I
1:30:15 leave Cochabamba, I go to Brazil. And I end up in a city called Fortaleza, Fortaleza. And just as I
1:30:25 arrive, the first trip to this isolated beach, sand dunes that look like they’re straight out of the
1:30:35 Sahara, butted against the most sparkling waters of the Caribbean, the first tour bus is going to go
1:30:44 to this place. They’re going to be dune buggies. We don’t have to go by mule. We don’t need the
1:30:48 crude sailing vessels. And I’m just right on time. And so first bus leaves midnight, Friday night.
1:30:58 And I buy my ticket, get on the bus, and I let down my guard. And I spoke to the beautiful woman
1:31:07 on the bus on the way to the enchanted beach in Brazil. And that was the end of the trip.
1:31:12 And I would tell you the rest of the story, except it takes two hours to do. We’ll be at a,
1:31:20 well, you’re not doing it on tape, but if digital has any limits, we’ll be, we’ll be out of there.
1:31:25 But that the important thing about it was that was a moment where my style of interviewing
1:31:32 had to change again, because I was no longer traveling around the world. The woman and I
1:31:38 got married, moved to New York, started to have kids. And then I began to write for Esquire Magazine.
1:31:48 And all the things that I’d learned on buses, trains, I was then able to project into Esquire’s
1:31:58 what I’ve learned column, which consists of interviews with the most celebrated, accomplished,
1:32:04 and creative people on earth. I have the handy recorder, the H4N on top of one of these. In fact,
1:32:11 the what I’ve learned, this is the third volume. That’s the third volume. These interviews have
1:32:17 been done for almost 20 years now, with everybody from presidents to premieres to movie stars.
1:32:25 Basically, people that you know, the idea is for me to interview them. And using their own words,
1:32:36 show them in a light that you never really knew. So you think you know these people,
1:32:44 and then you listen to their experiences and you say, whoa, I never knew that about Robert De Niro
1:32:50 or Mikhail Gorbachev. So that is where these conversations on the trains were so important,
1:32:57 because I did not approach these interviews with Woody Allen or Wolfgang Puck, George Clooney,
1:33:08 as if I was a journalist. I approached them as if they were sitting on the train next to the empty
1:33:15 seat. And I just sat down next to them. And that is where the evolution continued until
1:33:24 actually very recently, it was 20 years. So it took me like 10 years to understand that an interview
1:33:30 was more than Meet the Press, but then another 20 to figure out that it was more than sitting down
1:33:38 with George Clooney and having the time of my life. Because the crazy thing happened to me,
1:33:45 caught me completely off guard, and made me think about interviewing in a whole different way. And
1:33:52 this was only very recently. Can you talk about that or if you keep that off? No, 100%.
1:33:56 Can you mention that just because you brought it up and then we’ll dial back the clock?
1:34:00 Sure. And can I show you something first also? I’ve digested this entire thing with highlights
1:34:06 and so on. There are notes on writer’s block. Jody Foster’s comment, one of my favorites,
1:34:10 just for folks, “In the end, winning is sleeping better.” I just love that. So good.
1:34:15 Highlighted Woody Allen. It just goes on and on. So I love this entire compilation and encourage
1:34:20 people to check it out. But what changed so recently? So I was asked to give a speech
1:34:28 on a cruise and I never, ever, ever went on cruises before. In fact, I got to say
1:34:35 it’s almost laughable because there are certain people like they hear crews and they turn up their
1:34:42 nose. And I think I was one of those people. In fact, I had a friend who’s a writer and his wife
1:34:49 wanted to go on a cruise. And she kept on pestering and pestering him. And my wife finally said to him,
1:34:56 “Why don’t you take your wife on a cruise?” And he said, “Because I draw the line.”
1:35:02 I said, “Oh, man. Maybe I think about cruises that way.” And then I was invited to speak on a
1:35:12 cruise, but it was a special cruise. It was a cruise called Summit at Sea. Yep. And by the
1:35:18 Summit Series, guys. Okay. So you know these folks and basically it’s a cruise ship filled
1:35:25 with 4,000 entrepreneurial minds. And that was wild to begin with because I had never,
1:35:35 I had limited experiences with entrepreneurs. And then you put yourself on a ship with 4,000
1:35:44 entrepreneurs. Your life is going to change. A lot of potential energy. Yeah. It’s like
1:35:48 Ted plus Coachella plus infinite amounts of alcohol. There you go. And you can’t even get on an
1:35:56 elevator without meeting somebody. Somebody on the elevator is going to say, “What’s your name?
1:36:04 I’m Michael. This is where I work. This is what I do. Who are you?” I felt at the end of like three
1:36:10 days and my head was really, it was like getting pumped up with Achilleum. I was about to explode.
1:36:16 It was an amazing experience. And like you’re sitting down and like at dinner and the guy next
1:36:21 to you says, “Oh, this is the rocket ship I’m building. You want to see?” And he pulls out his
1:36:26 phone and he shows you his rocket ship. This is like wild. And it was like traveling around the
1:36:32 world, except the world came to you. I think Jane Goodall was there also. I mean, it just goes on
1:36:37 and on. And like the world is coming to you and wanting to hear you and tell you what they’re
1:36:44 up to. So like in three days at Summit at Sea, you literally can go around the world.
1:36:51 And I was totally unprepared for this. I was asked to give a speech called “Decoding the Art of the
1:36:58 Interview.” And I never spoken before. Didn’t know what it was going to be like. But I have
1:37:05 experience with Mikhail Gorbachev and Donald Trump and De Niro and Muhammad Ali later on
1:37:13 in life that they’re good stories. And so I’ve been telling these stories as I was traveling
1:37:21 around on Saturday nights and people always, “Oh, tell Ali’s story.” So I knew, okay, I don’t know
1:37:27 how to give a speech, but I can tell these stories. And so I go up and I tell my, and here’s the thing
1:37:33 about it. There are 20 events going on at once. Generally, when you look at that, what I’ve learned
1:37:39 column, I’m invisible. I don’t write a single word. I just interview them, the subject, and then put
1:37:47 it down in their own words. So I’m not a guy who you would ever see on TV that you would really
1:37:53 know. I’m invisible. Yeah, there are people who know what I do and people in the know will come up
1:38:01 and tell me, “Hey, I respect what you do in odd ways.” But I’m figuring, okay, I’m on this cruise
1:38:09 ship, maybe 20 people are going to show up at best. And in fact, I had read Pencils for Promise
1:38:16 by Adam Braun. And he talked about giving, it might have been his first speech. And I guess he
1:38:25 was expecting a crowd and he had maybe six friends attending and only one person other than his six
1:38:32 friends showed up. And he went out and he gave this speech. And what he realized was, you give the
1:38:40 speech as if that one person is the entire audience. And it turned out that she was so enthused that
1:38:48 she later went to work for his charity. So I went and prepared that book, prepared me. If there’s
1:38:55 one person in there, I don’t care. I’m going to give that person the best. I’m not going to be
1:39:00 disappointed. I’m just going to go out and tell my stories, give a few lessons, and let’s see how
1:39:07 it goes. Maybe the same day that I’m supposed to speak, they move my event. So it’s now even in
1:39:13 the program. If you’re going to my event, you’re going to the wrong place. So now I’m thinking,
1:39:18 okay, I’m down to like 10 people. That’s cool. I’ll speak to the one. The time for the speech
1:39:25 comes, people start filing in. And I had set up this speech around wine. And there’s a reason for
1:39:33 it because when one of the stories, we could get to a little later, I went out to learn about wine
1:39:38 by becoming the sommelier at Windows of the World at the top of the World Trade Center,
1:39:42 right before the planes hit it. So I’m very attached to wine. And what I wanted to do
1:39:50 was to have everybody drink in a glass of wine while I told these stories. So if I messed up,
1:39:57 they were still … Also, yeah, helps with reality bending also. That’s right. We set it up so that
1:40:02 all the wine is there ready, ready to be served to people as they come in. Budgeting for 10 people.
1:40:08 Well, no, I said, okay, there are like 150 seats. If 150 people show up, fine,
1:40:14 have the glasses and the wine, but let’s face it, you may only go through a bottle.
1:40:19 So they were all prepared and place seated at 150 and this funky nightclub. And all of a sudden,
1:40:26 the time starts to roll around and I’m watching and people are just flooding in. They take up
1:40:34 all the seats. And I was very specific to the people serving the wine. I set up this speech to
1:40:40 have toasts throughout to keep everybody’s involvement going. So everybody had to lift
1:40:46 their glass and scream with me to keep everyone engaged. And so I said to the people delivering
1:40:54 the wine, look, I need you to be able to walk down this corridor down the center and keep everybody’s
1:41:01 glasses filled because it’s bad luck to toast with empty glass. And so we’re all set and now
1:41:07 every seat’s taken and there’s still like 10 minutes before the speech is set to start and
1:41:13 people are still coming in. And now they’re coming down the aisle and they’re sitting like at my
1:41:19 ankles and they’re filling the aisle. They’re seated cross-legged in the aisle. They’re sitting
1:41:24 behind the bar. That’s right. Taking up the foot space. To the back, the complete back and now
1:41:30 there’s a line of people that can’t get in. I’ve become like the hottest nightclub in New York
1:41:37 City and I’ve never done this before. Not to derail this, but what do you attribute that to?
1:41:43 I think what happened is they switched you with Richard Branson in the program.
1:41:53 Just messing with you. That’s good. We’ll have to work on that next time. I think what happened
1:42:01 is we titled it Decoding the Art of the Interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, Robert De Niro and Donald
1:42:11 Trump. And naturally it said, like, Cal Fussman has interviewed these people, but people came in
1:42:17 wondering, what’s it like to interview Gorbachev or De Niro or Donald Trump?
1:42:23 And we’ll definitely dig into some of that. Okay. And so I’m watching all these people flood in
1:42:29 and now the aisle is completely cluttered. I can’t get wine to people. Now I’m starting to freak out
1:42:36 because I don’t want people toasting with an empty glass. And the back of the room is like,
1:42:43 it’s getting jam-packed. And so I just said, well, just go out and give your speech.
1:42:52 So the speech, it lasts for about an hour and I guess a really good response.
1:42:57 But what was surprising about it was afterwards, like, there’s just a long line of people to see me
1:43:06 and their business people. And the first couple came up to women and say, okay,
1:43:14 you taught us about asking questions. We got a problem. We are really passionate about our
1:43:21 business. We can’t seem to find people to work for us that are just as passionate as we are.
1:43:29 What can we do? What can we ask? I said, oh, that’s easy. Just tell them the Dr. Dre story. Dr. Dre story.
1:43:36 Yeah. I said, I was interviewing Dr. Dre and I said to him, what’s the longest you’ve gone
1:43:43 working on a passion project without sleep? And he said, oh, man, when I’m working on something,
1:43:50 I really care about, I’m in the zone. I don’t think about sleep. It’s just I go until it’s done.
1:43:57 Could be 72 hours. So I said, just tell the person you’re interviewing Dr. Dre. He goes 72 hours.
1:44:06 What’s the longest you’ve ever gone on a passion project without sleep?
1:44:12 You’ll be able to tell something about that person by their answer. And look, they may tell you,
1:44:19 you know what? I get eight hours sleep every night because I come to work every morning,
1:44:26 fully charged. And you’re going to know, hey, maybe that’s the right person for a certain job in your
1:44:33 company. It’s not going to be the most completely passionate person. But maybe they’re the person
1:44:40 that’s got to do something nuts and bolts. Right. CFO or the guy who interacts with Wall Street.
1:44:46 Exactly. Or gal. And so you will find out through that answer something that’s going to help you
1:44:55 make a decision. And if your girls are looking, you could tell they’re looking at, okay, that’s
1:45:00 our question. We’ll tell them the story. And then people started coming up to me running successful
1:45:07 businesses who had to hire a lot of people all at once because the business is doing really well.
1:45:14 And you could tell they were nervous because all of a sudden a business that starts with
1:45:20 an idea and only them is now taking on a thousand people in a year. How are you sure that those
1:45:29 thousand people have what you had when you started the company? That essence, because if they don’t
1:45:37 have it, the essence of the company is no longer what you wanted. And guys like that and women
1:45:46 are coming up and saying, you know, next time you’re in San Francisco, can we get together?
1:45:52 Because I can tell there’s obviously an issue with hiring. And it’s funny because now I’m starting
1:46:00 to ask everybody about it. And I’m really becoming very conscious that this is like an issue that’s
1:46:11 really important to a lot of people. Oh, it’s the challenge. We were chatting before we started
1:46:16 recording about Silicon Valley and some of the issues surrounding attracting and retaining
1:46:21 top talent. It’s the fundamental challenge for a lot of these startups in particular when you go
1:46:29 from perhaps hiring, say if you bootstrap for a period of time, 10 people in a year to hiring
1:46:34 10 people a day or a week. It’s a massive challenge putting together a process for that.
1:46:39 So question for you about the presentation. So if we were to try to decode decoding the art of
1:46:46 the interview, we’re going to try to meta that and decode the presentation itself. What story
1:46:52 or stories? And I don’t think I’ve heard any of them for that matter yet. Did people seem to
1:46:59 respond best to? There’s one that I have tucked in the back of my mind because when Alex,
1:47:04 mutual friend of ours asked me if I had heard this story and I said no, he was just not going to say
1:47:08 disgusted, but just speechless at how I had not managed to hear this yet. But what did people
1:47:16 respond to best in terms of stories? Interesting. Different people respond differently to the
1:47:23 different stories. One, if I was deconstructing the speech, one of the things that I wanted to do
1:47:31 was to explain how much you can do with a single question in a short amount of time.
1:47:39 And to back that up, I told a story about my meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. So
1:47:47 I’ll take you back to, say, 2008. I think it was February. We’re in New Orleans. And
1:47:54 in a hotel lobby, I’m all set to interview Mikhail Gorbachev for Ask Why Is What I’ve Learned
1:48:00 Column. We’ve got an hour and a half and fully prepared, ready to go. Couldn’t have been happier.
1:48:09 And I get a call. I pick up the phone. “Hi, Cal. It’s the publicist. Sorry to… So I have to pass
1:48:20 this on, but the interview with Mr. Gorbachev is going to have to be cut short.” And now I’m
1:48:25 being like, “Oh, man. Oh, what is it going to be down to an hour?” Because that’s the thing,
1:48:30 with this What I’ve Learned column, I can’t fluff it up. I can’t fill it out. I can’t use my words.
1:48:36 They have to be Mikhail Gorbachev’s words. And they have to be wise words. I need, at the very
1:48:43 least, an hour to extract us. Yeah, move into his soul in a way that makes him feel comfortable
1:48:51 and extract that wisdom. At the very least, 45 minutes. So I say to her, “Oh, okay, okay. How
1:48:58 much time do I got? 10 minutes. 10 minutes. Are you… I don’t want to say are you nuts, but it’s
1:49:06 impossible. I can’t do this interview in 10 minutes. Cal, Cal, look, I understand, but a lot of very
1:49:13 important people have been added to the list to see Mr. Gorbachev. There’s nothing we can do about
1:49:19 this. Do you want the 10 minutes or not? What am I going to do? Say no. Okay, I’ll take the 10
1:49:26 minutes. So I’m sitting down and I’m thinking, and the more I’m thinking about this, the worse it’s
1:49:31 getting. Because number one, I’m knowing that all of my questions are going to be translated into
1:49:42 Russian. And all of his answers are going to be translated back into English. They actually have
1:49:46 five minutes. Yeah, we’re moving down. Plus, you’re going to sit down and you’re going to exchange
1:49:52 pleasantries. It’s not going to start in a finger snap. Two and a half minutes. Yeah. It wasn’t two
1:50:00 minutes, but it wasn’t much more. And so the publicist leads me into the room. And at this point,
1:50:05 I’m thinking, okay, if it’s two and a half minutes, do your best. And I look up and like,
1:50:12 there he is, Gorby. And he’s a little older than I remember. He’s about 77 at the time. He was in
1:50:18 town to speak about nuclear weapons and why they should be abolished. And we sit down and I’m looking
1:50:26 at him and I just know, just know he’s expecting my first question to be about nuclear arms,
1:50:34 world politics, perestroika, Ronald Reagan. He’s just ready. So I looked at him, I said,
1:50:42 what’s the best lesson your father ever taught you? And he is surprised, pleasantly surprised.
1:50:50 He looks up and he doesn’t answer. He’s like thinking about this. It’s as if after a little while,
1:50:58 he’s seeing on the ceiling this movie of his past. And he starts to tell me this story. And it’s this
1:51:07 story about the day his dad was called to go fight in World War II. See, Gorbachev lived on a farm.
1:51:15 And it was a long distance between this farm and the town where Gorbachev’s dad had to join the
1:51:22 other men to go off to war. And so the whole family took this trip with the dad to this town
1:51:32 to wish him well as he went off. And Gorbachev is talking about this trip and he’s providing these
1:51:38 intricate details. And I’m transfixed. And I’m saying like, oh my God, that’s the worst possible
1:51:46 question. This interview is going to be over. He’s not even going to get to town yet.
1:51:50 So finally they do get to town. And Gorbachev’s dad takes the family into this little shop.
1:52:02 And he gets ice cream for everybody. And Gorbachev starts describing this ice cream
1:52:08 and the cup that it was in. It’s aluminum cup. And as he’s telling me, it’s almost like he’s got
1:52:15 his hand out in front of him and the cups in it. It’s that vivid to him. And it’s as if in this
1:52:22 moment, we both have this same realization. That cup of ice cream is the reason that he was able
1:52:30 to make peace with Ronald Reagan and then the Cold War. Because that cup of ice cream,
1:52:37 just the memory of it, is the memory of what it felt like for his dad to go off to war, for him
1:52:44 to see his dad going off to war. That cup of ice cream in the memory was the dread that he knew
1:52:51 of the possibility of never seeing his father again. And we are looking at each other like,
1:52:58 oh man, this is deep. He didn’t expect it any more than I did. Just at that moment,
1:53:05 knock on the door. It’s the publicist. Publicist comes in, very officious. Gorbachev, Cal, time for
1:53:13 the interview is up. And he looks at it and he acts his finger. He says, no, I want to talk to him.
1:53:19 Publishes, puts up our hands. Yes, sir. And he like backs out sheepishly. The door shuts,
1:53:27 conversation continues. Now we’re getting deeper. 10 minutes later, another knock on the door.
1:53:33 This time, the publicist comes in a little slower. Mr. Gorbachev, Cal, Gorbachev says,
1:53:39 no, I want to talk to him. She backs out. 10 minutes later, knock on the door. This time,
1:53:47 she’s in a panic because the train cars are just piling up. Mr. Gorbachev, please,
1:53:56 I’ve got the mayor of New Orleans right outside. There’s a long line of people we’re way behind
1:54:01 schedule. And Gorbachev just smiles. And he didn’t say anything. But the look on his face was,
1:54:07 hey, what can I do, Cal? So I said, thank you. I knew I pushed it to as long as it could be pushed.
1:54:16 And I laughed. And the interview was a success in that, you know, I had a little story like that.
1:54:24 And people could understand something about Gorbachev that they might never have known.
1:54:32 But for me, when I look back on it, what I realized was the power of the first question going straight
1:54:41 to the heart and not the head. Because it was that question that went into his heart that took us
1:54:49 to that very deep place and enabled the interview to continue to go. And because the interview could
1:54:55 go, I was able to fill out the page for Esquire. Otherwise, that would have been it. There would
1:55:02 have been no way the interview would have run. So lesson number one, when people ask me what tips
1:55:10 would I give is aim for the heart, not the head. Once you get the heart, you can go to the head.
1:55:19 Once you get the heart in the head, then you’ll have a pathway to the soul. And so basically,
1:55:26 the speech was lessons tied to stories that backed them up. And whether it was with Gorbachev
1:55:35 or Donald Trump or Robert De Niro or Muhammad Ali, each story allowed the listener to
1:55:42 understand something very basic. So I’m going to pick a name that we haven’t heard yet,
1:55:47 just because this is the one that made Alex dance around, because that’s all he could do to respond
1:55:54 before he insisted that I ask you about it. So Julio Cesar Chavez.
1:56:00 That’s another story. And it goes back to a time when I was a teenager. And again,
1:56:10 as I started out, you knew that my childhood hero was Muhammad Ali, so I followed boxing.
1:56:17 And naturally, I wanted to fight. Where I lived, there were no boxing gyms around.
1:56:22 What we had in New York was a tournament called the Golden Gloves.
1:56:27 Golden Gloves, big deal. Yeah. Sponsored by the Daily News.
1:56:30 The finals sold out Madison Square Garden every year. I had no idea how to fight.
1:56:36 And I wanted to do it. So basically, like a month before the Golden Gloves started,
1:56:44 I showed up at a gym that was a few towns over in a bad neighborhood and said,
1:56:50 like, I want to train for the Golden Gloves. You had to be 16. I just turned 16. I entered.
1:56:55 And this manager pulled me aside and said, no, no, no. That’s not the way it works.
1:57:00 He’s like, you don’t know how to fight. You don’t know anything about fighting.
1:57:04 What you do is you come here every night and we’ll teach you.
1:57:08 And within a year, we can put you in with people who have your experience and you’ll learn.
1:57:16 And then a year from now, you’ll have some experience and you can go into the Golden Gloves.
1:57:21 You know, if you’re good, you’ll do okay. I said, no, no, no, no. You don’t understand.
1:57:26 I came to fight. Thanks, pops. But listen, that’s right. And basically, I wasn’t on the tall side.
1:57:36 So there’s a short guy in a very short arms. And, you know, my style was basically, you know,
1:57:41 hey, man, I’m just going to rush across the ring and I’m just going to start throwing punches.
1:57:44 Joe Fraser style. That’s right. And you’ll see what happens.
1:57:49 Because like Joe Fraser knew how to fight. All I could do was just throw
1:57:55 reckless, wild, crazy punches one after another. I was in good shape. So I could throw punches
1:58:02 three minutes around, just start to finish. And it was actually, for the people in the gym,
1:58:10 it was kind of comical to watch. Because, you know, everybody knew that when I finally got in
1:58:16 the ring, one of two things was going to happen. Maybe I’d be able to just simply overwhelm whoever
1:58:24 was in the ring just by sheer virtue of I’m coming at you to throw everything I got and I’m not
1:58:30 stopping. The Tasmanian devil strategy. You got it. And so the month passes or so. And it’s time for
1:58:38 my fight in the Golden Gloves. And there was somebody at this club that was going to represent me.
1:58:44 And I show up the club. He was going to drive me into Queens, New York. I was living at Long Island
1:58:48 at the time. And I was all set. And so I show up for my manager to pick me up. He’s not there.
1:58:57 Lifted the altar. Right. Now I don’t have a manager. I don’t have a lift to get into this place.
1:59:05 And there’s no cell phones. You know, you’re standing by a pay phone, throwing in quarters.
1:59:10 Like, who can help me? I got to get to the fights. You got to fight. You know, of course,
1:59:15 everybody in the school knows about this. And so it’s at a high school in Queens with a very
1:59:21 large gym arena. It’s like a Catholic school. And I managed to get somebody to drive me down there
1:59:29 and arrive just in nick of time. But now like I’m all nervous just to get there. And I’m able to
1:59:37 check in. I wrap my hands, get my gloves on. And out of nowhere comes my opponent in the dressing
1:59:46 room. And in the most casual way possible, he just puts out his left hand and says like,
1:59:54 hey, Seuss, that was his name. But you can tell not only like was there a scar down one side of
2:00:00 his face to his lip, but you could just tell he had done this like 400 times before he was eight
2:00:07 years old. This is like checking in for work. That’s right. It’s complete. And so now I’m starting
2:00:17 to like realize, uh-oh, this could be like a predicament. And I get somebody who’s never,
2:00:27 I’d never met before to work my corner. And this guy has no idea of my style. No idea.
2:00:35 He thinks like, okay, I know how to fight. And so he says, okay, kid, listen, you know,
2:00:42 we’re going to go in the ring. I want you to just take it nice and easy. You move, move around a
2:00:47 little, show him the jab and let’s see what happens. So start to walk in the arena. And this is like
2:00:56 mid seventies. In fact, it’s not too not right around a few years before the Rocky movie came
2:01:03 out, you know, the Great White Hope. Well, I’m like the only white fighter on this card. And 90%
2:01:11 of the audience is all white. Okay. So when I come in the ring, it’s like the Great White Hope
2:01:20 has finally arrived. Like people are standing, cheering, going nuts. And I’m looking around.
2:01:28 And it’s like, it’s surreal. I’ve lost sense of where I’m at. And this one year I got, okay,
2:01:36 move around jab. I’ve forgotten who I am. And we get to the ring, go to the center,
2:01:43 get the instructions. And I am like completely lost. I do not know what happened. All I remember
2:01:50 was getting up actually my eyes opening and seeing like three fingers that were very blurry.
2:01:59 And then like I’m hearing four, five, six, and I get up. And now I can kind of see clearly.
2:02:11 And Jesus is coming at me. And his right hand comes back. And it’s like right in front of me,
2:02:17 right in front of me, and the bell rings. And so I go back to the corner and now I’m pissed.
2:02:25 Like, what, what just happened to me? Like, get in there, throw your punches, just go at him.
2:02:33 And I’m sitting on the stool. The manager is saying something. I don’t even hear what he’s
2:02:37 saying because all I’m hearing is myself, just screaming at myself, throw punches, remember
2:02:43 who you are. In the meantime, the referee’s coming over and he’s saying like, son, are you okay?
2:02:48 Are you okay? I’m saying, of course I’m okay. I’m going to kick his ass. I’m going to come out.
2:02:55 You’re going to see some punches. Next thing you know, like the referee is like waving his hands
2:02:59 and stopping the fight. I didn’t respond to him. I was like, I was out. So this dialogue that you
2:03:08 were having with yourself, like that was entirely internal. That’s right. I had no idea. The worst
2:03:15 part of all this is my dad is in the crowd and he brought like two of his childhood friends. Oh,
2:03:22 good. Right. So now you can imagine what I’m hearing. Like anytime there’s a family reunion,
2:03:30 anytime this comes up, we need a funny story. It’s like, oh, remember “Cow in the Golden Gloves.”
2:03:37 And so I’m hearing this again and again and again over the years. And finally,
2:03:44 must have been, well, like almost 20 years later, right after I meet the woman in Brazil,
2:03:51 she moves to New York. We get married and I’m watching the TV and Julio Cesar Chavez,
2:03:59 the great Mexican champion, Junior Weltaweight, 140 pounds. He was 85, 86 and 0 at that point.
2:04:07 And I’m watching him on TV as he’s cornering an opponent. I got a big bag of chips between my
2:04:13 legs. And at this point, right after the marriage, he’s put on a bunch of weight. So I got a beer
2:04:19 belly. So I got a beer in one hand, chips in the other, belly between them. And I’m screaming at
2:04:26 the TV, come on, finish him off. What are you doing? Finish him off Julio. And my wife looks at me and
2:04:32 says, hey, like, calm down. We’ve heard your boxing stories because that was the first thing
2:04:38 when my family met her that they indoctrinated her. You know about Cow in the Golden Gloves,
2:04:45 don’t you? So I look at her, I look at the TV and it’s clear what needs to be done here
2:04:52 because I’ve got to get my manhood back. And I said to my wife, you know what,
2:04:57 you see that guy on the TV? Julio Cesar Chavez? I’m going to fight him.
2:05:02 And so naturally, my wife, like, you’re crazy. Forget it. You know, we’ve heard the story,
2:05:13 but now I know I have to do this to close this chapter in my life, no matter what.
2:05:20 No, just to place it, it’s at the time you’re writing for Esquire.
2:05:25 Actually, when we moved to New York, I had written or I was writing for a magazine called GQ. And
2:05:33 the editor at the time, or my editor at GQ, was a guy named David Granger, who later became the
2:05:40 editor of Esquire. And when he did, he brought me and a bunch of writers with him. So this all
2:05:44 started at GQ. And the day after my wife is laughing at me, I march into David Granger’s
2:05:50 office and I say, hey, you want to buy a story? I’m going to go fight Julio Cesar Chavez. He says,
2:05:58 what? I give him the background. And he said, all right, let me go in and check with my boss.
2:06:04 See what our insurance policy looks like. Oh, they made me, that was the first thing,
2:06:08 you’re going to have to sign documents saying, we’re not responsible for this. This is all on you.
2:06:13 I said, that’s fine. And I go down to the Times Square gym. I’m 42nd Street at the time. And
2:06:22 up these rickety old wooden steps, it was like something out of the past, like you could literally
2:06:30 hear each foot that you put down. And then there’s like the drum beat of the bags. And you walk up
2:06:37 there. And since I had followed boxing, I knew who people were. And I just start looking around
2:06:45 at the trainers. And there was a guy I recognized. His name was Harold Weston. And he had fought
2:06:51 Tommy Hearns, the welterweight champion. Tommy Hearns was nasty. Yeah. And he had actually
2:06:58 done pretty well. He was a very slick boxer. He wasn’t that tall. And Tommy Hearns was like
2:07:03 6’2″, 6’3″, a tremendous reach and an unbelievable power in his hands. And I think that fight went
2:07:12 a while. I know Tommy scored a TKO, but Harold had done pretty well avoiding the punishment.
2:07:18 And so I went over to him and I said, hey, I’m going to be fighting Julio Cesar Chavez.
2:07:26 You think you can train me? And now he’s just like, what is this? Like, who are you here?
2:07:33 Yeah, looking for the hidden cameras. You got it. That’s exactly it. And then he’s called.
2:07:39 This guy says he’s going to fight Julio Cesar Chavez. Everybody in the gym is laugh. Are you
2:07:44 a professional? No. I’d like, are you an amateur? Well, I have one fight in the Golden Gloves 20
2:07:51 years ago. It didn’t turn out. And now, Harold’s saying like, okay, okay, you’re really going to
2:07:58 do this, huh? I’ll tell you what, you come back tomorrow, like 3 o’clock, and we’ll do a little
2:08:05 workout. And we’ll see. So I come back the next day. And this guy, he just tortured me. The whole
2:08:15 point was, get out of here. You’re not fighting Julio Cesar Chavez. You have no idea what it’s
2:08:21 like to be a boxer. A little respect for the craft here. And after three hours, I mean, literally,
2:08:28 I was reduced to tears again and again and again. And I just kept going. And I remember getting home
2:08:39 to my apartment. And like, I rang the door, the door opened, I literally collapsed into my wife’s
2:08:46 arms. And it’s like, she dragged me to the tub and had hot water going. She threw in some epsom
2:08:56 salts and I just like laid in there for like three hours, unable to move. And when I left the gym,
2:09:03 everybody in the gym was placing bets whether I was going to come back the next day. And I did.
2:09:08 And that was the first moment where, hey, that’s interesting. And he said, okay, I understand
2:09:16 you’re riding this for GQ. He was a fashionable guy. So that lured him in, you know, the style
2:09:22 element. And he said, so you’re really going to do this. And I said, yeah, I said, look,
2:09:27 I’m just asking for one round with Julio Cesar Chavez. One round. That’s it. But I’m going out
2:09:35 there. And I’m giving it my all. He said, well, look, let me show you ways to get through that
2:09:40 round. Now remember, this is a slick boxer. I’m going to teach you how to move and you will
2:09:45 survive. We can do this. If he’s taken this really seriously, you’re going down. But we don’t know
2:09:52 how he’s going to react. Maybe he’ll be curious. And I will teach you how to move around the ring
2:09:59 and protect yourself so that you don’t die. And now in my mind, I’m also now thinking about
2:10:10 the fight between Roberto Doran and Sugar Ray Leonard. I don’t know if your memory was a second
2:10:16 fight. No moss. No moss. That’s right. Where in the middle of the fight, we don’t know what really
2:10:22 happened. It’s never fully been explained. In the first fight they had Doran won by a decision
2:10:27 in Montreal. And afterward, he went back to Panama as a national hero, 50,000 people waiting for him
2:10:36 at the airport. And he just had like a three month binge party and gained like 50 pounds.
2:10:42 In the meantime, Leonard, after his first loss, went back home and was like training the next day
2:10:49 for the rematch. So they set it up to have an immediate rematch six months later. And after
2:10:57 maybe two months left, Doran started to train. Now he had to take off 40 or 50 pounds. He was in no
2:11:03 condition to do this, but he dramatically lost the weight. And we’ll never know, but he was overweight
2:11:11 a few days before the fight. Now, whether he took x-lax or something to purge his system
2:11:18 or whether after he made the weight, he went out and ate three steaks and a bunch of orange juice.
2:11:24 And we know that his stomach was not in the best of shape. But we also don’t know if
2:11:32 when he got in the ring, his stomach was bothering him or Leonard adopted a style that wouldn’t
2:11:40 allow Doran to hit him and basically broke Doran mentally. So we don’t know if it was his stomach
2:11:46 or his mind or both. But midway in the fight, Doran basically just throws up his hands and
2:11:51 says no moss. No more. No more. And Leonard celebrates and everybody watching was in disbelief
2:11:59 because for 20 years, Roberto Doran had been the epitome of the macho man. He was like Mike
2:12:05 Tyson of the lightweights in his era. He just bored straight ahead. Nothing could stop this guy.
2:12:11 He was relentless. And to see him quit was what I felt about my experience in the Golden Gloves.
2:12:20 So I basically had to somehow eradicate all that feeling. And I had to do it in a way that’s left
2:12:31 me with some shred of pride at the end. So Harold says to me, okay, look, I’m going to teach you how
2:12:37 to move. And he was like a very classy fighter. And as he’s showing me how to move around and
2:12:46 avoid punches, I said, no, Harold, no, no, no, it’s not the way we’re going to do this. No, no.
2:12:51 The first time I got in trouble because I didn’t go out throwing punches.
2:12:56 And that’s how I’m coming out this time. I’m coming out throw punches. And I want to do it
2:13:03 just like Joe Frazier. Joe Frazier is a short guy, stocky arms, just bobbing, weaving,
2:13:11 coming straight ahead. And Harold says, no, no, no, I’m not going to do this. Because basically
2:13:18 now I’m asking Harold to teach me a style that is going to bring all of my energy, full focus,
2:13:27 full bore straight ahead, right at one of the most damaging punches in coming missiles.
2:13:34 That’s right. And so he’s just fighting with like, there’s no way I’m not being a party to this.
2:13:40 If we do this, we do it smart. And you come out alive. Like you’re not going in there.
2:13:44 Oh, there is that gal. You’re not smoking, smoking cow.
2:13:48 Smoking cow. That’s right. And I said, no, I want you to teach me like Joe Frazier. And he said,
2:13:54 okay, you want to be smoking Joe, I can teach you how to be smoking Joe. And he pulls out a rope
2:14:01 and he sets it from one, the top of the ropes on one side of the ring to the other. And he makes me
2:14:08 start bobbing and weaving under this rope. Now, anybody who has never done this before,
2:14:15 like after a minute, your thighs are burning. And basically, Harold’s idea is I will make
2:14:21 him do this so long that he comes to his senses and fights the way I tell him so I can protect him.
2:14:29 But I just, no matter how much it burns, I just got down low and I just bobbed and weaved and moved
2:14:35 my head. And then he’s taken me to the bags and now he’s teaching me how to throw punches because
2:14:40 I didn’t know how to do any of this stuff. And then you have to get in the ring. And now,
2:14:48 like I’m 35 years old and all these kids are like 19, 20, they love to get in the ring because they
2:14:54 want to beat the crap out of me. And believe me, you know, they were because I did not know how to
2:15:00 fight. But every day I just kept on going back. I literally trained like a fighter. It must have been
2:15:08 for like four months. And plus, on the other hand, I had to figure out a way to get Julio Cesar
2:15:13 Chavez in the ring with me. He had no idea this. He had no idea that you’re in this intensive training
2:15:18 camp with no, no agreed upon fight. No, not a clue. He doesn’t know that I exist. And I am training
2:15:25 three hours every afternoon plus running in the morning, plus calisthenics at night,
2:15:31 eating just the way Harold’s telling me. My weight goes from I was about 165. Now I’m down to less
2:15:38 than 147. Closing in on 140. Chavez fights at 140. At this point, he’s 87 and 0 with, I don’t know
2:15:46 how many knockouts, but I think it was in the 80s. Very high percentage. Yeah, very high percentage.
2:15:50 I remember also just as a side note. So I was mystified and just captivated by who this is,
2:15:56 or Chavez, that at some point it looked at x-rays of his head and his skulls, like twice as thick
2:16:03 as normal human being. That’s right. So he was used to coming straight at people
2:16:09 and absorbing whatever punishment they were dishing out in order to lend his shots. And,
2:16:15 and believe me, when Harold heard that I was doing, and he said, “Look, Cal, I know a guy who
2:16:21 fought huluses,” or Chavez. His name is Juan Laporte. Okay. Basically, after that fight,
2:16:28 Laporte was pissing blood for a long time because one of Chavez’s biggest shots was his left hook
2:16:35 to the liver. And he’s saying like, “You don’t understand. This is a professional athlete
2:16:43 at the top of his profession.” You know, a lot of guys think, “Oh, if I was out on that football,
2:16:49 I would have made that catch.” They, you know, they see a professional drop the ball. I would
2:16:53 have brought that in. And lots of times they drop passes that the rest of us might have caught.
2:16:58 But you don’t understand what it’s like to be up against a professional athlete until you are.
2:17:05 Because even these amateur kids were knocking my head off every day,
2:17:10 but I just kept on coming back up them steps, kept on coming back up them steps.
2:17:14 Finally, a friend of mine, the skinny guy, writing for Sports Illustrated, had been sent
2:17:21 to do a story about Julio Cesar Chavez. So, while he’s out interviewing Julio Cesar Chavez,
2:17:27 he says, “Tomorrow, by the way, you know, I got a friend who wants to fight you. Is it okay
2:17:31 if he comes and fights you?” Julio says, “Sure.” I was like, “Send him, send him over.”
2:17:37 “He only wants one round. Fine, fine. It’ll be great.”
2:17:40 So, now Julio has said yes. It’s like, I’m just imagining, it’s like if your
2:17:47 second grade self in a different era had written to Tiger Woods being like,
2:17:52 “My friend in second grade wants to play you in golf.” You’re like, “Sure. Yeah.”
2:17:56 “Why not? Send him over.” Yeah. And like Julio is a very, he’s a fun loving guy.
2:18:03 So, you know, it was, maybe he saw it as a joke. I don’t know. And so, at this point,
2:18:09 it’s like months I’ve been training. Now, you look at my body, man. I got a six pack.
2:18:13 And now I’m getting in a ring and I was up against an amateur who was really beating me up
2:18:20 badly in the beginning. And then one day, he threw a right hand in my head and I ducked under it.
2:18:27 And I clocked him with a right hand and he just went sprawling backward.
2:18:31 And now, like he’s starting to think, “Okay, Julio, are you ready? Are you ready for this?”
2:18:38 All the people in the gym are laughing. That’s all part of like a community where like, what is
2:18:46 going to happen? And so, at this point, GQ meanwhile is funding this. They’re funding all the training
2:18:53 and they’re going to fund my trip to Mexico. They got to send photographers. They’ll send my wife.
2:18:59 Now I got an entourage coming out of Mexico to fight Julio Cesar Chávez. And he’s training to
2:19:07 fight Pernell Whitaker. This is like the biggest fight in his life. And he’s actually not really
2:19:15 training that hard. We’re supposed to have our fight like while he’s in training. And I’m saying
2:19:22 that he’s going to different towns and having parties. And so, I’m starting to think.
2:19:28 This is after you arrived. This is after I arrived. So, I didn’t know. I thought, well,
2:19:33 maybe he’s normally like this. But something in my mind was saying, man, if he’s fighting Pernell
2:19:39 Whitaker, he should be a little more focused than this. So, I’m waiting for this appointed day. And
2:19:46 Harold Weston, my trainer, knew the president of the World Boxing Council, Jose Suleiman,
2:19:52 who set up a weigh-in. And GQ made me robe. And Julio was very amused by all this. We went out
2:20:00 running one morning. And the thing about it was Julio trains in Toluca, Mexico, high altitude.
2:20:06 So, that was my first moment where I said, uh-oh. This might be an issue.
2:20:13 Yeah, because I trained really hard back in New York. But all of a sudden at altitude, you’re
2:20:20 you’re not the same. And so, we’re running the morning and it comes to this day where, okay,
2:20:26 we’re going to do it. So, I show up. I got my GQ robe on. They invited kids from their neighborhood
2:20:32 in to come witness this. And like the kids thought, like, oh, this is a fight. And so,
2:20:38 Julio was set up. I’m set up. We’re ready to go. The one thing Julio said was, look,
2:20:46 I can’t wear eight-ounce gloves like you’re going to wear because I’m scared I’m going to hurt my
2:20:52 hands. So, I’m just going to like wear training gloves. But other than that, and I said, no head
2:21:00 gear. I said, this is a fight. I’m coming to fight you. So, he just wanted to protect his hands.
2:21:06 And so, he had these white gloves. I wouldn’t call them pillowy, but there was cushion in there.
2:21:12 12 or 16 ounces. Yeah, it’s something. I don’t know if they were 12 or 16,
2:21:17 but they weren’t eight like mine. That was the only difference. And Jose Suleiman,
2:21:23 president of WBC, that’s the guy ring the bell. And all of a sudden, I go charging straight in
2:21:30 the style of Joe Frazier, right at Julio Cesar Chavez. He looks at me and he’s used to coming
2:21:36 straight ahead. And now he’s saying like, what’s going on? Now, here’s the thing about this.
2:21:42 Harold said to me, look, you don’t understand how good he is, how quick he is. You have no chance
2:21:48 of hitting him. Do you understand me? Like all the work you did, there’s only one chance you have.
2:21:54 And I’m going to tell it to you. You listen to me. You listen to me good. This is the strategy.
2:21:59 I want you to throw just like I’ve been teaching you. Left jam, right hand, straight, right hand,
2:22:05 left hook. Okay? He’s going to catch those punches. I want you to do it again. Left jam,
2:22:12 straight, right hand, left hook. He’s going to catch those punches. And I want you to do it again.
2:22:19 Left jam, right hand, left hook. And he’s going to catch them again. And I want you to keep on
2:22:24 doing that again and again and again. Do it 20 times. And then on the 21st time, if you’re still
2:22:34 standing, because we don’t know, he may just hit you in the liver and that’s a fight. If you’re
2:22:38 still standing, if you do that 20 times in a row and you’re still there, go left hand, right hand,
2:22:47 and then come back with another right hand. And so Bell rings. And now he’s like circling
2:22:54 around trying to figure out like, who is this lunatic coming out of me like Joe Frazier,
2:22:59 Bob and we even snorting. I mean, I could sound like Joe Frazier, but he’s so fast that just
2:23:04 like Harold says, I throw the left hand, I throw the left jab, he catches it, throw the right hand,
2:23:09 he catches it, I throw the left hook, he catches it. Like the first time I did it, he said, okay,
2:23:13 I know what you got. And I’m just going to see how much you can take in a little while.
2:23:22 But we’ll play this out. We’ll play it out. And so I keep storming in, I keep throwing these three
2:23:29 punches, he keeps catching them, he’s moving me around, but I keep throwing these three punches
2:23:34 again and again and again. Finally, two minutes into the round, I go left jab, right hand, and then
2:23:42 you could almost see him lifting his hand to catch my left hook. And I just throw the right hand and
2:23:48 just socks him in the jaw. And he looks at me and he sprawls backward as a way of saying, uh,
2:23:57 okay, you caught me. Okay, okay, okay. He goes back like he’s staggered. And then he smiles at me,
2:24:06 says, okay, now we’re going to fight. Now we’re going to fight. He comes in on me and he throws a
2:24:13 left hook to my liver. I’m telling you, it was like someone took the pipe of a Hoover vacuum cleaner,
2:24:21 attached to the vacuum cleaner that was on full blast sucking up and just shoved it down my throat,
2:24:26 down to my stomach. And it’s like my whole stomach is coming up through my mouth, right?
2:24:33 And I said, and the thing about it was I just started throwing punches back. It was his way of
2:24:42 just saying, I’m going to give you just like a little taste. But now I’m firing back because as
2:24:47 bad as I was hurt, this was my moment. I had to avenge what happened to me when I’m 16 years old.
2:24:53 And I’m firing back. Now he’s starting to like, now he’s starting to hit me.
2:24:57 And so the rounds over, I go back to my corner. My lips are blue. The altitude and that one shot
2:25:07 literally took everything out of me. But in my mind, I did it. I’m here. I did it.
2:25:14 And Julio, he’s training for his fight. He looks over at me and says,
2:25:20 “Altro, you want another?” And I said, “Si, mas.” And we did another one. And then in the second
2:25:28 round, he really started like, he was having fun, but he was starting to tag me pretty good.
2:25:34 And you could tell Jose Suleiman is watching this and he’s saying, a minute and a half into the
2:25:41 round, ring the bell, ring the bell, ring the bell before we have a gringo casualty on our hands.
2:25:47 That’s right. And so the bell rings and I go back to the corner and we embrace. He was really
2:25:53 wonderful about it because what was cool about what he did was he treated me. Now that I think
2:26:02 about it, he treated me like the assistant to President Johnson treated me. He didn’t laugh.
2:26:11 He saw my punches coming. He saw what I could handle. And then when he saw that I had like
2:26:18 foxed him for a second, he said, “Okay, I’ll lift the game, but I’m not here to level them.”
2:26:27 And so it was a really wonderful experience. I mean, they had been teasing my wife, asking her
2:26:33 like how much insurance we had and stuff like that. But at the end, he really rose to a high
2:26:40 level in the way he handled the whole thing because at the end of it, I walked out of it
2:26:44 after going through everything I did. I pushed myself as far as I could go. I got hit in the
2:26:50 liver and I came back. So now it’s just a good story. When you spoke to your wife after the two
2:26:56 rounds later that night or whenever you actually had a chance to decompress and be by yourselves,
2:27:01 how did she describe what was going through her head as she watched you guys after the first bell
2:27:07 ring? I think she was pretty scared. I think she probably was watching with her hands over her
2:27:16 eyes, but with her finger spread so that she could see. And I think she was really proud. And you
2:27:22 know, the thing about it is you realize it’s not so much about winning and losing. Although,
2:27:30 you know, my kids, it’s crazy because my kids hear the story and they tell their friends and like
2:27:36 junior high school or whatever. And their friends, did he win? They have no concept. But the thing
2:27:42 is I did win because I confronted myself. I had to go up those rickety steps every day. I had to
2:27:50 get the crap beaten up out of me every day in order to learn how to duck a punch. And I did. I
2:27:56 pushed myself as far as I could go. And now I get a great story out of it. And there’s no more
2:28:03 when I talk about the Golden Gloves. It’s just a funny part of the story. It’s not something
2:28:07 that eats at me anymore. I need that part of the story to set up the ending. So I’m thankful that
2:28:14 happened to me because without that, without A, I wouldn’t have done B, which led to C.
2:28:21 That’s a healthy way to think about a lot of things, I suppose. If people, even if they’re not
2:28:25 storytellers or writers, if they think about their mishaps or some of the
2:28:30 challenges they’ve had is the part A they needed to set up part B.
2:28:34 You know what? It is a great way of looking at life. And man, I have taken a beating so many
2:28:40 times. And one of the great things about telling stories is when you realize that,
2:28:47 okay, this beating I just took, maybe I can use that to get in advance
2:28:56 from a magazine to do something cool. And again and again, I use my mistakes, foibles,
2:29:05 humiliating moments to come back and try to make some sense to them and triumph over those
2:29:13 moments. And it’s, again, you don’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to win, but you have to
2:29:19 look deep inside yourself and know that I respect myself for this. And to this day,
2:29:29 like I really do, it gets complicated when people look at the picture. I get a big picture at home
2:29:35 of me hitting Julio and people look and it looks real. It looks authentic.
2:29:41 It is real.
2:29:42 It is real, but it lends people to say, “What happened? What was the result? The result was I survived.”
2:29:52 So, Cal, there are so many more stories that even if not on tape, I will have to ask you about,
2:30:00 but perhaps we’ll do a round too. I mean, we have to talk at some point about Muhammad Ali.
2:30:04 We have to talk about Trump. We have to talk about De Niro. There’s so many other things.
2:30:07 The James Beard Award, I mean, the list goes on and on, but I know you have a dinner to get to.
2:30:12 Do you have a little bit of time for some of my customary rapid-fire questions?
2:30:16 I love those questions. I hope I have rapid-fire answers.
2:30:20 They don’t have to be. So, that’s the whole twist on the phrasing of the rapid-fire questions.
2:30:25 The questions can be rapid-fire, but your answers can be as long as you would like them to be.
2:30:29 I love those questions.
2:30:31 All right. So, the first that I usually start with is when you think of the word successful,
2:30:35 who is the first person who comes to mind and why.
2:30:37 And you mentioned them during the course of this interview. There are two people.
2:30:41 One is this kid, Alex Benayan, who’s 23 years old.
2:30:46 He was in school at USC, and his parents had basically raised him to be a doctor.
2:30:53 To the point where during Halloween, when he was a kid, they would dress him up in scrubs.
2:30:59 Just get the point. That’s where you’re headed.
2:31:02 And he gets to college and he’s got a stack of biology books next to him, and he just can’t do it.
2:31:11 He’s really smart, but he’s just not linked to it.
2:31:15 And he starts to wonder, what am I doing here?
2:31:20 He’s going to school at USC. He’s a great school.
2:31:23 And he starts to wonder about this word success.
2:31:27 And he goes to the library and starts to look at biographies of people who he deemed to be successful,
2:31:34 to see what the definition of success was.
2:31:38 And he’s reading biography after biography, and he realizes that the book that I’m looking for
2:31:44 doesn’t exist. I need to go out and to interview these people to find out
2:31:51 what they think success is. And so he did.
2:31:56 And on his journey, one of the people that he went to interview was Larry King.
2:32:02 And he actually met Larry outside of Whole Foods when running down.
2:32:08 He saw Larry pushing his shopping cart when running down the street.
2:32:12 “Larry King!” Scared him, but Jesus, that whole Larry.
2:32:15 And asked if he could interview Larry, and Larry invited him to breakfast.
2:32:20 And when he arrived, Alex says, “I’m writing a book.”
2:32:24 And Larry said to Alex, “Well, if you’re writing a book, then you should talk to this guy.
2:32:29 You should talk to Cal, because he’s written two of my books with me, and he can help you.”
2:32:35 So Alex did get to sit down to talk with Larry, but I became very close with Alex at that point.
2:32:43 So when I think of success, I think of everything Alex was trying to find out.
2:32:49 That’s one. The second is another boxer, George Foreman, who you might remember.
2:32:57 My mom’s favorite boxer.
2:32:58 Really? Oh, yeah. Because she remembers old George.
2:33:01 George. Now, the old George was a bigger Mike Tyson.
2:33:06 Oh my God, terrifying.
2:33:07 Tyson was what? Six feet, maybe? George Foreman was six-three,
2:33:10 two-twenty, and just had a string of vicious knockouts.
2:33:16 And won the heavyweight title by knocking Joe Frazier down six times.
2:33:22 One time, he literally hit him with an uppercut and uprooted Joe Frazier like he was a tree stump.
2:33:28 It looks like a superhero movie.
2:33:31 For people, I’m sure you can find footage of it, but if you look at George Foreman, Frazier,
2:33:35 knockdown or knockout, the footage is unbelievable.
2:33:39 And you’re looking at somebody there who George Foreman grew up in a very tangled situation.
2:33:48 His personality was formed, won by living in poverty.
2:33:52 He would go to school in the mornings with a brown paper bag that had no food in it.
2:33:58 And he would blow it up to make it look like there was food in it.
2:34:02 So he wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of the other kids.
2:34:05 On top of that, his siblings, his sisters, would make fun of him.
2:34:10 He was younger. They would say, “You a mohead. You a mohead.”
2:34:14 And George Foreman had no idea what a mohead meant, but he knew it wasn’t good.
2:34:19 And he would hear that and he would chase his sisters around when he heard, “You a mohead.
2:34:24 You a mohead.” And finally, years later, he grew up and he found out what they were saying.
2:34:30 George Foreman’s mom was married to Mr. Foreman, but they separated for a while.
2:34:37 While they were separated, her mom went off with a guy named Leroy Morehead,
2:34:42 conceived George, conceived George, and then went back to Mr. Foreman.
2:34:49 And so when he was born, his siblings were Foreman’s would call him, “You a mohead.
2:34:56 You a mohead.” And so there was this angry part of George.
2:35:00 Very angry.
2:35:01 To the point where he told me people would be scared to ask him for an autograph.
2:35:08 When he would walk into a place, people would look down.
2:35:13 And he had this surliness was a big part of his demeanor.
2:35:17 And when he went to fight Muhammad Ali in Zaire, he was an undefeated champ.
2:35:24 People feared for Ali’s life.
2:35:26 And in fact, Ali would not watch George Foreman hit the heavy bag.
2:35:30 It was too scary.
2:35:31 This guy could hit that hard.
2:35:33 And what Ali saw was George Foreman had so much anger in him
2:35:39 that when he came out, he just came out to bludgeon whoever was in front of him.
2:35:43 And Ali had a sense that if he could make Foreman expend his energy
2:35:48 and not land those punches to have them punches come off his arms,
2:35:53 if he could infuriate Foreman to the point where Foreman lost his cool
2:35:58 and punched himself out, he figured out a way to win.
2:36:02 And naturally in the heat of Africa, it was basically Ali set this thing up perfectly.
2:36:09 Foreman arrived with a German shepherd, not knowing that the Zaireans had in their history
2:36:19 a memory of German shepherds being brought in by the Belgians to keep them under control.
2:36:24 So the Zaireans immediately hated George Foreman.
2:36:28 And a chat grew out of it.
2:36:32 Ali, boom, I Ali kill him.
2:36:34 And the bell rang and George Foreman came at Ali and Ali didn’t move.
2:36:38 He just kept his back against the ropes with his hands up.
2:36:42 This was the ropidope?
2:36:43 This was the ropidope.
2:36:44 And George Foreman is just slugging away.
2:36:47 And Ali would like open his guard up.
2:36:49 Just the little says, “That’s how you get.”
2:36:51 Then close his guard and Foreman just getting more and more infuriated.
2:36:55 Just punch after punch, first round, second round.
2:36:58 Those of us who are watching and I was watching on closed circuit television
2:37:03 on a big screen in St. Louis at the time, you’re almost crying
2:37:06 because you were screaming and Ali, get out of the way, dance, do something.
2:37:10 We couldn’t see what was happening.
2:37:12 That he was just, he kept talking to George.
2:37:14 We couldn’t hear him talking.
2:37:15 Oh man, that’s it.
2:37:17 That’s all you got?
2:37:18 Foreman is just throwing shot after shot after shot.
2:37:21 And then all of a sudden in like the fourth round,
2:37:24 you see Foreman throw a shot and Ali just duck under it.
2:37:28 And then just throw a jab straight back in Foreman’s face and Foreman’s head snapped back.
2:37:34 And we realized, oh my God, he’s punched himself out.
2:37:39 As the fight continues, a few more rounds.
2:37:41 Ali nails him in one right hand and it’s so hot, Foreman’s exhausted.
2:37:46 Ali nails him with a right hand, Foreman goes down, can’t beat the count.
2:37:50 And he’s crushed.
2:37:51 It must be akin to what Rhonda Rousey, for those who are like younger
2:37:57 and watch Mixed Martial Arts, what Rhonda Rousey went through after her recent defeat.
2:38:03 You think somebody is invincible and then all of a sudden they’re on their back.
2:38:07 One head kick, one head kick later.
2:38:08 That’s right.
2:38:09 And George Foreman, for like 20 years, could never get another title shot.
2:38:15 He retired and he did something and he told me what he did.
2:38:21 And he said, this is the hardest thing when you talk about success.
2:38:24 I asked him a question about success and he said, the hardest thing you can do
2:38:29 in life is to change your character.
2:38:33 And basically, in his early 40s, he came back to boxing,
2:38:38 but he was completely different.
2:38:41 He was no longer the surly guy.
2:38:44 He was a guy who would do ads for eating hamburgers, smiling and laughing.
2:38:49 Now, Chris, I’m wrong.
2:38:51 I remember his, I want to say I remember his comeback sort of promotional videos
2:38:56 where he’d be going for his boxing run and people would be handing him food.
2:38:59 That’s right, that’s right.
2:39:01 That’s right.
2:39:02 And he starts his comeback at, I think, more than 300 pounds.
2:39:05 Big guy.
2:39:06 He’s a big guy and he’s in his 40s.
2:39:09 But it’s what he changed in his head.
2:39:12 Now, he was smiling.
2:39:14 What did he do to change that?
2:39:16 He realized that surliness and that anger is what brought him down against Muhammad Ali, right?
2:39:26 So fast forward, he’s 45 years old and he gets a heavyweight title fight
2:39:33 against a guy 20 years younger named Michael Moore.
2:39:35 Oh, I remember.
2:39:36 Southpaw.
2:39:37 Southpaw, who is much faster, a little lighter, but should be able to move around George with ease
2:39:46 and just put punches into George’s face without George being able to respond.
2:39:50 But here’s the thing.
2:39:52 Foreman came into the ring wearing the exact red trunks that he was wearing
2:39:59 when Ali hit him and put him down.
2:40:01 And when Moore’s trainer saw that, he recognized it and thought, uh-oh, something’s up here.
2:40:11 And basically George didn’t waste any energy.
2:40:14 He rearranged his character and Moore, the first nine rounds, was completely out-boxed
2:40:22 and moved around.
2:40:23 George just kept his hands up, tried to land, could barely even land.
2:40:27 And his face started to get swollen and the 10th round started and his trainer, who, coincidentally,
2:40:35 was Angelo Dundee, Muhammad Ali’s trainer who was in the opposing corner in Zaire,
2:40:42 basically said to him, George,
2:40:44 you’re way behind.
2:40:45 You got to do something.
2:40:46 And George just kept moving forward and without wasting energy, just saw one moment
2:40:54 and he threw a right hand and he still had the power.
2:40:57 He still had everything that he had when he was young, power-wise.
2:41:02 And he clipped Moyer straight on the jaw and Michael Moore went down and couldn’t beat the count.
2:41:08 And Foreman went over to the corner, got down on his knees,
2:41:13 thank the Lord.
2:41:14 And to me, that was a symbol of success because he needed to change who he was
2:41:22 in order to have that success.
2:41:25 And he did it at 45.
2:41:28 So that’s the best answer I can give you.
2:41:32 Ah, love George Foreman.
2:41:34 This just reinvigorated so much more enthusiasm about learning more about George.
2:41:39 And I remember, it brings back so many memories because I remember that fight also
2:41:43 I want to say George used what I want to say was the crab defense.
2:41:48 In other words, he didn’t hold his forearms together perpendicular to the floor,
2:41:53 but they were kind of crossed over in front of his face.
2:41:56 Such a good story.
2:41:58 Well, it was all designed to, he knew he was going to endure punishment.
2:42:02 And he knew he had to do it in a way that expended the least amount of energy.
2:42:06 And he knew he just had to put himself in the right position to land that one shot.
2:42:11 So it’s a beautiful story to see somebody take their weakest point and do something within themselves
2:42:20 to change who they are.
2:42:24 And the history repeats itself irony of that fight that he won also is that Michael was known as a
2:42:31 very angry guy, had a criminal record and probably lost for some of the same reasons.
2:42:38 That’s right.
2:42:38 In fact, I’d have to go back and watch the fight, but I’m sure his trainer who was like
2:42:43 aware was probably saying, you know, if you’re way ahead, take it easy, stay away.
2:42:49 And he probably said, what are you crazy?
2:42:53 I got this under control.
2:42:55 Boom, one shot.
2:42:56 Yeah, incredible.
2:42:57 What is the book or books you’ve given most as gifts other than your own?
2:43:04 Which obviously for people listening, you know that I’ll link to everything in the show notes as
2:43:07 well.
2:43:08 A hard question to answer because it’s almost like wine.
2:43:12 Every meal, you’re going to have another experience with different people, different food.
2:43:20 So if I meet somebody, I like to give books that I’ve loved.
2:43:25 And like I mentioned meeting Alex and he says, he didn’t know how to write a book.
2:43:33 And he’s like, I want to write a great book.
2:43:36 You could just tell it was bursting out of him.
2:43:38 And so I gave him Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude for him to know, okay,
2:43:45 if you’ve never written a book and you’re going to tell somebody you want to write a great book,
2:43:50 all right, read this and know what a great book is.
2:43:53 And so my gifts tend to judge what the person needs and then fill that need.
2:44:01 So and then no different in wine.
2:44:03 If somebody’s having a steak, I’m probably not going to give them a wrestling.
2:44:07 I’ll give them something to compliment the steak.
2:44:09 I’ll give you more specific circumstance.
2:44:12 So let’s say that someone came to you and they said, you know what, I’m a board billionaire
2:44:17 and I want to give three books to every graduating high school senior in the country this year.
2:44:23 Wow, what a question.
2:44:25 Okay, one book that people should read.
2:44:31 And in fact, I got it with me right now.
2:44:34 One of the blurbs on this book actually says, as Toni Morrison, this is required reading.
2:44:41 Wow.
2:44:42 So yeah, and Toni Morrison is a great African American writer.
2:44:48 And this book is called Between the World and Me.
2:44:51 And it’s by a guy named Tom Nahisi Coates.
2:44:55 And it’s a letter to his son about being a black male in America.
2:45:01 And I think it is required reading just because if we want to understand what is going on,
2:45:10 we see what’s happening in Ferguson, Missouri.
2:45:12 It just seems like it’s a month after month after month.
2:45:17 We see protests and problems.
2:45:20 And this is just a way of redirecting your eyesight to a place that you normally wouldn’t go.
2:45:29 And it’s amazing thing about this book because as I’m reading it, I was walking down the street
2:45:36 and I passed a news box with the Los Angeles Times in it.
2:45:42 And on the front page, there was this statistic that said that basically every juvenile
2:45:50 that’s incarcerated in the state of California, it cost us $260,000 a year.
2:45:58 And you–
2:45:59 More than any Ivy League education.
2:46:02 There you go.
2:46:03 And think of that.
2:46:04 If you took that money and put it into lifting that same kid,
2:46:11 who knows what would happen?
2:46:12 You know, there’s DNA involved.
2:46:15 There’s a lot of stuff involved.
2:46:16 But it just made me realize why aren’t we putting the resources in before
2:46:23 rather than just paying this money out.
2:46:28 We don’t even know that we’re putting it out.
2:46:31 And so it’s just a book that makes you see the world differently.
2:46:36 Another book that I would recommend.
2:46:38 It’s a book that I’m reading now.
2:46:41 And just for those people wondering between the world and Maine,
2:46:43 this is a short book.
2:46:44 This is about 130 pages National Book Award winner.
2:46:48 I will order that as soon as we finish this chat.
2:46:51 The second book is OK if I give you two because these two are coming.
2:46:55 I can do two.
2:46:56 Just because these are two that I’m reading now.
2:47:00 So it’s just hot off the press.
2:47:02 It’s a book called Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln.
2:47:09 And I’m carrying it around with me as well.
2:47:11 This is amazing.
2:47:12 Yeah.
2:47:13 You hit me at the right time with this question.
2:47:16 It’s written by James C. Humes.
2:47:18 And there’s for anyone who wants to speak.
2:47:23 And if you’re a high school senior at some point,
2:47:26 you’re going to have to get up and speak.
2:47:28 It’s a great book because there’s all kinds of tips
2:47:32 on everything about speaking.
2:47:35 Subtitle 21 Powerful Secrets of History’s Greatest Speakers.
2:47:38 There’s this great anecdote in this book that really helped me
2:47:42 as I was preparing to give my speech because it’s hard to memorize a speech.
2:47:47 And then I’m reading about Ronald Reagan known as a great communicator,
2:47:53 American president.
2:47:54 Well, you know, when he spoke, he riveted people.
2:47:57 And when he was a young man, again, we’re talking about basically the same age
2:48:03 as the people you just mentioned.
2:48:05 What would you recommend for the high school senior?
2:48:07 Actually, Reagan was just getting out of college.
2:48:09 And he got a job in radio in Iowa.
2:48:14 And he was very good conversationally on the air.
2:48:16 But then it came time to read the advertisements.
2:48:20 And for some reason, he was so stiff and awkward reading these advertisements
2:48:29 that the advertisers basically said, “Get him off the air.”
2:48:33 And they fired him.
2:48:33 And he went back to his room and he’s like feeling horrible about it
2:48:39 because he loved being on the radio.
2:48:40 He loved communicating.
2:48:42 And he wondered, “What can I do in order to get my job back?”
2:48:48 So I guess FDR was doing the fireside chats
2:48:52 and he realized how riveting those were.
2:48:55 So he got those chats and he started to read them.
2:49:00 But what he did was he would look at the words
2:49:04 and then almost memorize the phrase in his head,
2:49:09 then look up and then say the words conversationally.
2:49:12 So he wasn’t trying to memorize them by reading it off the page.
2:49:17 He would just take a few of the words, then look up, give you those words,
2:49:22 look down.
2:49:22 He would never speak while he was looking down.
2:49:25 And then he went back to radio and that’s how he did his advertisements and it worked.
2:49:31 So it’s a great, the book is just filled with little tips like that
2:49:35 that will make it so much easier for anybody who’s got to get up and give a speech.
2:49:42 I am going to get another book for my list.
2:49:45 Do you have any favorite documentaries or movies?
2:49:48 You know, it’s a really interesting question.
2:49:51 I probably would have told you that there’s a movie Cinema Paradiso.
2:49:58 I love that movie.
2:49:59 Grateful.
2:49:59 Okay.
2:50:00 I would mention that, but something happened to me recently where a documentary and a movie
2:50:05 came together that provided this amazing experience.
2:50:09 The documentary was called Man on Wire.
2:50:12 And it was about Philippe Petit’s walk on a wire across the towers of the World Trade Center.
2:50:18 And it’s amazing documentary.
2:50:20 Everything that he had to go through to almost like a spy or an espionage agent,
2:50:26 figure out how to get up on the roof.
2:50:29 We’re not even talking about how do you walk a rope?
2:50:31 That’s one thing.
2:50:33 But then to wonder how do you get to the top of the World Trade Center as it’s being built
2:50:39 and get a wire from one side to the other to stabilize it at night when nobody’s watching.
2:50:47 And the documentary takes you through the whole thing.
2:50:50 It’s just amazing.
2:50:52 And the way they pieced it together with the alternating sort of black and white
2:50:56 reenactments, just the cinematography and the pacing is genius.
2:51:00 Yeah.
2:51:00 It’s definitely my favorite documentary.
2:51:02 But then last year, Robert Simekis did a movie called The Walk.
2:51:08 Is that Joseph Gordon-Levitt?
2:51:10 That’s right.
2:51:11 I haven’t seen it.
2:51:11 Oh, here’s the thing.
2:51:13 I saw this movie nine times.
2:51:15 The Walk.
2:51:16 The Walk.
2:51:17 I saw this movie nine times.
2:51:19 But you got to see it on 3D IMAX.
2:51:22 Because one of the innovative things about this film on 3D IMAX is you literally feel
2:51:30 like you are on the wire.
2:51:31 I mean, people left the theater vomiting.
2:51:36 I knew everything about that story.
2:51:41 Because as you mentioned, I worked at Windows of the World.
2:51:45 So when I was serving wine at the top of Windows of the World every day,
2:51:50 I was looking down at basically what Philip Petite was looking down at when he was crossing
2:51:57 this wire.
2:51:58 And I seen the documentary.
2:52:00 So I knew that basically not only did he walk on the wire, but he laid down on the wire on his back.
2:52:07 Unbelievable.
2:52:08 And then the police are coming.
2:52:09 And the police had been haunting him for years because wherever he would try and
2:52:14 juggle or walk the wire in order to get people to give change,
2:52:18 they would be trying to chase him away.
2:52:20 And so he had this cat and mouse game going with the police all these years.
2:52:24 And now he’s on the wire, more than 100 stories above New York City.
2:52:28 And the police are there and they can’t touch him.
2:52:31 He could do whatever he wants on this wire.
2:52:33 And so like the tables are turning.
2:52:35 And yet in this movie, when he steps on that wire,
2:52:41 I knew everything that was going to happen on that walk.
2:52:44 I’m begging him.
2:52:46 No, don’t do it.
2:52:47 Don’t do it.
2:52:48 Please don’t do it.
2:52:50 I completely suspended my disbelief.
2:52:53 And let me tell you how much I started taking people night after night to see this movie
2:52:58 again and again, because I want to gauge their reactions.
2:53:02 And gave them motion sickness pills beforehand.
2:53:05 I told, I warned him.
2:53:06 I say, if you’ve got a fear of heights, don’t come.
2:53:09 Go watch Robert De Niro in The Apprentice or whatever they call that movie.
2:53:13 What hit me was there’s this one scene in the movie
2:53:16 where he’s learning how to walk the tightrope.
2:53:19 And this is back in France.
2:53:21 That’s where he’s from.
2:53:22 And he’s like two steps away from getting back to the platform.
2:53:28 And he slips and has to catch the wire with his hand.
2:53:32 And he’s like 50 feet above ground or something.
2:53:36 And he manages to get back to the platform.
2:53:40 And he comes down and his teacher is there.
2:53:42 And his teacher basically says to him, it’s the last two steps.
2:53:48 The people who die, they die in those last two steps.
2:53:51 Remember that.
2:53:53 And in fact, Philippe Petit was paying him to get those lessons.
2:53:56 And when Philippe Petit went to give him money for that lesson,
2:54:01 the teacher said, no, this lesson you get for free.
2:54:04 This doesn’t cost you anything.
2:54:06 So I knew this story cold.
2:54:09 I’d read his book.
2:54:10 I’d seen the documentary many times.
2:54:12 And I’m watching this film.
2:54:13 And when he falls down early on to get that lesson,
2:54:19 it’s shot in a way where the pole literally comes out of the screen right at your head.
2:54:26 Okay.
2:54:27 So the first time you’re just swooning, not swooning,
2:54:30 you’re swaying immediately to the right or the left to get out of the way.
2:54:34 Okay.
2:54:34 So now I’m watching the second time.
2:54:36 I know this pole is coming at my head.
2:54:38 Every time, on the ninth time,
2:54:41 poles coming straight at my head, I’m ducking out of the way.
2:54:44 It was that visceral and experienced.
2:54:48 And the direction was just amazing.
2:54:50 I love the acting.
2:54:51 And so if you can see that movie on 3D IMAX, please do.
2:54:58 It’s just wonderful.
2:55:00 Well, I guess I’ll put out a call or a request to perhaps the people involved
2:55:06 with making that film.
2:55:06 If they happen to be listening or if you know the people involved,
2:55:09 since people might not get to see the theatrical release in 3D,
2:55:14 talk to the people working with virtual reality,
2:55:16 get in touch with the Oculus folks or some of these other studios,
2:55:20 Dackery or whomever might be able to translate some of this to an immersive experience for folks.
2:55:26 Because that’s coming down the pike too.
2:55:28 Wow.
2:55:28 That’d be beautiful.
2:55:30 You know, I feel like we’re just going to have to do around two sometime, but I’ll ask.
2:55:34 You know, I’m going to come back anytime.
2:55:35 I’ll ask three more.
2:55:38 Okay.
2:55:38 If you could have a billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would you put on it?
2:55:42 One word.
2:55:43 Listen.
2:55:44 Listen.
2:55:46 I don’t know what reaction that would get,
2:55:48 but I would like to see the reaction on people’s faces when they saw that.
2:55:56 Because I think that listening is not an art form.
2:56:00 Well, it is an art form.
2:56:01 People just aren’t using it as an art form, but it is an art form.
2:56:04 A lot of great things could be achieved through listening.
2:56:08 What advice would you give your 30-year-old self?
2:56:12 And if you could place us again where you were at 30.
2:56:16 Okay.
2:56:17 I would not give myself one word of advice, and I’ll tell you why.
2:56:22 Because if I would have given myself that advice at 30, it would have moved me maybe one centimeter
2:56:32 in one direction that put my life in a different place.
2:56:35 And I needed to be on a very specific seat, on a very specific bus at a very specific time
2:56:48 in order to meet the woman that became my wife and as the mother of my kids.
2:56:53 So I couldn’t have that moved in any way.
2:56:57 I needed everything to happen just the way it did in order to have that moment,
2:57:03 in order to have the rest of my life.
2:57:04 So after that, I’m sure there are times when I’ve given myself advice.
2:57:09 Really, the time I needed advice was when I was in college,
2:57:16 and there was so much offered and so little I took advantage of.
2:57:20 What would your advice be to either your kids or to people going into college?
2:57:26 They say, “Okay, what should I take?
2:57:30 I just don’t even know what to do with myself.”
2:57:32 Okay.
2:57:33 Paradox of choice.
2:57:34 I can’t figure it out.
2:57:35 If they want to travel, you got a chance to learn like four languages, five languages.
2:57:44 And it’s going to be so relaxed.
2:57:47 All you got to do is just go into the class and then meet somebody from the opposite sex
2:57:53 who speaks the language and you’re going to be going out and talking in the new language.
2:57:58 And you could do that over and over again in college.
2:58:01 You got that time.
2:58:02 One of the things, if it was me, knowing that I wanted to be a writer or knowing that I’m now
2:58:11 going to be speaking and I’m going to be speaking about questions that people ask when they’re hiring,
2:58:18 I would love to have studied human behavior because I know that when a company is looking
2:58:27 to fill a job, if the person doing the interview understands the role that needs to be filled
2:58:35 and understands human behavior, they can ask questions to the applicants that will fill
2:58:42 that role in a really good way.
2:58:45 That’s my hunch.
2:58:46 Have you ever heard the story of the book that Newt Gingrich used to navigate politics,
2:58:53 at least one that he’s credited with a lot of whatever success he’s had?
2:58:57 Chimpanzee politics.
2:58:59 I’m not kidding.
2:59:01 I am not kidding.
2:59:02 I’m going to write that one down.
2:59:03 I’m going to go home and order it.
2:59:04 I am not kidding.
2:59:05 So what about as a writer or to a kid who’s graduating from college and says to himself or
2:59:12 herself, “Should I go on to get my MFA or continue to say go to a specialty journalism school
2:59:19 or writing school if they’d only taken maybe one or two classes that required a lot of writing?
2:59:25 What advice would you give to them?”
2:59:27 I would tell them just write.
2:59:31 And the great thing about it is, okay, I’m not knocking the schooling because as we talked
2:59:37 about earlier, I owe everything to the University of Missouri Journalism School.
2:59:42 It set me on my way and then the connections.
2:59:44 On the other hand, all you need to do to be a writer is to write.
2:59:50 And not only that, but all you need to do is to find places that are interested in taking
2:59:56 your writing, doesn’t have to be for much money, but you can go out especially now.
3:00:01 You don’t even need a physical publication.
3:00:06 Now you can just create a blog on the internet and just start writing.
3:00:09 So I would advise people to just, if you want to be a writer, write and just keep writing
3:00:15 and keep writing.
3:00:16 If you have the means and the will to go to school and get a teacher or teachers that
3:00:22 can help you through, even better, but nothing should really stop you from writing and you
3:00:30 shouldn’t use, “Well, I need to go to school first as an excuse to put off writing.
3:00:36 I need to make the school make me write.
3:00:38 You make you write.”
3:00:40 Yeah, you don’t have that intrinsic motivation.
3:00:42 It’s going to be hard to make anything happen because you won’t always have a school teacher
3:00:47 to whack you with a ruler.
3:00:48 That’s right.
3:00:48 And not only that, but the other thing is just put yourself in a position where
3:00:52 you have no money and you need to write something to make money.
3:00:57 If you need to eat, unless you can find a bar that’s putting out olives and little
3:01:02 chicken fingers, you’re going to write and get paid so that you can eat.
3:01:08 I remember talking to a friend of mine who’s a journalist, writes for a number of very
3:01:13 well-known newspapers and he always laughs when he has to listen to book authors like
3:01:20 myself, sort of whinge and pontificate about writer’s block.
3:01:25 And he just scoffs at the whole idea.
3:01:27 He’s like, “I don’t have the luxury of having writer’s block.”
3:01:30 He’s like, “I have a deadline, a deliverable, whatever it is, 4pm, 5pm.”
3:01:34 He’s like, “No, I can’t use about the subtleties of writer’s block.”
3:01:39 Because he has to ship, he has to ship words every day or whatever it might be every week.
3:01:44 What are your thoughts on writer’s block, if that’s not too general a question?
3:01:48 Oh, I only had it once.
3:01:49 Okay.
3:01:50 I only had it once.
3:01:52 And what happened was I was writing for Esquire and working on a column called “The Perfect Man”
3:02:00 and the idea was basically in line with this conversation.
3:02:04 I was going to take all my flaws and all my mistakes and then go to experts
3:02:08 who were going to teach me how to overcome them.
3:02:11 And then I was going to write about the experience so that everybody could have the
3:02:15 collected wisdom. And so I learned how to walk through using Alexander technique.
3:02:22 I learned how to publicly speak by going in a boxing ring with Michael Buffer and
3:02:28 announcing a fight.
3:02:29 Sounds like a fun gig.
3:02:30 That was great.
3:02:31 I learned how to lose weight by going to Jack LaLaine, who was the exercise champion of his day.
3:02:38 And I went through, learned how to barbecue through Stephen Reichlund,
3:02:43 author of the Barbecue Bible.
3:02:44 And one of the last things I did was go to learn about wine.
3:02:49 Because if you are a man, you want to have a feeling that you can go into a restaurant
3:02:56 with a group of people.
3:02:58 The wine list comes to you and you don’t feel like, oh man, what am I going to do?
3:03:03 I don’t know what’s what here.
3:03:05 And then you don’t know if the waiter is going to try and unload a lousy bottle
3:03:11 that they can’t sell on you or a bottle for a lot of money.
3:03:14 You’re helpless.
3:03:16 So I wanted to learn enough to know how to walk into a restaurant with confidence
3:03:22 and order what I want.
3:03:23 And the solution to that was to be trained to be the sommelier for a night
3:03:29 at Windows of the World, which sold for a time more wine than any other restaurant on the
3:03:34 planet at the top of the World Trade Center.
3:03:37 And I had no idea where this adventure was going to send me, but it took me two years
3:03:43 to learn all about wine.
3:03:45 Because you then find out you have to go to these places where they make the wine
3:03:49 and you have to understand the difference between all of the varietals and the wine
3:03:55 list at Windows of the World.
3:03:57 There was hundreds of pages to know all all those wines.
3:04:02 It was almost impossible, but you start to get an idea.
3:04:06 And I had world-class sommeliers teaching me.
3:04:11 And for one night, I was the sommelier at Windows on the World.
3:04:15 It was an amazing experience.
3:04:17 And one of the great things I did is I had a guy who I knew come in.
3:04:21 He brought his wife.
3:04:22 It’s like the first couple of the evening.
3:04:25 And I seated them right next to a window.
3:04:28 So you’re looking down on New York from 106 stories or whatever.
3:04:33 And I had a bottle of champagne, lordeaux champagne from France, which it basically
3:04:41 was like a $10 bottle of champagne.
3:04:43 But nobody knew that.
3:04:45 And this had been served at the Assemblee National in France.
3:04:52 It was like basic bottle of champagne.
3:04:54 But I took it out to their couple.
3:04:56 They were celebrating their anniversary.
3:04:58 And I walked over with a flourish.
3:05:00 And I announced that I was serving lordeaux champagne.
3:05:04 And that it had never been served at these heights before.
3:05:08 And it would never be served at these heights again.
3:05:11 And this woman looks at me.
3:05:14 She didn’t know who I was.
3:05:15 Her husband did.
3:05:16 And she just broke out in tears.
3:05:19 And then the husband had never tasted the champagne before.
3:05:21 But they both poured it.
3:05:23 They both put it up.
3:05:24 And they said, oh, Cal, we never knew what champagne was before this moment.
3:05:30 And it teaches you that the wine and the moment are inextricably linked.
3:05:37 And I can take a great moment and make a great wine out of it.
3:05:41 And I can take a great wine and make a great moment out of it.
3:05:44 In any event, the evening transpired.
3:05:46 And it was great.
3:05:47 But it was all it was profound.
3:05:49 It was also funny.
3:05:50 I’d spill wine on people’s down the glass because I had to be moving really quick.
3:05:55 There was a lot of people.
3:05:56 And that’s inexcusable.
3:06:01 That should never happen here.
3:06:02 That bottle is on the house.
3:06:04 Everybody at the table.
3:06:06 Oh, this is great.
3:06:08 And people at the adjacent table are saying, come over here.
3:06:10 Spill some here.
3:06:11 Spill some here.
3:06:13 And we get through the night.
3:06:14 It’s a delightful time and really memorable.
3:06:19 Now I go home to write the story and start to go through my notes.
3:06:23 Because it’s taken me two years to get this experience.
3:06:26 And the planes crash into the World Trade Center.
3:06:29 And I remember going to the Brown Zero like a week later,
3:06:35 the military took me around in a Humvee.
3:06:39 And that guy still was so overwhelmed that I was almost knocked out when I saw it.
3:06:49 Because I remember seeing like there was this thin coat of white dust over everything.
3:06:57 And you could see in a parking lot this coat of dust over the cars.
3:07:03 And I actually said to the guy in the army who was taking me around.
3:07:07 I said, why don’t those people come back and get their cars?
3:07:11 And he put his hand on my shoulder.
3:07:14 And he said, Cal, those cars don’t have any owners anymore.
3:07:19 And it’s very hard to explain the enormity, but I just couldn’t write.
3:07:23 How could I translate this experience of utter joy learning all about this amazing beverage
3:07:32 that transformed lives, meeting all these friends along the way.
3:07:37 Wherever you would go, it was like traveling around the world again.
3:07:40 It would just open up a party.
3:07:42 And that party would invite you to another party and another party and another party.
3:07:48 And so there I am having this amazing experience.
3:07:51 And then on top of it, for one night, I was the sommelier.
3:07:55 And not only that, but at the end or toward the middle of the night,
3:07:59 somebody, like people were pressing $20 in my hand.
3:08:01 They thought I was really the sommelier.
3:08:03 And a few days later, somebody who came in that night,
3:08:09 and nobody knew that I wasn’t the real sommelier.
3:08:12 Somebody came in like three days later and asked for me.
3:08:16 And so I was feeling so good about the experience.
3:08:20 And right after that, the planes came in and took the towers down.
3:08:24 And now I’ve got to write the story about this.
3:08:28 And the editor, he now knows, he’s basically bankroll this thing for two years.
3:08:33 Same guy who bankrolled me going up against Julio Cesar Chavez bankrolled the wine story.
3:08:39 I’m flying around the world taste the wines in France, wines in Italy, the wines in Germany,
3:08:45 going to California.
3:08:46 And he allowed me to go through the whole experience.
3:08:49 And now he knows something amazing has got to come out of this.
3:08:57 Because I saw how much he put in.
3:09:00 And we all know this seminal moment in American history.
3:09:05 So he’s got to step up to it.
3:09:06 And I couldn’t.
3:09:08 I would stare in front of the computer for hours at a time.
3:09:12 And nothing would come out.
3:09:15 Like my eyes would be bleeding.
3:09:17 And every time I would have to go into the office to see the editor.
3:09:22 Like I knew we both knew.
3:09:26 Like, where’s the story?
3:09:27 Where’s the story?
3:09:28 Years started passing.
3:09:30 And he started to do things to try to like help me and push it out of me.
3:09:37 Whether it was lighthearted or, hey, you know, it’s like years now.
3:09:42 The movie Sideways, which is about wine had come out.
3:09:45 Wine is really hot now.
3:09:47 Now is the time.
3:09:48 So the editor is really trying to push the story out of me in the best way he can.
3:09:54 Might be lighthearted with a little off-handed joke.
3:09:56 It might be, hey, come on, it’s years now.
3:10:01 We’re waiting for the story.
3:10:02 Movie Sideways comes out.
3:10:04 It’s a big hit in the wide wine world.
3:10:06 And now he’s saying, you know, this is the time that the story needs to come out.
3:10:10 I can’t do it.
3:10:11 I go to the computer almost night after night.
3:10:15 And it’s the most painful thing because I never had writers blocked before.
3:10:21 But there was just nothing that would come out of me.
3:10:24 It just wasn’t, it was like a wine that wasn’t ready to be served.
3:10:28 It needed to be in the barrel.
3:10:30 Only you don’t know how long it needs to be in the barrel.
3:10:34 And you’re feeling all this guilt.
3:10:36 And finally, I just took all my, I had these copious notes in boxes.
3:10:42 And I put them down in the basement.
3:10:44 Just, okay, let me just get it out of my face.
3:10:46 Because every time I would go into my office, I would see these boxes and I would just flinch.
3:10:51 Oh, it seems like a huge just anxiety trigger.
3:10:55 Yeah.
3:10:55 The undone homework assignment.
3:10:57 The ultimate undone homework assignment that your boss has basically bankrolled for a couple of years.
3:11:06 And so you basically know that you can’t go in with any more big ideas until that is completed.
3:11:17 And so it really affected me, but there was nothing I could do about it.
3:11:22 And I put these notes away in the basement.
3:11:24 And then we had this terrible ice storm.
3:11:27 I was living in North Carolina at the time.
3:11:29 And everything turned into mold in my basement.
3:11:36 And all the notes got black.
3:11:38 So I had like no notes of anything.
3:11:44 Basically everything had been wiped out.
3:11:46 My notes were ground zero afterward.
3:11:49 And now like, how am I going to do this?
3:11:52 But you know, there was a writer taught me something very early in my career.
3:11:57 His name was Harry Cruz.
3:11:58 I don’t know if you’ve ever heard him.
3:12:00 No.
3:12:00 Wrote a book called Feast of Snakes.
3:12:02 And if you’re a young man and the Harry Cruz also wrote for Esquire.
3:12:06 If you’re a young man and you don’t even know how this book would translate now.
3:12:13 But it was a real kind of macho.
3:12:16 What was the name again?
3:12:17 Feast of Snakes.
3:12:18 He wrote another book called Car about a guy eating a car.
3:12:22 This guy was out there.
3:12:26 And as soon as I read these books, I just I got to meet this guy.
3:12:32 I got to meet this guy.
3:12:33 So I started to tell people, you know, I’m going to go meet Harry Cruz.
3:12:36 And people started looking at me saying, are you sure?
3:12:40 I said, what do you mean?
3:12:42 And he said, well, his drinking is legendary.
3:12:45 Plus the amount of drugs that he puts in his body.
3:12:48 You’re not going to be able to stay with this guy.
3:12:50 You’re going to hurt yourself.
3:12:52 And so naturally I get in my car.
3:12:54 I drive 20 straight hours down to Gainesville, Florida.
3:12:58 This is when I was living in New York.
3:13:00 And I drive right up to his house and knock on the door.
3:13:04 And there’s no response and knock again.
3:13:08 No response.
3:13:09 And I could almost hear like a snoring.
3:13:12 So I just opened the door.
3:13:15 Oh my God, Florida.
3:13:17 And Harry is laid out on a lazy boy chair with like an empty bottle of rum on his belly.
3:13:27 And I get close to him and he just his head is just moving around.
3:13:32 He’s like getting himself out of sleep.
3:13:34 He said, what do you want?
3:13:35 I said, like, Harry, I just read Feast of Snakes.
3:13:38 I just drove 20 hours straight to see you.
3:13:42 Well, why don’t you drive over to Gator Gulch and let’s get us some alcohol.
3:13:47 I drive over to Gator Gulch and I think that was what was called something like that.
3:13:56 And they’ve already got like a carton filled with alcohol from me to bring back.
3:14:02 The usual.
3:14:02 Yeah, the usual.
3:14:03 That’s kind of the usual.
3:14:04 I come back and we start drinking and like naturally after a little while,
3:14:09 I just been driving for 20 hours and now I’m drinking and I’m starting to float away
3:14:16 and he’s getting more lucid.
3:14:18 And this is before the drugs came out.
3:14:20 And I said to him, Harry, you’re a writer.
3:14:26 Do you keep a diary?
3:14:28 How can you drink like this and do all these drugs and remember anything?
3:14:34 And he looked at me and he smiled and he said, boy, the good shit sticks.
3:14:41 And it was that line that saved me when I needed to write the wine story.
3:14:48 Because I always knew the good shit sticks, the moments that were truly great were the
3:14:55 moments that I needed and almost 10 years passed.
3:15:00 And in a chance meeting with a woman who was in a position, it was a terrible position.
3:15:08 She had loved her husband.
3:15:10 Her husband had died.
3:15:11 She was alone.
3:15:12 Time had passed.
3:15:14 She was ready to go out and meet somebody again.
3:15:16 And she said, I’m older.
3:15:19 I’ve never really dated.
3:15:20 I don’t know what to do.
3:15:22 And I said to her, join a wine class because you will meet people and just by the way they
3:15:30 talk about their wines, you’re going to know if you should like them or not.
3:15:34 And she said, wow, that’s a good idea.
3:15:37 And something in that conversation opened up a pathway.
3:15:44 And then I was sitting, I went to a bar and I’m sitting down and remember this whole thing
3:15:50 started with me just wanting to be able to give somebody instruction.
3:15:55 When the wine list came before me, I could give the waiter instruction.
3:16:01 This is what I want without feeling like I didn’t know what I was doing.
3:16:05 So I have this conversation with the woman and a couple of nights later I said, you know what,
3:16:11 let me just write down the good shit, the good shit that’s stuck.
3:16:17 And I’m sitting at a bar and I’m writing down all the stuff, the good shit that’s stuck.
3:16:23 And the bartender’s pouring drinks and a waiter came back with a Italian dessert wine.
3:16:31 And there’s a white wine and the waiter said to the bartender that people, they don’t like it.
3:16:40 They say there’s something wrong with it.
3:16:42 And so it was Vin Santo.
3:16:44 And so the bartender was a young guy and I think that he really didn’t know much about wine.
3:16:51 He was like a college kid to the bartender.
3:16:53 And so he said, well, look, you know, Vin Santo, it’s not cheap.
3:16:59 And I said, wait a minute, let me smell that wine because he brought the wine back.
3:17:04 I said pour me a glass.
3:17:06 And so I swirled around, I put it up to my nose and I said, no, it’s no good.
3:17:12 And the way I said it, I must have said it with such conviction that the bartender said, oh, okay.
3:17:18 You said it the same way that Jesus said his name in the locker room.
3:17:21 That’s right. That’s exactly it.
3:17:23 I knew this wine was no good.
3:17:26 And so the bartender said to me, well, like, how’d you know?
3:17:29 And we got into a conversation and he had told me that he had been in a choir.
3:17:36 He said, I’m not really a bartender.
3:17:38 And he explained that when he was young, he was a singer and he had actually
3:17:43 gone to the Vatican and sang in a choir for the pope.
3:17:46 So I said, okay, fine, then you understand this.
3:17:49 When you put that wine to your nose, all right, listen to it.
3:17:54 You can tell that as there’s something certainly in the taste, maybe you can get it from the smell.
3:18:01 It starts out okay, but there’s somebody singing off key in there.
3:18:05 And I don’t know if it’s the way the wine was stored.
3:18:09 But in the middle of that taste of wine are off key notes.
3:18:14 And I don’t know, maybe the wine was a little corked.
3:18:18 Maybe it was just the way they stored it.
3:18:21 But as soon as he heard that, like he realized it, it translated for him.
3:18:26 And okay, when somebody in the choirs got a voice that isn’t hitting what the rest of us are hitting,
3:18:33 it’s a problem.
3:18:34 And he understood that.
3:18:36 And he looked at me and he said, thanks.
3:18:40 And I knew that was the end of the story.
3:18:42 And as soon as he said it, I went to the keyboard and I wrote the whole thing out.
3:18:47 Do you recall the title of the piece?
3:18:49 Yeah, it’s called Drinking at 1300 Feet.
3:18:52 Drinking at 1300 Feet.
3:18:54 Yeah.
3:18:55 Cal, you’re a great man.
3:18:57 You’re a very, very generous person.
3:19:00 And I want to let you get to your dinner.
3:19:04 And would love to direct people to where they can find you and more about you.
3:19:08 Because you’ve spent a lifetime gathering, unearthing and telling other people’s stories.
3:19:15 Of course, you’ve told some of your own, but I want to hear more and more of these stories.
3:19:21 Next time, I feel like we should have some wine.
3:19:24 Next time we’ll do this, we’ll wine.
3:19:25 But where can people find you online?
3:19:28 Okay, they can go to calfussman.com.
3:19:31 That’s C-A-L-F-U-S-S-M-A-N.com.
3:19:34 .com and send a message.
3:19:37 I’m just starting to speak.
3:19:39 Anybody interested in listening to some stories or getting tips on interviewing
3:19:44 or tips on interviewing for a job, I’m here.
3:19:49 Go to the website and they can click on the contact form or something like that to let you know.
3:19:53 Are you on social media at all?
3:19:54 Not really.
3:19:55 This is all like a new adventure for me.
3:19:58 I don’t even know how to promote myself.
3:20:00 It’s just happening.
3:20:02 Maybe I can give you the choir acapella analogy version of this type of thing.
3:20:07 Cal, this is so much fun.
3:20:09 I always love our conversations.
3:20:11 And as always, thank you so much for taking the time.
3:20:14 It’s a beautiful experience.
3:20:16 I hope we have many more.
3:20:17 And let me tell you something.
3:20:19 You are really good at what you do.
3:20:21 Thank you.
3:20:22 Thank you.
3:20:22 Well, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.
3:20:24 And you’ve been very, very generous with your time and with your advice.
3:20:29 So I really do appreciate it.
3:20:30 And for everybody listening, thank you for listening.
3:20:33 Hey, guys, this is Tim again.
3:20:35 Just one more thing before you take off.
3:20:38 And that is Five Bullet Friday.
3:20:40 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday
3:20:43 that provides a little fun before the weekend?
3:20:45 Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter,
3:20:49 my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
3:20:52 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
3:20:54 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday
3:20:58 to share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered
3:21:01 or have started exploring over that week.
3:21:03 It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
3:21:05 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos,
3:21:11 all sorts of tech tricks and so on.
3:21:13 They get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts.
3:21:16 Guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them
3:21:22 and then I share them with you.
3:21:24 So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short,
3:21:27 a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend,
3:21:30 something to think about.
3:21:32 If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.vlog/friday.
3:21:35 Type that into your browser, tim.vlog/friday.
3:21:39 Drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one.
3:21:41 Thanks for listening.
3:21:43 This episode is brought to you by Momentus.
3:21:46 Momentus offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories,
3:21:50 including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more.
3:21:55 I’ve been testing their products for months now and I have a few that I use constantly.
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3:22:07 I’ll come back to the latter part of that a little bit later.
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3:22:32 In fact, I’ve been taking it daily, typically before podcast recording,
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3:22:40 in short-term memory and performance under stress.
3:22:43 So those are some of the products that I’ve been using very consistently.
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3:22:50 I tend to be very minimalist and I’m taking these with me nonetheless.
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3:24:07 This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep.
3:24:10 I have been using 8Sleep pod cover for years now.
3:24:13 Why?
3:24:13 Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like fitted sheet,
3:24:17 you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed.
3:24:21 8Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod,
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3:24:31 More on that in a second.
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