The Daily Stoic - You’re Addicted To The Illusion of Control | Sebastian Junger (PT. 1)

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

After you have faced death, you can’t believe what people care about online. In this episode, Ryan sits down with bestselling author and legendary war reporter Sebastian Junger. Sebastian talks about why he refuses to get a smartphone, how technology gives us the illusion of control, Ambrose Bierce, and the multiple times he was nearly executed as a war reporter. Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times Bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death In Belmont, War, Tribe, Freedom and In My Time Of Dying.   As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world, and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film "Restrepo", a feature-length documentary (co-directed with Tim Hetherington), was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He is also the founder and director of Vets Town Hall.Follow Sebastian on Instagram @SebastianJungerOfficial and on X @SebastianJunger Grab signed copies of Sebastian’s books Tribe, Freedom and In My Time Of Dying at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com🎥 Watch Sebastian Junger's first episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kApbOu6bXt0👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like The Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show, but not listen to ads. Well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic.

We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, completely ad-free. No interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive

bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20% off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show of descriptions to make those ads go away. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow

students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoog podcast. I hope everyone is having a great Thanksgiving break if you are in fact on one because you're listening here in America. If not, sorry. But it's funny, we were at sort of like a friend's giving before we went out of town. I was sitting with some parents talking about things

eating. And Samantha, my wife walked by and I said, hey, could you grab my phone? I think it's like somewhere on the other side of the house. And one of the parents was like, what? You don't have your phone with you? They weren't like, oh, you're not watching your kids because kids are there. They were like, how do you just not have it on you all the time? And I usually do, although I do try to actively sort of practice, you know, just like setting it down and walking away from. I try to spend less time on my phone, right? I've talked about this before. One of my rules I don't touch my phone for the first one hour that I'm awake. It doesn't always go that way, sometimes I need directions or I'm listening to music or whatever. The idea is I'm not getting

sucked into the phone right when I start the day. And we're all sort of amazed at different people who use their phones less or use their phones more. Most of us are just used to being on it all the time, although I can imagine if you're from another time or if you've been to war or witnessed war up close or seen like some real shit, social media, the things people are doing on their phone might seem ridiculous. I can also imagine if you've ever been shot at, if you've ever been lined up for execution, as today's guest was not just once, but twice, you're going to have a different perspective on social media, that people scrolling their feed, people getting in fights, people chattering about stuff, people monitoring their followers. All that's going to

seem, I think, silly to you, ridiculous to you, almost offensive to you in some ways. One of the stoic practices, right, we talk about this idea of Momentomori. And I think when you have experienced different things, we've got that clarity that can come from under how quickly life can, can leave you, you know, it turns down the volume on some stuff. It gives you a different view on some stuff. And certainly today's guest knows all about that, Sebastian Younger, because he doesn't have a smartphone. And, you know, you always meet people and you're like, what? How do you do this? And you just realize different people have different experiences. And from these different experiences, they experience life differently.

and we get so used to the paradigm, the lens on which we experience reality that it seems inconceivable to us that there is any other way. I'm like, I was to him, you don't have a smartphone at all. And another parent was saying to me, you don't have your smartphone on your physical possession at all times. But yeah, we're all different. And he talks about that in today's episode, talks about how technology gives us the illusion of control. We talk about one of our mutually favorite authors, Ambrose Pierce, and he tells some stories from his experiences as a journalist covering war. But I have loved reading today's guest books over the years. Sebastian Younger is the number one New York Times best-selling author of The Perfect Storm,

Fire, A Death in Belmont War, Tribe, Freedom, and most recently in my time of dying, which is one of my absolute favorites. He's an award-winning journalist. It's a contributor to Vanity Fair, Special correspondent in ABC. He's won a National Magazine Award and a Peabody. He's a documentary filmmaker. You may have seen his form Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Just an incredible thinker, writer, philosopher.

I really enjoyed getting to spend some time with him. And I really liked this episode of The Daily Stoke podcast. I'm going to split it up into two because we really got into it. You can grab signed copies of Sebastian's book, Tribe, Freedom, and in my time of dying at the painted porch right now. And I'll let you get back to whatever you are doing with your family. And I hope you enjoy this episode. So only a flip phone? Only a flip phone. It's all I've ever had.

How's it work for you? It's great. Yeah. Because I can't do all the stuff that everyone gets sucked into. Like I can't get my email. Right. You know, I can't navigate. I can't book a taxi. I can't do anything. I have to do it all myself. as a human being. Do you actually book taxis or do you call someone and they book you an Uber? No, I wave my arm. I live in New York. I wave my arm and a taxi stops. But what about like when you're traveling? You go places. Yeah, I just, I call it, sell the hotel like the old days. Hey, can you call me a taxi? Really? Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. And I don't count on being able to just go anywhere whenever I want. Like, that's not part of what life is. You know what I mean?

It's just not my reality. How do you think that change, like, how do you think that changes your reality like what does that give you that I'm missing with my smartphone well I mean the problem with the smartphone is that it's designed to be an addiction sure right and once I feel like once you crack that door open suddenly there's social media in you know as part of your every moment of every day yeah right and email is this weird sort of Sisyphian task where more email you do the the more you get. The more you have to do. Yeah, sure.

With every other job in the world, you do half the job, you only have half left. With email, you do have the job, you have three quarters left, right? And so the less email you do during the day, the less you have to do, right? So, and it's just peace of mind and the inconvenience, I mean, for me, an inconvenience is an opportunity. So I don't know how to get to the, where's the restaurant? You know, like, so I'll ask someone, like, hey, do you know how to get to the Italian restaurant, you know, whatever.

Yeah. So I've just had a little human interaction. Right. Right. And then this drives my wife crazy, but like she has a smartphone, but sometimes we don't know where we are. We're driving. And I was like, listen, don't look at it.

I'm just going to do this by the seat of my pants. The sun's over there. I know that's west. We're heading. I know we're basically going south. Sure. Like, you know, like we're going to, like, do this the old way. And it works.

Like, it makes your brain engage with the world. I was thinking about this the other day, and I had some sympathy from my parents in, like, Like when I leave to go pick up my kids from school, I know how long it's going to take me to get there. Not generally, but that trip. Like, it's telling me it's going to take 41 minutes. And so I can leave. And I was just thinking, like, how stressful. And, you know, like, oh, stuff happens.

You get stressed. You try to pick them up on time, whatever. I think, like, they would leave work every day in the dark, not knowing, like, would they get there in time for, right? And, like, just the stress of that that I as a kid was, like, like, you made me wait for one minute in front of the school. Like, and just going, oh, yeah, like, not that long ago, you would leave and be like, it generally takes 30 minutes, but it could take 90 minutes. Right.

I would say there's also a stress, a terrible stress of thinking you can control your life to within the minute. Also true. Right. And then when life doesn't accommodate that, it feels like everything falls apart, right? So there's a, there's a, I feel like smartphones increase anxiety by increasing the illusion that you have control. Yes.

And you don't. Yes. At the end of the day, you don't. Yeah. Right. And so the old way, it's like, yeah, it might take half an hour. I might take an hour. I'm going to bring a book in case I'm early. You know, they have a book in case I'm late. You know, like whatever. Like it's a, yeah. And then that's how life is for humanity and is still like that for most of humanity. Yeah. I mean, even just as an invention as simple as a clock, right, how it changes your sense of the world. Like you talk in tribe about what life must have been like for people. people who weren't constantly aware that it was 1230. The clock in the mirror, right? Yeah. I mean, you don't have, you don't know what you look like, really, except in a very rough sense, right? And you don't know how old you are. Yeah. Except in a very rough sense. Yeah. And you don't know what time of day it is. And so if you're going to meet your, you know, the other clan that you're, you know, at the summer gathering at the forks of the

river, you know, you head there like a little after the apple blossoms come out. Yeah, right. Exactly. And then there's a lot of hanging out, but that's what, what's the point of life? It's, it's appreciating the moment with people you love, like in safety, right? I mean, whatever. It's like, I mean, what else is there, right? And so the problem with the phone is it deprives us of that in a weird way. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I've just, like, whenever someone is like living very differently than you, it might not be for you, but it's always interesting to go, okay, what is, what are they getting out of that? And so I'm curious about how it changes your just, your interactions of the world. Yeah, probably more people-focused, larger margins for air, less awareness of

certain things. Like, you probably get home at the end of the day sometimes and find out big things happen. Yeah. Oh, totally. Totally. You're like, oh, wow. But everyone else knew about this for eight hours. It didn't change it happening or change what they did about it, but they just carried it for eight more hours than you. Right. And the truth is that, I mean, collectively, rates of addiction and anxiety and depression, all that's in suicide, are just climbing and climbing and climbing, right? I mean, if the outcomes for society were good, I'm like, well, maybe I'm missing out on something. Yeah. Right. And, you know, I think antidepressants have helped the society quite a lot. But it's interesting that we need so many of them. Right. You know what I mean? Like, but the outcomes look

horrible. Like on the plane today coming from New York, I sat next to a young couple who seemed to be married because they each had a wedding ring and they were acting married. And the plane landed and they each took out their phone, and they were too young to have been married very long. They each took out their phones. And while we were in the back of the plane, row 35, right? So we had 20 minutes still. And so they didn't talk to each other. They each took out their phone and watched TikTok videos separately on each of their phones.

And one of the video that the young woman was watching was of a man who was saying, it was a wedding, and the groom was sort of like saying, something to his bride to be, and he was saying it by reading it off his phone. I'm like, what are you guys alive for? Yes. Right? Like, I mean, why even bother with anything? And if you have kids, you're going to stick the kid on the screen as soon as you can

so that you can get back to your screen. Like, let's just blow up the planet now and be done with it. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I just don't understand it. But what did you do on the plan? Are you one of those people that, as they say, you raw dog a flight? Did you just sit there, stare at the seat in front of you? I had to get up before I am, so I slept the whole way, but I can sleep anywhere.

But I have, you know, I have two books with me. Yeah. Right. And I read. Or I just sit and I think, you know, I mean, one of the great things about not having a smartphone is that your brain winds up in this sort of, in neutral, in this idle gear, right? It's idling, and it's not, doesn't have to do anything. You can't do anything distracting.

And so you just sit there waiting for the bus. And, you know, I make my living with my mind. Yeah. And those sort of neutral moments. are way more productive in some ways than when I'm focused at my desk, right? That's a very forebrain, cognitive, like, you know, word-oriented state of mind for me.

Yeah. But when I'm sort of spacing out somewhere, even driving, you know, it was a minimal task, you know, driving or in a plane or whatever. Or walk. Yeah. Thoughts that come to me are intuitive and powerful and sometimes brilliant

and totally essential to my work. And I would lose all of that. Yeah, I think most of the right, that I do at my desk is synthesizing and polishing thinking that I did elsewhere. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the problem with the smartphones is that you could endlessly distract yourself with, like, mundane, this mundane task. And these are things that don't matter.

Yes. They don't endure. They don't affect your life. Like, they're just, they're, it's garbage. I mean, in some ways, it's like really is garbage. I mean, it's garbage, like fast food is garbage. It doesn't have nutrients. It doesn't sustain you.

It just passes the time. But it tastes good. But it tastes good. And it keeps you from feeling hungry. Exactly. but I would say there's a great power and feeling hungry sometimes. What do you do for music, though?

Do you also have an iPod? Or do you just don't listen to music unless you're, like, sitting in the house? I don't listen to music unless I'm at home. Really? Yeah, I have a CD player. A CD player. I listen to music at home, yeah.

I never walk around listening to music. Really? No, I mean... Oh, that helps me get in the vibe, like in the headspace. I find music unlocks my thing, so I like carrying it around. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I can kind of see that, but, you know, You know, the more you're injecting your brain with, the less you're receiving from the world.

You're turning off different sounds to listen to specific sounds. I would certainly. And I love music. I play music. I love music. And our home is filled with music. But I just... Not out in the world. Not out in the world. And, you know, partly I live in New York City. I live in the Lower East Side, right? Which it's not like in the 80s or something when it was truly a dangerous place. But there's a lot of trouble people out there. And, you know, frankly, I want to be... I want to have my awareness about me. Or it's not going to hit by a car. Yeah. Yeah. No, exactly. And particularly, I have young children. So I'm like, I mean, it's not like I'm on Combat Patrol,

but I do want to be switched on and observant and, you know, music because it's so lovely, you know, it blunts that. Well, hearing this about you makes, gives me a little context because one of my favorite stories about you. It's in the beginning of your episode with Tim Ferriss. You're going to meet him to do his podcast. I think you'd get to his house early. Yeah. And you just start going through the book.

He's like, he's not there. So he tells you to let him in. And you walked in and you started going through. the books on his shelf. And you, you had started reading Seneca. And you guys talk about this at the beginning. But that sort of, that sort of little bit of extra time that not, oh, well, I'll immediately go into my phone or I'll immediately go into work mode. It introduces a lot of serendipity and then a lot of time for reading. But that was, I guess, one of your introductions to the Stoics. Yeah, you know, it was my introduction to the Stoics, although I remember my dad talking about

him. He was sort of classically educated in Europe. So, you know, all the, all those, you know, Greeks and Romans, you know, he knew them all cold. But, yeah, there's a great pleasure in that for me. And, you know, I have a flip phone that I can make calls and I can text. Yeah. Right, which is, you know, a great blessing, you know, particularly with young children. A couple of years ago, I worked on this project that got nominated for a Grammy, and so I went to the Grammys and they were like, you know, it's from like,

there's two different Grammys. It was not the main musicians' Grammys. It's all the jazz albums and the classical albums. There's one where they get through all the old. awards and then the one on TV is a separate ceremony with like 10 awards. But anyways, they were like, hey, it's from, you know, it starts at four and then it's done at nine. And I was like, I'm not sitting somewhere for nine hours. And I brought a book. And everyone looked around and looked at me like I was insane. And I was like, I'm probably the only person walking the red carpet into

the Grammys carrying a book. But I was like, what am I going to do for five hours? My award thing is going be eight seconds, if we're lucky. And also, I'm just going to spend this whole time on my phone. What am I going to do? When I was a kid, when I was in college, one summer I got, you know, my dad was a reader. He's brought up in Europe. I had a great education. I just read all the time as a kid. I was a little nerd. And one summer after my freshman year in college, I got a job with the highway department in the little town that I lived in. And, you know, there were a bunch of World War II vets and Vietnam vets, basically, mostly white town. And there was a heat clause. And so if it was over, you know, 96 degrees or something, they couldn't send us out. But they couldn't send us home either.

So we were stuck in the garage, right? The sort of maintenance garage with the bulldozers and the dump trucks and all this other stuff. And I just lived in terror of having eight hours to spend in the town garage on a hot day, right? So I, no matter what, I always had a book with me. And I was an anthropology student and totally enamored of anthropology. And I remember I brought, I don't know why they just didn't beat me up right then and there, but I brought a Cloud Lovie Strauss. Yeah. Right? The raw and the cooked, I think it was. And I was sort of reading my way through that. And so there was one day, it was a heat clause day. And I sort of curled up in the bucket of a bulldozer. Yeah. Right. Sure. Or a backhoe. And I sort of curled up and the steel was nice and cool. And I was

reading my French anthropologists. Right. He couldn't have imagined his book would ever be consumed in this setting. Exactly. And right. And this old guy, I mean, to me, old guy, he was probably, you know, my age now, 60, but he came over and he tipped the book up to see what I was reading, right? And all the guys were playing, playing poker and looking at like girly magazines and, you know, I mean, it was, you can imagine. And smoking, you can imagine. And he tipped the book up to see what I was reading and just sort of frown. And I was sort of braced for like, you know, I was the only college kid there. Like, I was braced for the inevitable comment, right? And, and he nodded. it, and he said, you keep doing that kid so that you don't wind up in a job like this. Yeah. And so that's the power of reading and sort of the power of not having some other distracting thing to do, and it forces you to curl up with club Lovie Strauss. Sometimes your life has to be, like, look, it would be wonderful if every subject was riveting and every author was compelling and they're not.

And sometimes your life has to be boring to a degree that you could sit through things that otherwise would be too boring for you to sit through. Like, you need eight hours to sit through some dense tome if your life is incredibly stimulating or you have access to unlimited stimulation through your phone. Yeah, that's right. It's an impossible ask to make someone read that book. Absolutely. And I, you know, and so if you don't have this sort of easy task of scrolling through your

social media all the time, you have to develop things that are harder to develop, but they're more rewarding. So I can, I play, I play music, right? And so I've been in many boring situations and I can practice music in my head because I can hear the notes in my mind and I can move my fingers in ways that correspond with the notes and I literally can practice music.

Like if I'm stuck somewhere for an hour, I can say, okay, I'm going to practice this song which is I've been having trouble with. And they actually did a study and they found that people that practice music in their heads, they took beginners and taught them, you know, guitar or something. And the ones who practice music, in their heads, were told to practice in their heads,

developed much quicker, much faster. They learned much faster than the ones who did not. Yeah. So if they just practiced on guitar and didn't also practice in their heads and they had a limited amount of practice time, the people that practiced internally developed really quickly. I heard someone say once it's very hard to be good at something that you don't think about in the shower.

Oh, yeah. Like if you're not, if it's not so captivating to you that it is filling that all the time. It's insatiable. You're probably not going to. Yeah. You're just going to, well, you're going to be beaten by the person who is thinking about in the shower. Right. And the unconscious mind works in a really powerful way. So there's any number of, you know, mathematical problems that have been solved when someone's asleep. Yeah. Right. Or physicists have solved problems in their sleep. Our comedies in the bath or whatever. Yeah. That's right. That's right. But there's something about sleep that is very, very powerful as it unlocks the unconscious in ways

that is like so powerful and intuitive that it will solve problems that the sort of like slow moving like forebrain doesn't just can't quite do and you know what I found is that I'm if I'm practicing a really hard passage of music

and I can't get it and I can't get it and I go to sleep when I wake up in the morning my brain has worked on the neural pathways involved with that piece of music in the morning I can play it. I don't think everyone needs to go get a flip phone is not everyone's life is conducive to that, by the way. Like, we, I think we have some freedom to be a little bit more eccentric than, you know, your average person.

But certainly you can decide that it's not going to be the last thing you see before bed and the first thing you see in the morning. And that gives you space to take advantage of that subconscious working while you're asleep. And, yeah, I go to bed. I have some ideas. I write them down. I wake up in the morning. That, when you wake up in the morning and you're fresh. And you don't know the awful things that happened in the world while you were sleeping.

You didn't get any stupid emails from people yet. Tony Morrison talked about how she had to do all of her writing before she heard the word mom for the first time. But it's like there is something about that space. There's virgin mental space in the morning. Absolutely. And a lot of people soil it before their feet hit the floor. Yeah. I have a friend who they go to sleep with the TV on.

And I'm just like, your mind's definitely working all night. but you're stressed about whatever the CNN ticker is saying. So anyways, I think that fresh time in the morning, your mind has just done a reset, how much are you going to stay in that freshness before you soil it, I think, is really essential. And I hear you about some people have jobs that just require apps that do this and that.

But there is no reason for all of us to be carrying around social media in our pocket. Definitely. I have no social media on my phone. And, you know, I've done like that, the smartphone is a real tool. Basically, music, navigation, a camera that I take lots of pictures of my kids with, and, yeah, notes that I, you know, I can Google stuff or whatever. But for the most part, you got the thing, what are the things that are going to make you use

it 10x more than you ordinarily would? Don't have those under phone. Right. And those, you know, those are the things that were designed as addictions. And those addictions, the companies that develop those, addictions have monetized your addictions to the tune of trillions of dollars. Yes. Right.

You're trading your, you're a piece of mind and you're an addicted life for their money. Right. And that to me, it's just like, I'm not doing that. Sorry. I'm just not giving you my money. Why? And you give me your disease. Like I said, I'm not doing it.

Yeah. If Steve Jobs is alive, do you think he'd have social media on his phone? Or do you think he probably would have created ways to, like, this is a Zen sort of Buddhist dude, right? Like, I think it's interesting to look at the technology habits of the people who run these services. They're telling you it's like finding out the smoking execs don't smoke or are upset if they catch their kids smoking. Yeah, right, totally. Well, I mean, I haven't run this story down, but I heard that in Silicon Valley, all the people working in the tech industries, the private schools that they send their kids to do not allow smartphones. Totally.

Right. So, you know, that's where Congress should sort of make some inquiries. Like, if you, if this is unhealthy for your children, you develop this shit, right? Like, what legislation can we enact that would protect all the nation's children from the toxic effect of these addictions? Well, look, we were about to ban TikTok, which is one of the biggest social networks, controlled by our primary foreign adversary. And we got to the one yard line. And why didn't we? It's because the people in power realized, oh, by. saving said social network, they'll probably tweak the algorithm to be more favorable to us. And since the political leverage of, hey, do you want to get rid of something that's bad for everyone? Or would you like the thing that's bad for everyone to be slightly more favorable to the messages that you want out in the world? Yeah. And social media increases political division. Yeah. Right. And polarity. And, you know, there are both parts. but I think right now the republics particularly are invested in division as a form of political power.

Yeah, look, the executives that he had in the front row, and again, I think this is less a political thing and more of a, like, politics thing, right? The powerful billionaires that he had sitting in the front row of the inauguration were not, you know, munitions, manufacturers or they were attention merchants, right? They're not people who own casinos even, right? They were the billionaires who control the social networks who control what consumes most of our cognitive power as a society because those are the people that you have to have have on your side or have properly intimidated to not fuck with you. Yeah. And if, you know, if you can generate sort of rage in people, right, you can get them out to vote. And social media is great for generating rage. Yeah.

Right. So, you know, I can totally see in today's political environment, like, I don't know, we don't want to get rid of social media. I mean, that's the soil that our plant grows in. This is the opium of the masses also. Yeah, exactly, yeah. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone, and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior,

especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond. right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q&A events for, good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent. And just as a

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Yeah, right. The first thing I thought of was Ambrose Spears. Yeah. And then it made me think when you're talking about this sort of subconscious is this, like, how do you know if you're dead or not? This could all be a flash of fleeting existence. And, I mean, I think that's one of the greatest short stories of all time. Oh, it's amazing.

I read in seventh grade, my seventh grade teacher told me that I would like it, and I did. And so I wasn't thinking about that explicitly when I wrote that section. But I did, that story came out of the same question and fear that I had after I almost drowned, which was afterwards, you know, I sort of had heard somewhere, and it's a sort of urban myth maybe, but that when you drown, like you can live sort of an entire lifetime. Yeah. The time slows down. Yeah.

And you might have the illusion of living out the whole rest of your life. Yes. And then you drown, and that happens at 30 seconds, right? And I just started to obsess over the idea that I might have actually, that I might still be drowning right now. Yeah. And I think I'm 63, but I'm only 23 seconds into my 30 seconds of drowning and how would I know? And I, you know, I don't really think that, but I couldn't disprove it.

Yeah. Well, Richard Lindquater, who lives out in Bastrop, he has this whole movie called Waking Life about that premise. The idea that we're, you know, you have these dreams and they feel interminably long and, like they can tell from brain scans, it actually only occurred over, you know, one second. You know what I mean? In the dream, everything is, it's happening, right? And, yeah, what if that's your life? It's kind of this philosophical mind-blowing of a thing. Right. And then you can sort of get into the quantum physics of everything, which is just, you know, it's equivalently surreal and unanswerable and bizarre. And I find you know, I'm pretty terrifying. Yeah. You know, Ambrose Beers' father's name was Marcus Aurelius Beers.

and his uncle, his father's brother, was Lucius Verisbiers, the two brothers that are co-emperors. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. Who were those parents? Yeah, right. Somebody was a Roman history nerd. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And then I'm fascinated with the, he's like, I'm going to give one of my sons the good brother's name. And then I'm going to give my other son, the shitty brother's name. Wow. That's amazing. Just the heaviness and the lightness of that, I find fascinating. Yeah. Amazing.

He's such an amazing writer, too, sort of similar to you, and there's a handful of these, where it's like, I think a lot of his stories come out of the PTSD from his horrible Civil War experience. I mean, he's there at Shiloh. He's terribly wounded. And then basically never is able to fully reintegrate into society after this experience. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think that's one of the things civilians don't get, because war is in their mind, and it is, truly. terrible, right? So you would think that coming home would just be a welcome relief, right? And so I was talking to this guy who was in the special forces in Vietnam. He was a lurp, a long-range patrol, crazy dangerous work. They dropped these guys behind enemy lines really outside of any air support. So their faces are painted and they just, if their positions revealed, they'll die, right? And so he said that they would at night, there was only like six of them. Yeah. Right. So they couldn't have a regular person on guard because there's just not enough hour. You need your sleep.

So they would sleep, they would create with their bodies the spokes of a wheel with their heads at the center and their feet all sticking out like the spokes of a wheel. So if they were compromised and everyone sat up, someone would be facing the enemy. Yeah, right? Right. And as my buddy who was in the platoon I was with said, it gives a new meaning to the word spokesman. Yes. Right.

So the problem with vets in the Civil War and on, you know, on back for eternity, like, the wrong with vets is they don't get to come home. They're no longer spokesman. Yeah, they're not part of a wheel anymore. They're not part of a wheel. Yeah. You're by yourself. Yeah.

So you're in danger. Yeah. Right? You're more in danger by yourself in a society that's at peace than you are as a lurp in Vietnam, like, with your bros. Yes. And that's what, at least emotionally, that's what it feels like. Yes.

And it's a very, very tough thing. Well, with Amber's Pierce, I think, what's so interesting is he comes home. What was perhaps one of the most moral crusades of a war. It doesn't start that way, but it becomes that way because he fights for the union. And I think that's one of the things that you sort of miss in that story is the guy that's being executed is a shitty guy. He's a Confederate soldier, right? Who is a spy. That's why he's being executed. But anyways, he comes back to what almost immediately becomes like gilded age America. And so it must have been so like the moral injury of.

the war, but then coming home to this decadent, corrupt, corroded society where these people who didn't serve in the war are now effectively billionaires because they hired a substitute. And then they've, they've hijacked the government. You know, he starts in San Francisco, comes west as a political reporter. So he's familiar with Stanford and Huntington, all these sort of barons who have purchased the government effectively. And he's just like, do you know what happens to Ambrose Spears? No, don't tell me.

Oh, it's a crazy story. So he becomes this sort of muckraking reporter, powerful, sort of cynical guy who's, you know, tearing everyone down. And then at some point, he writes his sister, hey, I can't do this anymore. And he tours all the battlefields that he goes on, kind of like your thing where you go on your walk, tours all the battlefields. And then heads to Mexico where Pancho Villa and the sort of revolution is happening. and he's like, I'm just going to cover this. But he writes a letter. He goes, I'm probably going to end up lined up.

His last letter is I'll probably end up, you know, put in front of a wall somewhere and shot. But if not, you know, I'll say, you know, I'll see again. And then that's what ends up happening. He predicts his own death. And he's executed. Like, the Mexican army just can't wrap their head around this guy coming down to see what they're doing for the lark of it and suspect he's some sort of spy and he gets, he gets executed. and he's never seen again.

And he's kind of one of those first guys that gets killed that the rumors are. Maybe he's still alive somewhere. And so his legend lives on. But, yeah, he can't, he tries to reintegrate in society. And even though he achieves all this success and fame and, you know, reaches the peak of his birth. He just can't make it work. It was a great journalist named John Reed, Jack Reed, who was down there at the same time as well. And he made it back.

He was just a kid. Yeah. And he made it back. He wrote a book called Insurgent Mexico. And there's a paragraph that describes the Tropa, Pancho Villas, troop. Yeah. Coming at a gallop towards him. And it's an extraordinary paragraph because basically Cormac McCarthy took that paragraph.

I was like, I can do this. And his famous paragraph of the Comanche attacking the soldiers in Mexico. Oh. That is a famous paragraph, right, from Blood Meridian. Yeah. And I adore Cormac McCarthy, so I'm not dissing on him at all, right? Yeah, yeah. But you can see the influence.

You can see that you could totally see the roots. It's extraordinary, totally extraordinary part. Even the cadence and there were some of the repetition and the attention to detail, the frock coat worn backwards, you know, like, I mean, just all this sort of kormacky in detail. I was like, oh, that's Jack Reed. Right. It was totally amazing.

After I finished my book in my time of dying, I came across this amazing anecdote about Dostoevsky that I didn't know. So when he was young, he was sort of a radical, like lefty sort of, like radical. And he had some sort of lefty friends. And they would get together and talk. about like ending serfdom, like freeing the serfs and things like that, right? And the equivalent of like defund the police or something, right? You know, and, you know, it got the czar's attention.

And, you know, these are like sort of elite society, you know, like intellectuals. And the kids were, they were rounded up, arrested, and put in jail for eight months for speaking against the czar. Yeah. Right. And wasn't a particularly serious crime, right? They just needed their hand slapped, basically. And then after eight months, they were released and loaded into a wagon, into a carriage. And they were like six of them.

And they thought they were going to be driven to the court and, you know, processed and discharged their families, right? Of course. And instead, they were driven to a town square and tied stakes. Yeah. And a firing squad was arrayed in front of them. And the orders were given, you know, like charge your rifles, ready, aim. And it was a mock execution. But, of course, they didn't know that.

Yeah. So two of the six men were insane for the rest of their lives. Yeah. The last moment, a rider galloped into the square and said, the czar forgives them. So two of the six men were insane for the, it broke them psychologically, right? Dostoevsky was made of stronger stuff, and he wrote about it indirectly in one of his novels. But what he said was that in that moment, facing the rifle barrels, right? Like in that moment, he noticed sunlight glinting off the steeple of a church.

And he had the extraordinary thought in moments I would. join the sunlight. Yeah. And I will become part of all things. Yes. Like the overview effect that astronauts talk about. Exactly. He basically has there and that moment. Right. And I'm about to join everything. And he also had time to think, if I should somehow survive this, I will turn each moment into an eternity. Right. So that's what you were saying about, you know, when you're dream it. Like one second could last, it feels like it lasts an hour. Yeah. So there is that sort of elasticity of time in these moments of like psychological extreme. Well, two things. One, how fucking insane is it that we are still executing people by firing squad? Like that was brought

back? Like, what does that say about who we are as a society? That that is a fucking real thing. That is deranged. But two, there's another Ambrose Spear story. It's called Parker Adersen philosopher. And it's about a soldier who's captured and he's going to be executed and he thinks he's going to die by a firing squad, and he's sort of very philosophical about it. And he's sort of cribbing, like, some of the stoic stuff. He's like, you know, I knew I was going to die when I was born, and he's talking with the general of the Confederates or whatever. And he's saying all the things that a philosoph, Seneca going to his death, right?

He's doing it. And then they had this long conversation, and then the sun comes up, and the general goes, okay, take him out to be hung like a spy. and immediately all the artifice of it collapses because in his mind he saw himself getting an honorable death firing squad and then the shift and then this whole, not spoiler, it's almost a 150-year-old story,

but he sort of freaks out and he in the scuffle, he grabs a sword and he ends up killing the general. It's this crazy story, but I think, you know, the metanist that you find out that Ambrose Spears is killed as a spy is kind of mind-blowing, but he has this sense that, like, hey, I'm going to be able to meet my

my death bravely because I prepared for it. And then in the face of the overwhelmingness of it, it breaks him psychologically, just like the Dostoevsky people were talking about. I thought it as Ambrose Spears kind of making this commentary of the, it's all well and good to talk about these things. And then you don't know until you face your own imminent demise for real in that moment. Right. Yeah, I've twice in my life as a journalist. been in a situation where I thought I was going to be executed. So it's not a combat situation, you know, but like there's nothing I can do and it's going to happen.

And I just, I remember feeling incredibly weak. Like, I mean, like physically weak, weak and numb and not entirely there. Yeah. It was really, and the psychological consequences later of that state of mind even for an hour were profound. What do you mean? Oh, I mean, the sort of trauma of spending an hour thinking I'm going to be shot. It's like lasts for years.

But it was really interesting. It was so frightening that it wasn't frightening. It was just a form of sort of a profound muscular weakness and just a removal. Like a disassociation? Yeah. Yeah, I was just hollow. Like, yeah, extremely unpleasant. When you are under the impression you were about to be executed, where does the mind go?

Well, I was, you know, in one case, I was told I was going to be, and I didn't quite believe them. Right? I'm like, I don't know. I'm in Nigeria. I was detained by this sort of rebel movement that accused me of being a spy and this one guy walked up to me with a machine guy and said,

when we kill you later, I'll be the one to do it. I was like, he's not the commander. There's a lot of reasons to be worried right now, but I'm not convinced this is going to happen, right? Is that a protection mechanism, you think? Well, I think it was both a protection mechanism and, you know, I think I was right. I mean, obviously here I am, right?

And, you know, they would have been executing an American spy, like someone from the U.S. military who was spying, U.S. government who was spying. That's a big deal. Yeah, yeah. Right. I mean, I sort of knew like, okay, maybe there's nothing I can do about it, but this may be a bad move for you guys, right?

You maybe have sensed other profound recklessness if that's what, that's the state's airplane, yeah, yeah, yeah. And in the other, I was stopped by rebels in Sierra Leone on a remote road with a couple of government soldiers and there's like these 20 rebels. out of the jungle with machine guns and, you know, extremely bad situation. And, you know, they were like, sort of, it was a little like Dostoevskyer to level their, cocked their rifles, leveled them. One guy shouted, no, no, no, don't shoot. You know, like, they were arguing about whether to shoot us. Yeah, right. And not, so it's not a planned thing. It's like, this could happen right now.

Yeah, it was an ambush and they stopped us. And I was with government soldiers. They were the enemy, these guys were enemies, right? And a couple of journalists. And, you know, that went on, the argument went on for maybe 10 minutes. And it was a long 10 minutes. But I just felt, all I remember thinking is it's going to suck for my parents. I didn't have kids. I didn't have a family then, but it was going to suck from my parents. And I really hope it doesn't hurt. Yeah. I just remember that I hope this doesn't hurt. Yeah. death experience does is like introduce you to death. Like you are now on nodding terms with this thing that's kind of an abstraction prior and to basically everyone else who hasn't had that

experience. Yeah. And my, you know, my sort of like psychological sort of defense mechanism was that all the other times that I'd come close to getting killed, you know, maybe three or four times in my career, right? That it had always been in war zones. I mean, I was going to places that are dangerous. That's the deal. You're going to go into a casino. You might. You're going to go into a casino. You lose some money, right? I mean, that's the deal, right? And you might make some money, but that's the deal, right? So I sort of knew that. So after my buddy Tim was killed in Libya, I made a movie called Restrepa with Tim. He and I shot it, directed it, produced it, the whole thing. And in eastern Afghanistan, and we were very, very close and went through a lot together. And

after he was killed in Libya, I just, I got out of war reporting. I'm done. And I had the idea, this delusion, that now I've slid into home base. Yeah. I'm safe. I'm not going to war zones anymore. How could I die? Yeah. Right?

I'm not gambling with my life. I got married. I had children. And I just thought I'm fine. You know, I was a very fit 50-something-year-old, right? And I'm not a walking heart attack. I'm like, you know, I drive carefully. I mean, I sort of did, checked every box you can check.

And I'm not going to war zone. So I had nothing to worry about. And what I didn't know, of course, is that your human body is a huge liability. It can be a huge liability and you can be extremely healthy and still have something going on in it that can kill you. Entropy is working on us at all times. At all times. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I, of course, I knew, okay, you get cancer and, you know, you're going to die in a few months or a few years. I mean, of course, we all know we're in that lottery. Yeah. But what I didn't realize is that there's things that can kill completely healthy,

athletic people. Yeah. Kill them, you know, a brain aneurism. Sure. Or whatever. Like, like, you're dead by dinner. Yeah. You know, you think you're just having a normal Tuesday, and you're not going to be here by dinner time, right? And that really shook the foundations of my reality in a way that the war zone stuff didn't. And what I had was I had undiagnosed aneurism in my pancreatic artery, and an aneurysm as sort of unnatural ballooning of the artery for, you know, various reasons. But I have a ligament in the wrong place. And it's a very, very random, freaky thing, right? and it's extremely rare where I had it and extremely deadly and, you know, in mid-sentence,

like literally in mid-sentence talking to my wife, I felt the pain in my abdomen and I was dying. Like that quickly, I was dying and I had an hour to have to live. I was in Australia last summer and, you know, the walk from Bondi to, that walk along the coast there, there's this cemetery, I think it's the Bronte Cemetery. It's the cemetery right on the coast, one of the, maybe the prettiest cemetery in the world. And I'm looking out over it. And I was just thinking every single person here was surprised when it happened. Like they all thought they had more time.

Almost nobody dies and goes, I'm past due. Right. Right. Like even people who are old, even people who have cancer, everyone thinks it's going to happen a little bit further in the future than it does. And here we are walking around our normal life acting like we're not that person. Like we're not going to be surprised by the thing that's obviously going to come too soon and surprise all of us. Yeah, I had this as I sort of tried to process what happened to me because, you know, I barely survived.

And the psychological consequences for me lasted way longer than the physical consequences of almost dying. And I had this thought, like, okay, if I was in prison and I knew I was going to be executed tomorrow morning. Yeah. And I had some books. I had a musical instrument, like I had, you know, whatever, the things that have given me solace and comfort in my life, I had them available. Would I play music?

Would I read my history books? Yeah. Why would you? You're going to be dead tomorrow morning, right? But then there's like, okay, but I'm going to be dead at some point tomorrow morning. Sure. Why do anything? Yes.

Right? And so it was a real question. Like, who do you want to be? If you know this is your last 24 hours, who do you want to be in those 24 hours? Right. Right. And that's where I come down against, like, smartphones, not to bring it around to smartphones. Like, would you scroll through social media in

those last 24 hours? And if you wouldn't, what the fuck are you doing, doing it today? Because you don't know. Well, it's a tricky thing, right? Like the Memento Mori idea from the Stoics and from the philosophers, like someday you're going to die, right? Or Marx Reelis in meditation says, you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say anything. Now, if you knew you were going to die in 24 hours, like there's something existentially obliterating about knowing that an asteroid is coming or, you know, you just caught an infectious disease that kills in seven hours or what, right? If you knew for certain you were going to die in a short amount of time, it's kind of, it's actually not that sort of morally and philosophically

clarifying because everything becomes meaningless, in some sense, especially if you don't believe in an afterthought. But the practice. After life. I believe in afterthought. Yeah, yeah. Especially if you don't believe in it in the afterlife. But I think it's more that you could go in 24 hours. You could go in 24 years, whatever it is, right? And it's not so much the certain looming of it, but the fact that the uncertainty of it, that's what provides, I think, the moral clarity of like, hey, I got to be pretty good about how I spend this time. I might have a lot of time. I might have a little time, but I do know it's a finite amount of time. And will I have a good accounting for it whenever it runs out. Well, I mean, actually, I hear what you're saying. I think you could argue it either way, right? So you could also say that the fact that I only have 24 hours left makes those 24 hours more meaningful. Yeah, sure. Right. So do I want to spend those 24 hours with my children? Yes, I do. Right. How would I be with them? Would I be distracted and not paying attention? No, they'd be on my lap. I'd be holding them. I'd be telling them I love them. Yes. And then I'm going, but they, you know, we always with, you know, that's the parent. You should be, really,

in some ways all the time, right? And so I think you could argue that it's more meaningful and less meaningful, and that's the irony of life. Remember a couple years ago when there was that missile alert in Hawaii and they alerted like, what do you do, right? Like, obviously, I just mean like you basically don't do anything. You just do a couple, you just, you make a couple phone calls depending on where you are and then you kind of sit there and wait for it to happen, right?

So there's, I just mean there's something obliterating about that. And so maybe people are intimidated about things. about that. But it's also for certain that it is going to happen at some point. And so thinking about how do you spend your life day to day and not eliminating the enormous inefficiencies and time wastes and anxieties. That I think is very helpful. Obviously, you know for whom the bell tolls by Hemingway. And, you know, this sort of like central drama of it is this is a night before this military operation where Robert Jordan, I think his name is the narrator or the main character, he's pretty sure he's going to get killed.

Yeah. Right. They're blowing up a bridge. They're blowing a bridge in the morning, right? And, you know, he's just met this young woman. And I remember, this really struck me when I was young. I read this, and he said they had, you know, one night to have a love affair. Yeah.

And he said, we have to make an entire lifetime together. We have to fit it all into one night. Yeah. And so I think what we're both saying is true in different ways, but one way of looking. at life is, because I don't know, how do I fit a whole lifetime into today? Yes. Because it might be that actually might turn out to be what happens. Well, Seneca talks about, can you close the books on life each day?

Like, can you go, this was a good life up till this point? If it ended right now. And then if you wake up tomorrow, you're with house money. And that, I think, is incredibly powerful and helpful. I've talked about this before. But I think about so many of the things we're doing, it's because, like, we're working on this project so we can get the reward. when it comes out, right? Like, you work on a book. And are you miserable while you're doing it

for the reward of having done it? Well, in light of the fact that you could die before it comes out, that seems like a bad strategy. So how do you make some subtle shifts? So when you save the draft for the day, you're like, I am proud of where it is now. And I'm putting it out now when I'm saving it. And I'm putting it out tomorrow when I save it. And the day after, it's just that you're seeing this all is this kind of self-contained thing and going, hey, this is good. I just try to think like, this is enough. Up until here, this has been so much as opposed to I need tomorrow to make the shittiness of today worth it. Right. Well, you know, this, I mean, there's a sort of lesson in there for parenthood. I mean, parenthood is hard. It's really hard. And some, for many people, I think it's

just about the hardest thing they'll ever do. Yeah. And one of the things that parents tell themselves, I think, is, well, it's going to get easier later. Just get through this part. Yes. It'll get easier later. But you're cheating yourself.

Yes. Right. Get through this part. What are you talking about? You have a two year old. Yeah. You're going to mourn that two years. Exactly.

I mean, just because something's hard doesn't mean you can't take meaning and pleasure out of it. Yeah. Right. Hard. This society is like allergic to things that are hard. I'm like, listen, life is hard. Like, if that gets you to check out, if hardness gets you to check out of everything, you're going to look.

You're going to look. Yeah. And so, you know, you have to do is like, no, no, no, having a 18-month-old who's colicky and crying all the time, that is enough. Yeah. That's what I want. That's enough. Yeah, it'll change. It'll get easier.

But it won't necessarily get better, right? This is it. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes. that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.