The Tim Ferriss Show - #161: Lessons from War, Tribal Societies, and a Non-Fiction Life (Sebastian Junger)

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Starting point is 00:02:56 that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, ladies and gents, this is Tim Ferriss. And welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, whether they are chess prodigies, hedge fund managers, actors, military strategists, athletes, really anything and everything, because you find a lot of commonalities across these areas of expertise. This is an unusual episode, and I'm going to start with a question. Why did Ben Franklin complain that settlers along the frontier were constantly absconding to live with the American Indian tribes, but that the opposite never happened? This episode, we're going to talk

Starting point is 00:03:38 about human nature quite a lot and look at evolutionary biology. If you want a better understanding of warriors, tribal societies, human nature, including the pieces that we might dislike or deny, and what we can learn from it all, then this episode is for you. My guest is Sebastian Junger, an incredible writer, number one New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont, War, and his latest book, Tribe, which I read in about a day and a half. Just ingested it, rapid fire. As an award-winning journalist, a contributor to Vanity Fair, contributing editor that is, and a special correspondent at ABC News. He's covered major international news stories around the world,

Starting point is 00:04:14 has received both a national magazine award and a Peabody award. And he's also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film Restrepo, a feature length doc co-directed with Tim Hetherington, which was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Restrepo, for those who haven't seen it, chronicles the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan's Khorangal Valley, and it is widely considered to have broken new ground in war reporting. It is very rugged and raw. Younger has since produced and directed three additional docs about war and its aftermath. In our conversation, which took place at my house, we cover rites of passage and their importance, his entire career, warfare, the art of great nonfiction writing and storytelling,

Starting point is 00:04:56 investigative or rather participatory journalism, PTSD, and much, much more. Please be forewarned that some of these topics will no doubt offend many of you. And this is a good thing. And I'm going to paraphrase here, but I believe it was Mae West who said those who are offended easily should be offended more often. And I urge you to bite your lip if need be, step outside your comfort zone and listen to the entire episode. There are many gems within, including all sorts of hilarious stories, surprising statistics, and also some tear-jerking epiphanies and tales that Sebastian has to share. He's lived an incredible life, a very tough and rugged life, certainly in

Starting point is 00:05:37 his deployments or rather assignments that were in war-torn countries. And there's a lot to be learned here. So please be patient. Please listen to this conversation with Sebastian Junger. Sebastian, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It's nice to be here. It's so exciting to finally get a chance to hang because we have a mutual friend in Josh Waitzkin, who's been on the podcast twice. For those who don't know, the basis for searching for Bobby Fisher, but the book and the movie, but a lot more than that. I mean, a real masterful and kind soul who's really taught me a lot. But the first encounter we had was at Josh's wedding. And I guess we were piecing it together and that was probably like 10 years ago, something along those lines. And this is the first chance that we've had to really kind of dig in and get

Starting point is 00:06:29 to know each other. Let's start with some mundane stuff, but you have a book here on your backpack. Could you tell us what you're reading at the moment? I'm reading the biography of Thomas Paine, one of the intellectual fathers of American independence from Britain in the 1770s. And somehow, this is maybe TMI for people listening, but Sebastian arrived before I got back to my place, and I was doing some acroyoga, long story, and then you had picked up the letters from a Stoic. And did the Stoics come up in the book about pain? Yeah, the Stoics, the Greek Stoics were greatly admired by pain. I didn't know much about them. I knew the word. And I'd heard of Seneca, but I'm incredibly,

Starting point is 00:07:21 I'm sort of half illiterate, right, or untutored. And what the book said about the Stoics was amazing. And, you know, I'm not religious. I didn't grow up going to church. I don't believe in God. And so if you're like me, you're always looking for a way to sort of order the universe that's inspiring or reassuring and sort of makes sense of things. And so what they said about the Stoics, I really identified with.

Starting point is 00:07:49 I'm like, oh, I got to learn more about the Stoics. And then here I was before I took a nap on your couch. I sort of pawed through your book collection over there. And there was the letters of Seneca. And I grabbed it and sat down and I almost started whooping. I mean, with pleasure. The things that he was writing 2,000 years ago were so modern, so amazing, so essential, and I just thought I have to get this book immediately. So you seem to be a stoic without calling yourself such in a lot of respects. But I want to bring up something that I know nothing about, but a fan had asked me to inquire about, which is chainsaw.

Starting point is 00:08:35 Ask him about the chainsaw. So let's talk about your career with chainsaws. Can you give us some context? Yeah, absolutely. So I studied anthropology in college because it interested me. That you give us some context? Yeah, absolutely. So I studied anthropology in college because it interested me. That was on the East Coast? Yeah, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. And I had no interest in being an anthropologist, but it actually helped me throughout my career as a writer. After I got out of college,

Starting point is 00:08:59 I sort of wallowed around. I waited tables. I did various things to earn money while I was trying to become a writer. And I was very slowly getting into journalism, but it didn't pay very well. And I got a job eventually as a climber for tree companies. And I would work 80, 90 feet in the air with a chainsaw on a rope, taking trees down in pieces. Rigging branches and lowering them as I cut them and taking off the tops of trees on a rope, taking trees down in pieces, uh, you know, rig, rig, you know, rigging, rigging branches and lowering them as I cut them and taking off the tops of trees and taking them down all the way to the ground. It was extremely dangerous work, or I should say it's dangerous. If you make a mistake, there isn't any random danger in the top of a tree. And I realized at

Starting point is 00:09:38 one point, if I get killed doing this and plenty of people do, if I get killed doing this, and plenty of people do, if I get killed doing this, it will be because I killed myself by accident. It's not a random, it's not a situation where something random will kill me. That was very reassuring. And it also trained me to really focus on being in the present moment. Well, at one point, I wasn't in the present moment. And the chainsaw hit the back of my leg and tore open the back of my leg. And I had been a marathon runner and stuff, and I was super worried about my Achilles tendon. So it hit your lower leg, your entire back of your leg? I managed to drag it across the back of my ankle right where the Achilles is. And I turned the chainsaw.

Starting point is 00:10:19 I was way up in a tree on a rope, and I turned the the chainsaw off and I clipped it to my belt and looked down and I pulled my leg, I pulled the wound open because I wanted, you know, you go into shock and you get very clinical immediately, right? And I pulled the wound open and I wanted to see if the Achilles was intact. Indeed, it was, by the way, an Achilles is about the thickness of a number two pencil and it's white, just in case you ever wanted to know what your Achilles looks like. And I was so relieved to see it intact, but I still had a pretty messed up leg. And I rappelled down to the ground, and my crew took me to the hospital. And as I was recovering, I had this thought that people die all the time doing dangerous jobs in this country. They're mostly working class men.

Starting point is 00:11:11 And they work in industries that are very dangerous, drilling for oil, logging, commercial fishing, that the nation needs done. And they die in numbers comparable to soldiers in war, actually. But they don't get acknowledged. They don't get honored. And I thought, maybe I'll write about dangerous jobs. And that set me on course to write my first book called The Perfect Storm about a huge storm that, among other things, sank a commercial fishing boat at sea. So I was lamenting the fact, it's not really the right way to put it.

Starting point is 00:11:44 I was saying that we could probably talk for seven hours. There's so many things I want to ask you about and so many things that Josh wanted me to ask you also. But let's go back to the rappelling down trees for a second. How did you get that job? I mean, what qualified you or did not qualify you? How did that come to pass? Like many good stories, it started in a bar.

Starting point is 00:12:04 I was broke uh i was broke and i was at a bar one evening and i was sitting next to this guy and we just started talking and he said he owned a tree company and he said he was looking for a climber and you know i was a pretty athletic kid and um and he said listen i'll train you to climb if you'll work for me, but I can't give you full-time work, only occasional work. It's all I got. And, um, I was like, yeah, absolutely. So I started, he sort of trained me how to climb. And I, the great thing about climbing was that I could make, I mean, for an unemployed freelance writer in the, in the late eighties, I could make a couple hundred dollars a day cash. I could make

Starting point is 00:12:44 500 bucks a day, even a thousand dollars a day, depending on the job. And so it was,, I could make a couple hundred dollars a day cash. I could make 500 bucks a day, even $1,000 a day, depending on the job. And so I could work one day a week and sort of live off it. It was the perfect job for someone who was trying to do something else and needed some time. The athleticism, we were talking about this when we were having lunch together. What did your running times look like when you were at your peak? My running times were almost fast enough. That's what they look like from my perspective. What was your mile?

Starting point is 00:13:13 I ran 412 for the mile. That's a fucking fast mile. I mean, from my perspective, that seems extremely fast. And then you got into marathons after that. Yeah. I ran 904 for the two- two mile 2405 for five miles and a 221 marathon those are my sort of the set of distance records that i had so the the perfect storm uh i heard you described i read you being described as uh based on that work and i'm

Starting point is 00:13:42 paraphrasing here but the next hemingway along those lines. And Josh had also observed, I think the way he put it was, to quote, one of the leanest writers I know, so little bullshit between the muscle. How did you develop your writing style? And if that's a bad question, feel free to rephrase it. But how did you develop that leanness at that point in your life? Well, you know, I never studied English and I never studied writing in college or after. But I read a lot. I grew up in a household with a lot of books. My father was educated in Europe. He grew up in Europe and reading was this sort of imperative. I mean, I mean, it was, you just, you, you don't not read, you know, and I read John McPhee, Joan Didion, Peter Matheson, but I gravitated towards language that was efficient and lean and innovative. And when I would read a book that I liked, I would think about, like John McPhee,

Starting point is 00:15:00 I would think about why is it I like it? What is it about the writing that appeals to me? And when I, and even more importantly, when I read books I didn't like, I tried to figure out what was it about that sentence, about that paragraph that repels me. And that was how I learned to write. And it's a sort of process of natural selection. I just kept reading things that reinforced the style that I was drawn to anyway. And I kept writing more and more in that style. And I think if you know those writers and you read me, you can see my ancestry, my literary ancestry pretty clearly. What drew you to writing? So you weren't taking classes explicitly focused on turning you into a journalist. It doesn't sound like a writer. So what drew you

Starting point is 00:15:45 to writing? Well, it happened quite suddenly. I was a good distance runner in college and I had to write a thesis and I'd heard that the Navajo had this very strong tradition, ancient tradition of running. And they were still, they were sort of still at it in a kind of traditional way. And they were amazing sort of track and cross country athletes. And they had blended the two, uh, the two disciplines. And so I, I did my field work on the Navajo reservation. I spent a summer there. I trained with their best runners, you know, is up at six, 7,000 feet. I live in Fort defiance, um, Arizona. And I wrote a thesis about Navajo long distance running. That was the name of the thesis. And apparently thesis titles are supposed to have a colon in them. And I didn't know that. I just called it Navajo long distance running. And I just came alive academically doing

Starting point is 00:16:40 that. I mean, I was a pretty indifferent student. I was much more of an athlete than a student. And I just came alive. And the idea that you could go out into the world and gather information, gather research, interview people, and bring it back, and then turn it into words that people will read and be moved by, informed by, and moved by, and maybe changed by, that to me was just such an extraordinary idea. And so I thought,

Starting point is 00:17:07 maybe I'll be a journalist. That sounds like journalism. Maybe I'll try to be a journalist. And I literally graduated with my graduation plan. Post-graduation plan was, maybe I'll try to be a journalist. That was literally the plan I had in my head. Seems to have worked out. Well, eventually. I mean, eventually. In between, I was a pretty bad waiter in Washington, D.C. and in Cambridge. And, you know, like, I mean, it took a while. My first book came out when I was 35, and I had virtually no income from writing before that.

Starting point is 00:17:39 No. So the first book was The Perfect Storm, or no? Yes, that's right. Yes, it was. So was that your first, aside from the thesis, long-form piece of writing? I mean, it's just, that's incredible. That was the next long thing that I wrote, yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:53 And I wrote some articles. You know, I wrote some articles for the Boston Phoenix, and then I got into a couple of magazines, but I couldn't even come close to stitching together an income I could live on. Did you sell the book before you wrote it or write it before you sold it? I worked on the story for about a year and just sort of on my own dime. And then I wrote a magazine piece that Outside Magazine took.

Starting point is 00:18:22 And then I got a book contract from W.W. Norton, a very, very modest book contract. But it got me going. Based on the magazine piece. Yeah. And I ginned up some outline that sort of showed how I was going to expand the story. And you already had quite a bit in your back pocket then at that point. Yeah. I already had a bill crank full of notes and whatever.

Starting point is 00:18:43 I mean, I already done years bill crate full of notes and whatever. I mean, I already done a year's worth of work on this. But I was used to – I mean, everything I'd ever written, I'd written on my own time and then tried to sell it. I was constantly sort of peddling finished pieces of writing. Yeah, I never, the first story that I placed in the Boston Phoenix, which when I was 23 was like a big deal, was about tugboats in Boston Harbor. And they didn't commission that. Why would they, right? But I just, I moved to Boston and I just thought, what's the coolest thing in Boston? Maybe it's tugboats.

Starting point is 00:19:19 You know, like, so I just started hanging out on tugboats and I sent them a pretty nice piece of writing. And it was my first published piece up there and it was called Towing the Line. And that was my sort of entry into journalism. What was your writing process like after the magazine piece comes out, you get the book contract, did you continue taking other jobs or did you buckle down to focus full time on the writing? Oh, I did tree work throughout. I mean, I, you know, I didn't, my advance was pretty small and, and, um, I mean, and as was appropriate, I mean, I was totally unknown writer and it was, it was a totally bizarre topic at the time. Right. So I am not complaining, but the advance was

Starting point is 00:19:59 quite small. So I did tree work throughout the, you know, a couple of days a week I'd be up in the trees, but I also, after I, after I my book proposal, by some miracle, I had an agent, by the way. I hadn't made a dime for him for 10 years, right? But he liked my writing, right? God bless him. How did he get in touch? How did you guys connect? I met him, his name's Stuart Krzyzewski, and he's still my agent.

Starting point is 00:20:21 We're really good friends. And he said it was, the way he met me was sort of the ultimate sort of agent's nightmare. His, a client of his who wrote academic papers, in other words,

Starting point is 00:20:34 not a big paying gig, but he sort of handled, he handled the academic career of this guy who was a Shakespeare scholar. Okay. It took him three hours a year, you know, whatever.

Starting point is 00:20:47 That guy's college roommate was my father. And he got the message that his arguably smallest client's college roommate's son wanted to be a writer and would he read some stuff. And Stuart was like, that's about as bad as it gets. That is about as unpromising as it gets in the agent world. But he's a great, you know, Stuart's a great guy and he has an open mind. And he read some stuff that I'd written and really liked it. It took another 10 years for him to make any money off me. But it's, you know, like he saw something. Long-term investment.

Starting point is 00:21:19 It was. He saw something there and I'm eternally grateful to him. But I, so I gave him my book proposal based on the article. And then I went off to Bosnia. I wanted to be a war reporter. And in case the author thing didn't work out, when there was no reason to think it was going to work out, and I didn't want to do tree work my whole life.

Starting point is 00:21:37 So I went off. There was a civil war in Bosnia. And I went off to learn how to be a war reporter. And I was there. I finally came home in 94 because Stuart sent me a fax saying, I managed to sell your book. You've got to come home. And I came home.

Starting point is 00:21:53 During the period that you were up in the trees a few days a week, what did your – or once you'd sold the book, I'm not sure. I'm mixing up my chronologies a little bit, but what did your writing process, your daily or weekly schedule look like at that point? How do you write? I know it's a very boring, maybe often asked question, but I'm fascinated by this and Josh wanted me to dig into it. Well, you know, really there's two kinds of writing. There's fiction and there's nonfiction. And the first step, if you're a journalist, which I consider all nonfiction should be journalism, should be considered journalism.

Starting point is 00:22:33 There aren't other rules for literary nonfiction or anything. It's all journalism as far as I'm concerned. If you're a journalist, the first thing you have to do is do your research, right? Because you need something – you're writing about the real world and you need facts and quotes and interviews and all that. So my writing process really starts out in the world as I'm researching a story or in a library or on the internet or whatever, as I'm researching a story. Fiction writers, they depend on this weird sort of pipeline to God, right? I mean, they're trying to reimagine the world in a way that's never been done before and reproduce it on the page and have people enter this fictional world and be riveted by it. And that's where inspiration comes in.

Starting point is 00:23:17 And that's where you have to really be at your desk every morning because you never know when God's going to talk to you. And I mean God figuratively. I don't believe in God. But the creative gods. But for a journalist, it's much more like carpentry. You get the lumber, you get the bricks, you build the basement, you start putting it together. I mean, it is a process, and there's a lot of inspiration in the actual language that you use, but it's much more procedural than I think fiction writing probably is. The, uh,

Starting point is 00:23:45 you mentioned McPhee. So the, the only, or the most impactful writing class I ever took was with McPhee. It was a small seminar of about 12 to 15 students at Princeton. And, um, so you'll appreciate this just as a side note.

Starting point is 00:24:01 So we spent some, I still have to this day downstairs, an entire three ring binder full of all of my notes from that class. And I would say three quarters of them are all about structure and how he thinks about structure, which is extremely visual in a lot of cases. And he would map out just like an architect with a blueprint, the structure of his piece based on what he had gathered in all of these elaborate forms. And some would be like a seesaw, others would be a circle, others would be in some kind of weird, like cylindrical abstract piece of art, but there's a visual representation of how he saw

Starting point is 00:24:35 the story in its visual structure and, or visual representation. But, uh, and, and this is going to segue somewhere, but I remember we had to apply to get into the class and I don't think, and I still don't think I'm particularly a good writer. There are much better writers there. Uh, but we had to do short assignments every week and they would be on the most, the most boring topics possible deliberately to try to make us force us to make them interesting and when we got our first assignments back the routine was we'd have one group seminar a week and then we each got to spend i think an hour one-on-one with him going over our writing

Starting point is 00:25:15 assignments throughout the week and he handed our our assignments back and he goes now before as i'm handing these out i want you guys to remember you're all good writers so don't get demoralized and there was more red ink than black ink on the page i mean he just eviscerated everyone and not in a malicious way but he took out all of the bloat all of the redundancy all of the ambiguity and um for those people interested he there are a number of interviews he did for i think the paris review on the art of nonfiction, which are just fantastic. But what I wanted to ask you was, say, before the age of 30? Well, let me just say, McPhee, I mean, you're very lucky to have taken the class with him. Oh, so lucky.

Starting point is 00:26:17 He was a mentor that I didn't personally know, for me. Through his works, he was. And it's very interesting to hear what you said about him mapping out structure because I think good structure is an extremely visual thing. I think when people who are good at structure, I'd like to think I am, he definitely is. I think they arrive at the structure with the visual part of their brain. I mean, I think you've probably mapped his brain while it was at work. You would see that part light up.

Starting point is 00:26:51 That's just what I'm guessing. When I write out structure, it looks more like a diagram to a circuit board or something. It's not quite like geometric shapes, but it's very visual. It represented completely visually. And I feel it. Like when I get the right shape to something, I feel it. It's a very interesting process that for me is, it's something that feels like the divine spark that is finally sort of like blessed me with its presence. So let's say you have your box full of notes, right? So you've dug into a given topic, you've gone out in the field, and we could use the perfect storm for this example because perhaps

Starting point is 00:27:37 it's evolved or changed over time. What then? Like, do you sit down and go through and highlight certain pieces and then number them and order them in some fashion? What's the process of turning that heap of information into something that might become a book? I read through all my interviews with a red magic marker and I redline the stuff, the good quotes. And I read through all of the research material and I underline the stuff that's interesting to me. And then I go through everything I've underlined and I just write lists of what I consider the assets that I have to work with.

Starting point is 00:28:19 And once I have those lists, they cover many pieces of paper, then I'll start to clump them into sort of general topics. You know, history of fishing in New England and the physics of wave motion. I'm referencing topics in The Perfect Storm. Nightlife in Gloucester. You know, whatever. And, uh, and then once I have those big chunks, I start to, and this is where the visual visualness comes in. Visuality comes in. I start to try to picture how could I arrange those in a way where the energy and the interest in the reader gathers and builds and then achieve some sort of catharsis towards the end.

Starting point is 00:29:07 And it's a very intuitive process, but I got to say, I could never do it without writing it down. I mean, I'm literally moving ideas around on a piece of paper until they look right. And that's the part of writing that to me is almost closer to art than a sort of intellectual pursuit. I used to do this physically, and then I ended up using a piece of software called Scrivener, which is originally for playwrights that allows you to move pieces around like this. And so I've done my last three books using this software called Scrivener, which allows me to move these pieces around without separate files for each document. So I can actually see sort of the table of contents as I rearrange it. I can resection things. It's proven really helpful for me.

Starting point is 00:29:52 Now, McPhee, just to talk about daily routines. So he is one of those guys in the nonfiction world, I can't do this because I want to slam my head in a car door if I try this for one day or like jump out a window. He literally sits down, and once he has his information, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., come hell or high water, he's staring at the blank page with a break for lunch and swimming, as I remember it. And it just drove me to madness to do that. It was so depressing. So I tend to do my best writing, and I wish this were different, honestly, but my best synthesis, I can do interviews, research, all that throughout the day. But in terms of piecing it together into some type of narrative, it's like 10 or 11 p.m. to like 5 a.m. That's just my window

Starting point is 00:30:37 for whatever reason. Do you write throughout the day? Do you tend to do your best writing in the mornings, at night? What does that look like? I do my best writing when something's due. Spoken as a real journalist who's actually worked for papers and whatnot. Yeah. And that feeling of urgency might come six months out if it's a book deadline, or it might be the next morning if you're trying to finish up a magazine piece. But that intensity, it know, it's like athletes, you know, I mean, you know, athletes in the big game or the big race or whatever. I mean, that, that intensity can bring out something that you didn't even know you had access to much less embodied. Right. And, um, so the time of day, you know, I, you know, I, I have a cup of coffee and I sit down and I write for a couple hours till I get bored. if I feel that I'm blocked in my writing, usually with that blocked meaning

Starting point is 00:31:27 I just can't write the next section, I keep rewriting it and it doesn't work and it's stuck, it's not that I'm blocked, it's that I don't have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic. It always means, it's not that I can't find the right words,

Starting point is 00:31:45 it's that I don't have the ammunition. Right, the words aren't there in the first place. Yeah, because I don't have the ammo. I don't have the goods. I have not gone out into the world and brought back the goods that I'm writing about. And you never want to solve a research problem with language. You never want to be such a fine writer that you can sort of thread the needle and get through a thin patch in your research just because you're such a great prose artist. Use some linguistic smoke and mirrors. Yeah. It's loss over the fact that you don't have the research. Yeah. It's just bullshit. And literary writers, and I like to think of myself as a literary writer, I think sometimes think that language is so magical and so powerful that you should be

Starting point is 00:32:23 able to sort of do almost anything with it. And it's not true and it shouldn't be true. What do you think is the, if you were to say, giving a, this would be an odd place to give a commencement speech, but commencement speech to graduating seniors in high school. I've done that. Oh, you have?

Starting point is 00:32:46 Great. Perfect. Well, then let me not ask the question I was going to ask. What did you talk about? I was speaking at a very kind of elite school, private school in New York City. And these kids were going off either to college or to high school. I can't remember. At any rate, these are very, very privileged, very smart, very educated

Starting point is 00:33:11 children. And exceedingly accomplished parents, right? And I said to them something like, the hardest thing you're ever going to do, I was like, you're programmed to succeed. You guys are programmed to succeed. The hardest thing you're ever going to do in your life is fail at something. And if you don't start failing at things, you will not live a full life. You'll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work. That's not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in. And you have to do the hardest thing that you have not been prepared for in this school or any school.

Starting point is 00:33:58 You have to be prepared to fail. And that's how you're going to expand yourself and grow. And then you will really, as you work through that process of failure and learning, then you will really deepen into the human being you're capable of being. And that was four years ago. Who knows how it's going for them? Well, we were chatting about this before we started recording a little bit, which is how I was commenting on how accidental my career, and I'd kind of put that in air quotes, is. I mean, I couldn't have possibly planned this path. And you echoed something has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Starting point is 00:34:52 So along those lines, the question I was going to ask, it was specific to journalism. So if people came to you, these kids, graduating seniors, and they said, I want to be a journalist. So it's 20 of these kids, and they're about to go off to college. What should I study? What should I do? What should I avoid? What would your advice be to them? I mean, the path that I took is the one I know best, obviously.

Starting point is 00:35:17 And I would say what worked for me. I mean, as a journalist, I'm very hesitant to actually give advice to people. I feel that's one of the – in my book, Tribe, I really try not to tell the country what I think we all should do. I might try to pry bar that out of you. Well, I think it's – there are ways – there's other language you can use where you're not issuing a directive, but you're saying you're giving some wisdom. So what I would say to someone like that is what worked for me was to read an enormous amount, to think about what I read and why I liked it or didn't like it. Anthropology is an amazing discipline that gives you tools to understand almost every cultural social situation in the world. And, and you,

Starting point is 00:36:09 but mostly you must have an enormous appetite for humanity and for life and for the world. I mean, you really have to feel like you cannot fill yourself up enough with this amazing place that we live in. Like if you have that feeling and sincerely have it, you'll do okay if not at writing at something and that that hunger for humanity that interest in humanity is that what drove you to want to go into a war-torn country or territory and observe and write and capture?

Starting point is 00:36:45 Or was it something else? Why did that come about specifically? There's a few things. I grew up in a pretty affluent suburb of Boston. I grew up in a very physically protected way. I got to 18. I felt like I'd never really been challenged. I'd never been faced with a situation that I didn't know I could survive. And having studied a lot of anthropology, you know,

Starting point is 00:37:12 through college, as I moved through my 20s, I thought, this is ridiculous. I'm not an adult yet. I'm not a man yet. I mean, you cross that threshold into adulthood, into manhood, by facing something that could destroy you. And initiation rites in tribal societies around the world, their main purpose is to confront young men. And young women have a different challenge that they have to face. It's equally daunting. But young men face this challenge in these initiation rites of sort of demonstrating that they will face the most painful, scariest things possible for their community, for their

Starting point is 00:37:52 people. And that's adulthood, and that's manhood. And, you know, I'd hit 30, and other than a, you know, a chainsaw injury here or there, I hadn't really been tested in a real way. And my father grew up in Europe during World War II, and war is this sort of archetypal ordeal. It's a sort of ancient, in some ways, an ancient thing, and it's a very, very, in a lot of societies, it is the gate, for better or worse, I mean, I know there's a political conversation here

Starting point is 00:38:24 that we can have, but for better or worse, many societies sort of, it is the gate, for better or worse. I mean, I know there's a political conversation here that we can have, but for better or worse, many societies sort of see it as the gateway to adulthood, to manhood specifically for men. And I went off to Bosnia partly because I wanted to become a war reporter and I was sort of at a loss as to how to make a living and live an adult life, partly because I felt like I was still a child and that war would transform me in some ways that nothing else could. So this is jumping around, of course, but there are a couple of stories that I'd love to talk about that are in the book I'm holding in my hand, which is Tribe, the subtitle on homecoming and belonging. So I get sent a lot of books, and I very rarely read them. This one, of course, because of the

Starting point is 00:39:10 background, the shared friendship that we have with Josh, and my familiarity with your work, made me more inclined to read it. I read this in a day and a half. And for those who have seen my examples of my note-taking, I just have an index of notes that spans all of the front matter of the book, basically. There are some fantastic stories in this book. And I had follow-up questions, even if we weren't recording this, over a bottle of wine that I wanted to ask you. So can you please explain what skinwalkers are? You mentioned the navajo earlier and why they're in this book because i wanted to hear more about this yeah so skinwalkers

Starting point is 00:39:53 were this thing that i never heard of that i first encountered when when i was on the navajo reservation in 1983 as a 19 year old 20 year old 20-year-old, whatever I was. And basically the Navajo believed in something that other cultures would call werewolves. The belief was that there were certain Navajo, mostly men, who had basically turned, right? They'd lost their humanity and they'd become animals. But animals are a source of power in a lot of native societies. They became animals in the sense that they had no human affiliation. And they did this by putting on the hide of a wolf. And that gave them the powers of a wolf,

Starting point is 00:40:42 the powers of being able to run very, very fast for a long distance, the powers of being invisible, of being very, very ferocious when need be, being incredible hunters. And that these skin, they were called skinwalkers, and that these skinwalkers were, they were basically adopting the skills and powers of a warrior, except they were using it against their own people and that they would kill their fellow Navajo and eat them in the middle of the night.

Starting point is 00:41:11 And the Navajo in 1983 on the reservation where I lived were absolutely terrified of this phenomenon, as terrified as they, I'm sure they were a hundred years prior. And I got to say, the desert out there is a big lonely place. And I started to feel their terror. I mean, I didn't literally believe that these things exist, but the belief system that was around me still made me deeply, deeply scared of them. It was extraordinary experience for a rationalist like myself. My father's a physicist. I don't believe in God. He didn't believe in anything but what he could measure and observe. And all of a sudden, there I was in my trailer, very, very scared at certain moments of these things and of these skinwalkers. And so as I wrote about it in my thesis, I said, you know, the skinwalkers are basically the universal human fear that you can defend yourself as a society, as a community. You can defend yourself against all outside enemies.

Starting point is 00:42:19 But you're completely vulnerable to one madman in your midst. You know, one psychopath, one sociopath basically that has no feeling of protectiveness, of humanity towards his neighbors can kill more people than the enemy can. of the awful spate of mass shootings in this country that have suddenly become so commonplace in the last 10 or 15 years. And it gave me the idea that the mass shooters in Aurora, Colorado, and at Sandy Hook, and we all know the names, that they are our society's version of the skinwalkers. So part of what I enjoy about your writing,

Starting point is 00:43:09 and specifically in this book, is your frank writing about concepts that we tend to very cleanly separate in a binary way. And it's really, I think, a discussion that I hunger for, that is hard, I feel hard to have in many different sort of modern, I'm struggling for language here because it's a feeling that I get very frustrated by, and that is like a discussion of manhood and rites of passage and the clear historical importance of some of these bonds forged in extreme circumstances between men that in the safety of these sort of cocoons that we have in various cities or elsewhere do not exist,

Starting point is 00:44:06 but problems manifest nonetheless, or perhaps to an even greater extent. And in the current climate of a lot of political correctness, that's sort of foreboding. A lot of these topics just don't get broached. But I'd love for you to talk a little bit about your experience with, I think this was in Spain with the Viking helmet. Yeah. Because I think it illustrates a very important point. If you remember the story,

Starting point is 00:44:36 I'd love for you to describe what happened exactly with this Viking helmet. Yeah. I mean, and I think our society which really i feel really does strive i mean just to address your earlier point about political correctness i think we really are in a very um righteous way striving for fairness and equality throughout our society i think we really are and it makes it but we're also the product of our biology and our evolution. And the two are not easy partners, right? I mean, throughout the mammalian world, males and females are built differently and do different things and are good at different things.

Starting point is 00:45:17 That's just a fact of nature. If we want the sexes to be equal in our society, those inherent differences become potentially problematic. And as a result, instead of trying to figure out how to reconcile those very real differences in an equitable system, people and well-meaning people that some of them are good friends of mine would just rather you not acknowledge the differences. And that there's a short-term logic to that,

Starting point is 00:45:46 but there's a long-term loss. And eventually, we won't have real equality in this society until those unnegotiable differences are actually incorporated into our equality. And at any rate, that's why, what you brought up about sort of PC thinking, it can be very infuriating, but it's a funny thing. It's infuriating even though it's trying to do the right thing, but it's still infuriating.

Starting point is 00:46:11 And I'm going to hit pause on the Viking helmet, which we're going to get to. But there's another, I have so many notes in this book. It's just unbelievable. The let's, because you, you brought up these, uh, what most people would, would consider gender-based differences. Uh, could you talk for a second, and this is something I'd never really considered, but gender role switching, uh, if this makes any sense. And, uh, this was even in same sex groups. Uh, this was, this was very, I found this very thought-provoking, but if you could perhaps describe

Starting point is 00:46:47 what I'm very clumsily trying to allude to. Yeah. Well, one of the things that's interesting is that if you take passers-by in a moment of crisis, I mean, everyone will jump into a burning building to save their child, maybe to save their spouse, possibly their parents in law, you know, but whatever you have sort of familiar relations and people will risk their lives to help the people that they love. And it makes sense, right? But if you look at situations in public, in this anonymous society that we have, and someone's in danger, who goes to their aid, right? It happens all the time in New York. Someone falls onto the subway tracks and the train is coming. Who jumps down onto the

Starting point is 00:47:31 tracks to help them? Almost invariably, it's a man. Now, I feel like I'm very sexist in saying that, but statistics aren't sexist and And they've done studies of this. And men are, for a number of physical and psychological reasons, very, very prone towards that kind of impulsive risk-taking that's sort of on the spot, in the moment decision to jump onto some railroad tracks while a train's coming. It's not that they're braver. It's that they have psychological and physical predispositions and capacities that allow them, in fact, promote them to do that. So if you look at these stories, something like 95 difficulty, and that can either be the Blitz in London, which I write about, or that could be a group of coal miners who were trapped in a coal mine disaster in the 1950s in Canada. You need people who are in the, quote, male role of rescuing and risk-taking.

Starting point is 00:48:41 But then this other thing is important, and it's a kind of moral courage. And it does not require spontaneous muscular action with complete disregard for your own life, right? That's not what's required. As important as that is, there's something else, moral courage, where you basically are like providing some moral fiber for the group and you act as a kind of conscience for the group. And women are very, very good at that. And they did a study during World War II of who helped hide Jewish families who were fleeing the Nazis, Gentiles who helped Jewish families who were fleeing the Nazis, that's not something that takes muscular action in the moment. But if you're busted, if you're a Dutch farmer and you have a Jewish family in your basement, you're dead. You're executed. Women were considerably more likely to make that decision than men were.

Starting point is 00:49:44 And so what happens is that if you have, say, a group of coal miners who are stuck in a coal mine for a week, the first kind of spontaneous leaders you get are the classically male, sort of action-oriented, grab a pickaxe and start digging. When those efforts fail, another kind of leader takes over. They're way more empathic. They're way more affiliative. They reach negotiated solutions. They try to make people feel good. They're in the classically female role. And what's so interesting about that is that the male and female roles will be filled regardless of the sex. So a group of women with no men around, a woman will jump in,

Starting point is 00:50:30 will jump onto the railroad tracks to save the kid, right, if there are no men around. If there are no women around, a man will step forward and act in that wonderfully moral, empathic way that women are known for. And so society sort of needs both of these gender roles and it doesn't really care if an actual man or an actual woman fills them. So this, this,

Starting point is 00:50:56 we don't have to cover this one at length, but I also found it fascinating to read about the Iroquois peacetime leaders versus war time leaders and, and how they switched between the two and how they were so clearly delineated, right? I mean, when circumstances changed, it's like, okay, like, it's almost like a football game. It's like, okay, offense, you're off the field. Defense, you're in. And how does this, and I'm not much of a policy or politics wonk, but I struggle with trying to assess political candidates. How do you think of assessing political candidates,

Starting point is 00:51:32 presidential or otherwise, when you have to vote for one person? Well, it's a very interesting question. The Iroquois sort of figured it out, as he said. In peacetime, they had sachems who were partly elected by women, right? So the female voice

Starting point is 00:51:50 was found in the selection of sachems. They ran peaceful society. When war started, the sachems stepped down and war leaders took over. And if the people they were fighting sued for peace, it was not the war leaders who considered the deal.

Starting point is 00:52:07 It was the Satyams. And if peace was accepted, the war leaders stepped down immediately. And it's really interesting because the U.S. Constitution, parts of it are based on the Iroquois Law of peace. And Thomas Paine did a lot of work sort of incorporating the natural rights of man as were exemplified by Iroquois society into the intellectual basis for American governance. But as soon as the British surrendered, George Washington was basically the supreme leader. He was the military leader in the colonies when they were fighting the British. And as soon as the British surrendered, George Washington was basically the Supreme leader. He was the military leader in the colonies was when they were fighting the British. And as soon as the British surrendered,

Starting point is 00:52:49 he formally gave up power, gave up control to the civilian government. It was a very, very important thing to do because otherwise he could have continued on as quote King. And that would not be a democracy. And, and my guess is that they took

Starting point is 00:53:05 that, he took that idea from the Iroquois. Military thinking and peace thinking are very, very, they require very different sensibilities, very different calculations of cost and benefit. And so there is, the conundrum for us right now is we elect a president who, in time of war, is also the military leader. And I think in a democracy, the idea that you have a non-military person at the top of the chain of command is very, very sensible. You do not want a society run by the military. That's a military dictatorship. We do not want a society run by the military. That's a military dictatorship. We do not want that. But it does call for very, maybe even conflicting traits in a single person.

Starting point is 00:53:54 You know, the wisdom and the gentleness of a peacetime leader, the empathy of a peacetime leader, and the capacity for violence and effectiveness and decisiveness in a wartime leader, you're asking someone to be almost schizophrenic if they can do both of those well. Yeah, equally well. So you mentioned a couple of historical figures. Why did Ben Franklin complain that settlers along the frontier were constantly absconding to live with the Indians, but that the opposite almost never happened. Why is that? Well, it was this sort of strange phenomenon, right? I mean, the Christian society settled

Starting point is 00:54:33 the eastern seaboard of the New World in the 1600s, 1700s. And beyond the, you know, sort of beyond the tree line were the savages, right? They weren't Christian. They weren't civilized. They went about and they ran about almost naked, and they hunted wild animals and fornicated and everything else, right? I mean, it's sort of Satan's den, right? Sounds pretty fun, right? Sounds pretty great. Right. Maybe that's just me.

Starting point is 00:54:58 So for the civilized Christian society of that era, they clearly felt that they were the superior godly society and but what happened was that superiority that qual very quality of civilization and christianity was also quite stifling right we didn't evolve to live i mean we didn't evolve as as the human animals that we are social animals that that we are, to live within the strictures of sort of Puritan society. And so young men particularly, but young women as well, were constantly, the frontier was constantly sort of bleeding young people who went off, drifted off to live with the Indians.

Starting point is 00:55:39 I mean, the movement, the sort of societal movement was, I mean, it was a trickle, but it was significant, constantly towards the tribes. And the Indians were never running off to join white society, right? And then there were even weirder cases. You're talking about the people who were kidnapped? Yeah. That was the part that surprised me the most. I was like, okay, I can kind of see the appeal of being off in the woods free of certain constraints and fornicating that

Starting point is 00:56:05 sounds that that's probably a pretty appealing daydream to a puritan you know farmer uh you know youngest son isn't it but the the number of people who were kidnapped taken as supposedly slaves who then refused or very unwillingly uh refused to come back to white society or very unwillingly came. I mean, it's just... Well, my book Tribe starts with this story of Pontiac's rebellion in Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio, and Chief Pontiac fought the colonial powers for years very effectively, but eventually they sued for peace. And one of the deals was, part of the deal, the main part of the deal was that he give up 200 and some white captives that had been taken from the frontiers. And a significant number of the captives did not

Starting point is 00:57:00 want to be returned to their homes, to their society. And they actually weren't slaves. And what's interesting, I mean, the people thought that that's what happened to them. In fact, what happened to them is that the captives who weren't killed, and some were killed out of revenge for losses that the Indians had taken on the battlefield, but the ones who weren't killed were adopted. And as soon as you were adopted, you were considered absolutely one of the tribe. There was no distinction whatsoever. You were given to a family that had lost someone on the battlefield,

Starting point is 00:57:33 and you were the replacement for that person's son or daughter. And these people, I mean, there were two young women who were repatriated because of this peace accord after Pontiac's rebellion. And two young women actually managed to escape and make their way back to their adopted families. And this happened over and over and over again. All the way as the frontier marched across America, there were constantly these stories of people who were taken by the Indians and didn't want to come home. And the reason that was given was that it was an egalitarian society. It was not stratified by class, by income, by inherited wealth, by inherited power.

Starting point is 00:58:19 Everyone was equal. There were leaders, but there were leaders who were followed voluntarily. And if you didn't like the leadership style of Chief Pontiac, well, you could just take your family and move up Muskegon Creek and move in with your wife's cousin's family with this other group. And so authority was never imposed. Authority was accepted accepted and that led to a really basic equality in in native societies and and i should say as an anthropologist the sort of hominid groups that we evolved from that we were for hundreds of thousands of years all of the evidence that anthropologists archaeologists have been able to assemble is that they were extremely egalitarian groups. I mean, partly, you can't carry much wealth, right?

Starting point is 00:59:09 If you're a mobile nomadic society, how much wealth can you really carry? And a society that lives in groups of 40 or 50 that is mobile, it's extremely hard to accumulate differences of wealth and therefore status. How does that relate to your experiences in war and interviewing people who've been subjected to war, not necessarily as soldiers? I mean, you mentioned the Blitz and so on, but how does this relate to those experiences?

Starting point is 00:59:40 Well, one of the many ironies of war is that it's savage and it's violent and it's completely anti-human but it produces an intensity of human connection that you really can't you're hard-pressed to find in peacetime um so during the blitz and i looked a lot at the blitz in london and 30 000 people were killed by german bombs in around six months in and around London. The society didn't collapse, but it contracted sort of into itself. People were sleeping shoulder to shoulder with complete strangers in the tube stations. Fire brigades were rushing around trying to put out fires after the bombing raids. It was a brutal time.

Starting point is 01:00:26 And the government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties. Forget about the physical casualties, mass psychiatric casualties. But what happened was admissions to psychiatric wards actually went down from pre-war levels during the bombings and then went back up after the bombing stopped. One guy said, one official said, you know, it's amazing. We have neurotics driving ambulances. by hardship, by danger, by calamity, that communal life is so psychologically beneficial to people that there's a net gain in psychological well-being. So what you find is that in countries at war, Emil Durkheim, the famous sociologist, found that in European countries that were at war in the 1800s, the suicide

Starting point is 01:01:26 rate immediately went down. The murder rate went down. All of that kind of antisocial behavior was mitigated by the sort of monumental task that the country was engaged in. In New York, I live in New York City, in New York after 9-11, a massively traumatized population, right? And you would think a lot of psychological problems would come out because of this psychological trauma that the entire city experienced after 9-11. That's not what happened. The suicide rate went down after 9-11.

Starting point is 01:01:59 The violent crime rate went down. Even Vietnam vets who were struggling with PTSD in New York City said that their symptoms improved after 9-11 because they were needed. They had this sense like, oh my God, there's a crisis. I'm needed. I don't have time to stop thinking about myself. Time to think about the group, about us. And that feeling of us is what, not only does it make people feel good, but it buffers many people from their psychological demons, and it's kind of a relief.

Starting point is 01:02:33 One of the recurring themes that you write about and also that we spoke about, where after your TED Talk from a few years ago some of the feedback from vets uh from different wars was that they they missed the war and from civilians as well in this book it's like there there are certain aspects of the wartime maybe a perceived greater level of humanity even, oddly enough, that was lost once once peace was regained or achieved. How do you, how can one potentially go about, and this is sort of a multiple choice question, like manufacturing catastrophe in a, if that makes any sense, like simulating the characteristics that drive that increased cohesion, community, or sense of mental well-being, or just increase

Starting point is 01:03:37 cohesion in a way that you think we've evolved to find very healthy or healthful. Because we were discussing, for instance, boxing, and I had the same experience in jujitsu, even though I know it's terrible for me. I mean, I get injured every time I try to do this for any period of time. It's not good for your physical health. I mean, if you count all of the sort of collateral damage, but one of the appeals was, and we were both talking about the shared experience of it being completely egalitarian. It's like, oh, that's the guy who's really good at armors. That's the guy who's really good at stiff jab. That's the guy whose footwork is really good. It's like you don't, half the time, don't even know what they do. Don't even know necessarily their real name. I remember

Starting point is 01:04:16 when I was training at this place called AKA in San Jose, it was like, everybody was given some insulting nickname. I mean, and looking back on it, it's like, wow, it actually sounds a lot like, and I've never been in the military, but it kind of makes me think of full metal jacket and like snowball and, you know, and so on. But how, how can someone simulate that? Or what can we, what can we do focusing for now on like the, the personal wellbeing? Do you have any thoughts on, on how we might try to improve things that was a long fucking question i think you get the idea um yeah i mean the nickname thing is really interesting groups of men give each other nicknames women as far as i know don't uh it's a really interesting thing and i think it's a signal of tribal affiliation of group affiliation um the male group in our evolutionary past was extremely important

Starting point is 01:05:07 in hunting and in defense and the more cohesive and internally committed all the males were to the group to everyone else the more effective they would be at fighting and at um and at hunting and that and the survival of the community depended on them doing that job as well as on the women doing other things. But it depended on that and cohesion. Cohesion is increased, among other things, by hardship, by nicknames, by humor. I mean, all these things that you see men in groups do. I mean, any construction crew in New York City, you walk past them and half the time they're doubled over laughing. I mean, one of the things men do in groups is make each other laugh and they give each other nicknames.

Starting point is 01:05:48 So it's a really, really ancient that what you experience is a very common thing and I think quite ancient and serves a real purpose. We evolved as a species in a sort, experience of sort of ongoing moderate crisis. I mean, we're hunter gatherers. We evolved in a pretty harsh environment. Um, and we've survived in the harshest of environments in the Arctic and the Kalahari desert, um, for example. And so normal life for most of human history was a moderate ongoing crisis. What's very fortunate and beautiful and wonderful and also in a weird way tragic about modern society is that crisis has been removed. When you reintroduce a crisis like in the Blitz in London or an earthquake that I wrote about in Avizzano, Italy, early in the 20th century,

Starting point is 01:06:46 in Avizzano, something like 95% of the population was killed. Something like that. I mean, just horrific. I'm going from memory. But unbelievable casualties, just like a nuclear strike. And one of the survivors said that what happened afterwards, because people had to rely on each other, and so upper class people, lower class people, peasants and nobility, whatever, everyone sort of crouched around

Starting point is 01:07:08 the same campfires, right? And what this guy said was the earth, I'll try to do it by memory, I'm almost got it. The earthquake gave us what the law promises, but does not in fact deliver, which is the equality of all men. I think one of the things that people like about crisis is that suddenly everybody's equal. And you're evaluated, like in a boxing gym, you're evaluated for your actual conduct in the moment, not for who your father was, not for the clothing that you're wearing. The boxing gym that I work out at, you could be a suit from Midtown with a fancy job and a big bank. Or you could be like a really tough poor kid from the bowels of Brooklyn. And you're not judged.

Starting point is 01:07:54 There's no bias in either direction. There's no bias against the dude in the suit. And there's no bias against the ghetto kid. I mean, you're judged for how you act within that almost sacred space of the gym. And what happens in a crisis, in a war or an earthquake or whatever, is that people suddenly are judged for how they act. And that is, I think, one of the things that the, what were called the white Indians, the white captives of the American Indians. I think that is one of the things that appealed to them. They were no longer in this incredibly stratified and frankly unfair colonial society. They were in a place where they were totally self-determining in terms of how they were seen.

Starting point is 01:08:39 Let's talk about the C-Train and your return to New York City. And I'm missing, I'm trying to recall from memory, the timing on this, but it leads into a conversation of PTSD. Can you take us through that story? Yeah. One of the topics of this book is PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. I had this idea because of my work on the Navajo Reservation that the huge rates of PTSD that we're experiencing in America right now are maybe anomalous. And then if you live in a tribal society, the rates might be quite low. So that was the sort of genesis of my book. So I talked about my own experience with PTSD. I've been a war reporter since the early 90s. I stopped after one of my best friends was killed in combat a few years ago. But the first really traumatic assignment that I had was in northern Afghanistan a year before 9-11. In the fall of 2000, I was with Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was the leader of the Northern Alliance, and he was fighting the Taliban.

Starting point is 01:09:47 He was completely outnumbered, outgunned. Back then, the Taliban had fighter planes. The Taliban had tanks. They had artillery. They had all the toys, right? And Massoud, his forces were the sort of guerrillas. Well, it's great to be with the guerrillas until you start getting shelled, right? Or bombed or whatever. And so we had a tough – I was up there for two months.

Starting point is 01:10:09 And we saw and went through some very tough things. And I got back to New York. Young man, well, your age, in the late 30s. And I just felt completely like that nothing would ever affect me, right? I just assumed complete invulnerability to everything. And I got back to New York and a little shaken up, but all right. And then one day I went down into the subway and saw something I did every day. And it was rush hour. There were a lot of people. And I was seized with this incredible panic attack. I'd never had one in my life. Everything I was looking at seemed like a mortal threat.

Starting point is 01:10:51 Intellectually, I knew it wasn't, but it felt like it was. And I was way more scared than I'd ever been in Afghanistan. I had been plenty scared in Afghanistan. The trains were going too fast and they were going to jump the tracks and leap up onto the platform and kill me. The crowds were suddenly going to turn on me and beat me to death. The lights were too bright. The lights were somehow going to kill me. It was too loud.

Starting point is 01:11:13 The noise was going to – everything was a mortal threat. And I backed up against the iron support column and just sort of waited for it. And then I finally sprinted out of there and took a taxi. And that kept happening. Anytime I was in a small – like an enclosed place with too many people, too much going on, I would just panic. I just thought I was going crazy. I had no idea that it was in any way connected to the combat that I'd been in. Until a couple of years later, I was talking to a woman who was a psychologist.

Starting point is 01:11:42 It was a friend of a friend. It was at a picnic actually. And she asked about my war reporting and if I had any suffered any consequences consequences from it. I was like, no, of course not. I'm fine. And for some reason I thought to sort of mention,

Starting point is 01:11:54 but once in a while I have a weird panic attack. And she nodded in that way. The trinks do. Yeah. Interesting. You know? And she said, well,

Starting point is 01:12:04 and it was, and it was the spring of 2003. And she nodded and she said, well, that's interesting. She said, that's called PTSD. And we just invaded Iraq, right? And she said, you're going to be hearing quite a bit about that in the coming years, as indeed we have. And why are the rates, are the rates of PTSD in the U.S. anomalous? Are they unusually high compared to other cultures or other countries? And if so, why is that? Well, the truth about PTSD is that if you, almost 100% of people who have been traumatized either seen something gruesome or feared for their own life. And I should add that the witnessing of harm to others is more traumatic than dangerous. It's interesting, but almost 100%

Starting point is 01:13:03 of people who have been traumatized get short-term PTSD. That's what I got. It lasts some weeks. It lasts some months. It goes away. Therapy helps, whatever. But we're humans, right? I mean, we're adapted to survive danger and stress and hardship and all that other stuff.

Starting point is 01:13:20 We wouldn't be here, right? So trauma, if trauma was psychologically crippling to humans, we wouldn't be here, right? So trauma, if trauma was psychologically crippling to humans, humans wouldn't exist. Around 20% of people get long-term PTSD. So they pass the point where they should have recovered and they're stuck in this trauma loop and they can't get out of it. That's around 20% of people. Now you look at the US military. Every year, I'm sorry, every war, the casualty rate, thank God, has gone down because the intensity of the combat has gone down. As bad as World War I was, it wasn't as bad as the Civil War. World War II was not as intense. The combat was not as intense. There were not the mass casualties

Starting point is 01:14:03 of World War I. Korea, Vietnam, the war on terror has the lowest casualty rates of any war the US has fought, major war. But as the casualty rates have gone down and the level of trauma has gone down, disability claims have gone up. They're going the wrong directions. Right now, about 10% of the U.S. military actually experiences any combat at all, one out of 10 soldiers. The rest of them are crucial. They're necessary. They're not getting directly traumatized. But something like 50% of the U.S. military has filed for some form of PTSD disability.

Starting point is 01:14:43 So there's 40% in there that are a bit of a mystery, right? They come home and they're deeply, dangerously alienated, depressed. They don't fit in. Something's gravely wrong. And my theory is that what they're experiencing isn't a reaction to trauma. They couldn't be because most of them weren't traumatized. What they're experiencing is the radical readjustment from platoon life. A platoon is 40 or 50 people.

Starting point is 01:15:22 You're sleeping, depending on what kind of base you're on, shoulder to shoulder in the dirt or cot to cot in some kind of bungalow or whatever, but it's all group living, right? You're eating meals together, doing missions and patrols together, doing everything together for over a year. That is exactly how humans evolved to live. That is exactly our prehistory. So that you experience that incredible tight cohesion with your platoon. Now, there might be people you have conflicts with. That doesn't mean it's one big love fest, but it is close. And it's close with people that you know your life depends on. And then suddenly you're sprung from that and you're back in modern society.

Starting point is 01:16:10 And I think what's afflicting a lot of these vets isn't a response to trauma. It couldn't be. It's a response to the sudden aloneness and loneliness that modern society is known for, unfortunately. And you also have talked about how, for instance, returning Peace Corps volunteers also suffer from depression, right? I mean, similar, maybe not identical, but related reintegration issues. Yeah, I mean, you can see that, I mean, to the extent that, you know, this is proof or whatever, it's an interesting example. I mean, so you spend two years in, you know, Cameroon, incredibly poor country in Africa, Central Africa, in a really poor village.

Starting point is 01:16:53 I mean, that's a tough way to live for a couple of years for an American who grew up in modern society. And then after two years, you come home, and the depression rate for people coming back from Peace Corps service is astronomical. It's something like 50%. 25%, 50% is enormous. It's akin to soldiers, right? So there you have this common theme. Peace Corps volunteers are not traumatized, but they experience, like soldiers, this radical transition from closeness,

Starting point is 01:17:18 literally village life, back to the American suburb or whatever. I mean, this is the first society, I mean, modern Western society is the first society in human history where people live alone in an apartment, unheard of. Children have their own bedrooms. They're locked in a room by themselves at night. It's terrifying to young children. I mean, we're primates, right? Baby primates, if they're alone in the jungle, are incredibly vulnerable. And human infants know this, of course,

Starting point is 01:17:47 so they don't want to be put in a room by themselves. They know it's, in an evolutionary sense, they know it's dangerous, and they cry and they scream. Was it 90% contact? I might be pulling that out of my ass, but you talked about the sort of contact percentages. Yeah, the skin- skin on skin contact for infants um and young children in tribal societies is as high as 90 of the time skin on skin contact and the study looked at skin on skin contact in american society i think it was in the 70s the study was done, and it was as low as 17%,

Starting point is 01:18:27 something like that. Now, you could say, okay, well, people have to work, they have jobs, you know, I'm all true. But that doesn't mean that that radical shift in child rearing doesn't have consequences. How much of the, so PTSD is very interesting to me for a number of reasons. One is that I have quite a few friends now who are either active military or were active for a period of time. But most of my exposure has been to guys

Starting point is 01:18:59 in, say, the SEALs or Marine Force Recon and so on. I have quite a few questions related to this. But that's part one of the interest. Part two of the interest is that I've been involved with research and funding research related to the use of psychedelics to address untreatable or treatment-resistant depression at places like Johns Hopkins. And when you dig into that scientific community, you find a lot of people using,

Starting point is 01:19:29 for instance, MDMA with vets, uh, to try to address PTSD. So this has been a sort of recurrent topic that has popped up for me. A couple of questions for you. The first is, and the fact of the matter is I don't have perfect transparency into these folks' lives, nor should I, but the guys who I've spent a lot of time with in some of these special operations units do not seem to exhibit any symptoms of PTSD. And I'm sure that's not true across the board, but do you see a lot of differences in terms of those types of units versus uh i don't know the proper terminology here but just like basic infantrymen or yeah or support units yeah i mean what i mean what it seems to be is that unit cohesion is a buffer

Starting point is 01:20:18 for psychological um struggles and including ptsd So the more highly trained the soldier, the more highly trained the unit, the more psychologically resilient they are, even though they might be taking higher casualties. And what's so interesting about trauma is that it's not necessarily related to the level of danger. It's related to the level of control that you feel that you have. So if you're a sort of standard issue support unit, rear base soldier, you know, one of the huge bases that the American military has or the Israeli military has, for example, in previous wars in Israel, maybe the random mortar round comes in, right? And that is, strangely, that causes more, a greater proportion of psychiatric casualties than frontline units doing very intense fighting,

Starting point is 01:21:24 and they're taking higher casualties, but they're incredibly well-trained. So they have a sense of mastery over their environment. Yeah, they also have a very high degree of perceived agency, I would imagine, just because they're on offense, right? If you're in a commando unit, you get dropped behind enemy lines in a black helicopter, and you have the go command.

Starting point is 01:21:44 Absolutely. I mean, it's game on, right? The football game or whatever. enemy lines in a black helicopter and you have well it go command absolutely i mean you know it's game on right the big game and the football game you know football game or whatever i mean we're why you know we're humans are wired for action and war when need be and it you know your your neural circuitry just lights up and there's all kinds of hormonal stuff going on i mean you're you have an enormous agency but it even is true i read read a study, this is in my previous book called War, I saw this study where some army psychiatrists, the two unluckiest army psychiatrists in the whole military probably at that time, were at some remote outpost with special forces soldiers along, I don't know, up near the DMZ. And they were dropped in there. They were just doing some standard study, psychological assessment of these guys, right?

Starting point is 01:22:29 And these guys are real badasses. They were like SF, you know, like the real deal. And so these psychologists, they found out that the base, it was a 20-man position, something like that. The base was about to be attacked by a battalion of NVA, like 500 men, right? And there was 20 guys there, something like that. So the psychologist thought, oh, perfect.

Starting point is 01:22:55 This is a perfect moment to measure stress in soldiers, right? So... Definitely looking at the silver lining. That's right. Yeah, exactly. So they started taking cortisol levels hourly from the soldiers. And the officers, the lieutenant, the poor lieutenant, he's probably 22, right? His cortisol levels, he's young, he's not very well trained, and he has a huge amount of responsibility as the officer, right? He's a commanding officer. His cortisol levels are through the roof, right up until the point where the attack was supposed to begin, because they had intel that these guys were coming, right? And then after that time passed, his cortisol levels steadily declined,

Starting point is 01:23:35 and it turned out there was no attack, right? And then he went and returned to normal. The special forces guys were the opposite. As soon as they heard they were about to experience an overwhelming attack, their cortisol levels dropped. They got super calm. And they started doing, the reason their cortisol levels dropped is because it was stressful for them to wait for the unknown.

Starting point is 01:24:01 But as soon as they knew they were going to be attacked, they had a plan of action. They started filling sandbags. They started cleaning their rifles. They started stockpiling their ammo, getting their plasma bags ready, whatever they do before an attack. All of that busyness gave them a sense of mastery and control that actually made them feel less anxious than them just waiting around on an average day in a dangerous place. So the coming back to, and I really didn't think about this until now, but when we're talking about PTSD and potential causes, right? So you have going from a very unified sort of tribal existence that we've evolved to be part of to this very unusual sort of isolated modern existence

Starting point is 01:24:49 you also have what strikes me at least is we're looking at the agency versus lack of agency the the sense of a clear purpose and a task right it's like if you get if the towers get hit at 9 11 and there's a call for blood drives and everybody's standing online, every different race, color, or creed, it's like you have a very clear concrete purpose in front of you, as opposed to what I think a lot of us experience. And I'm not immune to this. Certainly there are, there are like weeks and months where I'm like, what the fuck am I doing? Like, I really just like, don't know what I should be doing in life. But a crisis or perceived crisis is a forcing function. It's like, you have a very clear directive of some type or another. What do you think are the most, and just to, and then a third,

Starting point is 01:25:37 which could be, is related certainly, but might be independently addressable, is when you come into an isolated existence, you're in an apartment by yourself, which quite frankly, I am a lot of the time, and I don't think it's healthy for me, is a focus on me, like a focus on I is just a breeding ground for neuroses and mental illness, I think. And when you take, for instance, certain types of psychedelics, it disrupts the default mode network, has very particular neurological effects that increase the sense of oneness and unity with others. So it in some ways mitigates that focus on the first person. What can we do to better support troops particularly and this is a question from another friend who's a big fan of your work but you know he views himself quite proudly as sort of

Starting point is 01:26:33 a bleeding heart liberal and he he feels very conflicted because he wants to support troops at the same time he wants to ask well did you find you find the WMDs, right? And so he's conflicted as to how to support the troops without feeling like he's supporting senseless wars. How would you answer that or talk to that? Well, countries go to war through a political process that's run by the government. And the troops have nothing to do with the war in that sense right i mean like guys who are drilling for oil in north dakota really don't have anything to do

Starting point is 01:27:11 with global warming right you know they're providing something that our society has decided at once including a lot of environmentalists frankly are driving around in cars they're running gasoline so with bumper stickers that say no blood for oil yeah no exactly right so there's a massive hypocrisy even though it's well-meaning. So you can't mistake the soldiers for the war. If you're upset about the wars that the U.S. gets into, you have to address that to the government. The soldiers themselves have simply volunteered to do anything. Think about how profound this is.

Starting point is 01:27:43 They have volunteered to do anything that the nation asked them to do anything. Think about how profound this is. They have volunteered to do anything that the nation asked them to do for very, very low amounts of money. Anything, right? And if we told them to plant trees in Canada, they'd go do that. And if we told them to go invade Canada, they'd do that.

Starting point is 01:28:00 They're like, whatever you want, we're going to do. So there's no conflict. There's no conflict between disagreeing with a war and sort of honoring people who have said, for $40,000 a year, I will do whatever you think this nation needs done. That's an incredibly honorable thing. And if you want to create a sense of unity of purpose in this country, which I think would be enormously psychologically beneficial to soldiers. I mean, soldiers experience unity of purpose in their platoon, then they come back to a country, to this country, which is basically a war with itself. I mean, we live in racially divided communities.

Starting point is 01:28:48 The gap between rich and poor is bad and growing worse. The political parties speak with incredible contempt for one another. If you're a soldier and you fought for this country and you come back to this mess, I mean, of course they're messed up, the soldiers. I mean, of course they are. Like, come on, guys, we fought for you and you can't even get along in peacetime i mean you guys are experiencing peace and you know you can't even get along so you want unity of purpose in this country one way to get there is to make as 50 years ago racist speech was acceptable

Starting point is 01:29:21 socially now it's unacceptable it's protected under free. Now it's unacceptable. It's protected under free speech, but it's politically and socially unacceptable. Contemptuous speech for your fellow citizens, for your political adversary. Likewise, it's protected under the first amendment, but it should be considered so damaging to the social fabric and the interest

Starting point is 01:29:47 of this nation that it's effectively banned from society by common consensus that would that would help that would help soldiers it would help all of us national service would be amazing i think it's morally wrong to force people to fight a war they don't want to fight. But national service with a military option where every 18-year-old or every young person had to do a year or two of national service would be – I mean, that would truly create the melting pot that this country is and should be. The classes, the races get mixed in this very egalitarian way. It would create a common, like in Israel, which has a PTSD rate, by the way, of 1%. It would create this sort of common experience and this unity of purpose, which is so profoundly healthful psychologically. What might some of the non-military options look like for that year or two of service

Starting point is 01:30:45 i mean what what's the nation need done you know i mean we need help in the inner cities you know we need infrastructure repair i don't know what i mean so you know it could resemble like a teach for america or a uh peace corps type of capacity yeah anything whatever you i mean i mean for us for us collectively, to use our imagination, and we have two things, right? We have this incredible resource of our young people. And we have a nation

Starting point is 01:31:12 that's deeply, deeply in crisis. And the one thing that unifies us is being attacked, right? We're attacked by terrorists and suddenly we're a unified country. And we don't want to have to wait for tragedy to unify us right we want to beat it to the punch and actually unify our country for positive reasons instead of as a reaction to a a horrible attack so i promised i'd come back to the viking helmet so i want to i want to address the Viking helmet.

Starting point is 01:31:48 So let me try to – this is from memory. Let me try to give a sketch. So you're in Spain, correct? You go out to a bar with some of your buddies. And I'll let you tell it because I think you'll do it more justice. But it underscores a point that I want to ask you about. So could you – Yeah, of course. And they weren't even my buddies.

Starting point is 01:32:06 They became my buddies. So I was 22 years old. My father grew up in Spain and in France. And I grew up going to those countries. And when I was after college, I decided I'd read a lot of Hemingway. This is all pretty predictable, right? I read a lot of Hemingway. I wanted to go to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls,

Starting point is 01:32:28 to see or participate in the running of the bulls, right? So the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona is this big citywide freak show, basically, for a week. And I was sleeping on someone's couch, and one night I slept on a park bench. I mean, it's just a free for all. It's an amazing time, right? And I went out to this bar in preparation for the running of the Bulls the next morning. No one who's within the barricades where they run the Bulls, no one, they fire the cannon off at seven in the morning to start to

Starting point is 01:33:03 release the Bulls from the arena. And they charge through town through these barricades. And no one who's within those barricades at 7 a.m. woke up at 6 a.m. to do it. I mean, everyone's been up all night. Anyone who's in that thing has been up all night. Well, I was going to be one of them. So I go to this some stupid little bar. Saw us on the floor. I spoke pretty good Spanish at the time.

Starting point is 01:33:22 I immediately started talking to these two young Spaniards who were just completely shit-faced, right? And one of them has a leather sort of drinking bag around, I don't know how else to describe it, a leather drinking bag called a bota around his neck, which is filled with red wine. And he keeps trying to get the red wine, squirt the red wine into his mouth, but he keeps missing it.

Starting point is 01:33:44 It's all over his white T-shirt. And these guys are having the best time in the world and we just become friends instantly we're talking and one of them the drunkest of the two has a cheap plastic viking helmet on his head and i didn't really think about it much we're talking and um suddenly these three very tough-looking North African kids walk in. And I had lived in France for a while with my family when I was 12, 13. So I spoke French also. These three really tough-looking Algerian or Moroccan kids walk in. And they're tough-looking guys, right?

Starting point is 01:34:19 And they walk into the bar. And the biggest of them walks right up to my new friend. I've known him for maybe half an hour and grabs the Viking helmet off his hand and says, that's mine. You stole it. So I'm the only one who speaks both languages. So now I'm translating, right? And my friend, my Spanish friend, new Spanish friend says, tries to grab it back and says, no, that's mine. I don't know who you are. And the Moroccan guys and the two spanish guys everyone suddenly has a hand on the viking helmet and they start pulling at it and it's rapidly devolving into a pretty good bar fight right and if the helmet starts to rip it's just cheap plastic right

Starting point is 01:34:58 and one of them shouts it's sort of king king solomon's judgment almost like one of themselves stop stop we're we're ripping it. And they stop. Everyone stops because no one wants to destroy the thing they're all fighting over. And one of the two Spanish guys, I think the less drunk of the two, turns to me and says, I have an idea. Will you take my place at this helmet? And will you defend it? I mean, this wonderful, elegant way that Spaniards have of speaking,

Starting point is 01:35:31 particularly when they're drunk. Will you defend it upon the honor of your ancestors and your good name and blah, blah, blah? And I'm thinking, like, how long do you have to know a guy before you have to back him up in a bar fight? I mean, is it under an hour, really? Is that it? And so I say, yes, I'll defend the helmet, et cetera.

Starting point is 01:35:50 And I take my place at the helmet. And he goes to the bartender. Now, the whole bar is watching this. This is high theater, right, at this point. And so me and the Spanish kid are glaring at the Moroccans, and they're glaring back, and we're faced off around this helmet. I'm really hoping it doesn't go to where it looks like it's headed. So me and the Spanish kid are glaring at the Moroccans and they're glaring back and we're faced off around this helmet. I'm really hoping it doesn't go to where it looks like it's headed.

Starting point is 01:36:20 So the Spanish guy goes to the bar and has a quick conference with the bartender who produces a big jug of cheap Spanish red wine and cracks the top open and hands it to him. And the guy comes back and fills the Viking helmet to the brim with red wine. Now, no one wants to be the asshole who spills the red wine, right? It's the festival of San Fermin. The whole thing's running on red wine. Like, no one wants to spill it, right? It just looks bad. So he fills the helmet to the brim with red wine, and he puts his hand under it,

Starting point is 01:36:45 and he says, okay, now everyone let go, and no one wants to be the idiot who spills the wine, so everyone let's go, and he presents it to the biggest, toughest-looking Moroccan kid, and says, you're a guest in our country, so you drink first, and the guy drank,

Starting point is 01:37:03 and he passed it to his left, and then it went around the circle, and then when it was empty of red wine, it got filled up, and then eventually they just got another jug and started passing the jug around. An hour later, I'm talking to some girl an hour later, like I eventually extricate myself from this, and I look over, and the five of them,

Starting point is 01:37:24 who are ready to tear each other to pieces, right? The five of them are hanging off each other, singing in unison in two different languages. And the Viking helmet has been completely forgotten and is under a table in the corner. So I underlined this and put a bunch of stars next to it. There are a lot of underlines in this book for me. What I liked about the encounter was that it showed how very close the energy of male conflict and male closeness can be. So I want to get your thoughts and advice on this, on something very closely related, which is I've felt for a long time, and this is completely unsubstantiated.

Starting point is 01:37:59 I mean, it's just a pet theory that a lot of the societal issues that we see are a direct result of male misbehavior from those who do not have an outlet for just innate capacity for violence and force. And I think it's such a great story because it shows how that can be in some cases directed, right? So you're like, oh shit, these guys are about to turn into like meatheads pounding each other's brains out. But like with a little finesse and enough red wine, like that's all diffused and now they're best buddies. And you and I, I heard a story very much like this where there's a, I'm not going to name him, but this very kind of cantankerous, outspoken, abrasive billionaire walked up to this huge Argentine guy at a party that I was in a

Starting point is 01:38:54 different room at the time for, and pushed the guy because they were both drunk. And he pushed this huge Argentine guy because he assumed, I'm the billionaire here. I'm the tough guy who's the alpha male what's this guy gonna do and what the guy did was turn around picked him up like a professional wrestler over his head and slammed him on top of a folding table and shattered the table so everyone's assuming holy shit like this guy's gonna get his life destroyed this this guy's gonna sue the shit out of him. But he couldn't because of the sort of reputational stakes. It would be a response that would forever shame him if that was the response because he clearly instigated it. And then a half hour later, they're best of friends

Starting point is 01:39:34 doing shots together. But it doesn't always end that neatly. And do you have any thoughts on how in the society in which we live, let's just say in this case in the U.S., we can end up with more male closeness and less sort of male violence? Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, it's tricky. I mean, how do we have less heart disease in a society where people drive and most people have plenty of food and a lot of fats and sugars? You know, I mean, the very safety of this society, the very thing that makes us lucky, also creates a danger. The diseases of affluence.

Starting point is 01:40:18 That's right. the society is that we don't have to organize groups of young men and put weapons in their hands and send them out to the edge of town to fight off an incursion from the young men of an enemy town, a hostile town. That's not happening anymore, right? I mean, wars are big formal things that for the United States almost always happen elsewhere. But in terms of our communities and our society at home, we no longer have to organize young men and prepare them for group violence so that we can survive. That's been the human norm for two million years, either from predators or from other humans. Men, young men, function in groups and function selflessly in groups

Starting point is 01:41:08 extremely well. You can organize 20, 30, 40, 50 young men and give them a task, a dangerous task, and they perform. Not only do they perform it very, very well, the harder the task is, the closer they get. Women are used for incredibly important, I mean, I'm talking in sort of human evolution and across the span of human history. Women are used for equally important tasks, but usually not group tasks like that. It's really the boys that are told to either hunt or fight in groups. And so they get very, very good at it. And in modern society, what young men want to do is achieve honor by defending the community. I mean, it's just wired into the male brain to do that. If you don't give young men a good and useful group to belong to, they will create a bad group to belong to. But one way or another, they're going

Starting point is 01:42:07 to create a group and they're going to find something, an adversary, where they can demonstrate their prowess and their unity. That thing that they find is often the law. It's the police. It's society itself. In some ways, they turn into skinwalkers. They have no outside enemy. So they create an enemy out of society. They don't want to be doing this. It's one of the risks of wartime leaders being all the time leaders. Yeah, that's right. And young men, like young women, for the most part, are well-intentioned and want to do right by their community and their society. But if you have a society which is so safe and protected and removed from the rest of the world as we are, in some ways, there's sort of nothing useful for the young men to do.

Starting point is 01:42:50 And then in their own ad hoc way, they create their own trials, right? So they take a lot of risks. They do stupid stuff. They jump off of stuff that's too high to jump off of. They drive too fast. They get into fights. I've never done any of that stuff. Young men die at six times the rate of young women from accidents and from violence. And there's a reason for that. They're wired to

Starting point is 01:43:15 demonstrate their prowess, and it often gets them killed. So this is not really something that needs a ton of commentary, because I'm not sure we can resolve millennia and millions of years of evolution. But I highlighted this part, and we talked about it before we started recording, because it was surprising yet completely unsurprising at the same time. And this is, let's read a short section here. I once asked a combat vet if he'd rather have an enemy in his life or another close friend.

Starting point is 01:43:44 He looked at me like I was crazy. Oh, an enemy. A hundred percent, he said. Not even close. I already got a lot of friends. He thought about it a little longer. Anyway, all my best friends I've gotten into fights with knock down, drag out fights. Granted, we were always drunk when it happened, but think about that.

Starting point is 01:43:59 He shook his head as if he couldn't believe it. Strange creatures we are. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I want to segue to a couple of listener questions because there were some good ones. This one is from Kip McInerney. And I'm going to abbreviate it a little bit.

Starting point is 01:44:19 How does he feel about veterans being victims in society after they return home and get out? General James Mattis, who you should definitely interview, this has actually been recommended a few times, gave a speech in 2014 about post-traumatic growth, as he called it, and how those experiences should be considered a precious commodity, one that cannot be simulated or taught in a classroom. How would you comment on that? I mean, victims, the status of victimhood is not a psychologically healthy place to be in.

Starting point is 01:44:53 And I think our society takes people who are unfortunate, who have experienced something difficult, and in a kind of misguided attempt to make the world right again for them, they classify them as victims. Now, they may call them survivors, they may call them whatever they want,

Starting point is 01:45:13 but actually the role that the person is being asked to play is one of a victim. Victims are taken care of, right? So after World War II, which saw casualties that completely eclipsed even these terrible wars of our current day, soldiers came back. They didn't do multiple deployments. They signed up and they were in the army until the war was done. Some of them were in for three, four years straight. Right. And they came home and basically they, society said to these men, and it was almost all men in the, in the, in the, you know, combat units, society said to these men, like, all right,

Starting point is 01:45:57 you're done fighting. Now we need you at home. You know, it's time to get to work. We have a country to rebuild. And they definitely were not thought of as victims of the war or of anything. They were thought of much like, I'm sure, the Cheyenne and the Comanche and the Apache and the Sioux and the Kiowa warriors who came back from the warpath. They were thought of as essential and functioning members of society. Now, maybe they were missing a limb, or maybe they had some trauma to process, but they were needed back home in the towns and cities of this great country

Starting point is 01:46:33 just as badly as they were needed in the Pacific, in the fields of Europe. And the problem with victimhood is that it perpetuates the psychological state of passivity and trauma that you want the person to escape from. Right. I mean, it's the sort of perceived lack of agency that helped produce the PTSD in the first place. Exactly. And you think about what the official London official said about the blitz. Now we have neurotics driving ambulances. And, and also,

Starting point is 01:47:09 I mean, one thing you wrote about, which was the presence of, of fraud, of course, within disability claims and how some vets who really suffer from severe PTSD don't want to go to these meetings because they're afraid they're going to beat the living shit out of some guy who's clearly just doing it to receive a check or some type of

Starting point is 01:47:29 payment. Yeah. And you know, it's a very politically delicate thing to bring up, but, and all I'm doing is repeating the accounts of, uh, of soldiers and veterans. Um, I mean, the best thing a journalist can do is convey information and that's what I'm doing they they um i mean they're veterans i've talked to who said they just they won't they won't go to these group therapy sessions because you know one out of 20 is some guy who really didn't see any combat and is trying to milk the system and pretending to have trauma pretending to have ptsd and he really doesn't you know one the tricky things, the VA, in trying to speed up the massive bureaucracy that they created over the last decades, in trying to speed that up, speed up disability claims, they said to soldiers,

Starting point is 01:48:14 if you self-diagnose, think about this, if you self-diagnose with PTSD, you do not have to give us proof that anything traumatic happened. You do not have to describe the incident that you were traumatized in. You just have to tell us that you believe that you were traumatized and that you have PTSD, and that's enough for a disability check. So humans being what they are, some number of people are going to take advantage of that. And we're a wealthy country. We can easily absorb those costs. So I have zero opinion about whether we should inquire further.

Starting point is 01:48:54 But I should say that the data show that having that kind of dishonesty in a process is actually psychologically detrimental not only to those specific people who are being dishonest, but to everybody. It's actually quite corrosive. How many photographs have you taken on your wartime deployments? Probably not the right word, but assignments. You know, I carry a video camera and I shoot a lot of footage, but I've never taken still photos. Okay. So with the video footage that you've shot, and by the way, I haven't told you this when rastrepo was first shown like very very first shown in

Starting point is 01:49:46 the northern california area i tracked it down and drove out to see one of the very first showings oh really i did thank you and uh i have some questions about that but what footage that you captured if any come to mind this is related to a question from Yasmin Hayat. If you had to choose, I'm going to substitute here because it was one photo, but I'm going to say one clip of footage that impacted him the most, which one is it and why? What did he experience while taking,

Starting point is 01:50:17 in this case, the video? I mean, the things that have impacted me, I didn't necessarily shoot video of. Sometimes it's at night. We can talk about that. I would say feel free to answer that. Yeah. When I was in northern Afghanistan in 2000, there was a big nighttime battle going on,

Starting point is 01:50:47 and there was a massed infantry assault against entrenched Taliban positions through a minefield. The Northern Alliance, sort of World War I style. And it was at night, and we were right behind the front lines, and a wave of soldiers sort of took the wrong route and went through this minefield and a lot of them got messed up and they were pulled out of there. And we saw them immediately afterwards. They'd sort of been piled onto the back of a flatbed pickup truck. They're alive. You know, they had lost legs and traumatic amputations.

Starting point is 01:51:21 I mean, they were extremely messed up. They're alive. Most of them probably survived. They're anti-personnel mines. And so we were there when they were brought into this sort of forward field hospital tent that was lit with kerosene lanterns, right? I mean, this is rough. This is World War I era. Frontier medicine.

Starting point is 01:51:41 Yeah. And in the very bright light of these propane lanterns, kerosene lanterns, they brought these poor guys in. And there was 12 guys where their bodies ended at their knee. Their bodies ended at their hips. I mean, you don't realize. I mean, it's psychologically incredibly deranging to see the human body rearranged. And I've found later in my research that one of the most traumatizing things in terms of PTSD is to see dismemberment, to see the coherence of the human form

Starting point is 01:52:21 rearranged in an odd way that you've never seen before. And it's just, it really tweaks people. And I, I, um, I had a moment of crisis. I mean, I, I went a little crazy. It felt like I went a little crazy. I mean, I just, my brain just sort of stopped functioning and, uh, I, I don't even have very clear memories of it, but I left the tent. I couldn't take it. I could not look, I could not bear to see what I was seeing. And I left the tent and I went outside into the cold Afghan night and lit a cigarette. And I thought, you know, war is exciting and it's dramatic and it's important and it's meaningful and it's all this other stuff. But if you're not also prepared to look unblinkingly, unflinchingly at the worst aspects of war,

Starting point is 01:53:14 dismembered people, you really have no business covering the quote good parts. And by good, I mean the parts that aren't traumatic. If you can't face what's in that tent, you have to get out of the business completely. And you can't be selective about your experience of war. But you have a job to do,

Starting point is 01:53:34 and it's to communicate to your readers back in the United States everything about what war looks like, including that. So grab your damn notebook and grab your pen and walk in there and just write down what it is like to behold such a thing. And as soon as I, this is interesting, right? As soon as I had a purpose, I was okay. My self-given purpose was document this thing that you 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 dealt with it too, as soon as I had a job to do,

Starting point is 01:54:11 I was okay. And I wrote it all down. And it was one of the most powerful parts of this piece that I wrote. And I passed through the gateway, through the threshold, and at that moment, I'd been in plenty of wars until then. But at that moment, I became a war reporter. So you mentioned, not by name, but Tim earlier. Yeah. Can you tell us who he was, what happened, and how it impacted you. Yeah, Tim Hetherington was a wonderful, brilliant English photographer who I was lucky enough to work with on my project in the Korongal Valley. I wanted to document the experience of one platoon, 30, 40, 50 men,

Starting point is 01:54:59 throughout one deployment. And I wound up at a little outpost called Restrepo. And on my second trip in there, that's when I started shooting video and thinking about movies. And on my second trip in there, I started working with Tim. He was assigned to me by Vanity Fair Magazine. And he quickly realized that this film project that I had was a pretty good idea. And we became partners. And we went through a very intense, amazing, difficult year together out there in the Korengal Valley. And we both got hurt. We both

Starting point is 01:55:32 came very close to getting killed out there. It was an extraordinary experience. And we became brothers, really. And we made a film called Restrepo and won a lot of awards. And then it was nominated for an Oscar and we went off to Los Angeles and this amazing world of Los Angeles during the Oscars. And I was, I was married at the time and he had, you know, he had a girlfriend and we were all out there together.

Starting point is 01:55:58 It was incredible experience. We didn't win. It didn't really matter. And we had an assignment to the arab spring was exploding all around us during the oscars right and so we had an assignment to go back overseas and document the civil war in libya from vanity fair at the last moment i could after the oscars we all went home and we were going to head to libya and the last moment i couldn't go for personal reasons and tim went on his own and and he was killed on April 20

Starting point is 01:56:26 in the city of Misrata in Libya by a mortar round, 81-millimeter mortar that was fired by Qaddafi's forces outside Misrata. And he bled out in the back of a rebel pickup truck racing for the Misrata hospital. And I got the awful phone call in, in New York city and, um, very, very quickly, uh, decided I would never cover war again. Um, it wasn't that I was scared of getting killed. That's a fear that you have to confront early on. And I'd sort of resolved my feelings about it. Um, it's that in that in watching the news of his

Starting point is 01:57:07 death, and he was beloved by people, including my wife, Daniela. I just loved him. I mean, everyone loved him. And I watched the news of his death ripple outwards from my apartment, because I got the news first, from my apartment outwards through all the people that he knew, that he loved, on out into people that he didn't even know who loved them, on out through his country and my country. And I just thought, I don't want to risk doing that to the people I love. I mean, I'm dead, right? My problems are over.

Starting point is 01:57:45 But I'm giving them a lifetime of pain and sorrow, and that's not an honorable thing to do. And so I got out of the business. What was the date on that again? April 20. April 20. Yep. Coincidentally, the anniversary of Columbine,

Starting point is 01:58:03 Hitler's birthday. There's all kinds of awful things that happened on April 20 for some reason. Um, coincidentally, the anniversary of Columbine, uh, Hitler's birthday. Oh, there's all kinds of awful things that happened on April 20 for some reason. What do you think your writing future will look like? Uh, tribe is a really different book from my other books. Um, it's an inquiry into something.

Starting point is 01:58:27 It's not a story. It doesn't take place on a fishing boat or in an outpost. It's a meditation and an inquiry about my society, my country, that I love very much. And something feels very, very wrong in our country right now. And I think if you look at the political discourse right now in this country, it is completely toxic and actually more dangerous to our nation than ISIS is. I mean, really, in real terms of how do we keep this country together for the next 250 years, ISIS is not going to be able to prevent us from doing that. I'm sorry. But we ourselves can. And it's happening right now. And my book is partly an attempt to make people think about what it means to belong

Starting point is 01:59:21 to a group. And this country is a group. So viewing ourselves that way, this relates to a question from Bobby Richards. Working so closely with service members and vets, what would be the one thing he would recommend that an American civilian could do for our vets? Not necessarily as a country, but as individuals. The main thing that I can think of is drawn from some of my research into American Indian ceremonies for returning warriors in the 18th century or vets from the current wars, 19th century, or vets from the current wars.

Starting point is 01:59:59 One of the common themes in these ceremonies is that the warrior gets to recount in front of his community what he did for them on the battlefield. And, you know, often it's a heroic sort of boasting of how brave he was and how he killed the enemy and how, you know, whatever. But it's this cathartic description of a warrior discharging his duties for his community. And there's something about doing that for the people you did it for that seems to be very, very psychologically healthy, to put it in modern terms, because it's almost universal in these ceremonies. And so I had the idea, I mean, we're not going to go back to a tribal society. I mean, we can't.

Starting point is 02:00:50 You'd have to get rid of the car, whatever. It's not happening. But we might be able to take certain structures of tribal life and incorporate them into modern society, right? So we get the best of both worlds. And the way to do that in terms of returning veterans is to turn the town hall or the city hall in every community in this country on Veterans Day into an open forum for veterans. So I have this idea of veteran town halls, where on my website, sebastianjunger.com, there's a page devoted to this. You open up the town hall, and veterans from any war have the right to stand up and speak for 10 minutes to their community. And I know veterans, right?

Starting point is 02:01:36 Some of them are going to be incredibly proud of their service, and they're going to say they missed the war. And it's going to make liberals uncomfortable. And some of them are going to... Just to be clear, you would consider yourself a liberal? Oh, I'm totally liberal, yeah. But as a journalist, I'm neutral. I mean, it's really important.

Starting point is 02:01:54 As a private person, I'm liberal. But as a journalist, I really try to be completely neutral in my analysis, in my evaluation of things. Conservatives will be made uncomfortable by veterans standing up and being incredibly angry

Starting point is 02:02:09 about the war that they had to fight. And everyone's going to be uncomfortable when someone stands up and just starts crying and can't even talk because they're crying too hard. But all of that is war, right? We sent these people to do a job for us

Starting point is 02:02:23 that we deem necessary, collectively deem necessary. And the emotional fallout for it is okay as long as we process it all collectively. It's not okay if we just make them deal with it. It's not their war. It's our war. So all of us need to deal with it, much like the American Indian tribes did in these ceremonies. It's an amazing thing. So we did this once in deal with it, much like the American Indian tribes did in these ceremonies. It's an amazing thing. So we did this once in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Starting point is 02:02:49 And Seth Moulton is a Democratic representative from Massachusetts who was a Marine lieutenant in Ramadi, I believe it was. Saw some very, very tough fighting. He helped me organize it. We did it together. And last Veterans Day in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, if you were a civilian and you'd like to say, I support the troops, what that literally meant on that day last year in Marblehead, Massachusetts, was that you really then should go down to the town hall and listen to what the veterans had to say about what was like for them.

Starting point is 02:03:23 There's no Q&A. There's no debate. This is not an evaluation of the war. It's not a patriotic thing. It's not an anti-war thing. It's just this is what the experience was like. And I really, really think that if we could do this in every country, in every town across the country,

Starting point is 02:03:39 that it would be enormously therapeutic for veterans, but even more important in some ways, it would start to bind for veterans, but even more important in some ways, it would start to bind the country together again. I think the veterans are suffering because the country's suffering. And if we can heal ourselves as a nation, the veterans are going to be fine. Could not agree more. Well, let's shift gears just to my perhaps somewhat typical uh series of rapid fire questions and then we'll we'll wrap up and have some more coffee oh and i didn't look at those in advance so now i'm in trouble all right all right i'm ready let me get ready here we go

Starting point is 02:04:19 all right i'll let you let you limber up okay i'm doing a little shadow boxing. So the first is when you hear the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind and why? Martin Luther King. Why? Because he transformed society in an incredibly courageous way. How do you define courage or bravery? Courage is risking or sacrificing your life for others. What is the book or books that you have given to others most often as a gift? At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matheson. I also recently read Sapiens by a guy named Harari, which is just phenomenal. That's a good book.

Starting point is 02:05:00 I'm going to give that thing over and over again to everyone I know. There's a friend of mine who's also been on the podcast named Naval Ravika, who you have to meet at some point. You guys would get along famously. Also one of his favorites of the last couple of years. At Play in the Fields of the Lord. It's a novel by Peter Matheson. It takes place in the jungles of South America.

Starting point is 02:05:19 And it's about a Sioux Indian named Louis Moon, who grew up on a reservation in the 1970s and he goes down to Brazil to meet his, what he considers his forebears. Wow. And it doesn't go very well. That sounds, and now, am I getting this right? Matheson also wrote In Search of the Snow Leopard or am I getting that?

Starting point is 02:05:40 That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic writer. getting that that's right yeah yeah yeah yeah uh fantastic writer uh what are you what would your close friends say you're exceptionally good at if i had two drinks in each of them um i think they would say that i'm really good at not reacting to things and seeming like um i'm unaffected when actually i'm deeply affected but on the surface you're not emotionally reactive that's right sounds like sounds like you're definitely a closet stoic uh this is actually not one of my typical questions when i'm gonna throw this one.

Starting point is 02:06:25 This is from, I think it's Robbie Fry. It looks like a very Dutch name. But if you could combine three different writers into one super scion, that's a Dragon Ball Z reference, don't worry about that. If you could combine three different writers into one writer, right,

Starting point is 02:06:40 to create the ultimate writer for you, who would they be? I think I would have to pick Cormac McCarthy, Peter Matheson, and Joan Didion. Good choices all. Let's see here. Where were you, so your first commercial book success, The Perfect Storm, how old were you when that came out? I was 35 years old. Okay.

Starting point is 02:07:12 So when the book hit, before it was made into a movie, what advice would you give to yourself at that point in time? The movie part of it didn't affect me very much, but the sudden attention, public attention that I got when the book became a bestseller affected me enormously. And I think I would say to my, and I was very anxious about all that, I think I would say to myself, you know, there's nothing, the public is not a threat. Like the public is actually waiting to hear someone, anything, say something that's helpful and makes sense because we're all trying to get through this life together. And everyone, everyone wants some guidance. And if there's anything I can say through my work or just on a stage that gives some comfort or guidance to people, they're enormously receptive. And when you realize

Starting point is 02:08:15 that we all need each other and we can all learn from each other, your stage fright goes away. And I had a horrific case of stage fright when my book came out. How do you feel now when you're getting ready for a talk like your Ted talk? Oh, I don't think twice about it. I mean, I'm just, I mean, it just doesn't affect me at all. I think my heart rate goes up a little bit. What is the most, what purchase of $100 or less? And we don't have to stick to that exactly, but recent purchase that has most positively impacted your life? I think Sapiens.

Starting point is 02:08:48 Sapiens. Yeah. I mean, that book- It's a fun book to read. It's amazing. I mean, I just started looking at everything differently. I mean, I love that book, but books are, I mean, a book is a kind of thing of magic, right? I mean, it contains a universe of information, and it's cheap at the price. So maybe it's unfair to use a book. $100 or less. I mean, I think one of the best values you can get for $100 is an axe,

Starting point is 02:09:22 a good axe. Good axe. You can do almost anything with a good axe. Any type of axe what are the characteristics of a good axe um it's got to be it can't be cheap wood in the half it's got to be good steel i mean i you know i don't even know how to evaluate this basically the more you pay for an axe the better quality it is and the longer the last and the better we'll cut and you keep it really really sharp and you can cut not as fast as a chainsaw i've used chainsaws a lot in my life but you can um you can basically do anything with it given a little bit of time and i've spent a lot of time in the woods and if i had to take

Starting point is 02:10:00 pick one thing to take into the woods with me it it would be an axe. I was just thinking, how would you open a tuna can with an axe? Oh, that's so easy, man. You could definitely open it. Oh, yeah. I remember when I was a young man in my 20s, and I was living just stupidly in some stupid apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. And I had a date with this girl, this beautiful girl, and I invited her over, and I was going to make spaghetti. I mean, I'm like 23, right? I'm going to make spaghetti. I mean, I'm like 23, right? I'm going to make spaghetti.

Starting point is 02:10:26 And I, like an idiot, I, I mean, I got like, and I cans of tomato sauce and pasta, right? And she came over and I realized I didn't have a can opener.

Starting point is 02:10:36 And, um, but I knew the answer. And I went into my room and I got a hatchet that I had and I opened the cans of tomato sauce with a hatchet and I hit it pretty hard and completely splattered her with tomato sauce. And here's the amazing part. She still went out with me. Very memorable at the very least. Yeah. So then he pulled out a hatchet. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Right. She probably still would leave that you weren't a serial killer who was going to take her head off.

Starting point is 02:11:05 That's right. Oh my God. Let's see. What is something you believe even though you can't prove it? Wow, that's a great question. I believe I'm a good person. What are some of the habits or common practices of journalists that you dislike? Oh, God. I really dislike laziness. And if you read a phrase or a sentence that's familiar, I mean, there are these cliches, these sort of linguistic tropes, like the mortars slammed

Starting point is 02:11:45 into the hillside. I just don't want to read that again. You know, like, just say it in an original way or don't say it, but you're wasting everybody's time, including your own, if you write and rely on these sort of linguistic tropes. I really dislike that. And also, the point of journalism is the truth. I was talking about this on the phone earlier, and maybe you overheard me, but the point of journalism is the truth. The point of journalism is not to improve society. And there are things, there are facts, there are truths that actually feel regressive. But it doesn't matter because the point of journalism isn't to make everything better.

Starting point is 02:12:31 It's to give people accurate information about how things are. And I think journalists really confuse those two things. Advocates are what we need for improvement, but not journalists. Journalists provide information like doctors provide information when they look at the x-ray of your lungs after you smoke for 10 years. Yeah, you need accurate forensics. That's right. Yeah, that's right. What do you think your 70-year-old self would give to myself that the world is this continually unfolding set of possibilities and opportunities. On the one hand, having the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but to also have the wisdom to stop exploring when you've found something that's worth sticking around for. And that's true of a place, commitment to staying, it's very, very hard to get the ratio, the balance of those two things right.

Starting point is 02:13:54 And I think my 70-year-old self would say just really be careful that you don't err on one side or the other because you have an ill-conceived idea of who you are. It's this fine line. It's a tough, tough, tough balance. Yeah, it is a tough balance. I find it tough, personally. Yeah, I mean, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of unhappy people because they're struggling to find that balance. How do you, what are the symptoms of knowing that you should pursue a given project? Because you've got Navajo long distance running.

Starting point is 02:14:28 You have the perfect storm. You have quite a bit of terrain that you cover. How do you know? And I'll just throw it out there as an example. For me, I find writing so difficult, personally, and I'm so plotting. And I have to go into isolation, it makes me very mentally unhealthy. I only write a book, certainly, if it's less painful to write it than to not write it. Like it generally manifests itself as a lot of insomnia, in my case. And I'm just like, okay, like this idea that's been

Starting point is 02:15:04 pestering me, like, I just need to get out of my head and onto paper or I won't be able to get to sleep. Um, so that is, or, but the insomnia could also be excitement, right? Like I'm excited about the possibilities of something and I just can't sleep. That's usually, uh, one of the symptoms that I might have. Like I might have a live one, this might be something I can run with. What with what what what is it like for you i you know i think the i've only written five books what was it what was a collection of i'm not sure who you're comparing yourself to oh yeah well the writers are writing 20 whatever like i you can always be insecure right no i've written i've written it to be james patterson i've really written only four books. One's a collection of short-form journalism.

Starting point is 02:15:45 So, you know, they're all books that had I not written them, I would have wished that someone else had so I could read it. One of the things I loved about Harari, Sapiens, is I finished it and I just thought, thank God someone wrote that book. Like the world really needed it. And the books that I write, maybe I'm flattering myself, but it feels to me like the world needs this book. And I know that sounds horribly grandiose, but I have to say it's the feeling I'm looking for when I'm choosing a topic.

Starting point is 02:16:23 I really don't want to write a book that I'm not sure the world needs. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think if you look at, I mean, we're sitting in Silicon Valley. If you look at some of the, not some, probably all of the biggest successes I know personally, they were scratching their own itch. Yeah. It was something they felt needed to exist absolutely

Starting point is 02:16:46 absolutely if you had one billboard anywhere and could put anything you want on it what would you put on it i think i would put the word read read Read. It's the only, I was talking about this recently with some people. We don't live in small groups anymore. When we evolved to live in groups of 30, 40, 50 people, and you could gather 50 people around and have a communal discussion about how to live, what to do, who you are, what you want to be. You could do that, right? We live in a country of 400 million.

Starting point is 02:17:27 There's no more gathering around the campfire to figure out who we are, how we want to live, what are our values. We can't do that anymore, but we still need to. And in some ways, in a country as advanced as ours with nuclear weapons and everything else is even more important than when we lived in groups of 50. I mean, it's vital that we have that conversation. And the only real way, I think, the only real way to collectively have that conversation is through books. It's the only thing that's cheap enough, accessible enough to everybody,

Starting point is 02:17:54 that contains enough information that can be shared and commonly understood. It's the only thing that we can have a group conversation even in a group of 400 million people. But if people don't read, that will never happen. And so I really feel that books, it makes books a kind of sacred object. And sacred in the sense that our society, I don't think, will survive without them. And that to me, as an atheist, one definition of sacredness is something that humanity needs in order to survive. Sebastian, this has been so much fun. I could go on and on. Those of you who don't have a visual,

Starting point is 02:18:36 which is all of you, can't see the many, many, many pages I've printed out and highlighted and sketched out by hand. But I'm going to tell people where they can find you, and I'm also going to put this in the show notes, of course, for everyone. But is there anything that, just as a parting comment, you would like my listeners to meditate on, consider, do? Well, one of the questions I ask in my book is, who would you die for? What ideas would you die for?

Starting point is 02:19:16 The answer to those questions, for most of human history, would have come very readily to any person's mouth. Any Comanche could tell you instantly who they would die for and what they would die for. And in modern society, it gets more and more complicated. And when you lose the ready answer to those ancient human questions, you lose a part of yourself.

Starting point is 02:19:36 You lose a part of your identity. And I think what I would ask people is, you know, who would you die for? What would you die for? And what do you owe your community? And in our case, our community is our country. What do you owe your country would you die for? What would you die for? And what do you, what do you owe your community? And in our case, our communities, our country,

Starting point is 02:19:46 what do you owe your country other than your taxes? What is there anything else you owe all of us? Um, I don't, there's no right answer or wrong answer, but it's something that I think everyone should try to ask themselves. This is a great book folks. I,

Starting point is 02:20:04 uh, I read a lot, so I have a high bar i really enjoyed this book it has a ton of notes and next time that we hang out probably in new york city and have some wine i will bring this with me because i have 20 30 other questions i'd like to ask you but for those people who might reflect back on some of your recent writing and wonder if this is a book about war, it doesn't strike me that it is a book about war. It's a book about human nature and what we've evolved to be and what we are and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And war just happens to be a very helpful circumstance in which we can find some illumination into those subjects. But I really enjoyed this book, so I encourage everybody to check it out. And Sebastian, thanks so much for

Starting point is 02:20:51 taking the time. I really appreciate it. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Thank you. And everybody listening, as always, you can find links to everything that we discussed in the show notes. And that includes Sebastian's website, all the social and whatnot and all the various resources that came up. And you can find that at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out. And as always, and until next time, thank you for listening.

Starting point is 02:21:23 Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive

Starting point is 02:22:12 that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #161: Lessons from War, Tribal Societies, and a Non-Fiction Life (Sebastian Junger)

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #161: Lessons from War, Tribal Societies, and a Non-Fiction Life (Sebastian Junger)

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