The Tim Ferriss Show - #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger

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Starting point is 00:05:52 Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers

Starting point is 00:06:18 from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider

Starting point is 00:07:01 stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim.blog slash combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening. York Times bestselling co-author of Extreme Ownership, host of the top-rated Jocko podcast, and co-founder and CEO of premier leadership consulting company Echelon Front. You can find Jocko on Twitter and Instagram at Jocko Willink. What have you observed and learned about what makes a good leader versus a good or mediocre or a bad leader?

Starting point is 00:08:07 The immediate answer that comes to mind is humility because you've got to be humble and you've got to be coachable. We would fire guys. Later when I was running training, we would fire a couple leaders from every SEAL team because they couldn't lead. And 99.9% of the time, it wasn't a question of their ability. It was a question of their ability to listen and their ability to step outside and see that maybe there's a better way to do things. That's number one. And number two, I would say

Starting point is 00:08:35 is an individual who is balanced. And I talk about, there's a phrase that I use, it's the dichotomy of leadership. So in a leadership situation, you're constantly balancing these opposing forces. So do you have to be aggressive? Absolutely. Can you be too aggressive? Yes, you can. Do you need to be courageous? Yes, you do. Can you be foolhardy and get people killed? Absolutely. So there's all these balances. Can you be too close to your men? Yes, you can. Can you be not close enough? Yes, you can. Can you be too robotic? Yes, you can. Can you be too emotional? Absolutely. So what I find the best leaders, they have this ability to balance all those opposing forces. And usually when you do find a problem, if you realize that your leadership isn't working, generally you can look and say, oh, I'm going too far in one direction on this particular force, this dichotomy of leadership. I'm going too far. I'm being overbearing. I'm micromanaging.

Starting point is 00:09:39 Micromanaging is a great one, right? You can obviously micromanage your people. They won't do anything on their own. They won't take any initiative. And that's horrible. The other end is you can not give them the guidance that they need and not pay close enough attention to them. And now they don't know what the mission is or what they're doing. So there's all these dichotomies that you have to balance as a leader. And, you know, I think that between being humble and balancing all those dichotomies of leadership is what makes a good leader. And how would say the ability to listen and be coachable,

Starting point is 00:10:06 what would be an example of how that manifests itself? Just how you would observe that and say, that's a guy who's good at being humble and coachable or the opposite. So I'm looking for the things that you would observe or hear where you'd be like, you know what? I think we might have to let that guy go. Again, now we're going back to training. We put these guys through very realistic and challenging training to say the least. And I know if there's any guys that went through training when I was running it right now, they're chuckling because it was very realistic, psychotic. And we put so much pressure on these guys and overwhelm them. And a good leader would come back and say, I lost it. I didn't control it. I didn't do a good job. I didn't see what was happening.

Starting point is 00:10:47 I got too absorbed in this little tiny tactical situation that was right in front of me. Either they'd make those criticisms themselves about themselves, or they'd say, what did I do wrong? And when you told them, they'd nod their head, they'd pull out their notebook, they'd take notes. And that right there, that's a guy that's going to make it, that's going to do it right. And then you get the guy that comes in and he's immediately saying, you know, you say, well, what'd you think of the operation? And if it was a disaster, he'd say it was a disaster. And you go, well, what went wrong? And immediately it's, well, my assault team leader didn't do X and my mobility commander didn't do Y. And I told those guys I wanted them to go over there, and they didn't go there.

Starting point is 00:11:25 Finger pointing. Immediately finger pointing. And that's just a telltale sign you've got a guy that's not humble enough and coachable. It's an awful thing. You can try and change people, and sometimes they would change, but it's difficult to get them to change. Some people are born with that characteristic, and it's a bummer to see. If you can't fix them, you can't fix them.

Starting point is 00:11:44 Right. And they're not going to listen to anybody. Well, it sounds like self-awareness is also a big component of that to have the awareness to kind of step outside and objectively evaluate yourself. I call it detachment. And you know, that's one of the things that early on in my leadership career, I actually remember when it happened. I was probably 20 something years, 22 or 23 years old. I was in my first SEAL platoon and we come up, we're on an oil rig in California doing some training. And we come up on this level of this oil rig and it's never been on an oil rig before. They're very complex. There's gear and boxes and just stuff everywhere on these levels. And they're see-through. You can and their see-through you can see through

Starting point is 00:12:25 the floors and you can so it's a complex environment we come up and we all get on this platform on this level and everybody freezes and i'm kind of waiting and i'm a new guy so you know i don't feel like i should be doing anything but then i said to myself you know somebody's got to do something so i just what's called high ported my gun. So I just lifted my gun up towards the air. Like I'm not, I'm not a shooter right now. And I took one step back off the line and I looked around and I saw what the picture was.

Starting point is 00:12:54 And I just said, you know, hold left, move right. And everybody heard it and they did it. And I said to myself, Hmm, that's what you need to do. And so I realized that detaching yourself from the situation so you could observe it, so that you can see what's happening is absolutely critical. And now, you know, when I talk to executives or mid-level managers, I explain to them that I'm doing that all the time. It sounds horrible, but it's almost like sometimes I'm not a participant in my own life.

Starting point is 00:13:23 I'm an observer of that guy that's doing it. So if I'm having a conversation with you and, you know, we're trying to discuss a point and I'm watching and saying, wait, are you being too emotional right now? Or, you know, wait a second, look at him. I'm not reading you correctly. If I'm seeing you through my own emotion or ego, I can't really see what you're thinking. But if I step out of that, I can see the real you. And if you are getting angry, if your ego is getting hurt, if you're about to cave because you're just fed up with me, whereas if I'm raging in my own head, I might miss all of that. And so that detachment that takes place as a leader is critical. And you're 100% right on that. How do you instill that or try to teach that? Is that something people... I feel like that maybe more than the humility seems to be a coachable skill. Part of the reason I say that is because I've found that whether it's a cognitive behavioral therapy or stoic philosophy for that matter,

Starting point is 00:14:21 you can, in small increments, condition people to have less of an extreme emotional response and to try to observe themselves. And I suppose that there's some Buddhist thought that would translate to that as well. But how do you help teach someone that ability to detach? So what we did to teach them was put them under extraordinary pressure where to fail to detach from the situation and step up and away from the problem would result in failure. I had a great experience where a guy that actually took my job over as the troop commander and a very close friend of mine, he was going through the training now and I was running the training. And we were going out to a place called Nyland, California to do land warfare. And again, this is desert operations. You're patrolling in long distances,

Starting point is 00:15:11 you're hitting targets and we have high level laser tag guns that we use to shoot. And it's very, we put a lot of pressure on people. There's helicopters, there's smoke, there's bombs, there's all kinds of stuff happening. And this guy, this buddy of mine, he was supposed to be commanding and all, but he had broken his neck about, I don't know, six weeks prior to this. Was it on like a ropes course or command of a helicopter? It was climbing a ship. And the guy above him fell and broke his neck. is not hot. And so this guy who had been in Ramadi with me and, you know, did an outstanding job and amazing effort and was brave to a fault, you know, we're lucky he's here. So the land warfare training takes place and he comes out and I said, Hey, just come out and watch with me.

Starting point is 00:15:59 And so he comes out and, you know, we're, we're watching and we're out on one of these field training exercises. So all this mayhem starts and there's bad guys up in the hills and there's bombs going off and there's smoke everywhere. But from our position, which we were standing next to the guys that were in it, and he looks at me and he says, you know, it's so easy when you're not in it. And I said, this is how it was for me when we went through. I was up here and he was like a light bulb went off. He said, I saw you. He kind of saw me like that and said, how does he know what's happening right now? So the ability, easy in so much as when you're the outsider looking in, you can see what to do, what's going on. Exactly. And when you did it, you were not necessarily physically removing yourself, but sort of mentally pulling the perspective back

Starting point is 00:16:46 so you could observe it. So if you take someone like your friend who has this realization like, oh, holy shit, okay, that explains a lot. Because if you could create this perspective, you would have a huge tactical advantage. What type of exercise would you put someone through where the consequences were so significant that they would

Starting point is 00:17:05 be forced to detach in that way? I mean, these are just exercises that we do. So we would use lasers. We have this advanced laser tag system where you can get shot at 300 meters. If you get shot at an island and your beeper goes off and says you're dead, then you're dead. And you're going to have to get carried out by your buddies, which is awful. They're going to get hurt, sprained ankles, everything else. It's a nightmare. And they're also now they can't maneuver as well. So now what happens when they get attacked again, which they're going to, because it's going to be Murphy's law out there and the problems compound. And if the leaders get bogged down in those problems and don't step back, we would kill all of them. And they'd come back with their heads down and say, you know, what the hell just happened and what can we do better?

Starting point is 00:17:49 And then, you know, we'd, we'd have this talk with them. And, you know, it's one of those things. It's like when you're growing up and you don't listen to anybody, not that you don't listen to people, but some lessons you have to learn through life and through experience. And so that happened and the guys would, you know, guys at varying levels, some of them would, would be able to go, Oh, I just saw it. Okay. Now I can make this happen. And that would happen as well, where I would see there, you know, when in like in Terminator, when the beginning of the Terminator said on August 27th, 2016, the machines became aware, you could see their leadership switch happen. And all of a sudden they'd go, boom. And then I'd know my job was done. And they'd step up, they'd take a step back from the situation, they would look around, they'd observe, they'd make good decisions and good calls, and then watch them progress out of it and finish the problem and do well. And then I knew that I had done my job. They'd become aware.

Starting point is 00:18:44 They became aware as leaders. Yeah. What do your morning routines look like on an ideal day? What is the first 90 minutes of your day look like? When do you wake up? What does that look like? So I wake up early. I wake up at 445. I like to have that psychological win over the enemy. And, you know, for me, when I wake up in the morning and I don't know why I'm thinking about the enemy and what they're doing, and I know I'm not active duty anymore, but it's still in there, that there's a guy that's in a cave somewhere and he's rocking back and forth and he's got a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the

Starting point is 00:19:26 other hand and he's waiting for me and we're gonna meet and when I wake up in the morning I'm thinking to myself what can I do to be ready for that moment which is coming which is coming so that propels me out of bed. And I work out early in the morning. So you wake up at 445. What's the next thing? Aside from like brushing your teeth and doing the usual. Do the usual, start working out. Ideally, I like to get done with my workout by the time the sun comes up. And so now if there's waves, you know, I live by the ocean, so I'll go surfing and get done with that. What does a typical morning workout look like?

Starting point is 00:20:09 I do a lot of pushups and dips. I deadlift and do squats. I do sprints. It's everything that everybody does. I swing kettlebells. I do burpees. It's all that. And it's like a 60-minute workout?

Starting point is 00:20:20 How long is the workout? It depends. It depends on what's going on. I'll try and do some strength movements to be strong. You know, deadlifts, cleans, clean and jerk, something like that to make myself stronger. Or even if it's something like just dead hang pull-ups and I'm just maxing out, but I'll do something like that to make myself stronger. And sometimes that can take a while, you know, cause I'll just want to relax and hit singles or doubles on deadlifts or cleans or whatever. And then when I get done with that, I'll do some kind of metabolic conditioning of some kind. I'll be sprinting or rowing or swinging a kettlebell

Starting point is 00:20:51 or lighter weight, cleaning jerks for reps or something like that. So that's what it looks like for me. When you think of the word successful, who are the first people or the first person that comes to mind? The part of the world that I've seen is a very dark place. It's a dark place. That's what war is. And when your job, which my job was, was to expand that darkness in many ways. I mean, war is about killing people. And so for me, when I look to someone that's successful, it's someone that brings some light into that darkness. So for me, the first people that come to my head are Mark Lee, who is one of my

Starting point is 00:21:50 guys, first SEAL killed in Iraq. Mike Monsoor, one of my guys, second SEAL killed in Iraq, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. And Ryan Jobe, one of my guys, wounded in Iraq, blinded in both eyes, made it home, medically retired from the Navy, married his high school sweetheart, got her pregnant, and finished his college degree. And after his 20-second surgery to repair the damage that was done to his head and face, there were complications, and he died as well. But all of those guys, in all that darkness, they did things. They made a sacrifice that was completely selfless. And to do that and to live and fight and die like a warrior, that to me is success success and those guys are my heroes are there any books that you've gifted to other people i think there's only one book

Starting point is 00:23:18 that i've ever given and i've only given it to a couple people. And that's a book called About Face by Colonel David Hackworth. And it is huge. So Colonel David Hackworth was the tail end of World War II. He was in Korea. He was highly decorated in Korea. He joined the merchant Marines or something when he was 15, got into the army again right after World War II. So he kind of got raised by those World War II veterans. And then he was in Korea and he was in Vietnam and he was just absolutely borderline worshiped by the men that he led and by some of the senior leadership. And just a great book. And he was a rebel and he did question the way we were doing things. And what's controversial about him is that he's the guy that said to Walter Cronkite, or he said, he's the first guy in Vietnam that said, we're not going to win this thing.

Starting point is 00:24:19 And so he's kind of blacklisted by much of the army. But, you know, as you dig into that, what he was really saying was, we're not going to win this thing if we keep fighting how we're fighting. He recognized that we needed to do a significant paradigm shift in the strategy that we were executing over there. And it's like you've heard, we never lost a tactical battle in Vietnam. You've heard that, right? Yeah. And there's plenty of people that will say that all day long. But if you and I are leading a platoon and we take our platoon out and we hit a booby trap and it kills three of our guys or two of our guys and wounds another three, and there's no one to shoot at, and we medevac those guys and we come back to base, who won that?

Starting point is 00:24:59 Right. And he recognized that. So the metrics that were being used were sort of not a smoke screen, but they were at best the wrong metrics. I had that book next to my bed in Ramadi and I literally read it every night. That's how I'd fall asleep. I'd go up, read a couple pages, just open it and you'd find something in every, it was very comparable. They were working with the South Vietnamese army and guess what? They were corrupt and they were scared and they weren't the best soldiers. And we were working with Iraqis and guess what? They were corrupt and they were scared and they weren't the best. There were so many parallels between the two. So that's the book that I've given to a couple of close friends of mine that I wanted them to have. The other book that I've read multiple times is Blood Meridian.

Starting point is 00:25:44 Blood Meridian. Blood Meridian. Yeah. I don't know that. You don't know? Oh, okay. So it's written by Cormac McCarthy. Oh, fantastic writer. So this is his best book.

Starting point is 00:25:54 And, you know, I was an English major in college. And so, you know, I was forced to read all kinds of books. And, you know, obviously Shakespeare is kind of the pinnacle in my mind. And Cormacarthy is the guy that i think actually has that and if you read blood meridian then there it is right and i think what what i find so gripping about it is you know i talked earlier about the darkness of the world and this is a historical novel based on a group called the Glanton gang that were killing Indians. And they ended up killing everybody. If you had black hair,

Starting point is 00:26:35 your scalp was going to be taken. And that's what it's about. And it's completely epic. But for me, it communicated to me, a guy Cormac McCarthy, was able to show the darkness in humanity. And there's nothing pleasant in any way, shape, or form in that book. But that's in many ways the world that I lived in. What would you put on a billboard? If you could have one billboard anywhere, what would you put on it? One of my kind of, I guess my mantra is a very simple one and that's discipline equals freedom. I've found that as an individual, the more disciplined you are and it's counterintuitive, right? The more disciplined

Starting point is 00:27:18 you are, the more freedom you actually have. And you and I both know if you wake up early, you get more done and you end up with more free time. So the more you manage your time, the more disciplined you are with your time management, the more free time you end up having. The more disciplined you are physically with your diet, the more freedom you have because you can do more stuff. You have more freedom. So the more disciplined you are, the more freedom you have. And what's interesting is how that transfers over to both military units and the civilian sector, that when an element or in a unit or when a company is a disciplined group, they actually end up with more freedom.

Starting point is 00:27:55 So I had a SEAL troop. We were highly disciplined. We had standard operating procedures for just about everything that we did. And you'd think that that would restrain your creativity, but it actually doesn't. The more disciplined you are, the easier I could say, hey, you four, go take down that building. And they knew what to do because they were highly disciplined. I knew what they were going to do because they were highly disciplined. We understood what parameters they were going to stay within because we had standard operating procedures to follow. So that discipline, both on an individual level and as a group,

Starting point is 00:28:30 equals freedom. And just like anything else with leadership, you can take that too far. You can discipline an element or a person so much that they break down and they no longer have creativity. So just like the dichotomy of leadership, you can go too strong with discipline and they end up breaking down or you can give them too much freedom and they break down in the other direction. I'm really glad that you mentioned that because I've realized in a way that my,

Starting point is 00:28:56 when I struggle the most kind of existentially or really just creatively, it's when I have the fewest constraints. I want positive constraints. I need boxes, not so that I have to stay within the box, but that I can start at least coloring inside the box. And that's part of the reason I've been so excited to adopt this rescue puppy, Molly, because it forces me to regiment and structure my day in such a way that I can then plan around fixed objects.

Starting point is 00:29:27 And I think that whether it's in the military, at least in my experience in business, you want to reserve your creativity for the things that require creativity, not for what should the steps be when I'm doing a room clearance. It's like, no, no, no. You want a standard operating procedure so that your brain cycles are allocated

Starting point is 00:29:43 to the places where you need those brain cycles. That's 100% right. So I've realized in the last few months for myself that what I thought I wanted, which is freedom in the form of infinite options, is not actually what I want at all. It's very stressful. And you end up, you know, you burn 10 calories in a million directions, you're fatigued and you didn't get shit done. So I'm actually in a way trying to figure out how I can say no to a thousand things so that I can be fully

Starting point is 00:30:10 creative on one or two things. It's one of the reasons I enjoy doing this podcast so much is that when you talk to people who've operated at the highest levels in any field, this kind of stuff comes up. And after a while, it's like, Ferris, idiot, do you get the message yet? You've heard meditation from 80% of the people who've been on your podcast. Maybe you should chill the fuck out and like sit down for 20 minutes every morning. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Momentous. Momentous offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories,

Starting point is 00:30:43 including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. Personally, I've been using Momentous Mag 3-in-8, L-theanine, and apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentus Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett. Their products contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party tested,

Starting point is 00:31:24 which in this case means informed sport and or NSF certified. So you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. So check it out. Visit livemomentous.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout for 20% off. That's livemomentous, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash Tim and code Tim for 20% off. And now, Sebastian Younger, Peabody Award-winning journalist, author of five New York Times bestsellers including The Perfect Storm and War, and documentarian whose films include Restrepo, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Sebastian's new book is In My Time of Dying. You can find him on Twitter at Sebastian Younger. Sebastian, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It's nice to be here.

Starting point is 00:32:21 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 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 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? 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. 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?

Starting point is 00:33:27 Yeah, the Greek Stoics were greatly abired by pain. I didn't know much about them. I knew the word and I'd heard of Seneca, but I'm incredibly, I'm sort of half illiterate 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 make sense of things. And so what they said about the Stoics, I really identified with. I'm like, oh, I got to learn more about the Stoics.

Starting point is 00:34:01 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 with pleasure. I mean, the things that he was writing 2,000 years ago were so modern, so amazing, so essential. I just thought I'd have to get this book immediately. 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 00:34:39 Ask him about the chainsaw. 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 was on the East Coast? Yeah, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. 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, 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.

Starting point is 00:35:14 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 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 one point, if I get killed doing this, and plenty of people do,

Starting point is 00:35:38 if I get killed doing this, it will be because I killed myself by accident. 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, you know, I'd been a marathon runner and stuff, but I was super worried about my

Starting point is 00:36:01 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. I turned the chainsaw, I was way up in a tree, you know, on a rope and I turned the chainsaw off and I clipped it to my belt and looked down and I pulled the wound open because I wanted to, you know, you go into shock and you get very clinical immediately, right? 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.

Starting point is 00:36:34 Just in case you ever wanted to know what your Achilles looks like. And I was so relieved to see it intact, but I was still pretty messed, 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 workless men. 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

Starting point is 00:37:10 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 you know we i was lamenting the fact it's not really the right way to put it 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 repelling down trees for a second. How did you get that job? I mean, what qualified you or did not qualify you?

Starting point is 00:37:37 How did that come to pass? Like many good stories, it started in a bar. 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 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 I was like, yeah, 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

Starting point is 00:38:09 unemployed freelance writer in the late 80s i could make a couple hundred dollars a day cash i could make 500 bucks a day even a thousand dollars a day depending on the job 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

Starting point is 00:38:33 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? I ran 412 for the mile. That's a fucking fast mile. Yeah. I mean, from my perspective, that seems extremely fast.

Starting point is 00:38:48 And then you got into marathons after that. Yeah. I ran 904 for the two mile, 2405 for five miles, and a 221 marathon. Those are my sort of set of distance records that I had. So the perfect storm. I heard you described, or I read you being described as based on that work, I'm 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

Starting point is 00:39:18 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? 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, Ernest Hemingway, of course, a little bit of Faulkner. I mean, I could go on, but I gravitated towards language that was efficient and lean and innovative. And

Starting point is 00:40:09 when I would read a book that I liked, I would think about, like John McPhee, I would think about why is it I like it? What is it about the writing that appeals to me? 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. 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 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, or a writer.

Starting point is 00:40:55 So what drew you to writing? 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 to track and cross country athletes. And they had blended the two disciplines. And so I did my field work on the Navajo reservation. I spent a summer there. I trained with their best runners you know it's up at six seven thousand feet I live in Fort Defiance Arizona and I wrote a thesis about Navajo long distance running that was the name of the thesis apparently thesis titles are supposed to have a colon in them and

Starting point is 00:41:36 I didn't know that I just called it Navajo long distance running and I just came alive academically doing that I mean I was a pretty indifferent. I was much more of an athlete than a student. 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, maybe I'll be a journalist. This sounds like journalism. Maybe I'll try to be a journalist. And I literally graduated with, you know, my graduation plan, post-graduation plan was maybe I'll try to be a journalist. Like that was literally the plan I had in my head.

Starting point is 00:42:20 Seems to have worked out. Eventually, in between, I was a pretty bad waiter in Washington, D.C. and in Cambridge. It took a while. My first book came out when I was 35, and I had virtually no income from writing before that. 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?

Starting point is 00:42:46 I mean, it's just, that's incredible.'m in it really that i wrote yeah you know i wrote some articles for the boston phoenix and then i got into a couple magazines but it was not 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 i wrote a magazine piece that outside magazine took and then i got a book contract from ww norton a very very modest book contract but you know it got me based on the magazine piece yeah and then i you know i ginned up some outline that you know 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.

Starting point is 00:43:28 Yeah, I already had a Bill Craig full of notes and whatever. I mean, I already done years worth of work on this. 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 got an assignment. The first assignment I did, I mean, 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. So I just started hanging out on tugboats and I sent them a pretty nice piece of writing.

Starting point is 00:44:09 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 as was appropriate. I mean, I was totally unknown writer and it was a totally bizarre topic at the time. Right. So I am not complaining, but the advance was quite small. So I did tree work a couple of days a week. I'd be

Starting point is 00:44:42 up in the trees, but I also, after I finished 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.

Starting point is 00:44:57 His name's Stuart Krzyzewski. And he's still my agent. 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. A client of his who wrote academic papers, in other words, not a big paying gig, but he sort of handled the academic career of this guy who was a Shakespeare scholar. It took him three hours a year, you know, whatever.

Starting point is 00:45:18 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 stewart was like that's about as bad as it gets like that is about as unpromising as it gets in the agent world but he's a great you know stewart's a great guy and he has an open mind and he read some stuff that I'd written and really liked it. And he took another 10 years for him to make any money off me, but he saw something. Long-term investment. It was, he saw something there and, 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 in case the author thing

Starting point is 00:46:03 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. So I went off, it was a civil war in Bosnia and I went off to learn how to be a war reporter. And I was there, I, you know, I finally came home in 94 because Stuart sent me a fax saying, I managed to sell your book. You got to come home. And I came home. During the period that you were up in the trees a few days a week once you'd sold the book i'm not sure i'm mixing up my chronology just 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

Starting point is 00:46:41 and josh wanted me to dig into it yeah so. 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. 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

Starting point is 00:47:04 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. 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

Starting point is 00:47:48 more like carpentry. You get the lumber, you get the bricks, you build the basement, you start putting it together. I mean, there's 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. You mentioned McPhee. So the only or the most impactful writing class I ever took was with McPhee. It was a small seminar, about 12 to 15 students at Princeton. And so you'll appreciate this just as a side note. So 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,

Starting point is 00:48:29 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 and 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 the story in its visual structure or visual representation. 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 a particularly good writer. There are much better writers there, but we had to do short assignments every week and they would be on the most boring topics possible deliberately to try to make us, force us to make them interesting.

Starting point is 00:49:16 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 assignments throughout the week. And he handed our assignments back, and he goes, now, 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 for those people interested he there are a number of interviews he did for i think the paris review on the art of non-fiction which are just fantastic but what i wanted to ask you was and then we're going to we're certainly going to spend a lot of time talking

Starting point is 00:50:01 about your experiences in warren with warriors and veterans of different types. Who were some of the most influential mentors or influences you had say before the age of 30? Well, let me just say McPhee, I mean, you were very lucky to have taken the class with him. He was a mentor that I didn't personally know for me through his works. He was, and it's very interesting to 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.

Starting point is 00:50:39 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:51:03 Like when I get at 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 storm for this example because perhaps it's evolved or changed over time. What then? Like you sit down and go through and highlight certain pieces and then number them and order them in some fashion.

Starting point is 00:51:40 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. 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, whatever. And then once I have those big chunks, I start to, and this is where the 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 achieves some sort of catharsis towards the end. And it's a very intuitive process, but I got to say,

Starting point is 00:52:51 I could never do it without writing it down. 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. So 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. 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

Starting point is 00:53:42 and once he has his information, 8am to 6pm, come hell or high water, he's like 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 PM to like 5 AM. That's just my window 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.

Starting point is 00:54:23 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's like athletes, athletes in the big game or the big race or whatever. I mean, that intensity can bring out something that you didn't even know you had access to, much less embodied. So the time of day, you know, 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 block meaning I can't write the next section, I keep rewriting 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

Starting point is 00:55:07 about that topic. It's not that I can't find the right words. 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

Starting point is 00:55:18 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

Starting point is 00:55:33 to gloss over the fact that you don't have the research. Yeah, it's just bullshit. And you know, 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 able to sort of do almost anything with it. And it's not true and it shouldn't be true.

Starting point is 00:55:51 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? Great, perfect. Well, then let me not ask the question I was going to ask. What did you talk about? commencement speech to graduating seniors in high school. I've done that. You have? Great.

Starting point is 00:56:05 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. These kids were going off either to college or to high school. I can't remember. At any rate, these are very, very privileged,

Starting point is 00:56:21 very smart, very educated children and exceedingly accomplished parents. And I said to them something like, your 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.

Starting point is 00:56:55 You have to do the hardest thing that you have not been prepared for in this school or any school. 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. Matt, 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 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 to a similar effect. And on the failure point, I mean, we were

Starting point is 00:57:36 talking since you're now training in boxing, made me think of, I think it's Customato, who is the most formative trainer of Mike Tyson, who said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. So along those lines, the question I was going to ask 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. And I would say what worked for me.

Starting point is 00:58:10 I mean, as a journalist, I'm very hesitant to actually give advice to people. 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 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 mostly you must have an enormous appetite for humanity and for

Starting point is 00:58:54 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 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? Or was it something else? Why did that

Starting point is 00:59:25 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 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 and into manhood by facing something that could destroy you. And initiation rites around in tribal societies around the world, their main purpose is to confront young men and women

Starting point is 01:00:05 young women have a different challenge that they have to face is equally daunting but young men face this challenge of in these initiation rites of sort of demonstrating that they will face the most painful scariest things possible for their community for their 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, 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 that we can have, but for better or worse, it's many societies sort of

Starting point is 01:00:54 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. 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, 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 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

Starting point is 01:01:41 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. 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 were this thing that I'd never heard of

Starting point is 01:02:13 that I first encountered when I was on the Navajo reservation in 1983 as a 19-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. 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.

Starting point is 01:02:49 And that gave them the powers of a wolf, 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. They were called skinwalkers and that these skinwalkers 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 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. You know, I didn't literally

Starting point is 01:03:38 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 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 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, but you're completely vulnerable to one madman in your midst. One psychopath, one sociopath, basically, that has no feeling of protectiveness, of humanity towards his neighbors can kill more

Starting point is 01:04:34 people than the enemy can. And that made me think 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. Part of what I enjoy about your writing 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 i'm struggling for language here because it's it's a feeling that i get very

Starting point is 01:05:27 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, 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. I think it illustrates a very important point. If you remember the story, I'd love for you to

Starting point is 01:06:12 describe what happened exactly with this Viking helmet. Yeah. 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 righteous way striving for fairness and equality throughout our society. I think we really are. But we're also the product of our biology and our evolution. And the two are not easy partners. I mean, throughout the mammalian world, males and females are built differently and do different things and are good at different things. That's just a fact of nature. If we want the sexes to be equal in our society, those inherent differences become potentially problematic.

Starting point is 01:06:55 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. There's a short-term logic to that, 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. At any rate, that's 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. I'm going to hit pause on the Viking helmet, which we're going to get to.

Starting point is 01:07:37 But there's another, I have so many notes in this book. It's just unbelievable. Because you brought up these, what most people would consider gender-based differences, could you talk for a second, and this is something I'd never really considered, but gender role switching, if this makes any sense. And this was even in same-sex groups. I found this very thought-provoking, but if you could perhaps describe what I'm very clumsily trying to allude to. Well, one of the things that's interesting is that if you take passersby 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, but whatever, you have familiar

Starting point is 01:08:20 relations and people will risk their lives to help the people that they love. 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? It happens all the time in New York. Someone falls onto the subway tracks and the train is coming. Who jumps down onto the 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 they've done studies of this. And men are, for a number of physical and psychological reasons, very,

Starting point is 01:08:59 very prone towards that kind of impulsive risk-taking. It's sort of on the spot, in the moment decision to jump onto some railroad tracks while a train's coming. towards that kind of impulsive risk-taking, that 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, it's something like 95% of bystander rescues are performed by men.

Starting point is 01:09:25 So when you have a society that's encountering a 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 but then this other thing is important and it's a kind of moral courage and it does not require spontaneous muscular action with this complete disregard for your own life right that's not what's required as important as that is there's's something else, moral courage. You basically are like providing some moral fiber for the group, and you act as a kind of conscience for the group.

Starting point is 01:10:13 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:11:03 They reach negotiated solutions. They try to make people feel good. 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, will jump onto the railroad tracks and to save the kid 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.

Starting point is 01:11:43 We don't have to cover this one at length, but I also found it fascinating to read about the Iroquois peacetime leaders versus wartime leaders and how they switched between the two and how they were so clearly delineated, right? I mean, when circumstances changed, it's like, okay, 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, presidential or otherwise, when you have to vote for one person? It's a very interesting question. The Iroquois sort of figured it out, as you said. In peacetime, they had sachems who were partly elected by women. So the female

Starting point is 01:12:25 voice 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. It was the sachems. 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

Starting point is 01:13:14 was the military leader in the colonies when they were fighting the British. And as soon as the British surrendered, 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 my guess is that he took that idea from the Iroquois. Military thinking and peace thinking require very different sensibilities, very different calculations of cost and benefit. And 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.

Starting point is 01:14:05 That's a military dictatorship. We do not want that. But it does call for very, maybe even conflicting traits in a single person. 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?

Starting point is 01:14:43 Well, it was this sort of strange phenomena, right? I mean, the Christian society settled the eastern seaboard of the New World in the 1600s, 1700s, and beyond the tree line were the savages, right? They weren't Christian. They weren't civilized. 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. So for the Christian,

Starting point is 01:15:11 sort of civilized Christian society of that era, they clearly felt that they were the superior godly society. But what happened was that superiority, that very quality of civilization and Christianity was also quite stifling, right? We didn't evolve to live, we didn't evolve as the human animals that we are, social animals that we are, to live within the strictures of sort of Puritan society. 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. I mean, the movement, the sort of societal movement, 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.

Starting point is 01:16:01 This is, 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 sounds that's probably a pretty appealing daydream to a puritan you know farmer uh you know youngest son but the number of people who were kidnapped, taken as supposedly slaves, who then refused or very unwillingly refused to come back to white society or very unwillingly came. And 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, 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 want to be returned to their homes, to their society. And they actually weren't slaves.

Starting point is 01:17:07 And what's interesting about, 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 and you were the replacement for that person's son or daughter. And these

Starting point is 01:17:40 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. 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. Everyone was equal.

Starting point is 01:18:18 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 know, 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. And that led to a really basic equality in Native societies.

Starting point is 01:18:43 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. Partly, you can't carry much wealth, right? If you're a mobile nomadic society, how much wealth can you really carry? In 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? in war and interviewing people who have 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? 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,

Starting point is 01:19:42 you're hard pressed to find in peacetime. 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 in, 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 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 bombings stopped. One official said, you know, it's amazing.

Starting point is 01:20:33 We have neurotics driving ambulances. that is often forced upon people 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 rate immediately went down. The murder rate went down. All that kind of antisocial behavior was mitigated by this sort of monumental task that the country was engaged in. In New York, I live in New York City,

Starting point is 01:21:19 in New York after 9-11, a massively traumatized population. 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. 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. Time to stop thinking about myself. Time to think about the group, about us.

Starting point is 01:21:57 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. One of the recurring themes that you write about, and also that we spoke about after your TED Talk from a few years ago, some of the feedback from vets from different wars was that they missed the war. from civilians as well in this book it's like 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 can one potentially go about and this is sort of a multiple choice question like manufacturing

Starting point is 01:22:45 catastrophe if that makes any sense like simulating the characteristics that drive that increased cohesion community or sense of mental well-being or just increase 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 if you count all of the 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, oh, that's the guy who's really good at armors. Oh, that's the guy who's really good at stiff jab. Oh, that's the guy whose

Starting point is 01:23:28 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 when I was training at this place called AKA in San Jose, it was like everybody was given some insulting nickname. And looking back on it, it's like, wow, that 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 Snowball and so on. But how can someone simulate that? Or what can we do, focusing for now on the personal well-being? Do you have any thoughts on how we might try to improve things? That was a long fucking question, but I think you get the idea. Yeah. I mean, the nickname thing is really interesting. Groups of men give each other nicknames.

Starting point is 01:24:07 Women, as far as I know, don't. It's a really interesting thing, and I think it's a signal of tribal affiliation, of group affiliation. The male group in our evolutionary past was extremely important 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 in hunting 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.

Starting point is 01:24:45 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, you know, like one of the things men do in groups is make each other laugh and they give each other nicknames. 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 of experience of sort of ongoing moderate crisis. I mean, we're hunter-gatherers. We evolved in a pretty harsh environment. And we've survived in the harshest of environments, in the Arctic and the Kalahari Desert, for example.

Starting point is 01:25:21 And 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, in Avizzano, something like 95% of the population was killed. Something like that. I mean, just horrific. I'm going from memory.

Starting point is 01:25:50 But unbelievable casualties. It was 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 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

Starting point is 01:26:15 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. 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

Starting point is 01:26:58 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. Let's talk about the C-Train and your return to New York City. I'm missing, so 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?

Starting point is 01:27:45 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 have 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.

Starting point is 01:28:22 In the fall of 2000, I was with Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was the leader of the Northern Alliance. He was fighting the Taliban. He was completely outnumbered, outgunned. I mean, back then the Taliban had fighter planes, the Taliban had tanks, they had artillery, they had all the toys. 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. So we had a tough, I was up there for two months and we saw and went through some very tough things. And I got back to New York, young man, well, your age, the late thirties. 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 said something I did every day. And it was rush hour. There were a lot of people.

Starting point is 01:29:16 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:29:48 The lights were somehow going to kill me. It was too loud. 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. 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

Starting point is 01:30:17 who was a psychologist. It was a friend of a friend that was at a picnic actually. And she asked about my war reporting and if I'd had any, suffered any consequences from it. like, no, no, of course not. I'm fine. And for some reason, I thought to sort of mention, but once in a while I have a weird panic attack. And she nodded in that way that shrinks too. Interesting. And she said, well, and it was the spring of 2003 and she nodded and she said, well, that's interesting. She said, that's called PTSD. And, you know, 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.

Starting point is 01:30:57 And 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 01:31:26 of people who have been traumatized get short-term PTSD that's what I got last weeks last some months 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 all that other stuff we wouldn't be here. So trauma, if the 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 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

Starting point is 01:32:11 as the Civil War. World War II was not as intense. The combat was not as intense. There were not the mass casualties of World War I. Korea, Vietnam, the war on terror has the lowest casualty rates of any war the US has fought, 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 them are very, they're crucial, they're necessary, they're not getting directly traumatized. But something like 50% of the US military has filed for some form of PTSD disability.

Starting point is 01:32:54 So there's 40% in there that are a bit of a mystery. 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.

Starting point is 01:33:14 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. 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,

Starting point is 01:33:37 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 01:34:04 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? For the 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 Cameroon, incredibly poor country in Africa, Central Africa, in a really poor village.

Starting point is 01:34:45 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%. It's enormous. It's akin to soldiers. So there you have this common theme. Peace Corps volunteers are not traumatized, but they experience, like soldiers, this radical transition from closeness, literally village life, back to the American suburb or whatever. I mean, this is the first society, I mean,

Starting point is 01:35:17 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, you know, human infants know this, of course. So they don't want to be put in a room by themselves.

Starting point is 01:35:38 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 yeah the skin-on-skin contact for infants and young children in tribal societies is as high as 90 percent 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 something like that now you could say okay well people have to work they have jobs you know what i'm all true but that doesn't mean that that radical shift in child rearing doesn't have consequences.

Starting point is 01:36:31 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 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, for instance, MDMA with vets 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, 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,

Starting point is 01:37:38 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 for psychological struggles, 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,

Starting point is 01:38:27 you know, one of the huge bases that the American military has or the Israeli military has, for example, in previous wars in Israel, the random mortar round comes in. Strangely, that causes more, a greater proportion of psychiatric casualties than frontline units doing very

Starting point is 01:38:46 intense fighting but they're 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 any lines in a black helicopter and you have to go command. Absolutely. I mean, you know, it's game on, right? The big game, the football game or whatever. I mean, humans are wired for action and war when need be.

Starting point is 01:39:14 And, you know, your neural circuitry just lights up and there's all kinds of hormonal stuff going on. I mean, you have an enormous agency. But it even is true, I read a study on my previous book called war i saw this study where some army psychiatrists they like two unluckiest army psychiatrists in their whole military probably at that time were at some for you know some like remote outposts with special forces soldiers along like i don't know near the dmz and they were dropped in there they were just doing some standard study, psychological assessment of these guys, right? And these guys are real badasses.

Starting point is 01:39:49 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:40:22 And the officers, the lieutenant, the poor lieutenant, he's probably 22, his cortisol levels, he's young, he's not very well-trained, and he has a huge amount of responsibility as the officer, as the commanding officer. His cortisol levels are through the roof right up into 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 and then turned out there was no attack and then he went 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 the reason their cortisol levels dropped it was stressful for them to wait for the unknown.

Starting point is 01:41:06 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 the plasma bags ready, whatever they do before an attack. All of that busyness gave them a sense of mastery

Starting point is 01:41:22 and control that actually made them feel less anxious than them just waiting around on an average day in a dangerous place. Coming back to, and I really didn't think about this until now, but when we're talking about PTSD and potential causes, right? going from a very unified sort of tribal existence that we've evolved to be part of to this very unusual isolated modern existence you also have what strikes me at least is we're looking at the agency versus lack of agency the sense of a clear purpose and a task 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 weeks and months where I'm like, what the fuck am I doing? I really just

Starting point is 01:42:20 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. And then a third, 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. A focus on I is just a breeding ground for neuroses and mental illness, I think. When you take, for instance, certain types of

Starting point is 01:42:52 psychedelics, it disrupts the default mode network, has very particular neurological effects that increase the sense of oneness and unity with others. 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 he views himself quite proudly as sort of a bleeding heart liberal, and he feels very conflicted because he wants to support troops at the same time he wants to ask well did you find the wmds right and so he's 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 countries go to war through a political process that's run by the

Starting point is 01:43:42 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 with global warming. You know, they're providing something that our society has decided it wants,

Starting point is 01:43:57 including a lot of environmentalists, frankly, who are driving around in cars. They're running gasoline. So with the bumper stickers that say no blood for oil. Yeah, exactly. Right. So there's a massive hypocrisy, even though it's well-meaning.

Starting point is 01:44:08 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. 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

Starting point is 01:44:40 invade Canada, they'd do that. They're like, whatever you want, we're going to do. So 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

Starting point is 01:45:13 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. 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. 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're not, you can't even get along. So you want unity of purpose in this country. One way to get there is to make, 50 years ago, racist speech was acceptable socially. Now it's unacceptable.

Starting point is 01:45:50 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 to the interests of this nation that it's effectively banned from society by common consensus. 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

Starting point is 01:46:36 that this country is and should be. The classes, the races get mixed in this very egalitarian way and would create a comet like in Israel, which has a PTSD rate, byitarian 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? I mean, what's the nation need done? You know, I mean, we need help in the inner cities.

Starting point is 01:47:06 You know, we need infrastructure repair. I don't know. I mean, you know. It could resemble like a Teach for America or a Peace Corps type of capacity. Yeah, anything, whatever. I mean, for us collectively, to use our imagination, and we have two things, right?

Starting point is 01:47:21 We have this incredible resource for our young people. And we have a nation 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. 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 horrible attack so i promised i'd come back to the viking helmet so i want i want to address the viking helmet so i mean let me try to this is from memory let me let me try to

Starting point is 01:47:58 give a sketch so you're in spain correct you go out to a bar with some of your buddies and you know 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. Could you? Yeah, of course. So, and they weren't, they weren't even my buddies. They became my buddies. So I was, 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, you know, 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. To see or participate in the running of the bulls, right? 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?

Starting point is 01:48:51 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, they fire the cannon off at seven in the morning to release the Bulls from the arena. And they charged through town to 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 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 which is some stupid little bar saw us on the floor i spoke pretty good spanish at the time 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

Starting point is 01:49:30 around, 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. 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 when you're talking. And one of are having the best time in the world. And we're, we just become friends instantly when you're talking.

Starting point is 01:49:45 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 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. It's really tough looking Algerian or Moroccan 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 really tough looking Algerian or Moroccan kids walk in and they're tough looking

Starting point is 01:50:11 guys, right? 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 and the helmet starts to rip it's just cheap plastic right and one of them shouts it's sort of king solomon's judgment

Starting point is 01:50:52 almost like one of themselves stop stop we're ripping it you know and they stop everyone stops because no one wants to destroy the thing they're all fighting over and 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 01:51:18 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?

Starting point is 01:51:33 So I'd say, yes, I'll defend the helmet, et cetera. 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. 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, you 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?

Starting point is 01:52:14 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 and he says, okay, now everyone let go. And no one wants to be the idiot who spills the wine, so everyone lets 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 01:52:44 and he passed it to his left, and 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 01:53:04 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 the, 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 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,

Starting point is 01:53:31 which is I've felt for a long time, and this is completely unsubstantiated. 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 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 with a little finesse and enough red wine like that's all diffused and now they're best buddies and 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

Starting point is 01:54:17 abrasive billionaire walked up to this huge argentine guy at a party that I was in a 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 going to 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. Everyone's assuming, holy shit, this guy's going to get his life destroyed. This guy's and slammed him on top of a folding table and shattered the table. Oh, that's great. So everyone's assuming, holy shit, this guy's going to get his life destroyed. This guy's going to sue the shit out of him.

Starting point is 01:54:54 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 doing shots together. But it doesn't always end that neatly, right? And do you have any thoughts on how in the society in which we live, let's just say in this case in the US, 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.

Starting point is 01:55:20 I mean, how do we have less heart disease in a society that where people drive and they have plenty of, most people have plenty of food and a lot of fats and sugars, you know, I mean, I mean, the very safety of this society, the very thing that makes us lucky also creates a danger. The diseases of affluence. That's right. 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.

Starting point is 01:56:13 That's been the human norm for 2 million years, either from predators or from other humans. Young men function in groups and function selflessly in groups 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

Starting point is 01:56:42 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, they get 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, 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 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

Starting point is 01:57:26 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. And then in their own ad hoc way, they create their own trials, right? So they take a lot of

Starting point is 01:58:04 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. Young men die at six times the rate of young women from accidents and from violence. There's a reason for that. They're wired to demonstrate their prowess and it often gets them killed. 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

Starting point is 01:58:38 same time. And this is to 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:58:56 Granted, we were always drunk when it happened, but think about that. 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. I'm going to abbreviate it a little bit, but how does he feel about veterans being victims in society after they return home and get out? General James Mattis, who you should definitely

Starting point is 01:59:21 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? The status of victimhood is not a psychologically healthy place to be in. 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, and they may call them whatever they want, but actually the role that the person is being asked to play is one of a victim. Victims are taken care of. 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

Starting point is 02:00:17 the army until the war was done. Some of them were in for three, years straight and they came home and basically they society said to these men and it was almost all men in the you know combat units society said to these men like all right 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, the Cheyenne and the Comanche and the Apache and the Sioux and the Kiowa warriors who came back from the warpath.

Starting point is 02:00:51 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 just as badly as they were needed in the pacific in the fields of europe and the problem with victimhood is that it

Starting point is 02:01:13 perpetuates the psychological state of passivity and trauma that you want the person to escape from right 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 also, I mean, one thing you wrote about, which was the presence 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 payment. Yeah. It's a very politically delicate thing to bring up, but all I'm doing is repeating the

Starting point is 02:01:59 accounts of soldiers and veterans. I mean, the best thing a journalist can do is convey information and that's what I'm doing. There are veterans I've talked to who said they won't go to these group therapy sessions because 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. One of 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, 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.

Starting point is 02:03:05 So I have zero opinion about whether we should inquire further. 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 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 Restrepo was first shown, like very, very first shown in the Northern California area, I tracked it down and drove out to see one of the very first showings. Oh, really? I did.

Starting point is 02:03:55 Thank you. 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, 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, 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, and there was a massed infantry assault,

Starting point is 02:04:38 I guess, entrenched Taliban positions through 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.

Starting point is 02:05:03 They're alive. You know, they had lost legs and, you know, traumatic amputations. I mean, they were extremely messed up. They were alive. Most of them probably survived. They're anti-personnel mines. So we were there where they were, when they

Starting point is 02:05:12 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. For medicine. Yeah. And in the very bright light of these

Starting point is 02:05:24 propane lanterns, kerosene lanterns, they brought these poor guys in. And, you know, there was 12 guys, you know, where their bodies ended at their knee. Their bodies ended at their hips. You don't realize 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 rearranged in an odd way that you've never seen before. And it's just, it really tweaks people. And I had a moment of crisis. 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 I don't even have very

Starting point is 02:06:12 clear memories of it, but I left the tent. I couldn't take it. 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, dismembered people, you really have no business covering the quote good parts. And by good, I mean the parts that are 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 is 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

Starting point is 02:07:06 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, 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, you know, I passed through the gateway, through the threshold. And I, at that moment, I'd been in plenty of wars till then, but in that moment I became a war reporter. 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

Starting point is 02:07:58 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 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 02:08:42 came very close to getting killed out there. It was extraordinary experience and we became brothers really. And we made a film called Restrepo. It 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 married at the time and he had a girlfriend and we were all out there together. 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. After the Oscars, we all went home and we were going to head to Libya. And the

Starting point is 02:09:25 last moment I couldn't go for personal reasons. And Tim went on his own and he was killed on April 20 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, you know, I got the awful phone call in New York City and very, very quickly decided I would never cover war again. 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. It's that in watching the news of his 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,

Starting point is 02:10:19 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, 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 20th yep coincidentally the anniversary of Columbine Hitler's birthday oh there's all kinds of awful things that happened on April 20th for some reason. What do you think your writing future will look like? Tribe is a really different book from my other books. It's an inquiry into something.

Starting point is 02:11:12 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. 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 to a group. And this country is a group so viewing ourselves that way this relates to a

Starting point is 02:12:07 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 ind Indian ceremonies or returning warriors in the 18th centuries or vets from the current wars, 19th centuries. 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

Starting point is 02:12:54 of a warrior discharging his duties for his community. 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 a 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, we can't, you know, you'd have to get rid of the car, you know, whatever, whatever, it's not happening. But we might be able to take certain structures of tribal life and incorporate them into modern society. 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,

Starting point is 02:13:36 the city hall and every community in this country on Veterans Day into an open forum for veterans. I have this idea of veteran town halls where on my website, sebastianyounger.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? Some of them are going to be incredibly proud of their service and and they're going to say they missed the war and it's going to make liberals uncomfortable and some of them are just to just to be clear you would you would consider yourself a liberal oh i'm totally liberal yeah yeah yeah but as a journalist i'm neutral i mean it's really important a private person i'm liberal

Starting point is 02:14:17 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 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 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,

Starting point is 02:14:59 much like the American Indian tribes did in these ceremonies, an amazing thing. So we did this once in Marblehead, Massachusetts, 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. There's no Q&A. There's no debate. This is not an evaluation of the war. It's not a patriotic thing.

Starting point is 02:15:46 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 town across the country, that it would be enormously therapeutic for veterans, but even more important in some ways, it would start to bind the country together again. I think the veterans are suffering

Starting point is 02:16:05 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. Let's shift gears just to my perhaps somewhat typical series of rapid fire questions, and then 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.

Starting point is 02:16:27 All right. All right. I'm ready. Let me get ready. Here we go. All right. I'll 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

Starting point is 02:16:55 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. 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 Ravikant, 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.

Starting point is 02:17:19 It's a novel by Peter Matheson. It takes place in the jungles of of south america and it's about a sioux indian named lewis moon who grew up on a reservation in the 1970s and he goes down to brazil to meet his what he considers his forebears and it doesn't go very well and now am i getting this right matheson also wrote in search of the snow leopard or am i getting that that's right yeah yeah yeah yeah fantastic writer what would your close friends say you're exceptionally good at Matheson also wrote In Search of the Snow Leopard, or am I getting that? That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic writer. What would your close friends say you're exceptionally good at?

Starting point is 02:17:52 If I had two drinks in each of them. I think they would say that I'm really good at not reacting to things and seeming like I'm unaffected when actually I'm deeply affected. But on the surface, you're not emotionally reactive. That's right. Sounds like you're definitely a closet stoic. This is actually not one of my typical questions, but I'm going to throw this one. This is from, I think it's Robbie Fry. It looks like a very Dutch name.

Starting point is 02:18:23 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? To like create the ultimate writer for you, who would they be?

Starting point is 02:18:36 I think I would have to pick Cormac McCarthy, Peter Matheson, and Joan Didion. Good choice 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.

Starting point is 02:18:57 Okay. So when the book hit, before it was made into a movie, you now, what advice would you give to yourself at that point in time the movie part of it didn't didn't affect me very much but the the sudden attention public attention that i got when the book became a bestseller affected me enormously and i was very anxious about all that i think i would say to myself the public is not a threat the public is not a threat. 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 wants some guidance. And if there's anything I can say

Starting point is 02:19:39 through my work or just on a stage that gives some comfort or guidance to people, they're enormously receptive. And when you realize that we all need each other and we all learn from each other, your stage fright goes away. And I had a terrific 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 purchase of a hundred dollars 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 sapiens yeah i mean that book it's a it's a fun book to read it's amazing i mean

Starting point is 02:20:21 i just started looking at everything differently like i mean, I love that book. A book is a kind of thing of magic. It contains a whole 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, a good axe. Good axe. You can do almost anything with a good axe. Any particular type of axe? What are the characteristics of a good axe? It can't be cheap wood in the haft. It's got to be good steel. I mean, I don't even know how to evaluate this.

Starting point is 02:20:55 Basically, the more you pay for an axe, the better quality it is, and the longer it'll last and the better it'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 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 pick one thing to take into the woods with me, it would be an ax. I was just thinking like, how would you open a tuna can with an ax? Oh, that's so easy, man. You can definitely open it. Oh yeah. Yeah. No, I remember when I was a young man in my 20s and I was living just stupidly in some

Starting point is 02:21:28 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. And I, like an idiot, I mean, I got like, and I had cans of tomato sauce and pasta, right? And she came over and I realized I didn't have a can opener, but I knew the answer.

Starting point is 02:21:48 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. Yes. And here's the amazing part. She still went out with me. Very memorable at the very least. Yeah, yeah. So then he pulled out a hatchet.

Starting point is 02:22:09 That's right. Yeah, exactly. Right. She probably still would have believed that you weren't a serial killer who was going to take her head off. That's right. Oh my God.

Starting point is 02:22:16 What is something you believe even though you can't prove it? I believe I'm a good person. What are some of the habits or common practices of journalists that you dislike? I really dislike laziness. And if you, and if you read a phrase or a sentence that's familiar, I mean, there are these cliches, these sort of, sort of linguistic tropes, like the mortars slammed into the hillside. I just don't want to read that again. You know, like just say it in

Starting point is 02:22:45 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. It's not, I was talking about this on the phone earlier and, you know, 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. 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

Starting point is 02:23:32 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. What do you think your 70- old self would give to your current self as advice i think i would say to myself the world is this continually unfolding set of possibilities and opportunities and the tricky thing about life is 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. I mean, that's true of a place, of a person, of a vocation. In balancing those two things, the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying, it's very hard to get the ratio, the balance of those two things right.

Starting point is 02:24:27 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 balance. Yeah, it is a tough balance. I find it tough, personally.

Starting point is 02:24:43 Yeah, I mean, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of unhappy people because they're struggling to find 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. What are the symptoms of knowing that you should pursue a given project? Because you've got Navajo long-distance running, you have the perfect storm, you have quite a bit of terrain that you cover.

Starting point is 02:25:01 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 pestering me, like, I just need to get it out of my head and onto paper or I won't be able to get to sleep. 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 one of the symptoms that I might have. Like I

Starting point is 02:25:41 might have a live one. Like this might be something I can run with. What is it like for you? 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. Well, the writers are writing 20, whatever. Like I, you can always be insecure, right? No, I've written. You don't have to be James Patterson. You're fine. I've really written only four books. One's a collection of short form journalism. 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,

Starting point is 02:26:20 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. I really don't want to write a book that I'm not sure the world needs. Yeah. 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 if you had one billboard anywhere and could put anything you

Starting point is 02:26:57 want on it what would you put on it i think i would put the word read read it's the only i was talking about this recently with some people. You know, we don't live in small groups anymore. 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. We live in a country of 400 million.

Starting point is 02:27:23 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. We live in a country of 400 million. 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 have collectively have that conversation is through books is the only thing that's cheap enough, accessible enough to everybody 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. I really feel that it makes

Starting point is 02:28:06 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, which is all of you, can't see the many, many, many pages I've printed out and highlighted

Starting point is 02:28:32 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,

Starting point is 02:28:55 who would you die for? What ideas would you die for? 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. You lose a part of your identity. And I think what I would ask people is, 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 other than your taxes? Is there anything else you owe all of us? There's no right answer or wrong answer,

Starting point is 02:29:33 but it's something that I think everyone should try to ask themselves. This is a great book, folks. 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'll 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

Starting point is 02:30:10 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 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 fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out.

Starting point is 02:30:48 And as always, and until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or

Starting point is 02:31:16 discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email,

Starting point is 02:31:55 and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers, that's not me, and even a mattress made specifically for kids. They have models with memory foam layers to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side, as I often do and did last night on one of their beds. Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for as I often do and did last night on one of their beds. Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach and back sleeping positions and on and on.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger

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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger

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