#744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger

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Optimal minimal. At this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I also your personal question? Now I just see an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cyber nanny organism living this show on metal and the sky. Late in the day, Paris show.

Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it is my job to sit down with world class performers 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 past one billion downloads to celebrate.

I've curated some of the best of the best some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited 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 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.log slash combo. And now with a further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

First up, Jaco Willink, retired US Navy SEAL officer, recipient of both the silver and bronze stars, number one New York Times best selling co-author of Extreme Ownership. Host of the top rated Jaco podcast and co founder and CEO of Premier Leadership Consulting company, Eschelon Front. You can find Jaco on Twitter and Instagram at Jaco Willink. What have you observed and learned about what makes a good leader versus a good or a mediocre or a bad leader?

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 meeting and 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 wasn't a question of their ability 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 is an individual who is balanced. And you know, 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. You know, 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 cannot 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? 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, or maybe like, you know what? I think we might have to let that guy go.

And 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. 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 over there and they didn't go there.

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. You know, that's 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.

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 our oil rig in California doing some training.

And we come up on this level of this oil rig and it's never been 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 see through the floors and you can see it's 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 guns. 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 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 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. 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, you know, 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? So 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 like cognitive behavioral therapy or stoic philosophy for that matter, 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 who just 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 the 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 nylon California to do land warfare.

And again, this is desert operations. You're patrolling in long distances. 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.

Is that unlike a ropes course or it was a climbing ship and the guy above him fell and broke his neck. And so this guy who had been in a remodeling 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. And so he comes out and you know, 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. You know, he said, I saw you. He kind of saw me like that and said, how does he know what's happening?

So the ability easy in so much is 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 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 or the consequences were so significant that they would be forced to detach in that way? I mean, these are just exercise 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 nylon and your beaker 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? And then 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. It was 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 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 their, you know, when in like in Terminator, when the beginning of the term in this 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 know my job was done. And they'd step up, they'd take us 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. They became aware as leaders. Yeah. What do your morning routines look like? And 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, wake up at 4.45. I like to have that psychological win over the day.

And 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. He's rocking back and forth and he's got a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other hand. And he's waiting for me.

And we're going to 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 4.45. 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 is it typical morning workout look like? A lot of polps, 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. How long is it? It depends. It depends on what's going on. I'll try and do some strength movements to be strong.

You know, dead lifts, 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. Sometimes that can take a while, you know, because I'll just want to relax and hit singles or doubles on dead lifts or cleans or whatever.

And then when I get done with that, I'll do some kind of metabolic conditioning of some kind, you know, I'll be sprinting or rowing or swinging a kettlebell or lighter weight, clean and 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 who comes to mind? The part of the world that I've seen is a very dark place. It's a dark place. That's a war is.

And when your job, which my job was, was to expand that darkness in many ways. I mean, it's a 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 guys, first seal killed in Iraq, Mike Montsoor, one of my guys, second seal killed in Iraq, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor and Ryan Job, one of my guys wounded in Iraq, blinded in both eyes, made it home, medically retired from the from the Navy, married his high school sweetheart, got her pregnant and finished his college degree.

And after his 22nd surgery to repair the damage that was done to his 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. And those guys are my heroes.

Are there any books that you've gifted to other people? I think there's only one book 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, like, join the merchant Marines or something, he was 15, got into the army when, again, right after World War II.

And 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, you were not going to win this thing.

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? And there's plenty of people that will say that all day long. But if you and I are leading up a tune, 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 and other three, and there's no one to shoot at. And we met a vac those guys and we come back to base who won that right. And you know, he recognized that.

So the metrics that were being used were sort of not a smoke screen, but they were at best to the wrong metrics. I had that book next to my bed in Ramadi, and I literally read it every night. I would, you know, that's how I'd fall asleep. I'd go up, read a couple pages, you know, just open up any and you'd find something in every. It was very comparable.

You know, 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 Iraq isn't guess what they were corrupt and they were scared and they weren't the best. There's 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 about face.

The other book that I've read multiple times is Blood Meridian. Yeah, I don't know that. Okay, so it's written by Corn Mac McCarthy. Oh, fantastic writers. So this is his best book 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 Corn Mac McCarthy is the guy that I think actually has that. And if you read Blood Meridian, then there it is.

Right. So 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 then it up killing everybody. If you had black hair, 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, Corn Mac 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 get a, if you get a 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 countertuitive, right? The more disciplined 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. So you know, I had a seal of truth. 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 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, I've realized in a way that my 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. 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 to standard operating procedure so that your brain cycles are allocated 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 creative on one or two things. It's one of the reason I enjoy doing this podcast so much is that when you talk to people who've operated 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 in your podcast. Maybe you should show 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.

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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. Nice to be here. It's so exciting to finally get a chance to hang because we have a mutual friend in Josh Wateskin who's been on the podcast twice. For those who don't know, the basis for searching for Bobby Fisher, but the book in the movie, but a lot more than that. I mean, a real masterful and kind soul. It was 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?

A reading of the biography of Thomas Payne, 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 Acro Yoga long story. And then you had picked up the letters from a stoic. And did the stoics come up in the book about Payne?

Yeah, the Greek stoics were greatly admired by Payne. 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 untruthed. And what the book said about the stoics was amazing. And I'm not religious. I didn't grow up going to church. I don't believe in God. And so if you're like me, you're always looking for a way to sort of order the universe that's inspiring or reassuring and sort of makes sense of things.

And so what they said about the stoics, I really identified with. I'm like, I got to learn more about the stoics. And then here I was before I took a nap on your couch, I sort of potted through your book collection over there. And there was the letters of Seneca that 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 I get to 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, 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.

We 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 walled around weighted tables. I did various things and money while I was trying to become a writer. And I was very slowly getting into journalism, but it didn't pay very well. And I got a job eventually as a climber for tree companies.

And I would work 80, 90 feet in the air with a chain saw on a rope, taking trees down in pieces, bringing 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, 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 had been a marathon runner and stuff. But I was super worried about my Achilles tendon. So you're lower leg, you're entire back.

I managed to drag it across the back of my ankle right where the Achilles is. I turned the chain saw out. I was way up in a tree on a rope and I turned the chain saw off and I clipped it to my belt and looked down and pulled the wound open because I wanted, you know, you're going to shock and you get very clinical immediately.

I pulled the wound open and I wanted to see if the Achilles was intact indeed. It was, by the way, and Achilles is about the thickness of a number two pencil and it's white. Just in case you ever wanted to know what your Achilles looks like. And I was so relieved to see it intact, but I was still pretty messed up like and I repelled down to the ground and my crew took me to the hospital.

And as I was recovering, I had to start that people die all the time doing dangerous jobs in this country. They're mostly work less 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 and more actually, but they don't get acknowledged. They don't get honored.

And I thought, maybe I'll write about dangerous jobs and that set me on course to write my first book called the perfect storm about a huge storm that among other things, say a commercial fishing boat at sea. You know, 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 or so many things on Ask You About and so many things that Josh wanted me to ask you also.

But let's go back to the you were pelling down trees for a second. How did you get that job? I mean, what qualified you or did not call you? How did that come to pass like many good stories that 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, absolutely. So I started, he sort of trained me on a climb. And I the great thing about climbing was that I could make, I mean, for an unemployed freelance writer in the late 80s, I could make a couple hundred dollars a day cash.

I can 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're having lunch together. What did your running times look like when you were at your peak?

My running times were almost fast enough. So what was your what was your mile? I ran 412 for the mile. That's a fucking fast mile. I mean, from my perspective, that seems extremely fast. And then you got into Marathons after that. Yeah, I ran a 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, 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 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. I never studied writing in college or 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 don't not read, you know, and I read John McFee, Joan Didian, 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 when I would read a book that I liked, I would think about like John McFee, 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 this sort of process of natural selection. I just kept reading things that reinforced the style that I was drawn to you anyway. And I kept writing more and more in that style. And I think if you know those writers and you read me, you can see my ancestry, my literary ancestry pretty clearly. What drew you to writing? So you weren't taking classes explicitly focused on turning you into a journalist. It doesn't sound like a writer.

So what drew you 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. They were still, there was sort of still added in a kind of traditional way. And they were amazing to track and cross country athletes. And they were had blended the two disciplines. And so I did my fieldwork on the Navajo reservation.

I spent a summer there. I trained with their best runners, you know, up at six, 7,000 feet. I lived 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 I didn't know that. It's called a Navajo long distance running. And I just came alive academically doing that. I mean, I was a pretty indifferent student. That 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 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.

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 seems to have worked out eventually. I mean between I was a pretty bad waiter in Washington DC and then Cambridge. And you know, I mean, it took a while. I mean, 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, yes it was. So was that your first aside from the thesis long form piece of writing. I mean, it's just that that's. That's the next one. I mean, I wrote, yeah, you know, I wrote some articles with Boston Phoenix. And then I got into a couple of magazines. But it was not. I couldn't even come close to stitching together. And 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. I wrote a magazine piece that. Outside magazine took. And then I got a book contract from W W Norton, a very, very modest book contract. But you know, I got me going based on the magazine piece. Yeah, I know. And then I, you know, I ginned up some outline that, you know, sort of showed how I was going to expand the story.

You already had quite a bit in your back pocket then at that. Yeah, I already had a bill, grateful notes and you know, whatever. I mean, I already done like, you know, years were the work on this. I was used to, I mean, everything I ever written. I'd written on my own time and then tried to sell it. I was constantly sort of peddling finished pieces of writings. Right. 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. You know, like, so I just started hanging out on tugboats. And I sent them a pretty nice piece of writing.

And it was my first public 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 didn't, my advance was pretty small and as was appropriate. I mean, I was only unknown writer and it was, it was a totally bizarre topic at the time. Right. So I'm not complaining. But the advance was quite small. So I did tree work a couple days a week. I'd be up in the trees. But I also, after I finished my book proposal, by some miracle, I had an agent, by the way, I had made a dime for him for 10 years. Right. But he liked my writing. Right. God.

He didn't touch with. I met him. Is name Stuart Krashevsky and where he's still my agent were really good friends. And he said it was the way he met me was sort of the ultimate sort of agents nightmare. A client of his who wrote academic papers. In other words, not a big pain gate. 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.

That guy's college roommate was my father. And he got the message that his arguably smallest clients college roommates son wanted to be a writer and would he read some stuff and Stuart was like, that's about as bad as a get like that. He's about as unpromising as it gets in the agent world. But he's a great, you know, Stuart's a great guy and he has an open mind and he read some stuff that I'd written and really liked it. He took another 10 years from to make any money off me.

But he saw something term investment. It was he saw something there. And I'm eternally grateful to him. But I so I gave him my book proposal based on the article. And then I went off to Bosnia. I wanted to be a war reporter in case the author thing didn't work out when there was no reason to think it was going to work out.

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 finally came home in 94 because Stuart sent me a fact saying I managed to sell your book. You got to come home. And I came up 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 chronologies a little bit. But what did your writing process daily or weekly schedule look like at that point. How do you write? I know it's a very boring, maybe. Often asked question, but I'm fascinated by this and just wanted me to dig into it. Yeah. So it's.

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 is should be considered journalism. There are other rules for literary nonfiction right.

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. Because you need something you're writing about the real world and you need facts and quotes and interviews and all that. 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 re-imagine the world in a way that's never been done before. They 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 more like carpentry and 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 McFee. So the only or the most impactful writing class I ever took was with McFee. It was a small seminar about 12 to 15 students at Princeton. And so you'll appreciate this. This is 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, 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 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 do apply to get into the class and I don't think I still don't think I'm 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.

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, but 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 their number of interviews he did for I think the Paris review on the art of nonfiction, which are just fantastic. But what I wanted to ask you was and then we're going to we're certainly going to spend a lot of time talking 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. Let me just say McFee, I mean, you're very lucky to have taken the toss with a minute. He was a mentor that I didn't personally know from me through his works. He was and it's very interesting to hear what you said about him mapping out structure because I think good structure is an extremely visual thing. I think when people who are good at structure, I'd like to think I am. He definitely is.

I think they arrive at the structure with the visual part of their brain. I mean, I think you've probably mapped his brain while it was at work. You would see that part light up. And 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 architect like geometric shapes, but it's very visual. It represents it completely visually. And I feel it. 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 less made with its presence. So let's say you have your box full of notes. So you've dug into a given topic. You've gone out in the field and we could use the perfect storm for this example. Look, 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. What's the process of turning that? Keep of information into something that might become a book. I read through all my interviews with a red magic marker and I red line 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 that 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 and Gloucester, you know, 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 can I arrange those in a way where the energy and the interest in the reader gathers and builds and then achieve some sort of catharsis towards the end.

And it's a very intuitive process, but I got to say 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 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.

And I actually see sort of the table of contents as I rearrange it, I can resection things. It's proven really helpful for me. Now, McFee just to talk about daily routine. So he is one of those guys in the nonfiction world. I can't do this because I want to slam my head in a car door if I try this for one day or like jump out a window. He literally sits down and once he has his information,

8 a.m. to 6 p.m. come the Heller Highwater. 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 p.m. to like 5 a.m. That's just my window for whatever reason. You write throughout the day. Do you tend to do your best writing in the mornings at night? What does that look like? I do my best writing when something's due. Spoken as a real journalist is 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 it's you're trying to finish up a magazine piece. But that intensity. You know, it's like athletes athletes in the big game or the big razor would have I mean that intensity can bring out something that you didn't even know you had access to much less embodied.

So the time and you know, I have a cup of coffee and I sit down and I write for a couple hours to 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 it doesn't work and it's stuck. It's not that I'm blocked. It's that I don't have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic.

It'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 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.

You're a great pro's artist. You some right linguistics, smoking mirrors. Yeah, I lost over the fact that you don't have the research. Yeah, it's just bullshit. And you know, the 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.

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. You have great. Perfect. Well, then let me not ask the question I was going to ask. What did you talk about? I was speaking at a very kind of elite school, private school in New York City. These kids were going off either to college or not high school. I can't remember.

Anyway, these are very, very privileged, 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 your program 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. You have to do the hardest thing that you have not been prepared for in this score, 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. Math 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 talking since you now training and boxing made me think of it's a custom auto.

It was 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, graduate seniors, and they said, I want to be a journalist. It's a 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. I mean, as a journalist, I'm very hesitant to actually give advice to people in my book, try. I really, 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, but well, I think it's 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 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 it, writing at something. And that hunger for humanity, that interest in humanity is that would 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 come about specifically?

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 been I never really been challenged. I'd never been faced with a situation that I didn't know I could survive. And having studied a lot of anthropology, you know, 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 a manhood by facing something that could destroy you. And initiation rights around and tribal societies around the world, their main purpose is to confront young men and women, young women have a different challenge that they have to face and equally daunting. Young men face the challenge of in these initiation rights 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 or deal. It's this sort of ancient in some ways, ancient thing and it's a very, very, 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 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, you know, a sort of a loss as to how to make a living and live an adult life. And partly because I felt like I was still a child and the 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 that the shared friendship that we have with Josh and my familiar area with your work, maybe more inclined to read it.

I'd read this in a day and a half and for those who have seen my examples of my note taking, I just have an index of notes that spans all of the front matter of the book, basically. There are some fantastic stories in this book. I had follow 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 skin walkers are? You mentioned the Navajo earlier. And why they're in this book is I wanted to hear more about this.

So skin walkers were this thing that I never heard of 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 were wolves. The belief was that they 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. 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 skin walkers and that these skin walkers, 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 100 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 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, and I don't believe in God.

He didn't believe in anything but what he could measure and observe and all the sudden there I was in my trailer, very, very scared at certain moments of these things and of these skin walkers. As I wrote about it in my thesis, I said, you know, the skin walkers 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.

You know, one psychopath, one sociopath basically that has no feeling of protectiveness of humanity towards his neighbors can kill more people than the enemy can. 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 skin walkers.

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 strongly for language here because it's a feeling that I get very frustrated by and that is like a discussion of manhood and rights 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 for Bowton, like 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. Do I think it illustrates a very important point if you remember the story, I'd love for you to 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 while 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, if they're out 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.

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 really quality in this society until those unnegotiable differences are actually incorporated into our equality.

And anyway, 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 you're going to get to. 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 passers-by in a moment of crisis, I mean, everyone will jump into a burning building to save their child, maybe to save their spouse, possibly their parents-in-law.

But whatever, you have familiar relations and people who risk their lives to help the people that they love. It makes sense. 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, very prone towards that kind of impulsive risk-taking that's sort of on the spot in the moment decision to jump onto some railroad tracks while trains 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. So when you have a society that's encountering a difficulty, and that can either be the Blitz and 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, mail roll 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. That's not what's required as important as that is. There's something else, moral courage. You basically are like providing the moral fiber for the group, and you act as a kind of conscience for the group.

And women are very, very good at that, and they did a study during World War II of who helped hide Jewish families who were fleeing the Nazis, Gentiles, who helped Jewish families who were fleeing the Nazis. That's not something that takes muscular action in the moment, but if you're busted, you know, if you're a Dutch farmer and you have a Jewish family in your basement, you're dead. You're ice-coated. Women were considerably more likely to make that decision than men were.

So what happens is that if you have 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 their way more empathic, their 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 kit. If there are no men around, if there are no women around, a man will step forward and act in that wonderfully moral and pathic 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.

We don't have to cover this one at length, but I also found it fascinating to read about the earthquake, peacetime leaders versus war time leaders and how they switched between the two and how they were so clearly delineated. 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 earthquake sort of figured it out, as he said, in peacetime, they had satyums who were partly elected by women. So the female voice was found in the selection of satyums. They ran peaceful society when war started. The satyums 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 satyums. And if peace was accepted, the war leaders stepped down immediately. And it's really interesting because the US Constitution. Parts of it are based on the earthquake law of peace. And Thomas Payne did a lot of work sort of incorporating the natural rights of man as we're exemplified by your coi society into the intellectual basis for American governance.

But as soon as the British surrendered, George Washington was basically the supreme leader. He was the military leader and the colonies was there when they were fighting the British. And as soon as the British surrendered, he formally gave up power, give 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 earthquake. Military thinking and peace thinking are very, very 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. That's a military dictatorship. We do not want that. But it does call for very maybe even conflicting traits in a single person, you know, the wisdom and the gentleness of a peacetime leader, the empathy of a peacetime leader and the capacity for violence and effectiveness and decisiveness in a wartime leader.

You're asking someone to be almost schizophrenic if they can do both of those well. Yeah, equally well. See, you mentioned a couple of historical figures. Why did Ben Franklin complain that settlers along the frontier were constantly absconding with the Indians, but that the opposite almost never happened. Why is that?

Well, it was this sort of strange phenomenon, right? 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 funny. That's pretty great. Right. Maybe that's just me. So for the Christian 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 is 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 that 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. This is, you're talking about the people who are 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 farmer. You know, young as 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.

In my book, Tribe starts with the story of Pontiac's rebellion in Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio, and she 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 home, to their home, to their society.

And they actually weren't slaves. And what's interesting about me, 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 there were a placement for that person's son or daughter. And these people, I mean, there were two young women who were repatriated because of this peace accord after Pontiac's rebellion. And two young women actually managed to escape and make their way back to their adopted families. And this happened over and over and over again.

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.

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 cousins 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. 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. Apparently you can't carry much wealth, right? If you're a mobile, nomadic society, how much wealth can you really carry?

And a society that lives in groups of 40 or 50 that is mobile, it's extremely hard to accumulate differences of wealth and their forced status. How does that relate to your 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 as violent and it's completely anti-human.

But it produces an intensity of human connection that you really can't, your heart 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 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 bombing stop when officials said, you know, it's amazing. We have neurotics driving ambulances. What it seems to be is that the communal life 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 that 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 anti-social behavior was mitigated by the sort of monumental task that the country was engaged in.

In New York, I live in New York City, 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 said, oh my god, there's a crisis. I'm needed. Time to stop thinking about myself. Time to think about the group, about us. And that feeling of us is what not only does it make people feel good, but it buffers many people from their psychological demons and it's kind of a relief. 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 they missed the war.

And from civilians as well in this book, there are certain aspects of the war time, maybe a perceived greater level of humanity, 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 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 Jiu Jitsu, 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 at armors.

That's the guy who's really good at stiff jab, but that's the guy who's footwork is really good. It's like, you don't have the time. Don't even know what they do. Maybe don't even know necessarily their real name. I remember that, you know, when I was training at this place called A.K.A. in San Jose, everybody was giving some insulting nickname.

And looking back on it, it's like, wow, it actually sounds a lot like, and I've never been in the military, but it kind of makes me think of full metal jacket and snowball and so on. But how can someone simulate that? Or what can we do focusing for now on like the personal well-being? Do you have any thoughts on how we might try to improve things? That was a long, fucking question. Yeah, I think you get the idea.

Yeah, I mean, the nickname thing is really interesting. Groups of men give each other nicknames. 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, depending on them doing that job, as well as on the women doing other things, but it depended on that and cohesion. Cohesion is increased among other things by hardship, by nicknames, by humor.

I mean, all these things that you see men in groups too, I mean, any construction crew in New York City, you walk past them and have the time they're doubled over laughing. I mean, you know, like one of the things men doing 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 Calahari Desert, for example.

And normal life for most of human history was a moderate ongoing crisis. What's very fortunate and beautiful and wonderful and also a weird way tragic about modern society is that crisis has been removed. When you reintroduce a crisis like in the Blitz and London, or an earthquake that I wrote about it,

and I've had Zanno Italy early in the 20th century, and I've had Zanno something like 95% of the population was killed, something like that. I mean, just horrific. I'm going from memory, but unbelievable casualties. Just like a nuclear strike. And one of the survivors said that what happened afterwards, because people had to rely on each other. And so upper class people, lower class people, you know, 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 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, you know, with a fancy job in a big bank, or you could be like a really tough poor kid from the Bows 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. You know, I mean, your judge for how you act within that almost sacred space of the gym. And what happens in a crisis in a war or an earthquake or whatever is that people suddenly are judged for how they act.

And that is, I think one of the things that the what we're 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, 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, a missing, some trend recall from memory, the timing on this.

But it leads into a conversation of PTSD. Can you take us through that story? 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 would might be quite low. So that was the sort of genesis of my book. So I talked about my own experience with PTSD.

I would 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. In the fall of 2000, I was with Ahmed Shah Masood, who was the leader of the Northern Alliance. He was fighting the Taliban. He was completely outnumbered, outguned.

And then back then the Taliban had fighter planes, the Taliban had tanks, they had artillery, they had all the toys. And Masood, his forces were the sort of gorillas. Well, it's great to be with the gorillas until you start getting shelt, right? And 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, you're age, the late 30s, and I just felt completely like that nothing would ever affect me, right? I just assumed complete invulnerability to everything. And I got back to New York and bullshaking up, all right. And then one day I went down into the subway and saw something I did every day. And it was rush hour, there are a lot of people. And I was seized with this incredible panic attack. I'd never had one in my life.

Everything I was looking at seemed like a mortal threat. You know, actually I knew it wasn't. But it felt like it was. And I was way more scared than I'd ever been in Afghanistan. I had been plenty scared in Afghanistan. The trains were going too fast and they were going to jump the tracks and leap up onto the platform and kill me. The crowds were suddenly going to turn on me and beat me to death. The lights were too bright.

The lights were going to somehow are 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 again in close place with too many people too much going on. I would just panic.

I just thought I was going crazy. I had no idea that it was in any way connected to the combat that I'd been in. Until a couple of years later I was talking to a woman who was a psychologist who's a friend of a friend that was a picnic actually. And she asked about my word reporting and if I had any suffered any consequences from it. I was like, 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 Henrik it's like.

And she nodded in that way the trinkets do interesting you know and she said well. 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 a rack right and she said you're going to be hearing quite a bit about that in the coming years. As indeed we have. And are the rates of PTSD in the US 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 danger is interesting but almost 100% of people have been traumatized get short term PTSD.

That's what I got last weeks, last months goes away. There are be helps whatever but we're humans right when we're adapted to survive danger and stress and hardship and all that all that 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 well. One was it wasn't as bad as civil war war two was not as intense the combat was not as intense there were not the mass casualties of over one.

Korea Vietnam the war on terror has the lowest casualty rates of any war the US has fought major war but as the casualty rates have gone down and the level of trauma has gone down disability claims have gone up they're going the wrong directions.

Right now about 10% of the US military actually experiences any combat at all one out of 10 soldiers the rest of them are very are their 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 so there's 40% in there that are a bit of a mystery they come home and they're. Deeply dangerously alienated depressed and don't fit in something gravely wrong and.

My theory is that what they're experiencing isn't a reaction to trauma they couldn't be because most of them weren't traumatized but they're experiencing is the. Radical readjustment from platoon life platoon is 40 50 people you're sleeping depending on what kind of base you're on shoulder to shoulder in the dirt or caught to cut.

Some kind of bungalow or you know whatever but it's all group living right you're eating meals together during missions and patrols together during everything together for over a year that is exactly how humans evolved to live.

That is exactly our pre history so you experience that incredible tight cohesion with your platoon now there might be people you have conflicts with it doesn't mean it's one big love fest but it is close and it's close with people that you you know your life depends on and then suddenly you're sprung from that and you're back in modern society. And I think what's affecting 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. It's known for unfortunately and you also talked about how for instance returning peace square volunteers also suffer from depression for the similar maybe not identical but. Yeah related re integration issues yeah I mean you can see the I mean to the extent that you know this is proof whatever it's interesting example I mean so you spend two years in.

Cameroon incredibly poor country in the africa center Africa you know really poor village I mean that's a tough way to live for a couple years for american grew up modern society. And then after two years you come home in the depression raid for people coming back from peace core service is astronomical something like 50% 25% 50% is enormous it's a kin to soldiers.

So there you have this common theme you know peace core 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 modern western society the first society 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 terrifying the young children I mean we're primates right baby primates 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 on a room by themselves they know it in an evolutionary sense they know it's dangerous and they cry they scream was it 90% contact I might be pulling that out of my ass but you talked about these of contact.

Yeah the skin on skin contact for infants and young children in tribal societies is as high as 90% of the time skin on skin contact and the study looked at skin on skin contact in American society I think it was in the 70s the study was done and it was as low as 17% 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 wearing doesn't have consequences.

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 John 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 I don't know the proper terminology here but just like basic.

In some way or support units. Yeah, 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 it's not necessarily related to the drug.

It's necessarily related to the level of danger. It's related to the level of control that you feel that you have so if you're a sort of standard issue support unit rear base. Soldier you know one of the huge bases that the American military has or the Israeli military has for example in previous wars in Israel the random order around comes in is strangely that is causes more a greater proportion of psychiatric casualties.

Then frontline units doing very intense fighting but 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 out imagine just because they're on offense right if you're in a commando unit you get dropped.

By naming lines and black helicopter and you have well it go command apps absolutely I mean you know it's game on right the big game football game football game whatever I mean we're white you know what humans are wired for action war when need be and you know your your neurosurgery just lights up and there's all kinds of hormonal stuff going on I mean you're you have an enormous agency but it even is true I read it says on my previous book call war.

I saw this study where some army psychiatrist they like to unlucky is the army psychiatrist in the whole military probably at that time where at some 40's I some like remote outpost with special forces soldiers along like I don't know. The DMZ and they were dropped in there they're just doing some standard study psychological assessment of these guys right in these guys are real bad asses they were like SF you know like 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 is a perfect moment to measure stress and soldiers right so it's definitely looking at the silver lining that's right exactly so they started taking cortisol levels hourly from the soldiers and the officers the lieutenant the poor lieutenant is probably 22 is cortisol levels he's not his young he's not very well trained and he has a huge amount of responsibility is the officer is a commanding officer.

His cortisol levels are through the roof right up into the point where the attack was supposed to begin as they had in tell 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. This special forces guys with the opposite as soon as they heard there were about to experience an overwhelming attack.

The cortisol levels dropped they got super calm the reason the cortisol levels dropped it was stressful for them to wait for the unknown. 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 it attacked all of that busyness gave them a sense of mastery and control that actually made them feel less anxious.

Then 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 so you have 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 standing online every different race color or create it's like you have a very clear concrete purpose in front of you as opposed to what I think a lot of his experience and I'm not immune to this certainly they're like weeks and months from like what the fuck am I doing like I really just like don't know what I should be doing.

But a crisis or perceived crisis is a forcing function 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 like a focus on I is just a breeding ground for neuroses and mental illness I think and when you take a break from the end of the day and I'm going to be a little bit more careful.

When you take for instance certain types of psychedelics it disrupts the default mode network has very particular neurological effects that increase the sense of oneness and unity with others in some ways mitigates that focus on the first person what can we do to better support troops particularly and this is a question from another friend who's a big fan of your work.

But you know he views himself quite proudly sort of a leading heart liberal and he's 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 do you answer that talk to that.

Countries go to war through a political process that's run by the government and the troops have nothing to do with the war in that sense right I mean like guys are drilling for oil and North Dakota really don't have anything to do with global warming right you know they're providing something that our society has decided it wants including a lot of environmentalist frankly a driving around in cars they're running gasoline so with the upper stickers that say you blood for a while.

Yeah exactly right so there's a massive hypocrisy even though it's well meaning so you you can't mistake the soldiers for the war. If you're upset about the wars that the US 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.

For very very low amounts of money anything right and if we told them the plant trees in Canada they go do that if we told them to go invade Canada they 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 thousand dollars a year I will do whatever you think this nation needs done that's incredibly honorable thing.

And if you want to create a sense of unity of purpose in this country which I think would be enormously psychologically beneficial to soldiers I mean soldiers experience unity of purpose in their platoon then they come back to a country to this country which is basically a war with itself I mean we live in racially divided communities the gap between rich and poor is bad and growing worse the political parties speak with incredible contempt for the world.

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 it's protected under free speech but it's politically and socially unacceptable.

Contempt you a speech for your fellow citizens for your political adversary likewise is protected under the first amendment but it should be considered so damaging to the social fabric to the interest of this nation that it's effectively banned from society by common consensus that would help soldiers who 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 by national service with a military option where every 18 year olds or every young person had to do a year or two of national service would be. I mean that would truly create the melting pot that this country is and should be the classes the races get mixed in this very egalitarian way and we create a comment like in Israel which has a PTSD rate by the way of 1%.

It would create this sort of common experience in this unity of purpose which is so profoundly helpful psychologically what might some of the non military options look like for that year or two of service.

I mean what is the nation need done you know I mean we need help in the inter cities you know we need infrastructure repair I don't know what I mean I so you know it could resemble like a teacher for America or a. Peace core type of capacity anything whatever you mean I mean for us collectively use our imagination and we have two things right 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 to come back to the Viking helmet so I want to address the Viking helmet.

So let me try to this is from memory let me try to give a sketch so you're in Spain right 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 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 in the 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 so the sun festival sunfermin in Pamplona is this big city wide you know like freak show basically for a week.

And I was sleeping on someone's couch and when I slept in a park bench I mean it's just a free for all it's amazing time right and I went out to this bar in preparation for the running of the bulls next morning no one who's within the barricades where they run the bulls they fire the cannon off at seven in the morning the release the bulls from the arena and they charged to town to these barricades and no one who's within those barricades at seven 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 while I was going to be one of the

bulls so I go to this was just some stupid little bar saw us on the floor I spoke pretty good Spanish at the time I immediately start talking to these two young Spaniards who were just completely shit faced right on one of them has a leather sort of drinking bag around us to describe it a leather drinking bag got a

bottle around his neck which is filled with red wine and he keeps trying to get the red wine square the red wine was mouth but he keeps missing it's all of his white t-shirt and these guys are having the best time in the world and we just become friends instantly read your

talking and one of them the drunkest of the two has a cheap plastic Viking helmet on his head and I didn't really think about it much we're talking and suddenly these three very tough looking North African kids walk in and I had lived in France for a while with my family when I was 12 13 so I spoke French also these really tough looking Algerian or Moroccan kids walk in and they're tough looking guys right and they walk into the bar and the biggest

up and 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 my friend my Spanish friend new Spanish friends has 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 just cheap plastic right and one of them shouts

it's sort of King Solomon's judgment almost like one of them says stop stop we're ripping it you know and they stop everyone stops because no one wants to destroy the thing they are all fighting over and one of the two Spanish guys I think the less drunk of the two turns to me and says I have an idea will you take my place at this helmet and will you defend it I mean this wonderful elegant way that Spaniards have of speaking particularly when they're drunk will you defend it with the

hand on the honor of your ancestors and your good name 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's it like so I say yes I'll defend the helmet etcetera 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 in the Spanish kid are glaring at the Moroccans and they're glaring back and we're faced off around this home and I'm really hoping it's going to be a great deal for you guys.

I'm really hoping it doesn't go to where you know it looks like it's headed so that the Spanish guy goes to the bar and has a quick conference with the bartender produces a big jug of cheap Spanish red wine and cracks the top open and handed to him and the guy comes back and fills the Viking helmet to the brim with red wine.

No one wants to be the asshole who spills the red wine right it's the festival sun fed me the whole thing's running on red wine like no one wants to spill it right that 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 wines or everyone let's go.

And he presents it to the biggest toughest looking Moroccan kid it says you're a guest in our country so you drink first and the guy drank and he passed it to his left and went around the circle and then when it was empty red wine he got filled up and then eventually they just got another jug and started passing the jug around an hour later I'm talking to this like some girl an hour later like I eventually extricate myself from this and I look over.

And the five of them who are ready to carry the 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 underline this put a bunch of stars next to it there are a lot of underlines in this book for me what I liked about the encounter was that it showed how very close the energy of male conflict and male closeness can be.

So I want to get your thoughts and advice on this on something very closely related which is I 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.

And it's just 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 meat heads pounding each other's brains out.

With a little the nest and enough red wine like that's all diffused in other 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 can tankerous outspoken abrasive billionaire walked up to this huge Argentine guy at a party that I was in a different room at the time for and push the guy because he 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 sold him to him on top of a folding table and shattered the table. Oh, that's great.

Everyone's assuming holy shit like this guy's going to get his life destroyed this guy's going to sue the shit out of him but he couldn't because of like the sort of reputation all the stakes like he it would be a response so like 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.

Yeah, but it doesn't always end that neatly right and do you have any thoughts on how then 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.

You can think thoughts on well it's tricky. I mean how do we have less heart disease in the 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 the very safety of the society the very thing that makes us lucky. Also creates a danger right the diseases of affluence that's right so the wonderful thing about the society is that we don't have to organize.

Groups of young men and put weapons in their hands and send them out to the edge of town to fight off and incursion from the young man of an enemy town a hostile town we know 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 say.

That's been the human norm for two million years either from predators or from other humans young men. Functioning 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 well the heart of the task is the closer they get women are used for incredibly important I mean I'm talking about.

In the human evolution 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 well young men want to do is achieve honor by defending the community I mean you should wired it should 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 find is often the law it's the police it society itself in some ways they turn into skin walkers they have no outside enemy so they create an enemy out of society they don't want to be doing this is one of the risks of.

More time leaders being all the time leaders yes that's right and young men like young women for the most part are well intention and want to do right by their community in their society but if you have a society which is so safe and protected and removed 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 risks they do stupid stuff they jump off a stuff that's too high to jump off of they drive too fast they get in a fight. I've never done any of that. They young men die at six times the rate of young women from accidents and for 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 same time. This is to read a short section here I once asked a combat vet if you'd rather have an enemy in his life or another close friend he looked at me like I was crazy.

Oh an enemy 100% he said not even close I already got a lot of friends he thought about it a little longer anyway all my best friends I've gotten into fights with knock down drag out fights. Granted we were always drunk when it happened but think about that you shook his head as if he couldn't believe it strange creatures we are. Absolutely absolutely.

I want to segue to a couple of listener questions because there were some good ones this one is from Kip McKinuni 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 interview this is actually been recommended a few times.

Give 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 they may call them whatever they want but but actually the role that's being at the person is being asked to play is one of the victims victims are taken care of so after World War 2 which saw.

Casualty to completely eclipse even these terrible wars of our current day soldiers came back they didn't do multiple deployments they signed up and they were in the army until the war was done some of them were in for three four years straight and they came home and.

Basically they society said to these men and was almost all men in the you know comment society said these men like alright you're not fighting now we need you at home you know time to get the work we have a country to rebuild and they definitely were not thought of his victims of the war or of anything they were thought of much like I'm sure the Cheyenne and the Comanche in the Apache in the Sue in the kaiwa warriors who came back from the war path they were thought of as essential and functioning members of society now maybe they were missing a lot of.

Maybe they were missing a lamb 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 victim point is that it perpetuates the psychological state of passivity and trauma that you want the person to escape from right it's these sort of perceived. Lack of agency that.

Help produce the PTSD in the first place that is exactly and you think about what the official London official said about the place now we have neurotic striving amulets is and also I mean one thing you wrote about which was. The presence of fraud of course within disability claims and how.

Some that's who really suffer from severe PTSD don't want to go to these meetings because they're afraid they're going to be the living shit out of some guy who's clearly just doing it to receive a check some type of pain yeah you know it's a very politically dog a thing to bring up but I'm doing is repeating the accounts of soldiers and veterans. I mean the best thing a journalist can do is convey information and that's what I'm doing they.

There veterans I've talked to said they just they won't go to these group therapy sessions because you know one out of 20 is some guy who really didn't see any combat is trying to milk the system pretending to have trauma pretending that PTSD really doesn't even one of the tricky things the VA and trying to speed up the massive bureaucracy that they created over the last decades.

You try to speed that up speed up disability claims they said the soldiers if you self diagnosed think about this if you self diagnosed 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 disability check so humans being what they are some number of people are going to take advantage of that and we're a wealthy country we can easily absorb those costs so I have zero opinion about whether we should inquire further 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 or 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 shoot a lot of footage but I've never taken still photos okay so with the video footage that you shot and by the way I haven't told you this when we're strep was first shown like very very first shown in the northern California area I tracked down and drove out to see one of the very first showing so really I did thank you.

And I have some questions about that but what footage that you captured if any come to mind this is related to a question from Yasmeen Hayat if you had to choose let's just 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 2000s there was a big nighttime battle going on and there was a massed infantry assault against entrenched Taliban positions through my field must the Northern Alliance sort of you know so we'll war one style.

And it was at night and we were right behind the front lines and a wave of soldiers went to 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 flat but pick up track they're alive you know they've lost legs and traumatic

amputations I mean they were extremely messed up there alive most of them probably survive their anti personnel months so we were there where they were when they were brought into this sort of forward yield hospital tents that was lit with carousine lanterns right and this is rough this is World War one era medicine yeah and in the very bright light of these propane lanterns carousine 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 found later in my research that one of them 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

just it really tweaks people and I I had a moment of crisis I went a little crazy it felt like I went a little crazy am I just my brain just sort of stop functioning and I don't even have very 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 and the cold F can night and live 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 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 the communicate to your readers back in the United States everything about what war looks like including that so grab your damn notebook and grab your pen and walk in there and just write down what it is like to behold such a thing and as soon as I this is interesting right as soon as I had a purpose I was okay

myself given purpose was document this thing that you can barely bear to look at as soon as I had a job to do and I'm sure that's how the medics dealt with it too so 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 that moment I've been in plenty of wars till then but in that moment I became a war reporter

you mentioned not by name but Tim earlier yeah can you tell us who he was what happened and how it impacted you yeah Tim Heatherington was a wonderful brilliant English photographer who I was lucky enough to work with on my project in the Korongal Valley I wanted to document the experience of one platoon 30 40 50 men throughout one deployment and I wound up at a little warehouse 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 Korongal Valley and we both got hurt and we both came very close to getting killed out there is extraordinary experience and we became brothers really and we made a film called Restrepo won a lot of awards and then it was nominated for an Oscar we went off to Los Angeles in this amazing world of you know Los Angeles during the Oscars and I was married at the time and he had a girlfriend and we were all out there together

was incredible experience we didn't win 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 last moment I couldn't go for personal reasons and Tim went on his own and he was killed on April 20th in the city of Miss Rada in Libya by a mortar round

81 millimeter mortar that was fired by Kadoffi's forces outside of Miss Rada and he bled out in the back of a rebel pickup truck racing for the Miss Rada hospital and you know I got the awful phone call in in New York City and very very quickly decided I would never cover what I was going to do decided I would never cover more again it wasn't that I was scared of getting killed that's a fear that you have to confront early on and I sort of resolved by feelings about it

it's that in watching the news of his death and he was beloved by people including my wife Danielle I just love them I mean he just everyone love them and I watched the news of his death ripple ripple outwards from my apartment because I got the news first from my apartment outwards through all the people that he knew that he loved on out into people that he didn't even

know who love them on out through his country in 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 20 yep coincidentally the anniversary of Columbine Hitler's birthday oh there's all kinds of awful things that happened on April 20 for some reason what do you think your writing future will look like tribe is a really different book from my other books

it's an inquiry into something it's not a story it doesn't take place on a fishing boat or an outpost it's a meditation and an inquiry about a society in my society my country that I love very much and something feels very very wrong

in our country right now and I think if you look at the political discourse right now in this country it is completely toxic and actually more dangerous to our nation than ISIS is I mean really in real terms of how do we keep this country together for the next 250 years

ISIS is not going to be able to prevent us from doing that I'm sorry but we ourselves can and it's happening right now and my book is partly an attempt to make people think about what it means to belong to a group and this country is a group

so viewing ourselves that way this relates to a question from Bobby Richards working so closely with service members and vets what would be the one thing he would recommend that an American civilian could do for our vets not necessarily as a country but as individuals the main thing that I can think of is drawn from some of my research into American Indian ceremonies or returning warriors

in the eight 17 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 now you know whatever but it's this cathartic description of a warrior's 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 unit of universal in these ceremonies and so I had the idea I mean we're not going to go back to a tribal society and we can't we can't we're not you know you have to get rid of the car you know you have 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 the city hall in every community in this country on veterans day into an open forum for veterans

I have this idea veteran town halls where my website Sebastian Younger dot com is a page devoted to this you open up the town hall and a veteran from 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 they're going to say they missed the war

and it's going to make liberals uncomfortable and some of them are just to be clear you you consider yourself liberal I'm told liberal yeah yeah yeah as a journalist of neutral it's really important private person liberal 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 with 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 fault for it is okay as long as we process it all collectively it's not okay if we just make them deal with it it's not their war it's our war so all of us need to deal with it much like the American Indian tribes did in these harmonies an amazing thing

so we did this once in Marblehead Massachusetts and Seth Molten 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 civilian and you like to say I support the troops with that literally meant on that day last year in Marblehead Massachusetts was the 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 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 because the country is 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

serious 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 alright alright I'm ready let me get ready here we go alright I'll let you let you limber up okay I'm doing a little shadow box and I love me 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 incredibly courageous way

how do you define courage or bravery courage is risking or sacrificing your life for others what is the book or books that you have given to others most often as a gift at playing 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 name

of a kind of you have to meet at some point you guys would get along famously also one of his favorites the last couple of years at play in the fields of the Lord it's a novel by Peter Matheson it takes place in the jungles of South America and it's about a sue Indian named Louis Moon

who grew up in a reservation in the 1970s and he goes down in Brazil to meet his what he considers his four bears 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

fantastic writer what would your close friends say you're exceptionally good at 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 stowick this is actually not one of my typical questions when I'm going to throw this one this is from I think it's Robbie Fry

it looks like a very Dutch name if you could combine three different writers into one super sia and 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 I think I would have to pick Kwame MacArthur Peter Matheson and Joan Didian good choices all let's see here where were you so your first commercial book success the perfect storm how old were you when that came out

I was 35 years old okay 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 best

seller 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 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 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 can all learn from each other

your stage fright goes away and I had a horrific case of stage fright when my book came out how do you feel now when you're getting ready for a talk like your TED talk oh I don't think twice about it I mean I 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 is most positively impacted your life

I think sapiens sapiens yeah I mean that book it's a fun book to read it's amazing I mean I just started looking at everything differently like I mean I love that book and books are I mean a book is a kind of thing of magic it contains a book you know verse of information so and it's cheap at the price so I that maybe it's unfair to use a book

hundred dollars or less I mean I think one of the best values you can buy for a hundred you can get for a hundred dollars and acts good acts you can almost anything with a good acts any particular type of acts what are the characteristics of a good acts it can't be cheap wood and the half it's got to be good steel I mean I you know I don't even know how to evaluate this basically the more you pay for an acts the better quality it is and the longer the last and the better will cut

it really really sharp and you can cut not as fast as chainsaw I've used chainsaws 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 now I had to take one thing to take into the woods with me would be an acts I was just thinking like how would you open a tunic and with an act like you

that's so easy man open it oh yeah yeah you know I remember when I was a young man in my twenties and I was living just stupidly in some stupid apartment in some of 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 cans of tomato sauce and pasta right and she came over and I realized I didn't have a little bit of it but I knew the answer when 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 tomatoes 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 that's right yeah exactly she probably still would leave that you are a serial killer is going to take her head off that's right oh my god 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 clichés these 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 an original way or don't say it but your waist and everybody's time including your own if you write in 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 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 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 like doctors provide information when they look at your the x-ray of your lungs after you spoke for 10 years you need accurate forensics that's right what do you think your 70 year 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 like stop exploring when you 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 and I think my 70 year old self would say just really be careful that you don't hear on one side of the other because you have a ill-conceived idea of who you are

it's just fine line it's a tough balance yeah it is a tough person 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

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 you generally manifest itself is a lot of insomnia in my case I'm just like okay like this idea that's been pestering me like I just need to get out of my head not into 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 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 the one was a collection of unless you're comparing yourself to the writer's writing 20 whatever like I you can always be secure right no I've written

I never really be James baddest 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 as I finished it and I just thought thank God someone wrote that book like the world really needed it and the books that I write maybe I'm flattering myself

but it feels to me like the world needs this book and I know that sounds horribly great use 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 some probably all of the biggest successes I know personally they were scratching their own it yeah something they felt needed to exist

absolutely if you had one billboard anywhere and could put anything you want on it what would you put on it I think I would put the word read read it's the only I was talking about this recently with some people you know we we we don't live in small groups anymore we evolve the living 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 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 in some ways in a country is advanced as ours with nuclear weapons everything else is even more important than when we lived in groups of 50 I mean it's

quite old that we have that conversation in 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 is 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 books a kind of sacred object and sacred in the sense that our society I don't think we'll 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 and sketched out by hand but I'm going to tell people where they can find you and then I'm also going to put this in the show notes of course for everyone but is there

anything that is a parting comment you would like my listeners to meditate on consider do well one of the questions I ask in my book is who would you die for what ideas would you die for the answer to those questions for most of human history would

come very readily to the to any person's mouth you know any command she could tell you instantly who they would die for what they would die for and in modern society gets more and more complicated and when you lose the ready answer to those in 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 you owe your community and in our case our

communities 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 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 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 in the circumstances in which we find ourselves and war just happens to be very helpful circumstance in which we can find some illumination into the 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 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast all spelled out and as always and until next time thank you for listening you all you didn't know I did love that freedom kind of stuff everything that happened with Giants and Computer W Κ 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.blogslashfriday.

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