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

If you want a better understanding of warriors, tribal societies, human nature, and what we can learn from it all, this is for you. My podcast guest is Sebastian Junger (@sebastianjunger https://twitter.com/sebastianjunger), the #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Perfect Storm http://www.sebastianjunger.com/the-perfect-storm, Fire http://www.sebastianjunger.com/fire-by-sebastian-junger, A Death in Belmont http://www.sebastianjunger.com/a-death-in-belmont, War http://www.sebastianjunger.com/war-by-sebastian-junger, and Tribe http://www.sebastianjunger.com/tribe-by-sebastian-junger. As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film "Restrepo," http://www.sebastianjunger.com/films-1 a feature-length documentary (co-directed with Tim Hetherington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Hetherington), was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. "Restrepo," which chronicled the deployment of a platoon of U. S. soldiers in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, is widely considered to have broken new ground in war reporting. Junger has since produced and directed three additional documentaries about war and its aftermath. In this episode, we cover rites of passage (and their importance), warfare, the art of great non-fiction writing, PTSD, evolutionary biology, and much more. Some of the topics will no doubt offend many of you, and this is a good thing. I urge you to bite your lip, if need be, and listen to the entire episode. There are gems within, including hilarious stories, surprising statistics, and tear-jerking epiphanies. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by FreshBooks https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email. FreshBooks is a bookkeeping software, which is used by a ton of the start-ups I advise and many of the contractors I work with. It is the easiest way to send invoices, get paid, track your time, and track your clients. FreshBooks https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email tells you when your clients have viewed your invoices, helps you customize your invoices, track your hours, automatically organize your receipts, have late payment reminders sent automatically and much more. Right now you can get a free month of complete and unrestricted use. https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email You do not need a credit card for the trial. To claim your free month, go to FreshBooks.com/Tim https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email and enter "Tim https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email" in the "how did you hear about us section." This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service http://99designs.com/tim. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you're happy with or your money back. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Sebastian Junger?

  No, we're seeing appropriate timing.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks is used by a ton of the startups that I work with or advise. Many of the fastest growing. It is used by almost all of the contractors that I work with. It is the easiest way online to send invoices, get paid, track your time for invoicing, track your clients, so they get to the point of paying you, all that stuff that you could possibly find. And right now, you can get a free month of complete unrestricted use, and you do not need a credit card for the trial. To claim your free month, just go to freshbooks.com/tim and enter "Tim" in the "How did you hear about us?" section. You can, of course, customize it to fit your brand with your own logo and color. And FreshBooks shows you whether or not, for instance, a client has looked at the invoice. They can

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  send late payment reminders to your clients automatically, so you do not have to think about it or chase them down. And you can track your hours. You can do all sorts of things. There are mobile outlets. You take pictures of your receipts, and FreshBooks will organize them for you later. It is a great piece of software, and if you are in a small business, or maybe a fast-growing business that is feeling growing pains, and you need to streamline, then this is a place to look. Because certainly, for me, this has been a headache in the past, and it doesn't have to be a headache for you. So check out freshbooks.com/tim and try it out and see what you think.

• 1:45Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a great partner for creating and growing your business. It's a one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs, whether that's a logo, website, business card, or anything else. I use 99designs to get book cover prototypes for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number-one New York Times bestseller. I also use them for banner ads, illustrations, and other things. With 99designs, designers Around the world compete to create the best design for you. You give feedback and then pick your favorite. You end up happy or you get your money back. It's very simple. You can check out a few of my own designs and those of yours, meaning Tim Ferriss Show listeners, at 99designs.com/tim.

• 2:27Tim Ferriss?

  And right now, my listeners, you guys, will get a free $99 upgrade on your first design. That's 99designs.com/tim. Check it out.

• 2:39Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gents. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, whether they are chess prodigies, hedge fund managers, actors, military strategists, athletes, really anything and everything, because you find a lot of commonalities across these areas of expertise. This is an unusual episode, and I'm going to start with a question. Why did Ben Franklin complain that settlers along the frontier were constantly absconding to live with the American Indian tribes, but that the opposite never happened? This episode, we're going to talk about human nature quite a lot and look at evolutionary biology. If you want a better understanding of warriors, tribal societies, human nature, including

• 3:21Tim Ferriss?

  the pieces that we might dislike or deny, and what we can learn from it all, then this episode is for you. My guest is Sebastian Younger, an incredible writer, number one New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont War, and his latest book Tribe, which I read in about a day and a half. Just ingested it. Rapid fire. As an award-winning journalist, a contributor to Vanity Fair, contributing editor, that is, and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world, has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award, and he's also a documentary filmmaker, whose debut film Restrepo, a feature-length doc co-directed with Tim Hetherington, which was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

• 4:04Tim Ferriss?

  Restrepo, for those who haven't seen it, chronicles the deployment of a platoon of US soldiers in Afghanistan's Khorangol Valley, and it is widely considered to have broken new ground in war reporting. It is very rugged and raw. Younger has since produced and directed three additional docs about War and its aftermath. In our conversation, which took place at my house, we cover rites of passage and their importance, his entire career, warfare, the art of great nonfiction writing and storytelling, investigative, or rather participatory journalism, PTSD, and much, much more. Please be forewarned that some of these topics will no doubt offend many of you, and this is a good thing. And I'm going to paraphrase here, but I believe

• 4:45Tim Ferriss?

  it was Mae West who said, "Those who are offended easily should be offended more often." And I urge you to bite your lip if need be, step outside your comfort zone, and listen to the entire episode. There are many gems within, including all sorts of hilarious stories, surprising statistics, and also some tear-jerking epiphanies and tales that Sebastian has to share. He's lived an incredible life, a very tough and rugged life, certainly in his deployments, or rather, assignments that were in war-torn countries. And there's a lot to be learned here. So, please be patient. Please listen to this conversation with Sebastian Younger.

• 5:29Tim Ferriss?

  Sebastian, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It's nice to be here. It's so exciting to finally get a chance to hang, because we have a mutual friend in Josh Waitzkin, who's been on the podcast twice. For those who don't know, the basis for Searching for Bobby Fischer, but the book and the movie, but a lot more than that. I mean, a real masterful and kind soul, who's really taught me a lot. But the first encounter we had was at Josh's wedding. And I guess we were piecing it together, and that was probably like 10 years ago? Something like that. 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?

• 6:13Tim Ferriss?

  I'm reading the biography of Thomas Paine, one of the

• 6:18Sebastian Junger?

  Intellectual Fathers of American Independence from Britain in the 1770s.

• 6:24Tim Ferriss?

  And somehow, when, this is maybe TMI for people listening, but Sebastian arrived before I got back to my place. And I was doing some acro yoga, a long story, and then you had picked up the Letters from a Stoic. And did the Stoics come up in the book about pain?

• 6:44Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, the Stoics, the Greek Stoics were greatly abired by pain. I didn't know much about them. I knew the word. And I'd heard of Seneca, but I'm incredibly, I'm sort of half illiterate, right, and or untutored. And what the book said about the Stoics was amazing. And, you know, I'm not religious. I didn't grow up going to church. I don't believe in God. And so if you're like me, you're always looking for a way to sort of order the universe. That's inspiring or reassuring and sort of makes sense of things. And so what they said about the Stoics, I really identified with.

• 7:25Sebastian Junger?

  I'm like, oh, I gotta learn more about the Stoics. And then here I was, before I took a nap on your couch, I sort of pawed through your book collection over there. And there was, there was the Letters of Seneca and I grabbed it and sat down and I almost started whooping. I mean, with pleasure. I mean, the things that he was writing 2000 years ago were so modern, so amazing, so essential. And I, you know, I, I just thought I have to get this book immediately.

• 7:55Tim Ferriss?

  So you, 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. So let's, let's talk about your career with chainsaws. Can you give us some context?

• 8:18Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, absolutely. So I studied anthropology in college because it interested me and that.

• 8:24Tim Ferriss?

  That was on the East Coast?

• 8:25Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, Wesleyan University in Connecticut. And I had no interest in being an anthropologist, but it actually helped me throughout my career as a writer. After I got out of college, I sort of walled around, you know, I waited tables. I did various things to earn money while I was trying to become a writer. And.

• 8:44Sebastian Junger?

  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 eighty, ninety feet in the air with a chainsaw on a rope, taking trees down in pieces. You know, rigging, rigging branches and lowering them as I cut them and taking off the tops of trees and taking them down all the way to the ground. It was extremely dangerous work, or I should say it's dangerous if you make a mistake. There isn't any random danger in the top of a tree. And I realized at 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. No one, it's not a random, it's not a situation where something random will kill me.

• 9:28Sebastian Junger?

  That was very reassuring and it also trained me to really focus on being in the present moment. Well, at one point I wasn't in the present moment and the chainsaw hit the back of my leg and tore open the back of my leg. And I, you know, I'd been a marathon runner and stuff, and I was super worried about my Achilles tendon. So it hit your lower leg, your entire back? It, I managed to drag it across the back of my ankle, right where the Achilles is. And I turned the chainsaw, I was way up in a tree, you know, on a rope. And I turned the chainsaw off and I clipped it to my belt and, and looked down and I pulled my leg, I pulled the wound open because I wanted, you know, you go into shock and you get very clinical immediately. Right?

• 10:10Sebastian Junger?

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

• 10:36Sebastian Junger?

  I had this thought that people die all the time doing dangerous jobs in this country. They're mostly working class, working class men. And they do, they work in industries that are very dangerous, drilling for oil, logging, commercial fishing, that the nation needs done. And they die in numbers comparable to soldiers in war, actually. But they don't get acknowledged, they don't get honored. And I thought, maybe I'll write about dangerous jobs. And that set me on course to write my first book called The Perfect Storm, about a huge storm that, among other things, sank a commercial fishing boat at sea.

• 11:13Tim Ferriss?

  So there, 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. There's so many things I want to ask you about, and so many things that Josh wanted me to ask you also. But let's, let's go back to the rappelling down trees for a second. How did you get that job? I mean, what qualified you or did not qualify you? How did that come to pass?

• 11:36Sebastian Junger?

  Like all, well, like many good stories, it started in a bar. I was, I was broke. 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, 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 start, he sort of trained me how to climb. And the great thing about climbing was that I could make, I mean, for an unemployed freelance writer in the, in the late eighties, I could make a couple hundred dollars a day cash.

• 12:19Sebastian Junger?

  I could make 500 bucks a day, even a thousand dollars a day, depending on the job. And so it was, and I could, so I could work one day a week and sort of live off it. And it was the perfect job for someone who was trying to do something else and needed some time.

• 12:33Tim Ferriss?

  The athleticism, we were talking about this when we were having lunch together. What was your, what did your running times look like when you were at your peak?

• 12:42Sebastian Junger?

  My running times were almost fast enough. That's what they look like from my perspective.

• 12:46Tim Ferriss?

  What was your, what was your mile?

• 12:48Sebastian Junger?

  I ran 412 for the mile.

• 12:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's a fucking fast mile. I mean, from my perspective, that, that seems extremely fast. And then you got into marathons after that.

• 12:57Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, I ran a 904 for the two mile, 2405 for five miles and a 221 marathon. Those are my sort of, the set of distance records that I had.

• 13:07Tim Ferriss?

  So the, the perfect storm. I heard you described, or read you being described as, based on that work. And 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, the, the, 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, how did you develop that leanness at that point in your life?

• 13:44Sebastian Junger?

  Well, you know, I, I never studied English and 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, you don't not read, you know? And I read John McPhee, Joan Didion, Peter Matheson, Ernest Hemingway, of course, a little bit of Faulkner.

• 14:17Sebastian Junger?

  I mean, I could go on, but I, but I, I gravitated towards. Language that was efficient and lean and innovative. And when I would read a book that I liked, I would think about, like John McPhee, I would think about, why is it I like it? What is it about the writing that appeals to me? And when I, and even more importantly, when I read books I didn't like, I tried to figure out what was it about that sentence, about that paragraph that repels me? And that was how I learned to write. And it's a sort of process of natural selection. I just kept reading things that reinforced the style that I was drawn to anyway.

• 15:02Sebastian Junger?

  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.

• 15:11Tim Ferriss?

  What drew you to writing? So you weren't taking classes explicitly focused on turning you into a journalist? It doesn't sound like, or a writer. So what drew you to writing?

• 15:22Sebastian Junger?

  Well, it happened quite suddenly. I was a good distance runner in college and I had to write a thesis. And I'd heard that the Navajo had this very strong tradition, ancient tradition of running. And they were still, they were sort of still at it in a kind of traditional way. And they were amazing sort of track and cross country athletes. And they had blended the two disciplines. And so I did my field work on the Navajo Reservation. I spent a summer there. I trained with their best runners. It was 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.

• 16:04Sebastian Junger?

  And apparently thesis titles are supposed to have a colon in them. And I didn't know that. I just called it Navajo long distance running. And I

• 16:14Sebastian Junger?

  I just came alive academically doing that. I mean, I was a pretty indifferent student. I was much more of an athlete than a student. And I just came alive and the idea that you could go out into the world and gather information, gather research, interview people and bring it back and then turn it into words that people will read and be moved by, informed by and moved by and maybe changed by. That to me was just such an extraordinary idea. And so I thought, maybe what I'll, maybe I'll be a journalist. That sounds like journalism. Maybe I'll try to be a journalist. And I literally graduated with, you know, my graduation plan, post-graduation plan was, maybe I'll try to be a journalist. Like, that was literally the plan I had in my head.

• 16:58Tim Ferriss?

  Seems to have worked out.

• 16:59Sebastian Junger?

  Well, eventually, I mean, eventually, in between, I was a pretty bad waiter in Washington DC and in Cambridge and, you know, like, I mean, I, it took a while. I mean, it was, my first book came out when I was 35 and I had virtually no income from writing before that.

• 17:14Tim Ferriss?

  No, so the, the first book was The Perfect Storm, or no?

• 17:18Sebastian Junger?

  Yes.

• 17:18Tim Ferriss?

  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 incredible.

• 17:27Sebastian Junger?

  That was the next long thing that I wrote, yeah. I never wrote some article, you know, I, 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 an income I could live on.

• 17:39Tim Ferriss?

  Did you sell the book before you wrote it or write it before you sold it?

• 17:44Sebastian Junger?

  Um, I worked on the story for about a year and just sort of on my own dime. And, uh, and then, and I wrote, I wrote a magazine piece that Outside Magazine took. And then I got a book contract from WW Norton, a very, very modest book contract, but it got, you know, it got me going.

• 18:05Tim Ferriss?

  Based on the magazine piece?

• 18:07Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, and I, you know, I ginned up some outline that, you know, sort of showed how I was gonna expand the story.

• 18:12Tim Ferriss?

  And you already had quite a bit in your back pocket then at that point?

• 18:15Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, I already had a bill crank full of notes and, you know, whatever. I mean, I already done, you know, a year's worth of work on this. But I was used to, I was used to, I mean, everything I'd ever written. I'd written on my own time and then tried to sell it, right? I was constantly sort of peddling finished pieces of writing.

• 18:33Tim Ferriss?

  Spec work.

• 18:34Sebastian Junger?

  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, and it was my first published piece up there and it was called Towing the Line. And, and that was my sort of entry into journalism.

• 19:09Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 19:21Sebastian Junger?

  Oh, I did tree work throughout. I mean, I, you know, I didn't, my advance was pretty small and, and, I mean, and as was appropriate. I mean, I was a totally 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 throughout the, you know, a couple of days a week, I'd be up in the trees. But I also, after I, after I finished my book proposal, by some miracle, I had an agent, by the way, who I hadn't made a dime for him for 10 years, right? But he liked my writing, right? God bless him.

• 19:50Tim Ferriss?

  How did he get in touch? How did you guys connect?

• 19:53Sebastian Junger?

  I met him, his name's Stuart Kraszewski and we're, he's still my agent. We're really good friends. And he said it was, the way he met me was sort of the ultimate sort of agent's nightmare. His, a client of his who wrote academic papers, in other words, not a big paying gig, but he sort of handled, he handled the academic career of this guy who was a Shakespeare scholar. Okay. It took him three hours of gear, you know, whatever. That guy's college roommate was my father.

• 20:25Sebastian Junger?

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

• 20:54Tim Ferriss?

  Long-term investment.

• 20:55Sebastian Junger?

  It was, he saw something there and, and I'm eternally grateful to him. But I, so I gave him my book proposal based on the article and then I went off to Bosnia. I wanted to be a war reporter. And in case the author thing didn't work out, when there was no reason to think it was going to work out, and I didn't want to do tree work my whole life. So I went off, there was a civil war in Bosnia and I went off to learn how to be a war reporter. And I was there, I, you know, I finally came home in 94 because Stuart sent me a fax saying, I managed to sell your book. You gotta come home. And I came home.

• 21:28Tim Ferriss?

  What, during the period that you were up in the trees a few days a week, what did your, or once you'd sold the book, I'm not sure, I'm mixing up my chronologies a little bit, but what did your writing process, your daily or weekly schedule look like at that point? How do you write? I know it's a very boring, maybe often asked question, but I'm fascinated by this and Josh wanted me to dig into it.

• 21:55Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah. 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 aren't other rules for literary nonfiction or anything. It's all journalism as far as I'm concerned. If you're a journalist, the first thing you have to do is do your research, right? Because you need something, you're, you're, you're writing about the real world and you need facts and quotes and interviews and all that. So. My writing process really starts out in the world as I'm researching a story, or in a library, or on the internet, or whatever, as I'm researching a story. Fiction writers, they depend on some, this weird sort of pipeline to God, right?

• 22:39Sebastian Junger?

  I mean, they're trying to, they're trying to reimagine the world in a way that's never been done before, and reproduce it on the page, and have people enter this fictional world and be riveted by it. And that's, 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 gonna talk to you. And I mean God figuratively, I don't believe in God, but the creative gods.

• 23:01Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 23:02Sebastian Junger?

  And, but for a journalist, it's much more like carpentry. You get the lumber, you get the bricks, you build the basement, you start putting it together. I mean, it is a process, and there's a lot of inspiration in the actual language that you use. But it's much more procedural than I think fiction writing probably is.

• 23:20Tim Ferriss?

  The, you mentioned McPhee. So the only, or the most impactful writing class I ever took was with McPhee. It was a small seminar of about 12 to 15 students.

• 23:30Sebastian Junger?

  Wow.

• 23:30Tim Ferriss?

  At Princeton. And, so you'll appreciate this, just as a side note. So we spent 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 had gathered, in all of these elaborate forms. And some would be like a seesaw, others would be a circle, others would be in some kind of weird, like cylindrical, abstract piece of art. But there was a visual representation of how he saw the story

• 24:12Tim Ferriss?

  in its visual structure, and, or visual representation. But, and this is gonna segue somewhere. But I remember, we had to apply to get into the class. And I don't think, and I still don't think I'm a particularly good writer, there are much better writers there, but... We had to do short assignments every week and they would be on the most, 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.

• 24:53Tim Ferriss?

  And he handed our, her, our assignments back and he goes, now, as I'm handing these out, I want you guys to remember, you're all good writers, so don't get demoralized. And there was more red ink than black ink on the page. I mean, he just eviscerated everyone and not in a malicious way, but he took out all of the bloat, all of the redundancy, all of the ambiguity. And for those people interested, he, there are a number of interviews he did for, I think, the Paris Review on the art of nonfiction, which are just fantastic. But what I wanted to ask you was, and then we're going to, we're certainly going to spend a lot of time talking about your experiences in war and with warriors and veterans of different types.

• 25:37Tim Ferriss?

  Who were some of the most influential mentors or influences you had, say, before the age of 30?

• 25:46Sebastian Junger?

  Well, let me just say, McPhee, I mean, you're very lucky to have taken the class with him.

• 25:53Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, so lucky.

• 25:54Sebastian Junger?

  He was, he was a mentor that I didn't personally know, for me. Through his works, he was. And it's very interesting to hear what you said about him mapping out structure because I think, 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, I don't, it's not quite architect, like geometric shapes, but it's, it's very,

• 26:40Sebastian Junger?

  It's very visual. It represented completely visually and I feel it like when I get the right shape to something, I feel it. It's a very interesting process that for me is, it feels, it's something that feels like the divine spark that is finally sort of like blessed me with its presence.

• 27:01Tim Ferriss?

  So let's say you have your, your box full of notes. So you've, you've dug into a given topic. You've gone out in the field and we could use the perfect storm for this example, because perhaps 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, what's the process of turning that heap of information into something that might become a book?

• 27:31Sebastian Junger?

  I read through all my interviews with a red magic marker, marker and I redline the stuff, the good quotes. And I read through all of the research material and I keep and I underline the stuff that's interesting to me. And then I go through everything I've underlined and I just write lists of what I consider the assets that I have to work with. And once I have those lists, they cover many pieces of paper, then I'll start to clump them into sort of general topics, you know, history of fishing in New England and the physics of wave motion. I'm, I'm referencing topics in the perfect storm, nightlife in

• 28:14Sebastian Junger?

  Gloucester, you know, whatever. And, and then once I have those big chunks, I start to, and this is where the visual, visualness comes in, visuality comes in. I start to try to picture, how could I arrange those in a way where the energy and the interest in the reader gathers and builds and then achieves some sort of catharsis towards the end. And it's a very intuitive process, but I gotta say, I could never do it without writing it down. I mean, I mean, it's a, I'm literally moving ideas around on a piece of paper until they look right.

• 28:54Sebastian Junger?

  And, and that's the part of writing that to me is almost closer to art than a sort of intellectual pursuit.

• 29:01Tim Ferriss?

  I, so I used to do this physically and then I ended up using a piece of software called Scrivener, which is originally for playwrights that allows you to move pieces around like this. And so I've done my last three books using this software called Scrivener, which allows me to move these pieces around without separate files for each document. So I can actually see sort of the table of contents as I rearrange it. I can re-section things. It's proven really helpful for me. Now, McPhee, just to talk about daily routines. So he is one of those guys in the nonfiction world. I can't do this because I want to slam my head in a car door if I try this for one day or like jump out a window. He literally sits down like eight, and once he has his information,

• 29:44Tim Ferriss?

  8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, come hell or high water, he's like staring at the blank page with a break for lunch and swimming as I remember it. And it just drove me to madness to do that. It was so depressing. So I tend to do my best writing, and I wish this were different, honestly, but my best synthesis, I can do interviews, research, all that throughout the day. But in terms of piecing it together into some type of narrative, it's like 10 or 11:00 PM to like 5:00 AM. That's just my window for whatever reason. Do you, do you write throughout the day? Do you tend to do your best writing in the mornings, at night? What does that look like?

• 30:20Sebastian Junger?

  I do my best writing when something's due.

• 30:24Tim Ferriss?

  Spoken as a real journalist who's actually worked for papers and whatnot.

• 30:28Sebastian Junger?

  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, finish up a magazine piece. But that intensity, you know, it's like athletes, you know? I mean, you know, it, athletes in the big game or the big race or whatever. I mean, that, that intensity can bring out something that you didn't even know you had access to, much less embodied, right? And So the time, you know, I have a cup of coffee and I sit down and I write for a couple hours till I get bored. If I feel that I'm blocked in my writing, usually with that blocked meaning I just can't write the next section. I keep rewriting and it doesn't work and

• 31:06Sebastian Junger?

  it's stuck. It's not that I'm blocked. It's that I don't have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic. It always means, it's not that I can't find the right words. It's that I don't have the ammunition.

• 31:22Tim Ferriss?

  Right. The words aren't there in the first place.

• 31:23Sebastian Junger?

  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 like be such a fine writer that you can sort of thread the needle and get through a thin patch in your research just because you're such a great prose artist.

• 31:41Tim Ferriss?

  Use some linguistic smoke and mirrors to gloss over the fact that you don't have the research.

• 31:47Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, it's just bullshit. And, you know, literary writers, 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.

• 32:03Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think is the, if you were, say, giving a, this would be an odd place to give a commencement speech, but commencement speech to graduating seniors in high school.

• 32:20Sebastian Junger?

  I've done that.

• 32:21Tim Ferriss?

  You have? Great. Perfect. Well, then let me not ask the question I was going to ask. What did you talk about?

• 32:26Sebastian Junger?

  I was speaking at a very, very kind of elite school, private school in New York City. And these kids were going off either to college or to high school. I can't remember. Anyway, these are very, very privileged, very smart, very educated children. And exceedingly accomplished parents, right? And I said to them something like,

• 32:59Sebastian Junger?

  The most, the hardest thing you're ever, your hardest thing you're ever gonna do? I was like, you're programmed to succeed. You guys are programmed to succeed. The hardest thing you're ever gonna 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, you'll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work. That's not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in. And you have to, you have to do the hardest thing that you have not been prepared for in this school or any school. You have to, you have to be prepared to fail. And, and that's how you're gonna expand yourself

• 33:39Sebastian Junger?

  and grow. And then you will really, as you work through that process of failure and learning, then you will really deepen into the human being you're capable of being. And Matt's four years ago, who knows how it's going for them?

• 33:52Tim Ferriss?

  Well, the, we were, we were chatting about this before we started recording a little bit, which is how, I was commenting on how accidental my career, and I'd kind of put that in air quotes, is. I mean, I couldn't have possibly planned this path. And you echoed something to a similar effect. And on the, on the, on the failure point, I mean, we were talking since, since you're now training in boxing, made me think of, I think it's Customato, who is the most formative trainer of Mike Tyson, who said, you know, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. So, along those lines, the question I was going to ask, it was specific to journalism. So if people came to you,

• 34:36Tim Ferriss?

  these kids, graduating seniors, and they said, I want to be a journalist. It's a, 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?

• 34:47Sebastian Junger?

  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. Like, I feel it's like one of the note, like, in my book, Tribe, I really, I really try not to tell the country what I think we all should do.

• 35:07Tim Ferriss?

  I might try to pry bar that out of you, but.

• 35:09Sebastian Junger?

  Well, I, you know, I, I think it's, there are ways, there'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, so what I would say to someone like that is, what worked for me was to read an enormous amount, to think about what I read and why I liked it or didn't like it. Anthropology is an amazing discipline that gives you tools to understand almost every cultural, social situation in the world. And, and you, but mostly you must have an enormous appetite for humanity and for life and for the world. I mean, you really have to feel like you cannot fill yourself

• 35:53Sebastian Junger?

  up enough with this amazing place that we live in. Like, if you have that feeling and sincerely have it, you'll do okay, if not at writing, at something.

• 36:06Tim Ferriss?

  And that, that hunger for humanity, that interest in humanity, is that what drove you to want to go into a war-torn country or territory and observe and write and capture? Or was it something else? Like, why did that come about specifically?

• 36:24Sebastian Junger?

  There's a few things. You know, I grew up in a, 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,

• 36:39Sebastian Junger?

  I'd never really been challenged. I'd never been faced with a situation that I didn't know I could survive.

• 36:46Sebastian Junger?

  And having studied a lot of anthropology, you know, through college, as I moved through my twenties, I thought, this is ridiculous. I'm not an adult yet. I'm not a man yet. I mean, you, you, you cross that threshold into adulthood, into manhood, by facing something that could destroy you. And, and initiation rites around, in tribal societies around the world, um, their main purpose is to confront young men and women, young women have a different challenge that they have to face, is equally, equally daunting. But, young men face this challenge of, in these initiation rites, of sort of demonstrating that they will face the most painful, scariest thing, things possible for their community, for

• 37:27Sebastian Junger?

  their people. Um, and that's adulthood, and that's manhood. And, you know, I'd hit thirty, and, other than, you know, a chainsaw injury here or there, I hadn't really been tested in a real way. And, my father grew up in Europe during World War II, and war is this sort of archetypal ordeal. It's a sort of ancient, in some ways, ancient thing, and it's a very, very, um, in a lot of societies, it is the gate, for better or worse, I mean, I know there's a political conversation here that we can have, but, for better or worse, it's, many societies sort of see it as the gateway to adulthood, to manhood,

• 38:07Sebastian Junger?

  specifically for men. And, I went off to Bosnia, partly because I wanted to become a war reporter, and I was, you know, sort of at a loss as to how to make a living and, you know, live an adult life, and partly because I felt like I was still a child, and that war would transform me in some ways that nothing else could.

• 38:27Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to, this is, this is, uh, jumping around, uh, 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. Uh, this one, of course, because of the, the background, the shared friendship that we have with Josh. And my familiarity with your work made me 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.

• 39:06Tim Ferriss?

  There are some fantastic stories in this book. And I had follow up questions, even if we weren't recording this, like over a bottle of wine that I wanted to ask you. So can you please explain what skinwalkers are? You mentioned the Navajo earlier and why they're in this book? Because I wanted to hear more about this.

• 39:27Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah. So, skinwalkers were this thing that I'd 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 werewolves. These were now, the belief was that there were certain Navajo, mostly men, who had basically turned, right? They'd lost their humanity and they'd become animals. But animals are a source of power in a lot of native societies. They became animals

• 40:04Sebastian Junger?

  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. And that these skin, they were called skinwalkers, and that these skinwalkers were, they were basically adopting the skills and powers of a warrior, except they were using it against their own people and that they would kill their fellow Navajo and eat them in the middle of the night. And the

• 40:47Sebastian Junger?

  Navajo in 1983, on the reservation where I lived, were

• 40:52Sebastian Junger?

  Absolutely terrified of this phenomenon, as terrified as they, I'm sure they were 100 years prior. And I gotta say, the desert out there is a big lonely place. And I started to feel their terror. I mean, I, 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 of a sudden, there I was in my trailer, you know, very, very scared at certain moments of these things and of these skinwalkers.

• 41:34Sebastian Junger?

  And so I, as I, as I wrote about it in my thesis, I said, you know, the skinwalkers are basically the, 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, no feeling of protectiveness, of humanity towards his neighbors, can kill more people than the enemy can.

• 42:13Sebastian Junger?

  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, and, and it gave me the idea that the mass shooters in Aurora, Colorado, and at Sandy Hook, and we all know the, the names, that they are our society's version of the skinwalkers.

• 42:40Tim Ferriss?

  So the, 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. So, and it's really, I think, a discussion that I hunger for, that is, I feel hard to have in many different, sort of modern, modern.

• 43:17Tim Ferriss?

  I'm struggling for language here because it's a feeling that I get very frustrated by, and that is like a discussion of manhood and rites of passage and the clear historical importance of some of these bonds forged in extreme circumstances between men that in the safety of these sort of cocoons that we have in various cities or elsewhere do not exist, 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 forbidden. Like a lot of these topics just don't get broached. But I'd love for you to talk a little bit

• 43:57Tim Ferriss?

  about your experience with, I think this was in Spain with the Viking helmet.

• 44:03Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Tim Ferriss?

  Because 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.

• 44:17Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah. I mean, and I think our society, which really, I feel, really does strive, I mean, just to address your earlier point about political correctness, I think we really are, in a very righteous way, striving for fairness and equality throughout our society. I think we really are. And it makes it, but we're also the product of our biology and our evolution. And the two are not easy partners, right? I mean, throughout the mammalian world, males and females are built differently and do different things and are good at different things. That's just a fact of nature. If we want the sexes to be equal in our society,

• 45:00Sebastian Junger?

  those inherent differences become potentially problematic. And as a result, instead of trying to figure out how to reconcile those very real differences in an equitable system, People and well-meaning people, that some of them are good friends of mine, would just rather you not acknowledge the differences. And that, there's a short-term logic to that, but there's a long-term loss. You know, and eventually, no, we, we won't have real equality in this society until those unnegotiable differences are actually incorporated into our equality. Um, and, um, at any rate, that's why, you know, what you brought up about sort of PC thinking, it's, it can be very infuriating, but it's a funny thing. It's infuriating even though it's trying to do the right thing.

• 45:45Sebastian Junger?

  But it's still infuriating.

• 45:46Tim Ferriss?

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

• 46:26Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, well, one of the things that's interesting is that if you, if you take passersby in a moment of crisis, I mean, every, everyone will jump into a, a burning building to save their child, maybe to save their spouse, possibly their, their parents-in-law, you know, but whatever, you have sort of familiar relations and people will risk their lives to, to help the people that they love, and it makes sense, right? But if you look at situations in public, in this anonymous society that we have, and someone's in danger, who goes to their aid, right? It happens all the time in New York, someone falls onto the subway tracks, and the train is coming, who jumps down onto the tracks to help them?

• 47:10Sebastian Junger?

  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 sort of in the, on the spot, in the moment decision to jump onto some railroad tracks while a train's coming. It's not that they're braver. It's that they have psychological and physical predispositions and capacities that allow them, in fact, promote them to do that. So if you look at these stories, it's something like 95% of bystander rescues are performed by men, okay?

• 47:55Sebastian Junger?

  So when you have a society that's encountering a difficulty, and that can either be the Blitz in London, which I write about, or that could be a group of coal miners who were trapped in a coal mine disaster in the 1950s in Canada. You need people who are in the quote "male role" of rescuing and risk-taking. But then this other thing is important, and it's a, and it's a kind of moral courage. And it does not require spontaneous muscular action with this complete disregard for your own life, right? That's not what's required. As important as that is, there's something else, moral courage, where you, you basically

• 48:39Sebastian Junger?

  are like providing the moral fiber for the group, and you, you act as a kind of conscience for the group. And women are very, very good at that. And they did a study of, 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, if, you know, if you're a Dutch farmer and you have a, you know, Jewish family in your basement, you're dead. Yeah, you're executed. Women were more considerably more likely to make that decision than men were. And so what happens is that if you have, say, a group of coal miners who are stuck in

• 49:24Sebastian Junger?

  a coal mine for a week, the first group of sort of spontaneous, the first kind of spontaneous leaders you get are the classically male, sort of action oriented, grab a pickaxe and start digging. When those efforts fail, another kind of leader takes over. They're way more empathic, they're way more affiliative, they reach negotiated solutions, they make people feel, 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

• 50:07Sebastian Junger?

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

• 50:28Tim Ferriss?

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

• 51:11Sebastian Junger?

  Well, it's, I mean, it's a very interesting question. The Iroquois sort of figured it out, as you said. The, in peacetime, they had sachems who were partly, partly elected by women, right? So I mean, so that, so the female voice was found in the selection of sachems. They ran peaceful society. When war started, the sachems stepped down and war leaders took over. And if the people they were fighting sued for peace,

• 51:40Sebastian Junger?

  It was not the war leaders who considered the deal. It was the stations and if peace was accepted, the war leader stepped down immediately. And it's really interesting because the US Constitution, parts of it are based on the Iroquois law of peace. And Thomas Paine did a lot of work sort of incorporating the natural rights of man as were exemplified by Iroquois society into the intellectual basis for American governance. But as soon as the British surrendered, George Washington was basically the supreme leader. He was the military leader in the colonies was when they were fighting the British.

• 52:23Sebastian Junger?

  And as soon as the British surrendered, he formally gave up power, gave up control to the civilian government. It was a very, very important thing to do because otherwise he could have continued on as quote, "king" and that would not be a democracy. And, and my guess is that they took that, he took that idea from the Iroquois. Military thinking and peace thinking are very, very, they require very different sensibilities, very different calculations of cost and benefit. And so there, there is the conundrum for us right now is we elect a president who in time of war is also the military leader.

• 53:06Sebastian Junger?

  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 an almost schizophrenic, you're asking someone to be almost schizophrenic if they can do both of those well.

• 53:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, equally well. So you mentioned a couple of historical figures. Why did Ben Franklin complain that settlers along the frontier were constantly absconding to live with the Indians, but that the opposite almost never happened? Why is that?

• 54:04Sebastian Junger?

  Well, it was this sort of strange phenomenon, right? I mean, the Christian society settled the eastern seaboard of the New World in the 1600s, 1700s. And beyond the, you know, sort of beyond the tree line were the savages, right? They weren't Christian, they weren't civilized, they went about, they ran about almost naked, and they hunted wild animals and fornicated and everything else, right? I mean, it's sort of Satan's den, right? Sounds pretty fun.

• 54:30Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds pretty great.

• 54:31Sebastian Junger?

  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 was also quite stifling, right? We didn't evolve to live, I mean, 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. And so, young men particularly, but young women as well, were constantly, the frontier was constantly sort of bleeding young people who went off, drifted off to live with the Indians.

• 55:15Sebastian Junger?

  I mean, the movement, the sort of societal movement was, I mean, it was a trickle, but it was significant constantly towards the tribes. And the Indians were never running off to join white society, right? And then there were even weirder cases.

• 55:30Tim Ferriss?

  This is, you're talking about the people who were kidnapped.

• 55:32Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah.

• 55:33Tim Ferriss?

  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, youngest son, isn't it? But... The, 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, or very unwillingly came, I mean, it's just...

• 56:06Sebastian Junger?

  Well, in my book Tribe, starts with this story of Pontiac's Rebellion in, in the, in western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and Chief Pontiac fought the colonial powers for years, very effectively, but eventually they sued for peace. And one of the deals was, part of the deal, the main part of the deal, was that he'd give up 200 and some white captives that had been taken from the, from the frontiers. And a significant number of the captives did not want to be returned to their home, to their homes, to their society. And they actually weren't slaves. And what's interesting about, I mean, the people thought that that's what happened to them. In fact, what happened to them is that the, the captives

• 56:49Sebastian Junger?

  who weren't killed, and some were killed out of revenge for losses that the Indians had taken on the battlefield, but the ones who weren't killed were adopted. And as soon as you were adopted, you were considered absolutely one of the tribe. There was no distinction whatsoever. You were given to a family that had lost someone on the battlefield, and you were the replacement for that person's son or daughter. And these 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

• 57:31Sebastian Junger?

  to their adopted families. And this happened over and over and over again, all the way, as the frontier marched across America, there were constantly these stories of people who were taken by the Indians and didn't want to come home. And, and the reason that was given was that it was an egalitarian society.

• 57:50Sebastian Junger?

  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, you could just take your family and move up Muskegon Creek and move in with your wife's, cousin's family with this other group. And so authority was all, um, authority was never imposed. Authority was accepted. And that led to a really basic equality in, in native societies. And, and I should say, as an anthropologist, the sort of hominid groups that we evolved

• 58:32Sebastian Junger?

  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. They're, I mean, partly you can't carry much wealth, right? If you're a mobile nomadic society, how much wealth can you really carry? And it really key, in a society that lives in groups of 40 or 50 that is mobile, it's extremely hard to accumulate differences of, of wealth and therefore status.

• 59:00Tim Ferriss?

  How does that relate to your experiences in war and interviewing people who've been subjected to war, not necessarily as soldiers? Uh, I mean, you mentioned the Blitz and so on, but how does this relate to, to those experiences?

• 59:16Sebastian Junger?

  Well, one of the many ironies of war is that it's savage and it's violent and it's completely anti-human, but it produces an intensity of human connection that you really can't, you're hard pressed to find in peacetime. Um, so during the Blitz, and I looked a lot at the Blitz in London and 30,000 people were killed by German bombs in around six months in, in and around London. Um, the society didn't collapse, but it contracted sort of in into itself. People were sleeping shoulder to shoulder with complete strangers in the tube stations. Fire brigades were rushing around trying to put out fires after the bombing raids.

• 1:00:00Sebastian Junger?

  It was a brutal time and the government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties. Forget about the physical casualties, mass psychiatric casualties. And but what happened was admissions to psychiatric wards actually went down from pre-war levels during the bombings and then went back up after the bombings stopped. One guy said, one official said, you know, it's amazing. We have neurotics driving ambulances. What it seems to be is that the the communal life that is often forced upon people by hardship, by danger, um, by calamity, that communal life is so psychologically beneficial to

• 1:00:45Sebastian Junger?

  people that there's a net gain in psychological well-being. So what you find is that in countries at war, Imel Durkheim, the fame, the the famous sociologist, found that in European countries that were at war in the 1800s, um, the suicide rate immediately went down, the murder rate went down. All of that kind of antisocial behavior was mitigated by the sort of monumental task that that country was engaged in. In New York, I live in New York City, in New York after nine 11, um, massively traumatized population, right? And you would think a lot of psychological problems would come out because of this psychological trauma that the entire city experienced after nine 11.

• 1:01:30Sebastian Junger?

  That's not what happened. The suicide rate went down after nine 11. Um, the, uh, the violent crime rate went down. Even Vietnam vets who were struggling with PTSD in New York City said that their symptoms improved after nine 11 because they were needed. They had this sense like, oh, my God, there's a crisis. I'm needed. I don't have, I, I, 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.

• 1:02:09Tim Ferriss?

  So the, the, one of the recurring themes. That you write about and also that we spoke about where after your TED Talk from a few years ago, some of the feedback from vets from different wars was that they missed the war and from civilians as well in this book, it's like there are certain aspects of the wartime, maybe a perceived greater level of humanity even oddly enough that was lost once peace was regained or achieved. How do you, how can one potentially go about,

• 1:02:53Tim Ferriss?

  and this is sort of a multiple choice question, like manufacturing catastrophe in a, if that makes any sense, like simulating the characteristics that drive that increased cohesion, community, or sense of mental well-being, or just increase cohesion in a way that you think we've evolved to find very healthy or healthful. Because we were discussing, for instance, boxing and I had the same experience in jujitsu, even though I know it's terrible for me. I mean, I get injured every time I try to do this for any period of time. It's not good for your physical health. I mean, if you, if you count all of the sort of collateral damage. But one of the appeals was, and we were both talking about the shared experience

• 1:03:38Tim Ferriss?

  of it being completely, like completely egalitarian. It's like, oh, that's the guy who's really good at armors. That's the guy who's really good at stiff jab. That's the guy whose footwork is really good. It's like you don't, half the time, don't even know what they do. Don't even know necessarily their real name. I remember at, you know, when I was training at this place called AKA in San Jose, it was like, everybody was given some insulting nickname. I mean, and looking back on it, it's like, wow, it actually sounds a lot like, and I've never been in the military, but it kind of makes me think of Full Metal Jacket and like Snowball and so on. But how, how can someone?

• 1:04:13Tim Ferriss?

  Simulate that, or what can we do, focusing for now on like the the personal well being? Do you have any thoughts on on how we might try to improve things? That was a long fucking question. I think you get the idea.

• 1:04:25Sebastian Junger?

  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 at hunting. And that and the survival of the community depended on them doing that job as well as on the women doing other things. But it depended on that and cohesion.

• 1:05:05Sebastian Junger?

  Cohesion is increased, among other things, by hardship, by nicknames, I mean, by humor. I mean, all these things that you see men in groups do. I mean, any construction crew in New York City, you walk past them and half the time they're doubled over laughing. I mean, you know, like, one of the things men do in groups is make each other laugh, and they give each other nicknames. So it's a really, really ancient, that what you experience is a very common thing, and I think quite ancient and serves a real purpose. We evolved as a species in a sort of, in a experience of sort of ongoing moderate crisis. I mean, we're hunter gatherers.

• 1:05:45Sebastian Junger?

  We evolved in a pretty harsh environment, and we've survived in the harshest of environments, in the Arctic and the Kalahari Desert, for example. And so, normal life for most of human history was a moderate, ongoing crisis.

• 1:06:03Sebastian Junger?

  What's very fortunate and beautiful and wonderful and also in a weird way tragic about modern society is that crisis has been removed. When you reintroduce a crisis, like in the Blitz in London, or an earthquake that I wrote about in Avadano, Italy, early in the 20th century, in Avadano, 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?

• 1:06:45Sebastian Junger?

  And what this guy said was, the Earth, I'll try to do it by memory, I 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. You could go, 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

• 1:07:26Sebastian Junger?

  from the bowels of Brooklyn, and you're not judged, 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, you're judged for how you act within that almost sacred space of the gym. And what happens in a crisis, in a war, or an earthquake, or whatever, is that people suddenly are judged for how they act. And that is, I think, one of the things that the, what were called the white Indians, the white captives of the American Indians, I think that is one of the things that appealed to them. They were no longer in this incredibly stratified and frankly unfair colonial society, they

• 1:08:09Sebastian Junger?

  were in a place where they were completely self-determining in terms of how they were seen.

• 1:08:15Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about the C train.

• 1:08:21Tim Ferriss?

  And your return to New York City. And I'm missing, so I'm trying to recall from memory, the timing on this. But it leads into a conversation of PTSD. Can you take us through that story?

• 1:08:35Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah. One of the topics of this book is PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. I had this idea, because of my work on the Navo Reservation, that the huge rates of PTSD that we're experiencing in America right now are maybe anomalous. And then if you live in a tribal society, the rates might be quite low. So that was the genesis of my book. So I talked about my own experience with PTSD. I've been a war reporter since the early 90s. I stopped after one of my best friends was killed in combat a few years ago. But the first really traumatic assignment that I had was in northern Afghanistan, a year before 9/11. In the fall of 2000, I was with Ahmad Shah Masood, who was the leader of the Northern

• 1:09:20Sebastian Junger?

  Alliance. And he was fighting the Taliban. He was completely outnumbered, outgunned. Back then, the Taliban had fighter planes, the Taliban had tanks, they had artillery, they had all the toys, right? And Masood, his forces were the guerrillas. Well, it's great to be with the guerrillas until you start getting shelled, right? Or bombed, or whatever. And so we had a tough, I was up there for two months, and we saw and went through some very tough things. And I got back to New York, young man, your age, late 30s, and I just felt completely like that nothing would ever affect me, right? I just assumed complete invulnerability to everything.

• 1:10:02Sebastian Junger?

  And I got back to New York, and I'm a little shaken up, but all right. And then one day, I went down into the subway, and it's something I did every day. And it was rush hour, there were a lot of people, and I was seized with this incredible panic attack. I'd never had one in my life.

• 1:10:23Sebastian Junger?

  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 somehow going to kill me. It was too loud. The noise was going to... Everything was a mortal threat and I backed up against the iron support column and just sort of waited for it. And then I finally sprinted out of there and took a taxi and that kept happening. Anytime I was in a small, like an enclosed place with too many people, too much going on, I would just panic. I just thought I was going crazy.

• 1:11:07Sebastian Junger?

  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. It was a friend of a friend. It was at a picnic, actually. And she asked about my war reporting and if I had any, suffered any consequence, 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 panic attack." And she nodded in that way that shrinks do. "Hmm, interesting." You know? And she said, "Well..." And it was, and it was the spring of 2003. And she nodded and she said, "Well, that's interesting." She said, "That's called PTSD."

• 1:11:52Sebastian Junger?

  And, you know, we just invaded Iraq, right? And she said, "You're going to be hearing quite a bit about that in the coming years, as indeed we have."

• 1:12:01Tim Ferriss?

  And why are the rates, is, are the rates of PTSD in the US anomalous? Are they unusually high compared to other, other cultures or other countries? And if so, why is that?

• 1:12:19Sebastian Junger?

  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. It's interesting, but almost 100% of people who have been traumatized get short-term PTSD. That's what I got. Lasts weeks, lasts some months, goes away. Therapy helps, whatever, but you know, we're, we're, we're, we're humans, right? I mean, we're adapted to survive danger and stress and hardship and all that, all that other stuff. We wouldn't be here, right?

• 1:12:57Sebastian Junger?

  So, 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 year, I'm sorry, every war, the casualty rate, thank God, has gone down. Because the intensity of the combat has gone down. As bad as World War I was, it wasn't as bad as the Civil War. World War II was not as intense, the combat was not as intense, there were not the mass casualties of World War I.

• 1:13:40Sebastian Junger?

  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, they're crucial, they're necessary, they're not getting directly traumatized. But something like 50% of the US military has filed for some form of PTSD disability. So there's 40% in there that are a bit of a mystery, right?

• 1:14:25Sebastian Junger?

  They come home and they're deeply, dangerously alienated, depressed, they don't fit in, something's gravely wrong. And

• 1:14:39Sebastian Junger?

  My theory is that what they're experiencing isn't a reaction to trauma. They couldn't be because most of them weren't traumatized. What they're experiencing is the

• 1:14:52Sebastian Junger?

  it's a radical readjustment from platoon life. A platoon is 40 or 50 people. You're sleeping, depending on what kind of base you're on, shoulder to shoulder in the dirt or cot to cot in a, in a, some kind of bungalow or, you know, whatever. But it's all group living, right? You're eating meals together, doing missions and patrols together. You're doing everything together for over a year. That is exactly how humans evolved to live. That is exactly our prehistory. So you experience that incredible tight cohesion with your platoon. Now, there might be people you have conflicts with. That doesn't mean it's one big love fest, but it is close. And it's close with people that you would, that you, you know, your life depends on.

• 1:15:35Sebastian Junger?

  And then suddenly you're sprung from that and you're back in modern society. And I think what's afflicting a lot of these vets isn't a response to trauma. It couldn't be. It's a response to the sudden aloneness and loneliness that modern society

• 1:15:57Sebastian Junger?

  is known for, unfortunately.

• 1:15:59Tim Ferriss?

  And you also have talked about how, for instance, returning Peace Corps volunteers also suffer from depression, right? For the, I mean, similar, maybe not identical, but related reintegration issues.

• 1:16:11Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, I mean, you can see that, I mean, to the extent that, you know, this is proof or whatever, it's an interesting example. I mean, so you spend two years in, you know, Cameroon, incredibly, incredibly poor country in Africa, Central Africa, in a really poor village. I mean, that's a tough way to live for a couple of years for American who grew up in modern society.

• 1:16:31Sebastian Junger?

  And then after two years, you come home and the depression rate for people coming back from Peace Corps service is astronomical. It's something like 50%. Twenty-five percent, fifty percent is enormous. It's akin to soldiers, right? So there you have this common theme. Peace Corps volunteers are not traumatized, but they experience, like soldiers, this radical transition from closeness, literally village life, back to, you know, the American suburb or whatever. I mean, this is the first society, I mean, modern Western societies, the first society in human history where people live alone in an apartment. Unheard of. Children have their own bedrooms. They're locked in a room by themselves at night. Terrifying to young children. I mean, we're primates, right? Baby primates,

• 1:17:15Sebastian Junger?

  if they're alone in the jungle, are incredibly vulnerable. And, you know, human infants know this, of course, so they don't want to be put in a room by themselves. They know it's, in an evolutionary sense, they know it's dangerous, and they cry and they scream.

• 1:17:28Tim Ferriss?

  Was it ninety percent contact? I might be pulling that out of my ass, but you talked about the sort of contact percentages or...

• 1:17:39Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, the skin-on-skin contact for infants and young children in tribal societies is as high as ninety percent of the time. Skin-on-skin contact. And the study looked at skin-on-skin contact in American society. I think it was in the seventies the study was done, and it was as low as seventeen percent, something like that. Now, you could say, okay, well, people have to work. They have jobs, you know. I'm all true. But that doesn't mean that that radical shift in child rearing doesn't have consequences.

• 1:18:17Tim Ferriss?

  How much of the... So PTSD is very interesting to me for a number of reasons. One is that I have quite a few friends now who are either active military or were active for a period of time. And, but most of my exposure has been to guys in, say, the SEALs or Marine Force Recon and so on.

• 1:18:41Tim Ferriss?

  I have quite a few questions related to this, but so that's that's part one of the interest. Part two of the interest is that I've been involved with research and funding research related to the use of psychedelics to address untreatable or treatment-resistant depression at places like Johns Hopkins. And when you 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, and the fact of the matter is, I don't have perfect

• 1:19:20Tim Ferriss?

  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 infantrymen or?

• 1:19:48Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, or support units. Yeah. I mean, what I mean, what it seems to be is that unit cohesion is a buffer for psychological struggles and including PTSD. So the more highly trained the soldier, the more highly trained the unit, the more psychologically resilient they are, even though they might be taking higher casualties.

• 1:20:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:11Sebastian Junger?

  And what's so interesting about trauma is that it it's not necessarily related to the level of danger. It's related to the level of control that you feel that you have. So if you're a sort of standard issue support unit, rear base,

• 1:20:32Sebastian Junger?

  Soldier, uh, you know, one of the huge bases that the American military has or the Israeli military has, for example, in previous wars in Israel, um, maybe the, you know, the, the random mortar round comes in, right? And that is strangely, that is causes more a greater proportion of psychiatric casualties than frontline units doing very intense fighting, but they're, and they're taking higher casualties, but they're incredibly well-trained. So they have a sense of mastery over their environment.

• 1:21:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they also have a very high degree of perceived agency, I would imagine, just because they're on offense, right? If you're in a commando unit, you get dropped behind any lines in a black helicopter and you have

• 1:21:17Sebastian Junger?

  Well,

• 1:21:18Tim Ferriss?

  the go command.

• 1:21:19Sebastian Junger?

  Absolutely. I mean, you know, it's game on, right? The, the big game, the football, you know, football game or whatever. I mean, we're why, you know, we're, humans are wired for action and war when need be. And it, you know, your, your neuro circuitry just lights up and there's all kinds of hormonal stuff going on. I mean, your app, you have enormous agency, but it even is true. I read a studies on my previous, previous book called War. Um, I saw this study where some army psychiatrist, they like two unluckiest army psychiatrists in the whole military, probably at that time, were at some, some like remote outpost with special forces soldiers along like, I don't know, up, up near the DMZ and, and they were dropped in there. They were just doing some standard study, psychological assessment

• 1:22:04Sebastian Junger?

  of these guys, right? And these, these guys are real badasses. They were like SF, you know, like the real deal. And so these psychologists, they found out that the, that the, that the base, it was a 20 man position, something like that. The base was about to be attacked by a battalion of NVA, like 500 men, right? And there was 20 guys there, something like that. So the psychologist thought, oh, perfect. This is a perfect moment to measure stress in soldiers, right?

• 1:22:33Tim Ferriss?

  So definitely looking at the silver lining.

• 1:22:36Sebastian Junger?

  That's right. Yeah, exactly. So they started taking cortisol levels hourly from the soldiers. And the officers, the lieutenant, the poor lieutenant, he's probably 22, right? His cortisol levels, he's not, he's young, he's not very well-trained and he has a huge amount of responsibility as the officer, right? He's a commanding officer. His cortisol levels are through the roof. Right up into the point where the attack was supposed to begin because they had intel that these guys were coming, right? And then after that time passed, his cortisol levels steadily declined and it turned out there was no attack, right? And then he went, returned to normal. The special forces guys were the opposite.

• 1:23:18Sebastian Junger?

  As soon as they heard they were about to experience an overwhelming attack,

• 1:23:24Sebastian Junger?

  their cortisol levels dropped. They got super calm and they started doing, the reason their cortisol levels dropped is because they, they, 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 an attack. All of that busyness gave them a sense of mastery and control that actually made them feel less anxious than them just waiting around on an average day in a dangerous place.

• 1:24:01Tim Ferriss?

  So the, coming back to, and I really didn't think about this until now, but when we're talking about PTSD and potential causes, right? So you have going from a very unified sort of tribal existence that we've evolved to be part of, to this very unusual, sort of isolated, modern existence. You also have, what strikes me at least, is we're looking at the agency versus lack of agency. The, the sense of a clear purpose and a task, right? It's like if you get, if the towers get hit at nine 11 and there's a call for blood drives and everybody's standing online, every different race, color, creed, it's like

• 1:24:45Tim Ferriss?

  you have a very clear, concrete purpose in front of you as opposed to what I think a lot of us experience, and I'm not immune to this certainly, there, there are like weeks and months where I'm like, what the fuck am I doing? Like, I really just like, don't know what I should be doing in life, but a crisis or perceived crisis is a forcing function. It's like you have a very clear directive of some type or another. What, what do you think are the most, and just to? 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

• 1:25:30Tim Ferriss?

  illness, I think. And when you take, for instance, certain types of psychedelics, it disrupts the default mode network, has very particular neurological effects that increase the sense of oneness and unity with others. So it in some ways mitigates that focus on the first person. What can we do to better support troops, particularly, and this is a question from another friend who's a big fan of your work, but, you know, he views himself quite proudly as sort of a bleeding-heart liberal, and he feels very conflicted because he wants

• 1:26:15Tim Ferriss?

  to support troops, at the same time, he wants to ask, well, did you find the WMDs? Right? And so he's conflicted as to how to support the troops without feeling like he's supporting senseless wars. How would you, how would you answer that, or talk to that?

• 1:26:30Sebastian Junger?

  Well, countries go to war through a political process that's run by the government. And the troops have nothing to do with the war in that sense.

• 1:26:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:26:42Sebastian Junger?

  I mean, like, guys who are drilling for oil in North Dakota really don't have anything to do with global warming.

• 1:26:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:26:49Sebastian Junger?

  You know, they're providing something that our society has decided it wants, including a lot of environmentalists, frankly, are driving around in cars, they're running gasoline.

• 1:26:55Tim Ferriss?

  With bumper stickers that say, "No blood for oil."

• 1:26:58Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, exactly, right? So there's a massive hypocrisy, even though it's well-meaning. So you can't mistake the soldiers for the war. If you're upset about the wars that the 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 to plant trees in Canada, they'd go do that. And if we told them to go invade Canada, they'd do that. They're like, whatever you want, we're gonna do. So there's no conflict.

• 1:27:42Sebastian Junger?

  You're, you're, there's no conflict between disagreeing with a war and sort of honoring people who have said for, for $40,000 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 a unit, 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.

• 1:28:27Sebastian Junger?

  The political parties are, speak with incredible contempt for one another. If you're a soldier and you fought for this country and you come back to this mess, I mean, of course they're messed up, the soldiers. I mean, of course they are like, like, come on, guys. We fought for you and you can't even get along in peacetime. I mean, you guys are experiencing peace and you'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, as, as, 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.

• 1:29:07Sebastian Junger?

  Contemptuous speech for your fellow citizens, for your political adversary. Likewise, it's protected under the First Amendment, but it should be considered so damaging to the social fabric and to the interests of this nation that it's effectively banned from society by common consensus. That would, that would help. That would help soldiers. It would help all of us. National service would be amazing. I think it's morally wrong to force people to fight a war they don't want to fight. But national service with a military option, where every 18 year olds or every young person had to do a year or two of national service would be.

• 1:29:51Sebastian Junger?

  I mean, that would truly create the melting pot that this country is and should be. The classes, the races get mixed in this very egalitarian way. It would create a comment like in Israel, which has a PTSD rate, by the way, of 1%. It would create this sort of common experience and this unity of purpose, which is so profoundly healthful psychologically.

• 1:30:15Tim Ferriss?

  What would some of the, what might some of the non-military options look like for that year or two of service?

• 1:30:23Sebastian Junger?

  I mean, what's the nation need done? You know, I mean, we need help in the inner cities, you know, we need infrastructure repair. I don't know. I mean, you know.

• 1:30:32Tim Ferriss?

  It could resemble like a Teach for America or a Peace Corps type of capacity.

• 1:30:36Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, anything, whatever. I mean, for us collectively to use our imagination, and we have two things, right? We have this incredible resource of our young people. And we have a nation that's deeply, deeply in crisis. And the one thing that unifies us is being attacked, right? We're attacked by terrorists and suddenly we're a unified country. And we don't want to, 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.

• 1:31:12Tim Ferriss?

  So I promised I'd come back to the Viking helmet. So I want to address the Viking helmet. So let me, let me try to, this is from memory. Let me, let me try to give a sketch. So you're in Spain, correct? You go out to a bar with some of your buddies and, you know, I'll let, I'll let you tell it because I think you'll do it more justice, but it underscores a point that I want to ask you about. So could you?

• 1:31:40Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, of course. So, and they weren't, they weren't even my buddies. They became my buddies. So I was, I was 22 years old. My father grew up in Spain and in France. And I, I grew up going to those countries. And when I was, you know, after college, I just, I decided I'd read a lot of Hemingway. Um, I, you know, 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 festival of San Fermin in Pamplona is this big citywide, you know, like freak show basically for a week. And I was sleeping on someone's couch and one night I slept in a park bench. I mean, it's just a free for all. It was amazing time, right?

• 1:32:23Sebastian Junger?

  And I went out to this bar. Um, in preparation for the running of the bulls the next morning. No one who's within the barricades where they run the bulls, no one. They fire the cannon off at one, at seven in the morning to start to release the bulls from the arena. And they charged through town through these barricades and no one who's within those barricades at 7:00 AM woke up at 6:00 AM to do it. I mean, everyone's been up all, anyone who's in that thing has been up all night. Well, I was going to be one of them. So I go to this, this is some stupid little bar. Sados on the floor. I speak, I spoke pretty good Spanish at the time. I immediately started talking to these two young Spaniards who were just completely shitfaced. Right?

• 1:33:06Sebastian Junger?

  And one of them has a leather sort of drinking bag around, how else to describe it? A leather drinking bag called a bota around his neck, which is filled with red wine. And he keeps trying to get the red wine, squirt the red wine into his mouth, but he keeps missing. It's all over his white t-shirt. And these guys are having the best time in the world. And we're, we just become friends instantly when they're talking. And one of them, the drunkest of the two, has a cheap plastic Viking helmet on his head. And I didn't really think about it much. We're talking and um, suddenly these three very tough looking North African kids walk in. And I had lived in France for a while with my family when I was 12, 13. So I spoke French also.

• 1:33:48Sebastian Junger?

  These three 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 of them walks right up to my new friend. I've known him for maybe half an hour and grabs the Viking helmet off his hand and says, that's mine. You stole it.

• 1:34:07Sebastian Junger?

  So I'm the only one who speaks both languages. So now I'm translating, right? And my friend, my, my Spanish friend, new Spanish friend says, tries to grab it back and says, "No, that's mine. I don't know who you are." And the Moroccan guys and the two Spanish guys, everyone suddenly has a hand on the Viking helmet and they start pulling at it and it's rapidly devolving into a pretty good bar fight, right? And if the helmet starts to rip, it's just cheap plastic, right? 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're all fighting over, right?

• 1:34:49Sebastian Junger?

  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 upon the honor of your ancestors and your good name and blah, blah, blah?" And I'm thinking like, "How long do you have to know a guy before you have to back him up in a bar fight?" I mean, is it under an hour, really? Is that's it? Like, and so I say, "Yes, I'll defend the helmet, etc." And I take my place at the helmet. And he goes to the bartender, and now the whole bar is watching this. This is high theater, right? At this point.

• 1:35:34Sebastian Junger?

  And so me and the Spanish kid are glaring at the Moroccans and they're glaring back and we're faced off around this helmet. I'm really hoping it doesn't go to where, you know, it looks like it's headed. So the Spanish guy goes to the bar and has a quick conference with the bartender, who produces a big jug of cheap Spanish red wine, and cracks the top open and hands it to him. And the guy comes back and fills the Viking helmet to the brim with red wine. Now, no one wants to be the asshole who spills the red wine, right? It's the festival of San Fermin. The whole thing's running on red wine, like no one wants to spill it, right? It just looks bad.

• 1:36:15Sebastian Junger?

  So he fills the helmet to the brim with red wine and he puts his hand under it. And he says, "Okay, now everyone let go. And no one wants to be the idiot who spills the wine, so everyone let's go." And he presents it to the biggest, toughest looking Moroccan kid. And says, "You're a guest in our country, so you drink first."

• 1:36:36Sebastian Junger?

  And the guy drank and he passed it to his left and then it went, and it went around the circle and then when it was empty of red wine, it got filled up. And then eventually they just got another jug and started passing the jug around. An hour later, I'm talking to 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 tear each other to pieces, right? The five of them are hanging off each other, singing in unison in two different languages and this, and the Viking helmet has been completely forgotten and is under a table in the corner.

• 1:37:12Tim Ferriss?

  So the, I underline this and put a bunch of stars next to it. There are a lot of underlines in this book for me. What I liked about the encounter was that it showed how very close the energy of male conflict and male closeness can be. So I want to get your thoughts and advice on this, on something very closely related, which is, I've felt for a long time, and this is completely unsubstantiated. I mean, it's just a pet theory that a lot of the societal issues that we see are a direct result of male misbehavior from those who do not have an outlet for just innate capacity for violence and force.

• 1:37:50Tim Ferriss?

  And I think it's such a great story because it shows how that can be, in some cases, directed, right? So you're like, oh shit, these guys are about to turn into like meatheads pounding each other's brains out, but like with, with a little, with a little finesse and enough red wine, like that's all diffused and now they're best buddies. And, and you and I, I heard a story very much like this where there's a, I'm not going to name him, but this, this very kind of cantankerous, outspoken, abrasive billionaire walked up to this huge Argentine guy at a party that I was in a different room at the time for,

• 1:38:32Tim Ferriss?

  and pushed 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 slammed him on top of a folding table and shattered the table. So everyone's assuming, holy shit, like this guy's gonna get his life destroyed. This guy's gonna sue the shit out of him, but he couldn't because of like the the the sort of reputational stakes like he it would be a response that would 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.

• 1:39:11Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:12Tim Ferriss?

  But it doesn't always end that neatly, right? And so do you have any thoughts on how in in the in the society in which we live, let's just say in this case in the US, we can end up with more male closeness and less sort of male violence? Do you have any thoughts on that?

• 1:39:32Sebastian Junger?

  Well, it's tricky. I mean, how do we have less heart disease in a society that where people drive and they have plenty of most people have plenty of food and a lot of fats and sugars, you know, I mean, I mean, the the very safety of this society, the very thing that makes us lucky, also creates a danger.

• 1:39:51Tim Ferriss?

  Right, the diseases of affluence.

• 1:39:53Sebastian Junger?

  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 an incursion from the young men of an of an enemy town, a hostile town. We that's not happening anymore. Right? I mean, wars are big formal things that for the United States almost always happen elsewhere. But in terms of our communities and our society at home, we no longer have to organize young men and prepare them for group violence so that we can survive. That's been the human norm for 2 million years, either from predators

• 1:40:36Sebastian Junger?

  or from other humans. Men, young men, function in groups and function selflessly in groups extremely well. You can organize 20, 30, 40, 50 young men and give them a task, a dangerous task, and they perform, not only do they perform it very, very well, the harder the task is, the closer they get. Women are used for incredibly important, I mean, I'm talking in sort of human evolution, 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, very good at it. And the, in modern

• 1:41:19Sebastian Junger?

  society, if you, what young men want to do is achieve honor by defending the community. I mean, it's just wired, it's just wired into the male brain to do that. If you don't give young men a good and useful group to belong to, they will create a bad group to belong to. But one way or another, they're going to create a group, and they're going to find something, an adversary, where they can demonstrate their prowess and their unity. That thing that they find is often the law. It's the police. It's society itself. In some ways, they turn into skinwalkers. They have no outside enemy. So they create an enemy out of society. They don't want to be doing this.

• 1:42:04Tim Ferriss?

  This is one of the risks of wartime leaders being all the time leaders.

• 1:42:08Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, that's right. And young, young, young men, like young women, for the most part, are well intentioned and want to do right by their, their community and their society. But if you have a society which is so safe and protected and removed from the rest of the world, as we are, in some ways, there's sort of nothing useful for the young men to do. And then, in their own ad hoc way, they create their own trials, right? So they take a lot of risks. They do stupid stuff. They jump off of stuff that's too high to jump off of. They drive too fast. They get into fights.

• 1:42:37Tim Ferriss?

  I've never done any of that.

• 1:42:39Sebastian Junger?

  Young men die at six times the rate of young women from accidents and from violence. And there's a, there's a reason for that. They're wired to demonstrate their prowess and it often gets them killed.

• 1:42:55Tim Ferriss?

  So this is, this is not really something that, 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 I, it was surprising yet completely unsurprising at the same time. And this is, I'll just read a short section here. "I once asked a combat vet if he'd rather have an enemy in his life or another close friend. He looked at me like I was crazy. 'Oh, an enemy? A hundred percent,' he said. 'Not even close. I already got a lot of friends.'" He thought about it a little longer. "Anyway, all my best friends I've gotten into fights with knocked down, drag out fights. Granted, we were always drunk when it happened, but think about that." He shook his head as if he couldn't believe it. Strange creatures we are.

• 1:43:40Sebastian Junger?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 1:43:44Tim Ferriss?

  I want to, I want to segue to a couple of listener questions because there were, there were some good ones. This one is from Kip McAnouny and 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 has actually been recommended a few times, gave a speech in 2014 about post-traumatic growth, as he called it, and how those experiences should be considered a precious commodity, one that cannot be simulated or taught in a classroom. How would you comment on that?

• 1:44:19Sebastian Junger?

  I mean, victims, the, the, the status of victimhood is not a psychologically healthy place to be in. And I think our society takes people who are unfortunate, who have experienced something difficult, and in a kind of misguided attempt to make the world right again for them, they classify them as victims. Now, they may call them survivors and they may call them whatever they want, but, but actually the role that's being, that they're being, that the, that the person is being asked to play is one of a victim. Victims are taken care of, right? So after World War II, which saw...

• 1:45:03Sebastian Junger?

  Casualties that 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, right? And they came home and basically, they, society said to these men, and it was almost all men in the, in the, you know, combat units, society said to these men, like, "All right, you're done fighting, now we need you at home. You know, it's time to get to work, we have a country to rebuild." And they definitely were not thought of as victims of the war, or of anything.

• 1:45:46Sebastian Junger?

  They were thought of, much like, I'm sure that Cheyenne and the Comanche and the Apache and the Sioux and the Kiowa Warriors who came back from the warpath, they were thought of as essential and functioning members of society, now maybe they were missing a limb, or maybe they had some trauma to process, but they were needed back home in the towns and cities of this great country, just as badly as they were needed in the Pacific, in the fields of Europe. And the, the problem with victimhood is that it perpetuates the psychological state of passivity and trauma that you want the person to escape from.

• 1:46:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right, it's, I mean, it's the sort of perceived lack of agency that helped produce the PTSD in the first place, potentially.

• 1:46:37Sebastian Junger?

  Exactly, and you think about what the official, London official said about the Blitz, "Now we have neurotics driving ambulances."

• 1:46:43Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:47:05Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, you know, it's a very politically delicate thing to bring up, but, and, and all I'm doing is repeating the accounts of, of soldiers and veterans. I mean, the best thing a journalist can do is convey information, and that's what I'm doing, they, they...

• 1:47:20Sebastian Junger?

  I mean, there are veterans I've talked to who said they just, they won't, they won't go to these group therapy sessions because, you know, one out of 20 is some guy who really didn't see any combat and is trying to milk the system and pretending to have trauma, pretending to have PTSD and he really doesn't. You know, one of the tricky things, the VA in trying to speed up the massive bureaucracy that they created over the last decades, it tried to speed that up, speed up disability claims, they said to soldiers, "If you self-diagnose, think about this, if you self-diagnose with PTSD, you do not have to give us proof that

• 1:48:01Sebastian Junger?

  anything traumatic happened. You do not have to describe the incident that you were traumatized in. You just have to tell, tell us that you believe that you were traumatized and that you have PTSD and that's enough for a disability check." So, humans being what they are, some number of people are going to take advantage of that. And, 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 having that kind of dishonesty

• 1:48:42Sebastian Junger?

  in a process is actually psychologically detrimental, not only to the, to those specific people who are being dishonest, but to everybody. It's actually quite corrosive.

• 1:48:56Tim Ferriss?

  How many photographs have you taken on your wartime deployments, probably not the right word, but assignments?

• 1:49:05Sebastian Junger?

  You know, I, I carry a video camera and I shoot a lot of footage, but I've never taken still photos.

• 1:49:12Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So with the video footage that you've shot, and by the way, when, I haven't told you this, when Restrepo was first shown, like very, very first shown in the Northern California area, I tracked it down and drove out to see one of the very first showing.

• 1:49:27Sebastian Junger?

  Oh, really?

• 1:49:28Tim Ferriss?

  I did.

• 1:49:28Sebastian Junger?

  Thank you.

• 1:49:29Tim Ferriss?

  And...

• 1:49:32Tim Ferriss?

  I have some questions about that, but what footage that you captured, if any come to mind, this is related to a question from Yasmin Hayat, if you had to choose, I'm going to substitute here because it was one photo, but I'm going to say one clip of footage that impacted him the most, which one is it and why? What did he experience while taking, in this case, the video?

• 1:49:54Sebastian Junger?

  I mean, the things that have impacted me, I didn't necessarily shoot video of. Sometimes it's at night.

• 1:50:06Tim Ferriss?

  We can talk about, I would say, feel free to answer that.

• 1:50:11Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah. When I was in northern Afghanistan in 2000, there was a big nighttime battle going on and there was a massed infantry assault against entrenched Taliban positions through a minefield. The northern alliance sort of, you know, sort of World War I style. And it was at night and we were right behind the front lines and a wave of soldiers went, sort of took the wrong route and went through this minefield and a lot of them got messed up and they were pulled out of there. And we saw them immediately afterwards. They'd sort of been piled onto the back of a flatbed pickup truck. They're alive. You know, they

• 1:50:55Sebastian Junger?

  had lost legs and traumatic amputations. I mean, they were extremely messed up. They're alive. Most of them probably survived. They're anti-personnel mines. And so we were there where they were brought into this sort of forward field hospital tent that was lit with kerosene lanterns, right? And this is, you know, this is rough. This is World War I era.

• 1:51:16Tim Ferriss?

  Frontier medicine.

• 1:51:17Sebastian Junger?

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

• 1:51:58Sebastian Junger?

  in an odd way that you've never seen before. And it's just, it really tweaks people. And I, I, um, I had a moment of crisis. I mean, I, I went a little crazy. It felt like I went a little crazy. I mean, I just, my brain just sort of stopped functioning. And I, I don't even have very clear memories of it, but I, I left the tent. I couldn't take it. I could not look, I could not bear to see what I was seeing. And I left the tent and I went outside into the cold Afghan night and lit a cigarette. And I thought, you know, war is exciting and it's dramatic and it's important and it's meaningful and it's

• 1:52:38Sebastian Junger?

  all this other stuff. But if you're not also prepared to look unblinkingly, unflinchingly at the worst aspects of war, uh, dismembered people, you, you really have no business covering the, the quote, "good parts." And by good, I mean the parts that are, aren't traumatic. Um, 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. And, but you have a job to do, and it's to communicate to your readers back in the United States, everything about what war looks like, including that. So grab your damn notebook and grab your

• 1:53:20Sebastian Junger?

  pen and walk in there and just write down what it is like to behold such a thing. And, um, as soon as I, this is interesting, right? As soon as I had a purpose, I was okay. My, my self-given purpose was document this thing that you can, you can barely bear to look at. But as soon as I had a job to do, and I'm sure that's how the medics dealt with it too, as soon as I had a job to do, I was okay. And, um, I wrote it all down and it was one of the most powerful parts of this piece that I wrote. And I sort of pa, you know, I passed through the gateway, through the threshold. And I, at that moment, I became, I'd been in plenty of wars till then, but in that moment, I became a war recorder.

• 1:54:07Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned, not by name, but Tim earlier.

• 1:54:14Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:14Tim Ferriss?

  Can you tell us who he was, what happened, and how it impacted you?

• 1:54:20Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, Tim Hetherington was a wonderful, brilliant English photographer who I was lucky enough to work with on my project in the Korengal Valley. I wanted to document the experience of one platoon, thirty, forty, fifty men, throughout one deployment. And I wound up at a little outpost called Restrepo. And on my second trip in there, that's when I started shooting video and thinking about movies. And on my second trip in there, I started working with Tim. He was assigned to me by Vanity Fair magazine. And he quickly realized that this film project that I had was a pretty good idea. And we became partners. And we went through a very intense, amazing, difficult year together out there in the Korengal Valley.

• 1:55:05Sebastian Junger?

  And we both got hurt. We both came very close to getting killed out there. It was an extraordinary experience. And we became brothers, really. And we made a film called Restrepo and won a lot of awards. And then it was nominated for an Oscar. We went off to Los Angeles and 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. It was incredible experience. We didn't win. It didn't really matter. And we had an assignment to, the Arab Spring was exploding all around us during the Oscars, right? And so we had an assignment to go back overseas and document the civil war in Libya from Vanity Fair.

• 1:55:50Sebastian Junger?

  At the last moment, I could, after the Oscars, we all went home and we were going to head to Libya. And at the last moment, I couldn't go for personal reasons. And Tim went on his own and he was killed on April 20 in the city of Masrada in Libya by a mortar round, any one millimeter mortar that was fired by Gaddafi's forces outside Masrada. And he bled out in the back of a rebel pickup truck racing for the Masrada hospital. And I got the phone, you know, I got the awful phone call in New York City. And

• 1:56:25Sebastian Junger?

  Very, very quickly decided I would never cover war again. It wasn't that I was scared of getting killed. That's a fear that you have to confront early on and I'd sort of resolved my feelings about it. It's that in watching the news of his death, and he was beloved by people, including my wife Daniela, I just loved him. I mean, everyone loved him. And I watched the news of his death ripple outwards from my apartment, because I got the news first, from my apartment outwards through all the people that he knew, that he loved, on out into people that he didn't even know who loved him, on out through his

• 1:57:09Sebastian Junger?

  country and my country. And I just thought, I don't want to risk doing that to the people I love. I mean, I'm dead, right? My problems are over, but I'm giving them a lifetime of pain and sorrow, and that's not an honorable thing to do. And so I got out of the business.

• 1:57:29Tim Ferriss?

  What was the date on that again?

• 1:57:33Sebastian Junger?

  April 20.

• 1:57:34Tim Ferriss?

  April 20.

• 1:57:35Sebastian Junger?

  Yep. Coincidentally, the anniversary of Columbine, Hitler's birthday. There's all kinds of awful things that happen on April 20 for some reason.

• 1:57:48Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think your writing future will look like?

• 1:57:51Sebastian Junger?

  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 in an outpost. It's a meditation and an inquiry about my society, my country, that I love very much, and something feels very, very wrong in our country right now. And I think if you look at the political...

• 1:58:25Sebastian Junger?

  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.

• 1:59:00Tim Ferriss?

  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?"

• 1:59:18Sebastian Junger?

  The main thing that I can think of is drawn from some of my research into American Indian ceremonies for returning warriors in the 17th, 18th centuries, or vets from the current wars, 19th centuries, or vets from the current wars. One of the common themes in these ceremonies is that the warrior gets to recount in front of his community what he did for them on the battlefield. And, you know, often it's a heroic sort of boasting of how brave he was and how he killed the enemy and how, you know, whatever. But it's

• 1:59:57Sebastian Junger?

  this cathartic description of a warrior's, a warrior discharging his duties for his community. And there's something about doing that for the people you did it for that seems to be very, very psychologically healthy, to put it in modern terms. Because it's almost a universal in these ceremonies. And so I had the idea, I mean, we're not going to go back to a tribal society. I mean, we can't, we can't, you know, you'd have to get rid of the car, you know, whatever, it's not happening. But we might be able to take certain structures of tribal life and incorporate them into modern society, right? So we get the best of both worlds. And the way to do that in terms of returning veterans is to

• 2:00:42Sebastian Junger?

  turn the town hall, the city hall, in every community in this country, on Veterans Day, into an open forum for veterans.

• 2:00:51Sebastian Junger?

  So this, I have this idea, Veteran Town Halls, where on my website, sebastianjunger.com, there's a page devoted to this. You open up the town hall, and veterans from any war have the right to stand up and speak for 10 minutes to their community. And I know veterans, right? Some of them are gonna be incredibly proud of their service, and they're gonna say they missed the war. And it's gonna make liberals uncomfortable. And some of them are gonna- Just to be clear, you would consider yourself a liberal? Oh, I'm totally liberal, yeah, yeah. But as a journalist, I'm neutral. I mean, it's really important, as a private person, I'm liberal, but as a journalist,

• 2:01:32Sebastian Junger?

  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 gonna be uncomfortable when someone stands up and just starts crying, and can't even talk because they're crying too hard. But all of that is war, right? We sent these people to do a job for us, that we deem necessary, collectively deem necessary, and the emotional fallout for it is okay, as long as we process it all collectively. It's not okay if we just make them deal with it. It's not their war, it's our war.

• 2:02:15Sebastian Junger?

  So all of us need to deal with it, much like the American Indian tribes did in these ceremonies, an amazing thing. So we did this once in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and Seth Moulton is a Democratic representative from Massachusetts, who was a Marine Lieutenant in Ramadi, I believe it was, saw some very, very tough fighting. He helped me organize it, we did it together. And last Veterans Day, in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, if you were a civilian and you'd like to say, "I support the troops," what that literally meant on that day last year in Marblehead, Massachusetts, was that you really then should go down to the town hall and listen to what the veterans had to say about what it was like for them.

• 2:02:59Sebastian Junger?

  There's no Q and A, there's no debate, this is not an evaluation of the war, it's not a- Patriotic thing, it's not an anti-war thing. It's just, this is what the experience was like. And I really, really think that if we could do this in every country, in every town across the country, 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's suffering. And if we can heal ourselves as a nation, the veterans are going to be fine.

• 2:03:35Tim Ferriss?

  Could not agree more.

• 2:03:37Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's, let's shift gears just to my perhaps somewhat typical series of rapid fire questions, and then we'll, we'll wrap up and have some more coffee.

• 2:03:49Sebastian Junger?

  Oh, and I didn't look at those in advance, so now I'm in trouble.

• 2:03:51Tim Ferriss?

  All right. All right, I'm ready. Let me get ready. Here we go. All right, I'll let you, let you limber up. Okay, I'm doing a little shadow boxing. All right. So the first is, when you hear the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind and why?

• 2:04:07Sebastian Junger?

  Martin Luther King.

• 2:04:08Tim Ferriss?

  Why?

• 2:04:09Sebastian Junger?

  Because he transformed society in incredibly courageous way.

• 2:04:13Tim Ferriss?

  How do you define courage or bravery?

• 2:04:15Sebastian Junger?

  Courage is risking or sacrificing your life for others.

• 2:04:20Tim Ferriss?

  What is the book or books that you have given to others most often as a gift?

• 2:04:26Sebastian Junger?

  At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matheson. I also recently read Sapiens by a guy named Harari, which is just phenomenal.

• 2:04:35Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good book.

• 2:04:35Sebastian Junger?

  I'm going to give that thing over and over again to everyone I know.

• 2:04:38Tim Ferriss?

  There's a friend of mine who's also been on the podcast named Naval Ravikant, who you have to meet at some point. You guys would get along famously, also one of his favorites of the last couple of years. At Play in the Fields of the Lord?

• 2:04:49Sebastian Junger?

  It's a novel by Peter Matheson. It takes place in the jungles of, of, of South America. And it's about a, a Sioux Indian named Louis Moon, who grew up in a reservation in the 1970s, and he goes down to Brazil to meet his, what he considers his forebears.

• 2:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 2:05:08Sebastian Junger?

  And it doesn't go very well.

• 2:05:11Tim Ferriss?

  That sounds, and now, am I getting this right? Matheson also wrote In Search of the Snow Leopard, or am I getting that?

• 2:05:16Sebastian Junger?

  That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:19Tim Ferriss?

  Fantastic writer.

• 2:05:23Tim Ferriss?

  What are you, what would your close friends say you're exceptionally good at?

• 2:05:29Tim Ferriss?

  If I had two drinks in each of them?

• 2:05:33Sebastian Junger?

  I think they would say that I'm really good at not reacting to things and seeming like

• 2:05:41Sebastian Junger?

  I'm unaffected when actually I'm deeply affected.

• 2:05:45Tim Ferriss?

  But on the surface, you're not emotionally reactive.

• 2:05:48Sebastian Junger?

  That's right.

• 2:05:50Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like, sounds like you're definitely a closet stoic.

• 2:05:57Tim Ferriss?

  This is actually not one of my typical questions. When I'm gonna throw this one, this is from, I think it's Robbie Fry. It's, looks like a very Dutch name. But if you could, if you could combine three different writers into one super Saiyan, 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?

• 2:06:20Sebastian Junger?

  I think I would have to pick Cormac McCarthy,

• 2:06:24Sebastian Junger?

  Peter Matheson, and Joan Didion.

• 2:06:30Tim Ferriss?

  Good choices all.

• 2:06:33Tim Ferriss?

  Let's see here. Where were you, so your first

• 2:06:38Tim Ferriss?

  book, commercial book success, The Perfect Storm, how old were you when that came out?

• 2:06:44Sebastian Junger?

  I was 35 years old.

• 2:06:46Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So when the book hit, before it was made into a movie, what advice would you give to your, you now, what advice would you give to yourself at that point in time?

• 2:06:58Sebastian Junger?

  The movie part of it didn't, what didn't affect me very much, but the, the sudden attention, public attention that I got when the book became a bestseller affected me enormously. And I think I would say to my, and I was very anxious about all that. I think I would say to myself, you know, there's nothing The public is not a threat. Like, the public is actually waiting to hear someone, anything, say something that's helpful and makes sense. Because we're all trying to get through this life together. And everyone, everyone wants some guidance.

• 2:07:38Sebastian Junger?

  And if there's anything I can say through my work, or just on a stage, that, that, that gives some comfort or guidance to people, they're enormously receptive. And when you, 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 terrific case of stage fright when my book came out.

• 2:07:57Tim Ferriss?

  How do you feel now, when you're getting ready for a talk, like your TED Talk?

• 2:08:02Sebastian Junger?

  Oh, I don't think twice about it. I mean, I was just, I mean, it just doesn't affect me at all. I think my heart rate goes up a little bit.

• 2:08:08Tim Ferriss?

  What is the most, what purchase of a hundred dollars or less, and we don't have to stick to that exactly, but recent purchase that has most positively impacted your life?

• 2:08:22Sebastian Junger?

  I think Sapiens.

• 2:08:24Tim Ferriss?

  Sapiens?

• 2:08:25Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, I mean, that book-

• 2:08:26Tim Ferriss?

  It's a, it's a fun book to read.

• 2:08:27Sebastian Junger?

  It's amazing. I mean, I just started looking at everything differently. Like, I mean, I love that book. And, but, books are, I mean, a book is a kind of thing of magic, right? I mean, it contain, I mean, it, it contains a universe of information, so, and it's cheap at the price. So, I, maybe it's unfair to use a book. A 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 is an axe, a good axe.

• 2:08:59Tim Ferriss?

  Good axe.

• 2:09:00Sebastian Junger?

  You can do almost anything with a good axe.

• 2:09:01Tim Ferriss?

  Any particular type of axe? What are the characteristics of a good axe?

• 2:09:07Sebastian Junger?

  It's gotta be, it can't be cheap wood and the hafts. It's gotta be good steel. I mean, I, you know, I don't even know how to evaluate this. Basically, the more you pay for an axe, the better quality it is, and the longer it'll last, and the better it'll cut. And you keep it really, really sharp, and you can cut not as fast as a chainsaw. I've used chainsaws a lot in my life, but you can- You can basically do anything with it, given a little bit of time. And I've spent a lot of time in the woods. And if I had to take, pick one thing to take into the woods with me, it'd be an axe.

• 2:09:39Tim Ferriss?

  I was just thinking, like, how would you open a tuna can with an axe?

• 2:09:42Sebastian Junger?

  Oh, that's so easy, man.

• 2:09:44Tim Ferriss?

  You could definitely open it.

• 2:09:44Sebastian Junger?

  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 Somerville, Massachusetts. And I had a date with this girl, this beautiful girl, and I invited her over and I was gonna make spaghetti. I mean, I'm like 23, right? I'm gonna make spaghetti. And I, like an idiot, I, I mean, I got like, and I had cans of tomato sauce and pasta, right? And she came over and I realized I didn't have a can opener. And, um, but I knew the answer and I went into my room and I got a hatchet that I had. And I opened the cans of tomato sauce with a hatchet and I hit it pretty hard and completely splattered her with tomato sauce. And here's the amazing part, she still went out with me.

• 2:10:31Tim Ferriss?

  Very memorable, at the very least.

• 2:10:33Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:34Tim Ferriss?

  So then he pulled out a hatchet.

• 2:10:35Sebastian Junger?

  That's right. Yeah, exactly. Right.

• 2:10:37Tim Ferriss?

  She was probably so relieved that you weren't a serial killer, he was gonna take her head off.

• 2:10:40Sebastian Junger?

  That's right.

• 2:10:41Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:10:44Tim Ferriss?

  Let's see. What is something you believe, even though you can't prove it?

• 2:10:52Sebastian Junger?

  Wow, that's a great question.

• 2:10:55Sebastian Junger?

  I believe I'm a good person.

• 2:10:57Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the habits or common practices of journalists that you dislike?

• 2:11:07Sebastian Junger?

  Oh, God. I, um, I really dislike laziness. And if you, and if you read a phrase or a sentence that's familiar, I mean, there are these cliches, these sort of, sort of linguistic tropes, like the mortar slammed into the hillside.

• 2:11:23Sebastian Junger?

  I just don't wanna read that again. You know, like, just say it in an original way, or don't say it. But you're wasting everybody's time, including your own, if you write by, and rely on these sort of linguistic tropes. I really, I really dislike that. And, um...

• 2:11:40Sebastian Junger?

  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 it, but it, the point of journalism is the truth. The point of journalism is not to improve society. And there are things, there are facts, there are truths, that actually feel regressive. But it doesn't matter, because the point of journalism isn't to make everything better. It's to give people accurate information about how things are. And I think journalists really confuse those two things. Advocates are what we need for improvement, but not journalists. Journalists provide information, like doctors provide information, when they look at your, the x-ray of your lungs after you smoke for 10 years.

• 2:12:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you need accurate forensics.

• 2:12:26Sebastian Junger?

  That's right. Yeah, that's right.

• 2:12:28Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think your 70-year-old self would give to your current self as advice?

• 2:12:38Sebastian Junger?

  I think I would say to myself, that 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've found something that's worth sticking around for. And 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,

• 2:13:23Sebastian Junger?

  that, if you get those, it's very, very hard to get those two, 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 err on one side or the other, because you have an ill-conceived idea of who you are.

• 2:13:42Tim Ferriss?

  It's this fine line. It's a tough, tough, tough balance.

• 2:13:46Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, it is a tough.

• 2:13:47Tim Ferriss?

  I find it tough personally.

• 2:13:48Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of unhappy people because they're struggling to find that balance.

• 2:13:53Tim Ferriss?

  How do you?

• 2:13:56Tim Ferriss?

  What are the symptoms of knowing? That you should pursue a given project, right? 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 what is for and then and I'll just throw it out there to

• 2:14:18Tim Ferriss?

  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 generally manifests itself as a lot of insomnia in my case. And I'm just like, okay, like this idea that's been pestering me like I just need to get it out of my head and onto paper, or I won't be able to get to sleep. So that is or but the insomnia could also be excitement, right? Like I'm excited about the possibilities of something and I just can't sleep. That's usually 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, what, what is it like for you?

• 2:15:02Sebastian Junger?

  You know, I think the I've only written five books. What was it? What was the collection of?

• 2:15:07Tim Ferriss?

  Unless you're comparing yourself to.

• 2:15:09Sebastian Junger?

  Well, the writers are writing 20, whatever, like you can always be insecure, right? No, I've written.

• 2:15:15Tim Ferriss?

  It doesn't have to be James Patterson.

• 2:15:16Sebastian Junger?

  I've really written only four books. One is a collection of of short form journalism. So

• 2:15:23Sebastian Junger?

  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.

• 2:15:30Sebastian Junger?

  One of the things I loved about Harare Sapiens is I finished it and I just thought, thank God, someone wrote that book. Like, the world really needed it. And the books that I write. Maybe I'm flattering myself, but it feels to me like the world needs this book. And I know that sounds horribly grandiose, but I have to say it's the feeling I'm looking for when I'm choosing a topic. I really don't want to write a book that I'm not sure the world needs.

• 2:16:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think if you look at, I mean, we're sitting in Silicon Valley. If you look at some of the, some, probably all of the biggest successes I know personally, they were scratching their own itch.

• 2:16:18Sebastian Junger?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:18Tim Ferriss?

  It was something they felt needed to exist.

• 2:16:21Sebastian Junger?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 2:16:23Tim Ferriss?

  If you had one billboard anywhere and could put anything you want on it, what would you put on it?

• 2:16:29Sebastian Junger?

  I think I would put the word "read."

• 2:16:38Tim Ferriss?

  Read.

• 2:16:39Sebastian Junger?

  It's the only, I was talking about this recently with some people, you know, we don't live in small groups anymore. When we evolved to live in groups of thirty, forty, fifty people, and you could gather fifty people around and have a communal discussion about how to live, what to do, who you are, what you want to be. You could do that, right? We live in a country of four hundred million. There's no more gathering around the campfire to figure out who we are, how we want to live, what are our values. We can't do that anymore, but we still need to. And in some ways, in a country as advanced as ours with nuclear weapons and everything else, it's even more important than when we lived in groups of fifty. I mean, it's vital that we have that conversation.

• 2:17:21Sebastian Junger?

  And the only real way, I think, the only real way to have, collectively have that conversation is through books. It's the only thing that's cheap enough, accessible enough to everybody, that contains enough information that can be shared and commonly understood. It's the only thing that we can have a group conversation, even in a group of four hundred million people. But if people don't read, that will never happen. And so, I really feel that books, it makes books a kind of sacred object. And sacred in the sense that our society, I don't think, will survive without them. And that, to me, as an atheist, one definition of sacredness is something that humanity needs in order to survive.

• 2:18:07Tim Ferriss?

  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 I'm also going to put this in the show notes, of course, for everyone. But is there anything that, this is a parting comment, you would like my listeners to meditate on, consider, do?

• 2:18:41Sebastian Junger?

  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 have come very readily to any person's mouth. You know, any Comanche could tell you instantly who they would die for and what they would die for. And in modern society, it gets more and more complicated. And when you lose the ready answer to those ancient human questions, you lose a part of yourself. You lose a part of your identity. And I think what I would ask people is, you know, what would you die for? What would you die for? And what do you owe your community? And in our case, our community is our country. What do you owe

• 2:19:22Sebastian Junger?

  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.

• 2:19:38Tim Ferriss?

  This is a great book, folks. I read a lot, so I have a high bar. I really enjoyed this book. It has a ton of notes. And next time that we hang out, probably in New York City, and have some wine, I'll bring this with me because I have 20, 30 other questions I'd like to ask you. But for those people who might... Reflect back on some of your recent writing and wonder if this is a book about war. It doesn't strike me that it is a book about war. It's a book about human nature and what we've evolved to be and what we are and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And war just happens to be a very helpful circumstance in which we can find some illumination into those subjects.

• 2:20:20Tim Ferriss?

  But I really enjoyed this book, so I encourage everybody to check it out. And Sebastian, thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Thank you. And everybody listening, as always, you can find links to everything that we discussed in the show notes. And that includes Sebastian's website, all the social and whatnot, and all the various resources that came up. And you can find that at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, all spelled out. And as always, and until next time, thank you for listening.

• 2:20:59Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:21:41Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 2:22:03Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a great partner for creating and growing your business. It's a one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs, whether that's a logo, website, business card, or anything else. I used 99designs to get book cover prototypes for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. I also used them for banner ads, illustrations, and other things. With 99designs, designers around the world compete to create the best design for you. You give feedback and then pick your favorite. You end up happy, or you get your money back. It's very simple. You can check out a few of my own designs and those of yours, meaning Tim Ferriss Show listeners, at 99designs.com/tim.

• 2:22:44Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:23:27Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:24:12Tim Ferriss?

  So check out freshbooks.com/tim and try it out and see what you think. And until next time, thank you for listening.