Transcript for #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger

I'm a cybernetty organism living this year over metal and this color.

Sebastian, welcome to the show. Thank you very much.

I'm reading the biography of Thomas Payne, one of the intellectual fathers of American independence from Britain in the 70s, 70s.

Yeah, the Greek stoics were greatly abired by pain. I didn't know much about them. I knew the word in I'd heard of Seneca, but I'm incredibly, I'm sort of half illiterate or untuner. 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 to make sense of things. And so what they said about the stoics, I really identified with, I'm like, oh, I got to learn more about the stoics. And then here I was, before I took an app on your couch, I sort of pod through your book collection over there. And there was the letters of Seneca, and I grabbed it and sat down, and I almost started moving with the pleasure. I mean, the things that he was writing 2000 years ago, we're so modern, so amazing, so essential. I just I get to have to get this book immediately.

Yeah, absolutely. So I started anthropology in college because it interested me. That was on the East Coast. We are at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. I had no interest in being in anthropologists, but it actually helped me throughout my career as a writer. After I got out of college, I sort of walled around, I waited tables, I did various things to earn money while I was trying to become a writer. And I was very slowly getting into journalism, but it didn't pay very well. And I got a job eventually as a climber for tree companies. And I would work 80, 90 feet in the air with a chainsaw on a rope, taking trees down in pieces, bringing branches and lowering them as I cut them and taking off the tops of trees and taking them down all the way to the ground. It was extremely dangerous work. Or I should say it's dangerous if you make them stick. There isn't any random danger in the top of the tree, and I realize that one point, if I get killed doing this and plenty of people do, if I get killed doing this, it will be because I killed myself by accident. It's not a situation where something random will kill me. That was very reassuring, and it also trained me to really focus on being in the present moment. Well, at one point, I wasn't in the present moment and the chainsaw hit the back of my leg and tore open the back of my leg and I, you know, I've been a marathon runner and stuff. And I was super worried about my Kelly's tendon. So you're lower leg, you're entire, I managed to drag it across the back of my ankle right with the Achilles. I turned the chainsaw. I was way up in a tree, you know, on a rope. And I turned the chainsaw off and I clipped it to my belt and looked down and I pulled the wound open because I wanted, you know, you're going to shock and you get very clinical immediately, right? I pulled the wound open and I wanted to see if the Achilles was intact. Indeed, it was, by the way, and Achilles is about the thickness of a number two pencil and it's white. Just in case you ever wanted to know what your Achilles looks like. And I was so relieved to see it intact, but I was still pretty messed up. And I repelled down to the ground and my crew took me to the hospital. And as I was recovering, I had to start that people die all the time doing dangerous jobs in this country. They're mostly work less men. They work in industries that are very dangerous, drilling for oil, logging, commercial fishing, that the nation needs done. And they die in numbers comparable to soldiers and more, actually. But they don't get acknowledged. They don't get honored. And I thought maybe I'll write about dangerous jobs. And that set me on course to write my first book called The Perfect Storm about a huge storm that among other things, say, a commercial fishing boat at sea.

Like many good stories that started in a bar. I was broke. and I was at a bar one evening and I was sitting next to this guy and we just started talking and he said he owned a tree company and he said he was looking for a climber and you know I was a pretty athletic kid and he said listen I'll train you to climb if you'll work for me but I can't give you full-time work on the occasional work it's all I got and I was like yeah absolutely so I started he sort of trained me out of climb and I did great thing about climbing was that I could make I mean for an unemployed freelance writer in the late eighties I could make a couple hundred dollars a day cash. I could make five hundred bucks a day even a thousand dollars a day depending on the job. So I could work one day a week and sort of live off it. It was the perfect job for someone who was trying to do something else and needed some time.

I running times we're almost fast enough. I ran 412 for the mile.

Yeah. I ran 904 for the two mile, 2405 for five miles and it's you 21 marathons. Those are my sort of sense of distance records that I had.

I never studied English and I never studied writing, in college or after. But I read a lot. I grew up in a household with a lot of books. My father was educated in Europe. He grew up in Europe. And reading was this sort of imperative. I mean, I mean, it was you just you don't not read. You know, and I read John McFee, Joan Diddyan, Peter Matheson, or in his Hemingway, of course, a little bit of Faulkner. I mean, I could go on. But I gravitated towards language that was efficient and lean and innovative. And when I would read a book that I liked, I would think about John McFey, I would think about why is it? And I like it. What is it about the writing that appeals to me? And even more importantly, when I read books, I didn't like. I tried to figure out what was it about that sentence, about that paragraph that repels me. And that was how I learned it right. It's a sort of process of natural selection. I just kept reading things that reinforced the style that I was drawn to anyway. And I kept writing more and more in that style. And I think if you know those writers and you read me, you can see my ancestors, my literary ancestry pretty clearly.

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 there was still at it in a kind of traditional way and they were amazing to track and cross-country athletes and they we had blended the two disciplines and so I did my field work on the Navajo reservation I spent a summer there I trained with their best runners you know up at 6,000,000 feet I lived in Fort Defiance Arizona. And I wrote a thesis about Navajo long distance running. That was the name of the thesis. Apparently, the thesis title is supposed to have a colon in them. I didn't know that. I just called it Navajo long distance running. And I just came alive academically doing that. I mean, I was a pretty indifferent student. I was much more of an athlete than a student. I just came alive in 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 a extraordinary idea and so I thought maybe I'll be a journalist this sounds like journalism maybe I'll try to be a journalist and I literally graduated with, you know, my graduation plan post graduation plan was maybe I'll try to be a journalist. Like, that was literally the plan I had in my head. It just worked out. Eventually, I in between, I was a pretty bad waiter in Washington, D.C. and then Cambridge and, you know, like, I mean, I, it took a while. I mean, what, my first book came out when I was 35 and I had virtually no income from writing before that.

That's the next song really. I wrote, yeah. You know, I wrote some articles with Boston Phoenix, and then I got in a couple of magazines, but it was not, I couldn't even come close to stitching together. And then come, I could live on.

I worked on this story for about a year and just sort of on my own time. And I wrote a magazine piece that outside magazine took. And then I got a book contract from WW Norton, a very, very modest book contract. But, you know, it got me going based on the magazine piece. Yeah, and then I, you know, I'd ginned up some outline that, you know, sort of showed how I was going to expand the story.

Yeah, I already had a Bill Craig full of notes and you know, whatever. I mean, I already done like, you know, years were the work on this. I was used to, I mean, everything I ever written I'd written on my own time and then tried to sell it. I was constantly sort of peddling finished pieces of writing. I never got in the 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 tug boats in Boston Harbor. And they didn't commission that. Why would they, right? But I just, I moved to Boston. 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 said them a pretty nice piece of writing. And it was my first public piece up there. And it was called towing the line. And that was my sort of entry into journalism.

Oh, I did tree work throughout. I mean, I, you know, I didn't the my advance was pretty small and as was appropriate. I mean, I was only unknown writer and as it was totally bizarre topic at the time, right? So I am not complaining, but the advance was quite small. So I did tree work a couple days a week. I'd be up in the trees, but I also After I finished my book proposal, by some miracle I had an agent, by the way. I had made a dime for him for 10 years, right? But he liked my writing, right? God plus it. He didn't touch. I met him. I met him. His name's Stuart Crichesky, and where 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 agents nightmare. A client of his who wrote academic papers, in other words, not a big pain gate. But he sort of handled the academic career of this guy who was a Shakespeare scholar. It took him three hours a year, you know, whatever. That guy's college roommate was my father. And he got the message that his arguably smallest clients. College roommates son wanted to be a writer and would he read some stuff and stormed us 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, stewards of great guy and he has an open mind and he read some stuff that I'd written and really liked it. He took another 10 years from to make any money off me, but he saw something term in It was. He saw something there and and I'm eternally grateful to him, but I so I gave him my book proposal based on the article and then I went off to Bosnia. I wanted to be a war reporter in case the author thing 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. He 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 said to be a fact saying I managed to sell your book.

Well, really, there's two kinds of writing. There's fiction, and there's nonfiction. And the first step, if you're a journalist, which I consider all nonfiction should be journalism, should be considered journalism. There are other rules for literary nonfiction, right? It's all journalism, as far as I'm concerned. If you're a journalist, the first thing you have to do is do your research, because you need something you're writing about the real world and you need facts and quotes and interviews and all that. My writing process really starts out in the world as I'm researching a story or in a library or on the internet or whatever as I'm researching a story. Fiction writers, they depend on this weird sort of pipeline to God, right? I mean, they're trying to reimagine the world in a way that's never been done before and reproduced on the page and have people enter this fictional world and be riveted by it. And that's where inspiration comes in. And that's where you have to really be at your desk Every morning, because you never know when God's going to talk to you. And I mean, God figuratively, I don't believe in God, but the creative gods. But for a journalist, it's much more like Carpentry, and you get the lumber, you get the bricks, you build the basement, you start putting it together. I mean, there's a process and there's a lot of inspiration in the actual language that you use, but it's much more procedural than I think fiction writing probably is.

Well, let me just say, McPhee, I mean, you're very lucky to have taken this. Oh, he was a mentor that I didn't personally know from me through his works. He was. And it's very interesting to hear what you said about him mapping out structure because I think good structure is an extremely visual thing. I think when people who are good at structure, I'd like to think I am, he definitely is. I think they arrive at the structure with the visual part of their brain. I mean, I think you've probably mapped his brain while it was at work. You would see that part light up. And that's just what I'm guessing. When I write out structure, it looks more like a diagram to a circuit board or something. It's not quite architect, like geometric shapes, but it's very visual. It represented completely visually. And I feel it. Like when I get at the right shape to something, I feel it. It's a very interesting process that for me is it's something that feels like the divine spark. That is finally sort of like, less me with its presence.

I read through all my interviews with a red magic marker and I red line the stuff the good quotes and I read through all of the research material and I underline the stuff that's interesting to me and then I go through everything I've underlined and I just write lists of what I consider the assets that I have to work with. And once I have those lists, they cover many pieces of paper, then I'll start to clump them into sort of general topics, you know, history of fishing in New England and the physics of wave motion. I'm referencing topics in the perfect storm, nightlife and cluster, you know, whatever. And then once I have those big chunks, I start to, and this is where the visualness comes in. Visualality 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'm literally moving ideas around on a piece of paper until they look right. And that's the part of writing that to me is almost closer to art than it's sort of intellectual pursuit.

I do my best writing when something's due.

Yeah, and that feeling of urgency might come six months out if it's a book deadline or it might be the next morning if it's you're trying to finish up a magazine piece, but that intensity, you know, it's like athletes athletes in the big game or the big race or whatever. I mean, that intensity can bring out something that you didn't even know you had access to much less embodied. So the time and you know, I have a cup of coffee and I sit down and I write for a couple hours like a board if I feel that I'm blocked in my writing usually with that block meaning I can't write the next section I keep rewriting and it doesn't work and it's stuck It's not that I'm blocked. It's that I don't have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic. It's not that I can't find the right words. It's that I don't have the ammunition. Right, the words aren't there in the first place. Yeah, because I don't have the ammo. I don't have the goods. I have not gone out into the world and brought back the goods that I'm writing about. And you never want to solve a research problem with language. You never want to be such a fine writer that you can sort of thread the needle and get through a thin patch in your research just because you're such a great pros artist use some my linguistic smoke and mirrors. Yeah, you don't have to research. Yeah, it's just bullshit and you know the 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 when it shouldn't be true.

I was speaking at a very kind of elite school, private school in New York City. These kids were going off, either to college or to high school, I can't remember. Anyway, these are very, very privileged, very smart, very educated children. And exceedingly accomplished parents. And I said to them something like, your hardest thing you're ever going to do, I was like, your program to succeed. You guys are programmed to succeed. The hardest thing you're ever going to do in your life is fail at something. And if you don't start failing at things, you will not live a full life. You'll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work. That's not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in. You have to do the hardest thing that you have not been prepared for in this school or any school. You have to be prepared to fail. And that's how you're going to expand yourself and grow. And then you'll really As you work through that process of failure and learning, then you will really deepen into the human being, your capable of being. As four years ago, I was going for them.

I mean, the path that I took is the one I know, best obviously, and I would say what worked for me. I mean, as a journalist, I'm very hesitant to actually give advice to people in my book tribe. I really try not to tell the country what I think we all should do.

Well, I think there's other language you can use where you're not issuing a directive, but you're saying you're giving some wisdom. So what I would say to someone like that is what worked for me was to read an enormous amount to think about what I read and why I liked it or didn't like it. Anthropology is an amazing discipline that gives you tools to understand almost every cultural social situation in the world. Mostly, you must have a enormous appetite for humanity in for life, and for the world. I mean, you really have to feel like you cannot fill yourself up enough with this amazing place that we live in. Like, if you have that feeling, and sincerely have it, you'll do okay if not at writing at something.

There's a few things. You know, I grew up in a pretty affluent suburb of Boston. I grew up in a very physically protected way. I got to 18. I felt like I'd never been... I'd never really been challenged. I'd never been faced with a situation that I didn't know I could survive. And having studied a lot of anthropology, you know, through college as I moved through my 20s, I thought this is ridiculous. I'm not an adult yet. I'm not a man yet. I mean, you crossed that threshold into adulthood in a manhood by facing something that could destroy you. And initiation rights around the tribal societies around the world, their main purpose is to confront young men and women have a different challenge that they have to face at equally daunting. But young men face this challenge of in these initiation rights of certain demonstrating that they will face the most painful, scariest things possible for their community, for their people. And that's adulthood. And I'd hit 30, and other than a, you know, a chainsaw injury here, there. I hadn't really been tested in a real way. And my father grew up in Europe during World War II. And wars, this sort of archetypal or deal. It's a sort of ancient, in some ways, ancient thing. And it's a very, very, a lot of societies. It is the gate for better or worse. I mean, I know there's a political conversation here that we can have. But better or worse, it's many societies, sort of, see it as the gateway to adulthood, to menhood, specifically for men. And I went off to Bosnia, partly, because I wanted to become a war reporter. And I was, You know, it's sort of at a loss as to how to make a living and living at out life, you know, partly because I felt like I was still a child and the war would transform me in some ways that nothing else could.

So skinwalkers were this thing that I never heard of that I first encountered when I was on the Navajo reservation in 1983 as a 19 year old 20 year old, whatever I was. And basically the Navajo believed in something that other cultures would call werewolves. The belief was that they were certain Navajo mostly men who had basically turned. They'd lost their humanity and they'd become animals, but animals are a source of power in a lot of native societies. They became animals in the sense that they had no human affiliation. And they did this by putting on the the hide of a wolf. And that gave them the powers of a wolf, the powers of being able to run very, very fast forever, long distance, the powers of being invisible, of being very, very ferocious when need be being incredible hunters. They were called skinwalkers and that these skinwalkers He were basically adopting the skills and powers of a warrior, except they were using it against their own people, and they would kill their fellow Navajo and eat them in the middle of the night. And the Navajo in 1983 on the reservation where I lived were absolutely terrified of this phenomenon. As terrified as they, I'm sure they were 100 years prior. And I got to say, the desert out there is a big lonely place. I started to feel their terror. You know, I didn't literally believe that these things exist, but the belief system that was around me still made me deeply, deeply scared of them. It was extraordinary experience for a rationalist like myself. My father's a physicist. and I don't believe in God, he didn't believe in anything but what he could measure and observe and all of a sudden, there I was in my trailer, very, very scared at certain moments of these things and of these skinwalkers. And as I wrote about it, my thesis, I said, you know, the skinwalkers are basically the universal human fear that you can defend yourself as a society, as a community, you can defend yourself against all outside enemies, but you're completely vulnerable. to one madman in your midst. One psychopath, one sociopath, basically, that has no feeling of protectiveness of humanity towards his neighbors, can kill more people than the enemy can. And that made me think of the awful spate of mass shootings in this country that have suddenly become so commonplace in the last 10 or 15 years, and it gave me the idea that the mass shooters in Aurora, Colorado, and at Sandy Hook, and we all know they're in the names. that they are our society's version of the skinwalkers.

Yeah, and I think our society, which really, I feel really does strive, I mean, just to address your earlier point. Well, political correctness, I think we really are in a very righteous way, striving for fairness and equality throughout our society. I think we really are. But we're also the product of our biology and our evolution. And the two are not easy partners. I mean, throughout the mammalian world, males and females are built differently and do different things and are good at different things. That's just an effect of nature. If we want the sexes to be equal in our society, those inherent differences become potentially problematic. And as a result, instead of trying to figure out how to reconcile those very real differences in an equitable system. People and well-meaning people that some of them are good friends of mine would just rather you not acknowledge the differences. There's a short-term logic to that, but there's a long-term loss. You know, and eventually we won't have really quality in the society until those unagotiable differences are actually incorporated into our equality. And anyway, that's, you know, what you write up about sort of PC thinking, it can be very infuriating, but it's a funny thing. It's infuriating, even though it's trying to do the right thing, but it's still infuriating.

Well, one of the things that's interesting is that if you take passers by in a moment of crisis, I mean, everyone will jump into a burning building to save their child. Maybe to save their spouse, possibly their parents in law, you know, but whatever, you have to have familiar relations and people will risk their lives to help the people that they love and it makes sense, right? But if you look at situations in public, in this anonymous society that we have, and someone's in danger, who goes to their aid? It happens all the time in New York. Someone falls onto the subway tracks, and the train is coming. Who jumps down onto the tracks to help them? Almost invariably, it's a man. Now, I feel like I'm very sexist and 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 pro-intwards that kind of impulsive risk-taking, it's sort of on the spot in the moment decision to jump on some railroad tracks while trains coming. It's not that they're braver. It's that they have psychological and physical predispositions and capacities that allow them, in fact, promote them to do that. So if you look at these stories, in something like 95% of bystander rescues are performed by men, okay? So when you have a society that's encountering a difficulty, and that can either be the blitz in one day, which I write about, or that could be a group of coal miners who were trapped in a coal mine disaster in the 1950s in Canada. You need people who are in the, quote, male role of rescuing and risk-taking. But then this other thing is important, and it's a kind of moral courage. And it does not require spontaneous muscular action with this complete disregard for your own life, right? That's not what's required. As important as that is, there's something else moral courage. You basically are like providing the moral fiber for the group, and you act as a kind of conscience for the group. And women are very, very good at that. And they did a study during World War II of who helped hide Jewish families who were fleeing the Nazis, Gentiles who helped Jewish families who were fleeing the Nazis. That's not something that takes muscular action in the moment. But if you're busted, you know, if you're a Dutch farmer and you have a Jewish family in your basement, you're dead, you're ice-cut. women were considerably more likely to make that decision than men were. So what happens is that if you have a say group of coal miners or stuck in a coal mine for a week, the first kind of spontaneous leaders you get are the classically male sort of action-oriented grab a pickaxe and start digging. When those efforts fail, another kind of leader takes over their way more empathic, their way more affiliative, they reach negotiated solutions, they try to make people feel good, they're in the classically female role. And what's so interesting about that is that the male and female roles will be filled regardless of the sex. So a group of women with no men around, a woman will jump in will jump out of the railroad tracks and to save the kid. If there are no men around, if there are no women around, a man will step forward and act in that wonderfully moral empathic way that women are known for. And so society needs both of these gender roles. and it doesn't really care if an actual man or an actual woman fills them.

It's a very interesting question. The aircoise sort of figured it out, as he said, in peacetime, they had sages who were partly elected by women. So the female voice was found in the selection of sages. They ran peaceful society when war started. The sages stepped down and war leaders took over. And if the people they were fighting sued for peace, it was not the war leaders who considered the deal. It was the sessions. And if peace was accepted, the war leaders stepped down immediately. And it's really interesting because the U.S. Constitution parts of it are based on the earthquake law of peace. And Thomas Payne did a lot of work sort of incorporating the natural rights of man as were exemplified by earthquake society. into the intellectual basis for American governance. But as soon as the British surrendered George Washington was basically the supreme leader. He was the military leader and the colonies was the one they were fighting the British. And as soon as the British surrendered, he formally gave up power, gave up control to the civilian government. It was a very, very important thing to do, because otherwise he could have continued on as, quote, King, and that would not be a democracy. And my guess is that he took that idea from the earthquake. Military thinking and peace thinking are very, very required, very different sensibilities, very different calculations of cost and benefit. And the conundrum for us right now is the we elect a president who in time of war is also a military leader. And I think in a democracy, the idea that you have a non-military person at the top of the chain of command is very, very sensible. You do not want a society run by the military. That's a military dictatorship. We do not want that. But it does call for very, maybe even conflicting traits in a single person. You know, the wisdom and the gentleness of a peacetime leader, the empathy of a peacetime leader, and the capacity for violence and effectiveness and decisiveness in a wartime leader, you're asking someone to be almost schizophrenic if they can do both of those well.

Well, it was this sort of strange phenomena, right? I mean, the Christian society settled the eastern seaboard of the new world in the 1600s, 1700s, and beyond the tree line were the savages, right? They weren't Christian. They weren't civilized. They ran about almost naked and they hunted wild animals and forticated and everything else, right? I mean, it's sort of Satan's dead, right? Sounds pretty great. Maybe that's just me. So for the Christian civilized Christian society of that era, they clearly felt that they were the superior godly society, but what happened was that superiority that very quality of civilization and Christianity was also quite stifling, right? We didn't evolve to live. We didn't evolve as the human animals that we are, social animals that we are. to live within the strictures of sort of Puritan society. So young men, particularly, but young women as well, were constantly, the frontier was constantly sort of bleeding young people who went off, drifted off to live with the India. That means the movement to sort of societal movement. I mean, it was a trickle, but it was significant, constantly towards the tribes. And the Indians were never running off to join white society, right? And then they were even weirder cases.

In my book Tribe starts with the story of Pontiac's rebellion in western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and she Pontiac fought the colonial powers for years. very effectively, but eventually they sued for peace. And one of the deals was the main part of the deal was that he gave up 200 and some white captives that had been taken from the frontiers. And a significant number of the captives did not want to be returned to their home, to their home, to their society. And they actually weren't slaves. And what's interesting about, I mean, the people thought that that's what happened to them. In fact, what happened to them is that the captives who weren't killed and somewhere 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 piece of cord after Pontex rebellion. And two young women actually managed to escape and make their way back to their adopted families. And this happened over and over and over again, as the frontier marched across America, they were constantly these stories of people who were taken by the Indians and didn't want to come home. And the reason that was given was that it was an egalitarian society. It was not stratified by class, by income, by inherited both, by inherited power. Everyone was equal. There were leaders, but there were leaders who were followed voluntarily. And if you didn't like the leadership style of Chief Pontiac, well, you know, you could just take your family and move up with speaking creek and move in with your wife's cousins family with this other group. And so authority was never imposed. The authority was accepted. And that led to a really basic equality in Native societies. And I should say as an anthropologist, the sort of hominid groups that we evolved from that we were. For hundreds of thousands of years, all of the evidence that anthropologists, archeologists have been enabled to assemble is that they were extremely egalitarian group. Partly, you can't carry much wealth, right? If you're a mobile nomadic society, how much wealth can you really carry? And a society that lives in groups of 40 or 50 that is mobile, it's extremely hard to accumulate differences of wealth and their forced status.

Well, one of the many ironies of war is that it's savage and as violent and it's completely anti-human. But it produces an intensity of human connection that you really can't. You're hard-pressed to find in peacetime. So during the blitz, and I looked a lot at the blitz in London, and 30,000 people were killed by German bombs in around six months in and around London. The society didn't collapse, but it contracted sort of into itself. People were sleeping shoulder to shoulder with complete strangers in the tube stations. Fire brigades were rushing around trying to put out fires after the bombing raids. It was a brutal time and the government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties. Forget about the physical casualties, mass psychiatric casualties. But what happened was admissions to psychiatric wards actually went down from prewar levels during the bombings. And then went back up after the bombing stopped. One official said, you know, it's amazing. We have neurotic striving ambulances. What it seems to be is that the communal life that is often forced upon people by hardship, by danger, by calamity. That communal life is so psychologically beneficial to people, that there's a net gain in psychological well-being. So what you find is that in countries at war, Emile Durkheim, the famous sociologist, found that in European countries that were at war in 1800s, the suicide rate immediately went down. The murder rate went down. All that kind of anti-social behavior was mitigated by the sort of monumental task that the country was engaged in. In New York, I live in New York City, New York after 9.11. Massively traumatized population. You would think a lot of psychological problems would come out because of this psychological trauma that the entire city experienced after 9.11. That's not what happened. The suicide rate went down after 9.11. The violent crime rate went down. even Vietnam vets who were struggling with PTSD in New York City said that there's symptoms improved after 9-11 because they were needed. They had this sense, oh my god, there's a crisis. I'm needed. Time to stop thinking about myself. Time to think about the group about us. And that feeling of us is what not only does it make people feel good, but it buffers Many people from their psychological demons and it's kind of a relief.

Yeah, I think you get the idea Yeah, I mean the nickname thing is really interesting a groups of men give each other their names women as well as I know adult It's a really interesting thing and I think it's a signal of tribal affiliation of group affiliation The male group in our evolutionary past was extremely important in hunting and in defense and the more cohesive and internally committed all the males were to the group to everyone else. The more effective they would be at fighting and in hunting and the survival of the community. dependent on them doing that job as well as on the women doing other things, but it dependent on that and cohesion. Cohesion is increased among other things by hardship, by nicknames, by humor. I mean, all these things that you see men and groups too. I mean, any construction crew in New York City, you walk past them and have to time their doubled over laughing. I mean, you know, like one of the things men doing groups is making each other laugh. And they give each other nickname. So it's a really, really ancient that what you experience is a very common thing. And I think quite ancient and serves a real purpose. We evolved as a species in a sort of experience of sort of ongoing moderate crisis. I mean, we're hunter-gatherers, we evolved in a pretty harsh environment, and we've survived in the harshest of environments, in the Arctic and the Kalahari Desert. For example, and normal life for most of human history was a moderate ongoing crisis. What's very fortunate and beautiful and wonderful and also a weird way tragic about modern society is that crisis has been removed. When you reintroduce a crisis like in the Blitz and London, or an earthquake that I wrote about it. I've had Zano Italy, early in the 20th century, and I've had Zano 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, everyone sort of crouched around the same campfires, right? And what this guy said was the earth. I'll try to do it by memory. I'm almost got it. The earth quake gave us what the law promises, but does not in fact deliver, which is the equality of all men. I think one of the things that people like about crisis is that suddenly everybody's equal. And you're evaluated, like in a boxing gym, you're evaluated for your actual conduct in the moment. not for who your father was, not for the clothing that you're wearing, the boxing gym that I work out at. You could be a suit from Midtown, you know, with a fancy job and a big bank, or you could be like a really tough or kid from the Bows of Brooklyn. There's no bias in either direction. There's no bias against the dude and the suit, and there's no bias against the ghetto kid. 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 we're called, the white Indians, the white captives of the American Indians, I think that is one of the things that appealed to them. They were no longer in this incredibly stratified, frankly unfair colonial society. They were in a place where they were totally self-determining in terms of how they were seen.

One of the topics of this book is PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. I had this idea because of my work on the Navajo reservation that the huge rates of PTSD that were experiencing in America right now are maybe anomalous and then if you live in a tribal society, the rates might be quite low. So that was the sort of genesis of my book. So I talked about my own experience with PTSD. I've been a war reporter since the early 90s. I stopped after one of my best friends was killed in combat. Two 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 Offmacham Asood, who was the leader of the Northern Alliance. He was fighting the Taliban. He was completely outnumbered outgunned. He knew back then the Taliban had fighter planes. The Taliban had tanks. They had artillery. They had all the toys. And Masood, his forces were this sort of guerrillas. Well, it's great to be with the grillers until you start getting shelved, right? And, or bombed or whatever. So we had a tough, I was up there for two months and we saw and went through some very tough things. And I got back to New York, young man, New Alts, your age, the rain late 30s. And I just felt completely like that nothing would ever affect me, right? I just assumed complete invulnerability to everything. And I got back to New York and a little shaking up at all right. And then one day, I went down into the subway and it says what I did every day. And it was rush hour and there are a lot of people. And I was seized with this incredible panic attack. I'd never had one in my life. Everything I was looking at seemed like a mortal threat. And 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'd been plenty scared of 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 just I'm out going to kill me. It was too loud. The noise was going to everything was a mortal threat and I backed up against the iron support column and just sort of waited for it. Then I finally sprinted out of there and took a taxi and that kept happening. Anytime I'm I was in a small, like an enclosed place with too many people too much going on, I would just panic. I just thought I was going crazy. I had no idea that he 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 that was at a picnic, actually. And she asked about my war reporting and if I had any suffered any consequences from it, I was like, no, of course not. I'm fine. And for some reason, I thought to sort of mention, but once in a while, I have a weird headache. And she nodded in that way, the drinks do. Yeah, interesting. And she said, well, it was the spring of 2003. And she nodded and she said, well, that's interesting. She said, that's called PTSD. And 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.

Well, the truth about PTSD is that if you almost 100% of people who have been traumatized, either seem something gruesome or feared for their own life. And I should add that the witnessing of harm to others is more traumatic than dangerous. It's interesting. Almost 100% of people have been traumatized, get short-term PTSD. That's what I got. Less weeks, less a month, goes away, therapy helps, whatever, but we're humans, right? When we were adapted to survive, danger and stress and hardship and all that, all that stuff, we wouldn't be here. So trauma, if trauma was psychologically crippling to humans, humans wouldn't exist. around 20% of people get long-term PTSD. So they passed 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 U.S. military. Every war, the casualty rate, thank God has gone down because the intensity of the combat has gone down. As bad as World War I was, it wasn't as bad as Civil War. World War II was not as intense. The combat was not as intense. There were not the mass casualties of World War I. Korea, Vietnam, the war on terror has the lowest casualties rates of any war the US has fought, major war. But as the casualties rates have gone down and the level of trauma has gone down, disability claims have gone up, they're going the wrong directions. Right now, about 10% of the US military actually experiences any combat at all, one out of 10 soldiers. The rest of them are very, are their crucial, they're necessary, they're not getting directly traumatized. But something like 50% of the U.S. military has filed for some form of PTSD disability. So there's 40% in there that are a bit of a mystery. They come home and they're deeply dangerously alienated depressed. They don't fit in something gravely wrong. My theory is that what they're experiencing isn't a reaction to trauma. They couldn't be because most of them weren't traumatized. But they're experiencing is the It's a radical re-adjustment from platoon life, but 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 a cot to cot, you know, some kind of bungalow, or you know, whatever, but it's all group living, right? You're eating meals together, you're emissions and patrols together, you're in everything together for over a year. That is exactly how humans evolve to live. That is exactly our prehistory. So the experience that incredible tight cohesion With your platoon, no, there might be people you have conflicts with that doesn't mean it's one big love fast, but it is close. And it's close with people that you, you know your life depends on. And then suddenly you're sprung from that. And you're back in modern society. And I think what's afflicting a lot of these vats isn't a response to trauma. It couldn't be. It's a response to the sudden, aloneness and loneliness that modern society is known for, unfortunately.

Yeah, I mean, you can see the extent that, you know, this is proof, whatever, it's an interesting example. I mean, so you spent two years in Come a rune incredibly poor country and now for example 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. And then after two years you come home in the depression rate for people coming back from Peace Corps service is astronomical. It's something like 50%. 25% 50% is enormous. It's akin to soldiers. So there you have this common theme. Peace Corps volunteers are not traumatized. But they experience, like soldiers, this radical transition from closeness literally village life. Back to the American suburb or whatever. I mean, this is the first society, I mean, 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, 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 on a room by themselves. They know it in an evolutionary sense. They know it's dangerous. And they cry if they scream. What was it?

Yeah, the skin on skin contact for infants and young children in tribal societies is as high as 90% of the time. Skin on skin contact. And the study looked at skin on skin contact in American society. I think it was in the 70s. The study was done. And it was as low as 17%. Something like that. Now you could say, OK, well, people have to work. They have jobs. You know, I'm all true. But that doesn't mean that that radical shift in childrearing doesn't have consequences.

Yeah, our support units. What it seems to be is that unit cohesion is a buffer for psychological struggles, including PTSD. So the more highly trained, the soldier, the more highly trained the unit, the more psychologically resilient they are, even though they might be taking higher casualties. And what's so interesting about trauma is that it's not necessarily related to the level of danger. It's related to the level of control that you feel that you have. So if you're a sort of standard issue, support unit, rear base soldier, you know, one of the huge bases that the American military has or the Israeli military has, for example, in previous wars in Israel, the random mortar round comes in. Strangely, that is, causes more a greater proportion of psychiatric casualties Then frontline units doing very intense fighting, but they're, they're taking hierarchies with these, but they're incredibly well trained. So they have a sense of mastery over their environment.

Well, it go command. Absolutely. I mean, you know, it's game on, right? The fit the big game and the football game, whatever. I mean, we're why, you know, humans are wired for action and war when need be. And, you know, your neural circuitry just lights up and there's all kinds of hormonal stuff going on. I mean, you're app, you have enormous agency. But even it's true. I read a stasis on my previous book called War. I saw this study where some army psychiatrists, they like two unluckiest army psychiatrists in their whole military, probably at that time. We're at some, like, remote outpost with special forces soldiers along, like, I don't know, the DMZ and they were dropped in there. They were just doing some standard study psychological assessment of these guys, right? And these guys are real bad asses. They're like SF, you know, like the real deal. And so these psychologists, But they found out that the base, it was a 20-man position, something like that. The base was about to be attacked by a battalion of NVA, like 500 men, right? And there was 20 guys there, something like that. The psychologist, that, oh, perfect. Does a perfect moment to measure stress and soldiers?

That's right. Exactly. So they started taking cortisol levels hourly from the soldiers. And the officers, the lieutenant, the poor lieutenant, he's probably 22. His cortisol levels, he's not his young, he's not very well trained, and he has a huge amount of responsibility is the officer. 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 then turned out there was no attack. And then he went returned to normal. This special forces guys were the opposite. As soon as they heard, they were about to experience an overwhelming attack, their cortisol levels dropped. They got super calm. The reason their cortisol levels dropped, it was stressful for them to wait for the unknown. But as soon as they knew they were going to be attacked, they had a plan of action. They started feeling 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.

countries go to war through a political process that's run by the government. And the troops have nothing to do with the war in that sense. Right. I mean, like guys who are drilling for oil and North Dakota, really don't have anything to do with global warming. You know, they're providing something that our society has decided at once, including a lot of environmentalists, frankly, are driving around in cars, they're running gasoline. So with the upper stickers that say, you're blood for oil. 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 going to do. So there's no conflict between disagreeing with a war and sort of honoring people who have said, for 40,000 dollars a year, I will do whatever you think this nation needs done. That's incredibly honorable thing. And if you want to create a sense of unity of purpose in this country, which I think would be enormously psychologically beneficial to soldiers. I mean, soldiers experience unity of purpose in their platoon that they come back to a country to this country, which is basically a war with itself. I mean, we live in racially divided communities. The gap between rich and poor is bad and growing worse. The political parties speak with incredible contempt for one another. If you're a soldier and you fought for this country and you come back to this mess, I mean, of course, they're messed up. Come on guys, we fought for you and you can't even get along in peacetime. I mean, you guys are experiencing peace and you're not, you can't even get along. So you want unity of purpose in this country. One way to get there is to make 50 years ago racist speech was acceptable socially. Now it's unacceptable. It's protected under free speech, but it's politically and socially unacceptable. Contempt you with 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, kind of the interest of this nation that it's effectively banned from society, by common consensus. That would help soldiers who would help all of us. National service would be amazing. I think it's morally wrong to force people to fight a war they don't want to fight. But national service with a military option, where every 18 year old or every young person had to do a year or two of national service would be, I mean, that would truly create the melting pot that this country is and should be. The classes, the races get mixed in this very egalitarian way to recreate a comet like an Israel, which has a PTSD rate, by the way, a 1%. We create this sort of common experience in this unity of purpose, which is so profoundly helpful psychologically.

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

Yeah, anything. Whatever. I mean, I mean, for us collectively, these are imagination. And we have two things, right? We have this incredible resource for our young people. And we have a nation that's deeply deeply in crisis. And the one thing that unifies us is being attacked Right? We're attacked by terrorists and suddenly we're a unified country. We don't want to have to wait for tragedy to unify us, right? We want to beat it to the punch and actually unify our country for positive reasons instead of as a reaction to a horrible attack.

Can you, yeah, of course. So they weren't even my buddies. They became my buddies. So I was 22 years old. My father grew up in Spain and in France, and I grew up going to those countries and when I was, you know, after college, I decided I'd read a lot of Hemingway. This is all pretty predictable, right? I read a lot of Hemingway. I wanted to go to Pamplona to see the running of the bolts. To see or participate in the running of the bolts, right? So, The festival of San Fermin in Pumplona is this big citywide, you know, like freak Joe basically for a week. And I was sleeping on someone's couch and when I slept in a park bench, I mean, it's just a free for all. It's an amazing time, right? And I went out to this bar in preparation for the running of the bulls the next morning. No one who's within the barricades where they run the bulls. They fire the cannon off at seven in the morning. They release the bulls from the arena and they charge through town to these barricades. And no one who's within those barricades at seven a.m. woke up at six a.m. to do it. I mean, everyone's been up all day. 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 position of some stupid little bar saw us on the floor. I spoke pretty good Spanish at the time. I immediately started talking to these two young Spaniards who were just completely shit faced. Right. And one of them has a leather. sort of drinking bag around us to describe it a leather drinking bag called a bota around his neck which is filled with red wine and he's keep trying to get the red wine squirt the red wine was mouth but he keeps missing its all of his white t-shirt and these guys are having the best time in the world and we've just become friends instantly when you'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 suddenly these three very tough-looking North African kids walk in. And I lived in France for a while with my family when I was 12 or 13. So I spoke French also. These really tough-looking Algerian and 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 head and says, that's mine. You stole it. So I'm the only one to speak, both languages. So now I'm translating right in my friend, my Spanish friend, new Spanish friends says tries to grab it back and says, no, that's mine. I don't know who you are. And the Moroccan guys and the two Spanish guys, everyone suddenly has a hand on the Viking helmet. And they start pulling at it. And it's rapidly devolving into a pretty good bar fight. And the helmet starts to rip. It's just cheap plastic, right? And one of them shouts, it's sort of King Solomon's judgment almost. Like one of himself stops stop, we're ripping it. You know, and they stop, everyone stops because no one wants to destroy the thing they are all fighting over. And one of the two Spanish guys, I think the less drunk of the two, turns to me and says, I have an idea, will you take my place at this helmet? And will you defend it? I mean, this wonderful elegant way that Spaniards have of speaking particularly when they're drunk, will you defend it 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? So I'd say, yes, I'll defend the helmet, et cetera. And I take my place at the helmet. And he goes to the bartender. And now the whole bar is watching this. This is high theater, right? And this point. So me and the Spanish kid are glaring at the Moroccans and they're glaring back and we're faced off around this helmet. I'm really hoping it doesn't go to where, you know, it looks like it's headed. So that 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. No, no one wants to be the asshole who spills the red wine, right? It's the festival of Sun Fettermine. The whole thing's running on red wine, like no one wants to spill it, right? That just looks bad. So he fills the helmet to the brim with red wine and he puts his hand under it. And he says, OK, 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. It says, you're a guest in our country. So you drink first. And the guy drank. And he passed it to his left and went around the circle. And then when it was empty, red wine, he got filled up. And then eventually, they just got another jug and started passing the jug around. An hour later, I'm talking to like some girl an hour later, like I eventually extricate myself from this. And I look over. And the five of them were ready to tear each other to pieces, right? The five of them are hanging off each other, singing in unison in two different languages and the Viking helmet has been completely forgotten and is under a table in the corner.

You think he thoughts on this? Well, it's tricky. I mean, how do we have less heart disease in the society that where people drive and they have plenty of most people have plenty of food and a lot of fats and triggers? You know, I mean, the very safety of this society, the very thing that makes us lucky, also creates a danger. The disease is of affluence. That's right. So the wonderful thing about the society is that we don't have to organize groups of young men and put weapons in their hands and send them out to the edge of town to fight off an incursion from the young men of an enemy town, a hostile town. That's not happening anymore, right? I mean, wars are big formal things that for the United States almost always happen elsewhere, but in terms of our communities and our society at home, we no longer have to organize young men and prepare them for group violence so that we can survive. That's been the human norm for two million years, either from predators or from other humans. Young men function in groups and functioned 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 heart of 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 get very good at it. And in modern society, well, young men want to do is achieve honor by defending the community. I mean, you should have 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 and 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.

That's right. And young men like young women for the most part are well-intentioned and wanted to do right by their community and their society. But if you have a society which is so safe and protected and removed the rest of the world as we are. In some ways, there's sort of nothing useful for the young men to do. And then in their own ad hoc way, they create their own trials, right? So they take a lot of risks. They do stupid stuff. They jump off a stuff that's too high to jump off of. They drive too fast. They get into fights. I've never done anything like that. Young men die at six times the rate of young women from accidents and from violence. There's a reason for that. they're wired to demonstrate their prowess and it often gives them killed.

The status of victimhood is not a psychologically healthy place to be in. And I think our society takes people who are unfortunate, who have experienced something difficult. And in a kind of misguided attempt to make the world right again for them, they classify them as victims. Now, they may call them survivors, they may call them whatever they want, but actually the role that's being asked that the version is being asked to play is one of a victim. Victims are taken care of. So, after World War II, which saw casualties that completely eclipse, even these terrible wars of our current day. Soldiers came back. They didn't do multiple deployments. They signed up and they were in the army until the war was done. Some of them were in for three, four years. Straight. And they came home. And basically, the society said to these men, and it was almost all men in the combat units. Society said to these men, like, all right, you're not 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. There were thought of much like I'm sure the Cheyenne and the Comanche in the Apache and the Sue and the Kyua warriors who came back from the Warpath. There were thought of as essential and functioning members of society. No, maybe they were missing a lamb or maybe they had some trauma to process. But they were needed back home. in the towns and cities of this great country, just as badly as they were needed in the Pacific and the fields of Europe. And the problem with victimhood is that it perpetuates the psychological state of passivity and trauma that you want the person who escaped from, right?

That, actually. Exactly. And you think about what the official London official said about the blitz. Now we have neurotic striving ambulances.

Yeah, you know, it's a very politically delicate thing to bring up, but all I'm doing is repeating the accounts of soldiers and veterans. I mean, the best thing a journalist can do is convey information and that's what I'm doing. their veterans I've talked to said they just they won't go to these group therapy sessions because you know one out of twenty is some guy who really didn't see any combat and is trying to milk the system pretending to have trauma pretending to have PTSD and he really doesn't you know one of the tricky things the VA and trying to speed up the massive bureaucracy that they created over the last decades and try to speed that up speed up disability claims they said the soldiers if you self-diagnose Think about this. If you self diagnosed with PTSD, you do not have to give us proof that anything traumatic happened. You do not have to describe the incident that you were traumatized in. You just have to tell us that you believe that you were traumatized and that you have PTSD and that's enough for a disability check. So humans being what they are, some number of people are going to take advantage of that. And we're a wealthy country. We can easily absorb those costs. So I have zero opinion about whether we should inquire further. But I should say, that the data show, that having that kind of dishonesty in a process is actually psychologically detrimental, not only to those specific people who are being dishonest, but to everybody. It's actually quite corrosive.

Carry a video camera. I shoot a lot of footage, but I've never taken still photos.

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

Yeah. When I was in Northern Afghanistan in 2000, there was a big nighttime battle going on. And there was a mast infantry assault against entrenched Taliban positions through my field. The Northern Alliance, so we'll war one style. And it was at night, and we were right behind the front lines, and a wave of soldiers went, so it took the wrong route, and went through this minefields, and a lot of them got messed up, and they were pulled out of there. And we saw them immediately afterwards, and they'd served and piled on to the back of a flat, but they got tried. They were alive, you know, they had lost legs, and you know, traumatic amputation, and they were extremely messed up their alive. Most of them probably survived. They're anti-personnel months. So we were there where there were brought into this sort of forward field hospital tent that was lit with carousine lanterns, right? And this is rough. This is Wilbur one area of medicine. Yeah. And in the very bright light of these propane lanterns, carousine lanterns, they brought these poor guys in. And you know, there was 12 guys, you know, where their bodies ended at their knee, their bodies ended at their hips. You don't realize it's psychologically incredibly deranging. to see the human body rearranged. And I've found later in my research that one of the most traumatizing things in terms of PTSD is to see dismemberment, to see the coherence of the human form rearranged in an odd way that you've never seen before. And it's just, it really tweaks people. And I had a moment of crisis. I went a little crazy. It felt like I went a little crazy. I just, my brain just sort of stopped functioning. And I don't even have very clear memories of it. But I left the tent. I couldn't take it. I could not bear to see what I was seeing. And I left the tent and I went outside and the cold Afghan night and lived a cigarette. And I thought, you know, war is exciting and it's dramatic and it's important and it's meaningful and it's all this other stuff. But if you're not also prepared to look unblinkingly, unflinchingly at the worst aspects of war, dismembered people, you really have no business covering the quote, good parts. And by good, I mean the parts that are traumatic. If you can't face what's in that tent, you have to get out of the business completely. And you can't be selective about your experience of war. But you have a job to do, and it's to communicate to your readers back in the United States, Everything about what war looks like, including that. So grab your damn notebook and grab your pen and walk in there and just write down what it is like to behold such a thing. And as soon as I was interesting, right? As soon as I had a purpose, I was okay. My self-giving purpose was document this thing that you can barely Beard 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. So as I had a job to do, I was okay. And I wrote it all down. And it was one of the most powerful parts of this piece that I wrote. And I passed through the gateway through the threshold. And at that moment, I'd been in plenty of wars until then. But in that moment, I became a war reporter.

Yeah, Tim Heatherington was a wonderful brilliant English photographer who I was lucky enough to work with on my project in the Corongal Valley. I wanted to document the experience of one platoon, 30, 40, 50 men throughout one deployment. And I wound up at a little outpost called Restrapo. 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 Corn Gal Valley. And we both got hurt. We both came very close to getting killed out there. There's extraordinary experience. And we became brothers, really. And we made a film called Bestrepo. It went a lot of awards. And then it was nominated for an Oscar. And 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 you know, we had a girlfriend. And we were all out there together. It was incredible experience. We didn't win. It didn't really matter. 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. prevent any fear. After the Oscars, we all went home and we were going to head to Libya and the last moment I couldn't go for personal reasons. And Tim went on his own and he was killed on April 20th in the city of misrata in Libya by a mortar round, anyone millimetre mortar that was fired by Gaddafi's forces outside of misrata. And he bled out in the back of a rebel pickup truck racing for the misrata hospital. And, you know, I got the awful phone call in New York City, and very, very quickly decided I would never cover more again. It wasn't that I was scared of getting killed. That's a fear that you have to confront early on, and I'd sort of resolve by feelings about it. It's that in watching the news of his death, and he was beloved by people, including my wife, then Yala, I just loved him. I mean, he did everyone love them. And I watched the news of his death, Ripple outwards from my apartment, because I got the news first from my apartment outwards through all the people that he knew that he loved on out into people that he didn't even know who loved them, on out through his country and my country. And I just thought, I don't want to risk doing that to the people I love. I mean, I'm dead, right? My problems are over. But I'm giving them a lifetime of pain in sorrow, and that's not an honorable thing to do. And so I got out of the business.

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

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

The main thing that I can think of is drawn from some of my research into American Indian ceremonies or returning warriors in the 18th century or vets from the current wars, 19th centuries. One of the common themes in these ceremonies is that the warrior gets to recount in front of his community what he did for them on the battlefield. And you know, often it's a heroic sort of boasting of how brave he was and how he killed the enemy and now you know, whatever. But it's this cathartic description of a warrior's warrior discharging his duties for his community. There's something about doing that for the people you did it for. that seems to be very, very psychologically healthy to put it in modern terms, because it's almost a unit of universal in these ceremonies. And so I had the idea, I mean, we're not gonna go back to a tribal society, and we can't, 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, so we get the best of both worlds. And the way to do that in terms of returning veterans is to turn the town hall of the city hall in every community in this country on Veterans Day into an open forum for veterans. I have this idea of veteran town halls where my website Sebastian Younger.com is a page devoted to this. You open up the town hall and a veteran from any war. have the right to stand up and speak for 10 minutes to their community. And I know veterans, right? Some of them are going to be incredibly proud of their service. And they're going to say they miss the war. And it's going to make liberals uncomfortable. And some of them are going to just to be clear. You would consider yourself liberal. Oh, I'm told liberal. Yeah. Yeah. But as a journalist of neutral, I mean, it's really important. The private person on liberal was a journalist. I really try to be completely neutral in my analysis in my evaluation of things. Conservatives will be made uncomfortable by veterans standing up and being incredibly angry about the war that they had to fight. And everyone's going to be uncomfortable with someone stands up and just starts crying and can't even talk because they're crying too hard. But all of that is war, right? We sent these people to do a job for us that we deemed necessary, collectively, deemed necessary. And the emotional five for it is okay as long as we process it all collectively. It's not okay if we just make them deal with it. It's not their war. It's our war. So all of us need to deal with it much like the American Indian tribes did in these harmonies and amazing things. So we did this once in Marblehead, Massachusetts and Seth Moulton is a Democratic representative from from Massachusetts who was a Marine lieutenant in Ramadi. I believe it was saw some very, very tough fighting. He helped me organize it. We did it together and Last Veterans Day, in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, if you were civilian and you'd like to say, I support the troops. With that literally meant on that day last year, in Marblehead, Massachusetts was, you really then should go down to the town hall and listen to what the veterans had to say about what I was like for them. There's no Q&A. There's no debate. This is not an evaluation of the war. It's not a patriotic thing. It's not anti-war thing. It's just, this is what the experience was like. And I really, really think that if we could do this in every town across the country, that it would be enormously therapeutic for veterans, but even more important in some ways, it would start to bind the country together again. I think the veterans are suffering because the country is suffering. And if we can heal ourselves as a nation, The veterans are going to be fine.

Oh, and I didn't look at those in advance. So now I'm in trouble. All right. All right. I'm ready. Let me get ready. There we go.

Why? Because he transforms society and incredibly courageous way.

Courage is risking or sacrificing your life for others.

I'd play in the fields of the Lord by Peter Matheson. I also recently read Sapiens by a guy named Harari, which is just phenomenal. That's a good book.

It's novel by Peter Matheson. It takes place in the jungles of of South America and it's about a sue Indian named Lewis Moon who grew up in a reservation in the 1970s and he goes down to Brazil to meet his what he considers his forebearers and now doesn't go very well.

I think they would say that I'm really good at not reacting to things and seeming like I'm unaffected when actually I'm deeply affected.

I think I would have to pick Cuomo McCarthy. Peter Matheson and Joan Didian.

I was 35 years old. Okay.

The movie part of it didn't affect me very much, but the sudden attention public attention that I got when the book became a bestseller affected me enormously. And I was very anxious about all that. I think I would say to myself, the public is not a threat. The public is actually waiting to hear someone anything, say something that's helpful in make sense, because we're all trying to get through this life together. and everyone wants some guidance. And if there's anything I can say through my work or just on a stage that gives some comfort or guidance to people, they're enormously receptive. And when you realize that we all need each other and we all learn from each other, your stage fright goes away. And I had a terrific case of stage fright when my book came up.

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

It's amazing. I mean, I just started looking at everything differently. Like, I mean, I love that book. And books are, I mean, a book is a kind of thing of magic. It contains a universe of information. So, and it's cheap at the price. So, that maybe it's unfair to use a book. $100 or less. I mean, I think one of the best values you can buy for $100, you can get for $100 as an axe, a good axe. Good axe.

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

Yeah, you know, I remember when I was a young man in my 20s and I was living just stupidly in some stupid apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. And I had a date with this girl, this beautiful girl and I invited her over and I was going to make spaghetti. I'm like 23, right? I'm going to make spaghetti. And I like an idiot. I mean, I got like, and I cans of tomato sauce and pasta, right? And she came over and I realized I didn't have a can. But I knew the answer and I went into my room and I got a hatchet that I had. And I opened the Kansas Tomato sauce with a hatchet. And I hit it pretty hard and completely splattered her with tomatoes. And here's the amazing part. She's still went out with me.

I really dislike laziness. And if you read a phrase or a sentence that's familiar, I mean, there are these cliches. These sort of linguistic tropes, like the mortars slammed into the hillside. I just don't want to read that again. You know, like, just say it in an original way, or don't say it, but you're wasting everybody's time, including your own, if you write in rely on these sort of linguistic tropes. I really dislike that. And also, the point of journalism is the truth. It's night I was talking about this on the phone earlier, and you know, maybe you overheard me. But the point of journalism is the truth. The point of journalism is not to improve society. And there are things. There are facts. There are truths that actually feel regressive. But it doesn't matter because the point of journalism isn't to make everything better. It's to give people accurate information about how things are. And I think journalists really confuse those two things. Advocates are what we need for improvement, but not journalists. Journalists provide information like doctors provide information and when they look at your the x-ray of your lungs after you spoke for 10 years.

I think I would say to myself, the world is this continually unfolding set of possibilities and opportunities. And the tricky thing about life is the one hand having the courage to enter into things that aren't familiar, but to also have the wisdom to like stop exploring when you found something that's worth sticking around for. I mean, that's true of a place of a person, of a vocation. In balancing those two things, the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying, it's very hard to get the ratio, the balance of those two things right. And I think by 70 year old self, it's just really be careful that you don't hear on one side of the other because you have a ill-conceived idea of who you are.

It is a tough balance. I find it tough personally. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of unhappy people because they're struggling to find that balance.

You know, I think the I've only written five books. Well, what was the one was a collection of, unless you're here, you're comparing yourself to. Yeah, well, the writers are writing 20, whatever. Like, you can always be insecure, right? No, I never, I never, it would be James battles. I really written only four books. One's a collection of short-form journalism. So, you know, they're all books that had an art written that my would have wished that someone else had so I could read it. One of the things I loved about Harari, Sapiens, was I finished it, and I just thought, thank God someone wrote that book. The world really needed it. In 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.

I think I would put the word read read. It's the only I was talking about this recently with some people. You know, we don't live in small groups anymore. We have all the living groups of 30, 40, 50 people, and you could gather 50 people around and have a communal discussion about how to live what to do, who you are, what you want to be. You could do that. We live in a country of 400 million. There's no more gathering around the campfire to figure out who we are, how we want to live, what are our values. We can't do that anymore, but we still need to. In some ways, in a country, as advanced as ours, with nuclear weapons, everything else is even more important than when we lived in groups of 50. I mean, it's the vital that we have that conversation. In the only real way, I think the only real way to have collectively have that conversation is through books. 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 400 million people. But if people don't read that will never happen. I really feel that it makes books a kind of sacred object and sacred in the sense that our society, I don't think we'll survive without them. And that to me as an atheist, one definition of sacredness is something that humanity needs in order to survive.

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 the human history would come very readily to any person's mouth. You know, any command she could tell you instantly who they would die for and what they would die for. And in modern society, it gets more and more complicated. And when you lose the ready answer to those ancient human questions, you lose a part of yourself. You lose a part of your identity. And I think what I would ask people is, who would you die for? What would you die for? And what do you owe your community? And in our case, our communities are country. What do you owe your country other than your taxes? Is there anything else you owe all of us? There's no right answer or wrong answer, but it's something that I think everyone should try to ask themselves.