#744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/d88439a10a649333

This episode is brought to you by Viore Clothing, spelled V-U-O-R-I. Viore. I've been wearing
Vore.
At least one.
item per day for the last few months and
You can use it for everything. It's performance apparel is
But it can be used for working out. It can be used for going out to dinner, at least in my case, I feel very comfortable with it.
Super comfortable, super stylish, and uh
I just want to read something that one of my employees said. She is an athlete. She is quite technical, although she would never say that. I asked her if she had ever
used or heard of Viore and this was her response. I do love their stuff, been using them for about a year. I think I found them at REI, first for my partner, T shirts that are super soft but somehow last as he's hard on stuff. And then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger.
Sweatpants.
I live in them and they too have lasted. They're stylish enough I can wear them out and about. The material is just super soft and durable. I just got their Clementine running shorts for summer and love them. The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out. In closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing
With the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga running loungewear that lasts and that I think look good also.
I like the discrete logo. So that gives you some idea. That was not intended for the sponsor read. Uh that was just her response via text. Vory, again spelled V U O R I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility.
you can wear it running, you can wear their stuff training, doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands, or in my case again, going out to dinner. It really doesn't matter what you're doing.
Their clothing.
It's so comfortable.
And uh look so good and it's it's non offensive. You don't have a huge
brand logo in your face. You'll just want to be in them all the time. They're men's core short K-O-R-E. The most comfortable line athletic short is your one short for every sport. I've been using it for kettlebell swings, for runs, you name it the Banks short. This is their go to land to see short.
is the ultimate in versatility. It's made from recycled plastic bottles. And what I'm wearing right now
Which I had to pick one to recommend to
folks out there, or at least to men out there, is the Ponto Performance Pant. And you'll find these at the link I'm gonna give you guys. You can check out what I'm talking about, but I'm wearing them right now.
their thin performance sweatpants, but that doesn't do them justice. So you gotta check it out. PONTO Ponto Performance Pant. For you ladies, the women's performance jogger.
is the softest jogger you'll ever own.
Vieuri.
isn't just an investment in your clothing, it's an investment in your happiness. And for you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase. So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet.
It's super popular. A lot of my friends have now noticed are wearing this.
And so am I.
VoriClothing.com forward slash Tim. That's V U O R I clothing.com slash Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over$75 and free returns. So check it out.
VoriClothing.com slash Tim, that's V-U-O-R-I Clothing.com slash Tim, and discover the versatility.
Of Viore clothing.

This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep.
Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers, that's not me, and even a mattress made specifically for kids.
They have models with memory foam layers to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side, as I often do and did last night on one of their beds. Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach and back sleeping positions, and on and on. They have you covered. So how will you know which helix mattress works best for you and your body?
Take the Helix Sleep Quiz at Helix Sleep.com slash Tim and find your perfect mattress in less than two minutes. Personally, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe.
Mattress.
I also have one of those in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. They frequently say it's the best night of sleep they've had in ages. It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. Helix mattresses are American made and come with a 10 or 15 year warranty, depending on the model.
Your mattress will be shipped straight to your door free of charge. And there's no better way to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on it in your own home.
That's why they offer a one hundred night risk free trial. If you decide it's not the best fit, you're welcome to return it for a full refund.
Helix has been awarded number one mattress by both GQ and Wired magazines. And now Helix has harnessed years of extensive mattress expertise to bring you a truly elevated sleep experience. Their newest collection of mattresses, called Helix Elite, includes six different mattress models, each tailored for specific sleep positions.
and firmness preferences, so you can get exactly what your body needs. Each Helix Leap mattress comes with an extra layer of foam for pressure relief and thousands of extra microcoils for best in class support and durability.
Every Helix Leap mattress also comes with a 15 year manufacturer's warranty and the same one hundred night trial as the rest of Helix's mattresses. And you, my dear listeners, can get 20% off of all mattress orders, plus two free pillows. So go to HelixSleep.com/slash Tim.
to learn more. That's Helix Sleep, H E L I X, Helix Sleep.com
Slash Tim, this is their best offer.
To date and it will not last long.
So
Take a look.
With Helix, better sleep starts now.
Optimal minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And I'll see you personal question. Now we're just seeing.
cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endocrine.
No
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers.
From every field imaginable to tease out the habits.
routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply.
and test in your own lives.
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about.
And past one billion downloads.

I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favourites.
From more than seven hundred episodes over the last decade.
I could not be more excited.
To give you these super combo episodes, and internally we've been calling these.
The Super Combo episodes.
Because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks.
But to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider
Stars.
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.
Perhaps
They got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together.
And for the bios of all guests.
You can find that and more at Tim.blog slash.
Combo.
And now, without further ado
Please enjoy.
And thank you.
For listening.
First up
Jako Willing
Retired US Navy SEAL officer.
Recipient of both the silver and bronze stars.
Number one New York Times best selling co author of
Extreme ownership.
host of the top rated Jocko podcast.
And co founder and CEO.

Echelon Front
You can find Jocko on Twitter and Instagram
That
Jocko Willing
What have you observed and learned about what makes
A good leader.
Versus a good or a mediocre or a bad leader.
The immediate answer that comes to mind is humility.
Because you've gotta be humble.
And you've got to be coachable. We would fire guys. Later when I was running training.
We would fire
a couple leaders from every single team.
Because they couldn't lead.
And
Ninety nine point nine percent of the time.
It wasn't a question of their ability, it was a question of their
ability to listen and their ability to step outside and see that
Maybe there's a better way to do things.
That's number one. And number two I would say is an individual
Who is
Balanced.
And you know, I talk about there's a phrase that I use
It's the dichotomy of leadership. So in a leadership situation, you're constantly balancing these opposing forces.
So
Do you have to be aggressive?
Absolutely.
Can you be too aggressive?
Yes, you can.
Do you need to be courageous? Yes, you do.
Can you be
foolhardy and get people killed. Absolutely. So there's all these balances. Can you be
Too close to your men.
Yes, you can. Can you be not close enough?
Yes, you can.
Can you be too robotic? Yes, you can.
Can you be too emotional?
Absolutely.
So
What I find the best leaders, they have this ability to balance all those opposing forces. And usually when you do
Find a problem. If you realize that your leadership
Isn't working.
generally you can look and say
Oh.
I'm going too far in one direction on
This particular
Force.
This dichotomy of leadership. I'm going too far. I'm being overbearing. I'm micromanaging. You know
Micromanage is a great one, right? You can obviously micromanage your people.
They won't do anything on their own. They won't take any initiative. And that's horrible.
The other end is you can not give them
The guidance that they need and not
pay close enough attention to them and now they don't know what the mission is or what they're doing. So there's all these dichotomies that you have to balance as a leader.
And
You know, I think that
between being humble and balancing all those dichotomies of leadership is what makes a good leader.
And how would say the ability
To listen and be coachable.
What would be an example of how that manifests itself? Just how you would observe that and say
That's a guy who's good at
Being humble and coachable or the opposite.
So I'm looking for the things that you would observe or hear where you'd be like, you know what?
I think we might have to let that guy go.
Again, now we're going back to training. We put these guys through very
realistic and challenging training to say the least. And I know if there's any guys that went through training when I was running it right now that are chuckling because it was very realistic.
Psychotic.
And we put so much pressure on these guys and overwhelm them.
And
A good leader would come back.
And say
I lost it.
I didn't control it.
I didn't do a good job.
I didn't see what was happening.
I got too absorbed in this
little tiny tactical situation that was right in front of me.
Either they'd make those criticisms themselves.
About themselves. Or they'd say
What did I do wrong? And when you told them
They'd nod their head, they'd pull out their notebook, they'd take notes.
And that right there, that's a guy that's gonna make it, that's gonna do it right.
Then you get the guy that comes in.
And he's immediately saying
Yeah, you say well
What'd you think of the operation or and if it was a disaster, you'd say it was a disaster and you go, Well, what went wrong?
Immediately it's
Well
My assault team leader didn't do X.
And my mobility commander didn't do why.
And I told those guys I wanted them to over there and they didn't go there. Finger pointing.
immediately finger pointing and that's just a telltale sign. You've got a guy that's not humble enough and coachable. It's an awful thing.
You can try and change people, and sometimes they would change.
But it's difficult to get'em to change. You know, that's some people are
Born with that characteristic.
And it's a bummer to see. If you can't fix'em, you can't fix them. Right. And they're not gonna listen to anybody. Well it sounds like self awareness is also a big component of that.
the awareness to kind of step outside and objectively evaluate yourself.
I call it detachment.
And you know, that's one of the things that early on in my leadership career
I actually remember when it happened. I was
Probably twenty something years, twenty two or twenty three years old.
I was in my
First seal platoon.
And we come up, we're on our oil rig in California.
doing some training. And we come up on this level of this oil rig and it's
Never been in an oil rig before. They're very complex. There's gear and boxes and just stuff everywhere on these levels.
And their see through. You can see through the floors and you can see it's it's a complex environment.
We come up and we all get on this.
platform.
On this level.
And everybody freezes.
And I'm kinda waiting.
And I'm a new guy, so you know, I don't feel like I should be doing anything. But then I said to myself, you know, somebody's gotta do something.
So I just
what's called high ported my gun. So I just lifted my gun up.
towards the air. Like I'm not I'm not a shooter right now.
And I took one step back off the line and I looked around.
And I saw what the picture was.
And I just said you know
Hold left, move right.
And everybody heard it and they did it.
I said to myself Hm.
That's what you need to do.
And so I realized that detaching yourself from the situation so you could observe it. So you can see what's happening
Is
Absolutely critical.
And now
You know, when I talk to
executives or mid level managers.
I explained to them that I'm doing that.
All the time I
It sounds horrible, but it's almost like sometimes I'm not a participant in my own life.
I'm an observer of that guy that's doing it. So if I'm having a conversation with you
And you know, we're trying to discuss a point.
And I'm watching and saying, Wait, are you being too emotional right now? Or you know, or wait a second, look at him.
I'm not reading you correctly if I'm seeing you through my own emotion or ego. I can't really see what you're thinking.
But if I step out of that
I see the real you.
And if you are getting angry, if your ego is getting hurt, if you're about to cave because you're just fed up with me.
Whereas if I'm
you know, raging in my own head, I might miss all of that.
And so that detachment that takes place as a leader
It's critical.
And you're a hundred percent right on that.
How do you instill that or try to teach that?
Is that something people I I feel like that may be more than the humility.
Seems to be a coachable skill.
Part of the reason I say that
is because
I've found that whether it's like cognitive behavioral therapy
Or stoic philosophy for that matter.
You can
In small increments.
condition people to have less of an extreme emotional response and to try to observe themselves. And I suppose that there's some
Buddhist thought.
That would translate to that as well, but
How do you help teach someone that ability to detach?
So
What we did.
To teach them.
was put them under extraordinary pressure.
Where to fail to detach from the situation
And step
Up.
And a way.
From the problem.
would result in failure.
I had a great experience where
A guy that actually took my job over as the troop commander.
And a very close friend of mine.
He was going through the training now.
And I was running the training.
And we were going out to a place called Nyland, California to do land warfare.
And again, this is desert operations. You're patrolling in
Long distances, you're hitting targets.
And we have
high level
laser tag guns that we use to shoot and
And it's very we we put a lot of pressure on people. There's helicopters, there's smoke, there's bombs, there's all kinds of stuff happening.
And
This guy, this buddy of mine
He was supposed to be commanding and all.
But he had broken his neck. Oh god. About
I don't know, six weeks prior to this. So on like a ropes course or helicopter?
uh climbing the ship. And the guy above him fell and broke his neck. And so this guy
who had been in Ramadi with me.
And you know, did an outstanding job and
Amazing.
Effort.
And was brave.
to a fall, you know, we're lucky he's here.
So
The land warfare training takes place.
And he comes out and I said, Hey, just come out and watch with me.
And so
He comes out and you know, we're we're watching.
And we're out on one of these field training exercises. So all this mayhem starts.
And there's bad guys up in the hills and there's bombs going off and there's smoke everywhere.
But from our position.
Which we were standing next to the guys that were in it.
And he looks at me and he says, You know
It's so easy.
When you're not in it.
And I said.
This is how it was for me when we went through.
I was up here and he was like a light bulb went off, you know, he said
I saw you. He kinda saw me like that and said, How does he know what's happening right now? So the ability
Easy in so much as when you're the outsider looking in, you can see what to do. What's going on. And when you did it.
You were
Not necessarily physically removing yourself, but sort of mentally pulling the perspective back so you could observe it.
So if you take someone like your friend who has this realization like, Oh, holy shit. Okay, that explains a lot. Because if you could
create this perspective, you would have a huge tactical
Advantage.
What type of
Exercise.
Would you put someone through
where the consequences were so significant that they would be forced to detach in that way.
I mean, these are just exercises that we do.
So we would use
Lasers.
We have this advanced laser tag system where
You can get shot at three hundred meters. If you get shot at an island and your beeper goes off and says you're dead.
Then you're dead.
And you're gonna have to get carried out by your buddies, which is awful.
They're gonna get hurt, sprained ankles, everything else, it's a nightmare.
And they're also now they can't maneuver as well.
So now what happens when they get attacked again, which they're going to?
Because it's gonna be Murphy's Law out there.
And
The problem's compound and if the leaders
Get bogged down in those problems and don't step back.
We would kill all of them.
And they'd come back with their
Heads down.
And say, you know, what the hell just happened.
And what can we do better? And then you know, we
We'd have this talk with them.
And
You know it's one of those things. It's like when you're growing up and
You don't listen to anybody. Not that you don't listen to people, but
Some lessons you have to learn.
through life and through experience. And so that happened and the guys would
You know, guys at varying levels, some of them would would be able to go, Oh, I just saw it. Okay, now I can make this happen. And that would happen as well, where I would see their
You know, when in like in Terminator when the beginning of the Terminator said
On August twenty seventh, two thousand sixteen, the machines became aware.
You could see their leadership.
Switch happen.
And all of a sudden they'd go
Boom.
And then I would know my job was done.
And they'd step up
They take a step back from the situation.
They would look around, they'd observe, they'd make
Good decisions and good calls.
And then watch them progress out of it.
And
Finish the problem and
Do well.
And then I I knew that I had
Done my job.
They'd become aware.
They became aware as leaders, yeah.
What do your morning routines look like? On an ideal day, what does the first ninety minutes of your day look like? When do you wake up?
What does that look like? So I wake up early.
We wake up at four forty five.
I like to have that.
psychological win.
over
The enemy.
And
You know, for me
When I wake up in the morning and I don't know why
I'm thinking about the enemy.
And what they're doing. And I know I'm not active duty anymore.
But it's still in there.
That there's a guy
That's in a cave somewhere.
And he's rocking back and forth.
And he's
Got a machine gun in one hand.
And a grenade.
On the other hand.
And he's waiting.
For me.
And we're gonna meet.
And
When I wake up in the morning
I'm thinking to myself
What can I do?
To be ready.
For that moment.
Which is coming.
Which is coming.
So that propels me out of bed.
And I I work out early in the morning.
So you wake up at four forty five.
What's the next thing?
Aside from like
And doing the usual.
Do the usual. Start working out.
Ideally I like to get done with my work out by the time the sun comes up.
And so now if there's waves, you know, I live by the ocean, so I'll go surfing.
And
Get done with that.
What does a typical morning workout look like?
I do a lot of pulls, push ups and dips.
I deadlift and do squats.
I do sprints. It's with everything that everybody does.
I swing kettlebells.
I do burpees. It's all that. And it's like a
Sixty minute workout, how long is the work out? It depends.
It depends on what's going on.
I'll try and do some strength movements to be strong, you know?
Deadlifts.
Cleans, clean and jerk, something like that.
to make myself stronger or even if it's something like just dead hang pull ups and I'm just maxing out, but I I'll do something like that to make myself stronger. And sometimes that can take a while, you know,'cause I'll just want to relax and hit
singles or doubles on deadlifts or cleans or whatever.
And then
When I get done with that, I'll do some kind of
metabolic conditioning of some kind, you know, I'll be sprinting or rowing
Or swinging a kettlebell.
Yeah.
lighter weight, cleaning jerks for reps or something like that. So that's what it looks like for me.
When you think of the word successful
Who were the first people?
What's the first person that comes to mind?
The part of the world that I've seen.
Is a very dark place.
It's a dark.
Place.
That's what war is.
And
When your job
Which my job was.
Was to expand that darkness.
In many ways.
I mean
It's war is about killing people.
And so for me
When I look to someone
That's successful.
It's someone.
That
Bring some light.
Into that darkness.
So for me
The first people that come to my head.
Or
Mark Lee.
Who is one of my guys.
First seal killed in Iraq.
Mike Monsore.
One of my guys
Second seal killed my rock.
Posthumously awarded the
Medal of Honor.
Ryan Job.
One of my guys.
Wounded in Iraq.
Blinded in both eyes.
Made it home.
Medically retired from the from the Navy.
Married his high school sweetheart.
Got her pregnant.
And
finished his college degree.
And after his twenty second surgery.
to repair the damage that was done to his
His head and face.
There were complications and he died as well.
But all of those guys.
In all that darkness.
They did things. They they made a sacrifice.
That
was completely selfless.
And to do that.
And to live.
And fight.
And die.
Like a warrior.
That to me is success.
And those guys.
are my heroes.
Are there any books that you've gifted
Two other people.
I think there's only one book.
that I've ever given
And I've only given it to a couple people.
And that's a book called About Face.
by Colonel David Hackworth.
And
It is
Huge.
So Colonel David Hackworth was
The tail end of World War Two.
He was in Korea.
He was highly decorated in Korea.
He joined them.
Like joined the Merchant Marines or something when he was fifteen.
Got it into the army when
Again, right after World War Two. So he kinda got raised by those World War Two veterans.
And then he was in Korea and he was in Vietnam.
And he was
Just
Absolutely.
borderline worshiped by the men that he led.
And by some of the senior leadership.
And just a great book.
And he was a rebel.
And he did question the way we were doing things. And what's controversial about him is that
He's the guy.
That
said to Walter Cronkite.
Or he said he he's the first guy in Vietnam that said
You we're not gonna win this thing.
And so he's
Kind of
Blacklisted by much of the army.
But you know, as you dig into that, what he was really saying was we're not gonna win this thing if we keep fighting how we're fighting. He recognized that we needed to do a

paradigm shift in the strategy.
We were
Executing over there.
And
It's like you you've heard we never lost a tactical battle in Vietnam. You've heard that, right? Yep. And there's plenty of people that will say that all day long.
But if
You and I are leading a platoon.
And we take our platoon out.
And we hit a booby trap.
And it kills three of our guys or two of our guys and wounds another three.
And there's no one to shoot at.
And
We met those guys and we come back to base.
Who won that?
Right.
And you know, he recognized that.
So the metrics that were being used.
Or sort of uh
Not a uh smoke screen, but they were at best the wrong metrics.
I had that book next to my bed in Ramadi and I literally read it.
Every night I would you know that's how I'd fall asleep. I'd go up
Read a couple pages.
You know, just open any and you'd find something in every it was very comparable. You know, they were working with the
The South Vietnamese Army and guess what?
They were
corrupt and they were scared and they weren't the best soldiers and we were working with Iraqis and guess what? They were corrupt and they were scared and they weren't the best there were so many
Parallels between the two.
So that's the book that I've given to
A couple of close friends of mine that
I wanted them to have a face.
The other book that I've read multiple times.
Is Blood Meridian.
Blood Meridian. Yeah.
I don't know that. So
It's written by Cormac McCarthy.
Oh fantastic writer. So this is his best book.
And you know, I was an English major in college.
And so
You know, I was forced to read all kinds of books.
And you know
Obviously Shakespeare is kind of the pinnacle in my mind.
And Cormac McCarthy is the guy that I think
Actually has that.
And if you read Blood Meridian
Then there it is.
What I find so
gripping about it.
Is
You know, I talked earlier about the darkness of the world.
And this is a historical novel.
Based on a group called the Glanton Gang.
That were
Killing Indians.
And
They ended up killing everybody.
If you had black hair.
Your scalp was gonna be taken.
And that's what it's about.
And it's completely epic.
But for me
It communicated to me.
A guy


In humanity.
There's nothing.
Pleasant.
In any way, shape, or form in that book.
But
That's in many ways.
The world that
I lived in.
What would you put on a billboard if you get a if you get a one billboard.
Anywhere.
What would you put on it?
One of my
Kind of.
I guess my mantra.
is a very simple one, and that's discipline equals freedom.
I've found that
As an individual.
The more disciplined you are.
And it's
Counterintuitive, right? The more disciplined you are.
The more freedom you actually have.
And
You and I both know if you wake up early
you get more done. And you end up with more free time. So the more you manage your time
The more disciplined you are with your time management.
the more free time you end up having.
The more disciplined you are physically.
With your diet.
the more freedom you have because you can do more stuff. You have more freedom.
So the more disciplined you are, the more freedom you have. And what's interesting is how that transfers over
Two
both military units and the civilian sector.
That
when an element or when a unit or when a company is a disciplined group.
they actually end up with more freedom.
So you know, I had a single troop.
We were highly disciplined.
We had standard operating procedures for just about everything that we did.
And
You'd think that that would
restrain your creativity, but it actually doesn't. The more disciplined you are.
The easier I could say, Hey, you four, go take down that building. And they knew what to do because they were highly disciplined. I knew what they were going to do because they were highly disciplined.
we understood what parameters they were gonna stay within because we had standard operating procedures to follow.
So
That discipline.
Both on an individual level.
And as a group.
Equals freedom.
And just like
Anything else with leadership.
You can take that too far.
You can discipline
an element or a person so much that they break down and they no longer have creativity.
So just like the dichotomy of leadership.
You can go too strong with discipline.
And they end up breaking down or you can give them too much freedom.
And they break down in the other direction.
I'm really glad that you you mentioned that because I um
I've realized in a way that my
When I struggle the most kind of existentially or really just creatively
It's when I have the fewest constraints.
I want positive constraints.
I need boxes not so that I have to stay within the box, but that I can start at least coloring inside the box.
And
That's part of the reason I'm I've been so excited to adopt
This rescue puppy.
Molly because it forces me.
to regiment and structure my day.
in such a way that I can then plan around fixed objects.
And I think that whether it's in the military, at least in my experience in business
You wanna reserve your creativity for the things that require creativity.
Not for what should the steps be when I'm doing
a room clearance. It's like no no no, you want a standard operating procedure
So that your brain cycles are allocated
to the places where you need those brain cycles. That's a hundred percent right.
So I realize in the last few months for myself that
What I thought I wanted.
Which is freedom in the form of infinite options is not
actually what I want at all. It's very stressful and
You end up
You know, you burn ten calories in a million directions, you're fatigued and you didn't get shit done.
So I'm actually in a way
Trying to figure out how I can say no to a thousand things so that I can be fully creative on one or two things.
It's
One of the reason I enjoy doing this podcast so much is that when you talk to people who've operated at the highest levels in any field.
this kind of stuff comes up. And after a while it's like
Ferris.
Idiot.
Do you get the message yet? You've heard meditation from eighty percent of the people who've been on your podcast.
Maybe you should chill the fuck out and like sit down for twenty minutes every morning.
I
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.
This episode is brought to you by Mementis. Mementis offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. Personally
I've been using Mementus Mag3N8, Ltonine, and Apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Mementus Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. Mementus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world class products to market.
including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett. Their products contain high quality ingredients that are third party tested, which in this case means informed sport and or NSF certified, so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. So check it out.
Visit livemomentous.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout for twenty percent off. That's Live Momentus.
L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U S dot com slash Tim and code Tim for twenty percent off.

And now
Sebastian Younger.
Peabody award winning journalist.
Author of five New York Times bestsellers, including
The perfect storm.
And war.
And documentarian.
Whose films include Restrepo.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
Sebastian's new book is
In my time of dying.

Sebastian Younger
Sebastian, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. Nice to be here.
It's so exciting to finally get a chance to hang because
We have a mutual friend in Josh Waitskin, who's been on the podcast twice.
For those who don't know.
the basis for searching for Bobby Fisher, but the book and the movie, but a lot more than that. I mean a real masterful
And kind so.
Who's really taught me a lot.
But the
First encounter we had was at Josh's wedding and I guess we're piecing it together and that was ten years ago. Something something along those lines.
And this is the first chance that we've had to really kinda dig in
And get to know each other.
Let's start with some mundane stuff, but you have a book here on your backpack. Can you tell us what you're reading at the moment?
I'm reading the biography of
Thomas Paine.
One of the um
Intellectual fathers of
American independence from Britain in the seventeen seventies.
And
Somehow, this is maybe TMI for people listening, but
Sebastian arrived before I got back to my place.
I was doing some
Acro yoga, long story.
And
Then you had picked up the letters from a stoic
And did the stoics come up in the book about pain?
Yeah.
The Greek stoics were greatly abured 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.
All right.
Untutored.
What the book said about the stoics was amazing. And I and you know, I'm not religious. I didn't grow up going to church. I don't believe in God. And so if you're like me, you're always looking for
A way to sort of order the universe.
That's
inspiring or reassuring and sort of make sense of things. And so what they said about the Stoics
I really identified with I'm like, Oh, I 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 the letters of Seneca and I grabbed it and sat down and I almost started whooping.
With pleasure. I mean I the
The things that he was writing
Two thousand years ago.
were so modern, so amazing, so essential.
I just thought I'd get the have to get this book immediately.
You seem to be a uh
Stoic without.
Calling yourself such in a lot of respects, but
I wanna bring up something that I know nothing about.
But a fan had asked.
me to inquire about.
Which is chainsaw. Ask him about the chainsaw. Let's talk about
Your career.
With chainsaws.
Can you give us some context? Yeah, absolutely. So I studied anthropology in college because it interested me.
That was on the East Coast? Yeah, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
I had no interest in being an anthropologist, but it actually helped me throughout my career as a writer.
After I got out of college, I sort of 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 eighty, ninety feet in the air.

In pieces. Brigging branches and lowering them as I cut them and taking off the tops of trees and taking them down all the way to the ground. It was extremely dangerous work.
Or I should say it's dangerous if you make a mistake.
There isn't any random danger in the top of a tree, and I realized at one point
If I get killed doing this and plenty of people do, if I get killed doing this, it will be because I killed myself by accident.
It's not a situation where something random will kill me.
That was very reassuring and it also
Train 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
I managed to drag it across the back of my ankle right where the Achilles is.
I turned the chainsaw. I was way up in a tree, you know, on a on a rope and I turned the chainsaw off and I clipped it to my
Belt.
And look down and I pulled the wound open because I wanted you know, you go into shock and you get very
Clinical immediately, right?
I pulled the wound open and I wanted to see if the Achilles was intact. Indeed it was, by the way, an Achilles
Is about the thickness of a number two pencil and it's white.
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 repelled down to the ground and my crew took me to the hospital and
As I was recovering.
I had this thought.
that people die all the time doing dangerous jobs in this country. They're mostly
Workless men.
They work in industries that are very dangerous, drilling for oil, logging
Commercial fishing.
That the nation needs done.
And
They die in numbers comparable to soldiers in war, actually.
But they don't get acknowledged, they don't get honored. And I thought may maybe I'll write about dangerous jobs, and that set me on course.
You're right, my first book called The Perfect Storm.
about a huge storm that among other things like a commercial fishing boat at sea.

You know, we I was lamenting the fact it's not really the right way to put it. I was saying that we could probably talk for seven hours. There's so many things I want to ask you about and so many things that Josh wanted me to ask you also.
But let's go back to the
You were pelling down trees for a second.
How did you get that job? I mean what
qualified you or did not qualify you, how did that come to pass?
Like many good stories, it started in a bar. I was broke
And I was at a bar one evening and I was sitting next to this guy and we just started talking.
And he said he owned a tree company and he said he was looking for a climber.
And you know, I was a pretty athletic
Kid.
And he said, Listen, I'll train you to climb if you'll work for me, but I can't give you full time work, only occasional work, it's all I got.
And I was like, Yeah, absolutely. So I started he sort of trained me on a climb and I
The great thing about climbing was that I could make
I mean for an unemployed freelance writer in the late 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.
The uh
Athleticism. We were talking about this when we were having lunch together.
What did your running times look like?
When you were
At your peak.
My running times were almost fast enough. That's what they look like from my perspective.
Yeah.
I ran four twelve for the mile.
That's a fucking fast mile. Yeah. I mean, from my perspective, that that that seems extremely fast. And then you right got into marathons after that. Yeah.
I ran uh
Nine oh four for the two mile.
twenty four oh five for five miles and a two twenty one marathon. Those are my sort of
Set of distance records that I had.
So the
Perfect storm.
I heard you described or read you being described as based on that work.
I'm paraphrasing here, but the next Hemingway along those lines. And
Josh had also observed, I think the way he put it was
To quote
One of the leanest writers I know, so little bullshit between the muscle.
How did you
develop your
writing style. And if that's a bad question, feel free to rephrase it. But
How did you develop that leanness?
At that point in your life.
I never studied English 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 d you don't not read, you know, and
I read
John McFee, Joan Diddy and
Peter Matheson.
Ernest Hemingway, of course, a little bit of Faulkner.
I mean I could go on, but I
gravitated towards
Language
That was efficient and lean.
And innovative. And
When I would read a book that I liked
I would think about
Like Don McFe I would think about why is it I like it? What is it about the writing that that appeals to me?
And even more importantly, when I read

I tried to figure out what was it about that sentence, about that paragraph that repels me.
And
That was how I learned to write. It's just 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 ancest my literary ancestry pretty clearly.
What drew you to writing? So you weren't taking classes
explicitly focused on turning you into a journalist, it doesn't sound like or a writer.
So what drew you to writing?
It happened quite suddenly.
I was a good distance runner in college and I had to write a thesis and I'd heard that the Navajo
had this very strong tradition
ancient tradition of running and they were still
They were sort of still at it in a kind of traditional way. And they were amazing to attract and cross country athletes.
And they w 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. He was up at six, seven thousand feet. I live in Fort Defiance.
Arizona.
And
I wrote a thesis about
Navajo.
long distance running. That was the name of the thesis.
Apparently thesis titles are supposed to have a colon in them and 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 and the idea
That you could go out into the world and gather information.
Gather research, interview people and bring it back.
And then turn it into words.
That people will read and be moved by.
informed by and moved by and maybe changed by.
That to me was just
Such an extraordinary idea. And
So I thought, Maybe I'll be a journalist. This sounds like journalism. Maybe I'll try to be a journalist. And I literally graduated
With
You know, my graduation plan, post graduation plan was
Maybe I'll try to be a journalist. Like that was literally the plan I had in my head.
Seems to have worked out.
Eventually. I in between I was a pretty bad waiter in Washington, D C and in Cambridge and you know, like I I mean I I w it it took a while. I mean it w
My first book came out when I was thirty five and
I had virtually no income from writing before that. So the the first book was The Perfect Storm.
Or no.
Yes, that's it was
Was that your first aside from the thesis?
long form piece of writing. I mean it's just that
That's a good thing.
You know, I wrote some articles for the Boston Phoenix and then I got into a couple of magazines, but it was not I I couldn't even come close to stitching together
An income I could live on.
Did you sell
The book before you wrote it or write it before you sold it?
I worked on the story for about a year.
And
Just
sort of on my own dime. And I wrote a magazine piece that
Outside magazine took.
And then
I got a
book contract from W W Norton. A very, very modest book contract.
But you know it got me going. Based on the magazine piece. Yeah, and I and I ginned up some outline that you know, which sort of showed w how I was gonna expand the story. You already had quite a bit in your back pocket then at that point. Yeah, I already already had a Bill Craig full of notes and you know, whatever. I mean I already done like you know a year's worth of work on this.
I was used to w I mean everything I'd ever written
I'd written
on my own time and then tried to sell it. I was constantly sort of peddling
finished pieces of writing. I n yeah, I never got an assignment. I
The first assignment I did
I mean the first story that I place in the Boston Phoenix, which when I was twenty three 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 got I moved to Boston.
And I just thought what's the coolest thing in Boston? Maybe it's tugboats. You know, like I so I just started hanging out on tugboats.
And I sent them a pretty nice piece of writing. And it was my first published piece up there and it was called Towing the Line. And that was my sort of entry into journalism.
What was your writing process like?
After the magazine piece comes out.
You get the book contract.
Did you continue taking other jobs or did you buckle down to focus full time on the writing?
Oh, I did tree work throughout. I mean I you know, I didn't the m my advance was pretty small and as was appropriate. I mean I was totally unknown writer and it was it was a totally bizarre topic at the time, right. So I I'm not complaining. But
The advance was quite small. So I did tree work a couple of days a week I'd be up in the trees.
But I also
After I finish my book proposal.
By some miracle I had an agent, by the way.
I hadn't made a dime for him for ten years, right, but he liked my writing, right, God bless you. How did he get in touch
I met him.
His name's Stuart Khrushevski 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.
A client of his who wrote academic papers, in other words, not a big pain gig.
But he sort of handled the academic career of this guy who was a Shakespeare scholar.
It took him three hours of gear, you know, whatever.
That guy's college roommate.
Was my father.

And he got the message that his
Arguably smallest clients
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 get.
It's about as unpromising as it gets in the agent world. But he's a great you know, Stuart's a great guy and he has an open mind and he read some stuff that I'd written and really liked it. It took another ten years for him to make any money off me, but it's a long term investment. It was, he saw something there and
And I'm eternally grateful to him. But I so I gave him my book proposal
Based on the article. And then I went off to Bosnia. I wanted to be a war reporter.
In case the author thing didn't work out, when there was no reason to think it was gonna work out.
I didn't want to do tree work my whole life. So I went off
It was a civil war in Bosnia.
And I went off to learn how to be a war reporter and I was there I you know, I finally came home in ninety four.
Because Stewart sent me a fax saying I I managed to sell your book.
You gotta come home.
I came.
During the period that you were
Up in the trees.
A few days a week.
Once you'd sold the book, I'm not sure. I'm 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
Yeah. Josh wanted me to dig into it too. So it's
Well, I mean 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 non fiction should be.
Journalism is should be considered journalism. There are
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.
Because he needs something.
You're writing about the real world and you need facts.
And quotes and interviews and all that. So
My writing process really starts out in the world.
as uh I'm researching a story, or in a library or on the internet or whatever as I'm researching a story.
Fiction writers.
They depend on this weird sort of pipeline to God, right? I mean they're trying to
Reimagine the world.
In a way that's never been done.
before
And reproduce it on the page and have people enter this fictional world and be riveted by it. And that's
where inspiration comes in and that's where you have to really be at your desk.
Every morning.
'Cause 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.
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 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.
You mentioned McFee, so the only or the most impactful writing class I ever took was with McPhee.
It was a small seminar.
about twelve to fifteen students at Princeton and
Yeah.
So you'll appreciate this.

Just as a side note, so I still have to this day downstairs
An entire three ring binder full of all of my notes from that class.
And I would say three quarters of them are all about structure.
And how he thinks about structure, which is extremely visual in a lot of cases.
And he would map out just like an architect with a blueprint.
the structure of his piece based on what he had gathered.
And all of these elaborate
forms and some would be like a seesaw, others would be a circle, others would be in some kind of weird like cylindrical
Abstract piece of art, but there's a visual representation of how he saw.
The story.
in its visual structure or visual representation. And this is 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 boring
Topics possible.
Deliberately to try to make us.
Force us to make them interesting.
And
When we got our first assignments back, the routine was we'd have one group seminar a week, and then we each got to spend I think an hour one on one with him going over our writing assignments.
Throughout the week.
And he handed our our assignments back and he goes now before
As I'm handing these out, I want you guys to remember
You're all good writers, so don't get demoralized. And there was more red ink
Than black ink on the page. I mean he just
Eviscerated.
Everyone and not in a malicious way, but he took out all of the bloat.
All of the redundancy, all of the ambiguity.
For those people interested, he he there are 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 gonna we're certainly gonna spend a lot of time talking about your experiences
in war and with
warriors and veterans of different types.
Who were some of the most
Influential mentors.
Or influences you had.
Say before the age of
thirty.
Let me just say McPhee
I mean, you're very lucky to have d taken the thoughts with him and you're lucky so. 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 good structure is an extremely visual
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 s diagram to a circuit board or something. It's not quite architect like geometric shapes, but it's
It's very visual. It represented completely visually. And I
feel it. Like when I get at the right shape to something I
It's a

Process that for me is
It's something that feels like the divine spark.
That is finally sort of like
Bless me with its presence.
So let's say you have your box full of notes, right? So you've
dug into a given topic.
You've gone out in the field.
And we could use the perfect storm.
for this example because perhaps it's evolved or changed over time.
What then? Like do you sit down and go through and highlight certain pieces and then
number them and order them in some fashion. What's the process of turning that
heap of information into something that might become a book.
I read through all my interviews.
With a red magic marker and I 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.
I just write lists of what I

The assets that I have to work with.
And
Once I have those lists and they cover many pieces of paper.
Then I'll start to
clump them into sort of general topics.
Yeah, history of
Fishing in New England.
And the physics of wave motion.
I'm referencing.
Topics of the perfect storm.
Nightlife in Gloucester. You know, whatever. And then once I have those big chunks.
I start to
And this is where the visualness comes in, visuality comes in. I start to try to picture
How could I r arrange those
In a way.
Where
the energy and the interest in the reader
Gathers and builds.
And then achieve some sort of catharsis towards the end. And it's a very intuitive process.
But I 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.
Then it's sort of intellectual pursuit.
So I used to do this physically and then I ended up using a piece of software Scrivener, which is originally for
Playwrights.
That allows you to move pieces around like this.
And uh 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.
McFee just to talk about daily routines. So he is one of those guys
In the nonfiction world, I can't do this because I want to slam my head in a car door if I try this for one day or like jump out a window.
He literally sits down and once he has his information
Eight AM to six 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
ten or eleven PM to like five A. M. That's just my window for whatever reason.
Do you write throughout the day? Do you tend to do your best writing in the mornings, at night? What does that look like?
I do my best writing when something's due.
Spoken as a real journalist who's actually worked for papers and whatnot. Yeah, and the 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. Athletes in the big game or the big race or whatever.
I mean that intensity can bring out
Something that you didn't even know you had access to, much less embodied.
So the time of day, I you know, I I have a cup of coffee and I sit down and I write for a couple of hours till I get bored. If I feel that I'm blocked in my writing
Usually with that
Block meaning I can't write the next section. I keep rewriting it, 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,'cause 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 wanna
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 crow's artist. Yeah, the fact that you don't have the research. Yeah, it's just bullsh. And you know, it the literary writers, I like to think of myself as a literary writer
I think sometimes think that language is so magical and and so powerful
That you should be able to sort of do almost anything with it. And this acts it it's not true and it shouldn't be true.
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 s graduating seniors in high school.
I've done that.
Oh, you have? Great. Perfect. Well
Then let me not ask the question I was going to ask. What did you talk about?
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 or to high school. I can't remember. Anyway, th these are very, very
Privileged, very smart, very educated.
Children.
And the exceedingly accomplished parents.
And
I said to them something like
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
Your life has failed 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've not been prepared for.
In the school or any school.
You have to be prepared to fail.
And that's how you're gonna expand yourself and grow.
And then you 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.
That was four years ago. Who knows how it's going for them?
Well the uh
We were chatting about this before we started recording a little bit, which is
I was commenting on how accidental my
Career and I'd kinda put that in air quotes.
is. I mean it would I couldn't have possibly planned
this path and then you echoed something to a similar effect and
On the failure point, I mean we were talking since
Now training in boxing and
Made me think of
It's customato.
He was the most formative trainer of Mike Tyson, who said
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face, so
Along those lines
The question I was gonna ask was specific to journalism. So if people
Came to you, these kids.
Graduating seniors and they said
I want to be a journalist. So twenty of these kids.
And they're about to go off to college.
What should I study? What should I do? What should I avoid?
What would your advice be to them?
I mean the path that I took is the one I know
Best obviously. And I would say what worked for me
I mean, as a journalist, I'm very hesitant to actually give advice to people.
In my book Tribe, I really I really try not to tell the country what I think
We all should do.
I might try to pry bar that out of you, but you know, I think it's
There's other language you can use where you're not issuing a directive?
But you're saying you're giving some wisdom. So what I would say to
Someone like that is
What worked for me was to read an enormous amount
to think about what I read and why I liked it or didn't like it.
Anthropology is an amazing discipline that gives you tools to understand almost
Every
Cultural social situation.
In the world.
And
Mostly you must have an enormous appetite for humanity and for life and for the world. I mean you really have to feel
Like you cannot fill yourself up enough.
with this amazing place that we live in.
Like if you have that feeling
And sincerely have it.
You'll do okay.
If not it.
Writing at something.
And
That
hunger for humanity, that interest in humanity.
Is that what drove you
to
Want to
go into a war torn country or territory.
And observe and write and capture. Or was it something else?
Why did that come about specifically?
Pretty
Affluent.
Suburb of Boston.
I grew up in a very physically protected way.
I got to eighteen, 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 twenties, I thought this is ridiculous. I'm not an adult yet. I'm not a man yet. I mean
You cross that threshold into adulthood, into manhood.
By facing something that could destroy you.
And
initiation rights around in tribal societies around the world.
their main purpose is to confront young men and women young women have a different
challenge that they have to face is equally daunting. But
Young men face this challenge of
in these initiation rights of sort of demonstrating
That they will face the
most painful, scariest things possible for their community.
For their people.
And that's adulthood.
And that's manhood. And
You know, I'd hit thirty and
Other than that you know it
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 Two.
And war is this sort of
Archetypal.
Ordeal.
It's a sort of ancient
in some ways a 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 manhood, specifically for men.
And I went off to Bosnia.
Partly'cause 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 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.
This is uh jumping around.
Of course, but there are a couple of stories that I'd love to talk about that are in
Book I'm holding in my hand, which is Tribe.
Subtitle on Homecoming and Belonging. So I get sent a lot of books and I very rarely read them.
This one.
Of course because of the
background that w 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've seen my
Examples of my note taking, I just have
An index of notes that spans
All of the front matter of the book, basically.
There are some fantastic stories in this book.
I had follow up questions, even if we weren't recording this like over a bottle of wine that I wanted to ask you.
So
Can you please explain what skin walkers are? You mentioned the Navajo earlier.
And
Why they're in this book.
Because I wanted to hear more about this.
So skinwalkers
were this thing that I never heard of that I first encountered when I was on the Navajo reservation.
In nineteen eighty three. As a nineteen year old, twenty year old, whatever I was. And
Basically the Navajo believed in something that other cultures would call werewolves. The belief was that there were certain Navajo, mostly men
Who had
Basically turned. They'd lost their humanity and they'd become
Animals, but animals are a source of power in a lot of native societies.
They became animals in the sense that they had no
Human affiliation.
And they did this by putting
On the 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 ever a long distance.
The powers of being invisible.

They were called skin walkers, and that these skin walkers
They were basically
Adopt the skills and powers of a warrior.
Except they were using it against their own people and that they would kill their fellow Navajo and eat them.
In the middle of the night.
And the Navajo in nineteen eighty three on the reservation where I lived were
absolutely terrified of this phenomenon, as terrified as they I'm sure they were a hundred years prior.
And I gotta say, the desert out there is a big lonely place.
And
I started to feel their terror.
You know, I didn't literally believe that these things exist.
But
The belief system that was around me.
still made me deeply, deeply scared of them. It was extraordinary experience for a rationalist like myself. My father's a physicist
I don't believe in God. He didn't believe in anything but what he could measure and
And observe and all of a sudden there I was in my trailer.
very, very scared at certain moments of these things. And
And
As I wrote about it in my thesis, I said, you know, the
Skinwalkers are basically the universal human fear.
That you can defend yourself.
As a society, as a community, you can defend yourself against all outside enemies.
But you're completely vulnerable.
To one madman in your midst.
No, 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
Ten or fifteen years. 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.
Part of what I enjoy about your writing and specifically in this book.
Is
Your
Frank
writing about concepts that we tend to very cleanly separate.
In a binary way.
And it's really, I think, a discussion that
I hunger for that is hard I feel hard to have.
in many different
I'm struggling for language here because it's it's a feeling that I get very 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 m problems manifest.
Nondetheless, or perhaps to an even greater extent.
And in uh the current climate of a lot of political correctness, that's sort of forbotten. Like a lot of these topics just don't get broached.
But I'd love for you to talk a little bit about your experience with
I think this was in Spain with the Viking helmet.
Yeah.

I think it may it illustrates a very important point. If you remember the story
I'd love for you to
Describe.
what happened exactly with this Viking helmet. Yeah.
And I think our society, which really I feel really does strive I mean, just to address your earlier point
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 a fact of nature.
If we want the sexes to be
equal in our society, those inherent differences become potentially problematic.
And as a result, instead of
trying to figure out how to reconcile those very real differences in an equitable system.
People and well meaning people.
Some of them are good friends of mine.
We're 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 no, we we we won't have real equality in the society.
Until those
unnegotiable differences are actually incorporated into our equality.
At any rate, that's you know, what you brought up about sort of P C thinking, it's in 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 a variant.
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.
Because you brought up these
What most people would uh consider
Gender based differences.
Could you talk for a second? And this is something I'd never really considered.
But gender role switching.
If this makes any sense. And uh this was
Even in same sex groups.
I found this very thought provoking, but if you could perhaps describe
what I'm very clumsily trying to allude to.
Well, one of the things that's interesting is that if you take
Passers by in a moment of crisis. I mean, everyone will jump into a burning building to save their child.
Maybe to save their spouse.
possibly their their parents in law. You know. But whatever. You have sort of familiar relations and people who risk their lives to help
The people that they love. It makes sense, right?
But if you look at situations
In public, in this anonymous society that we have, and someone's in danger.
Who goes to their aid?
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 but 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 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.
In something like ninety five percent 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 London, which I write about
Or that could be
a group of coal miners who were trapped in a coal mine disaster in the nineteen fifties 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 dis 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 m so 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 Two of who helped
Hide.
Jewish families who were fleeing the Nazis.
Gentiles who helped Jewish families 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 you know Jewish family in your basement, you're dead. You're executed.
Women were
Considerably more
likely to make that decision than men were.
So what happens
Is that if you have a say a group of coal miners who are stuck in a coal mine for a week
The first kind of spontaneous leaders you get.
Or the classically male
sort of action oriented, grab a pickaxe and start digging.
When those efforts fail
Another kind of leader takes over.
They're way more empathic. They're way more affiliative.
They reach negotiated solutions. They try to make people feel good.
They're in the classically female role.
And what's so interesting about that
Is that the male and female roles will be filled
Regardless of the sex. So a group of women
With no men around.
A woman will jump in.
We'll jump onto the railroad tracks and to save the kid.
If there are no men around.
If there are no women around, a man will step forward and act in that wonderfully moral, empathic way.
that women are known for. And
So society sort of needs both of these gender roles.
And it doesn't really care if an actual man or an actual woman
Fills them.
We don't have to cover this one at length, but I also found it fascinating to read about the Iroquois peacetime leaders versus war time leaders and how they switched between the two and how they were so
Clearly.
delineated, right? I mean when circumstances changed, it's like okay
It's almost like a football game. It's like okay, offense, you're off the field.
Defense you're in.
And how does this
And I'm not much of a
Policy or politics wonk, but
I struggle with trying to assess political candidates. How do you
Think of assessing political candidates.
Presidential or otherwise.
When you have to vote for one person.
It's a very interesting question. The Iroquois sort of figured it out, as you said, in peacetime they had Sechems
who were partly elected by women so the female voice
was found in the selection of station. They ran
Peaceful society.
When war started the station's
Step 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 stations and if peace was accepted
the war leaders step down immediately. And it's really interesting because the US Constitution
Parts of it are based on
The Iroquois law of peace.
And
Thomas Payne.
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 the when they were fighting the British.
And as soon as the British surrendered, he formally
Give up power.
Give up control.
to the civilian government.
It was a very, very important thing to do because otherwise he could have continued on as quote king.
And that would not be a democracy.
And my guess is that he took that idea from the Iroquois.
Military thinking and peace thinking are very, very require very different sensibilities, very different
Calculations of cost and benefit.
And
the conundrum for us right now is that we elect a president
Who in time of war is also a mil the military leader.
And
I think in a democracy the idea that you have
A non military person at the top of the chain of command is very, very sensible.
You do not want a society run by the military. That's a military dictatorship.
We do not want that.
But it does call for very
Maybe even conflicting.
Traits in a single person.
You know, the wisdom and the gentleness of a peacetime leader.
The empathy.
Of a peacetime leader.
And the capacity for violence
And effectiveness and decisiveness in a wartime leader, you're asking someone to be almost schizophrenic if they can do both of those well.
Yeah, equally well.
So you mentioned a couple of historical figures.
Why did Ben Franklin

Along the frontier we're constantly absconding.
with the Indians, but that the opposite almost never
Happened. Why is that?
Well, it was this sort of strange phenomenon, right? The I mean the Christian society settled the eastern seaboard of the New Worlds.
In the sixteen hundreds, seventeen hundreds, and beyond the tree line were the savages, right? They weren't Christian.
They weren't civilized. They ran about almost naked and they hunted wild animals.
And fornicated and everything else, right? I mean it's sort of Satan's Satan's den, right? Sounds pretty fun, right? That's pretty great. Right. Maybe that's just me. So for the Christian sort of sort of civilized Christian society of that era
They clearly felt that they were the superior godly society, but what happened was
That superiority
That very quality of civilization and Christianity is
is also quite stifling, right? We didn't evolve to live
We didn't evolve as
is the human animals that we are.
social animals that we are.
To live in within the strictures of sort of Puritan society.
So young men particularly, but young women as well.
We're constantly
The frontier was constantly sort of bleeding young people.
Who went off.
drifted off to live with the Indians. I mean the movement the the sort of societal movement
I mean it was a trickle, but it was significant constantly towards the tribes.
running off to join white society, right?
And then there were even weirder cases. This is you're talking about the people who were kidnapped or
That was the part that surprised me the most. I was like, Okay, I can kinda see
The appeal of
being off in the woods free of certain constraints and fornicating. That sounds that that's probably a pretty appealing daydream to like a Puritan you know, farmer.
Uh you know, youngest son.
But
The number of people who were
kidnapped, taken as supposedly slaves, who then
refused or very unwillingly
Refuse to come back to
Yeah. And my book Tribe starts with this story of Pontiac's Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio.
And Chief Pontiac fought the colonial powers for years.
very effectively, but eventually they sued for peace.
And one of the deals was
The main part of the deal was that he give up
Two hundred and some.
White captives that have been taken 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 captives who weren't killed and some were killed out of revenge for losses that the Indians had taken.
on the battlefield. But the ones who weren't killed were adopted. And as soon as you were adopted
You were considered absolutely
One of the tribe.
There was no distinction whatsoever. You were given to a family that had lost someone
on the battlefield.
And you were the replacement.
For that person's
Son or daughter.
And
These people
I mean, there were two young women who were repatriated because of this peace accord.
After Pontiac's rebellion.
And

Actually managed to escape.
And make their way back to their adopted families.
And this happened over and over and over again.
As the frontier marched across America
There were constantly these stories of people who were taken by the Indians and didn't want to come home. And the reason that was given
was that it was an egalitarian society.
It was not stratified by class, by income, by inherited wealth, by inherited power.
Everyone was equal.
They were leaders.
But there were leaders who were followed voluntarily. And if you didn't like the leadership style of Chief Pontiac
Well, you know, you could just
Take your family and move up Muskegon Creek and move in with your wife's cousins family.
With this other group.
And
So
Authority was never imposed.
Authority was accepted.
And that led to a really basic equality in native societies. And I should say, as an anthropologist,
The sort of hominid
groups that we evolved from, that we were.
For hundreds of thousands of years, all of the evidence that
anthropologists, archaeologists have been able to assemble is that they were extremely egalitarian groups.
Hardly you can't carry much wealth, right? If you're a mobile nomadic society
How much wealth can you really carry?
In a society that lives in groups of forty or fifty
Yeah.
Is mobile.
It's extremely hard to accumulate differences of wealth and therefore status.
How does that relate?
to
your experiences in war and interviewing people who've been subjected to war, not necessarily as soldiers. I mean you mentioned the Blitz and so on, but
How does this relate to those experiences?
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.
So during the Blitz and I looked a lot at the Blitz in London and
Thirty thousand people were killed by German bombs.
In around six months.
In and around London.
The society.
Didn't collapse, but it contractted sort of in into itself. People were
Sleeping shoulder to shoulder with complete strangers in the tube stations?
Fire brigades were rushing around trying to put out fires after the bombing raids.
It was a brutal time and the government was prepared for
Mass psychiatric casualties. Forget about the physical casualties.
Mass psychiatric casualties.
But what happened was admissions to psychiatric wards
Actually went down.
From pre war levels.
during the bombings and then went back up after the bombing stopped.
One officials said, you know, it's amazing we have neurotics driving ambulances.
What it seems to be is that the communal
Life.
that is often forced upon people by hardship, by danger.
By calamity.
That communal life
Is so psychologically beneficial.
to people.
that there's a net gain in psychological well being.
So what you find is that in countries at war, Emil Durkheim, the famous sociologist
found that in European countries that were at war in the eighteen hundreds
The suicide rate immediately went down.
The murder rate went down.
All that kind of s anti social behavior
was mitigated by
the sort of monumental task that the

In New York. I live in New York City in New York after nine eleven.
A massively traumatized population. You would think a lot of
psychological problems would come out because of this psychological trauma.
that the entire city experienced after nine eleven.
That's not what happened.
The suicide rate went down.
After nine eleven.
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 eleven.
Because they were needed. They had this sense like, Oh my God, there's a crisis.
I'm needed.
Time to stop thinking about myself.
Time to think about the group. About us.
And that feeling of us.
Is what not only does it make people feel good.
But it buffers
Many people from their psychological demons. And it's kind of a relief.
One of the recurring themes
that you write about and also that we spoke about.
After
your TED talk from a few years ago.
Some of the feedback from vets
From
Different wars.
was that they missed the war.
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
Once peace was regained or achieved.
How can one
Potentially go about
And this is sort of a multiple choice question, like manufacturing
Catastrophe.
If that makes any sense. Like simulating
the characteristics that drive that
Increased cohesion.
community
More sense of mental well being.
Or just increase.
cohesion in a way that you think we've evolved to find very healthy or healthful.
Because we were discussing, for instance, boxing and I had the same experience in jujitsu, even though I know it's terrible for me. I mean, I get injured every time I try to do this for any period of time.
It's not good for your physical health.
If you count all of the collateral damage.
But one of the appeals was, and we were both talking about the shared experience of
It being
Completely egalitarian. It's like oh that's the guy who's really good
at armor. So that's the guy who's really good at a stiff jab. Well that's the guy's footwork is really good. It's like you don't
half the time don't even know what they do. Maybe don't even know necessarily their real name. I remember at uh you know when I was training at this place called AKA in San Jose. It was like
Everybody was given some insulting nickname and looking back on it, it's like wow, it's actually sounds a lot like and I've never been in the military, but it kinda makes me think of Full Metal Jacket and like Snowball and
And so on.
But how can someone
simulate that or what can we do focusing for now on like the
personal well being. Do you have any thoughts on how we might
Try to improve things. That was a long fucking question. I think you get the idea.
Yeah, I mean the nickname thing is really interesting.
Groups of men give each other nicknames. N women as far as I know don't.
It's a really interesting thing, and I think it's a signal of tribal affiliation.
Yeah.
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 the survival of the community.
depended on them doing that job as well as on the women doing other things. But it depended on that and cohesion
Cohesion is increased, among other things, by hardship.
By nicknames.
By humor?
I mean all these things that you see men in groups do. Yeah, 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 r it's a really, really ancient that what you experience is a very common
thing and v I think quite ancient and serves a real purpose.
We evolved as a species in a 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 in a weird way tragic about modern society is
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 Avezzano, Italy.
early in the in the twentieth century.
And of its own, something like ninety five percent of the population was killed.
Something like that. I mean just horrific. I I'm going from memory, but it
Unbelievable casualties. It's like a nuclear strike.
And
One of the survivors said
That
What happened afterwards because people had to rely on each other.
And so upper class people, lower class people, you know, peasants and nobility, whatever everyone sort of crouched around the same campfires, right?
And what this guy said was the earth
I'll try to do it by memory. I'm almost got it.
The earthquake.
Gave us what the law promises
But does not in fact deliver.
Which is the equality of all men.
I think one of the things that people like about crisis is that suddenly everybody's equal.
And you're evaluated like in a boxing gym.
You're evaluated for your actual conduct in the moment.
Not for who your father was, not for the clothing that you're wearing.
The boxing gym that I work out at.
You could be a suit from Midtown, you know, with a fancy job and a big bank.
Or you could be
Like
A really tough poor kid from the bowels of Brooklyn.
There's no bias in either direction. There's no bias against the dude in the suit.
And there's no bias against the ghetto kit.
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 the white captives of the American Indians
I think that is one of the things that appealed to them. They were no longer in this incredibly stratified
Frankly unfair.
Colonial society.
They were in a place where they were totally self determining in terms of how they were seen.
Let's talk about the
C train.
And your return to
New York City.
I'm missing
I'm trying to recall from memory.
The timing on this.
But it leads into a conversation of PTSD.
Can you take us through that story?
One of them.
Topics of this book is PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder.
I had this idea.
Because of my work on the Navajo reservation.
that the huge rates of PTSD that we're experiencing
America right now.
Or maybe anomalous. And then if you live in a tribal society, the rates would might be quite low.
So that was the sort of genesis of my book. So I talked about
My own experience with PTSD.
I've been a war reporter since the early nineties. I stopped after one of my best friends was killed in combat.

But
The first really traumatic
assignment that I had was in northern Afghanistan a year before nine eleven.
In the fall of two thousand, I was with Ahmed Shah Masud, who was the leader of the Northern Alliance.
He was fighting the Taliban, he was completely outnumbered, outgunned. I mean, back then the Taliban had fighter planes.
The Taliban had tanks, they had artillery, they had all the toys.
And Masud.
His forces were the sort of guerrillas.
Well
It's great to be with the guerrillas until you start getting shelled, right? Or bombed or whatever.
So we had a tough we are I was up there for two months and we saw and went through some very tough things. And I got back to New York
young man well your your age, the late thirties and
I just felt completely that nothing would ever affect me, right? I just assumed complete invulnerability to everything.
And I got back to New York.
And we'll shake it up, but all right.
And then one day.
I went down into the subway.
And so I did every day.
And it was rush hour, there are a lot of people.
And I was seized with this incredible panic attack.
I'd never had one in my life.
Everything I was looking at
Seem like a mortal threat.
Intellectually I knew it wasn't.
But it felt like it was. And I was way more scared than I'd ever been in Afghanistan. I had been plenty scared in Afghanistan.
The trains were going too fast and they were gonna jump the tracks.
and leap up onto the platform and kill me.
The crowds were suddenly gonna turn on me.
And beat me to death. The lights were too bright. The lights were gonna somehow gonna kill me. It was too loud. The noise was gonna everything was a mortal threat. And I backed up against the iron support column.
And just sort of waited for it.
Then I finally sprinted out of there.
And took a taxi and that kept happening.
Anytime I was in a small
Like an enclosed place with too many people, too much going on, I would just panic.
I just thought I was going crazy. I had no idea.
That it was in the
any way connected to the combat that I'd been in.
Until a couple years later.
I was talking to a woman who was a psychologist, who was a friend of a friend. I was at a picnic actually.
And she asked about my war reporting and if I d had any
suffered any consequences from it. I was like, No, I 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 the
Spring of two thousand three.
And she
Nodded and she said, Well, that's interesting. She said, That's called PTSD.
And
You know, we just invaded Iraq, right? And she said, You're gonna be hearing quite a bit about that in the coming years.
As indeed we have.
And
Are the rates of PTSD in the US anomalous? Are they unusually high?
Compared to other
cultures or other countries and
If so, why is that?
Well
The truth about PTSD is that if you
Almost one hundred percent of people who have been traumatized.
either seen something gruesome or feared for their own life.
And I should add that the witnessing of harm to others is more traumatic than danger is.
Interesting.
But
Almost a hundred percent of people who have been traumatized.
get short term PTSD.
That's what I got.
Lass of weeks, less of months goes away.
Therapy helps, whatever, but
We're humans, right? I mean, we're adapted to survive
Danger and stress and hardship and all that.
Oh, that other stuff. We wouldn't be here. So trauma, if the trauma was psychologically
crippling to humans, humans wouldn't exist.
Around twenty percent 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 twenty percent of people.
Now you look at the US military.
Every war.
The casualty rate, thank God, has gone down.
Because the intensity of the combat has gone down. As bad as World War One was, it wasn't as bad as the Civil War.
World War Two was not as intense. The combat was not as intense. There were not the mass casualties of World War One.
Korea, Vietnam. The war on terror has the lowest casualty rates of any war the US has fought.
Major war.
But as the casualty rates have gone down and the level of trauma has gone down
Disability claims have gone up.
They're going the wrong directions.
Right now.
About ten percent of the US military actually experiences any combat at all.
One out of ten soldiers.
The rest of them are very are they crucial, they're necessary, they're not getting directly traumatized.
But something like fifty percent of the US military has filed for
Some form of PTSD disability.
So there's forty percent in there.
They're a bit of a mystery.
They come home.
And they're
Deeply dangerously alienated.
Depressed.
They don't fit in.
Something's gravely wrong.
And
My theory.
Is that what they're experiencing isn't a reaction to trauma. They couldn't be because most of them weren't traumatized.
But they're experiencing is the
It's a radical readjustment.
From platoon life. A platoon is forty or fifty people.
You're sleeping.
Depending on what kind of base you're on, shoulder to shoulder in the dirt or 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, doing missions and patrols together, doing everything together for over a year.
That is exactly how humans evolved to live.
That is exactly our prehistory.
So that you experience that incredible tight cohesion.
With your platoon. Now there might be people you have conflicts with. It doesn't mean it's one big love fest.
But it is close.
And it's close with people that you
You know your life depends on
And then suddenly you're sprung from that.
And you're back in modern society.
And
I think
What's afflicting a lot of these vets isn't a response to trauma. It couldn't be.
It's a response to the sudden
Aloness
And loneliness.
That modern society
Is known for, unfortunately.
And you also
And talked about
How, for instance, returning Peace Corps.
Volunteers also suffer from depression. Right? For the similar, maybe not identical, but
Yeah. Yeah, I mean you can see that I mean to the extent that
No, this is proof, or whatever it's but it's an interesting example. I mean, so you spend two years in
Cameroon.
incredibly poor country in Africa, Central Africa.
in a really poor village. 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 and the depression rate for
People coming back.
One Peace Corps service is astronomical. It's something like fifty percent. Twenty five percent, fifty percent, it's enormous. It's it's akin to soldiers.
So there you have this common theme. You know and these core volunteers are not traumatized.
But they experience
Like soldiers, this radical transition from closeness
literally village life.
Back to
the American suburb or whatever. I mean this is the first society
I mean modern Western 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. It's terrifying to young children. I mean, we're primates, right? Baby primates
They're alone in the jungle or incredibly vulnerable.
And you know, human infants know this, of course, so they don't wanna be

In an evolutionary sense, they know it's dangerous and they cry and they scream. Was it ninety percent
Contacts.
I might be pulling that out of my ass, but you you talked about the sort of contact
Yeah, the skin on skin contact for infants.
And young children.
In
Tribal societies is as high as 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 what I mean all true.
But that doesn't mean
that that radical shift in child rearing doesn't have consequences.
So PTSD is very interesting to me for a number of reasons.
One is that I have quite a few friends now.
who are either active military or
were active for a period of time.
But most of my exposure has been to guys
in say the SEALs or Marine Force Recon and so on.
I've quite a few questions related to this, but that's part one of the interest. Part two of the interest is that I've been involved with
research and funding research.
related to the use of
Psychedelics.
to address untreatable or treatment resistant depression at places like Johns Hopkins.
And
when you dig into that scientific community, you find a lot of people using, for instance, MDMA.
With vets.
To try to address.
PTSD. So this has been a sort of recurrent
topic that has popped up for me.
A couple of questions for you. The first is
The fact of the matter is I don't have perfect transparency into these folks' lives, nor should I, but
The
Guys who
I've spent a lot of time with in some of these special operations units.
Do not seem to exhibit
Any symptoms of PTSD and I'm sure that's
Not
True across the board, but
Do you see a lot of differences in terms of those types of units versus
I don't know the proper terminology here, but just like basic infantrymen or
Yeah, or support units. Yeah. I mean it's
W I mean what it seems to be is that unit cohesion is a buffer
For psychological
Struggles.
Including PTSD. So
The more highly trained
The soldier.
The more highly trained the unit.
the more psychologically resilient.
They are.
Higher casualties. Yeah.
And what's so interesting about
Trauma

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
as, for example, in previous wars in Israel.
The random mortar round comes in.
Strangely that is
causes more a greater proportion of psychiatric casualties
than frontline units doing very intense fighting, but they're
They're taking higher casualties, but they're incredibly well trained. So they have a sense of mastery
over their environment.
Yeah, they also have a a very high degree of
perceived agency, I would imagine, just because they're on offense, right? If you're in a commando unit, you get dropped
behind enemy lines in a black helicopter and you have
Well go command. Abs absolutely. I mean, you know, it's game on, right? The big g the the football football or whatever. I mean we're wi you know we're humans are wired
for action and war when need be and
you know, your your neural circuitry just lights up and there's all kinds of hormonal stuff going on. I mean your app you have an enormous agency.
But it even is true. I read a study on my previous book called War.
I saw this study where
Some army psychiatrist that you like
two unluckiest army psychiatrists in the whole military probably at that time.
Or at some fo some like remote outpost with special forces soldiers along
Like, I don't know.
Yeah, the DMZ and
They were dropped in there, they were just doing some standard study
psychological assessment of these guys, right? And these guys are real badasses. They're like S F
You know, like re the real deal.
And so these psychologists
They found out that the base
It was a twenty man position, something like that.
The base was about to be attacked by a a a battalion of N VA, like five hundred men, right.
And there was twenty guys there, something like that.
So
the psychologist thought, Oh, perfect. There's a perfect moment to measure stress in soldiers. Right. So definitely looking at the silver lining. That's right. Yeah, exactly. So they started taking cortisol levels hourly.
From the soldiers.
And
The officers, the lieutenant, the poor lieutenant, he's probably twenty two.
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. The commanding officer.
His cortisol levels are through the roof.
Right up until the point where the attack was supposed to begin.
'Cause they had intel that these guys were coming, right?
And then after that time passed, his cortisol levels steadily declined and then it turned out there was no attack.
And then he went returned to normal.
The special forces guys were the opposite.
As soon as they heard they were about to experience an overwhelming attack
Their cortisol levels dropped.
They got super calm.
The reason their cortisol levels dropped
It was stressful for them to wait for the unknown.
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.
Coming back to
And I I really didn't think about this until now, but when we're talking about
PTSD and and potential causes, right? So you have going from a very unified sort of tribal existence
That we've evolved.
To be part of
To this
Very unusual.
Isolated.
modern existence. You also have
What strikes me at least is we're looking at the agency versus lack of agency.
The sense of a clear purpose and a task.
If
The towers get hit at nine eleven.
And there's a call for blood drives and everybody standing online.
every different race, color, or creed. It's like you have
A very clear
concrete purpose in front of you as opposed to what I think a lot of us experience, and I'm not immune to this, certainly. There are 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 a perceived crisis.
Is a forcing function. It's like
You have a very clear
Directive of some type or another.
And then a third which could be
Is related certainly, but might be independently addressable.
is when you come into an isolated existence, you're in an apartment by yourself.
Which quite frankly I am a lot of the time and I don't think it's healthy for me.
Is
A focus on mi, like a focus on I.
is just a breeding ground for neuroses and mental illness.
I think and
When you take, for instance, certain types of psychedelics
Yeah.
Disrupts
the default load network has very particular neurological effects.
That
Increase the sense of
oneness and unity with others. It in some ways mitigates that focus on the uh 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's feels very conflicted because
He wants to support troops at the same time he wants to ask, Well, did you find the WMDs?
Right. And so he's he's conflicted as to how to support the troops without feeling like he's supporting
Senseless wars.
How would you answer that or talk to that?
Countries go to war through a political process.
That's
Run by the government.
And
The troops have nothing to do with the war in that sense.
Right. I mean like guys who were drilling for oil in North Dakota
really don't have anything to do with global warming.
You know, they're providing something that our society has decided it wants, including a lot of environmentalists, frankly, are driving around in cars. They're running gasoline. So blood for white. So there's a massive hypocrisy, even though it's well meaning.
So you but 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 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 go do that.
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 between disagreeing with a war
And sort of honoring people who have said for
Forty thousand dollars a year.
I will do whatever you think this nation needs done.
That's an incredibly honorable thing.
And
If you want to
Create a sense of unity of purpose in this country.
Which I think would be enormously psychologically beneficial to soldiers. I mean soldiers
Experience
Unity of purpose in their platoon.
Then they come back to a country, to this country.
Which is basically a war with itself.
I mean we live in racially divided communities.
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
Fifty years ago, racist speech was acceptable socially.
Now it's unacceptable. It's protected under free speech.
But it's
Politically and socially unacceptable.
Contemptuous speech for your fellow citizens.
for your political adversary.
Likewise it's
protected under the First Amendment.
But it should be.
B.
considered so damaging to the social fabric and to the interests of this nation that it's
Effectively banned.
From society, by common.
Passes us.
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 eighteen year olds
Where 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 um egalitarian way.
It would create a comet like in Israel.
Which has a PTSD rate, by the way, of one percent.
It would create this sort of common experience.
In this unity of purpose, which is so
Profoundly healthful psychologically.
What might some of the non military options look like for that?
Year or two of service.
I mean what do what's the nation need done?
You know, I mean we need help in the inner cities, you know, we need
Infrastructure repair. I don't know. What I mean I so it could resemble like a Teach for America or a
Peace Corps type of capacity.
Collectively.
to use our imagination. And we have two things, right? We have this incredible resource
Or are 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 wanna have to wait for
Tragedy.
To unify us.
Right. We want to beat it to the punch.
And actually unify our country for positive reasons instead of as a reaction to a horrible attack.
So I promised I would come back to the Viking helmet. So I wanna I wanna address the Viking helmet.
It's
So I
Let me try to this is from memory. Let me let me try to give a sketch. So you're in Spain.
Right. You go out to a bar with some of your buddies.
And you know what, I'll let you tell it because I think you'll do it more justice.
But it uh underscores a point that I wanna ask you about. Could you Yeah, of course. So and they weren't they weren't even my buddies, they became my buddies. So I was I was twenty two years old.
My father grew up in Spain and in France.
And
I grew up going to those countries and when I was
No, after college I decid 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 bulls, right?
So
The Sun Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona is this big
City wide.
You know like
Freak show basically for a week.
And
I was sleeping on someone's couch and one night I slept on a park bench. I mean it's just a free for all. 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 bullsh
They fire the cannon off at seven in the morning to release the bulls from the arena.
And they charge through town through these barricades. And no one who's within those barricades at seven A. M.
Woke up at six 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 gonna be one of them. So I go to this is some stupid little bar.
Sawdos on the floor. Spoke pretty good f Spanish at the time.
I immediately
Start talking to these two young Spaniards who were just
Completely shit faced. Right? And one of them has a a leather
sort of drinking bag around how's to describe it. A leather drinking bag caught a bota.
around his neck, which is filled with red wine, and he keeps trying to get the red wine squirt the red wine to 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 you're talking and one of them
The drunkest of the two.
Has a
Cheap.

Mm-hmm.
And
I didn't really think about it much. We're talking and
Suddenly these three very tough looking North African kids walk in.
And I had lived in France for a while with my family when I was twelve, thirteen, so I spoke French also.
If
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'em 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 who speaks both languages, so now I'm translating, right? And my friend my my Spanish friend new f Spanish friend says
Tries to grab it back and says
No, that's mine. I don't know who you are.
And the Moroccan guys and the two Spanish guys, everyone suddenly has a hand on the Viking helmet.
And they start pulling at it. And it's rapidly devolving.
Into a pretty good bar fight.
And
The helmet starts to rip.
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'cause no one wants to destroy the thing they're all fighting over.
And
One of the two Spanish guys.
I think the less drunk of the two.

I have an idea. Will you
Take my place at this helmet.
And will you defend it?
I mean this a wonderful, elegant way that
Spaniards have of speaking, particularly when they're drunk.
Well, you defend it upon the an you know honor of your ancestors and your good name and blah blah blah. And I'm thinking like
How long do you have to know a guy before you have to back him up in a bar fight?
I mean, is it under an hour, really? Is that it? Like
So I say yes, I'll defend the helmet, et cetera, and I take my place at the helmet.
And
He goes to the bartender. Now the whole bar is watching this. This is high theater, right? At this point.
So me and the Spanish kid are glaring at the Moroccans and they're glaring back and we're faced off around this helmet. I'm really hoping it doesn't go to
where it 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 uh cracks the top open.
And hand 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 San Fermine. The whole thing's running on red wine. Like no one wants to spill it, right? It just looks bad.
So he fills the helmet to the brim with red wine.
And he puts his hand under it.
He says, Okay, now everyone let go.
And no one wants to be the idiot who spills the wine, so everyone lets go.
And he presents it to the
Biggest, toughest looking Moroccan kid.
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 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 in the Viking helmet.
has been completely forgotten and is under a table in the corner.
So the
I underlined this and put a bunch of stars next to it. There are a lot of underlines in this book for me. What I liked about the encounter was that it showed how very close the energy of male conflict and male closeness can be.
So I I wanna 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 and
I 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 meat heads pounding each other's
Brains out.
But like with with a little
finesse and enough red wine, like that's all diffused and now they're best buddies.
And
I heard a story very much like this.
Where
There's a I'm not gonna name him, but this very kind of cantankerous, outspoken, abrasive

walked up to this huge Argentine guy at a party.
That I was in a different room.
At the time for
And
pushed the guy'cause he was they were both drunk, and he pushed this huge Argentine guy because he assumed I'm the billionaire here
I'm the tough guy who's the alpha male. What's this guy gonna do? And what the guy did was turn around, picked him up like a professional wrestler over his head, and slammed him on top of a folding table and shattered the table.
Oh, everyone's assuming holy shit, like this guy's gonna get
His life destroyed this this guy's gonna sue the shit out of him. But he couldn't because of like the
the sort of reputational stakes. Like he
It would be a response that would like forever shame him if that was the response'cause he clearly instigated it. And then a half hour later, they're best of friends. Yeah.
Doing shots together. Yeah. But it doesn't always end
that neatly. Right. And uh do you have any thoughts on how
then the society in which we live, let's just say in this case in the US.
we can end up with more
male closeness and less
Sort of male violence. Do you have any thoughts on that?
I mean, how do we have less heart disease in a society that where people drive and they have plenty most people have plenty of food and a lot of fats and sugars. You know, I mean I mean
The very safety of the society.
The very thing that makes us lucky.
also creates a danger. The diseases of affluence.
That's right.
So the wonderful thing about the society is that we don't have to organize
groups of young men and put weapons in their hands.
And send them out.
To the edge of town.

From the young men of an enemy town, a hostile town. We don't 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 function selflessly in groups extremely well.
You can organize twenty, thirty, forty, fifty 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 good at it. And in modern society
What young men wanna do is
Achie honor by defending the community. I mean you should have wired it 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 blog to.
But one way or another, they're gonna create a group.
And they're gonna 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 skin walkers. They have no outside enemy.
So they create an enemy out of society.
They don't want to be doing this.
Wartime leaders being all the time leaders. Yeah. That's right.
And young men, like young women, for the most part are well intentioned and want to do right by their community and their society.
But if you have a society which is so safe and protected and removed from the rest of the world as we are
In some ways there's sort of nothing useful for the young men to do.
And then
In their own ad hoc way.
They create their own trials, right? So they
Take a lot of risks. They do stupid stuff. They jump up of stuff that's too high to jump off of. They drive too fast. They get into fights.
I've never done any of that. Young men die at six times the rate.
Of young women from accidents.
And from violence.
There's a reason for that.
They're wired.

Demonstrate their prowess. And it often gets them killed.
This is not really.
something that needs a ton of commentary'cause I'm not sure we can resolve
millennia and millions of years of evolution. But I highlighted this part and we talked about it before we started recording because
It was surprising yet completely unsurprising at the same time, and this is
To read a short section here. I once asked a combat vet if he'd rather have an enemy in his life or another close friend. He looked at me like I was crazy.
Oh, an enemy.
Hundred percent, he said. Not even close. I already got a lot of friends. He thought about it a little longer.
Anyway, all my best friends I've gotten into fights with knock down drag out fights.
Granted we were always drunk when it happened, but think about that.
He shook his head as if he couldn't believe it.
Strange creatures we are.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
I want to segue to a couple of listener questions.
Because there were some good ones.
This one is from Kip
McNoonie.
I'm gonna 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 two thousand fourteen about post traumatic growth, as he called it.
And how those experiences should be considered a precious commodity, one that cannot be simulated or taught in a classroom.
How would you comment on that?
The status of victimhood is not a psychologically healthy
Place to be in.
And I think our society
Takes people who are unfortunate.
who have experienced something difficult.
And in a kind of misguided attempt.
To make the world right again for them.
They classify them as victims.
Now they may call them survivors and they may call them whatever they want, but but actually the role that's being a that the person is being asked to play is one of a victim.
Victims are taken care of.
So
After World War Two
Which saw
Casualties that completely eclipsed.
Even these terrible wars of our current day.
Soldiers came back.
They didn't do multiple deployments. They signed up and they were in the army until the war was done.
Some of them were in for
Three, four years.
Straight.
And they came home.
And
Basically they society said to these men, and it was almost all men in the you know combat units, society said to these men, like
All right, you're done fighting. Now we need you at home.
You know, time to get to work. We have a country to rebuild.
And they definitely were not thought of as victims.
Of the war or of anything.
They were thought of much like I'm sure the
Cheyenne and the Comanche and the Apache and the Sioux and the Kiowa Warriors who came back from the war path.
They were thought of as essential and functioning members of society. You know, 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.
The
Pacific, in the fields of Europe.
And
Yeah.
Problem with victimhood.
Is that it?
Perpetuates the psychological state
Of passivity.
And trauma.
That you want the person to escape from. Right. It's the sort of s perceived lack of agency that
Help produce the PTSD in the first place. Exactly. And you think about what the official London officials said about the Blitz. Now we have neurotics driving ambulances.
And also I mean one thing you wrote about which was
the presence of fraud, of course, within disability claims.
And how
Some vets who really suffer from severe PTSD don't want to
go to these meetings'cause they're afraid they're gonna beat the living shit out of some guy who's clearly
just doing it to receive a check or some type of payment.
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. The
There are veterans I've talked to who 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 P T S T 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.
You 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 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 it
that you were traumatized and that you have PTST and that's enough for a disability check.
So
Humans being what they are, some number of people are gonna 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.
How many photographs have you taken on your
Wartime deployment's probably not the right word, but assignments.
I
carry a video camera and I shoot a lot of footage, but I've never taken still photos. Okay.
So with the video footage that you've shot, and by the way, I haven't told you this.
When Restrepo was first
Shown like
Very, very first shown in the Northern California area.
I tracked it down and drove out to see one of the very first showings. Oh really? I did. Thank you.
And
I have some questions about that, but
What footage
that you captured, if any come to mind. This is related to a question from Yasmin Hayat.
If you had to choose let's I'm gonna substitute here'cause it was one photo, but I'm gonna say one clip of footage that impacted him the most.
Which one is it and why?
What did he experience while taking?
In this case the video.
I mean the things that
Have impacted me.
I didn't necessarily
Shoot video of
Sometimes it's at night.
We can talk about I would say feel free to
To answer that. Yeah.
When I was in northern Afghanistan in two thousand
There was a big nighttime battle going on and there was a mass infantry assault.
Against entrenched Taliban positions through minefield.
Most of the Northern Alliance is you know sort of World War One 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.
They're alive.
you know, they had lost legs and traumatic amputations. I mean they were extremely messed up. They're alive. Most of them probably survive. They're anti personnel minds.
So we were there where they were where they were brought into this sort of forward field
hospital tent that was lit with kerosene lanterns, right? And this is
Rough.
This is World War One era. Yeah.
And in the very bright light of these sort of propane lanterns, kerosene lanterns.
They brought these poor guys in.
And you know, there was twelve guys, you know, where their bodies ended at their knee, their bodies ended at their hips. You don't realize
It's psychologically incredibly deranging.
To see the human body rearranged.
And I found later in my research that one of the m the most traumatizing things
In terms of PTSD is to see
Dismemberment.
To see the coherents 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
I had a moment of crisis. I went a little crazy.
It felt like I went a little crazy. I mean I just
Mm.
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

And I left the tent.
And I went outside into the cold Afghan night and lit a cigarette and I thought, you know
War's 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
More traumatic.
If you can't face what's in that tent, you have to get out of the business completely.
And you can't be selective about your experience of war.
But you have a job to do is to communicate to your readers back in the United States
Everything about what war looks like, including that.
So
Grab your damn notebook and grab your pen and walk in there and just write down
What it
Is like
To behold such a thing.
And
As soon as I
This is interesting, right? As soon as I had a purpose
I was okay.
My self given purpose was
Document this thing that you can barely
There to look at.
As soon as I had a job to do, and I'm sure that's how the medics dealt with it too.
So as I had a job to do, I was okay.
And I wrote it all down and
It was one of the most powerful parts of this piece that I wrote.
And I you know I passed
Through the gateway, through the threshold.
And I
That moment
I'd been in plenty of wars till then.
But in that moment I became a war recorder.
You mentioned
Not by name, but
Tim earlier. Yeah.
Can you uh tell us

What happened and how it impacted you?
Yeah Tim Heatherington
Was a
Wonderful, brilliant.
English photographer who I was lucky enough
To work with
On my project in the Corongal 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 Bostrepo 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 Corangal Valley.
Yeah, we both got hurt.
We both
Came very close to getting killed out there. It was extraordinary experience. And we became brothers really.
And we made a film called Restrepo.
Won a lot of awards and then it was nominated for an Oscar and we went off to Los Angeles and this
Amazing world.
Of uh you know, Los Angeles during the Oscars and
I was married at the time and he had you know, he had a girlfriend and we were all out there together. It was an incredible experience.
We didn't win. It didn't really matter. And
We had an assignment to r 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.
Vanity Fair.
After the Oscars we all went home and we were gonna head to
Libya and a last moment I couldn't go for personal reasons. And Tim went on his own and he was killed.
On April twenty, in the city of Misrata in Libya.
By a mortar round.
Any one millimeter mortar that was fired by Gaddafi's forces outside Misrata.
And he bled out in the back of a rebel pickup truck racing for the
Hospital.
And
You know, I got the awful phone call in in New York City.
And
Very very quickly.
decided I would never cover war again.
It wasn't that I was
Scared of getting killed, that's a fear that you have to confront early on and I'd sort of resolve my feelings about it.
It's that

Beloved by people, including my wife, Daniela. I just loved him. I mean he just everyone loved them.
And I watched the news of his death ripple.
Ripple outwards.
From my apartment.
Because I got the news first from my apartment.
outwards through all the people
that he knew that he loved on out into people that he didn't even know who 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.
What uh was the date on that again? April twenty.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Coincidentally the anniversary of Columbine.
Hitler's birthday.
Oh, there's all kinds of awful things that happen on April twenty for some reason.
What do you think your writing future will look like?
Tribe is a really different book.
From my other books.
It's an inquiry into something.
It's not a story. It doesn't take place on a fishing boat or in an outpost.
It's a meditation and an inquiry.
Oh a society 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
this course 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.
How do we keep this country
Together for the next two hundred and fifty years.
ISIS is not gonna be able to prevent us from doing that, I'm sorry.
But we ourselves can.
And it's happening right now. And my book
It's partly an attempt to
Make people think about what it means to belong.
To a group.
And this country is a group.
So viewing ourselves that way.
This relates to a question from Bobby Richards.
Working so closely with service members and vets, what would be the one thing he would recommend that an American civilian could do for our vets?
Not necessarily as a country, but as individuals.
The main thing that I can think of is drawn from some of my research into
American Indian ceremonies.
Or returning warriors.
in the eight, seventeenth, eighteenth centuries, or vets from the current wars, nineteenth centuries. One of the common themes in these ceremonies is that the warrior
Gets to recount in front of his community.
What he did.
For them.
On the battlefield.
And you know, often it's a
Heroic.
sort of boasting of how brave he was and how he killed the enemy and how you know, whatever.
But
It's this cathartic
description of a warrior's a warrior discharging his duties for his community.
There's something about doing that for the people you did it for.
That seems to be
Very, very psychologically healthy, to put it in modern terms.
'Cause it's a v it's almost a un a universal in these
Ceremonies.
So I had
The idea. I mean, we're not gonna go back to a tribal society. I mean we can't. We can't we're not you know, you'd have to get rid of the car.
You know, you have to whatever, whatever.
It's not happening. But we might be able to take certain structures of tribal life.
And incorporate them into modern society. So we get the best of both worlds.
And
The way to do that in terms of returning veterans
is to turn the town hall, the city hall, and every community in this country on Veterans Day.
Into an open forum for veterans.
I have this idea, veteran town halls.
Where and my website, SebastianYounger.com, there's a page devoted to this.
You open up the town hall.
And a veteran from any veterans from any war.
Have the right to stand up and speak for ten minutes to their community.
And I know veterans, right? Some of'em are gonna be
Incredibly proud.
Of
their service and and they're gonna say they missed the war.
And it's gonna make liberals uncomfortable.
And some of'em are good. Just to just to be clear, you would you would consider yourself a liberal. Oh, 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 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'cause they're crying too hard.
But all of that is war.
Right. We sent these people.
To do a job for us that we deem necessary, collectively deem necessary.
And the emotional fallout for it.
Is okay as long as we process it all.
Collectively.
It's not okay if we just make them deal with it. It's not their war. It's our war.
So all of us need to deal with it 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 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 like to say
I support the troops.
What 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 it was like for them.
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 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 gonna be fine.
Could not agree more.
Let's
Shift gears just to my
Perhaps somewhat typical.
series of rapid fire questions and then we'll we'll wrap up and have some more coffee.
Oh, and I didn't look at those in advance, so now I'm in trouble. All right. All right, I'm ready. Let me get ready. Here we go. All right, I'll let you
So the first is
When you hear the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind and why? Martin Luther King.
What?
Because he transforms society in an incredibly courageous way.
How do you define
Courage or bravery.
Courage is risking or sacrificing your life for others.
What is the book or books that you have given to others most often as a gift?
At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matheson.
I also recently read
Sapiens by a guy named Harari, which is just phenomenal. That's a good book. I'm gonna give that thing over and over again to everyone I know. There's uh friend of mine who's also been on the podcast named Naval Ravakant, who you have to meet at some point. You guys would get along famously.
Also one of his favorites of the last couple of years.
At play in the fields of the Lord.
It's a novel by Peter Matheson. It takes place in the jungles of of South America. And it's about
A Sioux Indian named Louis Moon.
who grew up on a reservation in the nineteen seventies and he goes down to Brazil to meet his what he considers his forebears.
And it doesn't go very well.

And now am I getting this right? Matheson also wrote In Search of the Snow Leopard, or am I getting that right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Fantastic writer.
What would your close friends say you're exceptionally good at?
Yeah.
If I had two drinks in each of them.
I think
They would say that I'm really good at not
Reacting to things and
Seeming like
I'm unaffected.
When actually I'm deeply affected.
But on the surface you're not emotionally reactive.
That's right.

Sounds like you're definitely a closet stoic.
Yeah!
Oh.
Yeah.
This is actually not one of my typical questions, but I'm gonna throw this one. This is from I think it's Robbie Fry. It's looks like a very Dutch name. If you could combine three different writers into one super scion, that's a Dragon Ball Z reference, don't worry about that. Um if you could combine three different writers into one
Rider.
Right, to like create the ultimate writer for you. Who would they be?
I think I would have to pick up.
Cormac McCarthy.
Peter Matheson.
And Joan Diddy in.
Good choice is all.
Let's see here. Where were you so your first
Commercial book success.
The perfect storm. How old were you when that came out?
I was thirty five years old.
Okay.
So when the book hit
Before it was made into a movie.
You now, what advice would you give to yourself at that point in time?
The movie part of it didn't
Didn't affect me very much. But the
The sudden attention, public attention that I got when the book became a best seller affected me enormously.
And that was very
Anxious about all that. I think I would say to myself
The public is not a threat.
The public is actually waiting to hear.
Someone anything.
Say something.
That's helpful and makes sense.'Cause we're all trying to get through this
Life together.
And
Everyone wants
Some guidance and if there's anything I can say.
Through my work?
Or just on a stage?
That gives some comfort or guidance to
People they're enormously.
Receptive. And when you realize that we all need each other and we can all learn from each other.
Your stage fright goes away. And I had a terrific case of stage fright when my book came out.
How do you feel now when you're getting ready for a talk, like your TED Talk?
Oh, I don't think twice about it. I mean I'm just
I mean it just doesn't affect me at all. I think my heart rate goes up a little bit.
What purchase of a hundred dollars or less, and we don't have to stick to that exactly, but
recent purchase that has most positively impacted your life.
I think
Sapiens. Sapiens.
Yeah, I mean that book it's a it's a fun book to read. It's amazing. I mean I 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 whole universe of information. So
And it's cheap at the price. So I that maybe it's unfair to use a book
Hundred dollars or less.
I mean I think one of the best values you can buy for a hundred dollars or you can get for a hundred dollars is an axe, a good axe. Good axe.
You can do almost anything with a good axe.
Any particular type of axe? What are the characteristics of a good axe?
It can't be cheap wood and the half. It's gotta be
Good steal. 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 will cut.
You keep it really, really sharp.
And you can cut.
Not as fast as the chainsaw I've
You've changed a lot in my life.
But you can
basically do anything with it given a little bit of time. And I've spent a lot of time in the woods. And if I had to take pick one thing to take into the woods with me, it would be an X.
I was just thinking like how would you open a tuna can with an axe? Oh yeah
Yeah, no, 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 twenty three, right? I'm gonna 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 of
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.
But I hit it pretty hard.
And
Completely splattered her with tomato sauce.

And here's the amazing part.
She still went out with me.
Ha
Very memorable at the very least. Yeah, yeah. So then he pulled out a hatchet. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Right. She probably still relieved that you weren't a serial killer who's gonna take the head off. That's right. Oh my God.
What is something you believe
Even though you can't prove it.
I believe I'm a good person.
What are some of the habits
Or common practices of journalists that you dislike.
I really dislike laziness. And if you and if you read a phrase or a sentence that's familiar
I mean there are these cliches, they're these sort of sort of linguistic tropes like the mortars slammed into the hillside.
I just don't want to read that again.
You know like
Just say it in an original way, or don't say it.
But you're wasting everybody's time, including your own.
If you're right.
And rely on these sort of linguistic tropes. I really dislike that. And
Also
The point of journalism is the truth.
It's not yeah, I was talking about this on the phone earlier, and you know, maybe you overheard me, but it
The point of journalism is the truth.
The point of journalism is not to improve.
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
Or
And I think journalists really confuse those two things.
Advocates.
Or what we need.
Improvement, but not journalists.

Information like doctors provide information when they look at your
The X ray of your lungs after you smoke for ten years.
Yeah, you need accurate forensics.
That's right.
What do you think your seventy year old self
would give to your current self.
As advice.
I think I would say to myself
The world's
There's this continually unfolding set of possibilities and opportunities.
And
The tricky thing about life is
On the one hand, having the courage.
To enter into things that are unfamiliar?
But
To also
Have the wisdom to like
Stop.
Exploring when you found something that's worth sticking around for.
I mean that's true of a place of a person
Of a vocation.
In balancing those two things, the courage of exploring
And the commitment to staying?
It's very hard to get the ratio, the balance of those two things right.
And I think my seven year old self would say just
Really be careful that you don't
Hair on one side or the other because you have a ill conceived
idea of who you are.
It's this fine line. It's a tough balance. Yeah, it is a tough balance. I find it tough personally. Yeah, I mean
Yeah, absolutely. I mean there's a lot of unhappy people because they're struggling to find that balance.
What are the symptoms of knowing
that you should pursue a given project.
Because you've got Navajo long distance running, you have the perfect storm, you have
Quite a bit of terrain that you cover.
How do you know?
throw it out there as an example for me
I find writing so difficult.
And I'm so plotting.
And I have to go into isolation and makes me very mentally unhealthy.
I only write
A book certainly if
it's less painful to write it than to not write it. Like it generally manifests itself as a lot of insomnia in my case. And I'm just like, okay, like this idea that's been pestering me, like I just need to get it out of my head and onto paper, or I won't be able to get to sleep.
But the insomnia could also be excitement, right? Like I I'm excited about the possibilities of something and I just can't sleep. That's usually
one of the symptoms that I might have.
Like I might have a live one. Like this might be something I can run with. What is it like for you?
You know, I think the I've only written five books. Unless you're who you're comparing yourself to. Oh, yeah, I well the writers are writing twenty whenever like I you can always be insecure, right? No, I've ri I never written. I've really written only four books. One's a collection of short form journalism. So
You know, they're all books that had I not written them I would have wished that someone else had so I could read it.
One of the things I loved about Harari sapiens
I finished it and I just thought.
Think.
God, someone wrote that book.
Like the world really needed it.
In the books that we're going to do.
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 I really don't want to write a book that I'm not sure the world needs.
Yeah.
If you look at I mean we're sitting in Silicon Valley, if you look at some of the
Not some probably.
all of the biggest successes I know personally
They were scratching their own edge.
Yeah. It was something they felt needed to exist.
Absolutely.
If you had
One billboard anywhere and could put
Anything you want on it, what would you put on it?
I think I would put the word read.
Read.
It's the only I was talking about this recently with some people
You know, we we we don't live in small groups anymore.
We 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.
We live in a country of

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 our as ours with nuclear weapons and everything else is even more important than when we lived in groups of fifty. I mean, it's g vital that we have that conversation. And the only real way, I think the only real way to have collectively have that conversation is through books.
It's the only thing that's
Cheap enough, accessible enough to everybody.
It 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.
I really feel that
It makes
Books a kind of sacred object.
It's sacred in the sense that our society
I don't think we'll survive without them.
And that to me is as an atheist one definition of sacredness is
Something that humanity needs in order to survive.
Sebastian, this has been so much fun. I 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 gonna tell people where they can find you and I'm also gonna put this in the show notes of course for everyone, but
Is there anything that
Just as a parting comment.
You would like my listeners to
Meditate on consideration.
Do.
Well, one of the questions I ask in my book is
Who would you die for?
What ideas would you die for?
The answer to those questions for most of human history would have come very readily to the to any person's mouth.
You know, any commandee.
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 an ancient human questions
You lose a part of yourself.
And I think what I would ask people is
Who would you die for? What would you die for? And what do you owe your community? And in our case, our community is our country.
What do you owe your country?
Other than your taxes.
Is there anything else you owe all of us?
There's no right answer or wrong answer, but it's something that I think everyone should try to ask themselves.
This is a great book, folks.
I read a lot, so I have a high bar. I really enjoyed this book. It has a ton of notes.
And next time that we hang out probably in New York City.
and have some wine. I'll bring this with me because I have twenty, thirty 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 in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
And war just happens to be a very
Helpful.
circumstance in which we can find some illumination
into those subjects. But I really enjoyed this book, so I encourage everybody
to check it out and
Sebastian, thanks so much for 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 uh that includes Sebastian's website.
All the social and whatnot.
And all the various resources that came up.
And you can find that at four hour workweek dot com forward slash podcast all spelled out and
As always, and until next time, thank you for listening.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading.
Albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts.
guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try out
Just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser. Tim.blog slash.
Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one.
Thanks for listening.
This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep.
Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers, that's not me, and even a mattress made specifically for kids. They have bottles with memory foam layers to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side, as I often do and did last.
night on one of their beds. Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach and back sleeping positions and on and on. They have you covered. So how will you know which Helix mattress works best for you and your body? Take the Helix Sleep Quiz at helixsleep.com slash Tim and find your perfect mattress in less than two minutes.
Personally, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Lux mattress.
I also have one of those in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic.
They frequently say it's the best night of sleep they've had in ages. It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. Helix mattresses are American made and come with a 10 or 15 year warranty, depending on the model. Your mattress will be shipped straight to your door free of charge, and there's no better way to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on it in your own home.
That's why they offer a 100-night risk-free trial. If you decide it's not the best fit, you're welcome to return it for a full refund. Helix has been awarded number one mattress by both GQ and Wired magazines. And now Helix has harnessed years of extensive mattress expertise to bring you a truly elevated sleep experience.
Their newest collection of mattresses called Helix Elite includes six different mattress models, each tailored for specific sleep positions and firmness.
preferences so you can get exactly what your body needs. Each Helix Leap mattress comes with an extra layer of foam for pressure relief and thousands of extra microcoils for best in class support and durability. Every Helix Leap mattress also comes with a 15 year manufacturer's warranty and the same 100 night trial as the rest of Helix's mattresses. And
You, my dear listeners, can get 20% off of all mattress orders, plus two free pillows. So go to helixsleep.com slash Tim to learn more. That's HelixSleep.
H-E-L-I-X Helix Sleep.com slash Tim. This is their best offer.
to date and it will not last long.
So take a look.
With Helix, better sleep starts now.
This episode is brought to you by Viore Clothing spelled V-U-O-R-I. Viori. I've been wearing
Fiore at least one item per day for the last few months and you can use it for everything. It's performance apparel, but it can be used for working out. It can be used for going out to dinner, at least in my case, I feel very comfortable with it.
Super comfortable, super stylish, and I just want to read something that one of my employees said. She is an athlete. She is quite technical, although she would never say that. I asked her if she had ever
used or heard of Viore and this was her response. I do love their stuff, been using them for about a year. I think I found them at REI, first for my partner, T-shirts that are super soft but somehow last as he's hard on stuff. And then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger.
sweatpants. I live in them and they too have lasted. They're stylish enough I can wear them out and about. The material is just super soft and durable.
I just got their Clementine running shorts for summer and love them. The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out, in closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing, with the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga running loungewear that lasts and that I think look good also.
I like the discrete logo. So that gives you some idea. That was not intended for the sponsor read. That was just her response via text. Vore, again spelled B-U-O-R-I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility. You can wear it running. You can wear their stuff training.
doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands, or in my case, again, going out to dinner. It really doesn't matter what you're doing.
Their clothing is so comfortable.
And uh you look so good and it's it's non-offensive, you don't have a huge
brand logo in your face. You'll just want to be in them all the time. Their men's core short K-O-R-E. The most comfortable line athletic short is your one short for every sport. I've been using it for kettlebings, for runs, you name it, the Banks short. This is their go-to land to see short.
is the ultimate in versatility. It's made from recycled plastic bottles. And what I'm wearing right now
Which I had to pick one to recommend to.
folks out there or at least men out there is the Ponto Performance Pant. And you'll find these at the link I'm gonna give you guys. You can check out what I'm talking about. But I'm wearing them right now. They're
thin performance sweatpants, but that doesn't do them justice so you gotta check it out. PONTO Ponto Performance Pant. For you ladies, the women's performance jogger is the softest jogger you'll ever own.
Fury.
isn't just an investment in your clothing, it's an investment in your happiness. And for you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase. So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet.
It's super popular. A lot of my friends have now noticed are wearing this.
And so am I. Beoreclothing.com forward slash Tim. That's B-U-O-R-I Clothing.com slash Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over$75 and free returns. So check it out.
Vioriclothing.com slash Tim, that's V-U-O-R-I Clothing.com slash Tim, and discover the versatility of Viore Clothing.