The Peter Attia Drive - #195 - Freedom, PTSD, war, and life through an evolutionary lens ｜ Sebastian Junger

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:15.480 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

00:00:19.800 into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health

00:00:24.600 and wellness, full stop. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen.

00:00:28.880 If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more

00:00:33.280 in-depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level,

00:00:36.840 at the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now,

00:00:41.740 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's

00:00:48.080 today's episode. My guest this week is Sebastian Younger. Sebastian is a New York Times bestselling

00:00:55.040 author of Tribe, The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in the Delmont, and War. His newest book,

00:01:01.680 Freedom, came out in May of this year, and we spend some time talking about it. Sebastian is also an

00:01:06.720 award-winning war reporter and journalist who has covered major international stories around the

00:01:11.140 world. And he is a documentary filmmaker whose debut film, Restrepo, was nominated for an Academy

00:01:17.580 Award. His other documentaries include Korengel, The Last Patrol, Which is the Way to the Front of

00:01:23.640 the Line from Here, and Hell on Earth, The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS. I've wanted to

00:01:28.960 interview Sebastian for a while. In fact, ever since reading his book, Tribe, which I think I read in

00:01:33.120 2016 or 2017. And while this is a bit of a different interview compared to a lot of the interviews I do on

00:01:38.980 the podcast, I really want to speak with him for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to talk about his

00:01:43.240 very unique life experience and his philosophy of life, which is actually something I only learned

00:01:49.000 about in the prep for this podcast and became kind of transfixed by. These experiences have led him to

00:01:54.860 write some amazing books, but also have given him kind of a remarkable outlook on life. And in

00:01:59.040 particular, Tribe is a book that I've thought a lot about in terms of my understanding of the importance

00:02:05.620 of community in people's mental health and how it plays into their longevity, of course. In this

00:02:11.120 discussion, we talk about a lot of things. We talk about his upbringing and how it led him to his

00:02:14.580 career as a war reporter. We talk about the psychology of war and the PTSD that he saw many

00:02:19.980 around him experience. And of course, that he experienced, although at the time, he didn't

00:02:23.720 really understand that that's what it was. From there, we talk about his philosophy on life,

00:02:28.240 what having kids has meant to him, and how he has parented his kids in a way that I think is

00:02:32.980 a little bit non-traditional. We spoke about his near-death experience, and this is something he's

00:02:38.000 spoken about on other podcasts, but I think here we went into a little more detail. And I must say,

00:02:42.940 this was kind of a remarkable story. We talk about how this changed him for the better and the worse,

00:02:47.420 and how it led to the new book that he's writing on what's going to happen when you die.

00:02:53.140 We spoke about his trauma and his past depression, why he only uses a flip phone, social media as an

00:02:59.820 addiction, the importance of the Tribe, and the dangers of isolation. We end our conversation

00:03:03.580 speaking about his newest book, Freedom, and the documentary that it's based on, The Last Patrol.

00:03:09.360 We talk about what it means to be free and how we know when to quit. So without further delay,

00:03:14.560 please enjoy my conversation with the very talented Sebastian Younger.

00:03:24.100 Sebastian, I have been looking forward to sitting down with you for,

00:03:28.460 God, it's been 18 months. It was pre-COVID. I know when we first talked about sitting down,

00:03:32.620 and then for obvious reasons, things got postponed, but nevertheless, here we are.

00:03:38.100 It's thrilling to talk to you. When I interviewed you, it was really fascinating. I mean, I loved

00:03:43.680 our conversation. Well, there are a lot of things I'm looking forward to here, but perhaps the most

00:03:48.080 trivial of them is getting to listen to you speak. I'm sure you've been told this before, but you

00:03:52.980 may have the single greatest voice ever. So the fact that I'm going to get to sit here and listen

00:03:57.980 to you talk is fantastic. Thank you. Where did you grow up, Sebastian?

00:04:02.920 I grew up outside of Boston in a little town called Belmont, Massachusetts.

00:04:07.340 Okay. I want to understand a little bit better about, well, let's start with your dad. Your dad's

00:04:12.800 a veteran, correct? No, he's not a veteran. I mean, he was a refugee from two wars.

00:04:17.780 Oh, okay.

00:04:18.540 Yeah. He grew up in Europe. His dad was a journalist in Europe, European-born, as was my

00:04:24.840 dad. And they lived in Spain. And then they left when the fascists came in in 1936, under Franco.

00:04:32.200 They fled. His father was, my dad's dad was Jewish. And they fled to France. And then when the Nazis came

00:04:38.160 in a few years later, they fled to the United States. And my dad made his life here, met my mom,

00:04:45.140 and tried to join the U.S. military and couldn't because he had asthma. So he served the country in

00:04:50.820 other ways. He was a physicist and he contributed to a lot of important projects, which involved the

00:04:55.160 U.S. military, the U.S. government. But he was enormously grateful to this country for our

00:05:00.280 sacrifice in World War II. And, you know, it's interesting that his implacable pacifism was also

00:05:07.140 mixed with an understanding that sometimes war, sometimes force is necessary to protect humanity

00:05:12.980 from fascism and other evils. So he had a very complex sort of understanding of our duties as

00:05:17.720 citizens and our place in the world as America. How did he communicate that to you? And how old

00:05:23.140 were you when some of those lessons started to mean something more than just kind of the words that

00:05:28.060 were spoken? And did he communicate through direct words or was it more indirect means?

00:05:32.660 Yeah. When we were growing up, the word fascist was like a dirty word. You know, I grew up knowing

00:05:37.440 that that was the sort of ultimate evil and America stood diametrically opposed to fascism,

00:05:43.400 that we were the opposite of fascism. We were the ultimate anti-fascist state. And I grew up during

00:05:49.800 Vietnam and I grew up in a very liberal environment. So every adult I knew, everyone I knew was sort of

00:05:56.300 anti-Vietnam, anti-war and by extension and not fairly, but by extension sort of anti-U.S. military.

00:06:03.320 I mean, that's just the environment I grew up in. Right. So I was very surprised and learned a lot

00:06:09.120 when I said to my dad, you know, back then I was born in 1962. So in 1980, I turned 18 and I got a

00:06:15.880 card in the mail from the U.S. government saying, you're an 18 year old male. We need to know where

00:06:22.680 you live physically, what your address is in case we need to call you into combat. And I said to my

00:06:28.480 father, who I knew was a pacifist, I was like, what the hell is this? Like the draft is over. What do you

00:06:33.180 mean my government needs to know where I am? Doesn't need to know where my sister is, but where

00:06:38.160 I am in case they need me to fight one of their wars. And I was like, I'm not signing this. And

00:06:43.320 I expected my father to wholly approve the message, my message that I wasn't going to sign this.

00:06:48.480 He said, no, no, no, you're definitely signing it. He's like, you know, you don't know what the

00:06:54.080 next war is going to be. It may be a right. It may be a war that needs to be fought like World War 0.99

00:06:57.860 II was. And you don't owe your country nothing. You owe it something and you may owe it your life

00:07:03.720 depending on the circumstances. And if a war comes along that you feel is immoral and unnecessary,

00:07:08.920 then it's your duty to protest and go to prison if you need to, to protest it. But you don't know

00:07:13.440 that yet. And you're going to sign that card because you are part of this country and it's

00:07:18.240 a magnificent thing to be part of. And that completely turned around my thinking about what

00:07:23.880 it means to be an American citizen and a human being and to be part of a community. I mean,

00:07:28.340 you know, whatever, it's 35 years later, I'm still chewing over that one.

00:07:33.600 Yeah, I bet. So you weren't really, I mean, yeah, you were probably a teenager as Vietnam was coming 0.97

00:07:39.200 to an end. What were your dad's thoughts on that? I mean, did he kind of view that as a different war

00:07:43.940 from World War II? I mean, obviously it was, but how did he kind of vocalize that to you?

00:07:48.780 Oh, totally different war. He said it was unnecessary. And the specter of communism taking

00:07:53.840 over the world that the Gulf of Tonkin was a straight up lie. So unlike 9-11, Vietnam started 0.94

00:08:00.080 with a straight up lie. They got us into a war that everyone knew was sort of unwinnable.

00:08:05.320 And a lot of people thought was not needed, which was very, very different from 9-11 and from World

00:08:10.560 War II, as far as my dad was concerned. So he hated the Vietnam War and was very, very adamant about

00:08:16.680 it, as was every other adult I knew. I mean, it speaks to the community I was in. I could have grown

00:08:21.960 up somewhere else and it would have been the opposite, but I didn't.

00:08:24.780 But it does sort of speak to his ability to balance simultaneous, seemingly simultaneous

00:08:30.020 contradictory facts, which is that he could look five years later, right? Vietnam ends in what,

00:08:36.460 74, 75, they're pulling the last troops out. And just five years later, you're getting a card that is

00:08:41.600 effectively a draft card. And yet he can immediately pivot and say, well, wait a minute. No,

00:08:47.780 no, no, this is very important. And I can put Vietnam out of my mind and say, because again,

00:08:53.900 there's a recency bias that could have easily sounded like, I don't want my son being one of 1.00

00:08:58.860 the boys that got slaughtered there for no reason. Well, he made it clear to me that if it's an immoral

00:09:03.920 war, my job is to go to prison to protest it. If I need to, like to say, absolutely not, right?

00:09:10.180 You're not going to use me for your immoral, your immoral designs, right? But equally strongly,

00:09:15.600 I mean, the Holocaust burned, my dad was half Jewish, I'm a quarter Jewish, right? I mean, I

00:09:19.660 don't identify in any cultural way with that quarter of me. But the Holocaust seared itself 0.65

00:09:25.920 into the minds of humanity in the 1940s, and the sacrifice of American soldiers. Now, America acted

00:09:34.240 out of its own interest and thought process. It didn't join World War II because of the Holocaust. But

00:09:39.620 the fact is that there are thousands, tens of thousands of American troops buried in France,

00:09:44.620 his home country of France, stopping fascism, making sure that fascism did not take over Western

00:09:51.120 Europe and the world. And that's his home country, right? And he's seeing the graves of American 0.88

00:09:56.400 soldiers, young men his age. His contribution to that was, you know, when they fled Paris,

00:10:01.780 and the Germans, they took Paris, you know, without a fight, it was a negotiated surrender. And they sent 0.93

00:10:07.200 advance units and tank columns deep, deep into France to grab the Spanish border, which, of course,

00:10:14.060 across the border with Franco, it was a friendly regime, a friendly fascist regime. So my father and

00:10:18.860 his family fled by car. And they were in Bayonne. And he was out, he was 18, he's walking down the

00:10:26.440 street. And he sees a German officer on foot in front of a column of tanks, and they're creeping down a

00:10:33.200 boulevard. And the officer turns to him, and says, do you know which way it is to the center of town?

00:10:39.160 Because they didn't know, they didn't have maps, they didn't know, right? And my father spoke German.

00:10:43.800 I mean, he spoke just about every language in Europe, because they lived all over the place.

00:10:46.840 My father was born in Dresden. The German officer was speaking bad French. My father spoke back to him 0.97

00:10:52.000 in perfect German, and lied to him and said, yeah, the center of town's that way, and pointed the entire

00:10:57.800 tank column in the opposite direction, and off they went. So that was his little act of rebellion,

00:11:03.080 right? And his dad said, don't ever be that stupid again, because they will kill you. If he found that 1.00

00:11:07.580 out, he would have killed you right there. So my father, you know, that kind of experience doesn't

00:11:11.280 leave you. And he thought the world, the foremost threat to freedom and human dignity in the human race

00:11:16.560 was fascism in his mind. So Vietnam was a blip in the screen with that, right? I mean, fascism was it. 0.74

00:11:22.560 And, you know, I would argue, it still is it. That is still the threat. And this country has

00:11:27.720 gone through a little taste of it, and we came out hopefully stronger. But that boogeyman has not

00:11:32.300 gone away in human society. When did you decide what you wanted to study in college, and what did

00:11:37.340 you study in college? I grew up, my dad was a physicist, but he was very enamored of history and

00:11:43.540 of anthropology. And I grew up reading anthropology, anthropological works. I was very interested in

00:11:47.660 the Native American societies. And I was also a really good long distance runner in high school

00:11:52.880 and college. I ran a 412 for the mile and went on to run a 221 marathon. So I had some, not world

00:11:58.600 class, obviously, not even close, but I was like a pretty good runner. And I found out in college that

00:12:03.420 the Navajo were really good long distance runners. And, you know, when I was in college, I wasn't in

00:12:08.180 college to get a career. I was in college to learn stuff that interested me, which was anthropology,

00:12:12.180 right, and a number of other things. And so I majored in anthropology, and I decided to do field

00:12:16.720 work on the Navajo reservation. And I went out there in 1983, I think it was, and spent a summer

00:12:24.160 on the reservation training with their best guys. And I wrote a thesis on Navajo long distance

00:12:29.080 runners. And that was the first time, like, I researched something and then wrote about it, you

00:12:33.060 know, basically the work of journalism. So when I got out of college, I did construction for a little

00:12:37.580 while trying to figure out what I was going to do. And I was on a, I was sponsored by Etonic running

00:12:42.240 shoes. I was running local road races. I was a sponsored athlete at a sort of like regional

00:12:46.440 level. And trying to figure out what am I going to do with my life? Oh, maybe I'll be a journalist.

00:12:50.880 Like, that's pretty close to what my thesis was. And I, when I was writing my thesis, I was just on

00:12:54.840 fire. I just loved it. I was a very middling student. And the thesis I was, I got honors. And I

00:12:59.680 just, I was like, Oh, I'm going to be a journalist. That was a long, tortuous path to get there. But that

00:13:04.240 was my sort of naive decision when I was 21 or whatever. Now, I remember hearing you in an interview

00:13:11.560 years ago. I don't remember which interview it was, but you talked about a job you had

00:13:16.620 felling trees. You were in a logging job. Where was that? And how old were you? Was that post-college

00:13:22.360 as well? Yeah, yeah. I was post-college. That was, I was in my late twenties. So, you know,

00:13:27.760 like fast forward some years out of college, I still haven't figured it out, right? I'm still not

00:13:32.000 trying to be a writer, trying to be a journalist. Basically, I don't have a clue, but I'm reading a lot,

00:13:37.000 a lot of good writers, Peter Matheson, Joan Didion, Ernest Hemingway, a lot of great writers.

00:13:41.820 And I'm writing and writing and writing and getting occasional things published, but I'm

00:13:44.860 turning into a better writer, but I couldn't make a living. And I was sick of waiting tables and I got

00:13:50.000 a job as a climber for tree companies. And so it wasn't logging, it was residential tree work,

00:13:54.940 right? And you need climbers. You need, if you don't have a crane, you need a guy up in the tree on a

00:13:58.920 rope with a chainsaw. You know, I was a pretty athletic young man and I took to it very, very quickly and I

00:14:04.260 was good at it. And, you know, basically you're swinging around on a rope with a pair of climbing

00:14:08.400 irons strapped to your legs and your feet with a chainsaw. I was taking down these big, big trees,

00:14:13.740 some of them, you know, a hundred, you know, white pines, a hundred feet high, topping them out and

00:14:17.960 taking them down in a fall, in a small space. Like I can take a tree down in a space that's the size of

00:14:23.480 the footprint of the tree. Like, I mean, the size that the tree is viewed from above, I can take a tree

00:14:29.140 down in that space with ropes and a chainsaw and a climbing saddle.

00:14:33.120 By the way, I just want to point out how familiar I am with this because of my middle child who's

00:14:38.860 just turned seven, but he's obsessed with this process. And there's this series on YouTube called

00:14:45.800 Pine Tree Removal Part One, Pine Tree Removal Part Two, and Pine Tree Removal Part Three. Each of

00:14:52.120 these videos is about two hours long. So it's taken together. It's a six hour series exactly as you're

00:14:59.620 describing it, which is 120 foot pine tree in a subdivision between two houses that are 30 feet

00:15:08.040 apart and it has to come down. And the six hour video is how long it takes to take, bring the tree

00:15:14.380 down minus any spaces. So it edits out, you know, the pauses and the lunch breaks and the bathroom

00:15:19.120 breaks. But basically there were three major sections that have to come down. So they go to the top,

00:15:25.600 they trim all the branches, cut the first part, it comes down, they just keep doing this.

00:15:30.400 Well, I think my son has seen the entirety of that 30, maybe 40 times. So by extension,

00:15:37.440 I've seen it like three times. That's awesome.

00:15:40.580 He knows every move, meaning wherever you are, he'll tell you, okay, that guy, he's going to take

00:15:48.040 his chainsaw and he's going to cut this thing at that angle. And then once he gets that branch down,

00:15:51.820 he's going to wrap around this thing and then he's going to cut this thing at this angle.

00:15:54.940 And then they're going to do, it is his obsession. When he turned five, he wanted a chainsaw for his

00:16:01.020 birthday. And he was so upset that he didn't get it. And I tried to explain to him like,

00:16:08.060 dude, you'll kill yourself with this thing. And he's like, I will not. Like, I know how to use

00:16:13.740 this thing. I mean, he was convinced he knew how to use it because he'd watched so much pine tree

00:16:17.940 removal. So you would literally be his hero.

00:16:20.800 That's awesome. Well, listen, I have a buddy who runs a tree company and he has a girl as a

00:16:25.320 teenager now, but she, you know, when she was young, seven, eight years old, whatever he got

00:16:30.120 her, he set her up on a climbing rig, you know, a little harness and he set the ropes up the way 0.93

00:16:35.660 climbers use. And she learned how to like work her way up a rope and rappel back down. And it was all,

00:16:43.120 you know, six feet off the ground. It was all safe. So if you could find someone, an arborist

00:16:47.520 in your town to come rig that up for you, your son would love you forever, which I'm sure he will

00:16:52.840 anyway, but he'll love you even twice, twice as much forever.

00:16:55.840 Well, the compromise is we got him a gomboy, you know, one of those big saws when he was five.

00:17:01.240 And at first I wouldn't let him touch it without me being right there. And then I figured out,

00:17:05.680 okay, he actually knows how to use this thing without killing himself. And now he's out there

00:17:09.400 running around in the woods with a saw that's almost as long as him, just trimming every dead branch.

00:17:15.380 And when people come over and see it, they think we are the worst parents in the world

00:17:18.860 because like who would let a kid that little use a saw that big. But I mean, I think, you know,

00:17:24.540 that they get a healthy respect for it. I think he will be using a chainsaw before the age of 16,

00:17:29.200 which was when I told him he could have one. That's awesome. That's awesome. Well,

00:17:33.200 one thing to say about that work, I mean, I'm scared of heights and I had to kind of control that

00:17:37.520 fear to work that high up in the air. Was that part of the appeal? Were you doing this to overcome that fear?

00:17:42.740 No, no, no, no. I was doing it because I could make 500,000 bucks a day back in the early 90s.

00:17:48.800 Wow.

00:17:49.400 Yeah. You know, if I contracted my own job and did the climbing, I could make pretty big money. So I

00:17:54.240 could work a couple of times a week and then the rest of the time I could train, I could write,

00:17:58.900 I could do whatever I wanted. So for a young man, it was a perfect job for me. I wouldn't say I'm

00:18:03.860 without my anxieties and fears, but I have a fairly high risk tolerance. And what I figured out about

00:18:09.020 tree work was that there are no accidents. It's like, there are no accidents in the game of chess.

00:18:15.680 Like you play poker and you might just draw the wrong card. There are no accidents in chess. If

00:18:21.280 you lose a chess game, it's because you lost the chess game because you made worse moves than the

00:18:25.920 other guy.

00:18:26.660 Right. So there's no chance and there's complete information at all times.

00:18:30.480 That's right. If you get hurt or killed doing tree work, it's because you screwed up. You're

00:18:34.140 dealing with the laws of physics. They're immutable. And if you do a front cut wrong and you top out a

00:18:39.500 tree wrong and it comes back on you, it's because you did it wrong and you didn't take into account

00:18:43.340 the wind direction. There are no variables that are outside of your control. Your own stupidity

00:18:48.340 is the, or carelessness is the only thing outside of your control and you can control that. And so 1.00

00:18:53.420 when I figured that out, I'm like, I'm just going to make sure I don't screw up. I screwed up once

00:18:59.000 and I hit my leg with a chainsaw and tore it up. And, you know, it took a while to recover from

00:19:03.120 that. That was the injury I needed. And after that, I actually wouldn't be that scared up there

00:19:07.760 because I knew, although it was sometimes terrifying to look down, I knew that I was way

00:19:13.320 safer than I was in a car, ironically, as long as I didn't make a mistake. And that kind of agency,

00:19:18.980 having that kind of agency over an outcome, unlike driving, unlike combat, unlike a lot of things,

00:19:25.120 that kind of agency was very exciting to have. It made, gave me a kind of Zen focus, like in the

00:19:31.280 moment, like you are here right now, do not blow this. And that, that kind of practice was extremely

00:19:37.460 good for me. Talk to me a little bit about this process of becoming a better writer. I mean,

00:19:41.620 it fascinates me to no end because I enjoy writing, but I'm obviously not very good at it yet, but I'm

00:19:47.320 getting better, right? Like I'm better today than I was 10 years ago. And, but when I look at people who

00:19:52.160 do this for a living, I'm very interested in what the reps look like, what the feedback process looks

00:19:57.960 like. Is it something that can be done in isolation or is it something that requires an editor or

00:20:03.480 someone who can really sharpen your sword? I mean, it depends. I mean, there are some writers,

00:20:09.940 some very good writers who basically dump out an incredibly rough first draft and they just,

00:20:16.780 in their description, sort of vomited out and sentences aren't even complete. There are sections

00:20:21.720 like put the, you know, whatever, the sailboat stuff in here and then they move up, whatever.

00:20:26.420 And it's, it's a very sloppy, fast, sort of intuitive brain dump. And they can do that for

00:20:32.300 500 pages and then they go back. That is not me. And people like that often make really good use of

00:20:37.260 an editor who can work through that and kind of see how to begin to shape it. I don't do that.

00:20:42.180 I'm sort of like a road paver. I go two miles an hour and I leave behind pretty much finished

00:20:47.840 roadway. Not that editors don't weigh in at the sort of sentence level, like slight,

00:20:52.540 this is slightly confusing, or maybe you want to say more about this because I don't quite

00:20:57.700 understand what you're referring to here. Other people might, you know, whatever. But I get very

00:21:03.220 little editing from my editors and it's because I'm so obsessive about writing and I go over it and

00:21:09.320 over it and over it. And I write very carefully. And the stuff that I write is definitely flawed,

00:21:14.900 but not that flawed. And I have this feeling like for me, good writing is a matter of efficiency,

00:21:22.700 being efficient with your words, not quite the minimum possible words, but something close to

00:21:27.740 that. And fat creeps into your prose very, very easily. And you can really pare it down.

00:21:34.220 It's about efficiency and it's about rhythm. The sentences need rhythm. And then it's about saying

00:21:40.700 things in a way that people have never read before. I mean, no one ever needs, again, to hear

00:21:46.480 someone say the rain drummed on the roof. Like if you're going to say the rain drummed on the roof,

00:21:51.960 then just forget about the damn rain and move on to the next interesting thing. No one ever needs to 0.98

00:21:57.020 read a sentence they've read before in someone else's writing. And if you really apply that harshly,

00:22:02.500 you will get rid of a lot of what you wrote. I mean, it's amazing how much it's slightly formulaic

00:22:07.180 and you're repeating stuff. Mortars are always slamming into hillsides and blah, blah, blah.

00:22:11.200 You know, it's just like, get rid of that stuff. So rhythm, efficiency, and originality. And if you

00:22:17.540 do that, it's going to be pretty good writing. Do you think journalism and storytelling are similar

00:22:24.760 styles? Because you tend to do both of these well, right? I mean, there's so much of your work

00:22:31.980 is really telling amazing stories. It's historical, it's anecdotal. And then some of it, of course,

00:22:38.140 is much more what we would think of as journalism, reporting on what is happening and trying to

00:22:43.340 provide context around it. Do you think that, I mean, first of all, I don't think a lot of people

00:22:47.920 do that. Some people do, but that's not the normal way to do things. Does this style lend itself

00:22:53.760 equally to both of those disciplines? Well, I mean, I write long-form journalism or long-form

00:23:00.320 nonfiction. So first of all, there is no nonfiction category that is liberated from the rules of

00:23:08.740 journalism in terms of quote attribution and making stuff up or whatever. Like you can't say, oh, well,

00:23:15.900 it's creative nonfiction. So I can, you know, maybe slide by with a little bit of creative, like,

00:23:20.260 no, you can't. Like it's either true or it's not true. And you can't blend them because then

00:23:25.400 suddenly everything's going to be suspect. So there's some great books that have, I mean,

00:23:29.320 in Cold Blood, Truman Capote's absolute masterpiece. It's a masterful book, right? But by his own

00:23:34.640 admission, he like wove in some stuff that was not the result of his research. Like he richly

00:23:40.240 imagined some scenes. No problem, right? I mean, it's a masterwork, but it's important to understand

00:23:46.260 that that actually is not nonfiction and it's not journalism. But just to go on to say that there's

00:23:51.580 a whole food chain of journalism. So, you know, you get a sort of Reuters or AP report that's written

00:23:56.700 in minutes or maybe an hour. It basically doesn't have a style. It doesn't have a literary style,

00:24:02.900 right? There's a lead paragraph and the follow up and that, you know, whatever. I mean, there's a

00:24:06.940 whole formula to how to construct something that's packed with information and completely charmless

00:24:12.080 in a literary sense, totally charmless. But you don't want charming writing when you're reading about

00:24:19.020 how Harari fell to the rebels, right? I mean, whatever. You just want the information.

00:24:22.660 Then there's more long form journalism where you can even use the first person if you want.

00:24:28.940 I think sparingly, but you're allowed to use the first person. You're allowed to be

00:24:32.600 a little bit more scene setting. You can use some novelistic techniques with content, which is

00:24:39.500 completely true and real, right? But the novelistic techniques might be taking a break at a compelling

00:24:46.040 moment right before the rebels attack the city, right? You take a break and then you do a thousand

00:24:51.480 words of backstory about the history of Zimbabwe or whatever. And then you, you know, resume where

00:24:56.480 the action stopped. Like those are all novelistic techniques that are great for getting people to

00:25:01.160 read nonfiction. It's just that you're making use of factual material, not inventive material.

00:25:07.020 So I'm a long form nonfiction writer and that extends for me. A book is long form nonfiction. It's

00:25:17.040 just very long form. So my books, some of my books you can read in a couple of hours. Some of my books

00:25:21.680 you can read a couple of days, but basically it's all the same rules and creative tools of getting

00:25:27.760 people to read good narrative journalism. Let's fast forward. We're into the late 80s,

00:25:32.460 right? So you've had your leg injury. By the way, if I recall, it was an Achilles tendon injury,

00:25:38.540 correct? Well, yeah. I mean, I was up in a tree. It was an elm tree in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. It

00:25:43.860 wasn't even that high. And I was in a hurry. I hadn't worn my boots that day because I wasn't

00:25:48.860 going to be wearing climbing irons. So I just had sneakers on and I was cutting something below me

00:25:54.300 quickly, one handed with a little climbing saw. The tip of the saw hit the tree and it popped into

00:25:59.020 the back of my leg and it tore open right across the Achilles tendon. It tore open my leg. So I turned the

00:26:04.960 saw off. It didn't hurt at all. I was like, something hit my leg. There's nothing else moving

00:26:09.720 down there but the saw. I better check. I just make sure I'm not cut, right? Turned the saw off,

00:26:14.640 clipped it on, looked. And of course, my leg was hanging open. And so I pulled my leg up as close

00:26:20.180 as I could to see if the Achilles was intact or not. I was very concerned about the Achilles.

00:26:25.700 Now, keep in mind, had it been someone else's leg, I mean, I'm not a doctor. I'm not a medic,

00:26:30.240 right? I wouldn't have looked inside their chainsaw wound to see if the Achilles was intact.

00:26:33.620 But you're immediately in shock. You know, there's this sort of psychological remove when

00:26:38.600 you're hurt. And I had no problem pulling the cut open and looking for my Achilles. I had no

00:26:42.820 problem at all. And it seemed to be there. It was about the thickness of a number two pencil and

00:26:46.620 was sort of a whitish color. And I was like, I don't know, that looks like the Achilles looks

00:26:51.480 like it's still there. So I rappelled down at the bottom of the tree and my crew helped me to the car

00:26:56.660 and drove me to the hospital. I was going to ask you, I didn't know if you'd injured it or not. And as a

00:27:00.360 runner, that's a big deal. Yeah, it was intact. I did rupture my Achilles in combat when I was in

00:27:05.940 my mid-40s. When I was in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan, we were moving up a hillside

00:27:10.720 under a big load. And I felt something slap into the back of my leg. And there was a lot of long

00:27:15.500 distance sniper activity. You know, like you don't necessarily hear the bullet that hits you.

00:27:19.760 And I was like, oh, no, I got shot. I got shot in the back of the leg. Damn it. And I pulled the

00:27:27.720 pant leg up and there was no blood. I had no idea what had happened to me, but it was a partial

00:27:32.340 rupture of my Achilles. And I sort of limped on it for a few days. And then it kind of healed back

00:27:37.680 together a bit. And I was able to continue my in-bed, which was about another month or so.

00:27:42.680 I babied it a little bit, but I scraped by and I got physical therapy eventually and healed it.

00:27:47.620 But apparently the malaria medication that they were giving soldiers, larium,

00:27:52.140 mefloquine, I think is the medical name, it makes people prone to Achilles tendon ruptures.

00:27:57.200 Who knew? And we were all on larium out there.

00:27:59.740 Yeah. And fluoroquinolones, which are a class of antibiotics, ciprofloxacin being the one that

00:28:04.440 probably most people are familiar with, has a similar effect.

00:28:07.020 As does aging.

00:28:08.900 Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about what led you to that, right? So when was the moment when you

00:28:14.420 realized that being a journalist was one thing, but being a journalist who went into the theater

00:28:20.280 of combat was another, and that was the place you wanted to go?

00:28:24.200 Yeah. So I was living in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the storm that I wrote about in The Perfect

00:28:28.520 Storm hit that town in 1991. I was still limping around from my chainsaw injury, and I was living

00:28:34.860 with my girlfriend, and I'd never lived with a woman before. And the relationship ended,

00:28:39.460 and, you know, ended pretty painfully. And maybe some sort of weird male reaction to heartbreak,

00:28:45.740 I was like, all right, I'll show her, I'm going to go to a war. Like, it was just some bizarre,

00:28:51.380 like, because there was a civil war in Bosnia. And I was like, all right, we're broken up,

00:28:54.840 I'm going to go to a war zone and learn to be a war reporter. I was looking for a big life change,

00:28:59.020 I was looking for something sort of that felt meaningful and exciting, and that would challenge

00:29:03.140 me to, in my mind, complete the maturation process. I didn't, still didn't quite feel like I was really

00:29:09.900 a man, like I was really mature. Like, surely an ordeal like war will put you over the threshold

00:29:15.940 into adulthood and into manhood. And so off I went. So every other free, I mean, like, 80% of the other

00:29:22.060 male freelancers over there had all been dumped by their girlfriend. Like, it seemed to be a sort of

00:29:26.440 common, common reaction for some reason. So I started freelance war reporting over there as a

00:29:33.420 radio correspondent. And then I wrote my book, The Perfect Storm. And the day, two days after I

00:29:37.680 turned it in, I took a flight to Delhi, and then on into Peshawar and on into Afghanistan. It was 1996.

00:29:44.760 And there was a war in Afghanistan, a civil war in Afghanistan after the Soviets pulled out.

00:29:49.120 And I was there as the Taliban were taking over in the summer of 1996. And that was my first

00:29:54.540 official war assignment for a New York, a magazine in New York City. And it just was the most meaningful

00:30:00.900 and incredible work I'd ever even imagined. And so I kept doing it.

00:30:05.020 What did your dad think when you told him you were going to do this? Was he

00:30:08.420 fully supportive, partially supportive, ambivalent?

00:30:12.740 My dad, I think he was proud of me. I think he was also sort of worried. My mom,

00:30:18.340 maybe in a kind of classic way, she was like, why are you doing this to me?

00:30:23.180 Like, she thought my war reporting was directed at her, like to make her upset. I'm like, Mom,

00:30:29.280 I'm not doing it to you. I'm just doing it. My father didn't take it that way. I think he was

00:30:33.440 kind of proud and worried. But also war had completely shaped his life and his family's

00:30:39.180 life in Europe. And I said, look, war is this, it's a part of human society. It's a part of history.

00:30:45.840 Like, I want to understand what it is, what it's like, how it works, how I'm going to react

00:30:49.380 in that environment. And I didn't find all of that out in Bosnia, but it was the beginning of

00:30:54.460 a process. Tell me more about Afghanistan. What was that like? And did you view,

00:31:00.000 maybe give people a bit of a reminder about who the Taliban were at the time, what the Northern

00:31:03.980 Alliance was, where the Mujahideen, what they ultimately became, maybe give people a little

00:31:09.800 bit of the refresher about what happened when the Soviets pulled out. And what was it about 1990

00:31:13.760 when they pulled out? The Soviets pulled out in late 1989, after 10 years, their sort of proxy

00:31:20.360 government collapsed after a couple of years, and it sort of lapsed into civil war that was brought to

00:31:25.200 a stop by the Taliban takeover in 1996. The Taliban were a religiously inspired political movement that

00:31:34.620 was basically the brainchild of the ISI, the Pakistani Secret Service. It was their way of controlling

00:31:41.480 Afghanistan and giving Pakistan what they called a strategic depth in their fight with India.

00:31:48.560 So basically, if they controlled Afghanistan, they would always have a fallback position in case India 0.98

00:31:53.200 invaded them, which was a threat, which was a possibility, invaded them. They always had a fallback

00:31:58.400 position to fight from. But the Taliban were, I mean, we all know, right, they had Sharia law. It was

00:32:04.080 incredibly harsh. They were stoning adulterers and not letting women go out of the house without a male

00:32:09.480 escort and all kinds of ghastly policies that, frankly, we see in other allies like Saudi Arabia 0.98

00:32:15.420 and doesn't seem to bother anyone particularly. It's ghastly wherever it is, whether it's a US ally

00:32:20.380 or not, it's all despicable. And I eventually wound up in 2000 with the last quadrant of the country that

00:32:27.900 had not been taken over by the Taliban was being defended by Ahmad Shah Massoud, a legendary guerrilla

00:32:33.120 fighter against the Soviets. And he had organized the Tajiks. He was ethnic Tajik. He'd organized the

00:32:40.200 Tajik and some other allied demographics to hold off the Taliban in this one quadrant of Afghanistan

00:32:47.280 in the northeast. So I was with Massoud in the fall of 2000 as he fought the Taliban. And this was like,

00:32:54.580 this was big stuff. I mean, these were tank battles. These were massed infantry assaults into,

00:32:58.640 you know, entrenched positions on ridgetops. You know, it was like very, very intense war

00:33:03.340 and extremely traumatic to me, at least. I came back very affected by it psychologically and not

00:33:09.920 even knowing I had PTSD because that term was not being used yet. I just thought I was kind of going

00:33:15.040 crazy. But I got back to New York after those two months and I was pretty nuts. I couldn't take the

00:33:20.280 subway. I couldn't be in a small crowded space. I freaked out in a ski gondola. I mean, I just had

00:33:25.680 reactions to things I never associated with the combat, but it was clearly a byproduct of what I

00:33:31.700 experienced. I got very angry. I had a short fuse. I cried a lot. You know, all the classic

00:33:37.440 symptoms. I just didn't recognize them. But at any rate, Massoud was killed two days before 9-11.

00:33:42.800 Which is, I mean, the details of his death are, it's just hard to believe he kind of fell for that

00:33:47.960 trick. Were you surprised? It just seems like such a ploy that was so transparent in a way, but

00:33:56.120 maybe that's only true in hindsight, I guess. Yeah. I mean, he relied on other people to keep

00:34:00.760 him safe and people can get paid off and whatever. I mean, you know, I don't know the details of that,

00:34:06.800 but yes, it was a movie camera filled with explosives and there were two Al-Qaeda suicide

00:34:11.200 bombers that were posing as journalists and they asked to interview him and they blew themselves up. 0.97

00:34:17.040 One actually survived the blast and tried to run away and he was gunned down. There was another

00:34:21.620 young man who was a translator who was in the room, Fahim Dashti, very, very brave young man who

00:34:27.360 worked in a film office that Massoud set up to document his efforts against the Taliban and against

00:34:34.120 Al-Qaeda and, as my father would have put it, against fascism. And the Taliban caught him last week

00:34:42.780 in the Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul and executed him for his work with Massoud. There were four men

00:34:50.140 in that office. 20 years later. 20 years later, there were four men in that film office working

00:34:55.680 for Massoud, documenting the war against the Taliban. And they caught Fahim Dashti and executed

00:35:01.280 him just a week ago. Tragic, very, very brave, very, very brave man. So at any rate, after Massoud was

00:35:08.020 killed, two days later, 9-11 happened, clearly part of the same strategic thinking by Al-Qaeda.

00:35:13.780 And as soon as I could, I rushed back to Afghanistan through Dushanbe in Tajikistan and joined the 0.99

00:35:18.800 commanders I'd been with the year before. And I was sleeping in my clothes on a front line for a month

00:35:25.120 straight until the American bombers had done their work. And then the Northern Alliance, I mean, I never

00:35:31.420 saw an American soldier. There were a few SF guys, special forces guys out there, but it was all

00:35:35.640 Northern Alliance foot soldiers. They broke through the Taliban front lines on November 13th,

00:35:40.540 I think it was, 2001. And we followed them in the back of a pickup truck. We walked into Kabul the

00:35:46.300 following morning past a pile of dead bodies and walked into Kabul. And the jubilation by the

00:35:52.180 populace that had been liberated from the Taliban was indescribable. When people found out I was

00:35:57.160 American, they would come up and hug me for what our country did to liberate them from the Taliban.

00:36:02.220 An extraordinary moment for me as a person. But we were so filthy. We smelled so bad after our

00:36:10.460 month sleeping in the front lines that we tried to get a taxi. You know, there's taxis and whatever

00:36:15.720 in Kabul, like the, you know, and we tried to get a taxi and the driver would not take us. He said,

00:36:21.140 you guys smell too bad, too awful for my taxi. You're going to have to, I think we walked across

00:36:26.200 Kabul and found a place like a hotel where we could stay in the sort of chaotic first moments

00:36:30.920 of liberation. I want to go back a little bit to kind of the precursor or, or really what caused

00:36:36.800 this first bout of PTSD. Cause again, I'm still kind of, I've seen your documentaries. So I kind

00:36:44.540 of have a sense of what this is like, but I'm assuming there are some people listening to this

00:36:47.860 who haven't, but when you're reporting in a war, it's, it's very different than if say

00:36:55.560 you're a wall street reporter and your job is to cover this sector, this, this banking sector,

00:37:03.260 or you're covering this beat on sports. Like there's a distance between you and your subjects

00:37:10.100 in most other forms of reporting that I think can't really exist in the war. If for no other

00:37:16.100 reason, then you were literally physically with your subjects. So let's just put the danger aside

00:37:21.920 for a moment. The fact that you're embedded with your subject matter. Am I missing an example?

00:37:27.860 Is there another example of where that's also common in journalism?

00:37:32.060 Well, let me, let me just say that you, you can have an emotional connection to anybody.

00:37:36.220 Yeah. Yeah. I'm saying this is physical though, right? Like you're, you're cohabitated with,

00:37:40.820 you're dependent on, let's even be more specific. Presumably are, they're helping you,

00:37:46.260 they're keeping you safe, right?

00:37:47.440 Well, there's two issues. One is emotional connection, which you can have with anybody,

00:37:52.500 frontline nurses or cops or sanitation workers or teachers or whatever. You can emotionally connect

00:37:58.960 to people and be affected by their emotional reality because you're starting to share it and

00:38:03.280 invest in them and become empathic to them, sensitized to their issues. And it's a very powerful

00:38:08.540 experience. In addition, in a war, if you're anywhere near the frontline, you're exposed to risk.

00:38:16.460 And you're exposed to, not that you aren't in other places, but you're exposed to human suffering and

00:38:24.480 human suffering is incredibly traumatic to behold, particularly if you yourself feel removed from

00:38:30.620 it. So one of the most, one of the hardest things that ever happened to me psychologically was I was

00:38:38.320 in Liberia during the civil war and a mortar round landed in a crowded field of refugees who had fled

00:38:45.280 the fighting and crammed into Monrovia. And, you know, I was, I was sort of in hiding. The government

00:38:51.340 thought I was a spy. The Liberian government thought, accused me of being a spy and I was sort of in

00:38:55.960 hiding. So I was having my own terrifying thing go on because I thought they might torture or kill me

00:39:01.900 if they caught me. So I was having my own issues. But in addition, this field full of people, men,

00:39:08.500 women, children, you know, mortar landed right in the middle of them and killed 27 people, a lot of

00:39:16.920 them children. And I was out when the mortar hit, I was out. I mean, I hit the ground. I was very close,

00:39:21.500 very, very close. And I hit the ground, right? I mean, we're, it was a bad situation. And sometime

00:39:27.320 later, they piled the bodies up in front of the U.S. embassy as a protest that America was not

00:39:31.880 invading. They wanted America to invade Liberia and stop the war, right? That was what the populists

00:39:37.380 wanted. That's what the civilians wanted. And they piled these bodies up in front of the embassy.

00:39:43.020 And I had to walk past, I walked past them on my way into the embassy to, because I was trying to get

00:39:47.640 evacuated because I was in so much danger. And I stopped and my mind just went blank. And there was

00:39:55.440 children, there was a, you know, I mean, it's hard even now for me to talk about it. And it was almost

00:39:59.120 20 years ago. I went into shock. I didn't know what to do. And I started counting them. And I thought,

00:40:06.640 someone needs to know what this number is. It was 27. So later, the trauma to me was that I'd had no

00:40:15.680 emotional reaction to such a horror. I mean, I was completely in shock. And I had no, it was a

00:40:21.040 completely abstract thing. I had to, it was a psychological defense. And that psychological

00:40:26.460 defense finally broke down a week or two later when I finally got out to Paris and got to safety.

00:40:31.680 And I was sitting in a cafe waiting for my girlfriend who was joining me in Paris. I had

00:40:36.840 a couple of days to kill. I was sitting in a cafe, smoking a cigarette. And I saw some, two men carrying

00:40:43.720 a mattress across the street and it sort of sagged in exactly the same way that a body does.

00:40:48.180 And I just went into a full blown panic attack because I knew I was looking at a mattress.

00:40:53.420 The rest of my mind reacted to body, dead body. I'm in a war zone. I completely panicked.

00:40:59.180 And, you know, I still have trouble talking about that without crying. I mean, I still have to even

00:41:05.020 now sort of choke back the sort of emotions. And that was almost 20 years ago. So human suffering,

00:41:10.880 and that was what happened when I came back from Afghanistan. I saw an enormous amount of human

00:41:14.720 suffering and of a particularly bloody, gruesome, visually bloody and gruesome sort. And I came

00:41:21.960 back altered. And I also, you know, we got shelled very, very badly by the Taliban. You know, there was

00:41:26.880 nothing we can do about it. We just basically got spanked by Katyusha rockets for an hour. I mean,

00:41:31.460 it killed our horse, our pack horse got killed because the horse couldn't get down like we were.

00:41:35.960 We survived that. But, you know, all of that was enormously traumatizing. And,

00:41:40.180 and now the dangerous stuff that I've been through is easy to process. It's no problem.

00:41:45.220 It's the suffering. It's the dismemberment that you see, particularly with children,

00:41:49.540 that you see that you never goes away. And I still have to be careful talking about it because I will

00:41:54.460 get choked up. And then that's a process that I can't stop once it starts.

00:41:58.480 Did you ever read the book? I think it's called One Bullet Away by Nate Fick, Nathan Fick.

00:42:03.720 No, I've heard of it. I haven't read it.

00:42:05.060 Yeah, it's a great book. He was a Marine and he wrote about his tours in, I believe it was mostly

00:42:10.940 Iraq. I can't recall if he was also in Afghanistan. But one of the things that I remember being very

00:42:16.740 keen to as kind of a, a subtext of this was we focus a lot on mortality in combat, the number of

00:42:25.960 people who have died, but there are lots of people who don't die who are forever scarred. And I mean,

00:42:32.660 physically let's emotional is that's, we have a lot of attention being paid to that, fortunately,

00:42:37.760 but, you know, I thought back to my experiences in surgical training, which was at a really,

00:42:44.260 really busy trauma center in Baltimore, arguably one of the most violent cities in the United States.

00:42:49.800 And lots of patients died. Sometimes they would arrive dead. When the paramedics got to them,

00:42:56.400 they were alive. By the time we got to the hospital, they were dead. Others would arrive alive,

00:42:59.920 but never made it out of the trauma bay, or they would die in the operating room,

00:43:03.520 or they would die a few days later as a complication of too much blood loss or sepsis or something like

00:43:08.660 that. But there were a lot of people who didn't die, who did leave the hospital, but their lives

00:43:15.540 would never be the same again, right? They trans pelvic gunshot wound, which is normally fatal,

00:43:20.660 by the way, a trans pelvic gunshot wound is almost a universally fatal injury because of

00:43:24.680 the vasculature in there and how difficult it is to get that bleeding under control.

00:43:31.580 So sometimes the best victory you can have in that type of a gunshot wound is to sacrifice a limb.

00:43:36.840 You'll have to ligate the femoral artery and vein, which means you'll lose that leg,

00:43:41.400 but you'll save the life. And you think, well, that person's not the same.

00:43:45.360 And I just remember reading Nate's book and thinking how many of these Marines lived,

00:43:52.200 but we kind of forget their story of how injured they are going forward. It's almost like that's

00:43:59.500 what you're talking about, right? It's like, it's that suffering in these other folks who then live

00:44:05.080 and they are to themselves and others, a reminder of this trauma. And again, that's just the physical

00:44:11.700 side of it. The psychological piece, again, I could be potentially worse. I'm not sure.

00:44:17.440 There's a very moving command at some military events with older veterans. And the command is

00:44:25.580 to stand for the flag or whatever it may be. And the command is stand as you are able.

00:44:31.620 Acknowledging that some people would like to be able to stand and can't and shouldn't feel ashamed

00:44:37.160 of their inability to stand. Stand as you are able. Very, very dignified, moving acknowledgement

00:44:43.800 of the cost of war. Between Bosnia and when you're trying to get evacuated from the American embassy

00:44:52.360 is probably a dozen years. Were you during that period of time aware of what was PTSD in you? Or were

00:44:59.920 you still sitting there in that cafe in Paris, unclear as to why you were having this reaction?

00:45:04.500 Oh God, I had no idea why I was having that reaction. It was exactly 10 years, 93 in Bosnia,

00:45:09.720 2003 Liberia. I'd been in a bunch of wars in between, you know, in between those, but no,

00:45:16.680 I had no idea. You know, I spent 15 minutes thinking I was going to be executed by rebels

00:45:20.180 in Sierra Leone. I mean, some bad things happened and they always had an effect on me. And I always

00:45:26.160 just thought, oh, I'm just losing it. What's wrong with me? You know, and I, the nation was not talking

00:45:30.840 about PTSD and I didn't know anything about it. And, you know, some of the reactions,

00:45:35.520 I mean, there were no ski gondolas in Afghanistan. So why would I relate panicking in a ski gondola

00:45:40.560 to combat in Afghanistan? I wouldn't, I just thought I was going nuts. And, you know, finally I was at a,

00:45:46.140 I was a party and the wife of a older friend of mine, older woman was a psychiatrist. She was asking

00:45:52.840 me sort of out of curiosity, you know, is this right after we'd invaded Iraq? So around 03,

00:45:57.940 around the same time. And she said, have you, all this combat you've covered,

00:46:00.920 you ever had any psychological consequences? And I was like, no, I don't think so. No,

00:46:06.560 not really. I'm good. And then I was like, I mean, I did start to have panic attacks once in a while,

00:46:11.580 but I don't think it had anything to do with combat. I mean, they're just, you know, I don't know.

00:46:14.960 And she was like, you know, you'll find that that probably was connected to combat. And

00:46:21.960 there's something called PTSD. Keep in mind, this is early on in the Iraq war. When we're having this

00:46:29.400 conversation, she said, I think America is going to be hearing a lot more about PTSD in the coming

00:46:37.220 years, but you might want to look into it because actually I think you're having, you're suffering

00:46:42.580 more consequences than you realize. She was absolutely right.

00:46:45.960 How did you receive that at that point in time?

00:46:49.400 Oh, I was enormously relieved. I was like, oh, this is a normal reaction. Like the kind of freak

00:46:54.380 show I can produce in a subway platform in New York city. Isn't just my unique and pathetic weakness 0.99

00:47:00.100 and neurosis. This is actually a normal, healthy reaction to trauma. What would happen is that the 0.99

00:47:06.000 traumatic reaction would dissipate over time. You know, it would be the strongest when I got back

00:47:10.660 or within a week or two of getting back and then it would dissipate and dissipate. And after, you

00:47:15.920 know, it's like, you know, it's like a year later, I don't care how heartbroken you are that your

00:47:20.740 girlfriend broke up with you a year later, you know, you're pretty good. You know what I mean?

00:47:25.260 I mean, you can sort of think about it and have some thoughts, but, but, you know, basically it's not

00:47:28.880 invading your daily experience like it might a week later. And likewise with PTSD, I think the

00:47:35.100 statistic is about 80% of people a year out from the trauma, 80% have fully recovered and regained a

00:47:42.320 normal functioning, healthy life, which doesn't mean they're not changed by it. You can be changed

00:47:48.560 by something, but not in a psychologically dysfunctional state and grieve your mom's death

00:47:55.900 or your divorce or whatever it may be. You can always, you know, you may always grieve that. That

00:48:00.160 doesn't mean that you have a psychological issue. What was the reaction of others? It sounds like

00:48:05.660 at least you had one girlfriend during this period of time who was probably witness to some of this,

00:48:10.220 or were you somehow able to sort of shield these anxiety attacks and panic attacks from others?

00:48:15.940 The panic was going on internally. I mean, I was literally white knuckling it and pouring sweat

00:48:20.560 and I would conceal it as much as I possibly could. And I think I was successful

00:48:25.520 from anyone around me. I mean, I never told anybody about it until later, but not, you know,

00:48:31.920 not immediately afterwards or now. I, I, I wasn't something I wanted to share.

00:48:37.100 So the war in Iraq starts in March of 03. When are you next back in combat?

00:48:43.320 I refused to cover Iraq. I thought it was a mistake and a travesty and that it had nothing to do with 9-11 1.00

00:48:49.540 and I didn't want to get killed covering a mistake. And I didn't think I could be unbiased in my

00:48:54.380 reporting. So I didn't cover Iraq. But by 2005, the war in Afghanistan, which was an easy win 1.00

00:49:01.260 initially because it was so underfunded, undermanned, no one was focusing on it because

00:49:06.760 of Iraq. It didn't go that well. And what was an easy win. And we had the gratitude of the strong

00:49:13.640 majority of Afghan citizens. We did not follow through. And so by 05, the Taliban insurgency

00:49:18.980 has started to like, tires have started to grip. Now they're not just spinning their wheels. They're

00:49:24.140 actually starting to get some traction. And the Americans are starting to really take some

00:49:29.500 casualties. And I think they were losing a soldier every three days in 2005. And they were starting

00:49:35.020 to get into some pretty good firefights. I was like, damn, that's, who saw that coming? Right? 0.99

00:49:40.040 It was so, it looked like it was such a successful, 01 looked so successful. So I thought, I want to

00:49:46.120 know what it's like to be an American soldier in combat. You know, having grown up in Vietnam,

00:49:50.700 it never occurred to me that I would, that that would interest me journalistically. And it never

00:49:54.800 occurred to me that the US military would allow unfettered access of the sort that I might find

00:50:00.080 interesting. I mean, I don't want to just go to press conferences and have some public relations

00:50:04.560 major tell me, give me some spin about what's going on. Like that doesn't interest me. Right?

00:50:08.880 So, but it really looked like George Bush should have made good on his promise to provide full

00:50:13.920 access to American journalists or journalists of any country on the front lines with American

00:50:18.840 soldiers. And I was like, all right, I'm in. I want to see how this, what this is like.

00:50:22.900 So I was in Zabul province with the second of the 503rd, the same unit I profiled later in

00:50:27.960 Afghanistan, battle company. Minutes after stepping out of a Black Hawk, getting delivered to a unit that

00:50:34.080 was in the field doing a combat operation, minutes after stepping out of the Black Hawk, I was in a

00:50:38.220 pretty good firefight. I mean, RPG almost hit me. You know, I mean, boom, all of a sudden I'm in

00:50:42.200 combat with American soldiers. And I just couldn't believe the intensity of the fight and the quality

00:50:50.220 of the soldiers. Like these guys, it was all men in this unit. I mean, these guys were working so hard,

00:50:55.920 right? Physically. I mean, the mortar teams were carrying 160 pounds, 160, 160 pounds on, you know,

00:51:03.640 overnight combat patrol movements, dusk to dawn, basically carrying their own body weight on their

00:51:09.620 back. I mean, unbelievable. They were working way harder at this to rebuild this other country

00:51:15.680 than anyone I knew ever worked in college. Any of my buddies in college, they never worked as hard at

00:51:21.940 anything, you know? And I was just, I really liked those guys. And I was like, I want more of this.

00:51:27.880 Like if this unit goes back to Afghanistan in two years, it was a two-year cycle of deployments.

00:51:32.740 If they go back to Afghanistan, man, I'm going to follow them for a year and see what it's, 1.00

00:51:37.200 just document one platoon in one place for one year and document that with a video camera and

00:51:42.920 by writing a book. My book became War, the book War, and the documentary that I made with my

00:51:50.080 friend and brother, Tim Hetherington, was called Verstruppo.

00:51:53.500 What did you learn about those guys in terms of their motivation? How many of them saw this as

00:52:00.320 a duty, a direct response to what happened on 9-11 in the way that I suspect many young men saw

00:52:08.180 what happened on December 7th, 1941 as their moral obligation to go and do something about it versus

00:52:16.340 how many of them would you infer were looking for a sense of purpose as the primary objective for

00:52:26.100 which this became a vehicle to do it? I don't know if my question makes sense, right? One is like

00:52:30.360 purely in response to 9-11, I hate that I have to do this. I don't want to do this,

00:52:34.720 but I see no higher calling versus I need to find the sense of purpose.

00:52:39.720 I mean, none of the guys I knew joined the military despite hating it. I mean,

00:52:43.820 they may have may well have joined up out of a sense of patriotic duty after 9-11. Absolutely.

00:52:50.480 But I think a lot of those people were from families that had a military history that probably

00:52:56.620 had male relatives that served in one war or another. I mean, prior generations. A lot of them

00:53:02.260 honestly were young men that were just wanted to test themselves in combat. You know, I mean,

00:53:06.620 you can join the military and not be in a combat unit, right? The combat units do not want people

00:53:12.880 that don't want to be in combat units. There are enough young men that are quite psyched

00:53:16.980 to experience combat, in fact, very driven to experience combat, worried that the war is going

00:53:22.960 to be over before they get to experience combat. There's enough young men like that, that you can

00:53:29.180 fill those frontline combat units with entirely enthusiastic soldiers. And, you know, if anything,

00:53:35.580 it's sometimes hard to get those guys to give it up, to give combat up. And I think that was

00:53:40.640 probably true in Vietnam as well. I've read letters from American Civil War soldiers and

00:53:45.340 soldiers in World War I talking about how the war was the some of the best days of their lives.

00:53:50.820 Veterans of these World War I and the Civil War, I mean, bloodbaths, right? You know, letters

00:53:55.240 saying those those were some of the most meaningful days of our lives and we miss it. Right. So

00:54:00.400 and, you know, the casualty rates were horrific. You know, now the casualty rates are a lot less. And

00:54:05.820 a lot of the guys that I knew out there really, really missed that experience of combat. And I

00:54:11.680 just read in in the Washington Post that the Taliban fighters now sort of have nothing to do

00:54:18.780 because they won the war and that they are openly saying that they missed the fighting. They're already

00:54:24.240 nostalgic for the war that they fought. So you get people like that. You get men like that.

00:54:30.460 But they're out there. Maybe they joined after 9-11 because of patriotism or a history of family

00:54:37.660 history of service. But I would say the majority of them were like pretty psyched to see themselves as,

00:54:45.100 yeah, man, I was in combat. I saw the real thing and I did OK. You know, like a lot of them were like

00:54:49.980 that. And how much of that do you think is the desire to prove themselves in the theater of combat

00:54:55.460 versus the sense of connection that must come from that? I have a number of friends who were

00:55:01.900 former special forces guys. And certainly one of the things they talk about is the trust you must

00:55:08.180 have in your other soldiers. It's sort of one thing if you're working in an office building and you say

00:55:14.200 to your colleague, hey, would you mind tracking this thing down for me? Because I, you know, I need that

00:55:19.300 piece of information and you're closer to it. Can you grab it for me? And you've got to trust that

00:55:23.880 they're going to pull it together for you by next day when you need it. It's quite another thing when

00:55:27.760 you're in combat and you ask someone to do something where, you know, literally somebody's

00:55:32.480 life is on the line, which is not to say that everything you ask is of that gravity, but enough

00:55:37.260 things are. I've never experienced that, right? Like I've never had to ask somebody to do something

00:55:43.340 where my life depends on it. And nor have I been asked to do something where someone else's life

00:55:49.440 depends on it. Outside of medicine, I guess I'll carve out trying to help a person who's been

00:55:53.240 injured. So I have to imagine that that's, that sense of purpose, that sense of fulfillment that

00:55:59.800 comes from both leaning on somebody and being leaned on is exceptional. Do you think that ultimately that

00:56:05.960 is the thing that hooks people? Yeah. I mean, I think humans are wired to respond positively to

00:56:14.200 behaviors and traits that were adaptive in our evolutionary past. And clearly if people that go

00:56:20.900 through danger together are loyal to each other in facing that danger and consider that that group

00:56:28.340 that's faced and survived danger together has a special, unique bond and that thing makes us,

00:56:33.820 us, right? That describes human groups since the dawn of time, right? Humans lived in groups of 30,

00:56:41.360 40, 40, 50 people typically in the, you know, 90% of our evolutionary past. And that loyalty to others

00:56:49.800 who are loyal to you in the face of an, you know, an attacking lion or another human group that's coming 1.00

00:56:56.220 to kill you. Like that reaction is completely, that is very, very adaptive and adaptive things feel good.

00:57:03.540 The things that keep us alive and allow us to procreate and survive, they feel good. And that's why we do them.

00:57:10.620 And that's how evolution works. And so that group bond, that mutual group bonds is completely

00:57:15.900 intoxicating. And you have not experienced that, but you are hardwired to be receptive to it,

00:57:23.600 even at the sort of neurochemical level of dopamine and oxytocin, like you are hardwired

00:57:28.860 to be receptive to it and to grow, to want it and to need it. And it would take you some hours

00:57:34.960 in a dangerous situation with some other people to pretty quickly start thinking, these are my

00:57:40.300 people. You know, we survived the plane crash together. I'm alive because of them. And I

00:57:44.800 pulled this other guy out of the water and it's going to be days till we're rescued. And this is

00:57:49.540 now our tribe and you are, you know, it happens in prisons and it happens in all kinds of situations.

00:57:54.280 Like that's what humans are. And it's an extraordinary thing. And other animals don't quite have it in the

00:58:00.700 same social way that humans do. One of the profound things about humans is that humans will be willing

00:58:08.280 to die for a same sex peer that they're not related to. And I'm not going to talk about women because 0.97

00:58:13.920 I'm not a woman. I haven't studied it. So I'll restrict my conversation to men. A man will die

00:58:19.240 for a same sex peer that he's not related to, not his cousin, not his brother, just another dude who

00:58:24.100 happens to be in the platoon. And that arrangement where they each, they might not even like each

00:58:30.080 other. I mean, as this one guy in the platoon I was with said to me in 07, 08, when I was in the

00:58:34.820 Corongal Valley, Brendan O'Byrne, who's still a good friend of mine, he was like, you know,

00:58:38.600 it's funny. There are guys in the platoon who straight up hate each other, but we would all die

00:58:42.900 for each other. Now, if you're in a group that has that arrangement with each other, it's not even

00:58:47.080 dependent on feelings. That's a very secure place to be as a young man, as a human being.

00:58:52.840 And there are a lot of groups that function that way. I know some guys in the FDNY, the fire

00:58:58.740 department in New York City, completely functions like that. The willingness to overlook your own

00:59:03.560 safety and your own concerns for the sake of the group is the people that are in that position.

00:59:10.060 Strangely, they don't feel like it's an onerous responsibility or obligation. They feel that it's

00:59:16.480 a privilege and that they're honored to be in that role, that they're special. They are special.

00:59:21.360 And I interviewed a fireman in the late 90s, a sort of storied fireman named Pat Brown. I mean,

00:59:27.600 anyone in the FDNY would know that name. And, you know, he went into the World Trade Centers on 9-11

00:59:33.020 and his last call was from an emergency phone at the 30th floor of one of the trade centers

00:59:40.700 saying, it's Pat Brown, we're on the 30th floor and we're going to keep moving. His casualties coming

00:59:45.780 down and we're going to keep moving upwards. And he led his men upwards until the buildings collapsed.

00:59:52.760 And the ability for humans to do that for each other is a profound thing. And it's what makes

00:59:57.940 human society possible. So there's two things that I want to understand a bit better, Sebastian.

01:00:03.120 Actually, several. Let's go back to the beginning. 10,000 years ago, you and I might have been in a

01:00:08.440 group of 30 or 40, as you said. It's really, I understand very clearly why the 30 or 40 of us

01:00:15.960 would have been inseparable and even put aside personal differences because we actually needed

01:00:21.040 each other to survive. Like there's no one human that could have survived 10,000 years ago in

01:00:25.980 isolation. You couldn't have got enough food, provided enough shelter, and provided enough security

01:00:33.680 from animals and other humans. So we take that off the table and we realize there's some minimum

01:00:39.180 effective group size that was necessary just to survive. And anybody who tried to deviate from that

01:00:46.120 wasn't going to. Now let's use the example, which is, well, that can be scaled somewhat and you look at

01:00:53.620 firefighters. So I'm very close to a firefighter who was a fire chief in San Jose, was devastated in a way

01:01:02.200 that I think many people wouldn't have been during 9-11 because he understood very clearly

01:01:11.040 that his brothers died. That's the language he used. His brothers died on 9-11. And we were actually

01:01:17.920 talking about this recently because of the 20th anniversary. And he said he has no doubt that had

01:01:24.900 he been there that day, he would have died. Like that's not something that he thinks, oh, I wonder what

01:01:30.620 I would have done. No, he knows what he would have done. So that's a very interesting bond to me

01:01:36.340 because it scales what we just talked about at the 30 to 40 people level. His tribe is much bigger than

01:01:44.440 30 to 40 people. Now you go one step further, which is the story of Pat Brown, which is his tribe now

01:01:53.320 includes a whole bunch of people who were not firefighters. He wasn't going from the 30th floor up

01:01:58.640 to get firefighters out. He was going to get civilians out. And you can say, well, okay, that was

01:02:04.760 his job. But I mean, that kind of strikes me as a bullshit answer, right? I mean, I don't think he was 0.99

01:02:10.420 just doing it because it was his job. He was doing it because he felt some higher duty, some higher

01:02:14.640 calling. So now his tribe was even larger than just all the firefighters. It was all of the people

01:02:21.400 that were in danger. All of this suggests that this connectedness can scale beyond a group of 30 to 40

01:02:29.500 people. Do you agree with that? I do to an extent. I mean, I would say that your fireman friends,

01:02:35.480 we were all, Americans were virtually all morally, emotionally wounded on 9-11. And these were American

01:02:43.900 firefighters that died and you were talking to an American firefighter. It's possible that if an

01:02:49.280 equivalent story happened in Germany or Zimbabwe or Pakistan, he might not quite have grieved his

01:02:56.900 Pakistani brothers who had died in a building collapse in Lahore. So you're saying it might have

01:03:01.860 been more the American connection than the occupational connection? Yeah. I mean, yeah,

01:03:06.820 those are my brothers and they're my brothers partly because we share the same country and this country

01:03:11.300 was attacked. And there's layers, different layers of affiliation. And we definitely, humans have a

01:03:18.380 kind of symbolic capacity for symbolism where, okay, I may not know you, but you're wearing the

01:03:24.400 same insignia. You're wearing the same uniform. You're doing the same job I do. I can relate to

01:03:28.400 you. Like I got you. Yeah. We may not know each other. I may not love you like a brother, but I

01:03:32.920 respect you and I might risk my life for you. I mean, if you're going to become a firefighter,

01:03:39.320 one of the sources of pride is that you take care of a vulnerable population. That's what you are.

01:03:45.320 You're a sheepdog. So Pat Brown went up those stairs with his brothers because that's what 1.00

01:03:51.780 they do. And they were doing it together. And that's the way it wasn't even, didn't even come

01:03:55.520 up for review. Oh, should we do this or not? Like if you're going to review that, you're not going

01:03:58.980 to be in the fire department. Like just get out now. They all know that. I'm sure there are people

01:04:03.080 that actually like, Oh, you know what? I just found out I'm not a firefighter today. I'm actually not

01:04:08.220 a firefighter. I'm going to get out of here. And the fire department doesn't want you in there 0.99

01:04:11.200 either. I mean, they didn't want anyone in second platoon battle company in the Korongal Valley,

01:04:17.660 you know, at some level didn't want to be there. No, we don't need you. You don't need us. Like

01:04:21.940 we'll put you somewhere else where you're not a danger to yourself and others. So you got to

01:04:26.120 understand that sacrifice is part of a way that Pat Brown probably saw himself is the meaning of

01:04:32.220 his existence to some degree came from his role as a fireman. So of course he went up the damn stairs. 1.00

01:04:36.960 That's what a fireman does. But I understand where your question is leading is like, is it possible 0.99

01:04:42.400 to feel affiliated with 300 million people? Like, can we feel affiliated as a nation even if we don't

01:04:50.380 know each other? And yes, because humans are capable of symbolic thought and we're capable of

01:04:56.580 understanding intellectually, Oh, we're all Americans. Like you and I might be different races. You may,

01:05:02.480 maybe you don't even speak English, you know, maybe whatever you could have enormous differences

01:05:05.980 between individuals, but there's some concept when my father came to these shores and arrived in

01:05:10.760 Baltimore off of Portuguese freighter transporting Cork from Lisbon called the São Tomé. And they 0.64

01:05:16.700 landed in Baltimore and he stepped ashore and the immigration official welcomed him. He looked around

01:05:25.840 him and he knew he was in a country like no other. It was filled with every race and language of the

01:05:30.840 world. And he quickly discovered that. And that's human's ability for abstract thought. Of course,

01:05:37.820 it's not that hard to cleave that either as we've been seeing in the last few years, but yeah,

01:05:42.540 it's an extraordinary thing. Where do you think that was at its peak in American history? The sense of

01:05:48.840 unity that is, that sense of when were we most a tribe in the abstract sense and at the largest

01:05:55.440 scale? World War II? After 9-11, for sure. I think World War II, you know, there was curfew in New York

01:06:04.260 that was enforced. There was a huge, you know, can and metal collecting operation because the armed

01:06:10.400 forces needed metal, aluminum. I can't remember what, but you know, there was a whole drive to collect

01:06:14.500 cans. I mean, there was a huge amount of sort of national undertaking that everyone understood.

01:06:19.620 We're in this together, you know, buy war bonds, all that stuff. The Depression was another time. I knew

01:06:26.200 a man, he's passed away, but he, who was young during the, during the Dust Bowl and the Great

01:06:31.660 Depression out in Missouri. He said that the schoolhouses would be left open at night. You know, these are

01:06:37.320 one-room schoolhouses, right? This is the 1930s in the American West and Midwest, that the schoolhouses

01:06:42.800 would be left open, unlocked because migrant families, you know, people were on the move with 1.00

01:06:47.700 children and, you know, they were poor. They were destitute. They were desperate. They were looking

01:06:51.120 for work in the Dust Bowl and they would be, you know, driving horse and cart across the lands

01:06:55.420 and they needed places to sleep with their children. And so every town left their schoolhouse open so

01:07:00.480 that these migrants could enter with their children and sleep in a safe, protected place. And they would

01:07:06.100 leave before class started in the morning and every school had a well, so they would have water for the

01:07:10.340 water for the horses. You know, and that's the kind of communalism that typifies a nation that's

01:07:16.040 enduring a great hardship and the, and the sort of looking out for one's neighbors and looking out

01:07:20.700 for people that are less well off than you are. You know, the Blitz in London had plenty of that as

01:07:25.540 well. People react very, very, very, very, very, in very healthy ways to that kind of stress. I, I,

01:07:30.800 I researched a, a, in my book Tribe, I researched an earthquake in Italy in 1916, if I remember

01:07:38.300 correctly, in Avedzano, the area of Avedzano. And one guy, they, you know, they had a 90 something

01:07:43.860 percent mortality rate. I mean, basically it was like a nuke, a nuclear bomb had gone off in that

01:07:49.240 area and 90 something percent of the people died within minutes. And one of the survivors wrote that

01:07:56.960 the people who were left, there was a complete egalitarianism among the survivors. It didn't matter

01:08:03.280 if you were a criminal or you were rich or you were poor or an outcast or did not matter what you

01:08:08.440 were, the people that were still alive regarded each other as equals because there was a matter

01:08:13.880 of survival. And this guy said, as soon as outside relief got there, that that egalitarianism

01:08:20.560 ended. And he said that the, the crisis, that the earthquake had given them, briefly given them

01:08:26.520 what the law promises, but cannot in fact deliver, which is the equality of all people.

01:08:32.060 Well, if you experience that, you do not want to give it up. And that's one of the things that

01:08:36.460 soldiers experience in combat with each other in a platoon.

01:08:39.640 When we think back to our ancestors, again, even just 10,000 years ago,

01:08:45.100 did they live in that state because it was effectively a crisis 24 seven?

01:08:50.820 Well, it wasn't necessarily a crisis, but there were subsistence level

01:08:53.600 stone age people that needed everyone to contribute to survive. And I'm sure the crises were regular enough

01:09:00.520 that it keep them sort of bonded together. But look, if you're a hunter gatherer society,

01:09:04.620 there's no getting off the treadmill. You've got to keep that system going pretty much continually.

01:09:09.940 Now they've done studies of even in very harsh environments, like the Kalahari desert,

01:09:14.720 the native people of that area, the Kung, for example, that they worked an average of four hours

01:09:21.620 a day to survive in one of the harshest environments of the world.

01:09:24.900 The average person in industrial society, post-industrial society works, you know, an eight

01:09:32.260 hour day, a 40 hour work week. So it's interesting as we've gotten more advanced, the time requirements

01:09:37.880 for survival have increased, not decreased. But at that level, it does not require a full-time

01:09:44.780 effort to survive, but it does require a full-time cooperation, collaboration within the groups.

01:09:50.500 Do we have any sense of how hunter gatherers treated death or how they responded to loss?

01:10:00.420 I mean, I'm just going from a very kind of general knowledge right now. I haven't made a study of it.

01:10:06.200 There was very little suicide and depression in hunter gatherer societies. Suicide was virtually

01:10:11.640 unheard of. So the deaths that happened were either violent as a result of warfare or dangerous

01:10:18.940 animals or infant losses from disease. But if you live through the initial high risk years,

01:10:26.040 a lot of people in those societies lived until into their seventies and eighties, a long lifespan

01:10:31.540 in Western terms, even by today's standards. And I think there's a general feeling that the person

01:10:39.040 had passed on to a realm in which inhabited by other dead people, other dead ancestors,

01:10:44.380 and that you'll be joining them soon enough. And that one of the jobs of the shamans,

01:10:50.980 or shamanism is a virtually universal human behavior in almost every human society.

01:10:56.980 One of the jobs of the shaman is to shuttle back and forth between that world and the world of the

01:11:01.440 living with important information about how it's going over there and what we need to do,

01:11:06.940 we as living people need to do to remain in a right and proper relationship with the dead.

01:11:11.940 Yeah. I mean, that's interesting, right? Because it suggests that

01:11:15.060 the impact of loss was so significant that we needed a way to explain it. And we needed a way to

01:11:21.060 give meaning to life, which was in part saying that even when you're gone, it still matters and you

01:11:27.080 mattered and you might be reincarnated depending on whatever the belief system was that emerged from

01:11:31.240 that. I was just recently on an elk hunt. And I mean, I love hunting, but it's never lost on me when

01:11:39.980 you kill an animal that that animal lived. You know, in the case of an elk, that animal was

01:11:45.020 alive for eight or nine years before you killed it. And again, I won't get into all the benefits of it

01:11:51.600 and why a certain number of animals you're benefiting the herd by removing a select number of them,

01:11:57.480 et cetera. But I remember when I shot my elk just last week, I remember thinking, so first of all,

01:12:05.140 as I watched him die, all of the other elk made a circle around him as he bedded down to die. Now

01:12:12.160 that blew my mind because I hadn't seen that before. A lot of times when the arrow hits the elk,

01:12:20.120 he makes noises. They freak out. Everybody scatters. But for whatever reason, on this occasion,

01:12:25.920 the arrow hit him, he wandered 40 yards. He bedded down, was making noises like he was dying and he

01:12:36.440 was surrounded by the other elk. And eventually they went away when he died. And you can't help but

01:12:42.800 sort of anthropomorphize that and sort of project your own thinking. Like, what were they thinking?

01:12:49.160 Like, this guy, he was the biggest of them and they just watched him die. Do they understand what

01:12:58.460 that means? And will they remember that? Will they remember that next week? Or will they, it's a silly

01:13:04.040 question because it can't be answered, but, or at least I don't think it can be answered. Maybe it

01:13:07.740 has been studied, but it certainly makes me wonder how other species experience loss.

01:13:17.200 Well, here, I mean, here's just a thought that is not a direct answer to that question, but it's,

01:13:23.060 I think it's an interesting avenue to go down. Humans have psychological mechanisms to protect

01:13:29.280 themselves from painful experiences, right? They go into shock physically if they're in physical pain.

01:13:34.880 In war, there's two different ways of processing the fact that you're killing other human beings.

01:13:41.480 At the end of the day, everyone knows that that's wrong and there's a moral burden that comes with it.

01:13:46.340 And one way to do it is to convince yourself that they're not fully human. You're not really

01:13:49.820 killing humans, right? It's the enemy. They're less than human. It doesn't matter, right? That's a

01:13:54.740 very common one. And it's easy to feel that way when they're killing your friends and you're filled

01:13:59.260 with rage and grief and you're like, okay, pick your insult, you cockroaches, you, you know, whatever, 0.97

01:14:04.340 you rats, you know, like they use, they resort to animals to refer to the enemy, to dehumanize them. 0.97

01:14:10.620 But the other thing you can do is to accord a kind of respect. Like you're a worthy foe. And the 0.85

01:14:16.980 Greeks did this with the Trojans. You're a worthy foe. Now we are going to wipe you out, make no 0.99

01:14:21.320 mistake about it, but you're a, you're a worthy enemy and we respect you. We respect how hard you 0.97

01:14:26.520 are fighting. You're brave. We're still going to kill you, but we have respect for you. That's another

01:14:31.120 way of psychologically distancing from the fact that you're killing people, right? And they're trying

01:14:36.420 to kill you. So there is a moral burden often in hunting because you're killing this animal and

01:14:41.960 sort of native, many native peoples around the world, they live off hunting, right? I mean, 1.00

01:14:48.020 we have to kill the bison and the leopard and the bear and the elephant and what have you in order to

01:14:53.340 survive. So make no mistake about it. We're going to keep doing that. But one way to protect yourself, 0.80

01:14:58.760 protect the hunter psychologically from the sort of moral questions around that, any moral pain around

01:15:04.420 that is to say sort of like, thank you. Like, thank you, elk. Thank you, bison for giving us

01:15:09.980 food to eat. We respect you. We honor you. And there's a whole sort of ritual process that

01:15:16.780 incorporates the death into a context of respect. So here's what I'm going to go, just go out on a

01:15:23.280 sort of crazy limb here. We all know that the miracle of modern society, and I don't mean that

01:15:28.940 ironically, it truly is a miracle. And we can talk about it later. I'm alive because some

01:15:34.340 nearly miraculous Western medicine intervened when I was dying and saved my life. So on many,

01:15:40.940 many levels, this society is a miracle. It's transcendent. We understand the cosmos. We

01:15:46.080 understand the human body. I mean, I could go on and on, and we can fly in airplanes and drive cars.

01:15:51.400 I mean, it's insane, right? How amazing it is. But we also know that it costs the planet a lot.

01:16:00.040 I mean, we are gouging mountains and cutting down forests and polluting the ocean and blah, blah, blah.

01:16:04.340 That's the cost of our amazing society. And what's interesting about that is virtually all humans

01:16:10.320 think that nature is beautiful, right? I mean, you can take the most hardcore, ultra right-wing,

01:16:17.780 like anti-climate change, anti-vaxxer, whatever. They know a tree is beautiful. And when you cut down

01:16:25.100 a tree, it's less beautiful. We all know that. Every child knows that. We all know that nature is

01:16:30.700 beautiful. And the world, the planet's a wondrous place. It's our home. It's our mother earth.

01:16:35.240 We all know that. And we are basically killing the elk, killing the buffalo in order to eat

01:16:42.240 without saying thank you. And I think it might change in some ways the whole conversation about

01:16:48.400 environmentalism. Even if we didn't do anything differently, even if we kept strip mining mountains

01:16:53.740 because we need to, because we might need to, I don't know. Even if we kept cutting down forests

01:16:57.960 because we need trees, we need paper, whatever. I mean, I'm not saying we should or shouldn't do

01:17:01.680 anything of that sort. But if we just added an acknowledgement of the harm and a sort of thank

01:17:08.520 you to the earth for providing our sustenance, if we just did that, it would reconcile this sort of

01:17:16.460 like cognitive dissonance of all of us knowing that we hurt something we love in order to exist.

01:17:22.760 And liberals hurt the planet just as much as conservatives, by the way. Like the sort of

01:17:27.500 liberal piety, oh, I drive a Prius, so I'm good. It's complete nonsense, right? We all need to

01:17:33.060 acknowledge it. And I'm just, I would just say like we might learn something from native peoples

01:17:37.600 about protecting ourselves emotionally and psychologically from the necessary harm that we do

01:17:43.500 by overtly stating and ritualizing that relationship with the earth. And so the next time they flat top a

01:17:51.100 mountain for coal, why not bring in a minister, a priest, a shaman, or all three to say thank you

01:17:58.340 to the mountain? You know, like it won't hurt. And it might actually do people, the community

01:18:02.440 and the coal miners and all of us that use electricity, it might actually do us a lot of

01:18:06.600 good. That's just my thought for the week. I think it's very powerful. And I think when it

01:18:12.020 comes to animals in particular, because look, it's a very controversial topic and you can't talk

01:18:16.680 about hunting without offending, you know, half the population. But, you know, my view has been,

01:18:22.160 if you choose to eat meat, it's a good idea for you to at least understand what it's like to take a life

01:18:27.280 of what you're eating and to remove the distance between you and the animal you're eating. And it

01:18:33.000 will change the way you eat. I mean, this will probably be the first year when I will subside

01:18:38.540 entirely on wild game that's been hunted, you know, ethically. And there's literally been a change

01:18:44.120 in my palate. Like I just don't like eating big steaks and things that frankly are a little forced.

01:18:51.980 There's really something to be said for this other thing. It's not for everybody. And I don't feel like

01:18:55.700 I should impose that on anybody. And that's just sort of my little two cents on it. But I did bring

01:19:00.800 my daughter on a hunt once two years ago and she was only 11 years old. And I remember thinking,

01:19:07.760 well, this could be very traumatic for her because it was a deer and that beautiful type of deer called

01:19:12.440 an axis deer. I think they're the most beautiful animals to look at. But when the, after the animal

01:19:17.860 died, fortunately it died very quickly. I wanted her to come up and kind of lay her hands on it while 0.98

01:19:22.380 it was still warm and understand like you're going to eat this tonight, but this thing gave us a gift.

01:19:28.680 And we actually did, we sort of went through this exercise you described where we thanked the deer

01:19:32.620 because it was going to feed us. And it fed about 40 people that night. And she still looks back at

01:19:38.560 that very fondly. That must've been a complete, absolutely core experience of our human ancestors

01:19:45.700 for, you know, as I said, most of, most of human evolution is that relationship of respect

01:19:52.040 with the animals that you fed yourself with. I feel like it's psychologically enormously healthy.

01:19:59.500 And one of the things this society is, one of the ways in which it's unhealthy is that it has

01:20:03.980 de-ritualized the vital processes that keep us alive, that keep us fed, that keep us sheltered.

01:20:11.120 It's de-ritualized them and allowed us to actually not acknowledge the harm that we do.

01:20:18.020 I mean, we all know in our heart, right? But, and then when you can articulate it, I mean,

01:20:22.780 the difference between hurting someone's feelings and hurting someone's feelings and saying,

01:20:26.880 I'm so sorry, you know, that I hurt your feelings. I kind of had to do it. We were not a good couple.

01:20:32.560 We had to break up, but I, I, you know, I'm still, I'm still hurting from the, the sorrow

01:20:37.520 that, that unavoidable decision that I carry, carry in me, you know, and I mean, you, there's a world

01:20:44.760 of difference between dumping someone and having a conversation like that. Right. And that's the

01:20:49.440 conversation we need to have with our planet, regardless of where you fall on the climate change

01:20:54.120 environmental spectrum. I, you could be a hardcore, like I'm driving a vehicle that

01:20:58.840 gets eight miles to the gallon and I don't care about conservation at all. You can be that person

01:21:04.920 too, and still acknowledge the harm and it would be very good for you. Yeah. I mean, that's a great

01:21:09.200 example of dialectical synthesis and holding these truths seemingly contradictory, but together. And I,

01:21:16.760 I agree completely with that. How old were you when you had your first child? I was 55.

01:21:21.820 How did that change your appetite or tolerance for risk? Because again, I, I've never taken what

01:21:30.680 you've said to be thrill seeking, right? I don't think anybody who's read your work would say,

01:21:36.340 this is a guy who's doing this because when he's not base jumping, he has to be doing that other

01:21:42.440 thing. But there's no way to deny that what you're doing was very risky. What was the change in your,

01:21:48.660 in your outlook to your own life and the risks that you took once you became a father?

01:21:54.160 Yeah. I mean, my life is not my own now in the sense that if something happened to me,

01:21:58.180 lifelong consequences would be born by my wife and my children. I have two little girls,

01:22:04.680 four and a half and one and a half who are the center of my center of my world. Right. And,

01:22:10.640 you know, I would die for them in an instant. And my main job right now is to not die,

01:22:14.720 right? Like just to keep myself alive. But I, you know, I stopped war reporting. I mean,

01:22:19.760 so right now I'm incredibly risk averse, right? I mean, I've looked both ways before I cross the

01:22:24.500 street. I don't cross against the light. Most of the time I drive the speed, you know, whatever on

01:22:29.180 every, I don't like ladders, like in every avenue, I'm very, very cautious. I stopped war reporting

01:22:34.500 in 2011. This was right after Tim died?

01:22:40.420 Yeah. When my, so my colleague out at Restrepo, OP Restrepo, where we filmed Restrepo and we're,

01:22:46.820 you know, where we spent off and on, spent a deployment with 2nd Platoon, a battle company,

01:22:51.380 173rd Airborne. He was a brother and a colleague and a friend. And we were out there together a lot

01:22:57.900 and we made a film together and we went out, went to the, we're nominated for the Oscars together.

01:23:02.160 And a few weeks after the Oscars, we were going to cover the Arab Spring on assignment for Vanity

01:23:07.580 Fair at the last minute. I couldn't go. And he was killed in the city of Misrata by shrapnel that

01:23:13.600 a little piece of metal that hit his femoral artery in his groin. And he bled out. After that, I,

01:23:19.520 I saw what his death did to everyone who loved him. I mean, Tim, I think his death was fairly rapid

01:23:25.160 and painless and his problems were over, but his, the people who loved him, their problems were just

01:23:30.420 beginning. And I watched how that worked. And I was like, I'm not going to do that to the people

01:23:34.720 who loved me. I'm, you know, war reporting at that point went from seeming sort of noble

01:23:39.680 and selfless to something that seemed quite selfish and self-concerned. And so I stopped.

01:23:46.360 I might not have had that reaction at 25 or 30 or 35 or 40, but I was almost 50. And so I stopped

01:23:53.160 and I never looked back. I've never wanted to go back. I miss, I miss some of those experiences,

01:24:00.000 but I don't want to repeat them. Given that you've experienced both sides of that sacrifice,

01:24:05.580 what does it tell you about the people who can do those jobs, whether it be soldiers, firefighters,

01:24:13.620 fishermen in Alaska who also have families who are making those choices. And the stakes are,

01:24:23.920 I think, as high as they could possibly be because presumably they understand what you just said.

01:24:29.560 Yeah. I don't know how they do it. A lot of soldiers don't have kids. I mean,

01:24:33.620 the guys that I was with out there were mostly 19, 20, 21, almost none of them had children.

01:24:38.940 A few did. But lots of soldiers do have kids. And particularly once you get into the National

01:24:44.680 Guard and units like that, like, oh my God. And firemen, of course, it's a big,

01:24:49.320 very family-centric culture. I don't know how they do it. And I also don't know how with the fire

01:24:54.840 department, the paramedics, I mean, they have children and they go to car accidents where

01:25:00.200 they're pulling dead children out of the back seats of vehicles. I mean, psychologically,

01:25:06.740 I don't know how they do it. I don't know how they process the trauma. I mean,

01:25:11.120 I can't even read a news story about something bad happening to a child. I mean, literally,

01:25:15.280 I can't even read it. Right. I don't know how they do their work, that level of trauma that those guys

01:25:20.320 endure and women endure seeing that. And also frontline ER doctors. I mean, all of it. I mean,

01:25:28.360 really, I'm just reminded of myself in Liberia counting, you know, counting the bodies in the

01:25:34.020 pile of bodies and like sort of wincing at the children, you know, like the cost of that later,

01:25:41.180 two weeks, two years, 20 years later, the cost of that, I just, I worry about those people. I don't

01:25:47.720 understand how they survive it psychologically. When I went to medical school, I think everybody

01:25:52.280 who goes to medical school has a very clear, not everybody, but I think a lot of people have a very

01:25:55.920 clear sense of what they want to do. They're very specific. I want to become this kind of a doctor.

01:26:01.220 And so for me, that was pediatric oncology. That was, those were the experiences I had seen

01:26:07.740 while I was an engineering student that led to my change of heart and led me to decide I wanted

01:26:12.900 to go to medical school. And I remember even interviewing in medical school or for medical

01:26:17.300 schools. And at one interview in particular, the person who was interviewing me, who was a surgeon,

01:26:23.560 was an ENT surgeon said, well, you wrote your essay about this and you want to do pediatric oncology.

01:26:27.840 I just want to tell you that I think that's a horrible idea. He said, right now that might seem

01:26:33.060 like something that you can do, but one day you will have kids and that will be the most difficult

01:26:38.180 thing to do is to take care of dying kids. Now, again, that's obviously not entirely true because

01:26:44.000 there are lots of people who take care of kids with cancer who have children and I've seen them and

01:26:49.340 I've seen them be completely attached. Like they're not detached. They're not cold. They're not calloused.

01:26:54.100 But it was at the time a comment that sort of put me off a little bit. Like who is he to tell me

01:26:59.640 that I can't do that? But he was entirely correct. Now that I have kids, I know as sure as Tuesday

01:27:09.040 follows Monday, there is zero chance I could be a pediatric oncologist. I just know that whether

01:27:15.220 that's a flaw or not, without judgment, I can just say I couldn't do it.

01:27:18.580 Yeah, I totally understand that. I totally understand that. I have two little girls and

01:27:24.360 my sensitivity to harm to children is so completely unbounded that it makes it hard to even

01:27:32.440 read the newspaper or go through life. You know, I mean, it's like it sensitizes you enormously. And

01:27:39.340 it's that in trauma, it sounds like you had a sort of traumatic experience in your life. And I'm sorry

01:27:45.280 to hear that. Trauma also particularly sensitizes you. And seeing trauma to the innocent is something

01:27:52.460 that you never, you will never fully escape the effects of that. Like that will not go away. I

01:28:01.280 mean, my opinion, like it's been 20, 25 years for some things for me. And it's like, it hasn't changed

01:28:07.200 at all in my head. Like it's the most painful thing I can think of.

01:28:10.200 Yeah. I think even though I chose to go into something different, which was not

01:28:14.160 specifically going to be geared around that, you still in surgery saw lots of trauma. We were at

01:28:19.660 a level one trauma center, which meant I think we probably averaged 15 penetrating traumas a day.

01:28:25.040 And that doesn't tell you about all the blunt traumas. So all the car accidents,

01:28:28.840 death was right always there. And you would still see kids die because you still took care of pediatric

01:28:34.620 trauma. And that was, and remains some of the most difficult stuff I've ever seen by far,

01:28:40.680 which is not to say now that, well, people dying of cancer isn't horrible,

01:28:45.260 but there was something about the, at least one had a chance to make amends and it wasn't sudden,

01:28:53.520 but there was this thing about the kid dies in a car accident and the parent is, had zero chance to

01:29:01.960 prepare for this. Like there wasn't one nanosecond of preparatory grieving that could go on. I always

01:29:09.740 found that to be the hardest stuff actually, even though paradoxically it wasn't always accompanied

01:29:14.780 by suffering on the part of the victim. Yeah. Right. To your point actually about Tim.

01:29:19.760 Yeah. Yeah. No, I can't even begin to imagine for the parents and for you dealing with the parents,

01:29:24.500 like ghastly, absolutely ghastly. I mean, now that I, you know, I sort of knew that abstractly before I

01:29:29.580 was a parent, before I was a father, but now I really know it in my bones and I, my mind can't

01:29:34.800 even go there. I remember when one boy, I might've even told the story on a podcast once, but he was

01:29:41.000 15 or 16 years old and he was being driven home from school by his older brother. They were going

01:29:47.640 through an intersection when a guy ran a red and T-boned them on the passenger side, which is where

01:29:53.360 the victim was sitting. He arrived alive, but barely. And, um, I, I was the trauma chief. And so

01:30:02.720 for, for this type of an indication, this is a blunt trauma. And when he's unresponsive, it's

01:30:09.340 basically going to be a head injury or massive internal bleeding. You know, he's not going to be

01:30:13.940 dead because he broke his bones or something like that. It's going to be his aorta was sheared.

01:30:17.980 One of the internal vessels was sheared or, or blunt head trauma to make a very long story short.

01:30:24.020 It was pretty clear. He was dead due to head injury due to the, the response, the neurologic

01:30:29.400 exam, but it was a vascular injury and he probably should have been declared dead in five minutes,

01:30:35.280 but I wouldn't do it. We kept, I just was adamant that we keep working. And, you know,

01:30:39.520 30 minutes later, I finally conceded he was dead and declared, declared him dead. When I went to tell

01:30:45.020 his mom, she screamed so loud. It's not like in the movies sometimes where people sort of weep softly,

01:30:52.720 like this was, this was devastating. And I remember she tore the pocket off my scrubs,

01:30:59.620 literally grabbed my chest and tore the pocket off my scrubs. I spent hours with her. I would

01:31:07.560 actually go to his funeral. It was one of the very few people I didn't know whose funeral I went to.

01:31:12.200 You know, at this point I'm in a suit, right? When it came time to walk past the casket,

01:31:18.160 she was there. I had, I didn't think for a second she would remember me. I mean, cause how could she,

01:31:23.780 right? And there were hundreds of people walking past and she was greeting them all sensibly, right?

01:31:32.220 When she got to me, she did the same thing. She completely collapsed, grabbed me and tore the 1.00

01:31:38.860 pocket off my dress shirt. And I was really, really moved. I mean, I just couldn't believe

01:31:45.220 this had happened. I couldn't believe she would even remember some random person, although obviously

01:31:50.420 it was such a traumatic experience, but I kept that shirt for a very long time as kind of a reminder

01:31:56.600 of something that on a given day can change the course of your life. Like such a random freak thing

01:32:03.440 and how many lives his siblings. And, uh, it's just, it, um, it blew my mind, but there was,

01:32:11.620 there was like a memory within her for this, for this interaction separated by days and, and obviously

01:32:17.840 by endless sadness. That's brutal. I mean, what a, what a devastating thing. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

01:32:25.040 That's, that's a hard thing. How do you think we are doing as a society? And we can say that's

01:32:31.420 medically or not medically in terms of treating victims of PTSD. And, and we can even just limit

01:32:37.620 this to, to, to, to combat because I think people can have PTSD for many things that are not combat

01:32:42.480 related, but going back to the friend who said to you in 2003 with incredible insight, we're about

01:32:50.700 to get very, very familiar with PTSD. Well, she was right. How are we doing?

01:32:56.660 Well, I mean, not surprisingly for a society that has astronomical levels of addiction, depression,

01:33:05.920 suicide, anxiety, compulsive disorders, astronomical levels of all of those social ills.

01:33:14.440 Not surprisingly, we're not doing too great on the PTSD fronts.

01:33:18.680 Statistically, the more affluent the society, the higher the incidence of PTSD. Like if you

01:33:26.440 live in an affluent society, you are statistically prone to worse and longer PTSD than if you live

01:33:32.140 in a poor society. In a poor society, there's an expectation that life is hard. So when something

01:33:36.880 bad happens, it's not so much of a shock. And also in less affluent societies in the developing

01:33:43.120 world, particularly people live, they have a more communal existence because they need each other.

01:33:48.940 So if you go to a, you know, a village in Africa or in Asia or wherever it may be, people are

01:33:54.560 interdependent on one another because they don't have their own little house in the suburbs, in the

01:33:59.280 American suburbs, the way I grew up. And that social proximity is a buffer for psychological

01:34:04.800 struggles. So suicide is lower in those communities. Depression rates are lower. Anxiety is lower,

01:34:11.380 even though those lives are stressful in all kinds of ways that ours aren't because we're

01:34:16.060 affluent society. So the problem, humans evolved to survive. We're great at surviving, right? We

01:34:22.740 evolved in a violent and unpredictable world where people had accidents or were attacked by animals

01:34:28.780 or other human beings all the time. And life was traumatizing. And if trauma was psychologically

01:34:36.140 incapacitating to a majority of people for any length of time, the society wouldn't exist because

01:34:42.160 the group couldn't survive because there'd be no one around to function because everyone's traumatized.

01:34:48.240 So clearly, in terms of us, our species, trauma is something that humans are designed to work

01:34:55.040 through fairly quickly because the business of survival has to be attended to. So the statistics

01:35:01.680 bear this out. Within, for most people, the majority of trauma symptoms disappear within three months.

01:35:08.720 And about 80% of people wind up with long-term trauma reaction that doesn't diminish with time.

01:35:15.860 So in my opinion, I mean, I'm not a psychologist, a psychiatrist. I'm not a doctor. I've looked at this

01:35:21.220 as a journalist. I've had my own experience with PTSD. But in my opinion,

01:35:26.180 the problem is in our society is that we see PTSD as something that needs to be treated.

01:35:33.320 The reason there's a long-term problem with trauma reaction, I think, is partly because we live in such

01:35:39.880 an alienated, socially unconnected, non-communitarian society. People live in incredible isolation.

01:35:48.780 Children have their own bedrooms. I mean, this is the first time in human history that a society has

01:35:54.540 been affluent enough to give children each their own room in a middle-class house, right?

01:36:01.380 Insane. In human terms, completely insane, right? Like, children aren't supposed to be by themselves

01:36:08.120 in the dangerous world. You know, people traditionally sleep in groups in human society.

01:36:12.540 That families live in their own automatic, you know, self-heated, self-sustaining house

01:36:20.800 or apartment, unconnected to their neighbors, who are unconnected to any sense of, you know,

01:36:27.320 community endeavor. It's also, like, completely insane, right? It's completely new in the human

01:36:33.560 experience. And, you know, what I would say is that the, I mean, what the statistics bear out

01:36:38.940 is that when people experience trauma communally and recover from trauma communally, it goes quite

01:36:46.300 well. I looked at a study that was done in a very warlike tribe in East Africa. They were a raiding 0.86

01:36:52.600 society. It was a cattle herding society. They were a raiding society, and warfare was quite normal.

01:36:57.500 It still is. The warriors that were well-connected socially, I mean, I don't mean status-wise,

01:37:03.980 I mean, that were well-embedded in the community would come back from these very violent raids

01:37:09.600 with, you know, a sort of startle response and some other sort of surface-level trauma reactions,

01:37:15.160 like they'd jump at loud noises or whatever, sometimes nightmares, but they wouldn't get

01:37:19.900 depression. The depression component of PTSD was not something they had to struggle with because

01:37:24.900 they had a healthy relationship with their society. The warriors that were not socially connected

01:37:30.340 in a healthy way, those are the ones who were prone to long-term depression. So what I would say

01:37:36.220 is that our society is not good at treating PTSD because it's psychologically stressful for everybody,

01:37:44.240 virtually everybody, and you can see the results of that in our rates of depression, suicide,

01:37:49.760 addiction, anxiety, all those other things. Again, it comes back to this challenge of

01:37:56.040 with modernity has come amazing things. Like I would never want to go back and live 10,000 years

01:38:02.960 ago, even though I acknowledged that they probably had a much greater sense of community and belonging

01:38:07.800 and purpose because frankly, I like that I don't have to worry about my drinking water. And I like that

01:38:16.000 I'm never starving. And I like that there's not a tribe a hundred miles away that wants to kill me

01:38:21.620 and all these other things. But at the same time, the example you gave about children sleeping in

01:38:26.800 the room is a, is a, is such a fascinating one because it's one I've discussed many times with

01:38:31.140 my wife. So everyone who's had kids probably can relate to the fact that at some point in our

01:38:36.640 experience with three kids, it always seems to be about four years of age. They stopped wanting to

01:38:42.320 sleep alone. So we were pretty lucky. All of our kids were sleeping in the crib fine. They,

01:38:48.240 we had pretty good sleepers, but boy, when they turned four, they were not happy about being alone

01:38:54.040 in their room. And what does the textbook say? Well, you know, you go through all of the do this,

01:38:59.580 do that, do this, do that. But none of the do this, do that is bring them in your room, right? Like

01:39:03.980 that's absolutely not the textbook thing to do is bring your four-year-old into your bed with you.

01:39:10.620 But of course that's exactly what would have been happening 10,000 years ago. So on some level you

01:39:16.660 have to think, well, gosh, we probably evolved to sleep with our children. 0.65

01:39:21.460 Yeah. Americans are the only mammal that doesn't sleep with its young. Let's just put it that way. 0.96

01:39:26.520 And Americans, and I'm including the English speaking world. I mean, our culture is essentially

01:39:30.500 derivative of, of England. So in England, removing your child from your bed space started in the 1700s

01:39:38.900 and then spread throughout the English speaking world. But it is not the human norm. It never has been,

01:39:45.700 and it still isn't. I mean, most of the world sleeps in a communal space. Most of the world

01:39:50.620 is not affluent enough to give their child their own crib and their own bed and their own room.

01:39:55.560 If you went camping in the Bob Marshall wilderness in Montana with your family, you would not put your...

01:40:02.400 Right. We wouldn't have five separate tents.

01:40:04.320 You wouldn't have five, right? Yeah, exactly. Right.

01:40:06.640 You would keep your four-month-old right next to you, right? Because it's a dangerous world. And

01:40:11.280 the four-month-old knows that. And the four-year-old knows that. I mean, infants get their

01:40:15.580 safety from proximity to adults, period, end of sentence. And they know at one month, at four

01:40:21.200 months, at three years, at four years, at 10 years, they know that if they're by themselves

01:40:26.000 in the darkness, their life is in danger.

01:40:29.820 Think about how profound that is, Sebastian, right? Because I think, I think someone who doesn't

01:40:33.780 have kids might think that sounds strange. But I bet that many people listening to this who have

01:40:38.520 kids will appreciate the almost irrational fear that a four-year-old can have of sleeping alone

01:40:45.320 in the darkness. But if you think about it through the lens you're describing it, which

01:40:50.080 is, this is very evolutionarily hardwired, it shouldn't be surprising, right?

01:40:55.520 No, it's not irrational. And it's not irrational at all. I mean, in the context of modern America,

01:41:00.140 it is most of the time. But I mean, look, the big threat to humans were the large cats.

01:41:07.140 I mean, in our evolution, large cats that hunted at night. And so nighttime was a very, very

01:41:12.600 dangerous time for humans. They found countless human or, you know, early human skulls with the

01:41:18.620 sort of four prongs of the front teeth of a large cat, a large feline, you know, having punctured the

01:41:24.520 skull. And so a child or even an adult that was alone in the darkness, their life was at risk. You

01:41:31.180 cannot fight off a lion by yourself unless you happen to have an AK-47 next to you. So people

01:41:38.040 that are surprised at this, what I would say to them is, look, try going camping by yourself. Go

01:41:43.260 into the woods and see how much sleep you get if you are completely alone in the Bob Marshall

01:41:47.800 wilderness. Now go camping with a group of friends and see how well you sleep. You will sleep a lot

01:41:53.980 better because you're in a group. Could the group do anything if they were attacked by a grizzly bear?

01:41:58.660 Probably not. Like you're probably just as much at risk by yourself as in a group.

01:42:04.540 But there's something about being alone in the darkness that even makes adults fearful and they

01:42:11.220 will not get a good night's sleep. So if you don't believe me, just go camping by yourself for a night

01:42:14.600 and see how well it goes. And children who are, I think the ghastly term is ferberized. There was a

01:42:21.040 doctor named Dr. Ferber who wrote a book about how to ferberize your children and get them to sleep

01:42:26.600 in their own room. You put them quote down, put them down early. And then you and your wife or

01:42:31.740 husband can have a nice evening on your own. He later recanted everything he taught in the early

01:42:37.480 1990s. There's an article in the New Yorker about it. And he said he was dead wrong about making

01:42:42.780 children sleep by themselves. It was completely, it was counter to evolution. It was unhealthy for

01:42:47.060 the child. It was quite nice for the adults, but not even that nice because the screaming of the,

01:42:51.280 of the terrorized child, you know, is, is hard to take as well while they're being

01:42:55.240 ferberized. So, so Dr. Ferber himself actually recanted all of that. It's worth tracking down.

01:43:00.420 So right now, most of the world, people still sleep with their children. And there's a point,

01:43:04.980 you know, we are, my wife and I have always slept with our children. Our eldest is four and a half.

01:43:10.420 We make it clear to her, listen, if you want to, you know, we have some spare mattress in the closet.

01:43:14.960 I'm like, listen, if you want to take that little mattress and sleep in the kitchen

01:43:17.960 or sleep on the couch in the living room, you know, go for it. You don't have to sleep here.

01:43:22.300 We have a platform. We have a pad on the floor in the, what used to be the bedroom. There's no

01:43:27.240 bed there anymore. I'm like, listen, honey, you can sleep wherever you want. It doesn't matter to

01:43:30.780 us, but you're always welcome in bed, you know, with the family. And that's where she prefers to 0.91

01:43:35.140 sleep. Another thing that you do that's pretty different from the average person in America is you

01:43:41.700 don't use a smartphone. Obviously that's a very deliberate decision. Talk to me a little bit

01:43:46.840 about it and how it's probably made your life better, despite the fact that you've given some

01:43:51.100 things up, right? You can't email people when you're on the run. You have to be at a computer

01:43:54.360 to send an email. So you made some sacrifices to do that relative to the expectations potentially of

01:44:01.300 others around you. Because obviously 30 years ago, you didn't need to send email, let alone send it

01:44:06.220 while you were on the run. But we now live in a world where people expect responses and things like

01:44:11.280 that. But walk me through the calculation and the trade-off that's led you to decide, hey,

01:44:16.360 I'm not carrying a smartphone and I'm happier for it. I was pretty simple. I mean, I didn't have to

01:44:20.700 give anything up because I never had a smartphone. So I never, the idea of sending an email while

01:44:24.600 you're on walking down the street, it's like insane to me, right? I mean, I just like, that's

01:44:28.720 something that happens at your desk when you're working. And when you're walking down the street,

01:44:32.560 you want to be in the street, you know, A, so you don't get run over by a truck. B, so that you can

01:44:37.260 observe this. I live in New York City, in Lower East Side Manhattan, like this sort of bounty of human

01:44:42.340 experience, the sheer craziness and wonderment of being part of human society in New York City

01:44:47.540 or anywhere. I want that. When I'm walking down the street, that's what I want to be experiencing.

01:44:52.800 And when I'm at home working at my desk and I got to deal with email, which is such a sort of tax on

01:44:59.060 our energy and our time, you know, I want to confine that as much as possible. It's drudgery. And I don't

01:45:05.140 want to invading something to me precious, which is the experience of being alive. I will also say

01:45:10.560 that I wrote a book called Freedom, how humans maintain their autonomy in the face of more

01:45:16.400 powerful forces, more powerful societies, oppressors. One of the main ways in a modern

01:45:22.500 society that people get deprived of their freedom is through addiction. We are an enormously addicted

01:45:27.300 society. People are addicted to drugs, they're addicted to television, they're addicted to social

01:45:31.560 media. To the extent that you're addicted, you are unfree. And the tech giants that develop social

01:45:39.540 media figured out there are algorithms that elicit an essentially addictive compulsive response

01:45:47.360 to social media engagement. Like they deliberately figured out the math of how to addict people

01:45:55.260 to their iPhones, to social media. That addiction has resulted in, they've clearly correlated depression

01:46:05.240 and anxiety and suicide in teenagers, particularly teenage girls, starting with the advent of Facebook

01:46:14.820 in, I believe it was 2012, right? They watched the line shoot upwards with the use of social media.

01:46:21.680 It was, it's an algorithm that has killed people, young people. They have blood on their hands because

01:46:28.200 of this algorithm. And so one of the things I don't want to do is find, I would be just as addicted to

01:46:35.160 that stuff as anybody else. We all have a potentially addictive personality and I don't want to be that guy

01:46:41.000 walking down the street, completely submerged in an environment which is designed to addict me

01:46:48.980 further and further and then monetize my addiction, right? I mean, I'd like, thank you, no. I'll just go

01:46:55.540 walk down the street on my own and I'll check my email when I get back home and all the other stuff

01:46:59.960 that the iPhone offers. And again, it's a little minor miracle. You have all of human knowledge

01:47:04.960 at your fingertips. I'm not sure I want all of human knowledge in my pocket. If it gets all of human

01:47:10.520 knowledge at my desk is an amazing thing in my pocket, maybe not. Do I need Google Maps to get from

01:47:15.760 here to there? No, I don't, right? I know the sun rises in the east. I can put a map in my back

01:47:20.620 pocket. Like I can figure it out. Thank you. Do I need to get a car, you know, a ride, an Uber with

01:47:26.480 my iPhone? Yeah, that would be convenient, but I can also stick up my arm and get a taxi. There are

01:47:30.200 workarounds for all the stuff that the iPhone offers you and you avoid the enormous downside

01:47:35.820 of compulsive addictive behavior and all the anxiety and depression that that statistically

01:47:41.000 gives rise to. Does your wife have a smartphone? She does. 0.95

01:47:45.200 I mean, obviously you respect her decision and she respects yours. Do you feel that there are

01:47:50.700 some people who are just able to utilize it for the benefits and not succumb to the challenges?

01:47:55.740 And do you, are you, are you simply taking a cautionary approach in your own, in your own life?

01:48:00.340 Yeah. I mean, she's very deliberately and consciously, particularly around the girls

01:48:03.700 does not do that behavior, that obsessive behavior. I mean, the weird thing about email

01:48:08.720 and texting in most of your life, if you have something to do, a chore to do, shovel that pile

01:48:16.360 of the dirt over there. The more you shovel, the less work is left. The weird thing about email is

01:48:24.040 that the more you do, the more you have to do. The Greek myth of Sisyphus, the never ending task,

01:48:30.580 that's email. The harder you work at it, the more email you generate back at you that you then try

01:48:37.760 to do as quickly as possible, which generates more and it's going to kill you. And my wife doesn't do 1.00

01:48:42.640 that. Half the time she leaves the house and she doesn't even have her iPhone because she forgot

01:48:46.280 it. Like, I mean, she's, she's, she uses it in the way that I think, you know, in an extremely

01:48:50.700 healthy way. And she is very, very careful not to exhibit those behaviors. And, but I'll tell you

01:48:56.860 what, my little girl, I mean, my little girl has had virtually no screen time in her entire life.

01:49:02.120 She doesn't have a tablet. Like we do not own a television. When we take a long drive somewhere,

01:49:07.140 she gets bored. She looks out the window, she whistles, she sings, she goes to sleep. She did,

01:49:12.120 she does what we people of our generation or my generation did when we were young is we got bored

01:49:17.340 and we learned to entertain ourselves with little stories in our mind or what have you. And that's how

01:49:22.120 my daughter deals with it. So she has a completely screen free existence. And, but if you give her an

01:49:29.600 iPhone, the first thing she does is get addicted to it. I don't know how, I mean, she's four. How did

01:49:35.000 she learn this? Like this? I mean, the design is so intuitive that even an uninitiated three-year-old

01:49:40.080 can learn it within minutes. And then the only thing she wants to do is play with that phone,

01:49:47.140 right? So that to me is like, oh, they knew what they were doing. It worked. They figured it out.

01:49:53.260 They hooked a three-year-old within minutes. If that's not evil, what is, right? So, you know,

01:49:58.380 we don't even let her near that thing. How much of your philosophy around having your kids sleep with

01:50:05.180 you, not having a smartphone, et cetera, how much of that do you think is influenced by your time in

01:50:09.580 combat? So as a thought experiment, let's go back to 1985. You ultimately decide, you know, I want to

01:50:18.140 be a lawyer. You go to law school. So you're living in Lower East Side right now. You're working for a

01:50:25.000 law firm. Everything else is the same about you. You've married the same woman. You have the same

01:50:29.220 kids. Again, it's a silly thought experiment. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think you carry a smartphone? 0.95

01:50:33.500 Think of it less through the lens of, well, as a lawyer, it might be expected that I need to have my

01:50:38.260 phone on me 24-7. It's less through that lens and more through the philosophical lens I'm asking this

01:50:42.880 question. So if I were young, I mean, I think it's more of a cultural thing. Like if I were young,

01:50:48.020 if I were 25 and came of age when all this stuff was normal, I would probably have one of them.

01:50:52.560 I think you're younger than me. I'm 59. So what I didn't do was adopt it in midlife.

01:51:00.300 And there was something about the behaviors of people with iPhones that I just thought,

01:51:04.460 I don't want to look like that. I mean, occasionally I smoke a cigarette.

01:51:08.700 One of the things I don't, you know, and I see smokers standing furtively outside doorways

01:51:12.880 in Midtown smoking their noon cigarette. And even though I can enjoy a cigarette,

01:51:18.260 there's something about the addictive, the visuals of that addiction that's so mortifying,

01:51:22.820 right? I'm like, I don't want to be that person, right? That's how I feel about the iPhone. So

01:51:26.460 I don't, it's not combat. You know, I studied anthropology. I see that through that human life,

01:51:31.540 through that lens. I think about what are healthy human behaviors. I married a like-minded person,

01:51:40.600 a like-minded woman. So fortunately she and I see absolutely eye to eye about that stuff.

01:51:45.500 I have the reinforcement of other like-minded people. There's a wonderful website called

01:51:50.800 Evolutionary Parenting, www.evolutionaryparenting.com. That basically walks you through how to

01:51:57.880 raise your child in an evolutionarily consistent way in modern society, like taking into account

01:52:04.760 the obvious sort of context of all this. How can you keep within sort of normal sensible norms,

01:52:10.720 how can you keep your parenting within a sort of way that's sort of evolutionarily healthy and

01:52:15.320 consistent? What do they say about food, for example? I think this would be, I mean,

01:52:20.460 there's the obvious, right? Don't feed them things that, you know, are pure crap. But do they 0.99

01:52:24.820 talk about anything else about food and eating and rituals and things like that?

01:52:28.240 They might. I mean, they're more of a sort of behavior thing. And children are not out to foil

01:52:34.660 your training. They're not out to foil your plans. Like when three-year-olds have temper tantrums,

01:52:40.060 they're not being, quote, bad. It's part of a process of neurological development that they have

01:52:44.940 to go through. And when you pathologize normal developmental stages and normal child behavior,

01:52:51.720 like crying when you stick them in a dark room, when you pathologize that, they're doing something

01:52:57.300 that they're evolutionarily wired to do. They're moving through neurological stages, development

01:53:02.560 stages in a normal and healthy way. And when you pathologize it because it makes your life

01:53:07.200 inconvenient, eventually they will learn norms that abide by your preferences. But that doesn't mean

01:53:14.620 it's good for them. It means it's convenient for you. And so what this website does is talk about

01:53:19.860 those norms and get you to understand those behaviors in sort of evolutionary terms. So my

01:53:26.720 daughter, every time she sees a sparkly glittery object, she wants it. You can't walk through the

01:53:31.240 damn pharmacy without her saying, I want that. I want that. I want that. Is she an abnormally 1.00

01:53:35.820 materialistic, acquisitive girl? No. She's exhibiting absolutely healthy hunter-gatherer norms

01:53:42.320 about acquisition of appealing things. You don't want to pathologize it. You don't want to get her

01:53:47.400 everything either, but you have to put it in a proper evolutionary context in order to have

01:53:52.100 patience with it. And that's what this website does. I cannot wait to check that out, actually.

01:53:57.560 You've alluded to it briefly in our discussion, and I've heard you speak about it before, but

01:54:01.880 you recently had a very near-death experience. Tell me a little bit about that.

01:54:07.960 Yeah. I mean, you as a doctor will know what these numbers mean. I have an anatomical sort of anomaly

01:54:14.480 in my abdomen. My celiac artery has been compressed by my median arcuate ligament, which is in the wrong

01:54:20.540 place. And it's completely occluded the celiac artery. So the blood was forced to flow throughout

01:54:26.000 my entire lifetime. It was not asymptomatic in me. The blood was forced to flow through smaller

01:54:32.120 sort of sub-arteries that feed the pancreas and the duodenum and, I guess, other digestive organs.

01:54:39.400 And those little arteries, those arteries are smaller and not designed to take the full blood

01:54:44.800 flow that the celiac carries. And over the course of presumably many years, I hope it was a long time

01:54:52.520 because I don't want this to happen again. One of the arteries in the pancreatic duodenal artery,

01:54:57.900 one of the little arteries developed an aneurysm. And then for about six months, I had this really

01:55:05.260 awful pain in my upper abdomen that came and went. And just being a stupid guy, I never went to the 0.99

01:55:10.880 doctor. I'm like, if you can bear the pain, it's probably not going to kill you. 1.00

01:55:15.360 What was the pain like?

01:55:16.740 It would come and go. And it was a kind of searing, cramping, slightly nauseous pain. And it was,

01:55:21.980 I've been told that abdominal aneurysms can cause pain. And there's a big nerve center right around

01:55:31.400 the solar plexus. And I, you know, I think maybe he was pushing on that, but, you know,

01:55:36.000 it wasn't the pain of kidney stones, but it was way more than indigestion, right? I mean, it was, 0.98

01:55:40.040 you know, I would sit down and have to wait it out when it happened. It was pretty awful.

01:55:43.560 And what was the frequency of that?

01:55:45.580 I don't know. Every couple of days, once a day, something like that, it would come and go

01:55:49.760 last half an hour, an hour. And then it would, and then after some months of that,

01:55:54.500 I had a lot of other health problems. I was just important. I had sudden onset,

01:55:58.460 severe adult allergies for some reason. No idea why. I've always been a big runner and I had

01:56:03.860 trouble running. I mean, just something was wrong with me, right? And I couldn't figure it out. And

01:56:08.860 after some months of that, the pain suddenly went away and the allergy suddenly went away,

01:56:12.820 like overnight. I was like, oh, great. I'm good. And then within a few weeks,

01:56:17.820 one afternoon, I had a dream. I had a horrible nightmare that I died.

01:56:24.340 And I was in, you know, it was about six in the morning. I'm in bed with my family and everyone's

01:56:28.140 asleep. And I had a dream that I died by some accident. It was an oversight and it was stupidity

01:56:32.920 on my part. And I died and I was looking back at my family and they were grieving and I couldn't 1.00

01:56:37.200 return to them because I'd crossed over. I was, I was like, oh, you idiot. You blew it. 1.00

01:56:41.760 And I woke up just like incredibly shaken. And I'm not a doctor. I think that my artery had

01:56:49.980 already started dissecting because the following morning I had sort of ongoing pain when I woke up

01:56:55.820 in my, something was wrong and I still didn't go to the doctor. And that afternoon was a beautiful

01:57:01.720 day and I was going to go running. And I was like, I'm not going to go running. I don't feel quite right.

01:57:06.200 And within about half an hour, thank God I didn't go running. I would have died crawling around in

01:57:10.440 the woods. Then about half an hour, I felt this surge of pain in my abdomen. I was like, Jesus,

01:57:16.760 what is that? Flooded my entire abdomen. And I was like, damn, that is strange feeling.

01:57:23.280 It wasn't unbearable, but it was, I'd never had that feeling before. And then within a few minutes, 0.74

01:57:28.200 I tried to stand up and I almost fell over. My blood pressure apparently was just tanking.

01:57:32.380 And what had happened was the artery, the aneurysm had ruptured and I was bleeding out

01:57:37.880 into my abdomen. And of course I didn't know this. And I was in the woods with my wife,

01:57:43.020 an old cabin that I built. She dragged me back out of the woods, me sort of stumbling and got me to

01:57:50.680 the driveway and put me in the car so I could sit down and I started to go blind. The sky turned

01:57:57.880 electric white. And that started to take over my entire field of vision. And I was syncopic. I was

01:58:04.560 in and out of consciousness and the paramedics got there. And by the time they got there, I was in

01:58:09.680 something called compensatory shock. And so I suddenly, I sort of revived. I was like feeling

01:58:13.920 okay. And the paramedics were like, you know, were you good? We think you dehydrated. It's a hot day.

01:58:18.740 Just sit and drink some water and you'll probably feel better. And I was like, all right,

01:58:23.040 that sounds good. And my wife is like, you know, he went blind a few minutes ago. Like you're taking

01:58:27.420 him to the ER. So they took me to the ER. And it was very far, right? Yeah. I took them an hour and

01:58:33.660 a half. It was an hour and a half before I got to the ER. I lost my bowel control on the way there.

01:58:39.000 And I was like, all right, I went blind for a while and I lost my bowels. Like that's probably not a good

01:58:44.720 sign. Like something's wrong. I got to the ER and the medic who I tracked down later, the guy in the back

01:58:51.160 of the ambulance with me, he said, we got to the ER and you just tanked. You turned white as a sheet.

01:58:58.720 And my hemoglobin was 1.2. The ER doctors were like, you can't.

01:59:04.280 Yeah, that's sort of incompatible with life.

01:59:06.320 Yeah, it was. And that's where I was at. I think I had probably lost about 90% of my blood. I mean,

01:59:11.720 I don't know. I was still conscious. I was in and out of consciousness.

01:59:14.280 How much IV fluid had they given you in the ambulance?

01:59:16.940 I just put a bag in my arm.

01:59:18.500 Just a single bag?

01:59:19.480 Yeah, a couple of bags. I don't know. But I got to the ER and I was 1.2. My blood pressure was 60

01:59:25.080 over 40. And the doctor asked permission to cut into my neck, to put a line into my neck. I think

01:59:31.740 it would be my carotid or my jugular?

01:59:33.920 Jugular.

01:59:34.580 Jugular. Okay. And I said, you mean, in case there's an emergency? I had no idea I was dying.

01:59:39.900 And I said, in case there's an emergency, he was like, this is the emergency right now. I was like,

01:59:44.120 yeah, you got permission. So we started cutting my neck, whatever they do. And basically, 0.90

01:59:48.580 that was when I died. I started to die. So a big black pit opened up underneath me and I started

01:59:53.840 to get pulled down into it. And I said to the doctor, you got to hurry. You're losing me right

01:59:58.460 now. You got to hurry.

02:00:00.220 Did you say that or did you think that?

02:00:02.040 I said that to him. I said, doc, you got to hurry. You're losing me right now. I can feel myself

02:00:06.220 going. And then my dead father appeared. Now, I just want to stop and say, I'm an atheist. My father

02:00:12.540 was a physicist. I'm not religious. I'm not a supernaturalist. I'm not a mystic. I don't

02:00:18.520 believe in anything. I can't measure and can't test. And my father was the same way. And he appeared

02:00:26.080 above me and a kind of presence. And he seemed to be welcoming me. And I wanted to have nothing

02:00:36.960 to do with him. And it wasn't a conversation. It was a communication. And he wasn't, I couldn't

02:00:44.140 see him. I could feel him. He was a presence. And I was like, basically, not now, dad. Like,

02:00:49.820 I don't want to have anything. I love you, but I don't want to have anything to do with you right

02:00:52.600 now. I want to, you know, I'm staying, I want to stay here. I'm nothing to do with what, you know,

02:00:57.580 that, whatever that is.

02:00:59.860 How long earlier had your dad passed away?

02:01:02.280 Nine years earlier.

02:01:03.420 And you were with him when he died, if I recall.

02:01:05.260 I was holding his hand. Yeah. So, you know, I have a very spotty memory after that. I remember

02:01:12.740 the doctor saying to the, whoever was pushing me, go as fast as you can without running,

02:01:17.840 without actually running. Go as fast as you can, I think was to the cath lab.

02:01:21.960 Do you remember them putting the breathing tube in your mouth?

02:01:24.480 I can't remember if I remember or not. I was in and out of consciousness. I remember

02:01:28.540 they put me in a CAT scan and they had to shave me. They put a line in my groin, right?

02:01:34.620 Yep.

02:01:35.540 And I wanted to joke with them. I was like, I was, I almost said, I'm sorry. I forgot to

02:01:39.680 shave down there this morning. Right. I was, I was trying to make them laugh for some reason. I

02:01:43.220 don't know. Like a very wacky, like sensibility. And they put a line in my groin and they put,

02:01:50.080 and I think they had trouble seeing where the bleed was because I had so much blood and I'd been

02:01:53.340 bleeding into my abdomen for an hour and a half. Luckily, I'm a long distance runner. I got a good

02:01:58.420 heart. I mean, the doctor said, if you weren't in really top shape, you would have just,

02:02:01.460 you would have died. You would have gone into cardiac arrest and your kidneys would have failed

02:02:04.960 and it would have been over. It took them another eight hours to find the leak. I mean, I was on the

02:02:10.600 fluoroscope for so long that I got radiation burns on my back. Two weeks later, the square red patch

02:02:15.620 appeared on my back because I had so much radiation. And I remember at one point the doctors looking at

02:02:20.960 each other like, and I know this kind of thing is very hard to fix. And it was in the middle of the

02:02:25.980 night in a small hospital on Cape Cod, Hyannis Hospital. And I remember the doctors looking at

02:02:31.280 each other and literally are like, what do we do? Like, we can't find it. Like, what do we do?

02:02:35.860 And I remember thinking, Oh guys, tell me, you don't tell me. I just didn't see that exchange,

02:02:40.420 but they were heroes, man. They pulled it off. They finally found it and they, they embolized it with

02:02:45.780 catheter embolism. And they gave me 10 units of blood. I wound up getting 10 units of blood

02:02:52.280 blood. And they saved my life. How long were you in the ICU?

02:02:58.040 Five days. Do you remember much of that? Oh yeah. I woke up the next morning and I had no idea that

02:03:04.540 I'd almost died. And the nurse came in, experienced nurse, you know, in their fifties or sixties,

02:03:10.280 maybe even. And she said, listen, you almost died yesterday. You're, you are the luckiest guy we,

02:03:15.200 any of us know, like you should have died. We can't believe you survived that. I was horrified. You know,

02:03:20.420 I have these two little girls and I was absolutely traumatized by that news. I had no idea I'd almost

02:03:25.700 died. And I thought about it. I sat there. I was throwing up blood pretty regularly. I don't know

02:03:32.000 how the blood got into my stomach, but it did. And she came back an hour later and said, Hey,

02:03:35.740 how are you doing? And I said, I lied. I was like, yeah, I'm doing okay physically, but honestly,

02:03:39.640 I'm struggling with what you told me. It's terrifying that you can almost die in your own,

02:03:44.720 in front of your family, your own driveway, when you're a very healthy person on a nice June day.

02:03:49.420 Like, are you kidding? That can happen. Like, I don't have heart problems. I don't have anything

02:03:54.060 like you can just, you can, the universe can just take you out. And I was like, totally traumatized

02:04:00.260 by that. And she said, try thinking about that as a sacred experience rather than a scary experience.

02:04:11.320 And then she walked out of the room and I've been thinking about that my whole life.

02:04:15.340 Like, yeah, I was given a glimpse of the mystery, you know, the great mystery of death. And I was

02:04:21.160 given a, I was allowed to look at it and allowed to survive the look at it. And I brought, got brought

02:04:27.280 back. And then I started to do some research. I mean, first of all, I can't tell you how traumatizing

02:04:31.820 that whole thing was. Combat's nothing compared to that. That really messed me up.

02:04:36.140 This was June of 19 or 20?

02:04:38.980 June of 20.

02:04:40.060 Okay.

02:04:40.920 I know, I just got paranoid that I could, that that could happen at any moment, anywhere. Had I

02:04:45.120 been on an airplane, I would have died. Had I been walking in the woods, I would have died.

02:04:48.540 Had I been almost anywhere but where I was, I would have died. And I got maybe super paranoid. It was

02:04:52.760 extremely traumatic. At least combat you can leave behind and you come home and you're not going to,

02:04:57.480 you know. And I started to look into near death experiences by people.

02:05:03.000 You know, imagine my surprise that an awful lot of people

02:05:06.760 see the black pit. A lot of, an awful lot of people have dead relatives at the threshold

02:05:13.880 to engage with them. And it really got me sort of interested in what the hell, you know, what is

02:05:19.540 this? Like, are we really sure? And I know this is going to sound completely flaky, but it really

02:05:25.420 aroused my curiosity about this consistency of experience across many different societies,

02:05:30.420 many different kinds of people and irreproducible through low blood oxygen, ketamine, endogenous DMT,

02:05:38.560 all the things that happen in the dying brain. If you reproduce those things artificially, people

02:05:43.060 don't have the near death experiences. You seem to have to be kind of dying to have them. And

02:05:49.060 it really made me start to wonder, wow, like maybe it isn't just nothing. Like maybe there is some

02:05:58.680 other dimension that some kind of existence continues on that we just don't understand or

02:06:04.840 even don't even have brains developed enough to capable of understanding it. Maybe it's possible.

02:06:10.660 And I know there's been some research in quantum physics trying to understand a possible

02:06:15.440 post-death existence in terms of quantum physics and quantum fluctuation and all that stuff. I mean,

02:06:22.100 these are people who are a lot smarter than me and I, you know, I don't know if I'd even understand it,

02:06:25.540 but it did get me sort of intrigued in an empirical sense of like, do we actually,

02:06:32.660 are we actually completely sure that there's nothing? Because that not, that's not what the

02:06:37.060 experience that my, it's not what my experience of it was. You've obviously read about other

02:06:41.800 people's experiences. Have you spoken with other people who have experienced this? Not face-to-face

02:06:46.560 literally spoken. I've had some, you know, I've talked about this on some podcasts and people have

02:06:52.140 reached out, you know, via Facebook or whatever social media that I do have on my laptop, you

02:06:58.300 know, with messages about, yeah, something like that happened to me and I had the exact same

02:07:01.420 experience or a similar one, you know, so I have had some affirmation, not only

02:07:06.680 of the mystery of it, but of the trauma of it. Have you spoken with any neuroscientists about it?

02:07:14.140 I mean, I'm curious what sort of biological explanations could exist for this.

02:07:20.620 Well, I've read some papers on it. I haven't spoken to neuroscientists, but I've read some papers by

02:07:25.400 doctors and medical researchers and possibly neuroscientists sort of trying to explain the

02:07:31.620 phenomenon in terms of neurochemistry. And so ketamine is released in the dying brain. You can

02:07:38.120 give someone ketamine and they'll have all kinds of visions and all kinds of stuff. They won't

02:07:42.400 necessarily see their dead father, right? You can deprive someone of oxygen so that the blood levels of

02:07:48.120 oxygen are very low. They don't necessarily have the experience of the dying person. There's something

02:07:53.580 called DMT. I think it's akin to ecstasy, the drug ecstasy. Well, that's MDMA. Do you mean DMT or MDMA?

02:08:02.120 I'm sorry. DMA. I'm sorry. Okay. Yeah. MDMA. I'm not actually now. I can't remember one of the two,

02:08:08.480 but there's an endogenous compound that is also a drug that is released in the dying brain. And so

02:08:15.260 step in if you know which it is now, I can't remember. But again, it doesn't produce some of the

02:08:20.040 hallmark experiences of near death. So there is an ongoing mystery about exactly what this is.

02:08:26.440 It could be the situation, right? It could be that those chemicals alone are insufficient

02:08:30.740 to elicit that response. They have to be combined with the belief that you're dying, right? Maybe

02:08:36.620 that's the... Well, here's the thing. I had no idea I was dying. And I'm guessing a lot of dying people

02:08:42.640 don't realize they're dying. I mean, I don't know, but I'm guessing by the time you're dying,

02:08:47.740 your brain is so fuzzy and addled that you may not even be able to be understanding of it,

02:08:53.000 depending on the kind of death, of course. But I had no idea. I mean, the guy wanted to cut into 0.62

02:08:57.800 my neck and I was like, you mean in case there's an emergency? Like, why would you do that? Like,

02:09:02.960 I had no idea. So you were in the ICU for five days. You're in the hospital, presumably for another

02:09:06.960 few days. How long until you were back home? I think I came home on the seventh day.

02:09:12.360 And what was your recovery like physically? I mean, I had a huge hematoma in my abdomen. So I

02:09:17.180 had a huge amount of dead blood and, you know, it took months for my body to process that.

02:09:21.960 I mean, pretty quickly I was walking and then running and my physical activity was really

02:09:26.520 constrained by my paranoia, my medical paranoia. I was like, God, maybe I should rent an apartment

02:09:32.360 next to the hospital. You know, I mean, not literally, but I sort of joked about it with

02:09:35.560 my wife. Like it may... I mean, I, you know, that I survived an hour and a half like that was a miracle.

02:09:40.960 Like, I just didn't want to do anything that might make it hard for, you know, an ambulance crew

02:09:45.820 to get to me. So I definitely wasn't going to go running in the woods and all these things that

02:09:49.000 have been part of my life, my whole life. Like suddenly they were terrifying to me. I became

02:09:53.980 someone I didn't recognize. I mean, I became an incredibly, for a while, an incredibly neurotic,

02:09:58.440 fearful person. What chipped away at that?

02:10:01.180 I'm still dealing with it, frankly, you know, and if I didn't have daughters, a family,

02:10:05.660 I might be less worried about it. But I, you know, I don't want to go to Africa with my family and 0.98

02:10:11.160 like expire on a transatlantic flight next to my kids. You know, like I, you know, I'm in the

02:10:16.300 process of making sure that this kind of thing certainly or almost certainly can't happen with

02:10:21.500 any of the other small arteries. And I'm in the process of like nailing that down. But as with

02:10:27.600 combat trauma, the passage of time helps, but it really changed me. And I think might've changed me

02:10:32.940 forever. I think I'm not sure that fear is going to entirely go away. Like there are certain loud

02:10:37.460 noises I still jump at because they sound like gunshots. I'm not sure that's ever going away.

02:10:42.320 Have you been able to sort of incorporate the wisdom from that nurse?

02:10:46.460 Yeah, I've been working at it. You know, my anthropologist friend of mine said, that's,

02:10:50.800 you know, you had a classic shamanic journey. I mean, the shaman goes to the sort of threshold

02:10:55.960 of death, encounters the afterworld and comes back with some information. You, your whole life

02:11:00.660 have gone to places of death, places where death is happening to people and might happen to you,

02:11:05.560 you know, war zones. And you come back and you have some information for people. And so maybe you

02:11:12.180 can look at this journey. And I hate that word journey because it's, you know, sort of misused

02:11:17.220 sometimes. But if you look at it as a kind of journalistic journey, what information are you

02:11:23.100 coming back with that might be useful to other people and to yourself? And that I'm working on.

02:11:28.860 I'm going to write a book called Pulse about what happened to me physically, but also what the

02:11:38.020 consequences were psychologically and what the possibilities are metaphysically. I want to talk

02:11:45.560 to a quantum physicist about quantum fluctuation and the endurance, you know, the possible enduring

02:11:50.360 nature of the soul, you know, et cetera. And I just want to, not to confirm, I mean, none of this

02:11:55.440 is possible to prove, but I would like to walk through the possibilities to see what might be

02:12:00.260 the explanation for my experience. When you think about the PTSD associated with this particular

02:12:06.600 event, does it manifest more with depression or more with anxiety? Anxiety for sure. Was that also

02:12:15.200 true of the combat PTSD? It was until Tim got killed. And then I was in my first marriage

02:12:22.600 and I've talked about this before. So it's, I, we lost a pregnancy and we found out right when,

02:12:30.300 right when Tim was killed and the timing was weird enough that I could, it was pretty complicated

02:12:36.520 psychologically for me that for the first time in my life sent me into like a real depression,

02:12:42.720 like a dangerous depression. And I felt removed, completely removed and isolated from every person

02:12:51.240 I loved, including my wife at the time. Like I felt like I was living behind bulletproof plexiglass

02:12:57.120 and couldn't escape. It was a dangerous, dangerous feeling. I figured it out, but it was a, it was a

02:13:02.780 very, very unpleasant time in my life. What do you think was the most important factor or factors that

02:13:08.260 helped you emerge from that? Boy, that's a good question. I mean, I was talking to somebody,

02:13:13.880 you know, a professional about it that helps. I was married to someone I really loved, but the marriage

02:13:19.200 wasn't working. And eventually we both sort of like confronted that and acknowledged it. And we

02:13:23.900 ended the marriage and that was very painful, but it felt like a healthy step. We're still friends.

02:13:28.480 You know, we did it. The marriage didn't work, but the divorce did. I'd started drinking a little

02:13:33.760 more than I probably should have. I mean, I've never, you know, by no means was an alcoholic,

02:13:38.120 but I had a unhealthy relationship with alcohol and I, I stopped drinking. I had atrial fibrillation,

02:13:44.500 which is an arrhythmia in my heart. And I was told, you know, I've fixed that. I had a,

02:13:47.760 an ablation that fixed it completely, but the doctor said, you know, you know, alcohol can

02:13:52.360 trigger it. Try not drinking. And I didn't drink for a month. And I felt so good that I'd turned the

02:13:56.580 corner. And all of a sudden I was starting to feel like a healthy person, emotionally healthy person.

02:14:00.660 It was a lot of, it's a lot of different things, a lot of different things.

02:14:03.820 How much did other people outside of the therapist, how much did other people contribute to

02:14:09.380 the improvement in your wellbeing? Again, I'm thinking about the tribe, right? Who was your tribe at that

02:14:14.200 point in life? You'd obviously lost a very important member of your tribe. If I'm doing the math

02:14:19.500 correctly, you would go on to lose another important member of the tribe, being your father.

02:14:24.060 So who were the important members of your tribe? And is it necessary that they understand what

02:14:29.660 you've been through, right? So can people who didn't know Tim or who have not been in combat be a

02:14:36.840 part of your healing? So I met someone else and remarried and she had been through some pretty

02:14:44.120 tough things herself. Not combat, obviously, not obviously it could have been, but it wasn't.

02:14:49.760 And there was something about her compassion and understanding that was enormously helpful to me.

02:14:57.140 That was really quite profound. And I mean, the problem with anxiety is it doesn't make sense.

02:15:02.860 You're anxious about something that isn't rational. So being told rationally, you don't have to worry

02:15:09.860 about this. You're not going to get another arterial rupture. It never, it's not going to happen.

02:15:15.180 The anxiety isn't necessarily tied to reality. Well, likewise with depression, like you can be very

02:15:20.440 depressed and the fraternity of other people, the love of other people might not reach you because the

02:15:28.160 nature of depression is that you're at the bottom of the ocean. You can't reach me. I know you're

02:15:33.300 talking to me. I know you love me. I see your lips moving, but you don't understand where I am. You

02:15:38.360 can't reach me here. And one of the biggest things that helps someone in those circumstances, it's

02:15:45.420 feeling needed and feeling useful and being asked to contribute. Like, look, bro, you might be depressed,

02:15:51.520 but we need you to stay in guard duty for a while, or you need to kill that elk, or we need some sandbags.

02:15:58.740 The river's rising. Like you, when people are needed by the group, they click into this thing that

02:16:04.740 actually improves their own psychological state of mind. I mean, the admissions to psych wards in London

02:16:12.260 during the blitz went down, went down during the blitz, during the bombings.

02:16:16.500 As did depression post 9-11. Suicide went down post 9-11.

02:16:21.100 That's right. So the crisis engenders is a kind of call to action, which gets, allows people

02:16:27.460 to buffer themselves from their psychological troubles. And the love of one person sometimes

02:16:35.360 is quite painful to experience because you realize that that person who loves you

02:16:39.640 can't reach you where you are. But being needed is a different thing. And I think ultimately that

02:16:46.340 sense of being necessary might be the ultimate antidote to the experience of depression.

02:16:52.820 I've always been very fascinated by the opioid epidemic. So I was very attuned to how much of a

02:16:58.540 problem it was, you know, years and years ago. And I remember really naively thinking as the pandemic

02:17:06.040 took hold in late March, early April of 2020, I wonder if this is a crisis that will make people

02:17:12.960 better. I wonder if this is a crisis that will improve the collective state of our emotional

02:17:19.200 health in the way that previous crises had. You alluded to them, right? The Great Depression,

02:17:24.680 World War II, 9-11. And of course, the answer turned out to be no. For most people, or at least on

02:17:31.140 average, the answer was not yes, at least as it's been borne out by statistics in terms of

02:17:36.340 the rates of accidental overdoses, which saw an enormous increase, in fact, overtook all other

02:17:44.240 forms of accidental deaths. So it exceeded that of car accidents in the age demographic where car

02:17:51.500 accidents had historically been the leading cause of death. And it wasn't just because people weren't

02:17:56.020 driving, right? It was due to the surge in overdoses. Was I just sort of really naive to think that that

02:18:03.840 could possibly have the opposite effect? Is it obvious to you now? Why? Is it the isolation of

02:18:10.620 the pandemic that is almost assuredly what fueled that? Or why was that not a crisis that did better?

02:18:17.000 I think a couple of reasons. You know, first of all, what we were asked to do to protect the nation

02:18:21.920 was to isolate from each other, right? Because it was a pandemic. And humans in a crisis want to come

02:18:28.460 together, physically come together, like within proximity, physical touching of each other. Like

02:18:33.500 that's what makes people feel safe. And again, that's why children feel safe when they sleep with

02:18:38.020 their parents. They can touch their parents. Like they feel them and that reduces their anxiety and

02:18:42.840 they sleep very deeply, right? And they will get a good night's sleep. And so will the parents if

02:18:46.780 they're not stuck in a dark room. Well, likewise, when you're scared, if you're facing a crisis,

02:18:51.920 the proximity of others, it raises oxytocin levels. It raises testosterone levels of men. It

02:18:58.020 does all kinds of good things that allow the group to deal with the crisis. This was a crisis that did

02:19:03.460 the opposite. It alienated people. It isolated people. And isolation, we know, very often leads

02:19:09.160 to depression. Just ask someone who's done a week in solitary confinement at a federal penitentiary what

02:19:14.260 the effects of isolation are. They'd rather be like electrocuted. They'd rather be taking, have their

02:19:20.000 meals taken away, anything. Then just please don't stick me in a hole by myself. It's the hardest

02:19:25.280 thing for humans. And that's basically what we were asked to do. And understandably, it was a pandemic.

02:19:30.020 But the other thing is that there was no unity of purpose. The political leadership was completely

02:19:36.540 contradictory about what it meant to be a good American. And so on the one hand, you had

02:19:42.300 knowledgeable people saying being a good American means wearing a mask and social distancing and

02:19:47.920 eventually getting your vaccine. Right. And then you had political leadership that was like,

02:19:53.140 no, it actually means not wearing a mask and not social distancing and not getting a vaccine.

02:19:58.100 And so the discordant, contradictory messages from the upper, upper echelons of our society,

02:20:04.520 I think, made people crazy. There was no way to feel like, oh, I'm saving aluminum cans. I'm going to

02:20:12.600 give them to, you know, like once a week, I'm going to take them down to the, you know,

02:20:16.260 the scrap metal drive in my little town because the troops overseas need the metal. Like there was

02:20:20.720 no unity of purpose there because we were being told completely contradictory things by the political

02:20:26.060 leadership. And I suspect, well, it's interesting, right? The depression, there wasn't an external enemy

02:20:33.260 in the way that there was in World War II or post 9-11. And yet that unity could still exist,

02:20:39.600 suggesting that even an infectious agent, though not an enemy per se, it's hard to be angry at a virus.

02:20:46.520 If handled correctly, potentially could have been more, at least less damaging. I don't want to say

02:20:51.200 more unifying given the isolation requirements at the time, but could have been less destructive,

02:20:56.440 I suppose. Had Donald Trump come out and said, it's your patriotic duty to wear a mask and a social

02:21:02.100 distance. And you know what, if you get the vaccine, I know maybe you're worried about it. Maybe

02:21:07.440 you're scared of it. If you get the vaccine, you're a damn hero to this country. You know what I mean? 1.00

02:21:13.580 Most of the country would have done it. And unfortunately, I don't know what his calculus

02:21:18.360 was, but unfortunately he didn't choose to do that, even though he sort of mumbled at one point

02:21:23.120 that you should wear a mask and he got himself a vaccine, right? And I'm sure the whole White House

02:21:26.700 staff did, as did all Fox News and all of CNN, you know, like everybody got the vaccine.

02:21:31.980 But the split messaging from that side of the American political environment was enormously

02:21:39.420 confusing. I mean, I happen to be a Democrat. I enormously respect elements of the conservative

02:21:45.800 political ideal. I get it. I don't share it, but I get it. I respect it. That kind of thing was

02:21:50.880 really, I found incredibly selfish and unbelievably anti-American and unpatriotic for the Trump

02:21:57.180 administration to engage in that stuff. Not to make this a political question,

02:22:01.460 although it sounds like it coming on the heels of that, we're literally on the heels of the withdrawal

02:22:06.340 from Afghanistan. I just mentioned, I came back from a hunt and a number of the guys I hunt with

02:22:10.460 are former special forces guys. And a lot of the time around the camp was kind of talking about

02:22:16.800 their experiences in Afghanistan and their views on the U.S. withdrawal. I've received a number of

02:22:23.420 questions from people on social media who knew I was going to be interviewing you, wanting your

02:22:27.300 thoughts on the manner of the withdrawal and whether it was necessary at all in the first place.

02:22:34.240 So, for example, a lot of the SEALs I spoke with were adamant that this was not something that

02:22:38.800 should have happened, right? That this was no longer actually a war. It was really more of a

02:22:43.700 peacekeeping operation and 5,000 troops could have stayed there indefinitely and kept the Taliban at

02:22:51.460 bay and still would have been a fraction of the number of troops that we have in Germany, for example,

02:22:56.340 or South Korea or any number of the geographies of our allies. What are your thoughts on that?

02:23:03.260 I would agree with your friends who said that. I mean, there's 40,000 cops in New York City.

02:23:08.320 I think when we finally withdrew the last troops, it was down to a couple of thousand, 2,500?

02:23:16.340 Yeah, 2,500 U.S. And then including NATO, you can round up a bit, maybe call it 5,000, I think is

02:23:21.980 what I have read. So their ability to carry out targeted strikes, to carry out airstrikes,

02:23:29.360 just the sort of safety tripwire of American forces in Afghanistan would have essentially guaranteed

02:23:35.660 that the Taliban could not overrun the rest of the country. And at minimal cost in lives and 0.78

02:23:41.020 treasure, the Taliban had not attacked American forces since February of 2020.

02:23:47.700 Right. Not a single American casualty since.

02:23:50.040 Right. Now, maybe that's because they knew that the Trump administration had negotiated a withdrawal

02:23:57.480 and they knew we don't want to mess this up or just sit tight. So they, I mean, it's possible.

02:24:01.860 I don't know. Maybe if we decided to stay, it would have changed. But I think we could have

02:24:05.920 maintained troops there at minimal costs to this nation and at enormous benefit to the Afghan people.

02:24:13.320 Our big error there, in my opinion, I wrote a piece for Vanity Fair about this recently,

02:24:18.020 a few weeks ago. The reason the Taliban were allowed in by the Afghan populace was that they

02:24:23.180 promised to clean up corruption. And they pretty much did. Abuse at the police checkpoints where you

02:24:28.600 have to bribe the policemen to get through with your family. Every time you file a piece of paper

02:24:33.940 with the government, you've got to bribe the clerk. That's, you know, whatever. That kind of awful,

02:24:39.580 endemic corruption that makes the lives of ordinary Afghans, ordinary people absolutely miserable

02:24:46.500 and enriches at the top of the food chain, makes these, you know, warlords and government 0.60

02:24:52.640 ministers like obscenely wealthy. The Taliban clean that up. And our big mistake was that

02:25:00.660 we stood up a government in Afghanistan that was incredibly corrupt. We never insisted on

02:25:07.500 any kind of accountability for the money we pumped in there. We pumped money in that we knew was going

02:25:14.460 to these warlords, just enriching them to govern a corrupt governors and all that.

02:25:18.240 It was an enormously abusive system. And we didn't care. And we gave them the kind of government that

02:25:25.440 Afghans don't want and that Afghan soldiers, understandably, are not willing to die for. 0.99

02:25:29.560 We did it to ourselves. We didn't need to do that. We could have insisted on some accountability,

02:25:33.980 but we didn't do it. And it wasn't the military. It was the State Department that was not interested

02:25:38.840 in pursuing. The military would have done whatever they were ordered. And if the orders came down,

02:25:43.480 look, you got to track every penny and make sure it's not getting abused, the military would have

02:25:49.000 done that as much as they were capable of. So it's tragic that that happens. And in the end,

02:25:55.920 if we weren't going to insist on a decent government, what's the point of staying forever anyway?

02:26:02.420 You can't ask anyone to die for a corrupt system. And that's what we would have been asking American

02:26:08.820 soldiers to do, which begs the question, why did we allow a corrupt system to blossom under our watch 0.93

02:26:16.360 when we had held all the trump cards and could have forced that government to actually act ethically?

02:26:23.740 Why do you think we didn't?

02:26:25.260 I don't know. I brought it up with John Kerry in 2010. He asked for a meeting with me and the war

02:26:30.680 wasn't going well. And I was like, the war is never going to go well until you address the 0.92

02:26:35.160 corruption issue because Afghans are never going to fight for this government you've given them. 0.99

02:26:39.000 And he was like, well, we can't do that. You know, like we have no leverage here. I was like,

02:26:42.340 what are you talking about? Threatened to leave Afghanistan. Like the last time the Taliban took

02:26:46.640 over, they hung the president Najibullah from a street lamp for corruption. Every corrupt government

02:26:52.220 minister knows that if we pull out, they're all hanging from street lamps. You have a huge amount

02:26:56.720 of leverage. And they just, they wouldn't do it. It was too much of a hassle.

02:27:01.840 I can't believe we haven't even talked about your last book. I feel like we need

02:27:05.080 to spend a few minutes on it because I find it just fascinating. So yet I hate doing forced,

02:27:12.380 rushed, quick stuff. So we'll take as much time as you want to take. Tell me when you took this

02:27:17.120 journey. So I walked along the railroad lines from Washington DC to Philadelphia to Pittsburgh.

02:27:22.720 We were basically, we called it high-speed vagrancy. Railroad lines are this kind of

02:27:27.600 swath of no man's land that goes right through America, right? Right through the ghettos and the 1.00

02:27:33.220 suburbs and the farms and the industries and the junkyards and everything. And it's no man's land.

02:27:39.280 And you can do whatever you want. And as long as the cops don't catch you. And so we had this

02:27:43.480 interesting 400 mile game of hide and seek with the cops. And we were sleeping under bridges and

02:27:48.440 abandoned buildings and getting our water out of creeks. And most nights, as I say in my book,

02:27:54.520 most nights, we were the only people who knew where we were. And there's many definitions of freedom,

02:28:00.080 but surely that's one of them. So that was eight years ago that I did that trip with three other

02:28:06.480 guys that had been in a lot of combat. And then later, a few years ago, I decided I wanted to

02:28:11.400 write a book about freedom. And for me, the word freedom, the thing I wanted to understand about it

02:28:16.020 is that we're the only species where a smaller individual or a smaller group can outfight a larger

02:28:23.420 individual or a larger group. And when you talk about freedom, basically, it means an underdog group

02:28:29.640 maintaining their autonomy in the face of a greater power. How does that work? I mean,

02:28:35.440 the Montenegrins in the early 1600s were outnumbered 12 to one when the Ottoman Empire invaded their

02:28:42.460 mountain domain. Outnumbered 12 to one. And every time the Ottomans came in, the Montenegrins destroyed 1.00

02:28:50.440 them, right? There's no mammal where that could be true of, only humans. And so I organized my thoughts

02:28:59.780 into three sections in my book, run, fight, and think. And those are basically the three ways that

02:29:05.300 humans maintain their autonomy. They outrun their oppressors if they can't, like the Apache did.

02:29:10.460 The Apache remained autonomous for centuries while their sedentary, wealthy, or Pueblo neighbors got 1.00

02:29:17.640 rolled by the Spanish immediately. The Apache remained free, some elements of them, until 1886. 0.80

02:29:23.880 That's almost, almost within my grandmother's lifetime. They did that by being mobile. If you

02:29:29.800 can't outrun your oppressor, you're going to have to outfight them. And the ability of small human

02:29:35.880 groups to defeat on the battlefield, much more powerful adversaries like the Taliban defeated the

02:29:42.620 United States. And the Russians before us, and the English before that, is unique to the human

02:29:49.680 species. And I looked at MMA and some of the individual martial arts to look at the dynamics

02:29:56.180 of combat to understand how smaller individuals can also defeat larger ones. One of the reasons that

02:30:01.620 happens is that big muscles require a lot of oxygen. And if you throw 20 punches in a row and you're a big

02:30:07.520 guy and you don't connect, you're out of breath at the end of that. And small muscles, small frames

02:30:13.820 use less oxygen and are more reactive and more efficient. As a smaller fighter, if you can slip 20

02:30:19.260 punches, you're not in oxygen debt. The big guy is, right? And that's essentially what the Taliban did 0.80

02:30:26.500 with the U.S. on a sort of macro scale. Massive armies go through enormous amount of resources that

02:30:32.480 insurgencies don't. And after 20 years, we basically ran out of resources and the will

02:30:37.340 to spend them. But the final chapter is called Think. And it's about how you maintain your autonomy

02:30:44.120 within your society. So the first thing you have to do is repel the enemy, outrun or outfight the

02:30:50.860 enemy. But the problem in human history is that a community, a society that's well enough organized

02:30:57.700 to outfight an enemy is well enough organized to oppress their own people. So fascist dictators

02:31:05.620 throughout history, totalitarian states, they are very militaristic societies that are well armed to

02:31:12.880 repel invaders. But they also use that military organization to oppress their own society and control 0.51

02:31:19.980 it. And so I look at how societies can maintain their freedom from within, from an oppressor that

02:31:29.060 is of their own people, an oppressive leader. And I looked at the labor movement in America around 100

02:31:36.640 years ago. And the brilliance of the human species is that we can outthink more powerful entities. And the

02:31:45.580 labor movement was able to eventually get their way in the face of the National Guard with fixed

02:31:51.720 bayonets and the entire U.S. government. They eventually got their way. And in terms of fair

02:31:58.120 pay and fair work hours, fair work conditions. And the tipping point often is having, well, first of all,

02:32:04.160 you need selfless leaders. You need leaders. If you're going to overthrow the British in Dublin,

02:32:08.800 in Ireland in 1916, if you're going to confront the U.S. government as a labor union, as a labor

02:32:15.260 uprising, you're going to need leaders who are willing to die for the cause. They cannot tell

02:32:21.140 everyone else to rush the machine guns while they stay hiding behind the sandbags. If you don't have

02:32:25.800 leaders that are willing to die, you will, as an underdog group, you will not win. But likewise,

02:32:31.260 you need women. Social movements like that, political movements, insurgencies that don't incorporate 1.00

02:32:36.860 women into their power structure and into their strategy and their tactics will probably not 1.00

02:32:42.860 succeed. And so I looked at the, again, at the mill strikes in America and the turning point came

02:32:48.540 when the strikers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, started putting women on the front lines to confront 1.00

02:32:54.340 the National Guard soldiers with fixed bayonets. And the soldiers didn't know what to do. They were

02:32:59.880 not willing to bayonet women. They had mothers, they had sisters, they had wives, they weren't willing 1.00

02:33:04.740 to do it. And whereas killing men is morally much less of a problem, even for totalitarian regimes and

02:33:12.420 certainly for democracies. So when you put women into the equation, the police don't quite know what 0.99

02:33:18.120 to do. As one frustrated policeman said at the time, he said, one cop can handle 10 men, but it takes

02:33:25.700 10 cops to handle one woman. And that was the beginning of the end for the resistance to these

02:33:32.820 crucial changes that came to the textile industry in, you know, 1912, 1914.

02:33:38.780 Did the Taliban ever use women? Obviously they're, from a Sharia law standpoint, not exactly

02:33:43.580 sensitive to women, but did they ever use women in the true sense of the word use for their gains?

02:33:50.700 No. And, you know, here's the thing is that on the battlefield, particularly at the distances

02:33:54.720 that are typical of modern combat, I mean, you know, automatic weapons easily fire two, three,

02:33:59.760 four hundred meters. You don't see the faces of the people you're fighting. You certainly don't

02:34:04.100 know what sex they are. You don't. Women's capabilities really come to the fore in the 1.00

02:34:10.260 kinds of insurgencies that they had, for example, for the Battle of Algiers when the French were

02:34:14.180 occupying Algiers in Morocco in the 1950s and 1960s. So or the mill strikes in Massachusetts,

02:34:20.420 women have lateral networks. They're not good at top down hierarchies. Men are good at top 1.00

02:34:26.180 down hierarchies. And the top guy says, all right, now we're going to charge the machine

02:34:29.500 guns and men will do it. Right. And women's their forte is not that so much as lateral egalitarian 1.00

02:34:35.880 networks. They're unranked, but they're lateral. And it's very hard for information, the intelligence

02:34:41.720 agencies to penetrate those networks. Basically, an insurgency depends on the society from which

02:34:48.480 it springs to fight. Right.

02:34:50.500 So the Taliban are exclusively male fighters. But if they are not part of a society that incorporates

02:34:56.860 women and women are absolutely crucial to any functioning society, if you don't incorporate 1.00

02:35:01.760 that, it's not going to go very far. And, you know, the Easter Rising in Ireland is another

02:35:06.340 excellent example of that. If you literally have women on the front lines, it doesn't matter 1.00

02:35:11.140 so much in open combat because a lot of it's spray and pray tactics anyway. You're just unloading

02:35:17.020 a belted machine gun. When you're operating in a situation like the mill strikes in Lawrence,

02:35:22.720 these are society face to face with itself. And there is some public accountability to murdering

02:35:27.280 women with bayonets. Given now that the Taliban will likely be carrying out their actions and 0.96

02:35:32.180 not at 400 meters, what do you think is going to be the natural history of how things go in Afghanistan?

02:35:40.020 Well, you know, it takes a very different temperament, a very different mindset to be a successful

02:35:44.460 insurgency than to run a run a government. Right. Completely different mindsets. And

02:35:49.380 I think I mentioned I heard that the Taliban fighters are now bored. Right. I mean, they missed

02:35:53.760 the war. Right. So the Taliban are brilliant insurgency, brilliant strategic thinkers.

02:35:59.620 They outfought the most powerful military ever in human history. I'd fought them. They outlasted

02:36:04.580 them. They outlasted our will to fight. Now they have to run Afghanistan. It's twice the population 1.00

02:36:10.480 it was in 1996 when I saw them take power back then. The cities have been modernized.

02:36:16.360 A generation of Afghans have received education. Afghan girls have received an education.

02:36:21.580 They're going to find Afghanistan to be an unwieldy mess that is very, very hard to run and run 1.00

02:36:27.880 according to Sharia law. So I don't know what the future holds, but I imagine that there's going to 1.00

02:36:33.460 be some fracturing within the Taliban, really hardcore, ultra sort of like conservative

02:36:38.840 elements falling out with more moderate elements that want engagement with the West. I imagine that

02:36:45.400 kind of fracturing will happen. The Tajik resistance is organizing itself in Massoud's old territory in

02:36:53.100 Barakshan and the northeast quadrant of the country. If they don't abide by some basic international 0.71

02:36:58.920 human rights norms, they're going to have a very, very hard time accessing international donations,

02:37:04.780 international monetary systems, international relief efforts, and recognition by foreign governments.

02:37:10.820 I mean, they're going to have a tough time. Do you really think that's true? I mean,

02:37:14.320 that might be true of Western governments. Do you think China will care especially?

02:37:18.440 I mean, some of them might not, but the West is important. The original Taliban was recognized by

02:37:23.600 the UAE, Pakistan, and one other country. I can't remember. Saudi, maybe? I can't remember.

02:37:29.580 There's $8 billion of Afghan money is sitting in New York banks and I think will not be released

02:37:34.820 without some kind of legitimacy to the Afghan government. The Taliban have a world of hurt

02:37:41.080 ahead of them. They might make it work, but it's not going to be the simple prospect that it was in

02:37:46.440 1996 when all these cities were rubble and the population was half this size and no one had cell

02:37:53.240 phones and whatever else. They're going to have a tough hill to climb.

02:37:56.700 How long did it take you to go on your journey, your walk?

02:38:01.560 We walked off and on for a year and then I kept doing it a little bit after that from time to time

02:38:07.140 with one or two buddies. We called it The Last Patrol.

02:38:11.020 Was it HBO that did the... Where does that documentary appear?

02:38:14.740 Yeah. I brought a videographer who quickly became part of the group and The Last Patrol was aired on

02:38:21.300 HBO in 2015, I think. But after we stopped shooting, some of us kept going back out there. I really liked

02:38:27.340 it out there on the railroad lines.

02:38:28.500 When did you know you were done?

02:38:30.940 I was headed for a place called Jumonville Glen, where the French and Indian Wars basically started.

02:38:36.360 A young George Washington in 1754 led an expedition, a small expedition against a French force,

02:38:42.540 reconnaissance force. And his sort of native tracker and scout, Seneca named Tanagrisson,

02:38:49.040 known as the Half King, he precipitated a massacre of some of the French soldiers who surrendered

02:38:53.700 to Washington. And that triggered a reaction by the Brits, which went into the French and Indian 1.00

02:38:59.320 War, which eventually set the terms for the Revolutionary War. Without the British winning

02:39:04.480 the French and Indian War, the Seven Years' War, America might not have dared throw off British 0.99

02:39:08.760 rule with France right on their border. So it's an iconic place that very few people have heard of,

02:39:15.140 and it's right outside of Connellsville, Pennsylvania, western Pennsylvania. And I wanted to

02:39:19.040 end there. I wanted to sneak into Jumonville Glen. It's in the woods, deep in the woods.

02:39:23.700 So I wanted to sneak in there and sleep there, thinking that the last people that slept there

02:39:28.180 under this little cliff, the last people that slept there might have been the French forces under

02:39:33.940 Jumonville in 1754. And I wanted to get out of there before the park, you know, it's a national

02:39:40.800 historical site. And before the park guards showed up, you know, I sneak out of there before dawn. I

02:39:45.580 wanted to do that. And we got to Connellsville. It was a very hot day. And I'd sort of shredded my feet.

02:39:51.080 It was 100 degrees during the day. And when it's that hot, we're carrying a lot of weight. And we're

02:39:55.520 moving 10, 20 miles a day. We're carrying 60, 70 pounds on our backs. And we're sweating an awful

02:40:01.480 lot. And basically, your bottoms of your feet kind of turned to oatmeal, basically. And my feet were

02:40:06.620 bleeding. I was in enormous amount of pain. And we got to Connellsville. And Connellsville is very,

02:40:10.060 very poor. As one lady said, so poor that when it gets hot, they don't even have pools in their

02:40:15.880 backyard. They just swim in the river that runs through the middle of the city. And it's an old

02:40:21.280 industrial town. And indeed, there was Connellsville swimming at the end of the day during the scorcher

02:40:26.980 of a summer day, taking the heat off. And we got there. We stumbled, limped to the cobble of the

02:40:33.640 beach along the Yokogany River and took off our boots and our shirt and staggered into the water.

02:40:39.640 And I came back. I sat down and the dog was exhausted and the men were exhausted and I could

02:40:45.100 barely walk. We had another, we were going to sleep somewhere in downtown Connellsville. We're

02:40:49.860 going to try to hide from the police somewhere and sleep along the river and then keep moving

02:40:53.800 in the morning. And we had 15 miles to go to get to Jumaulville Glen. And I looked around at the guys

02:40:59.620 and, you know, I was in the middle of getting divorced. And I was like, I was like, you know what?

02:41:04.960 The trip just ended. We don't need to go to Jumaulville. It's over. We're done.

02:41:09.400 We got what we needed out of this. It's time to go home and face our, all of us go home and face

02:41:13.020 our lives, which is what we did. So I recognized the ending when it came to me. I didn't know. I

02:41:18.960 didn't even, I didn't wake up in the morning thinking that. I knew it in the moment. And I

02:41:23.080 think one of the great things to work on is to know in the moment when things are over.

02:41:30.880 Trips, relationships, anything. When it's over, you got to know it's over. And if you don't,

02:41:36.740 God help you.

02:41:37.960 I mean, I hate asking a glib question because I agree with that wholeheartedly, right? I mean,

02:41:43.640 knowing when to quit is an amazing gift. What are some of the signs? How do you know when it's time?

02:41:50.660 Because it's, it's not always obvious in the moment.

02:41:53.840 No, it's not. You got to feel it. It's got to be a feeling. Your, your instincts,

02:41:57.940 your feelings don't lie, you know? And if you just suddenly

02:42:00.740 get the feeling that you were doing something because you think you're supposed to,

02:42:06.120 you're supposed to stay married. You're supposed to go walk all the way to Jumon,

02:42:10.200 Jumonville Glen on bleeding feet. Like if you think you're supposed to, because it's embarrassing not to,

02:42:16.900 that's not the right reason. And I don't know how to articulate it more than that. Like you got to,

02:42:23.140 you got to feel it. Like sometimes you get an instinctive sense not to trust somebody.

02:42:27.120 That's a feeling. It's not knowledge. It's feeling. And those instincts serve us very,

02:42:31.840 very well. And you got to pay attention to them. And I felt it. I was like, okay,

02:42:37.220 why exactly are you going to Jumonville Glen? Oh, because you thought that would be a cool ending

02:42:41.920 for your project, your little project, you know, like, oh, the symbolism of it. You don't do things

02:42:46.840 for symbolism. You don't do things because they're a good ending. You got to feel what you need and

02:42:52.620 what's right and what's good. And I felt it come right up to the ground into me.

02:42:57.420 I was like, look at the dog. Look at the men. We're all broken. Like you don't. Yeah. Can

02:43:02.260 we do it physically? Yeah, we can do anything. We'll crawl there if we have to. We could do it.

02:43:06.860 I was with some tough guys, you know, like, yeah, we could do it. But why? Why are we doing it? If

02:43:11.560 you can't answer that question very readily with conviction and with some feeling in your chest,

02:43:17.340 if you can't answer it, don't do it. Did the guys put up an argument?

02:43:22.620 No. Everyone was thrilled. We knew. We all knew. Do you think that they simultaneously knew or do you

02:43:31.200 think that they had come to that conclusion earlier and didn't want to speak up?

02:43:34.040 Uh, I think I somehow convinced them that I knew what I was doing and they kind of trusted my

02:43:40.560 decisions. And, you know, I might've just had a rebellion on my hands. I don't know. But

02:43:46.200 I mean, we got shot at in Pennsylvania. So we started shooting at us just because they didn't

02:43:51.340 like the looks of us. You know, we, we, we were hungry. We were cold. We walked through the winter.

02:43:56.200 How did you guys feed yourself? We'd walk into town and buy some food and keep walking out the

02:43:59.860 other side and go back out onto the lines. And we smoked a little tobacco out there and, you know,

02:44:04.880 we, there's stuff we needed from town. We'd stop, we'd go in, we'd look like hell.

02:44:08.540 We'd look homeless. Basically we looked like sort of high speed homeless. Right. And then we'd keep

02:44:12.580 going. And so a lot of stuff, you know, the cops were looking at for us with a helicopter,

02:44:16.420 like all kinds of weird, crazy stuff happened. And we were a unit, right? We, I mean, we were

02:44:20.720 brothers, like we were connected. And so when that moment came by the Yucca Gaini river, I think we

02:44:25.840 all felt it. And it was the obvious, it was the obvious thing to do. You think back over the last

02:44:30.600 250 years of American civilization or nearly 250 years, I guess, as a society, when during that arc

02:44:38.660 were we most free? Depends how you define freedom.

02:44:42.840 I'll let you define it because I feel you're, you're in a better position to do so than I am.

02:44:47.260 Politically we're the most free now. Obviously the initial democratic endeavor with the constitution

02:44:55.620 and the bill of rights forgot to include black people, outrageous transgression. That's not a

02:45:02.220 free society. Politically, you know, by the time you get to the civil rights movement, suffrage,

02:45:07.580 and then the civil rights movement, the labor movement, by the time you start getting into the

02:45:11.540 1970s, 1980s, you're starting to get something at least approaching some political freedom.

02:45:18.580 Economic freedom is a different matter. And if you have a society where the income gap is too wide

02:45:25.600 between rich and poor, it's hard to argue it's a completely free society. People can be held in sort

02:45:32.280 of a voluntary bondage of having to work three jobs because we all know that story, right? I mean like

02:45:38.520 that's not a free society. But then following on from that, if you can't freely make choices that are

02:45:46.760 good for you, you're not free. And if you are addicted to something, you're not entirely free.

02:45:54.940 And we live in a massively addicted society, addicted to substances, addicted to visual stimuli

02:46:01.980 from television or iPhones. We are not free people in that sense. And I don't know which is worse,

02:46:08.700 the inability to vote or the inability to look up from your iPhone, which is a greater form of

02:46:16.020 oppression, which corrodes your human dignity more. I don't know. It's an open question. What I will say

02:46:23.260 is that I had the good fortune to interview a man who had spent some decades in prison for doing

02:46:29.800 an extremely bad thing from a very brutal, diminished situation in his family and his society. And

02:46:38.840 it had the predictable results of violence and crime. And he killed somebody and he paid the price

02:46:45.460 for it. And he spent almost 30 years in prison, educating himself. He found God. I'm an atheist,

02:46:51.900 but I completely respect someone who finds God. And he straightened himself out and he was let out

02:46:57.340 on good behavior. And I was able to interview this man a week after a couple of weeks after he was let

02:47:02.460 out of prison after 25 some whatever years. At the end of the interview, I said, I feel, I said,

02:47:10.780 I feel silly asking this, but is it possible to be more free in prison than outside of prison?

02:47:15.460 And he looked at me like I was crazy. He said, yeah, of course it is. Are you kidding? He said,

02:47:20.860 you can't be a drug addict in prison. You don't have an iPhone. You can't be all distracted.

02:47:26.380 You look at people walking around. They're not free. They're all chained to something. He said,

02:47:31.900 if you're in prison, you got nothing but time. And eventually, eventually you're going to have an

02:47:37.380 honest conversation with yourself about who you really are and what you're doing in there.

02:47:42.480 And when you have that conversation with yourself, you're a free man no matter where you are.

02:47:48.460 And there's a lot of people on the outside. And by that, he means outside of prison. There's a lot

02:47:52.280 of people on the outside who never get around to having that conversation with themselves.

02:47:56.500 So I don't think you can pin down an era. I would say our freedom right now is, in a historical context,

02:48:04.660 is breathtaking in its depth, but with some very, very serious worrisome caveats, some very

02:48:12.160 worrisome footnotes to that. Among them, economic inequality. I mean, that's going to bring us down.

02:48:19.360 Boy, the point of view of that guy, having just got out of prison, is staggering. And I think that

02:48:25.700 the insight is profound. I mean, if you can't look at yourself, if you can't examine who you are,

02:48:33.920 if you're too distracted by the trappings of fill in the blank, how free are you?

02:48:42.460 Where do you come out on the guy you came across when you were doing the patrol who basically had,

02:48:51.980 if I recall, he had a shovel tied around his belt and a few other possessions. Basically,

02:48:57.420 everything he owned was with him. And you asked the question, is he the freest guy you've seen

02:49:03.440 or the least free? Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't have an answer for that. I mean,

02:49:09.560 material possessions give you a kind of freedom in the sense that you're not living a survival level

02:49:16.080 marginal existence, but they require work. You know, do you want to have freedom of maneuver?

02:49:22.660 Do you want to be able to be mobile? Do you want to have temporal freedom where your time is your own?

02:49:29.480 Do you want to have economic freedom where you have a whole ton of money and you can make

02:49:33.180 choices? I'm going to stay at that hotel. I'm going to go to do this. I'm going to do that.

02:49:38.340 You know, like there's no form of freedom where you have it all. And so that guy,

02:49:43.880 we didn't talk to him. I just got a glimpse of him. But, you know, he had all of his possessions

02:49:47.640 tied to the blade of a shovel, a snow shovel. And the snow shovel, the handle was tied to the back

02:49:52.420 of his pants. And he was walking along, sledding all of his belongings behind him. And, you know,

02:49:57.880 clearly didn't have a job to go do in the morning and clearly was living out of dumpsters and

02:50:02.600 whatever else. So, yeah. Is he free? Is he the ultimate free person or the ultimate oppressed

02:50:07.180 person? I don't know. I mean, I don't offer answers, but some of the questions are interesting.

02:50:11.460 And, you know, I will say, you know, and I might sort of end on this because I have to get going

02:50:17.660 to pick up my kids. But sedentary society started about 10,000 years ago when we humans started to

02:50:23.160 cultivate wild grains in Mesopotamia. And what that allowed for an accumulation of wealth and it allowed

02:50:30.400 for social hierarchies, right? The development of class, leaders and led, rulers and serfs.

02:50:37.420 The advantage of that system is that you could feed a 40,000 man army and defend yourselves and

02:50:42.840 your riches very, very easily, right? Nothing's going to overrun the city of Ur. I mean, huge,

02:50:49.380 massive walls, massive army. The disadvantage is that most people spent most of their day working

02:50:55.580 and working for the pharaoh, right? I mean, metaphorically speaking, you know, working for

02:51:00.400 their ruler. And so the nomads of that era were materially poor like the Apache were, 1.00

02:51:08.640 but their time was their own. They were completely mobile and it was an egalitarian society. It's hard

02:51:17.400 to oppress people. They can put everything they own on the back of a horse and leave in the middle of the

02:51:21.960 night, right? Hard to do. So nomadic peoples have typically been materially poor and very,

02:51:29.320 very autonomous and very egalitarian. And I will say that for a lot of human history,

02:51:36.780 wealthy, sedentary people have romanticized mobile nomadic peoples, have romanticized those lives

02:51:43.820 precisely because it looks and is so free. Even in this society, we romanticize outlaws and

02:51:51.480 motorcycle gangs and all those groups that we would never, most of us never want to be part of,

02:51:56.700 but it's enormously romanticized because they're mobile and they're fairly egalitarian. And that's

02:52:02.500 exactly what nomads were for 10,000 years and still are. And there's a very revealing quote from a group,

02:52:09.760 a song from a group of nomads called the Yomut in Northern Iran, the vast grand grasslands around the

02:52:18.100 Caspian Sea. And the Yomut were a tribal, mobile, pastoral, nomadic society, very warlike. 0.92

02:52:27.980 And they said of their sedentary, wealthy, sedentary neighbors, they said,

02:52:33.680 I am Yomut. I do not have a mill with willow trees. In other words, I'm not a farmer.

02:52:40.560 I do not have a mill with willow trees. I have a horse and court. I will kill you and go.

02:52:49.400 Ultimate arrogance and pride of a nomadic, a warlike nomadic person. And so what I would say 1.00

02:52:57.780 is that the enormous wealth and sedentary nature of Western society has enabled us to do astounding

02:53:05.100 things. Scientifically, technologically, it's allowed for the rise of democracy and rule of law

02:53:11.100 and the medicine that saved my life. Like the list is endless. But we're not the Yomuts, right? There 1.00

02:53:18.460 is something inherent, something important to human dignity that takes place in a society that is mobile

02:53:25.940 and entirely governing of its own circumstances and more or less egalitarian. There is something

02:53:32.840 essential to human dignity that happens in those societies that has trouble happening in this

02:53:39.220 wealthy, wealthy, amazing industrial society that we live in. And we're not going to go back to being

02:53:45.720 nomads, but it might help just to take note, take note of those qualities and maybe instill some of

02:53:51.880 them where we can into our own society. Sebastian, I want to thank you for taking a lot of your time

02:53:58.300 out to sit down today and also for sharing so much of what is both personal and painful on your journey

02:54:04.880 of learning and writing. So thank you. And I wish you a continued speedy recovery and offline. I'd like

02:54:10.620 to talk to you a little bit about some of this stuff as well. Oh, well, thank you. I look forward

02:54:15.140 to the conversation. Thank you for having me. That was a wonderful, wonderful conversation. And I feel

02:54:20.640 like I left virtually nothing unset. So thank you for giving me that opportunity. Thank you, Sebastian.

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The Peter Attia Drive - February 14, 2022

#195 - Freedom, PTSD, war, and life through an evolutionary lens ｜ Sebastian Junger

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