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Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris
show where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to
tease out the habits, routines, favorite books and so on that you can apply and test in your own
lives. This episode is a two for one and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year
anniversary which is insane to think about and past one billion downloads. To celebrate I've curated
some of the best of the best. Some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade.
I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes and internally we've been
calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to yes enjoy the household
names the super famous folks but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.
Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one.
We went to great pains to put these pairings together and for the bios of all guests you can find
that and more at Tim.log slash combo and now without further ado. So what I find the best leaders
they have this ability to balance all those opposing forces and usually when you do find a problem
if you realize that your leadership isn't working generally you can look and say oh I'm going too far
in one direction on this particular force this dichotomy leadership I'm going too far and being
overbearing on micromanaging you know micromanage is a great one right you can obviously micromanage
your people they won't do anything on their own they won't take any initiative and that's horrible.
The other end is you cannot give them the guidance that they need and not pay close enough attention
to them and now they don't know what the mission is or what they're doing. So there's all these
dichotomies that you have to balance as a leader and and their see through you can see through the
floors and you can see it's complex environment. We come up and we all get on this platform
on this level and everybody freezes and I'm kind of waiting and I'm a new guy so you know I don't
feel like I should be doing anything but then I said to myself you know somebody's got to do something
so I just what's called high-ported my guns I just lifted my gun up towards the air like I'm not
I'm not a shooter right now and I took one step back off the line and I looked around and I saw
what the picture was and I just said you know hold left move right and everybody heard it and they
did it and I said to myself hmm that's what you need to do and so I realized that detaching yourself
from the situation so you could observe it so that you can see what's happening is absolutely
critical and now you know when I talk to executives or mid-level managers I explain to them that I'm
doing that all the time I it sounds horrible but it's almost like sometimes I'm not a participant in
my own life I'm an observer of that guy that's doing it so if I'm having a conversation with you
and you know we're trying to discuss a point and I'm watching and saying wait are you being too
emotional right now or you know are wait a second look at him I'm not reading you correctly if
I'm seeing you through my own emotion or ego I can't really see what you're thinking but if I
step out of that I can see the real you and if you are getting angry if your ego is getting hurt
if you're about to cave because you're just fed up with me whereas if I'm you know raging in
my own head I might miss all of that and so that detachment that takes place as a leader is critical
and you're 100% right on that how do you instill that or try to teach that is that something people
so I feel like that maybe more than the humility seems to be a coachable skill part of the reason I
say that is because I've found that whether it's like cognitive behavioral therapy or stoic philosophy
for that matter you can in small increments condition people to have less of an extreme emotional
response and to try to observe themselves and I suppose that there's some who just thought that
would six weeks prior to this so don't like a ropes course or it was a climbing ship and the guy
above him fell and broke his neck hot and so this guy who had been in a remodeling with me and
you know did an outstanding job and amazing effort and was brave to a fault you know we're lucky
he's here so the landlord for training takes place and he comes out and I said hey just come out
and watch with me and so he comes out and you know we're watching and we're out on one of these
field training exercises so all this mayhem starts and there's bad guys up in the hills and there's
bombs going off and there's smoke everywhere but from our position which we were standing next to
the guys that were in it and he looks at me and he says you know it's so easy when you're not in it
and I said this is how it was for me when we went through I was up here and he was like a light bulb
went off you know he said I saw you he kind of saw me like that and said how does he know what's
happening right so the ability easy in so much is when you're the outsider looking in you can see
what to do what's going wrong exactly and when you did it you were not necessarily physically
removing yourself but the metrics that were being used were sort of not a smoke screen but they were
at best the wrong metrics I had that book next to my bed in Ramadi and I literally read it every night
I would you know that's how I'd falsely but go up read a couple pages you know just open
and you find something in every it was very comparable you know they were working with the
the South Vietnamese army and guess what they were corrupt and they were scared and they weren't
the best soldiers and we were working with their raccoons and guess what they were corrupt and
they were scared and they weren't the best there was so many parallels between the two so that's
the book that I've given to a couple close friends of mine that I wanted them to have about face
the other book that I've read multiple times is Blood Meridian blood Meridian yeah I don't know that
you know okay so it's written by Corn Mackenzie oh fantastic writer so this is his best book
and you know I was an English major in college and so you know I was forced to read all kinds of
books and you know obviously Shakespeare is kind of the pinnacle in my mind and Corn Mackenzie is
the guy that I think actually has that and if you read Blood Meridian then there it is right and I
think what what I find so gripping about it is you know I talked earlier about the darkness of the
world and this is a historical novel based on a group called the Glanton gang that were killing
Indians and they ended up killing everybody if you had black hair your scalp was going to be taken
and that's what it's about and it's completely epic but for me it communicated to me a guy
Corn Mackenzie was able to show the darkness in humanity and there's nothing pleasant in any
way shape or form in that book but that's in many ways the world that I lived in what would you
put on a billboard if you had a if you get a one billboard anywhere what would you put on it
or one of my kind of I guess my mantra is a very simple one and that's discipline equals freedom
I've found that as an individual hey you four go take down that building and they knew what to do
because they were highly disciplined I knew what they were going to do because they were highly
disciplined we understood what parameters they were going to stay within because we had standard
operating procedures to follow so that discipline both on an individual level and as a group
equals freedom and just like anything else with leadership you can take that too far you can
discipline an element or a person so much that they break down and they no longer have creativity
so just like the dichotomy of leadership you can go too strong with discipline and they end up
breaking down or you can give them too much freedom and they break down in the other direction
I'm really glad that you mentioned that because I I've realized in a way that my when I struggle
the most kind of existentially or really just creatively their products contain high quality
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and now Sebastian Younger Peabody award-winning journalist author of five New York Times best
sellers including the perfect storm and war and documentarian whose films include Rastrepo winner
of the grand jury prize at Sundance Sebastian's new book is in my time of dying you can find him
on Twitter at Sebastian Younger Sebastian welcome to the show thank you very much nice to be here
it's so exciting to finally but I want to bring up something that I know nothing about
but a fan had asked me to inquire about which is chainsaw ask him about the chainsaw let's talk
about your career with chainsaws can you give us some kind yeah absolutely so I studied anthropology
in college because it interested me that was on the east coast we are Wesleyan University in
Connecticut I had no interest in being an anthropologist but it actually helped me throughout my
careers a writer after I got out of college I sort of walled around our weighted tables I did various
things to earn money while I was trying to become a writer and I was very slowly getting into
journalism but it didn't pay very well and I got a job eventually as a climber for tree
companies and I would work eighty now explicitly focused on turning you into a journalist it doesn't
sound like no a writer so what drew to writing it happened quite suddenly I was a good distance
runner in college and I had to write a thesis and I'd heard that the Navajo had this very strong
tradition ancient tradition of running they were still there was sort of still at it in a kind of
traditional way and they were amazing so track and cross country athletes and they we had blended
the two disciplines and so I did my fieldwork on the Navajo reservation I spent a summer there I
trained with their best runners you know up at six seven thousand feet I lived in Fort Defiance
Arizona and I wrote a thesis about Navajo long distance running that was the name of the thesis
apparently thesis titles as opposed to have a colon in the Macabastan and I just thought what's
the coolest thing in Boston maybe it's tugboats you know like I so I just started hanging out on
tugboats and I said them a pretty nice piece of writing and it was my first published piece up
there and it was called towing the line and that was my sort of entry into journalism what was your
writing process like after the magazine piece comes out you get the book contract did you continue
taking other jobs or did you buckle down to focus full time on the writing oh I did tree work
throughout I mean I you know I didn't my advance was pretty small and as was appropriate I mean
I was totally unknown writer and it was it was a totally bizarre topic at the time right so I
am not complaining but the advance was quite small so I did tree work a couple days a week I'd be
up interviews and all that so my writing process really starts out in the world as I'm researching
a story or in a library or on the internet or whatever as I'm researching a story fiction writers
they depend on this weird sort of pipeline to God right I mean they're trying to re-imagined the
world in a way that's never been done before and reproduce it on the page and to have people enter
this fictional world and be riveted by it and that's where inspiration comes in and that's where
you have to really be at your desk every morning because you never know when God's going to talk to
you and I mean God figuratively I don't believe in God but the creative gods but for a journalist
it's much more like carpentry and you get the lumber you get the bricks you build the basement you
start putting it together I mean it is a process and there's a lot of inspiration in the actual
language that you use but it's much more procedural than I think fiction writing probably is
you mentioned McFee so the only or the most impactful writing class I ever took was with McFee
it was a small seminar about 12 to 15 students at Princeton and so you'll appreciate this
this is a side note so I still have to this day down Sticky so he was he was a mentor that I didn't
personally know from me through his works he was and it's very interesting to hear what you said
about him mapping out structure because I think good structure is an extremely visual thing I think
when people who are good at structure I'd like to think I am he definitely is I think they arrive
at the structure with the visual part of their brain I mean I think you probably mapped his brain
while it was at work you would see that part light up and that's just what I'm guessing when I
write out structure it looks more like a diagram to a circuit board or something it's not quite
architect like geometric shapes but it's it's very visual it represented completely visually and I
feel it like when I get at the right shape to something I feel it it's a very interesting
process that for me is it's something that feels like the divide spark that is finally sort of like
blessed me with its presence so let's say you have your box full of notes right so you've
dug into a given topic you've gone out in the field and we could use the perfect storm for this
example looks perhaps it's evolved or changed over time what then like you sit down and go through
and highlight certain pieces and then number them and order them in some fashion what's the process
of turning that now McFee just to talk about daily routine so he is one of those guys in the
nonfiction world I can't do this because I want to slam my head in a car door if I try this for one
day or like jump out a window he literally sits down and once he has his information 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
come the heller high water he's like staring at the blank page with a break for lunch and swimming
as I remember it and it just drove me to madness to do that it was so depressing so I tend to do
my best writing and I wish this were different honestly but my best synthesis I can do interviews
research all that throughout the day but in terms of piecing it together into some type of narrative
it's like 10 or 11 p.m. to like 5 a.m. that's just my window for whatever reason you write throughout
the day you tend to do your best writing in the mornings at night what does that look like I do my
best writing when something's due and as a real journalist is actually worked for papers and what not
yeah and that feeling of urgency might come six months out if it's a book deadline or it might be
the next morning if it's you're trying to finish up a magazine piece but that intensity you know
it's like athletes athletes in the big game or the big race or whatever I mean that intensity can
bring out something that you didn't even know you had access to much less embodied so the time
and you know I you know I have a cup of coffee and I sit down I write for a couple hours so I get
bored if I feel that I'm blocked in my writing usually with that block meaning I can't write the
next section I keep rewriting it doesn't work and it's stuck it's not that I'm blocked it's that I
don't have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic it's not that I can't
find the right words is that I don't have the ammunition right the words aren't there in the first
place yeah because I don't have the ammo I don't have the goods I have not gone out into the world
and brought back the goods that I'm writing about and you never want to solve a research problem
with language you never want to be such a fine writer that you can sort of thread the needle and
get through a thin patch in your research just because you're such a great pro's artist you
some right linguistics smoking mirrors yeah I lost over the fact that you don't have the research
yeah it's just bullshit and you know the literary writers and I like to think of myself as a literary
writer I think sometimes think that language is so magical and so powerful that you should be able
to sort of do almost anything with it and this actually it's not true and it shouldn't be true
what do you think is the if you were say giving a this would be an odd place to give a commencement
speech but commencement speech to graduating seniors in high school I've done that you have great
perfect well then let me not ask the question I was going to ask what did you talk about I was
speaking at a very kind of elite school private school in New York City these kids were going off
either to college or to or high school I can't remember anyway these are very very privileged
very smart very educated children and exceedingly accomplished parents and I said to them something
like your hardest thing you're ever going to do I was like your program to succeed you guys are
programmed to succeed the hardest thing you're ever going to do your life is failed this is ridiculous
I'm not an adult yet I'm not a man yet I mean you cross that threshold into adulthood in a manhood
by facing something that could destroy you and initiation rights around the tribal societies
around the world their main purpose is to confront young men and women young women have a different
challenge that they have to face it equally daunting but young men face this challenge of in
these initiation rights of sort of demonstrating that they will face the most painful scariest
things possible for their community for their people and that's adulthood and that's manhood and
you know I'd hit 30 and other than you know a chainsaw injury here or there I hadn't really been
tested in a real way and my father grew up in Europe during World War II and war is this sort of
archetypal ordeal it's this sort of ancient in some ways ancient thing and it's a very very
in a lot of societies it is the gate for better or worse I mean I know there's a political
conversation here that we can have but better or worse it's many societies sort of see it as the
gateway to adulthood to manhood specifically for men of being very very ferocious when need be
being incredible hunters they were called skin walkers and that these skin walkers
they were basically adopting the skills and powers of a warrior except they were using it against
their own people and that they would kill their fellow Navajo and eat them in the middle of the
night and the Navajo in 1983 on the reservation where I lived were absolutely terrified of this
phenomenon as terrified as they I'm sure they were a hundred years prior and I got to say the
desert out there is a big lonely place and I started to feel their terror you know I didn't
literally believe that these things exist but the belief system that was around me
still made me deeply deeply scared of them it was extraordinary experience for a rationalist
like myself my father's a physicist and I don't believe in God he didn't believe in anything but
what he could measure and observe and all the sudden there I was in my trailer very very scared
at certain moments of these things and of these skin walkers and as I wrote about it my thesis I said
you know the skin walkers are basically the universal human fear that you can defend yourself
as a society as a human in the selection of satians they ran peaceful society when war started
the satiants stepped down and war leaders took over and if the people they were fighting sued for
peace it was not the war leaders who considered the deal it was the satiants and if peace was accepted
the war leaders stepped down immediately and it's really interesting because the US Constitution
parts of it are based on the Irkhoi law of peace and Thomas Payne did a lot of work sort of
incorporating the natural rights of man as were exemplified by Irkhoi society into the intellectual
basis for American governance but as soon as the British surrendered George Washington was basically
the supreme leader he was the military leader young man particularly but young women as well
were constantly the frontier was constantly sort of bleeding young people who went off drifted off
to live with the Indians that mean the movement that the sort of societal movement I mean it was a
trickle but it was significant constantly towards the tribes not and Indians were never
running off to join white society right and then there were even weirder cases this is you're
talking about the people who are kidnapped yeah that was the part that surprised me the most I was
like okay I can kind of see the appeal of being off in the woods free of certain constraints and
fornicating that sounds that that's probably a pretty appealing daydream to like a pure farmer
you know youngest son but the number of people who were kidnapped taken as supposedly slaves who
then refused or very unwillingly refused to come back to white society were very unwillingly
came in my book drive starts with the story of Pontiac's rebellion in western Pennsylvania
eastern Ohio and she Pontiac fought the colonial powers for years very effectively but eventually
they sued for peace and one of the menid groups that we evolved from that we were for hundreds of
thousands of years all of the evidence that anthropologists archaeologists have been
enabled to assemble is that they were extremely egalitarian group partly you can't carry much wealth
right if you're a mobile nomadic society how much wealth can you really carry in a society that
lives in groups of 40 or 50 that is mobile it's extremely hard to accumulate differences of wealth
and their forced status how does that relate to your experiences in war and interviewing people who
have been subjected to or not necessarily as soldiers I mean you mentioned the blitz and so on but
how does this relate to those experiences well one of the many ironies of war is that it's
savage and as violent and it's completely anti-human but it produces an intensity of human
connection that you really can't your hard press to find in peacetime so during the blitz and
I looked a lot at the blitz in London and 30,000 people were killed by German bombs in around six
about us and that feeling of us is what not only does it make people feel good but it buffers
many people from their psychological demons and it's kind of a relief one of the recurring themes
that you write about and also that we spoke about after your TED talk from a few years ago
some of the feedback from vets from different wars was that they missed the war and from civilians
as well in this book it's like there are certain aspects of the war time maybe a perceived
greater level of humanity even oddly enough that was lost once the piece was regained or achieved
how can one potentially go about and this is sort of a multiple choice question like
manufacturing catastrophe if that makes any sense like simulating the characteristics that drive
that increased cohesion community or sense of mental well-being or just increase cohesion in a way
that you think we've evolved to find very healthy or healthful maybe because we were discussing
for instance boxing and I had the same experience in jujitsu even though I know it's terrible for me
I mean I get injured every time I try to do this for any period of time it's not good for your
physical health if you count all of the collateral damage but one of the appeals was and we were
both talking about the shared experience of it being completely egalitarian it's like oh that's
the guy is really good at armors that's the guy is really good at stiff jab but that's the guy's
footwork is really good it's like you don't have the time don't even know what they do
maybe don't even know necessarily their real name I remember that you know when I was training
at this place called a.k.a. in san Jose it was like everybody was given some insulting nickname
and looking back on it it's like wow it actually sounds a lot like and I've never been in the military
but it kind of makes me think of full metal jacket like snowball and so on but how can someone
simulate that or what can we do focusing for now on like the personal well-being do you have any
thoughts on how we might try to improve things that was a long fucking question yeah I think you
get the idea yeah I mean the nickname thing is really interesting groups of men give each other
nicknames women as far as I know don't it's a really interesting thing and I think it's a signal
of tribal affiliation of group affiliation the male group in our evolutionary past was extremely
important in hunting and in defense and the more cohesive and internally committed all the males
were to the group to everyone else the more effective they would be at fighting and in hunting
and the survival of the community dependent on them doing that job as well as on the women
doing other things but it depended on that and cohesion cohesion is increased among other things by
hardship by nicknames by humor I mean all these things that you see men in groups too I mean any
construction crew in New York City you walk past them and half the time they're doubled over
laughing I mean you know like one of the things men doing groups is make each other laugh and they
give each other nicknames so it's a really really ancient that what you experience is a very
common thing and I think quite ancient and serves a real purpose we evolved as a species in a sort
of experience of sort of ongoing moderate crisis I mean we're hunter-gatherers we evolved in a
pretty harsh environment and we've survived in the harshest of environments in the Arctic and the
Calahari Desert for example and normal life for most of human history was a moderate ongoing crisis
what's very fortunate and beautiful and wonderful and also a weird way tragic about modern society
is that crisis has been removed when you reintroduce a crisis like in the blitz and London or an
earthquake that I wrote about it avidzano italy early in the in the 20th century and avidzano something
like 95% of the population was killed something like that I mean just horrific I'm going from
memory but unbelievable casualties just like a nuclear strike and one of the survivors said that
what happened afterwards because people had to rely on each other and so upper class people
lower class people you know peasants and nobility whatever everyone sort of crouched around the same
campfires right and what this guy said was the earth I'll try to do it by memory I'm almost got
it the earthquake gave us what the law promises but does not in fact deliver which is the equality of
all men I think one of the things that people like about crisis is that suddenly everybody's equal
and you're evaluated like in a boxing gym you're evaluated for your actual conduct in the moment at
the first really traumatic assignment that I had was in northern Afghanistan a year before 9-11
in the fall of 2000 I was with op macha masood who was the leader of the northern alliance
he was fighting the Taliban he was completely outnumbered outguned and you know back then the
Taliban had fighter planes the Taliban had tanks they had artillery they had all the toys and
masood his forces were the sort of guerrillas well it's great to be with the guerrillas until you
start getting sheld right hence or bombed or whatever so we had a tough we I was up there for two
months and we saw and went through some very tough things and I got back to New York young man
you know your age the rain late thirties and I just felt completely like that nothing would ever
affect me right I just assumed complete invulnerability do everything and I got back to New York
and bullshaking up all right and then one day I went down into the subway and so something I did
every day and it was rush hour there are a lot of people and I was seized with this incredible
panic attack I'd never had one in my life everything I was looking at seemed like a mortal threat
you know actually I knew it wasn't but it felt like it was and I was way more scared than I'd
ever been in Afghanistan I'd been plenty scared in Afghanistan the trains were going too fast and
they were going to jump the tracks and leap up onto the platform and kill me the crowds were
suddenly going to turn on me and beat me to death the lights were too bright the lights were
going to somehow are going to kill me it was too loud the noise was going to everything was a
mortal threat and I backed up against the iron support column and just sort of waited for it
then I finally sprinted out of there and took a taxi and that kept happening anytime I was in
a small like an enclosed place with too many people too much going on I would just panic
I just thought I was going crazy I had no idea that it was in any way connected to the combat
that I'd been in until a couple of years later I was talking to a woman who was a psychologist
who was her friend of a friend that was at a picnic actually and she asked about my war reporting
and if I had any suffered any consequences from it I was like no of course not I'm fine
and for some reason I thought to sort of mention but once in a while I have a weird Henrik attack
and she nodded in that way the trinkets do yeah interesting you know and she said well
and it was the spring of 2003 and she nodded and she said well that's interesting she said that's
called PTSD and you know we just invaded a rack right and she said you're going to be hearing quite
a bit about that in the coming years as indeed we have and are the rates of PTSD in the US
anomalous are they unusually high compared to other cultures or other countries and if so why is
that well the truth about PTSD is that if you almost 100% of people who have been traumatized
either seen something gruesome or feared for their own life and I should add that the witnessing
of harm to others is more traumatic than danger is interesting but almost 100% of people who have
been traumatized get short term PTSD that's what I got last weeks last some months goes away
there at the helps whatever but we're humans right when we were adapted to survive danger and stress
and hardship and all that all that stuff we wouldn't be here so trauma if the trauma was psychologically
crippling to humans humans wouldn't exist around 20% of people get long term PTSD so they pass the
point where they should have recovered and they're stuck in this trauma loop and they can't get out
of it that's around 20% of people now you look at the US military every war the casualty rate
thank god has gone down because the intensity of the combat has gone down as bad as well where one
was it wasn't as bad as civil war well war two was not as intense the combat was not as intense
there were not the mass casualties of well war one Korea Vietnam the war on terror has the lowest
casualty rates of any war the war I mean it's what I mean what it seems to be is that unit cohesion
is a buffer for psychological struggles including PTSD so the more highly trained the soldier the more
highly trained the unit the more psychologically resilient they are even though they might be taking
higher casualties yeah and what's so interesting about trauma is that it it's not necessarily related
to the level of danger it's related to the level of control that you feel that you have
occurred there were about to experience an overwhelming attack the accordus all levels dropped
they got super calm the reason the cortisol levels dropped it was stressful for them to wait for
the unknown but as soon as they knew they were going to be attacked they had a plan of action they
started filling sandbags they started cleaning their rifles they started stockpiling their ammo
getting the plasma bags ready whatever they do before an attack all that busyness gave them a
sense of mastery and control that actually made them feel less anxious than them just waiting
around blood for exactly right so there's a massive hypocrisy even though it's well meaning
so you you can't mistake the soldiers for the war if you're upset about the wars that the US gets
into you have to address that to the government the soldiers themselves have simply volunteered to
do anything think about how profound this is they have volunteered to do anything that the nation
asked them to do for very very low amounts of money anything right and if we told them to plant
trees in Canada they go do that and if we told them to go invade Canada they'd do that they're
like whatever you want we're going to do peace core type of capacity yeah anything whatever you
mean it means for us collectively to use our imagination and we have two things right we have this
incredible resource for our young people and we have a nation that's deeply deeply in crisis
and the one thing that unifies us is being attacked right we're attacked by terrorists
and suddenly we're a unified country we don't want to have to wait for tragedy to unify us
right we want to beat it to the punch and actually unify our country for positive reasons
instead of as a reaction to a horrible attack so I promised I'd come back to the Viking helmet
so I want I want to address the Viking helmet so let me try to this is from memory let me let me
try to give a sketch so you're in Spain correct you go out to a bar with some of your buddies and
you know I'll let you tell it because I think you'll do it more just this but it underscores a
point that I want to ask you about could you yeah of course so I think what's the span of human
history women are used for equally important tasks but usually not group tasks like that it's
really the boys that are told to either hunt or fight in groups and so they they get very good at
it and in modern society well young man want to do is achieve honor by defending the community I
mean you should have wired it should have wired into the male brain to do that if you don't give
young men a good and useful group to belong to they will create a bad group to belong to but
one way or another they're going to create a group and they're going to find something an adversary
where they can demonstrate their prowess and their unity that thing that they find is often the law
it's the police it's society itself in some ways they turn into skin walkers they have no
outside enemy so they create an enemy out of society they don't want to be doing this is one of
the risks of wartime leads to five of them as victims now they may call them survivors they may
call them whatever they want but but actually the role that's being at that the person is being
asked to play is one of the victim victims are taken care of so after World War II which saw
casualties that completely eclipse even these terrible wars of our current day so I'll just
came back they didn't do multiple deployments they signed up and they were in the army until the
war was done some of them were in for three four years straight and they came home and basically
they society said to these men and was almost all men in the you know combat unit society said to
these men like all right you're not fighting now we need you at home you know it's time to get
to work we have that and we're a wealthy country we can easily absorb those costs so I have zero
opinion about whether we should inquire further but I should say that the data show that having
that kind of dishonesty in a process is actually psychologically detrimental not only to those
specific people who are being dishonest but to everybody it's actually quite corrosive how many
photographs have you taken on your wartime deployments probably not the right word but assignments
I carry a video camera and I shoot a lot of footage but I've never taken still photos okay
so with the video footage that you've shot and by the way I haven't told you this when Restrepa
was first shown like very very first shown in the Northern California area I tracked it down and
drove out to see one of the very first showing so really I did thank you I don't even have very
clear memories of it but I left the tent I couldn't take it I could not bear to see what I was seeing
and I left the tent and I went outside and I know the cold Afghan night and lived cigarette and I
thought you know war is exciting and it's dramatic and it's important and it's meaningful and it's
all this other stuff but if you're not also prepared to look unblinkingly unflinchingly at the worst
aspects of war dismembered people you really have no business covering the quote good parts
and by good I mean the parts that are are traumatic if you can't face which in that tent
you have to get out of the business completely and you can't be selective about your experience
of war but you're 19th century one of the common themes in these ceremonies is that the warrior
gets to recount in front of his community what he did for them on the battlefield and you know
often it's a heroic sort of boasting of how bravy was and how he killed the enemy and now you know
whatever but it's this cathartic description of a warrior's a warrior discharging his duties
for his community there's something about doing that for the people you did it for
that seems to be very very psychologically healthy to put it in modern terms because it's
almost a unit of universal in these ceremonies and so I had the idea I mean we're not going to go
back to a tribal society and we can't we can't we're not you know you'd have to get rid of the car
you know you have whatever rid of it's not happening but we might be able to take certain structures
of tribal life and incorporate them into modern society so we get the best of Q&A there's no debate
this is not an evaluation of the war it's not a patriotic thing it's not an anti-war thing
it's just this is what the experience was like and I really really think that if we could do this
in every town across the country that it would be enormously therapeutic for veterans but even
more important in some ways it would start to bind the country together again I think the veterans
are suffering because the country's suffering and if we can heal ourselves as a nation
the veterans are going to be fine could not agree more let's shift gears just to my
perhaps somewhat typical series of rapid-fire questions and then we'll wrap up and have some more
coffee oh and I didn't look at those in advance so now I'm in trouble all right all right I'm ready
let me get ready here we go all right I'll let you let you limber up again do a little shadow
box and all right the so the first is when you hear the word successful who's the first person
who comes to mind and why Martin Luther King why because he transformed society in incredibly
courageous way commercial book success the perfect storm how old were you when that came out I
was 35 years old okay so when the book hit before it was made into a movie you now what advice would
you give to yourself at that point in time the movie part of it didn't didn't affect me very much
but the the sudden attention public attention that I got when the book became a best seller
affected me enormously and I was very anxious about all that I think I would say to myself
the public is not a threat the public is actually waiting to hear someone anything say something
that's helpful and makes sense because we're all trying to get through this life together and
everyone wants some guidance and if there's anything I can say through my work or just on a stage
that gives some comfort or guidance to people they're enormous here's the amazing part she still
went out with me very memorable at the very least yeah yeah so then he pulled out a hatchet that's
right yeah exactly right she probably survived with leave that you weren't a serial killer was
going to take her head off that's right oh my god what is something you believe even though you
can't prove it I believe I'm a good person what are some of the habits or common practices of
journalists that you dislike I really dislike laziness and if you and if you read a phrase to me
by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field
and then I test them and then I share them with you so if that sounds fun again it's very short
a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about if
you'd like to try it out just go to tim.blog slash friday type that into your browser tim.blog slash
friday drop in your email and you'll get the very next one thanks for listening
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