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

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, at the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com subscribe Now without further delay. Here's today's episode. My guest this week is Sebastian Younger. Sebastian is a New York Times best selling author of Tribe the Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in the Delmont and War. His newest book, Freedom, came out in May of this year and we spend some time talking about it. Sebastian is also an award winning war reporter and journalist who has covered major international stories around the world and he is a documentary filmmaker whose debut film Restrepo was nominated for an Academy Award. His other documentaries include Korengel the Last Patrol, which is the way to the Front of the Line from Here, and Hell on Earth, the Fall of Syria, and the Rise of Isis. I've wanted to interview Sebastian for a while, in fact ever since reading his book Tribe, which I think I read in 2016 or 2017. And while this is a bit of a different interview compared to a lot of the interviews I do on the podcast, I really wanted to speak with him a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to talk about his very unique life experience and his philosophy of life, which is actually something I only learned about in the prep for this podcast and became kind of transfixed by. These experiences have led him to write some amazing books, but also have given him kind of a remarkable outlook on life. And in particular, Tribe is a book that I've thought a lot about in terms of my understanding of the importance of community in people's mental health, how it plays into their longevity. Of course, in this discussion we talk about a lot of things. We talk about his upbringing and how it led him to his career as a war reporter. We talk about the psychology of war and the PTSD that he saw many around him experience and of course the that he experienced, although at the time he didn't really understand that that's what it was. From there we talk about his philosophy on life, what having kids has meant to him and how he has parented his kids in a way that I think is a little bit non traditional. We spoke about his near death experience and this is something he's spoken about on other podcasts. But I think here we went into a little more detail and I must say, this was kind of a remarkable story. We talk about how this changed him for the better and the worse, and how it led to the new book that he's writing on what's going to happen when you die. We spoke about his trauma and his past depression, why he only uses a flip phone, social media as an addiction, the importance of the tribe, and the dangers of isolation. We end our conversation speaking about his newest book, Freedom, and the documentary that it's based on, the Last Patrol. We talk about what it means to be free and how we know when to quit. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with the very talented Sebastian Younger. Sebastian, I have been looking forward to sitting down with you. For God, it's been 18 months. It was pre Covid. I know, when we first talked about sitting down, and then for obvious reasons, things got postponed, but nevertheless, here we are.

It's thrilling to talk to you. When I interviewed you, it was really fascinating. I mean, I loved our conversation.

While there are a lot of things I'm looking forward to here, but perhaps the most trivial of them is getting to listen to you speak. I'm sure you've been told this before, but you may have the single greatest voice ever. So the fact that I'm going to get to sit here and listen to you talk is fantastic.

Thank you.

Where did you grow up, Sebastian?

I grew up outside of Boston in a little town called Belmont, Massachusetts.

Okay, I want to understand a little bit better about. Well, let's start with your dad. Your dad's a veteran, correct?

No, he's not a veteran. I mean, he was a refugee from two wars.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, he grew up in Europe. His dad was a journalist in Europe. European born, as was my dad. And they lived in Spain and then they left. When the fascists came in in 1936 on the Franco, they fled. His father was. My dad's dad was Jewish and they fled to France. And then when the Nazis came in a few years later, they fled to the United States. And my dad made his life here. Met my mom and tried to join the US Military and couldn't because he had asthma. So he served the country in other ways. He was a physicist and he contributed to a lot of important projects which involved the US Military, the US government. But he was enormously grateful to this country for our sacrifice in World War II. And it's interesting that his implacable pacifism was also mixed with an understanding that sometimes war, sometimes force is necessary to protect humanity from fascism and other evils. So he had a very complex sort of understanding of our duties as citizens and our place in the world as America.

How did he communicate that to you and how old were you when some of those lessons started to mean something more than just kind of the words that were spoken? And did he communicate through direct words or was it more indirect means?

Yeah, when we were growing up, the word fascist was like a dirty word. You know, I grew up knowing that that was the sort of ultimate evil and America stood diametrically opposed to fascism, that we were the opposite of fascism. We were the ultimate anti fascist state. And I grew up during Vietnam and I grew up in a very liberal environment. So every adult I knew, everyone I knew was sort of anti Vietnam, anti war, and by extension, and not fairly, but by extension, sort of anti US military. I mean, that's just the environment I grew up in. Right. So I was very surprised and learned a lot 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 card in the mail from the US government saying, you're an 18 year old male. We need to know where you live physically, what your address is in case we need to call you into combat. And I said to my father, who I knew was a pacifist, I was like, what the hell is this? Like the draft is over. What do you mean? My government needs to know where I am, doesn't need to know where my sister is, but where I am in case they need me to fight one of their wars. And I was like, I'm not signing this. And I expected my father to wholly approve the message, my message that I wasn't going to sign this. He said, no, no, no, you're definitely signing it. He's like, you know, you don't know what the next war is going to be. It may be a righteous. It may be a war that needs to be fought like World War II was. And you don't owe your country nothing. You owe it something. And you may owe it your life, depending on the circumstances. And if a war comes along that you feel is immoral and unnecessary, then it's your duty to protest and go to prison if you need to, to protest it. But you don't know that Yet. And you're going to sign that card because you are part of this country and it's a magnificent thing to be part of. And that completely turned around my thinking about what it means to be an American citizen and a human being and to be part of a community. I mean, you know, whatever. It's 35 years later, I'm still chewing over that one.

Yeah, I bet. So you weren't really. I mean, yeah, you were probably a teenager. As Vietnam was coming to an end. What were your dad's thoughts on that? I mean, did he kind of view that as a different war from World War II? I mean, obviously it was, but how did he kind of vocalize that to you?

Oh, totally different war. He says unnecessary. And the specter of communism taking over the world, that the Gulf of Tonkin was a straight up lie. So unlike 9 11, Vietnam started with a straight up lie. They got us into a war that everyone knew was sort of unwinnable and a lot of people thought was, was not needed, which was very, very different from 911 and from World War II as far as my dad was concerned. So he hated the Vietnam War and, and was very, very adamant about it, as was every other adult I knew. I mean, it speaks to the community I was in. I could have grown up somewhere else and it would have been the opposite, but I didn't.

But it does sort of speak to his ability to balance simultaneous, seemingly simultaneous, contradictory facts, which is that he could look five years later, right? Vietnam ends in what, 74, 75. They're pulling the last troops out and just five years later, you are getting a card that is effectively a draft card. And yet he can immediately pivot and say, well, wait a minute. No, no, no, this is very important. And I can put Vietnam out of my mind and say, because again, there's a recency bias that could have easily sounded like, I don't want my son being one of the boys that got slaughtered there for no reason.

Well, he made it clear to me that if it's an immoral war, my job is to go to prison to protest it if I need to. Like to say, absolutely not. Right. You're not going to use me for your immoral, your immoral designs. Right. But equally strongly, I mean, the Holocaust burned. My dad was half Jewish. I'm a quarter Jewish. Right. I mean, I don't identify in any cultural way with that quarter of me. But the Holocaust seared itself into the minds of humanity in the 1940s and the sacrifice of American soldiers. Now America Acted out of its own interest and thought process. It didn't join World War II because of the Holocaust. But the fact is that there are thousands, tens of thousands of American troops buried in France, his home country of France. Stopping fascism, making sure that fascism did not take over Western Europe and the world. And that's his home country, right? And he's seeing the graves of American soldiers, young men his age. His contribution to that was when they fled Paris and the Germans, they took Paris, you know, without a fight. It was a negotiated surrender. And they sent advance units and tank columns deep, deep into France to grab the Spanish border, which of course, across the border with Franco. It was a friendly regime, a friendly fascist regime. So my father and his family fled by car. And they were in Bayonne and he. He was out. He was 18. He's walking down the street and. And he sees a German officer on foot in front of a column of tanks, and they're creeping down a boulevard. And the officer turns to him and says, do you know which way it is to the center of town? Because they didn't know. They didn't have maps. They didn't know. Right. And my father spoke German. I mean, he spoke just about every language in Europe because they lived all over the place. My father was born in Dresden. The German officer was speaking bad French. My father spoke back to him in perfect German and lied to him and said, yeah, the center of town's that way, and pointed the entire tank column in the opposite direction and off they went. So that was his little act of rebellion, Right? And his dad said, don't ever be that stupid again because they will kill you. If he found that out, he would have killed you right there. So my father, you know, that kind of experience doesn't leave you. And he thought the world, the foremost threat to freedom and human dignity in the human race was fascism in his mind. So Vietnam was a blip in the screen with that. Right? I mean, fascism was it. And, you know, I would argue it still is it. That is still the threat. And this country has gone through a little taste of it, and we came out hopefully stronger. But that boogeyman has not gone away in human society.

When did you decide what you wanted to study? In college. And what did you study in college?

I grew up. My dad was a physicist, but he was very enamored of history and of anthropology, and I grew up reading anthropology, anthropological works. I was very interested in the Native. Native American societies. And I was also a really good long distance runner in high school and college. I ran a 412 for the mile and went on to run 221 Marathon. So I had some. Not world class, obviously not even close, but I was like a pretty good runner. And I found out in college that the Navajo were really good long distance runners. And when I was in college, I wasn't in college to get a career. I was in college to learn stuff that interested me, which was anthropology and a number of other things. And so I majored in anthropology and I decided to do field work on the Navajo reservation. And I went out there, 1983, I think it was, and spent a summer on the reservation training with their best guys. And I wrote a thesis on Navajo long distance runners. And that was the first time, like I researched something and then wrote about it. You know, basically the work of journalism. So when I got out of college, I did construction for a little while, trying to figure out what I was going to do. And I was on a. I was sponsored by Etonic Running Shoes. I was running local road races. I was a sponsored athlete at a sort of like regional level. And trying to figure out what am I going to do with my life. Oh, maybe I'll be a journalist. Like that's pretty close to what my thesis was. And I. When I was writing my thesis, I was just on fire. I just loved it. I was a very middling student. And the thesis I was, I got honors. And I just, I was like, oh, I'm going to be a journalist. So it was a long, tortuous path to get there. But that was my sort of naive decision when I was 21 or whatever.

Now I remember hearing you in an interview years ago. I don't remember which interview it was, but you talked about a job you had felling trees. You were in a logging job. Where was that? And how old were you? Is that post college as well?

Yeah, yeah, I was post college. I was in my late 20s. So fast forward some years out of college. I still haven't figured it out. Right. I'm still not trying to be a writer, trying to be a journalist, basically. I don't have a clue, but I'm reading a lot. A lot of good writers. Peter Matheson, Joan Didion, Ernest Hemingway, a lot of great writers. And. And I'm writing and writing and writing and getting occasional things published. But I'm turning into a better writer. But I couldn't make a living and I was sick of waiting tables and I got a job as a climber for tree companies. And so it wasn't logging. It was residential tree work, right? And you need climbers, you need. If you don't have a crane, you need a guy up in the tree on a rope with a chainsaw. You know, I was a pretty athletic young man and I took to it very, very quickly and I was good at it. And, you know, basically you're swinging around on a rope with a pair of climbing irons strapped to your legs and to your feet with a chainsaw. I was taking down these big, big trees, some of them, you know, 100 white pines, 100ft high, topping them out and 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 the footprint of the tree. Like, I mean, the size that the tree is viewed from above. I can take a tree down in that space with ropes and a chainsaw and a climbing saddle, by the way.

I just want to point out how familiar I am with this because of my middle child who's just turned seven, but he's obsessed with this process. And there's this series on YouTube called Pine Tree Removal Part 1, Pine Tree Removal Part 2, and Pine Tree Removal Part 3. Each of these videos is about two hours long. So it's taken together, it's a six hour series exactly as you're describing it, which is 120 foot pine tree in a subdivision between two houses that are 30ft apart. And it has to come down. And the six hour video is how long it takes to bring the tree down minus any spaces. So it edits out the pauses and the lunch breaks and the bathroom breaks. But basically there are three major sections that have to come down. So they go to the top, they trim all the branches, cut the first part it comes down, they just keep doing this. Well, I think my son has seen the entirety of that 30, maybe 40 times. So by extension, I've seen it like three times.

That's awesome.

He knows every move, meaning wherever you are, he'll tell you, okay, that guy, he's going to take his chainsaw and he's going to cut this thing at that angle. And then once he gets that branch down, he's going to wrap around this thing and then he's going to cut this thing at this angle and. And then they're going to do. It is his obsession. When he turned 5, he wanted a chainsaw for his birthday and he was so upset that he didn't get it. And I tried to explain to him, like, dude, you'll kill yourself with this thing. And he's like, I will not. I know how to use this thing. I mean, he was convinced he knew how to use it because he'd watched so much pine tree removal. So you would literally be his hero.

That's awesome. Well, listen, I have a buddy who runs a tree company, and he has a girl as a teenager now, but she, you know, when she was young, seven, eight years old, whatever, he got her, he set her up on a climbing rig, you know, a little harness, and he set the ropes up the way climbers use, and she learned how to, like, work her way up a rope and rappel back down. And it was all, you know, six feet off the ground. It was all safe. So if you could find someone arborist in your town to come rig that up for you, your son would love you forever, which I'm sure he will anyway, but he'll love you even twice. Twice as much forever.

Well, the compromise is we got him a gomboy. You know, one of those big saws when he was 5. And at first, I wouldn't let him touch it without me being right there. And then I figured out, okay, he actually knows how to use this thing without killing himself. And now he's out there running around in the woods with a saw that's almost as long as him, just trimming every dead branch. And when people come over and see it, they think we are the worst parents in the world, because who would let a kid that little use a saw that big? But, I mean, I think they get a healthy respect for it. I think he will be using a chainsaw before the age of 16, which was when I told him he could have one.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, one thing to say about that work, I mean, I'm scared of heights, and I had to kind of control that fear to work that high up in the air.

Was that part of the appeal? Were you doing this to overcome that fear?

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

Wow.

Yeah. You know, if I contracted my own job and did the climbing, I could make pretty big money. So I could work a couple of times a week, and then the rest of the time, I could. I could train, I could write. I could do whatever I wanted. So for a young man, it was a perfect job for me. I wouldn't say I'm without my anxieties and fears, but I have a fairly high risk tolerance. And what I figured out about tree work was that there are no accidents. It's like there are no accidents in the game of chess. Like, you play poker and you might just draw the wrong card. There are no accidents in chess. If you lose a chess game, it's because you lost the chess game because you made worse moves than the other guy, right?

So there's no chance. And there's complete information at all times.

That's right. If you get hurt or killed doing tree work, it's because you screwed up. You dealing with the laws of physics, they're immutable. And if you do a front cut wrong and you top out a tree wrong and it comes back on you, it's because you did it wrong and you didn't take into account the wind direction. There are no variables that are outside of your control. Your own stupidity is the or. Carelessness is the only thing outside of your control, and you can control that. And so when I figured that out, I'm like, I'm just going to make sure I don't screw up. I screwed up once and I hit my leg with a chainsaw and tore it up. And, you know, it took a while to recover from that. That was the injury I needed. And after that, I actually wouldn't be that scared up there because I knew, although it was sometimes terrifying to look down, I knew that I was way safer than I was in a car, ironically, as long as I didn't make a mistake. And that kind of agency, having that kind of agency over an outcome, unlike driving, unlike combat, unlike a lot of things, that kind of agency was very exciting to have. It gave me a kind of Zen focus, like, in the moment, like, you are here right now. Do not blow this. And that kind of practice was extremely good for me.

Talk to me a little bit about this process of becoming a better writer. I mean, it fascinates me to no end because I enjoy writing, but I'm obviously not very good at it yet. But I'm getting better, right? Like, I'm better today than I was 10 years ago. But when I look at people who do this for a living, I'm very interested in what the reps look like, what the feedback process looks like. Is it something that can be done in isolation, or is it something that requires an editor or. Or someone who can really sharpen your sword?

I mean, it depends. I mean, there are some writers, some very good writers, who basically dump out an incredibly rough first draft, and they just, in their description, sort of vomit it out and sentences aren't even complete. There are sections like, put the. You Know, whatever, the sailboat stuff in here, and then they move, whatever, and it's. It's a very sloppy, fast, sort of intuitive brain dump. And they can do that for 500 pages, and then they go back. That is not me. And people like that often make really good use of an editor who can work through that and kind of see how to begin to shape it. I don't do that. I'm sort of like a road paver. I go two miles an hour and I leave behind pretty much finished roadway. Not that editors don't weigh in at the sort of sentence level. Like, this is slightly confusing. Or maybe you want to say more about this because I don't quite understand what you're referring to here. Other people might, you know, whatever, but I get very little editing from my editors. And it's because I'm so obsessive about writing. And I go over it and over it and over it, and I write very carefully. And the stuff that I write is definitely flawed, but not that flawed. And I have this feeling like, for me, good writing is a matter of efficiency. Being efficient with your words. Not quite the minimum possible words, but something close to that and fat creeps into your prose very, very easily, and you can really pare it down. It's about efficiency and it's about rhythm. The sentences need rhythm. And then it's about saying things in a way that people have never read before. I mean, no one ever needs again to hear someone say, the rain drummed on the roof. Like, if you're going to say the rain drummed on the roof, then just forget about the damn rain and move on to the next interesting thing. No one ever needs to read a sentence they've read before in someone else's writing. And if you really apply that harshly, you will get rid of a lot of what you wrote. I mean, it's amazing how much it's slightly formulaic and you're repeating mortars are always slamming into hillsides and blah, blah, blah, you know, just like, get rid of that stuff. So rhythm, efficiency and originality. And if you do that, it's going to be pretty good writing.

Do you think journalism and storytelling are similar styles? Because you tend to do both of these well, right? I mean, so much of your work is really telling amazing stories. It's historical, it's anecdotal. And then some of it, of course, is much more what we would think of as journalism, reporting on what is happening and trying to provide context around it. Do you think that. I mean, first of all, I don't think a lot of people do that. Some people do, but that's not the normal way to do things. Does this style lend itself equally to both of those disciplines?

Well, I mean, I write long form journalism or long form nonfiction. So first of all, there is no nonfiction category that is liberated from the rules of journalism in terms of quote attribution and making stuff up or whatever. Like, you can't just say, oh, well, it's creative nonfiction. So I can, you know, maybe slide by with a little bit of creative, like, no, you can't. Like it's either true or it's not true. And you can't blend them because then suddenly everything's going to be suspect. So there's some great books that have. I mean, In Cold Blood, Truman Capote's absolute masterpiece. It's a masterful book. Right. But by his own admission, it. He like wove in some stuff that was not the result of his research. Like he richly imagined some scenes. No problem, right. I mean, it's a masterwork. But it's important to understand that that actually is not nonfiction and it's not journalism. But just to go on to say that there's a whole food chain of journalism. So, you know, you get our sort of Reuters or AP report that's written in minutes or maybe an hour. It basically doesn't have a style. Right. It doesn't have a literary style. Right. There's a lead paragraph and the follow up and that, you know, whatever. I mean, there's a whole formula to how to construct something that's packed with information and completely charmless in a literary sense. Totally charmless. But you don't want charming writing when you're reading about how Harari fell to the rebels, right? I mean, whatever. You just want the information. Then there's more long form journalism where you, you can even use the first person if you want, I think sparingly. But you're allowed to use the first person. You're allowed to be a little bit more scene setting. You can use some novelistic techniques with content which is completely true and real. Right. But the novelistic techniques might be taking a break at a compelling moment right before the rebels attack the city, right? You take a break and then you do 1000 words of backstory about the history of Zimbabwe or whatever, and then you resume where the action stopped. Like, those are all novelistic techniques that are great for getting people to read nonfiction. And it's just that you're making use of factual material, not invented material. So I'm A long form nonfiction writer. And that extends for me, a book is long form nonfiction. It's just very long form. So my books, some of my books you can read in a couple of hours. Some of my books you can read a couple of days. But basically it's all the same rules and creative tools of getting people to read good narrative journalism.

Let's fast forward. We're into the late 80s. So you've had your leg injury, by the way, if I recall, it was an Achilles tendon injury, correct?

Well, yeah, I mean, I was up in a tree. It was an elm tree in Welfare, Massachusetts. It wasn't even that high and I was in a hurry. I hadn't worn my boots that day because I wasn't going to be wearing climbing irons. So I just had sneakers on. And I was cutting something below me quickly one handed with a little climbing saw. The tip of the saw hit the tree and it popped into the back of my leg and it tore open right across the Achilles tendon. It tore open my leg. So I turned the saw off. It didn't hurt at all. I was like, something hit my leg. There's nothing else moving down there but the saw. I better check. I just make sure I'm not cut right. Turned the saw off, clipped it on, looked and of course my leg was hanging open. And so I pulled my leg up as close as I could to see if the Achilles was intact or not. I was very concerned about the Achilles. Now keep in mind, had it been someone else's leg, I mean, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a medic. Right. I wouldn't have looked inside their chainsaw wound to see if the Achilles was intact. But you're immediately in shock. You know, there's this sort of psychological remove when you're hurt. And I had no problem pulling the cut open and looking for my Achilles. I had no problem at all. And it seemed to be there. It was about the thickness of a number two pencil and was sort of a whitish color. And I was like, I don't know. That looks like the Achilles. Looks like it's still there. Right. So I rappelled down to the bottom of the tree and my crew helped me to the car 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 runner, that's a big deal.

Yeah, it was intact. I did rupture my Achilles in combat when I was in my mid-40s. When I was in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan. We were moving up a hillside under a big load, and I felt something slap into the back of my leg. And there was a lot of long distance sniper activity. You know, like, you don't necessarily hear the bullet that hits you. And I was like, oh, no, I got shot. I got shot in the back of the leg, damn it. And I pulled the pant leg up, and there was no blood. I had no idea what had happened to me. But it was a partial rupture of my Achilles, and I sort of limped on it for a few days, and then it kind of healed back together a bit, and I was able to continue my in bed, which was about another month or so. I babied it a little bit, but I scraped by and I got physical therapy eventually and healed it. Apparently, the malaria medication that they were giving soldiers, Larium Mefloquin I think, is the medical name. It makes people prone to Achilles tendon ruptures. Who knew? And we were all on Larema there.

Yeah. And fluoroquinolones, which are a class of antibiotics, Ciprofloxacin, being the one that probably most people are familiar with, has a.

Similar effect as does aging.

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about what led you to that. Right. So when was the moment when you realized that being a journalist was one thing, but being a journalist who went into the theater of combat was another, and that was the place you wanted to go?

Yeah. So I was living in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the storm that I wrote about in the Perfect Storm hit that town in 1991. I was still limping around from my chainsaw injury, and I was living with my girlfriend, and I'd never lived with a woman before, and the relationship ended and ended pretty painfully and maybe some sort of weird male reaction to heartbreak. I was like, all right, I'll show her. I'm going to go to a war. Like, it was just some bizarre. Because there was a civil war in Bosnia. And I was like, all right, we're broken up. I'm going to go to a war zone and learn to be a war reporter. I was looking for a big life change. I was looking for something sort of that felt meaningful and exciting and that would challenge me to, in my mind, complete the maturation process. I didn't. Still didn't quite feel like I was really a man. Like, I was really mature. Like, surely an ordeal like war will put you over the threshold into adulthood and into manhood. And so off I went. So every other Free. I mean, like, 80% of the other freelancer, male freelancers over there had all been dumped by their girlfriend. Like, it seemed to be a sort of common. Common reaction for some reason. So I started freelance war reporting over there as a radio correspondent. And then I wrote my book, the Perfect Storm. And the day, two days after I turned it in, I took a flight to Delhi and then on into Peshawar and on into Afghanistan. It was 1996, and there was a war in Afghanistan, a civil war in Afghanistan after the Soviets pulled out. And I was there as the Taliban were taking over in the summer of 1996. And that was my first official war assignment for a New York magazine in New York City. And it just was the most meaningful, incredible work I'd ever even imagined. And so I kept doing it.

What did your dad think when you told him you were going to do this? Was he fully supportive, partially supportive? Ambivalent?

My dad, I think he was proud of me. I think he was also sort of worried. My mom, maybe in a kind of classic way, she was like, why are you doing this to me? She thought my war reporting was directed at her to make her upset. I'm like, mom, I'm not doing it to you. I'm just doing it. My father didn't take it that way. I think he was kind of proud and worried. But also, war had completely shaped his. His life and his family's life in Europe. And I said, look, I'm. War is this. It's a part of human society. It's a part of history. Like, I want to understand what it is, what it's like, how it works, how I'm going to react in that environment. And I didn't find all of that out in Bosnia, but it was the beginning of a process.

Tell me more about Afghanistan. What was that like? And did you view, maybe give people a bit of a reminder about who the Taliban were at the time, what the Northern alliance was, where the Muhajah Din, what they ultimately became? Maybe give people a little bit of the refresher about what happened when the Soviets pulled out and what was it about 1990 when they pulled out?

The Soviets pulled out in late 1989 after 10 years. Their sort of proxy government collapsed after a couple of years, and it sort of lapsed into civil war. That was brought to a stop by the Taliban takeover in 1996. The Taliban were a religiously inspired political movement that was basically the brainchild of the isi, the Pakistani secret service. It was their way of controlling Afghanistan and giving Pakistan, what they called a strategic depth in their fight with India. So basically, if they controlled Afghanistan, they would always have a fallback position in case India invaded them, which was a threat, which was a possibility. Invaded them. They always had a fallback position to fight from. But the Taliban were. I mean, we all know, right, they had Sharia law. It was incredibly harsh. They were stoning adulterers and not. Not letting women go out of the house without a male escort and all kinds of ghastly policies that, frankly, we see in other allies like Saudi Arabia, and doesn't seem to bother anyone particularly. It's ghastly wherever it is, whether it's a US Ally or not. It's all despicable. And I eventually wound up in 2000 with the last quadrant of the country that had not been taken over by the Taliban was being defended by Ahmed Shah Massoud, a legendary guerrilla fighter against the Soviets. And he had organized the Tajiks. He was ethnic Tajik. He'd organized the Tajik and some other allied demographics to hold off the Taliban in this one quadrant of Afghanistan in the northeast. So I was with Massoud in the fall of 2000 as he fought the Taliban. And this was like, this was big stuff. I mean, these were tank battles. These were massed infantry assaults into, you know, entrenched positions on ridge tops. You know, it was like very, very intense war and extremely traumatic to me, at least I came back very affected by it psychologically and not even knowing I had PTSD because that term was not being used yet. I just thought I was kind of going crazy. But I got back to New York after those two months, and I was pretty nuts. I couldn't take the subway. I couldn't be in a small, crowded space. I freaked out in a ski gondola. I mean, I just had reactions to things. I never associated with the combat, but it was clearly a byproduct of what I experienced. I got very angry. I had a short fuse. I cried a lot. All the classic symptoms. I just didn't recognize them. But at any rate, Massoud was killed two days before 9 11, which is.

I mean, the details of his death are. It's just hard to believe he kind of fell for that trick. Were you surprised? It just seems like such a ploy that was so transparent in a way. But maybe that's only true in hindsight, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, he relied on other people to keep him safe, and people can get paid off and whatever. I mean, you know, I don't know the Details of that. But, yes, it was a movie camera filled with explosives. And there were two Al Qaeda suicide bombers that were posing as journalists, and they asked to interview him, and they blew themselves up. One actually survived the blast and tried to run away, and he was gunned down. There was another young man who was a translator who was in the room. Fahim Dashti. Very, very brave young man who worked in a film office that Massoud set up to document his efforts against the Taliban and against Al Qaeda and, as my father would have put it, against fascism. And the Taliban caught him last week in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul and executed him for his work with Massoud. There were four men in that office. 20 years later, 20 years later, there were four men in that film office working for Massoud, documenting the war against the Taliban. And they caught Fahim Dusti and executed him just a week ago. Tragic. Very, very brave. Very, very brave man. So at any rate, after Massoud was killed two days later, 9, 11 happens. Clearly part of the same strategic thinking by Al Qaeda. And as soon as I could, I rushed back to Afghanistan through Dushanbe in Tajikistan and joined the commanders I'd been with the year before. And I sleeping on, you know, in my clothes on a front line for. For a month straight until the American bombers had done their. Done their work. And then the Northern Alliance. I mean, I never saw an American soldier. You know, there are a few SF guys, Special Forces guys out there, but it was all Northern alliance foot soldiers. They broke through the Taliban front lines on November 13th. I think it was 2001. And we followed them in the back of a pickup truck. We walked into Kabul the following morning, past a pile of dead bodies, and walked into Kabul. And the jubilation by the populace that being liberated from the Taliban was indescribable. When people found out I was American, they would come up and hug me for what our country did to liberate them from the Taliban. Extraordinary moment for me as a person. But we were so filthy, we smelled so bad after our month sleeping in the front lines that we tried to get a taxi. You know, there's taxis and whatever in Kabul, like the. You know, and we tried to get a taxi, and the driver would not take us. He said, you guys smell too. Too bad, too. Too awful for my taxi. You're gonna have to. So we. I think we walked across Kabul and found a place like a hotel where we could stay in the sort of chaotic first moments of liberation.

I want to go back a little bit to Kind of the precursor or really what caused this first bout of ptsd, because, again, I'm still kind of. I've seen your documentaries, so I kind of have a sense of what this is like. But I'm assuming there are some people listening to this who haven't. But when you're reporting in a war, it's very different than if, say, you're a Wall street reporter and your job is to cover this sector, this banking sector, or you're covering this beat on sports. There's a distance between you and your subjects in most other forms of reporting that I think can't really exist in the war, if for no other reason than you are literally physically with your subjects. So let's just put the danger aside for a moment. The fact that you're embedded with your subject matter. Am I missing an example? Is there another example of where that's also common in journalism?

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

Yeah. I'm saying this is physical, though, right? Like you're cohabitated with. You're dependent on. Let's even be more specific. Presumably, they're helping you, they're keeping you safe, Right?

Well, there's two issues. One is emotional connection, which you can have with anybody. Frontline nurses or cops or sanitation workers or teachers or whatever. You can emotionally connect to people and be affected by their emotional reality because you're starting to share it and invest in them and become empathic to them, sensitized to their issues. And it's a very powerful experience. In addition, in a war, if you're anywhere near the front line, you're exposed to risk and you're exposed to. Not that you aren't in other places, but you're exposed to human suffering. And human suffering is incredibly traumatic to behold, particularly if you yourself feel removed from it. So one of the most. One of the hardest things that ever happened to me psychologically was I was in Liberia during the civil war and a mortar round landed in a crowded field. Field of refugees who had fled the fighting and crammed into Monrovia. And, you know, I was. I was sort of in hiding. The government thought I was a spy. The Liberian government thought accused me of being a spy. And I was sort of in hiding. So I was having my own terrifying thing go on because I thought they might torture or kill me if they caught me. So I was having my own issues. But in addition, this field full of people, men, women, children, a mortar landed right in the middle of them and killed 27 people, a lot of them children. And I was out when the mortar hit, I was out. I mean, I hit the ground. I was very, very, very close, and I hit the ground, right? I mean, it was a bad situation. And sometime later, they piled the bodies up in front of the US Embassy as a protest that America was not invading. They wanted America to invade Liberia and stop the war. Right? That was what the populace wanted. That's what the civilians wanted. And they piled these bodies up in front of the embassy. And I had to walk past. I walked past them on my way into the embassy because I was trying to get evacuated because I was in so much danger. And I stopped and my mind just went blank. And there was children, there was a. You know, I mean, it's hard even now for me to talk about it. And it was almost 20 years ago. I went into shock and I didn't know what to do. And I started counting them and I thought, someone needs to know what this number is. It was 27. So later, the trauma to me was that I'd had no emotional reaction to such a horror. I mean, I was completely in shock and I had no. It was a completely abstract thing. I had to. Was a psychological defense. And that psychological defense finally broke down a week or two later when I finally got out to Paris and got to safety. And I was sitting in a cafe waiting for my girlfriend who was joining me in Paris. I had a couple of days to kill. I was sitting in a cafe smoking a cigarette and I saw some. Two men carrying a mattress across the street and it sort of sagged in exactly the same way that a body does. And I just went into a full blown panic attack because I knew I was looking at a mattress. The rest of my mind reacted to body, dead body. I'm in a war zone. I completely panicked. And, you know, I still have trouble talking about that without crying. I mean, I still have to even now sort of choke back the sort of emotions. And that was almost 20 years ago. So human suffering. And that was what happened when I came back from Afghanistan. I saw an enormous amount of human suffering and of a particularly bloody, gruesome, visually bloody and gruesome sort. And I came back altered. And I also, you know, we got shelled very, very badly by the Taliban. You know, there was nothing we can do about it. We just basically got spanked by Katusha rockets for an hour. I mean, it killed our horse, our pack horse got killed because the horse couldn't get down like we were. We survived that. But, you know, all that was enormously traumatizing. And. And now the dangerous stuff that I've been through is easy to process. It's no problem. It's the suffering. It's the dismemberment that you see, particularly with children, that you see that you never goes away. And. And I still have to be careful talking about it, because I will get choked up, and then that's a process that I can't stop once it starts.

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

No, I've heard of it. I haven't read it.

Yeah, it's a great book. He was a Marine, and he wrote about his tours in. I believe it was mostly Iraq. I can't recall if he was also in Afghanistan. But one of the things that I remember being very keen to, as kind of a subtext of this, was we focus a lot on mortality in combat, the number of people who have died. But there are lots of people who don't die, who are forever scarred. And I mean, physically emotional is. We have a lot of attention being paid to that, fortunately. But I thought back to my experiences in surgical training, which was at a really, really busy trauma center in Baltimore, arguably one of the most violent cities in the United States. And lots of patients died. Sometimes they would arrive dead when the paramedics got to them, they were alive. By the time we got to the hospital, they were dead. Others would arrive alive but never made it out of the trauma bay, or they would die in the operating room, or they would die a few days later as a complication of too much blood loss or sepsis or something like that. But there were a lot of people who didn't die, who did leave the hospital, but their lives would never be the same again. Right. The trans pelvic gunshot wound, which is normally fatal, by the way, a trans pelvic gunshot wound is almost a universally fatal injury because of the vasculature in there and how difficult it is to get that bleeding under control. So sometimes the best victory you can have in that type of a gunshot wound is to sacrifice a limb. You'll have to ligate the femoral artery in vain, which means you'll lose that leg, but you'll save the life. And you think, well, that person's not the same. And I just remember reading Nate's book and thinking, how many of these Marines lived? But we kind of forget their story of how injured they are going forward. It's almost like that's what you're talking about, right? It's like, it's that suffering in these other folks who then live, and they are, to themselves and others, a reminder of this trauma. And again, that's just the physical side of it. The psychological piece, again, could be potentially worse. I'm not sure.

There's a very moving command at some military events with older veterans, and the command is to stand for the flag or whatever it may be, and the command is stand as you are able. Acknowledging that some people would like to be able to stand and can't and shouldn't. Shouldn't feel ashamed of their inability to stand. Stand as you are able. Very, very dignified. Moving acknowledgment of the cost of war.

Between Bosnia and when you're trying to get evacuated from the American Embassy is probably a dozen years. Were you, during that period of time, aware of what was PTSD in you, or were you still sitting there in that cafe in Paris, unclear as to why you were having this reaction?

Oh, God, I had no idea why I was having that reaction. It was exactly 10 years. 93 in Bosnia, 2003, Liberia. I'd been in a bunch of wars in between, you know, in between those. But, no, I had no idea. You know, I spent 15 minutes thinking I was going to be executed by rebels in Sierra Leone. I mean, some bad things happened, and they always had an effect on me. And I always just thought, oh, I'm just losing it. What's wrong with me? You know? And I. The nation was not talking about ptsd, and. And I didn't know anything about it. And, you know, some of the reactions. I mean, there were no ski gondolas in Afghanistan, so why would I relate panicking in a ski gondola to combat in Afghanistan? I wouldn't. I just thought I was going nuts. And, you know, finally I was at a. I was a party, and the wife of a older friend of mine, older woman, was a psychiatrist, she was asking me, sort of just out of curiosity, you know, is this right after we'd invaded Iraq around 03, around the same time, and she said, have you all this combat you've covered, you ever had any psychological consequences? I was like, no, I don't think so. No, not really. I'm good. And then I was like, I mean, I did start to have panic attacks once in a while, but I don't think it had anything to do with combat. I mean, they're just, you know, I don't know. And she was like, you know, you'll find that that probably was connected to combat, and there's something called ptsd. Keep in mind, this is early on in the Iraq war when we're having this conversation. She said, I think America is going to be hearing a lot more about PTSD in the coming years, but you might want to look into it, because actually, I think you're suffering more consequences than you realize. She was absolutely right.

How did you receive that at that point in time?

Oh, I was enormously relieved. I was like, oh, this is a normal reaction. Like the kind of freak show I can produce in a subway platform in New York City isn't just my unique and pathetic weakness and neurosis. This is actually a normal, healthy reaction to trauma. What would happen is that the traumatic reaction would dissipate over time. You know, it would be the strongest when I got back or within a week or two of getting back, and then it would dissipate and dissipate. And after, you know, as I, you know, it's like a year later, I don't care how heartbroken you are that your girlfriend broke up with you a year later, you know, you're pretty good. You know what I mean? I mean, you can sort of think about it and have some thoughts, but. But, you know, basically, it's not invading your daily experience like it might a week later. And likewise with PTSD, I think the statistic is about 80% of people a year out from the trauma, 80% have fully recovered and regained a normal, functioning, healthy life, which doesn't mean they're not changed by it. You can be changed by something, but not in a psychologically dysfunctional state. And grieve your mom's death or their divorce or whatever it may be. You may always grieve that. That doesn't mean that you have a psychological issue.

What was the reaction of others? It sounds like at least you had one girlfriend during this period of time who was probably witness to some of this. Or were you somehow able to sort of shield these anxiety attacks and panic attacks from others?

The panic was going on internally. I mean, I was literally white knuckling it and pouring sweat, and I would conceal it as much as I possibly could. And I think I was successful from anyone around me. I never told anybody about it until later, but not immediately afterwards or. No, I wasn't something I wanted to share.

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

I refused to cover Iraq. I thought it was a mistake and a travesty and that it had nothing to do with 9, 11. And I didn't want to get killed covering a mistake, and I didn't think I could be unbiased in my reporting, so I didn't cover Iraq. But by 2005, the war in Afghanistan, which was an easy win initially because it was so underfunded, undermanned, no one was focusing on it because of Iraq, it didn't go that well. And what was an easy win, and we had the gratitude of the strong majority of Afghan citizens, we did not follow through. And so by 05, the Taliban insurgency has started to, like, tires have started to grip. Now they're not just spinning their wheels. They're actually starting to get some traction. And the Americans are starting to really take some casualties. And I think they were losing a soldier every three days in 2005, and they were starting to get into some pretty good firefights. I was like, damn, that's. Who saw that coming, right? It was so. It looked like it was such a successful.01 looked so successful. So I thought, I want to know what it's like to be an American soldier in combat. You know, having grown up in Vietnam, it never occurred to me that I would. That that would interest me journalistically. And it never occurred to me that the US Military would allow unfettered access of the sort that I might find interesting. I mean, I don't want to just go to press conferences and have some public relations major tell me, give me some spin about what's going on. Like, that doesn't interest me, right? So. But it really looked like George Bush should have made good on his promise to provide full access to American journalists or journalists of any country on the front lines with American soldiers. I was like, all right, I'm in. I want to see how this. What this is like. So I was in Zabul province with the second or the 503rd, the same unit I profiled later in Afghanistan, Battle Company, minutes after stepping out of a Black Hawk, getting delivered to a unit that was in the field doing a combat operation. Minutes after stepping out of the Blackhawk, I was in a pretty good firefight. I mean, RPG almost hit me. You know, I mean, boom, all of a sudden, I'm in combat with American soldiers. And I just couldn't believe the intensity of the fight and the quality of the soldiers. Like, these guys, it was all men in this unit. I mean, these guys were working so hard, right? Physically, I mean, the mortar teams were carrying £160, 1, 6, 0, £160 on, you know, overnight combat patrol movements, Dusk to dawn basically carrying their own body weight on their back. I mean, unbelievable. They were working way harder at this point to repeal, to rebuild this other country than anyone I knew ever worked in college, any of my buddies in college, they never worked as hard at anything. You know, and I was just, I really liked those guys and I was like, I want more of this. Like if this unit goes back to Afghanistan in two years, it was a two year cycle of deployments. If they go back to Afghanistan, I'm going to follow them for a year and see what it's. Just document one platoon in one place for one year and document that with a video camera and by writing a book. My book became war. The book war and the documentary that I made with my friend and brother Tim Hetherington was called Restrepo.

What did you learn about those guys in terms of their motivation? How many of them saw this as a duty, a direct response to what happened on 911 in the way that I suspect many young men saw what happened on December 7, 1941 as their moral obligation to go and do something about it versus how many of them would you infer were looking for a sense of purpose as the primary objective for which this became a vehicle to do it? I don't know if my question makes sense. Right. One is purely in response to 9 11. I hate that I have to do this. I don't want to do this, but. But I see no higher calling versus I need to find the sense of purpose.

I mean, none of the guys I knew joined the military despite hating it. I mean, they may well have joined up out of a sense of patriotic duty after 9 11. Absolutely. But I think a lot of those people were from families that had a military history that probably had male relatives that served in one war or another. I mean probably prior generations. A lot of them honestly were young men that were just wanted to test themselves in combat. You know, I mean, you can join the military and not be in a combat unit. Right. The combat units do not want people that don't want to be in combat units. There. There are enough young men that are quite psyched to experience combat, in fact very driven to experience combat, worried that the war is going to be over before they get to experience combat. There's enough young men like that that you can fill those frontline combat units with entirely enthusiastic soldiers. And if anything, it's sometimes hard to get those guys to give it up, to give combat up. And I think that was probably true in Vietnam as well. I've read letters From American Civil War soldiers in World War I, talking about how the war was some of the best days of their lives. Veterans of These World War I and the Civil War. I mean, bloodbaths, Right. You know, letters saying those, those were some of the most meaningful days of our lives. And we miss it. Right? So. And the, you know, the casualty rates were horrific. You know, now the casualty rates are a lot less. And a lot of the guys that I knew out there really, really missed that experience of combat. And I just read in, in the Washington Post that the Taliban fighters now sort of have nothing to do because they won the war and that they are openly saying that they missed the fighting. They're already nostalgic for the war that they fought. So you get people like that, you get men like that. They're out there. They maybe they joined after 9, 11 because of zero patriotism or a history of family, history of service. But I would say the majority of them were, like, pretty psyched to see themselves as. Yeah, man, I was in combat. I saw the real thing, and I did okay. A lot of them were like that.

And how much of that do you think is the desire to prove themselves in a theater of combat versus the sense of connection that must come from that? I have a number of friends who are former Special Forces guys, and certainly one of the things they talk about is the trust you must have in your other soldiers. It's sort of one thing if you're working in an office building and you say to your colleague, hey, would you mind tracking this thing down for me? Because I need that piece of information and you're closer to it. Can you grab it for me? And you got to trust that they're going to pull it together for you by next day when you need it. It's quite another thing when you're in combat and you ask someone to do something where literally somebody's life is on the line. Which is not to say that everything you ask is of that gravity, but enough things are. I've never experienced that. I've never had to ask somebody to do something where my life depends on it, and nor have I been asked to do something where someone else's life depends on it. Outside of medicine, I guess I'll carve out trying to help a person who's been injured. So I have to imagine that that sense of purpose, that sense of fulfillment that comes from both leaning on somebody and being leaned on is exceptional. Do you think that ultimately that is the thing that hooks people?

Yeah, I mean, I think humans are wired to respond positively to behaviors and traits that were adaptive in our evolutionary past. And clearly, if people that go through danger together are loyal to each other in facing that danger, and consider that that group that's faced and survived danger together has a special unique bond and that thing makes us us, right? That describes human groups since the dawn of time, right? Humans lived in groups of 30, 40, 50 people, typically in the, you know, 90% of our evolutionary past. And that loyalty to others who are loyal to you in the face of an, you know, an attacking lion or another human group that's coming to kill you, like that reaction is completely, is very, very adaptive. And adaptive things feel good. The, the things that keep us alive and allow us to procreate and survive, they feel good and that's why we do them. And that's how evolution works. And so that group bond, that mutual group bond is completely intoxicating. And you have not experienced that, but you are hardwired to be receptive to it, even at the sort of neurochemical level of dopamine and oxytocin. Like you are hardwired to be receptive to it and to grow to want it and to need it. And it would take you some hours in a dangerous situation with some other people to pretty quickly start thinking, these are my people. You know, we survived the plane crash together, I'm alive because of them, and I pulled this other guy out of the water and it's going to be days till we're rescued. And this is now our tribe and you are, you know, it happens in prisons and it happens in all kinds of situations. Like that's what humans are and it's an extraordinary thing. And other animals don't qualify, quite have it in the same social way that, that humans do. One of the profound things about humans is that humans are, will be willing to die for a same sex peer that they're not related to. And I'm not going to talk about women because I'm not a woman. I haven't studied it, but so I'll restrict my conversation to men. A man will die for a same sex peer that he's not related to. Not his cousin, not his brother, just another dude who happens to be in the platoon. And that arrangement where they each, they might not even like each other. I mean, there's this one guy in the platoon I was with said to me in 0708 when I was in the Korengal Valley, Brendan O', Byrne, who's still a good friend of mine, he's like, you know, it's funny, there are guys in the platoon who straight up hate each other, but we would all die for each other. Now, if you're in a group that has that arrangement with each other, it's not even dependent on feelings. That's a very secure place to be as a young man, as a human being. And there are a lot of groups that function that way. I know some guys in the FDNY Fire Department in New York City completely functions like that. The willingness to overlook your own safety and your own concerns for the sake of the group is the people that are in that position, strangely, they don't feel like it's an onerous responsibility or obligation. They feel that it's a privilege and that they're honored to be in that role, that they're special. They are special. And I interviewed a fireman the late 90s, a sort of storied fireman named Pat Brown. I mean, anyone in the FDNY would know that name. And he went into the World Trade centers on 9 11, and his last call was from an emergency phone at the 30th floor of one of the Trade Centers saying, pat Brown, we're on the 30th floor and we're going to keep moving. There's casualties coming down, and we're going to keep moving upwards. And he led his men upwards until the buildings collapsed. And the ability for humans to do that for each other is a profound thing, and it's what makes human society possible.

So there's two things that I want to understand a bit better, Sebastian. Actually, several. Let's go back to the beginning. 10,000 years ago, you and I might have been in a group of 30 or 40, as you said. I understand very clearly why the 30 or 40 of us would have been inseparable and even put aside personal differences because we actually needed each other to survive. There's no one human that could have survived 10,000 years ago in isolation. You couldn't have got enough food, provided enough shelter and provided enough security from animals and other humans. So we take that off the table and we realize there's some minimum effective group size that was necessary just to survive. And anybody who tried to deviate from that wasn't going to. Now, let's use the example which is, well, that can be scaled somewhat, and you look at firefighters. So I'm very close to a firefighter who was a fire chief in San Jose, was devastated in a way that I think many people wouldn't have been during 9 11, because he understood very, very clearly that his brothers died. That's the language he used. His brothers died on 9 11. And we were actually talking about this recently because of the 20th anniversary. And he said he has no doubt that had he been there that day, he would have died. That's not something that he thinks, oh, I wonder what I would have done. No, he knows what he would have done. So that's a very interesting bond to me because it scales what we just talked about at the 30 to 40 people level. His tribe is much bigger than 30 to 40 people. Now you go one step further, which is the story of Pat Brown, which is his tribe now includes a whole bunch of people who were not firefighters. He wasn't going from the 30th floor up to get firefighters out. He was going to get civilians out. And you can say, well, okay, that was his job. But, I mean, that kind of strikes me as a bullshit answer, right? I mean, I don't think he was just doing it because it was his job. He was doing it because he felt some higher duty, some higher calling. So now his tribe was even larger than just all the firefighters. It was all of the people that were in danger. All of this suggests that this connectedness can scale beyond a group of 30 to 40 people. Do you agree with that?

I do to an extent. I mean, I would say that your fireman friends, we were all Americans, were virtually all morally emotionally wounded on 9 11. And these were American firefighters that died, and you were talking to an American firefighter. It's possible that if an equivalent story happened in Germany or Zimbabwe or Pakistan, he might not quite have grieved his Pakistani brothers who had died in a building collapse in. In Lahore.

So you're saying it might have been more the American connection than the occupational connection?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, those are my brothers, and they're my brothers partly because we share the same country. And this country was attacked. And there's layers, different layers of affiliation. And we definitely humans, have a kind of symbolic capacity for symbolism where, okay, I may not know you, but you're wearing the same insignia. You're wearing the same uniform. You're doing the same job I do. I can relate to you like, I got you. Yeah. We may not know each other. I may not love you like a brother, but I respect you, and I might risk my life for you. I mean, if you're going to become a firefighter, one of the sources of pride is that you take care of a vulnerable population. That's what you are. You're a Sheepdog. So Pat Brown went up those stairs with his brothers because that's what they do, and they were doing it together. And that's. It didn't even come up for review. Oh, should we do this or not? Like, if you're going to review that, you're not going to be in the fire department. Like, just get out now. They all know that. I'm sure there are people that actually like, ah, you know what I just found out? I'm not a firefighter today. I'm actually not a firefighter. I'm going to get out of here. And the fire department doesn't want you in there either. I mean, they didn't want anyone in 2nd Platoon Battle Company in the Corngal Valley, you know, at some level didn't want to be there. No, we don't need you. You don't need us. Like, we'll put you somewhere else where you're not a danger to yourself and others. So you have to understand that sacrifice is part of a way that Pat Brown probably saw himself. The meaning of his existence to some degree came from his role as a fireman. So of course he went up the damn stairs. That's what a fireman does. But I understand where your question is leading is like, is it possible to feel affiliated with 300 million people? Like, can we feel affiliated as a nation, even if we don't know each other? And yes, because humans are capable of symbolic thought and we're capable of understanding intellectually. Oh, we're all Americans. Like, you and I might be different races. Maybe you don't even speak English. You know, maybe whatever. You could have enormous differences between individuals. But there was some concept. When my father came to these shores and arrived in Baltimore off of Portuguese freighter transporting cork from Lisbon called the San Tome. And they landed in in Baltimore and he stepped ashore and the immigration official welcomed him. He looked around him and he knew he was in a country like no other. It was filled with every race and language of the world. And he quickly discovered that. And that's human's ability for abstract thought. Of course, it's not that hard to cleave that either, as we've been seeing in the last few years. But yeah, it's an extraordinary thing.

Where do you think that was at its peak in American history? The sense of unity? That is that sense of when were we most a tribe in the abstract sense? And at the largest scale, World War.

II after 9, 11, for sure. I think World War II, there was curfew in New York that was enforced There was a huge can and metal collecting operation because the armed forces needed metal, aluminum, I can't remember what, but you know, there was a whole drive to collect cans. I mean there was a huge amount of sort of national undertaking that everyone understood stood. We're in this together, you know, buy war bonds, all that stuff. The Depression was another time. I knew a man, he's passed away, but who, who was young during the, during the Dust bowl and the Great Depression out in Missouri. He said that the schoolhouses would be left open at night. You know, these are one room schoolhouses, right? This is the 1930s in the, the of middle American west and Midwest, that the schoolhouses would be left open, unlocked because migrant families, people were on the move with children and they were poor, they were destitute, they were desperate, they were looking for work in the Dust bowl and they would be driving horse and cart across the lands and they needed places to sleep with their children. And so every town left their schoolhouse open so that these migrants could enter with their children and sleep in a safe protected place. And they would leave before class started in the morning. And every school had a well, so they would have water for the, water for the horses, you know, and that's the kind of communalism that typifies a nation that's enduring a great hardship. And they're sort of looking out for one's neighbors and looking out for people that are less well off than you are. You know, the blitz in London had plenty of that as well. People react very, very, very, very, in very healthy ways to that kind of stress. I researched a, a in my book Tribe. I researched an earthquake In Italy in 1916, if I remember correctly, in Avidzano, the area of Avezano. And one guy, they, you know, they had a 90 something percent mortality rate. I mean basically it was like a nuke, a nuclear bomb had gone off in that area and 90 something percent of the people died within minutes. And one of the survivors wrote that the people who were left there was a complete egalitarianism among the survivors. Didn't matter if you were a criminal or you were rich or you were poor or an outcast, or did not matter what you were. The people that were still alive regarded each other as equals because it was a matter of survival. And this guy said as soon as outside relief got there that that egalitarianism ended. And he said that the crisis that the earthquake had given them, briefly given them what the law promises but cannot in fact deliver, which is the equality of all people. Well, if you experience that you do not want to give it up. And that's one of the things that soldiers experience in combat with each other in a platoon.

When we think back to our ancestors again, even just 10,000 years ago.

Did.

They live in that state because it was effectively a crisis 24, 7.

Well, it wasn't necessarily a crisis, but they were subsistence level stone age people that needed everyone to contribute to survive. And I'm sure the crises were regular enough that it keep them sort of bonded together. But look, if you're a hunter gatherer society, there's no getting off the treadmill. You got to keep that system going pretty much continually. Now they've done studies of even in very harsh environments like the Kalahari Desert, the native people of that area, the Kung, for example, that they worked an average of four hours a day to survive in one of the harshest environments of world, the world. The average person in industrial society, post industrial society works, you know, an eight hour day, a 40 hour workweek. So it's interesting, as we've gotten more advanced, the time requirements for survival have increased, not decreased. But at that level it does not require a full time effort to effort to survive, but it does require full time cooperation, collaboration within the groups.

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

I mean, I'm just going from a very kind of general knowledge right now. I haven't made a study of it. There was very little suicide and depression in hunter gatherer societies. Suicide was virtually unheard of. So the deaths that happened were either violent as a result of warfare or dangerous animals or infant losses from disease. But if you live through the initial high risk years, a lot of people in those societies lived until into their 70s and 80s, a long lifespan in western terms, even by today's standards. And I think there's a general feeling that the person had passed on to a realm in which inhabited by other dead people, other dead ancestors, and that you'll be joining them soon enough. And that one of the jobs of the shamans. Shamanism is a virtually universal human behavior. In almost every human society, one of the jobs of the shaman is to shuttle back and forth between that world and the world of the living with important information about how it's going over there and what we need to do, we as living people need to do to remain in a right and proper relationship with the people dead.

Yeah, I mean that's interesting, right, because it suggests that the impact of loss was so significant that we needed a way to Explain it. And we needed a way to give meaning to life, which was in part saying that even when you're gone, it still matters and you mattered, and you might be reincarnated, depending on whatever the belief system was that emerged from that. I was just recently on an elk hunt, and I love hunting, but. But it's never lost on me when you kill an animal that that animal lived. In the case of an elk, that animal was alive for eight or nine years before you killed it. And again, I won't get into all the benefits of it and why a certain number of animals, you're benefiting the herd by removing a select number of them, et cetera. But I remember when I shot my elk just last week, I remember thinking, so first of all, as I watched him die, all of the other elk made a circle around him as he bedded down to die. Now, that blew my mind because I hadn't seen that before. A lot of times when the arrow hits the elk, he makes noises, they freak out, everybody scatters. But for whatever reason, on this occasion, the arrow hit him.

He.

He wandered 40 yards. He bedded down, was making noises like he was dying, and he was surrounded by the other elk, and eventually they went away when he died. You can't help but sort of anthropomorphize that and sort of project your own thinking. Like, what were they thinking? Like this guy, he was the biggest of them, and they just watched him die. Do they understand what that means? And will they remember that? Will they remember that next week? It's a silly question because it can't be answered, but. Or at least I don't think it can be answered. Maybe it has been studied, but it certainly makes me wonder how other species experience loss.

Well, I mean, here's just a thought that. Not a direct answer to that question, but it's. I think it's an interesting avenue to go down. Humans have psychological mechanisms to protect themselves from painful experiences, right? They go into shock physically if they're in physical pain. In war, there's two different ways of processing the fact that you're killing other human beings. At the end of the day, everyone knows that that's wrong. And there's a moral burden that comes with it. And one way to do it is to convince yourself that they're not fully human. You're not really killing humans, right? It's the enemy. They're less than human. It doesn't matter. Right? That's a very common one. And it's easy to feel that way when they're killing your friends and you're filled with rage and grief and you're like, okay, pick your insult, you cockroaches, you, you know, whatever you, you rats, you know, like they use, they resort to animals to refer to the enemy to dehumanize them. But the other thing you can do is to accord a kind of respect, like you're a worthy foe. And the Greeks did this with the Trojans. You're a worthy foe. Now we are going to wipe you out, make no mistake about it. But you're a worthy enemy and we respect you. We respect how hard you are fighting, you are brave. We're still going to kill you, but we have respect for you. That's another way of psychologically distancing from the fact that you're killing people, right? And they're trying to kill you. So there is a moral burden often in hunting because you're killing this animal and, and sort of native. Many native peoples around the world, they live off hunting, right? I mean, we have to kill the bison and the leopard and the bear and the elephant and what have you in order to survive. So make no mistake about it, we're going to keep doing that. But one way to protect yourself, protect the hunter psychologically from the sort of moral questions around that, any moral pain around that is to say sort of like, thank you, like thank you elk, thank you bison, for giving us food to eat. We respect you, we honor you, and there's a whole sort of ritual process that incorporates the death into a context of respect. So here's what, I'm going to go just go out on a sort of crazy limb here. We all know that the miracle of modern society, and I don't mean that ironically, it truly is a miracle. And we could talk about it later. I'm alive because some nearly miraculous western medicine intervened when I was dying and saved my life. So on many, many levels, this society is a miracle. It's transcendent. We understand the cosmos, we understand the human body. I mean, I could go on and on. And we can fly in airplanes and drive cars. I mean, it's insane, right? How amazing it is. But we also know that it costs the planet a lot. I mean, we are gouging mountains and cutting down forests and polluting the ocean and blah, blah, blah. That's the cost of our amazing society. And what's interesting about that is virtually all humans think that nature is beautiful, right? I mean, you can take the most hardcore ultra right wing, like anti climate change, anti vaxxer, whatever, they know a tree is beautiful, and when you cut down a tree, it's less beautiful. We all know that. Every child knows that. We all know that nature is beautiful. And the world, the planet's a wondrous place. It's our home. It's our Mother Earth. We all know that. And we are basically killing the elk, killing the buffalo in order to eat without saying thank you. And I think it might change in some ways the whole conversation about environmentalism. Even if we didn't do anything differently, even if we kept strip mining mountains because we need to, because we might need to, I don't know, go. Even if we kept cutting down forests because we need trees, we need paper, whatever. I mean, I'm not saying we should or shouldn't do anything of that sort, but if we just added an acknowledgment of the harm and a sort of thank you to the Earth for providing our sustenance. If we just did that, it would reconcile this sort of like, cognitive dissonance of all of us knowing that we hurt something we love in order to exist. And liberals hurt the planet just as much as conservatives, by the way, like the sort of liberal piety. Oh, I drive a Prius, so I'm good. It's complete nonsense, right? We all need to acknowledge it. And I would just say, like, we might learn something from native peoples about protecting ourselves emotionally and psychologically from the necessary harm that we do by overtly stating and ritualizing that relationship with the earth. And so the next time they flat top a mountain for coal, why not bring in a minister, a priest, a shaman, or all three to say thank you to the mountain? It won't hurt. And it might actually do people, the community and the coal miners and all of us that use electricity. It might actually do us a lot of good. That's just my thought for the week.

I think that's very powerful and I think when it comes to animals in particular, because, look, it's a very controversial topic and you can't talk about hunting without offending half the population. But my view has been 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 of what you're eating and to remove the distance between you and the animal you're eating. And it will change the way you eat. I mean, this will probably be the first year when I will subside entirely on wild game that's been hunted ethically. And there's literally been a change in my palate like, I just don't like eating big steaks and things that, frankly, are a little forced. There's really something to be said for this other thing. It's not for everybody, and I don't feel like I should impose that on anybody. And that's just sort of my little two cents on it. But I did bring my daughter on a Hunt once two years ago, and she was only 11 years old. And I remember thinking, well, this could be very traumatic for her because it was a deer and a beautiful type of deer called an Axis deer, I think the most beautiful animals to look at. But after the animal died, fortunately it died very quickly. I wanted her to come up and kind of lay her hands on it while it was still warm and understand, like, you're going to eat this tonight. But this thing gave us a gift and we actually did. We sort of went through this exercise you described where we thanked the deer because it was going to feed us, and it fed about 40 people that night. And she still looks back at that very fondly.

That must have been a complete, absolutely core experience of our human ancestors, for, as I said, most of human evolution is that relationship of respect with the animals that you fed yourself with. I feel like it's psychologically enormously healthy. And one of the things this society is one the of. Of the ways in which it's unhealthy is that it has de. Ritualized the vital processes that keep us alive, that keep us fed, that keep us sheltered. It's de. Ritualized them and allowed us to actually not acknowledge the harm that we do. I mean, we all know in our heart. Right, but. And then when you can articulate it, I mean, the difference between hurting someone's feelings and hurting someone's feelings and saying, I'm so sorry, you know, that I hurt your feelings, I kind of had to do it. We were not a good couple. We had to break up. But I'm still hurting from the sorrow that that unavoidable decision that I carry in me. You know, I mean, there's a world of difference between dumping someone and having a conversation like that. Right. And that's the conversation we need to have with our planet. Regardless of where you fall on the climate change environmental spectrum, you could be a hardcore. Like, I'm driving a vehicle that gets eight miles to the gallon and I don't care about conservation at all. You can be that person too, and still acknowledge the harm, and it would be very good for you.

Yeah, I mean, that's a great example of dialectical synthesis and holding these truths, seemingly contradictory, but together. And I agree completely with that. How old were you when you had your first child?

I was 55.

How did that change your appetite or tolerance for risk? Because again, I've never taken what you've said to be thrill seeking. Right. I don't think anybody who's read your work would say, this is a guy who's doing this because when he's not base jumping, he has to be doing that other thing. But there's no way to deny that what you're doing was very risky. What was the change in your outlook to your own life and the risks that you took once you became a father?

Yeah, I mean, my life is not my own now in the sense that if something happened to me, lifelong consequences would be borne by my wife and my children. I have two little girls, four and a half and one and a half, who are the center of my world and I would die for them in an instant. And my main job right now is to not die. Right. Like just to keep myself alive. But, you know, I stopped war reporting. I mean, so right now I'm in incredibly risk averse. Right. I mean, I look both ways before I cross the street. I don't cross against the light most of the time. I drive the speed, you know, whatever on every. I. I don't like ladders, like in every avenue. I'm very, very cautious. I stopped war reporting in 2011.

This was right after Tim died.

Yeah. So my colleague out at Restrepo, op Restrepo, where we filmed Restrepo, where we off and on, spent a deployment with 2nd Platoon of Battle Company, 173rd Airborne. He was a brother and a colleague and a friend and we were out there together a lot and we made a film together and we were nominated for the Oscars together. And a few weeks after the Oscars, we were going to cover the Arab Spring on assignment for Vanity Fair. The last minute I couldn't go and he was killed in the city of Misrata by shrapnel that a little piece of metal that hit his femoral artery in his groin and he bled out. After that, I. I saw what his death did to everyone who loved him. I mean, Tim, I think his death was fairly rapid and painless and his problems were over. But his, the people who loved him, their problems were just beginning. And I watched how that worked and I was like, I'm not going to do that to the people who love me. War reporting at that point went from seeming sort of noble and Selfless to something that seemed quite selfish and self concerned. And so I stopped. I might not have had that reaction at 25 or 30 or 35 or 40, but I was almost 50 and so I stopped and I never looked back. I've never wanted to go back. I miss, I miss some of those experiences, but I don't want to repeat them.

Given that you've experienced both sides of that sacrifice, what does it tell you about the people who can do those jobs? Whether it be soldiers, firefighters, fishermen in Alaska who also have families who are making those choices. And the stakes are, I think, as high as they could possibly be because presumably they understand what you just said.

Yeah, I don't know how they do it. A lot of soldiers don't have kids. I mean, the guys that I was with out there were mostly 19, 20, 21. Almost none of them had children. A few did, but lots of soldiers do have kids. And particularly once you get into the National Guard and units like that, like, oh my God, and firemen, of course, it's a big, very family centric, you know, culture. I don't know how they do it and I also don't know how with the fire department, the paramedics, I mean, you know, they have children and they're put, you know, they go to car accidents where they're, they're, you know, they're pulling dead children out of the back seats of vehicles. Like, I mean, psychologically, I don't know how they do it. I don't know how they, I don't know how they process the trauma. I mean, I can't even read a news story about something bad happening to a child. I mean, literally, I can't even read it right. I don't know how they do their work. That level of trauma that those guys endure and women endure seeing that. And also frontline ER doctors, I mean, all of it. I mean, really, I'm just reminded of myself in Liberia, counting the bodies in the pile of bodies and like sort of wincing at the children, you know, like the cost of that later, two weeks, two years, 20 years later, the cost of that. I just, I worry about those people. I don't understand how they survive it psychologically.

When I went to medical school, I think everybody who goes to medical school has a very clear. Not everybody, but I think a lot of people have a very clear sense of what they want to do. They're very specific. I want to become this kind of a doctor. And so for me, that was pediatric oncology. Those were the experiences I had seen while I was an engineering student. That led to my change of heart and led me to decide I wanted to go to medical school. And I remember even interviewing in medical school or for medical schools. And at one interview in particular, the person who was interviewing me, who was a surgeon, was an ENT surgeon, said, well, you wrote your essay about this, and you want to do pediatric oncology. I just want to tell you that I think that's a horrible idea. He said, right now, that might seem like something that you can do, but one day you will have kids, and that will be the most difficult thing to do, is to take care of dying kids. Now, again, that's obviously not entirely true, because there are lots of people who take care of kids with cancer who have children. And I've seen them, and I've seen them be completely attached. Like, they're not detached, they're not cold, they're not calloused. But it was at the time a comment that sort of put me off a little bit, like, who is he to tell me that I can't do that? But he was entirely correct. Now that I have kids, I know as sure as Tuesday follows Monday, there is zero chance I could be a pediatric oncologist. I just know that whether that's a flaw or not, without judgment, I can just say I couldn't do it.

Yeah, I totally understand that. I could totally understand that. I have two little girls, and my sensitivity to harm to children is. It's so completely unbounded that it makes it hard to even read the newspaper or go through life. You know, I mean, it's like it sensitizes you enormously. And it's the. In trauma, it sounds like you had a sort of traumatic experience in your. In your life. And I'm sorry to hear that. Trauma also particularly sensitizes you. And seeing trauma to the innocent is something that you never. You will never fully escape. The effects of that, like, that will not go away. I mean, my opinion, like, it's been 20, 25 years for some things for me, and it's like, it hasn't changed at all. In my head, it's the most painful thing I can think of.

Yeah. I think even though I chose to go into something different, which was not specifically going to be geared around that, you still in surgery, saw lots of trauma. We were at a level one trauma center, which meant, I think we probably averaged 15 penetrating traumas a day. And that doesn't tell you about all the blunt traumas. So all the car accidents. Death was right Always there. And you would still see kids die because you still took care of pediatric trauma. And that was and remains some of the most difficult stuff I've ever seen by far. Which is not to say now that, well, people dying of cancer isn't horrible, but there was something about the. At least one had a chance to make amends and it wasn't sudden, but there was this thing about the kid dies in a car accident and the parent had zero chance to prepare for this. There wasn't one nanosecond of preparatory grieving that could go on. I always found that to be the hardest stuff, actually, even though, paradoxically, it wasn't always accompanied by suffering on the part of the victim.

Yeah, right.

To your point, actually, about Tim.

Yeah, yeah. No, I can't even begin to imagine for the parents and for you dealing with the parents, like, ghastly, absolutely ghastly. I mean, now that I sort of knew that abstractly before I was a parent, when I was a father, but now I really know it in my bones and my mind can't even go there.

I remember when one boy, I may have even told the story on a podcast once, but he was 15 or 16 years old and he was being driven home from school by his older brother. They were going through an intersection when a guy ran a red and T boned them on the passenger side, which is where the victim was sitting. He arrived alive, but barely. And I was the trauma chief. And so for this type of an indication, the. This is a blunt trauma. And when he's unresponsive, it's basically going to be a head injury or massive internal bleeding. He's not going to be dead because he broke his bones or something like that. It's going to be. His aorta was sheared, one of the internal vessels was sheared or blunt head trauma. To make a very long story short, it was pretty clear he was dead due to head injury due to the response, the neurologic exam. But it was a vascular injury and he probably should have been declared dead in five minutes. But I wouldn't do it. I just was adamant that we keep working. And 30 minutes later, I finally conceded he was dead and declared him dead. When I went to tell his mom, she screamed so loud. It's not like in the movies sometimes where people sort of weep softly. Like, this was devastating. And I remember she tore the pocket off my scrubs, literally grabbed my chest and tore the pocket off my scrubs. I spent hours with her. I would actually go to his funeral. It was One of the very few people I didn't know whose funeral I went to. You know, at this point, I'm in a suit, right? When it came time to walk past the casket, she was there. I didn't think for a second she would remember me. I mean, because how could she, right? And there were hundreds of people walking past, and she was greeting them all sensibly, right? When she got to me, she did the same thing. She completely collapsed, grabbed me, and tore the pocket off my dress shirt. And I was really, really moved. I mean, I just couldn't believe this had happened. I couldn't believe she would even remember some random person. Although obviously it was such a traumatic experience. But I kept that shirt for a very long time as kind of a reminder of something that on a given day can change the course of your life. Like such a random freak thing. And how many lives his siblings. And it blew my mind. But there was like a memory within her for this interaction, separated by days and obviously by endless sadness.

That's brutal. I mean, what a devastating thing. I'm sorry, that's a hard thing.

How do you think we are doing as a society? And we can say that's medically or not medically in terms of treating victims of ptsd, and we can even just limit this to combat, because I think people can have PTSD for many things that are not combat related. But going back to the friend who said to you in 2003, with incredible insight, we're about to get very, very familiar with ptsd. Well, she was right. How are we doing?

Well, I mean, not surprisingly, for a society that has astronomical levels of addiction, depression, suicide, anxiety, compulsive disorders, astronomical levels of all of those social ills, not surprisingly, we're not doing too great on the PTSD front. Statistically, the more affluent the society, the higher the incidence of ptsd. Like, if you live in an affluent society, you are statistically prone to worse and longer PTSD than if you live in a poor society. In a poor society, there's an expectation that life is hard. So when something bad happens, it's not so much of a shock. And also in less affluent societies, in the developing world particularly, people live. They have a more communal existence because they need each other. So if you go to, you know, a village in Africa or in Asia or wherever it may be, people are interdependent on one another because they don't have their own little house in the suburbs, in the American suburbs, the way I grew up, and that social proximity is a buffer for Psychological struggles. So suicide is lower in those communities, depression rates are lower, anxiety is lower, even though those lives are stressful in all kinds of ways that ours aren't because we're affluent society. So the problem, humans evolved to survive. We're great at surviving, right? We evolved in a violent and unpredictable world where people had accidents or were attacked by animals or other human beings all the time and life was traumatizing. And if trauma was psychologically incapacitating to a majority of people for any length of time, the society wouldn't exist because the group couldn't survive, because there'd be no one around to function, because everyone's traumatized. So clearly, in terms of us, our species, trauma is something that humans are designed to work through fairly quickly because the business of survival has to be attended to. So the statistics bear this out within. For most people, the majority of trauma symptoms disappear within three months and about 80% of people wind up with long term trauma reaction. That doesn't diminish with time. So in my opinion, I mean, I'm not a psychologist, psychiatrist, I'm not a doctor, I've looked at this as a journalist, I've had my own experience with ptsd. But in my opinion, the problem is in our society is that we see PTSD as something that needs to be treated. The reason there's a long term problem with trauma reaction, I think is partly because we live in such an alienated, socially unconnected, non communitarian society. People live in incredible isolation. Children have their own bedrooms. I mean, this is the first time in human history that a society has been affluent enough to give children each their own room in a middle class house, right? Insane in human terms. Completely insane, right. Like children aren't supposed to be by themselves in the dangerous world. You know, the way people traditionally sleep in groups in human society that families live in their own automatic, you know, so a self heated, self sustaining house or apartment unconnected to their neighbors who are unconnected to any sense of community, you know, community endeavor is also like completely insane, right? And completely new in the human experience. And you know, what I would say is that the, I mean, what the statistics bear out is that when people experience trauma communally and recover from trauma communally, it goes quite well. I looked at a study that was done in a, in a very warlike tribe in East Africa. They were a raiding society. It was a cattle herding society. They were raiding society and warfare was quite normal and still is. The warriors that were well connected socially. I mean, I don't mean status Wise, I mean, that were well embedded in the community would come back from these very violent raids with, you know, a sort of startle response and some other sort of surface level trauma reactions, like they jump at loud noises or whatever, sometimes nightmares, but they wouldn't get depression. The depression component of PTSD was not something they had to struggle with because they had a healthy relationship with their society. The warriors that were not socially connected in a healthy way, those are the ones who were prone to long term depression. So what I would say is that our society is not good at treating PTSD because it's psychologically stressful for everybody, virtually everybody. And you can see the results of that in our rates of depression, suicide, addiction, anxiety, all those other things.

Again, it comes back to this challenge of with modernity has come amazing things like, I would never want to go back and live 10,000 years ago, even though I acknowledge that they probably had a much greater sense of community and belonging and purpose. Because frankly, I like that I don't have to worry about my drinking water and I like that I'm never starving. And I like that there's not a tribe 100 miles away that wants to kill me and all these other things. But at the same time, the example you gave about children sleeping in the room is such a fascinating one because it's one I've discussed many times with my wife. So everyone who's had kids probably can relate to the fact that at some point in our experience with three kids, it always seems to be about four years of age, they stopped wanting to sleep alone. So we were pretty lucky. All of our kids were sleeping in the crib. Fine, we had pretty good sleepers, but boy, when they turned 4, they were not happy about being alone in their room. And what does the textbook say? Well, you go through all of the do this, do that, do this, do that, but none of the do this, do that is bring them in your room. That's absolutely not the textbook thing to do is bring your four year old into your bed with you. But of course, that's exactly what would have been happening 10,000 years ago. So on some level you have to think, well, gosh, we probably evolved to sleep with our children.

Yeah, Americans are the only mammal that doesn't sleep with its young. Let's just put it that way. Americans, and I'm including the English speaking world, I mean, our culture is essentially derivative of England. So in England, removing your child from your bed space started in the 1700s and then spread throughout the English speaking world. But it is not the human norm. It never has been and it still isn't. I mean, most of the world sleeps in a communal space. Most of the world is not affluent enough to give their child their own crib and their own bed in their own room. If you went camping in the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana with your family, you would not put your.

We wouldn't have five separate tents.

You wouldn't have five, right? Yeah, exactly right. You would keep your four month old right next to you. Right? Because it's a dangerous world. And the four month old knows that. And the four year old knows that. I mean, infants get their safety from proximity to adults, period, end of sentence. And they know at one month, at four months, at three years, at four, four years, at 10 years, they know that if they're by themselves in the darkness, their life is in danger.

Think about how profound that is, Sebastian. Right, because I think someone who doesn't have kids might think that sounds strange, but I bet that many people listening to this who have kids will appreciate the almost irrational fear that a four year old can have of sleeping alone in the darkness. But if you think about it through the lens you're describing it, which is this is very evolutionarily hardwired. It shouldn't be surprising, right?

No, it's not irrational and it's not irrational at all. I mean, in the context of modern America it is most of the time. But I mean, look, the big threat to humans were the large cats. I mean in our evolution, large cats that hunted at night. And so nighttime was a very, very dangerous time for humans. They found countless human early human skulls with the sort of four prongs of the front teeth of a large cat, a large feline, you know, having punctured the skull. And so a child or even an adult that was alone in the darkness, their life was at risk. You cannot fight off a lion by yourself unless you happen to have an AK47 next to you. So people that are surprised at this, what I would say to them is, look, try going camping by yourself. Go into the woods and see how much sleep you get if you are completely alone in the Bob Marshall Wilson Wilderness. Now go camping with a group of friends and see how well you sleep. You will sleep a lot better because you're in a group. Could the group do anything if they were attacked by a grizzly bear? Probably not. Like you're probably just as much at risk by yourself as in a group. But there's something about being alone in the darkness that even makes adults fearful and they will not get a good night's sleep. So if you don't believe me, just go camping by yourself for a night and see how well it goes. And children who are, I think the ghastly term is Ferberized. There was a doctor named Dr. Ferber who wrote a book about how to Ferberize your children and get them to sleep in their own room. You put them, quote, down, put them down early, and then you and your wife or husband can have a nice evening on your own. He later recanted everything he taught in the early 1990s. There's an article in the New Yorker about it. And he said he was dead wrong about making children sleep by themselves. It was completely. It was counter to evolution. It was unhealthy for the child. It was quite nice for the adults, but not even that nice, because the screaming of the terrorized child is hard to take as well while they're being Ferberized. So Dr. Ferver himself actually recanted all of that. It's worth tracking down. So right now, most of the world, people still sleep with their children. And there's a point. My wife and I have always slept with our children. Our eldest is four and a half. We make it clear to her, listen, if you want to, you know, we have some spare mattress in the closet. Like, listen, if you want to take that little mattress and sleep in the kitchen or sleep on the couch in the living room, you know, go for it. You don't have to sleep here. We have a platform. We have a pad on the floor in the. What used to be the bedroom. There's no bed there anymore. I'm like, listen, honey, you can sleep wherever you want. It doesn't matter to us. But you're always welcome in bed, you know, with the family. And that's where she prefers to sleep.

Another thing that you do that's pretty different from the average person in America is you don't use a smartphone. Obviously, that's a very deliberate decision. Talk to me a little bit about it and how it's probably made your life better, despite the fact that you've given some things up. Right? You can't email people when you're on the run. You have to be at a computer to send an email. So you made some sacrifices to do that relative to the expectations potentially, of others around you. Because obviously, 30 years ago, you didn't need to send email, let alone send it while you were on the run. But we now live in a world where people expect responses and things like that. But walk me through the calculation and the trade off that's led you to decide, hey, I'm not carrying a smartphone and I'm happier for it.

It was pretty simple. I mean, I didn't have to give anything up because I never had a smartphone. So the idea of sending an email while you're walking down the street is insane to me. Right? I mean, I just, like, that's something that happens at your desk when you're working. And when you're walking down the street, 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 observe this. I live in. I live in New York City at Lower east side Manhattan. Like, this sort of bounty of human experience, the sheer craziness and wonderment of being part of human society in New York City or anywhere. I want that when I'm walking down the street, that's what I want to be experiencing. 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 our energy or our time, you know, I want to confine that as much as possible. It's drudgery, and I don't want it invading something to me precious, which is the experience of being alive. I will also say that I wrote a book called Freedom How Humans Maintain Their Autonomy in the Face of More Powerful forces, more powerful societies, oppressors. One of the main ways in a modern society that people get deprived of their freedom is through addiction. We are an enormously addicted society. People are addicted to drugs, they're addicted to television, addicted to social media. To the extent that you're addicted, you are unfree. And the tech giants that develop social media figured out there are algorithms that elicit an essentially addictive, compulsive response to social media engagement. Like they deliberately figured out the math of how to addict people to their iPhones, to social media. That addiction has resulted in. They've clearly correlated depression and anxiety and suicide in teenagers, particularly teenage girls. Starting with the advent of Facebook in, I believe it was 2012. Right. They watched the line shoot upwards with the use of social media. It's an algorithm that has killed people. Young people. They have blood on their hands because of this algorithm. And so one of the things I don't want to do is find I would be just as addicted to that stuff as anybody else. We all have a potentially addictive personality. And I don't want to be that guy walking down the street completely submerged in an environment which is designed to addict me further and further and then monetize my addiction. Right. I mean, I'd like. Thank you. No, I'll just go walk down the street on my own and I'll check my email when I get back home and all the other stuff that the iPhone offers. And again, it's a little minor miracle. You have all of human knowledge, you know, at your fingertips. I'm not sure I want all of human knowledge in my pocket. If it gets all of human knowledge at my desk is an amazing thing in my pocket. Maybe not. You know, do I need Google Maps to get from here to there? No, I don't. Right. I know the sun rises in the east. I can put a map in my back pocket. Like, I can figure it out. Thank you. Do I need to get a car? You know, a ride, an Uber with my iPhone? Yeah, that would be convenient. But I can also stick up my arm and get a taxi. There are workarounds for all the stuff that the iPhone offers you. And you avoid the enormous downside of compulsive addictive behavior and all the anxiety and depression that that statistically gives rise to.

Does your wife have a smartphone?

She does.

I mean, obviously you respect her decision and she respects yours. Do you feel that there are some people who are just able to utilize it for the benefits and not succumb to the challenges? And do you. Are you simply taking a cautionary approach in your own life?

Yeah, I mean, she's very deliberately and consciously, particularly around the girls, does not do that behavior, that obsessive behavior. I mean, the weird thing about email and texting, in most of your life, if you have something to do, a chore to do, shovel that pile of the dirt over there. The more you shovel, the less work is left. The weird thing about email is that the more you do, the more you have to do. The Greek myth of Sisyphus, the never ending task, that's email. The harder you work at it, the more email you generate back at you that you then try to do as quickly as possible, which generates more, and it's going to kill you. And my wife doesn't do that half the time. She leaves the house and she doesn't even have her iPhone because she forgot it. Like, I mean, she's. She's. She uses it in the way that I think, you know, in an extremely healthy way. And she is very, very careful not to exhibit those behaviors. And. But I'll tell you what, my little girl, I mean, my little girl has had virtually no screen time in her entire life. She doesn't have a tablet. Like we do not own a television. When we take a long drive somewhere, she gets bored. She looks out the window, she whistles, she sings, she goes to sleep. She did, she does. What we people of our generation, or my generation did when we were young is we got bored and we learned to entertain ourselves with little stories in our mind or what have you. And that's how she, my daughter, deals with it. So she has a completely screen free existence. But if you give her an iPhone, the first thing she does is get addicted to it. I don't know how. I mean, she's four. How did she learn this? I mean, the design is so intuitive that Even an uninitiated 3 year old can learn it within minutes. And then the only thing she wants to do is play with that phone, right? So that to me is like, oh, they knew what they were doing. It worked, they figured it out. They hooked a three year old within minutes. If that's not evil, what is? So we don't even let her near that thing.

How much of your philosophy around having your kids sleep with you, not having a smartphone, et cetera, how much of that do you think is influenced by your time in combat? So as a thought experiment, let's go back to 1985. You ultimately decide, I want to be a lawyer. You go to law school. So you're living in Lower east side right now. You're working for a law firm. Everything else is the same about you. You've married the same woman, you have the same kids. Again, it's a silly thought experiment. Do you think you carry a smartphone? Think of it less through the lens of, well, as a lawyer, it might be expected that I need to have my phone on me 24 7. It's less through that lens and more through the philosophical lens. I'm asking this question, question.

So if I were young, I mean, I think it's more of a cultural thing. Like if I were young, if I were 25 and came of age when all this stuff was normal, I would probably have one of them. I think you're younger than me. I'm 59. So what I didn't do was adopt it in midlife. And there was something about the behaviors of people with iPhones that I just thought, I don't want to look like that. I mean, occasionally I smoke a cigarette. One of the things I don't, you know, And I see smokers standing furtively outside doorways in midtown smoking their, their noon Cigarette. And even though I can enjoy a cigarette, there's something about the addictive, the visuals of that addiction that's so mortifying, right? I'm like, I don't want to be that person, right? That's how I feel about the iPhone. So I don't, it's not combat, you know, I studied anthropology. I see that through that human life, through that lens, I think about what are healthy human behaviors. I married a like minded person, a like minded woman. So fortunately she and I see absolutely eye to eye about that stuff. I have the reinforcement of other like minded people. There's a wonderful website called evolutionary parenting, www.ovolutionaryparenting.com that basically walks you through how to raise your child in an evolutionarily consistent way in modern society. Like taking into account the obvious sort of context of all this, how can you keep within sort of normal, sensible norms, how can you keep your parenting within a certain way that's sort of evolutionarily healthy and consistent?

What do they say about food, for example? I think this would be, I mean there's the obvious, right? Don't feed them things that are pure crap. But do they talk anything else about food and eating and rituals and things like that?

They might. I mean they're more behavior thing. And children are not out to foil your training, they're not out to foil your plans. Like when, when three year olds have temper tantrums, they're not being quote, bad. It's part of a process of neurological development that they have to go through. And when you pathologize normal developmental stages and normal child behavior, like crying when you stick them in a dark room, when you pathologize that they're doing something that they're evolutionarily wired to do, they're moving through neurological stages, development stages in a normal and healthy way. And when you pathologize it because it makes your life inconvenient, eventually they will learn norms that abide by your preferences. But that doesn't mean it's good for them, it means it's convenient for you. And so what this website does is talk about those norms and get you to understand those behaviors in evolutionary terms. So my daughter, every time she sees a sparkly glittery object, she wants it. You can't walk through the damn pharmacy without her saying, I want that, I want that, I want that. Is she an abnormally materialistic, acquisitive girl? No. She's exhibiting absolutely healthy hunter gatherer norms about acquisition of appealing things. You don't want to pathologize it, you don't want to get her everything either, but you have to put it in a proper evolutionary context in order to have patience with it. And that's what this website does.

I cannot wait to check that out. Actually, you've alluded to it briefly in our discussion and I've heard you speak about it before, but you recently had a very near death experience. Tell me a little bit about that.

Yeah, you as a doctor will know what these numbers mean. I have an anatomical sort of anomaly in my abdomen. My celiac artery has been compressed by my media median arcuate ligament, which is in the wrong place. And it's completely occluded the celiac artery. So the blood was forced to flow throughout my entire lifetime. It was not asymptomatic in me. The blood was forced to flow through smaller sort of sub arteries that feed the pancreas and the duodenum and I guess other digestive organs. And those little arteries, those arteries are smaller and not designed to take the full blood flow that the celiac carries. And over the course of presumably many years. I hope it was a long time because I don't want this to happen again. One of the arteries in the pancreatic duodenal artery, one of the little arteries developed an aneurysm. And then for about six months I had this really awful pain in my upper abdomen that came and went. And just being a stupid guy, I never went to the doctor. I'm like, if you can bear the pain, it's probably not going to kill you.

What was the pain like?

It would come and go and it was a kind of searing, cramping, slightly nauseous pain. And it was. I've been told that abdominal aneurysms can cause pain. And there's a big nerve center right around the solar plexus. And I think maybe he was pushing on that. But it wasn't the pain of kidney stones. But it was way more than indigestion, right? I mean, it was, you know, I would sit down and have to wait it out. When it happened, it was pretty awful.

And what was the frequency of that?

I don't know. Every couple of days, once a day, something like that, it would come and go. It last half an hour, an hour and then it would. And then after some months of that, I had a lot of other health problems. I was just in poor. I had sudden onset severe adult allergies for some reason. No idea why. I've always been a big runner and I had trouble running. I mean, just something was Wrong. Wrong with me. Right? And I couldn't figure it out. And after some months of that, the pain suddenly went away and the allergy suddenly went away, like overnight. I was like, oh, great, I'm good. And then within a few weeks, one afternoon, I had a dream. I had a horrible nightmare that I died. And I was in. You know, it was about 6 in the morning. I'm in bed with my family and everyone's asleep. And I had a dream that I died by some accident. It was an accident. Oversight. And it was stupidity on my part. And I died. And I was looking back at my family and they were grieving and I couldn't return to them because I'd crossed over. I was like, oh, you idiot, you blew it. And I woke up just like incredibly shaken. And I'm not a doctor, I think that my artery had already started dissecting because the following morning I had sort of ongoing pain. When I woke up in my. Something was wrong, and I still didn't go to the doctor. And that afternoon was a beautiful 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. And within about half an hour, thank God, I didn't go running. I would have died crawling around in the woods. In about half an hour, I felt this surge of pain in my abdomen. I was like, jesus, what is that? Flooded my entire abdomen. And I was like, damn, that is strange feeling. It wasn't unbearable, but it was. I'd never had that feeling before. And then within a few minutes, I tried to stand up and I almost fell over. My blood pressure apparently was just tanking. And what had happened was the artery, the aneurysm had ruptured and I was bleeding out into my abdomen. And of course, I didn't know this. And I was in the woods with my wife in a little cabin that I built. She dragged me back out of the woods, me sort of stumbling, and got me to the driveway and put me in the car. Car, so I could sit down. And I started to go blind. The sky turned electric white. And that started to take over my entire field of vision. And I was syncopic. I was in and out of consciousness. And the paramedics got there, and by the time they got there, I was in something called compensatory shock. And so suddenly I sort of revived. I was like, feeling okay. And the paramedics were like, you know, you're good. We think you dehydrated. It's a hot Day. Just sit and drink. Drink some water. You'll probably feel better. And I was like, all right, that sounds good. And my wife is like, you know, he went blind a few minutes ago. Like, you're taking him to the er. So they took me to the er.

And it was very far, right?

Yeah, I took them an hour and a half. It was an hour and a half before I got to the er. I lost my bowel control on the way there. And I was like, all right, I went blind for a while, and I lost my bowels. Like, that's probably not a good sign. Like, something's wrong. Wrong. I got to the er, and the medic, who I tracked down later, the guy in the back of the ambulance with me, he said, we got to the ER and you just tanked. You turned white as a sheet. And my hemoglobin was 1.2. The ER doctors were like, you can't.

Yeah, that's sort of incompatible with life.

Yeah, it was. And that's where I was at. I think I had probably lost about 90% of my blood. I mean, I don't know. I was still conscious. I was in and out of consciousness.

How much IV fluid had they given you in the ambulance?

I just put a bag in my arm.

Just a single bag, maybe a couple bags.

I don't know. But I got to the ER, and I was 1.2. My blood pressure was 60 over 40. And the doctor asked permission to cut into my neck, to put a line into my neck. I think it would be my carotid or my jugular.

Jugular.

Jugular. Okay. And I said, you mean in case there's an emergency? I had no idea I was dying. And I said, in case there's an emergency. He was like, this is the emergency right now. I was like, yeah, you got permission. So we started cutting my neck, whatever they do. And basically, that was when I died. I started to die. So my. A big black pit opened up underneath me, and I started to get pulled down into it, and I said to the doctor, you got to hurry. You're losing me right now. You got to hurry.

Did you say that, or did you.

Think that I said that to him? I said, doc, you got to hurry. You're losing me right now. I can feel myself going. And then my dead father appeared. Now I just want to stop and say I'm an atheist. My father was a physicist. I'm not religious. I'm not a supernaturalist. I'm not a mystic. I don't believe in anything. I can't measure and can't test. Right. And my father was the same way. And he appeared above me and a kind of presence. And he was. He seemed to be welcoming me. Right. And I wanted to have nothing to do with him. And it wasn't a conversation, it was a communication. And he wasn't. I couldn't see him. I could feel him. He was a presence. And I was like, basically, not now, dad. Like, I don't want to have anything. I love you, but I don't want to have anything to do with you right now. I want to, you know, I'm staying. I want to stay here. I have nothing to do with what, you know, that. Whatever that is.

How long earlier had your dad passed away?

Nine years earlier.

And you were with him when he died?

If I recall, I was holding his hand. Yeah. So, you know, I have a very spotty memory after that. I remember the doctor saying to whoever was pushing me, go as fast as you can. Without running. Without actually running. Go as fast as you can. I think was to the cath lab.

Do you remember them putting the breathing tube in your mouth?

I can't remember if I remember or not. I was in and out of consciousness. I remember they put me in a CAT scan and they had to shave me. They put a line in my groin, right?

Yep.

And I wanted to joke with them. I was like. I was. I almost said, I'm sorry I forgot to shave down there this morning. Right. I was. I was trying to make them laugh for some reason. I don't know, like a very wacky, like, sensibility. And they put a line in my groin and they put. And I think they had trouble seeing where the bleed was because I had so much blood. I'd been bleeding into my abdomen for an hour and a half. Luckily, I'm a long distance runner. I got a good heart. I mean, the doctor said if you weren't in really top shape, you would have just died. You would have gone into cardiac arrest and your kidneys would have failed, and it would have been over. It took them another eight hours to find the leak. I mean, I was on the fluoroscope for so long that I got radiation burns on my back. Two weeks later, this square red patch appeared on my back because I had so much radiation. And I remember at one point the doctors looking at each other like. And I know this kind of thing is very hard to fix. And it was in the middle of the night in a small hospital on Cape Cod, Hyannis Hospital. And I remember the doctors looking at each other and literally were like, what do we do? Like, we can't find it. Like, what do we do? And I remember thinking, oh, guys, tell me you. Don't tell me. I just didn't see that exchange. But they were heroes, man. They pulled it off. They finally found it, and they embolized it with catheter embolism, and they gave me 10 units of blood. I wound up getting 10 units of blood. And they saved my life.

How long were you in the icu?

Five days.

Do you remember much of that?

Oh, yeah. I woke up the next morning, and I had no idea that I'd almost died. And the nurse came in, experienced nurse, you know, in her 50s or 60s, maybe even. And she said, listen, you almost died yesterday. You're. You are the luckiest guy we any of us know. Like, you should have died. We can't believe you survived that. That. I was horrified. You know, I have these two little girls, and I was absolutely traumatized by that news. I had no idea it almost died. And I thought about it. I sat there. I was throwing up blood pretty regularly. I don't know how the blood got into my stomach, but it did. And she came back an hour later and said, hey, how you doing? I said, I lied. I was like, yeah, I'm doing okay physically. But honestly, I'm struggling with what you told me. It's terrifying that you can almost die in your own. In front of your family, in your own driveway when you're a very healthy person on a nice June day. Like, are you kidding? That can happen. Like, I don't have heart problems. I don't have anything. Like, you can just. You can. The universe can just take you out. And I was, like, totally traumatized by that. And she said, try thinking about that as a sacred experience rather than a scary experience. And then she walked out of the room. And I've been thinking about that my whole life. Like, yeah, I was given a glimpse of the mystery, you know, the great mystery of death. And I was given a. I was allowed to look at it and allowed to survive the look at it. And I got brought back, and then I started to do some research. I mean, first of all, I can't tell you how traumatizing that whole thing was. Combat's nothing compared to that. That really messed me up.

This was June of 19 or 20.

June of 20.

Okay.

I just got paranoid that that could happen at any moment anywhere. Had I been on an airplane, I would have died. Had I been on a walk in the woods, I would have died. Had I been almost anywhere but where I was, I would have died. And I got, made me super paranoid. It was extremely traumatic. At least combat you can leave behind and you come home and you're not going to, you know. And I started to look into near death experiences by people. You know, imagine my surprise that an awful lot of people see the black pit. A lot of awful lot of people have dead relatives at the threshold to engage with them. And it really got me sort of interested in what the hell, you know, what is this? Like, are we really sure? And I know this is going to sound completely flaky, but it really aroused my curiosity about this consistency of experience across many different societies, many different kinds of people, and irreproducible through low blood oxygen, ketamine, endogenous dmt, all the things that happen in the dying brain, if you reproduce those things artificially, people don't have the near death experiences. You seem to have to be kind of dying to have them. And it made me really, it really made me start to wonder, wow, like maybe it isn't just nothing. Like maybe there is some other dimension that some kind of existence continues on that we just don't understand or even don't even have brains developed enough to capable of understanding it. Maybe it's possible. And I know there's been some research in quantum physics trying to understand a possible post death existence in terms of quantum physics and quantum fluctuation and all that stuff. I mean, these are people who are a lot smarter than me and I, you know, I don't know if I'd even understand it, but it did get me sort of intrigued in an empirical sense of like, do we actually, are we actually completely sure that there's nothing. Because that not, that's not what the experience, that is not what my experience of it was.

You've obviously read about other people's experiences. Have you spoken with other people who have experienced this?

Not face to face, literally spoken. I've had some, you know, I've talked about this on some podcasts and people have reached out via Facebook or whatever social media that I do have on my laptop with messages about, yeah, something like that happened to me. I had the exact same experience or a similar one. So I have had some affirmation not only of the mystery of it, but of the trauma of it.

Have you spoken with any neuroscientists about it? I mean, I'm curious what sort of biological explanations could exist for this?

Well, I've read some papers on it. I Haven't spoken to neuroscientists, but I've read some papers by doctors and medical researchers and possibly neuroscientists sort of trying to explain the phenomenon in terms of neurochemistry. And so ketamine is released in the dying brain. You can give someone ketamine and they'll have all kinds of visions and all kinds of stuff. They won't necessarily see their dead father. Right. You can deprive someone of oxygen so that the blood levels of oxygen are very low. They don't necessarily have the experience of the dying person. There's something called dmt. I think it's akin to ecstasy. The drug ecstasy?

Well, that's mdma. Do you mean DMT or mdma?

I'm sorry? Dma. I'm sorry. Okay, yeah, mdma. I'm not actually now, I can't remember one of the two. But there's an endogenous compound that is also a drug that is released in the dying brain. And so step in if you know which it is. Now, I can't remember, but again, it doesn't produce some of the hallmark experiences of near death. So there is an ongoing mystery about exactly what this is.

It could be the situation. Right. It could be that those chemicals alone are insufficient to elicit that response. They have to be combined with the belief that you're dying. Right. Maybe that's the.

Well, here's the thing. I had no idea I was dying. And I'm guessing a lot of dying people don't realize they're dying. I mean, I don't know, but I'm guessing by the time you're dying, your brain is so fuzzy and addled that you may not even be able to be understanding of it, depending on the kind of death, of course. But I had no idea. I mean, the guy wanted to cut into my neck. And I was like, you mean in case there's an emergency? Like, why would you do that? Like, I had no idea.

So you were in the ICU for five days. You were in the hospital presumably for another few days. How long until you were back home?

I think I came home on the seventh day.

And what was your recovery like, physically?

I mean, I had a huge hematoma in my abdomen, so I had a huge amount of dead blood. And, you know, it took months for my body to process that. I mean, pretty quickly I was walking and then running, and my physical activity was really constrained by my paranoia, my medical paranoia. I was like, God, maybe I should rent an apartment next to the hospital, you know, I mean, not literally, but I sort of joked about it with my wife. Like, it may. I mean, I, you know, that I survived an hour and a half. Like, that was a miracle. Like, I just didn't want to do anything that might make it hard for, you know, an ambulance crew to get to me. So I definitely wasn't going to go running in the woods. And all these things that are. Have been part of my life, my whole life, like, suddenly they were terrifying to me. I became someone I didn't recognize. I mean, I became an incredibly, for a while, an incredibly neurotic, fearful person.

What chipped away at that.

I'm still dealing with it, frankly, you know, and if I didn't have daughters, a family, I might be less worried about it. But I, you know, I. I don't want to go to Africa with my family and, like, expire on a transatlantic flight next to my kids, you know, like, you know, I'm in the process of making sure that this kind of thing certainly or almost certainly can happen with any of the other small arteries. And I'm in the process of, like, nailing that down. But as with combat trauma, the passage of time helps, but it really changed me and I think might have changed me forever. I'm not sure that fear is going to entirely go away. There are certain loud noises I still jump at because they sound like gunshots. I'm not sure that's ever going away.

Have you been able to sort of incorporate the wisdom from that nurse?

Yeah, I've been working at it. An anthropologist friend of mine said you had a classic shamanic journey. Mean the shaman goes to the sort of threshold of death, encounters the afterworld, and comes back with some information. You, your whole life have gone to places of death, places where death is happening to people and might happen to you. You know, war zones. And you come back and you have some information for people. And so maybe you can look at this journey, and I hate that word journey because it's sort of misused sometimes. But if you look at it as a kind of journalistic journey, what information are you coming back with that might be useful to other people and to yourself? And that I'm working on. I'm going to write a book called Pulse about what happened to me physically, but also what the consequences were psychologically and what the possibilities are metaphysically? I want to talk to a quantum physicist about quantum fluctuation and the enduring, you know, the possible enduring nature of the soul, you know, et cetera. And I just want to not to confirm I mean, none of this is possible to prove, but I would like to walk through the possibilities to see what might be the explanation for my experience.

When you think about the PTSD associated with this particular event, does it manifest more with depression or more with anxiety?

Anxiety for sure.

Was that also true of the combat ptsd?

It was until Tim got killed. And then I was in my first marriage and I've talked about this before, so we lost a pregnancy and we found out right when Tim was killed. And the timing was weird enough that it was pretty complicated psychologically for me, that for the first time in my life sent me into like a real depression, like a dangerous depression. And I felt removed, completely removed and isolated from every person I loved, including my wife at the time. Like, I felt like I was living behind bulletproof, bulletproof plexiglass and couldn't escape. It was a dangerous, dangerous feeling. I figured it out. But it was a, it was a very, very unpleasant time. Time in my life.

What do you think was the most important factor or factors that helped you emerge from that?

Boy, that's a good question. I mean, I was talking to somebody, a professional about it. That helped. I was married to someone I really loved, but the marriage wasn't working. And eventually we both sort of confronted that and acknowledged it and we ended the marriage. And that was very painful, but it felt like a healthy step. We're still friends, we did it. The marriage didn't work, but the divorce did. I'd started drinking a little more than I probably should have. I mean, I've never, you know, by no means was an alcoholic, but I, I had a unhealthy relationship with alcohol and I, I stopped drinking. I had atrial fibrillation, which is an arrhythmia in my heart. And I was told, you know, I fixed that. I had a, an ablation that fixed it completely. But the doctor said, you know, you know, alcohol can trigger a. Try not drinking. And I didn't drink for a month. And I felt so good that I turned the corner and all of a sudden I was starting to feel like a healthy person, emotionally healthy person. It was a lot of different things. A lot of different things.

How much did other people, outside of the therapist, how much did other people contribute to the improvement in your well being? Again, I'm thinking about the tribe, right? Who was your tribe at that point in life? You'd obviously lost a very important member of your tribe. If I'm doing the math correctly, you would go on to lose another important member of the Tribe being your father. So who are the important members of your tribe, and is it necessary that they understand what you've been through? Right. So can people who didn't know Tim or who have not been in combat be a part of your healing?

So I met someone else and remarried. And she had been through some pretty tough things herself. Not combat, obviously not. Obviously. It could have been, but it wasn't. And there was something about her compassion and understanding that was enormously helpful to me that was really quite profound. And I mean, the problem with anxiety is it doesn't make sense. You're anxious about something that isn't rational. So being told rationally, you don't have to worry about this. You're not going to get another arterial rupture. It's not going to happen. The anxiety isn't necessarily tied to reality. Well, likewise with depression. Like, you can be very depressed. And the fraternity of other people, the love of other people might not reach you because the nature of depression is that you're at the bottom of the ocean. You can't reach me. I know you're talking to me. I know you love me. I see your lips moving, but you don't understand where I am. You can't reach me here. And one of the biggest things that helps someone in those circumstances is feeling needed and feeling useful and being asked to contribute. Like, look, bro, you might be depressed, but we need you to stay on guard duty for a while, or you need to kill that elk, or we need some sandbags. The river's rising. When people are needed by the group, they click into this thing that actually improves their own psychological state of mind. I mean, the admissions to psych wards in London during the Blitz went down. Went down during the Blitz, during the.

Bombings, as did depression post 9 11. Suicide went down post 9 11.

That's right. So the crisis engenders is a kind of call to action which allows people to buffer themselves from their psychological troubles. And the love of one person sometimes is quite painful to experience because you realize that that person who loves you can't reach you where you are. But being needed is a different thing. And I think ultimately that sense of being necessary might be the ultimate antidote to the experience of depression.

I've always been very fascinated by the opioid epidemic. So I was very attuned to how much of a problem it was years and years ago. And I remember really naively thinking, as the pandemic took hold in late March, early April of 2020, I wonder if this is a crisis that will make people better. I wonder if this is a crisis that will improve the collective state of our emotional health in the way that previous crises had. You alluded to them, right? The Great depression, World War II, 9, 11. And of course, the answer turned out to be no for most people, or at least on average. The answer was not yes, at least as it's been borne out by statistics in terms of the rates of accidental overdoses, which saw an enormous increase, in fact overtook all other forms of accidental deaths. So it exceeded that of car accidents in the age demographic where car accidents had historically been the leading cause of. Of death. And it wasn't just because people weren't driving. Right. It was due to the surge in overdoses. Was I just sort of really naive to think that that could possibly have the opposite effect? Is it obvious to you now why is it the isolation of the pandemic that is almost assuredly what fueled that? Or why was that not a crisis that did better?

I think a couple of reasons. First of all, what we were asked to do to protect the nation was to isolate from each other, right? Because it was a pandemic. And humans in a crisis want to come together, physically come together, like within proximity, physical touching of each other, like that's what makes people feel safe. And again, that's why children feel safe when they sleep with their parents. They can touch their parents like they feel them, and that reduces their anxiety and they sleep very deeply. Right. And they will get a good night's sleep, and so will the parents if they're not stuck in a dark room. Well, likewise, when you're scared, if you're facing a crisis, the proximity of others, it raises oxytocin levels, it raises testosterone levels of men. It does all kinds of good things that allow the group to deal with the crisis. This was a crisis that did the opposite. It alienated people, it isolated people. And isolation, we know, very often leads to depression. Just ask someone who's done a week in solitary confinement at a federal penitentiary what the effects of isolation are. They'd rather be, like, electrocuted. They'd rather have their meals taken away, anything than just, please don't stick me in a hole by myself. It's the hardest thing for humans. And that's basically what we were asked to do. And understandably, it was a pandemic. But the other thing is that there was no unity of purpose. The political leadership was completely contradictory about what it meant to be a good American. And so, on the one hand, you had knowledgeable people saying, being A good American means wearing a mask and social distancing and eventually getting your vaccine. Right? And then you had political leadership that was like, no, it actually means not wearing a mask and not social distancing and not getting a vaccine. And so the discordant, contradictory messages from the upper, upper echelons of our society, I think made people crazy. There was no way to feel like, oh, I'm saving aluminum cans, I'm going to give them to, you know, like once a week, I'm going to take them down to the, you know, the scrap metal drive in my little town because the troops overseas need the metal. Like, there was no unity of purpose there because we were being told completely contradictory things by the political leadership.

And I suspect, well, it's interesting, right, the Depression. There wasn't an external enemy in the way that there was in World War II or post 9, 11, and yet that unity could still exist, suggesting that even an infectious agent, though not an enemy per se, it's hard to be angry at. A virus, if handled correctly, potentially could have been more, at least less damaging, I don't want to say more unifying given the isolation requirements at the time, but could have been less destructive, I.

Suppose, had Donald Trump come out and said, it's your patriotic duty to wear a mask and to social distance. And you know what, if you get the vaccine, I know maybe you're worried about it, maybe you're scared of it. If you get the vaccine, you're a damn hero to this country. You know what I mean? Most of the country would have done it. And unfortunately, I don't know what his calculus was, but unfortunately, he didn't choose to do that. Even though he sort of mumbled at one point that you should wear a mask and he got himself a vaccine. Right. I'm sure the whole White House staff did, all Fox News and all of cnn. You know, like, everybody got the vaccine. But the split messaging from that side of the American political environment was enormously confusing. I mean, I happen to be a Democrat. I enormously respect elements of the conservative political ideal. I get it. I don't share it, but I get it. I respect it. That kind of thing was really, I found incredibly selfish and unbelievably anti American and unpatriotic for the Trump administration to engage in that stuff.

Not to make this a political question, although it sounds like it coming on the heels of that, we're literally on the heels of the withdrawal from Afghanistan I just mentioned, I came back from a hunt and a number of the guys I Hunt with are former Special Forces guys. And a lot of the time around the camp was kind of talking about their experiences in Afghanistan and their views on the US Withdrawal. I've received a number of questions from people on social media who knew I was going to be interviewing you, wanting your thoughts on the manner of the withdrawal and whether it was necessary at all in the first place. So, for example, a lot of the seals I spoke with were adamant that this was not something that should have happened, that this was no longer actually a war. It was really more of a peacekeeping operation. And 5,000 troops could have stayed there indefinitely and kept the Taliban at bay and still would have been a fraction of the number of troops that we have in Germany, for example, or South Korea or any number of the geographies of our allies. What are your thoughts on that?

I would agree with your friends who said that. I mean, there's 40,000 cops in New York City. I think when we finally withdrew the last troops, it was down to a couple thousand. 2,500.

Yeah, 2,500 U.S. and then including NATO, you can round up a bit and maybe call it 5,000, I think is what I have read.

So their ability to carry out targeted strikes, to carry out airstrikes, just the sort of safety tripwire of American forces in Afghanistan, would have essentially guaranteed that the Taliban could not overrun the rest of the country and at minimal cost in lives and treasure. The Taliban had not attacked American forces since February of 2020.

Right. Not a single American casualty since right now.

Maybe that's because they knew that the Trump administration had negotiated a withdrawal and they knew, we don't want to mess this up or just sit tight. I mean, it's possible. I don't know, maybe if we decided to stay, it would have changed, but I think we could have maintained troops there at minimal cost to this nation and at enormous benefit to the Afghan people. Our big error there, in my opinion. I wrote a piece for Vanity Fair about this recently. A few weeks ago, the reason the Taliban were allowed in by the Afghan populace was that they promised to clean up corruption, and they pretty much did. Abuse at the police checkpoints, where you have to bribe the policemen to get through with your family. Every time you file a piece of paper with the government, you got to bribe the clerk. That's, you know, whatever. That kind of awful, endemic corruption that makes the lives of ordinary Afghans, ordinary people, absolutely miserable and enriches at the top of the food chain makes these warlords and government ministers, like, obscenely wealthy. The Taliban Clean that up. And our big mistake was that we stood up a government in Afghanistan that was incredibly corrupt. We never insisted on any kind of accountability for the money we pumped in there. We pumped money in that we knew was going to these warlords, just enriching them to corrupt governors and all that. It was an enormously abusive system, and we didn't care. And we gave them the kind of government that Afghans don't want and that Afghan soldiers, understandably, are not willing to die for. We did it to ourselves. We didn't need to do that. We could have insisted on some accountability, but we didn't do it. And it wasn't the military, it was the State Department that was not interested in pursuing. The military would have done whatever they were ordered. And if the orders came down, look, you got to track every penny and make sure it's not getting abused. The military would have done that as much as they were capable of. So it's tragic that that happens. And in the end, if we weren't going to insist on a decent government, what's the point of staying forever anyway? You can't ask anyone to die for a corrupt system. And that's what we would have been asking American soldiers to do. Which begs the question, why did we allow a corrupt system to blossom under our watch when we had all held all the trump cards and could have forced that government to actually act ethically?

Why do you think we didn't?

I don't know. I brought it up with John Kerry in 2010. He asked for a meeting with me, and the war wasn't going well. And I was like, the war is never going to go well until you address the corruption issue, because Afghans are never going to fight for this government you've given them. And he was like, well, we can't do that. You know, like, we have no leverage here. I was like, what are you talking about? Threatened to leave Afghanistan. Like, the last time the Taliban took over, they hung the president, Najibullah, from a street lamp for corruption. Every corrupt government minister knows that if we pull out, they're all hanging from street lamps. You have a huge amount of leverage, and they just. They wouldn't do it. It was too much of a hassle.

I can't believe we haven't even talked about your last book. I feel like we need to spend a few minutes on it because I find it just fascinating. So. Yet I hate doing forced, rushed, quick stuff. So we'll take as much time as you want to take. Tell me, when you took this journey.

So I walked along the railroad lines from Washington D.C. to Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. We were basically, we called it high speed vagrancy. Railroad lines are this kind of swath of no man's land that goes right through America, right through the ghettos and the suburbs and the farms and the industries and the junkyards and the everything and, and it's, and it's no man's land and you can do whatever you want and as long as the cops don't catch you. And so we had this interesting 400 mile game of hide and seek with the cops and we were sleeping under bridges and abandoned buildings and getting our water out of creeks. And most nights, as I say in my book, most nights we were the only people who knew where we were. And there's many definitions of freedom, but surely that's one of them. So that was eight years ago that I did that trip with three other guys that had been in a lot of combat. And then later, you know, a few years ago, I decided I wanted to write a book about freedom. And for me the word freedom, the thing I wanted to understand about it is that we're the only species where a smaller individual or a smaller group can out fight a larger individual or a larger group. And when you talk about freedom, basically it means an underdog group maintaining their autonomy in the face of a greater power. How does that work? I mean, the Montenegrins in the early 1600s were outnumbered 12 to 1 when the Ottoman Empire invaded their mountain domain. Outnumbered 12 to 1. And every time the Ottomans came in, the Montenegrins destroyed them. Right. There's no mammal where that could be true of only humans. And so I organized my thoughts into three sections in my book, Run, Fight and Think. And those are basically the three ways that humans maintain their autonomy. They outrun their oppressors if they can't, like the Apache did. The Apache remained autonomous for centuries while their sedentary, wealthier Pueblo neighbors got rolled by the Spanish. Immediately the Apache remained free, some elements of them, until 1886. That's almost, almost within my grandmother's lifetime. They did that by being mobile. But if you can't outrun your oppressor, you're going to have to out fight them. And the ability of small human groups to defeat on the battlefield much more powerful adversaries, like the Taliban defeated the United States and the Russians before us, and the English before that, is unique to the human species. I looked at MMA and some of the individual martial arts to look at the dynamics of combat to understand how Smaller individuals can also defeat larger ones. One of the reasons that happens is that big muscles require a lot of oxygen. And if you throw 20 punches in a row and you're a big guy and you don't connect, you're out of breath at the end of that. Small muscles, small frames use less oxygen and are more reactive and more efficient as a smaller fighter. If you can slip 20 punches, you're not in oxygen debt. The big guy is right. And that's essentially what the Taliban did with the US On a sort of macro scale. Massive armies go through enormous amount of resources that insurgencies don't. And after 20 years, we basically ran out of resources and the will to spend them. But the final chapter is called think. And it's about how you maintain your autonomy within your society. So the first thing you have to do is repel the enemy, outrun or out fight the enemy. But the problem in human history is that a community, a society that's well enough organized to out fight an enemy is well enough organized to oppress their own people. So fascist dictators throughout history, totalitarian states, they are very militaristic societies that are well armed to republic repel invaders, but they also use that military organization to oppress their own society and control it. And so I look at how societies can maintain their freedom from within, from an oppressor that is of their own people, an oppressive leader. And I looked at the labor movement in America around 100 years ago, and the brilliance of the human species is that we can outthink more powerful entities. And the labor movement was able to eventually get their way in the face of the National Guard with fixed bayonets and the entire US Government, they eventually got their way in terms of fair pay and fair work hours, fair work conditions. And the tipping point often is having. Well, first of all, you need selfless leaders. You need leadership. If you're going to overthrow the British in Dublin in Ireland in 1916, if you're going to confront the US government as a labor union, as a labor uprising, you're going to lead leaders who are willing to die for the cause. They cannot tell everyone else to rush the machine guns while they stay hiding behind the sandbags. If you don't have leaders that are willing to die, you will. As an underdog group, you will not win. But likewise, you need women. Social movements like that, political movements, insurgencies that don't incorporate women into their power structure and into their sort of strategy and their tactics will probably not succeed. And so I looked at the Again at the mill strikes in America. And the turning point came when the strikers in Lawrence, Massachusetts started putting women on the front lines to confront the National Guard soldiers with fixed bayonets. And, and the soldiers didn't know what to do. They were not willing to bayonet women. They had mothers, they had sisters, they had wives, and they weren't willing to do it. And whereas killing men is morally much less of a problem even for totalitarian regimes and certainly for democracies. So when you put women into the equation, the police don't quite know what to do. As one frustrated policeman said at the time, he said, one cop can handle 10 men, but it takes 10 cops to handle one woman. And that was the beginning of the end for the resistance to these crucial changes that came to the textile industry in 1912, 1914.

Did the Taliban ever use women? Obviously they're from a Sharia law standpoint, not exactly sensitive to women, but did they ever use women in the true sense of the word use for their gains?

No. And you know, here's the thing is that on the battlefield, particularly at the distances that are typical of modern combat, I mean, you know, automatic weapons easily fire 2, 3, 400 meters. You don't see the faces of the people you're fighting. You certainly don't know what sex they are. You don't. Women's capabilities really come to the fore in the kinds of insurgencies that they had. For example, for the Battle of Algiers when the French were occupying Algiers and Morocco in the 1950s, 50s and 1960s, or the mill strikes in Massachusetts. Women have lateral networks. They're not good at top down hierarchies. Men are good at top down hierarchies. And the top guy says, all right, now we're going to charge the machine guns and men will do it. Right. And women's, their forte is not that so much as lateral egalitarian networks that are unranked, but they're lateral. And it's very hard for information, the intelligence agencies, to penetrate those networks. Basically, an insurgency depends on the society from which it springs to fight. Right. So the Taliban are exclusively male fighters, but if they are not part of a society that incorporates women and women are absolutely crucial to any functioning society. If you don't incorporate that, it's not going to go very far. And you know, the Easter rising in Ireland is another excellent example of that. If you literally have women on the front lines, it doesn't matter so much in open combat because a lot of it's spray and pray tactics. Anyway, you're just unloading a belted machine gun when you're operating in a situation like the mill strikes in Lawrence. These are society face to face with itself. And there is some public accountability to murdering women with bayonets.

Given now that the Taliban will likely be carrying out their actions and not at 400 meters, what do you think is going to be the natural history of how things go in Afghanistan?

Well, it takes a very different temperament, a very different mindset to be a successful insurgency than to run a government. Completely different mindsets. And I think I mentioned I heard that the Taliban fighters are now bored. Right? I mean, they missed the war, Right? So the Taliban are brilliant insurgency, brilliant strategic thinkers. They out fought the most powerful military ever in human history. Out fought them, they outlasted them. They outlasted our will to fight. Now they have to run Afghanistan. It's twice the population it was in 1996 when I saw them take power back then. The cities have been modernized. A generation of Afghans have received education. Afghan girls have received an education. They're going to find Afghanistan to be an unwieldy mess that is very, very hard to run and run according to Sharia law. So I don't know what the future holds, but I imagine that there's going to be some fracturing within the Taliban. Really hardcore, ultra, sort of like conservative elements falling out with more moderate elements that want engagement with the West. I imagine that kind of fracturing will happen. The Tajik resistance is organizing itself in Massoud's old territory in Badakshan in the northeast quadrant of the country. If they don't abide by some basic international norm, human rights norms, they're going to have a very, very hard time accessing international donations, international monetary systems, international relief efforts, and recognition by foreign governments. I mean, they're going to have a tough time.

Do you really think that's true? I mean, that might be true of Western governments. Do you think China will care especially?

I mean, some of them might not. But the west is important. The original Taliban was recognized by the uae, Pakistan and one other country, I can't remember. Saudi maybe. I can't remember. There's $8 billion of Afghan money is sitting in New York banks and I think will not be released without some kind of legitimacy to the Afghan government. The Taliban have a world of hurt ahead of them. You know, they might. They might make it work, but it's not going to be the simple prospect that it was in 1996 when all these cities were rubble and the Population was half this size, and no one had cell phones and whatever else. Like, they're going to have a tough hill to climb.

How long did it take you to go on your journey, your walk?

We walked off and on for a year, and then I kept doing it a little bit after that from time to time with one or two buddies. We called it the Last Patrol.

Was it HBO that did the. Where does that documentary appear?

Yeah, I brought a videographer who quickly became part of the group. And the Last Patrol was aired on HBO in 2015, I think. But after we stopped shooting, we kept. Some of us kept going back out there. I really liked it out there in the railroad lines.

When did you know you were done?

I was headed for a place called Jumonville Glen, where the French and Indian wars basically started. A young George Washington in 1754, led an expedition, small expedition, against a French force reconnaissance force and his sort of native tracker and scout, a Seneca named Tanagrison, known as the Hef King, he precipitated a massacre of some of the French soldiers who surrendered to Washington. And that triggered a reaction by the Brits, which went into the French and Indian War, which eventually set the terms for the Revolutionary War. Without the British winning the French and Indian War, the Seven Years War, we might not have. America might not have dared throw off British rule with France right on their border. So it's an iconic place that very few people have heard of, and it's right outside of Connellsville, Pennsylvania, in western Pennsylvania. And I wanted to end there. I wanted to sneak into Jumonville Glen. It's in the woods, deep in the woods. So I wanted to sneak in there and sleep there, thinking that the last people that slept there under this little cliff, the last people that slept there, might have been the French forces under Jumonville in 1754. And I wanted to get out of there before the park. You know, it's a national historical site. And before the park guards showed up, you know, I sneak out of there before dawn. I, like, wanted to do that. And we got to Connellsville, it was very hot day, and I sort of shredded my feet. It was 100 degrees during the day, and when it's that hot, we're carrying a lot of weight. You know, we were moving 10, 20 miles a day. We're carrying 60, 70 pounds on our backs, and we're sweating an awful lot. And basically your bottoms of your feet kind of turned to oatmeal, basically. And my feet were bleeding. I was an enormous amount of pain and we got to Connellsville, and Connellsville is very, very poor, as one lady said, so poor that when it gets hot, they don't even have pools in their backyard. They just swim in the river that runs through the middle of the city. And it's an old industrial town. And indeed, there was Connellsville swimming at the end of the day, during the scorcher of a summer day, taking the heat off. And we got there, we stumbled, limped to the cobble of the beach along the Yokogeni river and took off our boots and our shirt and staggered into the water. And I came back, I sat down, and the dog was exhausted and the men were exhausted, and I could barely walk. We had another. We were going to sleep somewhere in downtown Connellsville. We're going to try to hide from the police somewhere and sleep along the river and then keep moving in the morning. And we had 15 miles to go to get the Jumonville Glen. And I looked around at the guys and, you know, I was in the middle of getting divorced, and I was like. I was like, you know what? The trip just ended. We don't need to go to Jumonville. It's over. We're done. We got what we needed out of this. It's time to go home and face our. All of us go home and face our lives, which is what we did. So I recognized the ending when it came to me. I didn't know. I didn't wake up in the morning thinking that I knew it in the moment. And I think one of the great things to work on is to know in the moment when things are over. Trips, relationships, anything. When it's over, you got to know it's over. And if you don't, God help you.

I mean, I hate asking a glib question, because I agree with that wholeheartedly. Right? I mean, knowing when to quit is an amazing gift. What are some of the signs? How do you know when it's time? Because it's not always obvious in the moment.

No, it's not. You got to feel it. It's got to be a feeling. Your instincts, your feelings don't lie, you know? And if you just suddenly get the feeling that you were doing something because you think you're supposed to, you're supposed to stay married, you're supposed to go walk all the way to Jumal Jumonville Glen on bleeding feet. Like, if you think you're supposed to because it's embarrassing not to, that's not the right reason. And I don't know how to articulate it more than that. Like, you got to. You got to feel it. Like, sometimes you get an instinctive sense not to trust somebody. That's a feeling. It's not knowledge, it's feeling. And those instincts serve us very, very well. And you got to pay attention to them. And I felt it. I was like, okay, why exactly are you going to Jumonville, Glenn? Oh, because you thought that would be a cool ending for your project, Your little project, you know, like, oh, the symbolism of it. You don't do things for symbolism. You don't do things because they're a good ending. You gotta feel what you need and what's right and what's good. And I felt that come right up to the ground into me. I was like, look at the dog, look at the men. We're all broken. Like, you don't. Yeah. Can we do it physically? Yeah, we can do anything. We'll crawl there if we have to. We could do it. I was with some tough guys, you know, like, yeah, we could do it, but why? Why are we doing it? If you can't answer that question very readily, with conviction and with some feeling in your chest, if you can't answer it, don't do it.

Did the guys put up an argument?

No. Everyone was thrilled. We knew. We all knew.

Do you think that they simultaneously knew, or do you think that they had come to that conclusion earlier and didn't want to speak up?

I think I somehow convinced them that I knew what I was doing and they kind of trusted my decisions. And I might have just had a rebellion on my hands, I don't know. But I mean, we got shot at in Pennsylvania. Somebody started shooting at us just because they didn't like the looks of us, you know, we were hungry, we were cold, we walked through the winter.

How did you guys feed yourself?

We'd walk into town and buy some food and keep walking out the other side and go back out onto the lines. And we smoked a little tobacco out there. And, you know, there's stuff we needed from town. We'd stop, we'd go in, we'd look like hell. We looked homeless, basically. We looked like sort of high speed homeless, right? And the. And we keep going. And so a lot of stuff, you know, the cops were looking at for us with a helicopter, like all kinds of weird, crazy stuff happened. And we were a unit, right? I mean, we were brothers. Like, we were connected. And so when that moment came by the Yokagane River, I think we all felt it. And it was the obvious, the Obvious thing to do.

You think back over the last 250 years of American civilization, or nearly 250 years, I guess, as a society. When during that arc were we most free?

Depends how you define freedom.

I'll let you define it because I feel you're in a better position to do so than I am.

Politically, we're the most free. Now, obviously, the initial democratic endeavor with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights forgot to include black people. Outrageous transgression. That's not a free society. Politically, by the time you get to the civil rights movement, suffrage, and then the civil rights movement, the labor movement, by the time you start getting into the 1970s, 1980s, you're starting to get something at least approaching some political freedom. Economic freedom is a different matter. And if you have a society where the income gap is too wide between rich and poor, it's hard to argue it's a completely free society. People can be held in sort of a voluntary bondage of having to work three jobs, because we all know that story, right? I mean, like, that's not a free society. But then following on from that, if you can't freely make choices that are good for you, you're not free. And if you are addicted to something, you're not entirely free. And we live in a massively addicted society, addicted to substances, addicted to visual stimuli from television or iPhones. We are not free people in that sense. And I don't know which is worse, the inability to vote or the inability to look up from your iPhone, which is a greater form of oppression, which corrodes your human dignity more. I don't know. It's an open question. What I will say is, is that I had the good fortune to interview a man who had spent some decades in prison for doing an extremely bad thing from a very brutal diminished situation in his family and his society. And it had the predictable results of violence and crime. And he killed somebody, and he went and he paid the price for it. And he spent almost 30 years in prison educating himself. He found God. I'm an atheist, but I completely respect someone who finds God. And he straightened himself out, and he was let out on good behavior. And I was able to interview this man a week after. A couple weeks after he was let out of prison after 25, some whatever, years. At the end of the interview, I said, I feel silly asking this, but is it possible to be more free in prison than outside of prison? And he looked at me like I was crazy. He said, yeah, of course it is. Are you kidding? He said, you can't be a drug addict in prison, you don't have an iPhone. You can't be all distracted. He'll look at people walking around, they're not free. They're all chained to something. He said, if you're in prison, you got nothing but time. And eventually, eventually you're going to have an honest conversation with yourself about who you really are and what you're doing in there. And when you have that conversation with yourself, you're a free man no matter where you are. And there's a lot of people on the outside. And by that he means outside of prison. There's a lot of people on the outside who never get around to having that conversation with themselves. So I don't think you can pin down an era. I would say our freedom right now is in a historical context, is breathtaking in its depth, but with some very, very serious worrisome caveats, some very worrisome footnotes to that, among them economic inequality. I mean, that's going to bring us down.

The point of view of that guy having just got out of prison is staggering. And I think that the insight is profound. I mean, if you can't look at yourself, if you can't examine who you are, if you're too distracted by the trappings of fill in the blank, how free are you? Where do you come out on the guy you came across when you were doing the patrol, who basically, if I recall, he had a shovel tied around his belt and a few other possessions. Basically everything he owned was with him. And you ask the question, is he the freest guy you've seen or the least free?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't have an answer for that. I mean, material possessions give you a kind of freedom in the sense that you're not living a survival level, marginal existence, but they require work. Do you want to have freedom of maneuver? Do you want to be able to be mobile? Do you want to have temporal freedom where your time is your own? Do you want to have economic freedom where you have a whole ton of money and you can make choices? I'm going to stay at that hotel. I'm going to go to do this, I'm going to do that. You know, like there's no form of freedom where you have it all? And so that guy, we didn't talk to him, I just caught a glimpse of him. But, you know, he had all of his possessions tied to the blade of a shovel, a snow shovel, and the snow shovel, the handle was tied to the back of his pants and he was walking along, sledding all of his belongings behind him. And, you know, he clearly didn't have a job to go do in the morning and clearly was living out of dumpsters and whatever else. So, yeah, is he free? Is he the ultimate free person or the ultimate oppressed person? I don't know. I mean, I don't offer answers, but some of the questions are interesting and, and you know, I will say, and I might sort of end on this because I, I have to get going to pick up my kids. But sedentary society started about 10,000 years ago when humans started to cultivate wild grains in Mesopotamia. And that allowed for an accumulation of wealth and it allowed for social hierarchies, right? The development of class leaders and led rulers and serfs. The advantage of that system is that you could feed a 40,000 man army and defend yourselves and your riches very, very easily, right? Nothing's going to overrun the city of Ur. I mean, huge, massive walls, massive army. The disadvantage is that most people spent most of their day working and working for the pharaoh, right? I mean, metaphorically speaking, you know, working for their ruler. And so the nomads of that era were materially poor, like the Apache were, but their time was their own. They were completely mobile. And it was an egalitarian society. It's hard to oppress people that can put everything they own on the back of a horse and leave in the middle of the night, right? Hard to do. So nomadic peoples have typically been materially poor and very, very autonomous and very egalitarian. And I will say that for a lot of human history, wealthy sedentary people have romanticized mobile nomadic peoples have romanticized those lives precisely because it looks and is so free. Even in this society, we romanticize outlaws and motorcycle gangs and all those groups that we would never, most of us never want to be part of. But it's enormously romanticized because they're mobile and, and they're fairly egalitarian. And that's exactly what nomads were for 10,000 years and still are. And there's a very revealing quote from a group, a song from a group of nomads called the Yomut in northern Iran. The vast grand grasslands around the Caspian Sea and the Yamut were a tribal, mobile, pastoral, nomadic society, very warlike. And they said of their sedentary, wealthy sedentary neighbors, they said, I am Yomut. I do not have a mill with willow trees. In other words, I'm not a farmer. I do not have a mill with willow trees. I have a horse and court. I will kill you and go. Ultimate arrogance and pride of a nomadic, a warlike nomadic person. And so what I would say is that the enormous wealth and sedentary nature of Western society has enabled us to do astounding things scientifically, technologically. It's allowed for the rise of democracy and rule of law. And the medicine that saved my life. The list is endless. But we're not the Yomuts, right? There is something inherent, something important to human dignity that takes place in a society that is mobile and entirely governing of its own circumstances and more or less egalitarian. There is something essential to human dignity that happens in those societies that has trouble happening in this wealthy, wealthy, amazing industrial society that we live in. And we're not going to go back to being nomads. But it might help just to take note, take note of those qualities and maybe instill some of them where we can into our own society.

Sebastian, I want to thank you for taking a lot of your time out to sit down today and also for sharing so much of what is both personal and painful on your journey of learning and writing. So thank you and I wish you a continued speedy recovery and offline. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about some of this stuff as well.

Well, thank you. I look forward to the conversation. Thank you for having me. That was a won wonderful, wonderful conversation and I feel like I left virtually nothing unsaid. So thank you for giving me that opportunity.

Thank you. Sebastian, thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics we discuss, we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you more in depth exclusive content without relying on paid ads. It's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. Now to that end, membership benefits include a bunch of things. One totally kickass comprehensive podcast show notes that detail every topic, paper, person, thing we discuss on each episode. The word on the street is nobody's shownotes rival these monthly AMA episodes or Ask me Anything episodes. Hearing these episodes completely access to our private podcast feed that allows you to hear everything without having to listen to spiels like this the Qualys, which are a super short podcast that we release every Tuesday through Friday highlighting the best questions, topics and tactics discussed on previous episodes of the Drive. This is a great way to catch up on previous episodes without having to go back and necessarily listen to everyone. Steep discounts on products that I believe in but for which I'm not getting paid to endorse and a whole bunch of other benefits that we continue to trickle in as time goes on. If you want to learn more and access these member only benefits, you can head over to peterattiamd.com subscribe. You can find me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, all with the ID peteratti amd. You can also leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast player you listen on. This podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. The use of this information and the materials linked to this podcast is at the user's own risk. The content on this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice from any medical condition they have, and they should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. Finally, I take conflicts of interest very seriously. For all of my disclosures and the companies I invest in or Advise, please visit PeterAttiamD.com about where I keep an up to date and active list of such companies.

Sam.