YouSaid · the spoken record

Sebastian Junger

lines on the record: 128
first: 2024-06-06
most recent: 2024-06-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, one of the questions I ask in my book is who would you die for? What ideas would you die for? The answer to those questions for most of human history would have come very readily to any person's mouth, any Comanche would tell you instantly who they would die for and what they would die for. And in modern society, it gets more and more complicated. And when you lose the ready answer to those ancient human questions, you lose a part of yourself. You lose a part of your identity. And I think what I would ask people is, Who would you die for? What would you die for? And what do you owe your community? And in our case, our community is our country. What do you owe your country other than your taxes? Is there anything else you owe all of us? There's no right answer or wrong answer, but it's something that I think everyone should try to ask themselves.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Group conversation even in a group of 400 million people. But if people don't read, that will never happen Feel that it makes books a kind of sacred object and sacred in the sense that our society, I don't think, will survive without them. And that to me has an atheist one definition of sacredness is something that humanity needs in order to survive.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I would put the word read It's the only I was talking about this recently with some people, you know, we don't live in small groups anymore. We evolve to live in groups of 30, 40, 50 people, and you could gather 50 people around and have a communal discussion about how to live, what to do, who you are, what you want to be. You could do that. We live in a country of 400 million. There's no more gathering around the campfire to figure out who we are, how we want to live, what are our values. We can't do that anymore, but we still need to. And in some ways, in a country as advanced as ours with nuclear weapons and everything else is even more important than when we lived in groups of 50. I mean, it's vital that we have that conversation. In the only real way, I think, the only real way to have collectively have that conversation is through books. It's the only thing that's cheap enough, accessible enough to everybody, that contains enough information that can be shared and commonly understood. It's the only thing that we can have a”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the writers are writing 20, whatever. You can always be insecure, right? No, and I've written James. I've really written only four books. One's a collection of short form journalism. So, you know, they're all books that had I not written them, I would have wished that someone else had so I could read it. One of the things I loved about Harari, sapiens, was I finished it and I just thought, thank God someone wrote that book. Like the world really needed it. And the books that I write, maybe I'm flattering myself, but it feels to me like the world needs this book. And I know that sounds horribly grandiose, but I have to say it's the feeling I'm looking for when I'm choosing a topic. I really don't want to write a book that I'm not sure the world needs.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I would say to myself, the world is this continually unfolding set of possibilities and opportunities. And the tricky thing about life is on the one hand, having the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar. But to also Have the wisdom to like stop exploring when you found something that's worth sticking around for. I mean, that's true of a place, of a person, of a vocation. In balancing those two things, the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying, it's very hard to get the ratio, the balance of those two things right. And I think my 70-year-old itself would say just. really be careful that you don't hair on one side or the other because you have an ill-conceived idea of who you are.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doesn't matter because the point of journalism isn't to make everything better, it's to give people accurate information about how things are. And I think journalists really confuse those two things. Advocates are what we need for improvement, but not journalists. Journalists provide information like doctors provide information when they look at the x-ray of your lungs after you smoke for 10 years.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really dislike laziness. And if you read a phrase or a sentence that's familiar, I mean, there are these cliches, these sort of linguistic tropes, like the mortars slammed into the hillside. Just don't want to read that again, you know, like just say in an original way or don't say it, but you're wasting everybody's time, including your own, if you write and rely on these sort of linguistic tropes. I really dislike that. And also, the point of journalism is the truth. Night I was talking about this on the phone earlier, and maybe you overheard me, but the point of journalism is the truth. The point of journalism is not to improve society. And there are things, there are facts, there are truths that actually... Feel regressive.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I opened that cans of tomato sauce with a hatchet, but I hit it pretty hard and completely splattered her with tomato sauce. Here's the amazing part she still went out with me”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, that's so easy, man. Oh Yeah, no, I remember when I was a young man in my 20s and I was living just stupidly in some stupid apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. And I had a date with this girl, this beautiful girl, and I invited her over, and I was going to make spaghetti. I mean, I'm like 23, right? I'm going to make spaghetti. And like an idiot, I mean, I got like, and I had cans of tomato sauce and pasta, right? And she came over and I realized I didn't have a can opener. But I knew the answer and I went into my room and I got a hatchet that I had.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It can't be cheap wood and the hafts. It's got to be good steel. I mean, I don't even know how to evaluate this. Basically, the more you pay for an axe, the better quality it is, and the longer the last and the better it will cut. And you keep it really, really sharp. And you can cut not as fast as a chainsaw. I've used chainsaws a lot in my life, but you can basically do anything with it given a little bit of time. And I've spent a lot of time in the woods. And if I had to pick one thing to take into the woods with me, it would be an axe.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's amazing. I mean, I just started looking at everything differently. I loved that book and books are, I mean, a book is a kind of thing of magic. It contains a universe of information. And it's cheap at the price. So maybe it's unfair to use a book. $100 or less. I mean, I think one of the best values you can buy for a hundred, you can get for $100 is an axe, a good axe”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think twice about it. I mean, I just mean, it just doesn't affect me at all. I think my heart rate goes up a little bit.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The movie part of it didn't affect me very much, but the sudden attention, public attention that I got when the book became a bestseller affected me enormously. And I was very anxious about all that. I think I would say to myself, the public is not a threat. The public is actually waiting to hear someone anything say something that's helpful and makes sense because we're all trying to get through this life together. Everyone wants some guidance. And if there's anything I can say through my work or just on a stage that gives some comfort or guidance to people, they're enormously receptive. And when you realize that we all need each other and we can all learn from each other, your stage fright goes away. And I had a horrific case of stage fright when my book came out.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they would say that I'm really good at not reacting to things and seeming like I'm unaffected when actually I'm deeply affected.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a novel by Peter Matheson. It takes place in the jungles of South America. And it's about a Sioux Indian named Lewis Moon. who grew up in a reservation in the 1970s and he goes down to Brazil to meet what he considers his forbears and doesn't go very well.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Play in the fields of the Lord by Peter Matheson. I also recently read sapiens by a guy named Harari, which is just phenomenal. That's a good book. I'm going to give that thing over and over again to everyone I know.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You really then should go down to the town hall and listen to what the veterans had to say about what was like for them. There's no Q&A. There's no debate. This is not an evaluation of the war. It's not a patriotic thing. It's not an anti-war thing. It's just, this is what the experience was like. And I really, really think that if we could do this in every town across the country, that it would be enormously therapeutic for veterans, but even more important in some ways, it would start to bind the country together again. I think the veterans are suffering because the country's suffering. And if we can heal ourselves as a nation, The veterans are going to be fine.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very, very tough fighting. He helped me organize it. We did it together. Last Veterans Day in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, if you were a civilian and you'd like to say, I support the troops, what that literally meant.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm told a liberal, yeah, yeah, yeah, but as a journalist, I'm neutral. I mean, it's really important as a private person, I'm liberal, but as a journalist, I really Try to be completely neutral in my analysis, in my evaluation of things. Conservatives will be made uncomfortable by veterans standing up and being incredibly angry about the war that they had to fight. And everyone's going to be uncomfortable when someone stands up and just starts crying and can't even talk because they're crying too hard. But all of that is war, right? We sent these people to do a job for us that we deemed necessary, collectively deemed necessary. And the emotional fallout for it is okay as long as we process it all collectively. It's not okay if we just make them deal with it. It's not their war. It's our war. So all of us need to deal with it, much like the American Indian tribes did in these ceremonies, an amazing thing. So we did this once in Marblehead, Massachusetts. And Seth Molton is our Democratic representative from Massachusetts who was a Marine lieutenant in Ramadi, I believe it was.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And speak for 10 minutes to their community. And I know veterans, right? Some of them are going to be incredibly proud of their service and they're going to say they missed the war. And it's going to make liberals uncomfortable. And some of them are going to.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's something about doing that for the people you did it for that seems to be very, very psychologically healthy, to put it in modern terms, because it's almost a universal in these ceremonies. And so I had the idea, I mean, we're not going to go back to a tribal society. I mean, we can't. We can't, you know, you'd have to get rid of the car. Whatever, whatever. It's not happening. But we might be able to take certain structures of tribal life and incorporate them into modern society. So we get the best of both worlds. And the way to do that in terms of returning veterans is to turn the town hall or the city hall and every community in this country on veterans day into an open forum for veterans. I have this idea veteran town halls and my website's sebastianyounger.com. There's a page devoted to this. You open up the town hall and a veteran have the right to stand up.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The main thing that I can think of is drawn from some of my research into American Indian ceremonies or returning warriors in the 17th, 18th centuries or vets from the current wars, 19th centuries. One of the common themes in these ceremonies is that the warrior gets to recount in front of his community what he did for them on the battlefield. And, you know, often it's a heroic sort of boasting of how brave he was and how he killed the enemy and how, you know, whatever. But it's this cathartic description of a warrior's warrior discharging his duties for his community.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a really different book from my other books. It's an inquiry into something. It's not a story. It doesn't take place on a fishing boat or in an outpost. It's a meditation and an inquiry about my society, my country that I love very much. And something feels very, very wrong in our country right now. And I think if you look at the political... Course right now in this country, it is completely toxic and actually more dangerous to our nation than ISIS is. I mean, really, in real terms, of how do we keep this country together for the next 250 years, ISIS is not going to be able to prevent us from doing that. I'm sorry. But we ourselves can. And it's happening right now. And my book Partly an attempt to make people think about what it means to belong to a group. And this country is a group.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“April 2 Coincidentally, the anniversary of Columbine, Hitler's birthday. There's all kinds of awful things that happened on April 20 for some reason.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ripple outwards from my apartment because I got the news first from my apartment outwards through all the people that he knew that he loved on out into people that he didn't even know who loved them on out through his country and my country. And I just thought, I don't want to risk doing that to the people I love. I mean, I'm dead, right? My problems are over, but I'm giving them a lifetime of pain and sorrow. And that's not an honorable thing to do. And so I got out of the business.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got the awful phone call in New York City. And very, very quickly decided I would never cover war again. It wasn't that I was scared of getting killed. That's a fear that you have to confront early on and I'd sort of resolve my feelings about it. It's that in watching the news of his death, and he was beloved by people, including my wife, Daniela. I just loved him. I mean, everyone loved him. I watched the news of his death ripple.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we made a film called Restrepo. It won a lot of awards. And then it was nominated for an Oscar. We went off to Los Angeles in this amazing world of, you know, Los Angeles during the Oscars. And I was married at the time. And he had a girlfriend. And we were all out there together. It was an incredible experience. We didn't win. It didn't really matter. We had an assignment to the Arab Spring was exploding all around us during the Oscars, right? And so we had an assignment to go back overseas and document the civil war in Libya for Vanity Fair. After the Oscars, we all went home and we were going to head to Libya. And the last moment I couldn't go for personal reasons. And Tim went on his own and he was killed on April 20th in the city of Misrata in Libya by a mortar round 81mm mortar that was fired by Gaddafi's forces outside Misrata. And he bled out in the back of a rebel pickup truck racing for the Misrata hospital.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tim Hetherington was a wonderful brewer. To work with on my project in the Korangal Valley, I wanted to document the experience of One Platoon, 30, 40, 50 men throughout one deployment. And I wound up at a little outpost called Ristrepo. And on my second trip in there, that's when I started shooting video and thinking about movies. And on my second trip in there, I started working with Tim. He was assigned to me by Vanity Fair magazine. And he quickly realized that this film project that I had was a pretty good idea. And we became partners. And we went through a very intense, amazing, difficult year together out there in the Corangal Valley. And we both got hurt. We both came very close to getting killed out there. It was extraordinary experience. And we became brothers, really.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as soon as I, this is interesting, right? As soon as I had a purpose, I was okay. My self-given purpose was document this thing that you can barely bear to look at. But as soon as I had a job to do, and I'm sure that's how the medics dealt with it too, as soon as I had a job to do, I was okay. And I wrote it all down. And it was one of the most powerful parts of this piece that I wrote. And I passed through the gateway, through the threshold. And I at that moment, I'd been in plenty of wars till then. But in that moment, I became a war reporter.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you're not also prepared to look unblinkingly, unflinchingly at the worst aspects of war, dismembered people, you really have no business covering the, quote, good parts. And by good, I mean the parts that are traumatic. If you can't face what's in that tent, you have to get out of the business completely. And you can't be selective about your experience of war. But you have a job to do is to communicate to your readers back in the United States everything about what war looks like, including that. So grab your damn notebook and grab your pen and walk in there and just write down what it is like to behold such a thing.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To see what I was seeing. And I left the tent and I went outside of the cold Afghan night and lit a cigarette. And I thought, you know, war is exciting and it's dramatic and it's important and it's meaningful and it's all this other stuff.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and in the very bright light of these propane lanterns, kerosene lanterns, they brought these poor guys in. And, you know, there was 12 guys where their bodies ended at their knee. Their bodies ended at their hips. You don't realize it's psychologically incredibly deranging to see the human body rearranged. And I've found later in my research that one of the most traumatizing things in terms of PTSD is to see dismemberment, to see the coherence of the human form rearranged in an odd way that you've never seen before. And it's just, it really tweaks people. And I had a moment of crisis. I went a little crazy. It felt like I went a little crazy. My brain just sort of stopped functioning. And I don't even have very clear memories of it, but I left the tent. I couldn't take it. I could not bear.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I was in northern Afghanistan in 2000, there was a big nighttime battle going on and there was a massed infantry assault against entrenched Taliban positions through minefield, the Northern Alliance, sort of World War I style. And it was at night, and we were right behind the front lines and a wave of soldiers went sort of took the wrong route and went through this minefield and a lot of them got messed up. And they were pulled out of there. And we saw them immediately afterwards and they'd sort of been piled onto the back of a flatbed pickup truck. They're alive. You know, they'd lost legs and traumatic amputations. I mean, they were extremely messed up. They were alive. Most of them probably survived. They're anti-personnel mines. So we were there where they were brought into this sort of forward field hospital tent that was lit with kerosene lanterns, right? And this is rough. This is World War I era.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You just have to tell us that you believe that you were traumatized and that you have PTSD and that's enough for a disability check. So humans being what they are, some number of people are going to take advantage of that. And we're a wealthy country. We can easily absorb those costs. So I have zero opinion about whether we should inquire further. But I should say that the data show that having that kind of dishonesty in a process is actually psychologically detrimental not only to those specific people who are being dishonest, but to everybody. It's actually quite corrosive.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, it's a very politically delicate thing to bring up. But all I'm doing is repeating the accounts of soldiers and veterans. I mean, the best thing a journalist can do is convey information. And that's what I'm doing. Veterans I've talked to who said they just won't go to these group therapy sessions because one out of 20 is some guy who really didn't see any combat and is trying to milk the system and pretending to have trauma pretending to have PTSD and he really doesn't. One of the tricky things, the VA in trying to speed up the massive bureaucracy that they created over the last decades and trying to speed that up, speed up disability claims, they said to soldiers, if you self-diagnose, think about this, if you self-diagnose with PTSD, you do not have to give us proof that anything traumatic happened. You do not have to describe the incident that you were traumatized in.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And you think about what the official London official said about the blitz. Now we have neurotics driving ambulances.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, you're done fighting. Now we need you at home. You know, it's time to get to work. We have a country to rebuild. And they definitely were not thought of as victims of the war or of anything. They were thought of much like I'm sure that Cheyenne and the Comanche and the Apache and the Sioux and the Kiowa warriors who came back from the warpath, they were thought of as essential and functioning members of society. Now, maybe they were missing a limb or maybe they had some trauma to process. But they were needed back home in the towns and cities of this great country just as badly as they were needed in the Pacific, in the fields of Europe. And the problem with victimhood is that it Perpetuates the psychological state of passivity and trauma that you want the person to escape from.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The status of victimhood is not a psychologically healthy place to be in. And I think our society takes people who are unfortunate, who have experienced something difficult. And in a kind of misguided attempt to make the world right again for them, they classify them as victims. Now, they may call them survivors, and they may call them whatever they want, but actually the role that the person is being asked to play is one of a victim. Victims are taken care of. After World War II, which saw casualties that completely eclipse even these terrible wars of our current day, soldiers came back, they didn't do multiple deployments, they signed up and they were in the army until the war was done. Some of them were in for three, four years. Straight. And they came home, and basically society said to these men, and it was almost all men in the”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Young men die at six times the rate of young women from accidents and from violence. There's a reason for that. They're wired to demonstrate their prowess and it often gets them killed.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And young men, like young women, for the most part, are well intentioned and wanted to do right by their community and their society. But if you have a society which is so safe and protected and removed from the rest of the world as we are, in some ways there's sort of nothing useful for the young men to do. And then in their own ad hoc way, they create their own trials, right? So they take a lot of risks. They do stupid stuff. They jump off of stuff that's too high to jump off of. They drive too fast. I get into fights.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Equally important tasks, but usually not group tasks like that. It's really the boys that are told to either hunt or fight in groups. And so they get very good at it. And in modern society, well, young men want to do is achieve honor by defending the community. I mean, it's a wired, it's just wired into the male brain to do that. If you don't give young men a good and useful group to belong to, They will create a bad group to belong to. But one way or another, they're going to create a group and they're going to find something, an adversary, where they can demonstrate their prowess and their unity. That thing that they find is often the law. It's the police. It's society itself. In some ways, they turn into skinwalkers. They have no outside enemy, so they create an enemy out of society. They don't want to be doing this.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So the wonderful thing about the society is that we don't have to organize groups of young men and put weapons in their hands and send them out to the edge of town. Fight off an incursion from the young men of an enemy town, a hostile town. That's not happening anymore, right? I mean, wars are big formal things that for the United States almost always happen elsewhere. But in terms of our communities and our society at home, we no longer have to organize young men and prepare them for group violence so that we can survive. That's been the human norm for two million years, either from predators or from other humans. Young men function in groups and function selflessly in groups extremely well. You can organize 20, 30, 40, 50 young men and give them a task, a dangerous task, and they perform, not only do they perform it very, very well, the heart of the task is the closer they get. Women are used for incredibly important, I mean, I'm talking in sort of human evolution across the span of human history. Women are used for”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's tricky. I mean, how do we have less heart disease in a society that where people drive and they have plenty of, most people have plenty of food and a lot of fats and sugars? You know, I mean, I mean, the very safety of this society, the very thing that makes us lucky also creates a danger.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like I eventually extricate myself from this. And the five of them who are ready to tear each other to pieces, right? The five of them are hanging off each other singing in unison in two different languages in the Viking helmet has been completely forgotten and is under a table in the corner.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The top open and hands it to him, and the guy comes back and fills the Viking helmet to the brim with red wine. Now, no one wants to be the asshole who spills the red wine, right? It's this festival of San Fermine. The whole thing's running on red wine. No one wants to spill it, right? It just looks bad. So he fills the helmet to the brim with red wine and he puts his hand under it. And he says, okay, now everyone let go and no one wants to be the idiot who spills the wine, so everyone lets go. And he presents it to the biggest, toughest looking Moroccan kid and says, you're a guest in our country, so you drink first. And the guy drank and he passed it to his left and it went around the circle. And then when it was empty of red wine, it got filled up. And then eventually they just got another jug and started passing the jug around. An hour later, I'm talking to like some girl, an hour later.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they stop. Everyone stops because no one wants to destroy the thing they're all fighting over. And one of the two Spanish guys, I think the less drunk of the two. To me and says, I have an idea. Will you take my place at this helmet and will you defend it? I mean, this wonderful, elegant way that Spaniards have of speaking, particularly when they're drunk, will you defend it upon the honor of your ancestors and your good name and blah, blah, blah. And I'm thinking like, how long do you have to know a guy before you have to back him up in a bar fight? I mean, is it under an hour, really? Is that it? So I'd say, yes, I'll defend the helmets, et cetera. And I take my place at the helmet. And he goes to the bartender. Now, the whole bar is watching this. This is high theater, right? And this point. So me and the Spanish kid are glaring at the Moroccans and they're glaring back and we're faced off around this helmet. And I'm really hoping it doesn't go to where, you know, it looks like it's headed so that the Spanish guy goes to the bar and has a quick conference with the bartender who produces a big jug of cheap Spanish red wine.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had lived in France for a while with my family when I was 12, 13, so I spoke French also. It's really tough looking Algerian or Moroccan kids walk in and they're tough looking guys right and they walk into the bar and the biggest of them walks right up to my new friend I've known him for maybe half an hour and grabs the Viking helmet off his hand and says that's mine you stole it So I'm the only one who speaks both languages so now I'm translating right and my friend my Spanish friend new Spanish friend says tries to grab it back and says no, that's mine. I don't know who you are. And the Moroccan guys and the two Spanish guys, everyone suddenly has a hand on the Viking helmet. And they start pulling at it. And it's rapidly devolving into a pretty good bar fight. And the helmet starts to rip. It's just cheap plastic, right? And one of them shouts, it's sort of King Solomon's judgment almost. Like one of them says, stop, stop. We're ripping it, you know?”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those barricades at 7 a.m. Woke up at 6 a.m. to do it. I mean, everyone's been up all. Anyone who's in that thing has been up all night. Well, I was going to be one of them. So I go to this some stupid little bar, sawdust on the floor. I spoke pretty good Spanish at the time. I immediately started talking to these two young Spaniards who were just completely shitfaced, right? And one of them has a leather sort of drinking bag around us to describe it, a leather drinking bag called a bota around his neck, which is filled with red wine. And he keeps trying to get the red wine to hurt the red wine into his mouth, but he keeps missing. It's all over his white t-shirt. And these guys are having the best time in the world. We just become friends instantly when you're talking. And one of them, the drunkest of the two, has a cheap plastic Viking helmet on his head. And I didn't really think about it much. We're talking. And suddenly these three very tough looking North African kids walk in.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, of course. And they weren't even my buddies. They became my buddies. So I was 22 years old. My father grew up in Spain and in France. And I grew up going to those countries. And when I was after college, I decided I'd read a lot of Hemingway. This is all pretty predictable, right? I read a lot of Hemingway. I wanted to go to Pamplona to see the running of the Bolts, to see or participate in the running of the bulls, right? The Festival of San Fermine in Pamplona is this big city-wide, you know, like freak show, basically, for a week. And I was sleeping on someone's couch and one night I slept in a park bench. I mean, it's just a free-for-all. It's amazing time, right? And I went out to this bar in preparation for the running of the bulls the next morning. No one who's within the barricades, whether they run the bulls, they fire the cannon off at 7 in the morning to release the bulls from the arena and they charge through town through these barricades. And no one who's with...”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything, whatever. I mean, for us, collectively, to use our imagination, and we have two things, right? We have this incredible resource for our young people, and we have a nation that's deeply, deeply in crisis. And the one thing that unifies us is being attacked, right? We're attacked by terrorists, and suddenly we're a unified country. We don't want to have to wait for tragedy to unify us, right? We want to beat it to the punch and actually unify our country for positive reasons instead of as a reaction to a horrible attack.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT