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

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“Contemptuous speech for your fellow citizens, for your political adversary. Likewise, it's protected under the First Amendment, but it should be considered so damaging to the social fabric and the interests of this nation that it's effectively banned from society by common consensus. That would help soldiers. It would help all of us. National service would be amazing. I think it's morally wrong to force people to fight a war. They don't want to fight. But national service with a military option where every 18-year-old or every young person had to do a year or two of national service would be, I mean, that would truly create the melting pot that this country is and should be. The classes, the races get mixed in this very egalitarian way. It would create a common like in Israel, which has a PTSD rate, by the way, of 1%. It would create...”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You want to create a sense of unity of purpose in this country, which I think would be enormously psychologically beneficial to soldiers. I mean, soldiers experience unity of purpose in their platoon, then they come back to a country, to this country, which is basically a war with itself. I mean, we live in racially divided communities. The gap between rich and poor is bad and growing worse. The political parties speak with incredible contempt for one another. If you're a soldier and you fought for this country and you come back to this mess, I mean, of course they're messed up. Come on, guys. We fought for you and you can't even get along in peacetime. I mean, you guys are experiencing peace and you can't even get along. So you want unity of purpose in this country. One way to get there is to make 50 years ago racist speech was acceptable socially. Now it's unacceptable. It's protected under free speech, but it's politically and socially unacceptable.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The blood for one. Yeah, exactly. Right. So there's a massive hypocrisy, even though it's well meaning. So you can't mistake the soldiers for the war. If you're upset about the wars that the US gets into, you have to address that to the government. The soldiers themselves have simply volunteered to do anything. Think about how profound this is. They have volunteered to do anything that the nation asked them to do. Very, very low amounts of money, anything, right? And if we told them to plant trees in Canada, they'd go do that. And if we told them to go invade Canada, they'd do that. They're like, whatever you want, we're going to do. So there's no conflict between disagreeing with a war and sort of honoring people who have said for $40,000 a year, I will do whatever you think this nation needs done. That's incredibly honorable thing.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Countries go to war through a political process that's run by the government. And the troops have nothing to do with the war in that sense. I mean, like guys who are drilling for oil in North Dakota. Really don't have anything to do with global warming. They're providing something that our society has decided at once, including a lot of environmentalists, frankly, are driving around in cars. They're running gasoline.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had a plan of action. They started filling sandbags. They started cleaning their rifles. They started stockpiling their ammo, getting the plasma bags ready, whatever they do before an attack. All of that busyness gave them a sense of mastery and control that actually made them feel less anxious than them just waiting around on an average day in a dangerous place.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, yeah, exactly. So they started taking cortisol levels hourly from the soldiers. And the officers, the lieutenant, the poor lieutenant, he was probably 22. His cortisol levels, he's young, he's not very well trained, and he has a huge amount of responsibility as the officer is the commanding officer. His cortisol levels are through the roof, right up into the point where the attack was supposed to begin because they had Intel that these guys were coming, right? And then after that time passed, his cortisol levels steadily declined, and it turned out there was no attack. And then he went returned to normal. The special forces guys were the opposite. As soon as they heard they were about to experience an overwhelming attack, their cortisol levels dropped. They got super calm. The reason their cortisol levels dropped, it was stressful for them to wait for the unknown. But as soon as they knew they were going to be attacked,”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A battalion of NVA, like 500 men, right? And there was 20 guys there, something like that. So the psychologist thought, oh, perfect. This is a perfect moment to measure stress in soldiers, right?”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I mean, you know, it's game on, right? The football game or whatever. I mean, humans are wired for action and war when need be. And your neural circuitry just lights up and there's all kinds of hormonal stuff going on. I mean, you have enormous agency. But it even is true. I read this on my previous book called War. I saw this study where some army psychiatrist, they like two unluckiest army psychiatrists in the whole military probably at that time were at some like remote outpost with special forces soldiers along like, I don't know, near the DMZ. And they were dropped in there. They were just doing some standard study psychological assessment of these guys, right? And these guys are real badasses. They were like SF, you know, like the real deal. And so these psychologists, they found out that the base, it was a 20-man position, something like that. The base was about to be attacked.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“then frontline units doing very intense fighting, but they're taking higher casualties, but they're incredibly well trained. So they have a sense of mastery over their environment.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, our support units. Yeah, I mean, what it seems to be is that unit cohesion is a buffer for psychological. Struggles, including PTSD. So the more highly trained Soldier, the more highly trained the unit, the more psychological. Are, even though they might be taking higher casualties. And what's so interesting about trauma is that it's not necessarily related to the level of danger. Related to the level of control that you feel that you have. So if you're a sort of standard issue support unit, rear base Soldier, you know, one of the huge bases that the American military has or the Israeli military has, for example, in previous wars in Israel, the random mortar round comes in. Strangely, that causes more, a greater proportion of psychiatric casualties.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The skin on skin contact for infants and young children in tribal societies is as high as 90% of the time. Skin on skin contact. And this study looked at skin on skin contact in American society, I think it was in the 70s the study was done. And it was as low as 17%, something like that. Now you could say, okay, well, people have to work. They have jobs. All true. But that doesn't mean. that that radical shift in child rearing doesn't have consequences.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Night's terrifying to young children. I mean, we're primates, right? Baby primates, if they're alone in the jungle, are incredibly vulnerable. And, you know, human infants know this, of course. So they don't want to be put in on a room by themselves. They know it's in an evolutionary sense. They know it's dangerous. And they cry and they scream.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you can see that, I mean, to the extent that this is proof, whatever. It's an interesting example. I mean, so you spend two years in Cameroon, incredibly poor country in Africa, Central Africa, in a really poor village. I mean, that's a tough way to live for a couple of years for American who grew up in modern society. And then after two years, you come home and the depression rate for people coming back from Peace Corps service is astronomical. It's something like 50%, 25%, 50% is enormous. It's akin to soldiers. So there you have this common theme. Peace corps volunteers are not traumatized, but they experience like soldiers, this radical transition from closeness, literally village life back to the American suburb or whatever. I mean, this is the first society, I mean, modern Western societies, the first society in human history where people live alone in an apartment, unheard of. Children have their own bedrooms. They're locked in a room by themselves.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think what's afflicting a lot of these vets isn't a response to trauma. It couldn't be. It's a response to the sudden aloneness and loneliness that modern society is known for, unfortunately.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My theory is that what they're experiencing isn't a reaction to trauma. They couldn't be because most of them weren't traumatized. But they're experiencing is the radical readjustment from platoon life. A platoon is 40 or 50 people. You're sleeping depending on what kind of bass you're on, shoulder to shoulder in the dirt or cot-to-cot in some kind of bungalow or, you know, whatever. But it's all group living, right? You're eating meals together, doing missions and patrols together, doing everything together for over a year. That is exactly how humans evolve to live. That is exactly our prehistory. So you experience that incredible tight cohesion with your platoon. Now, there might be people you have conflicts with. It doesn't mean it's one big love fest, but it is close. And it's close with people that you know your life depends on. And then suddenly you're sprung from that and you're back in modern society.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The combat was not as intense. There were not the mass casualties of World War I, Korea, Vietnam, the war on terror has the lowest casualty rates of any war the US has fought, major war. But as the casualty rates have gone down and the level of trauma has gone down, disability claims have gone up. They're going the wrong directions. Right now, About 10% of the US military actually experiences any combat at all. One out of 10 soldiers. The rest of them are crucial, they're necessary, they're not getting directly traumatized. But something like 50% of the US military has filed for some form of PTSD disability. So there's 40% in there that are a bit of a mystery. They come home and they're deeply, dangerously alienated, depressed. They don't fit in. Something's gravely wrong.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the truth about PTSD is that if you almost 100% of people who have been traumatized either seen something gruesome or feared for their own life And I should add that the witnessing of harm to others is more traumatic than danger is. It's interesting. But almost 100% of people who have been traumatized get short-term PTSD. That's what I got. Less weeks, lasts and months goes away. Therapy helps, whatever, but we're humans, right? I mean, we're adapted to survive danger and stress and hardship and all that other stuff. We wouldn't be here. So trauma, if trauma was psychologically crippling to humans, humans wouldn't exist. Around 20% of people get long-term PTSD. So they passed the point where they should have recovered and they're stuck in this trauma loop and they can't get out of it. That's around 20% of people. Now you look at the US military. Every war, the casualty rate, thank God, has gone down because the intensity of the combat has gone down as bad as World War I was. It wasn't as bad as the Civil War. World War II was not as intense.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the spring of 2003. And she nodded and she said, well, that's interesting. She said, that's called PTSD. And we just invaded Iraq, right? And she said, you're going to be hearing quite a bit about that in the coming years, as indeed we have.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“after 9 eleven, the violent crime rate went down. Even Vietnam vets who were struggling with PTSD in New York City said that their symptoms improved after nine hundred eleven because they were needed. They had this sense like, oh my God, there's a crisis. I'm needed. Time to stop thinking about myself. Time to think about the group, about us. And that feeling of us is what not only does it make people feel good, but it buffers many people from their psychological demons and it's kind of a relief.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is often forced upon people by hardship, by danger, by calamity, that communal life is so psychologically beneficial to people that there's a net gain in psychological well-being. So what you find is that in countries at war, Emil Durkheim, the famous sociologist, found that in European countries that were at war in the 1800s, the suicide rate immediately went down. The murder rate went down. All of that kind of antisocial behavior was mitigated by the sort of monumental task that the country was engaged in. In New York, I live in New York City, in New York after 9-11, a massively traumatized population. You would think a lot of psychological problems would come out because of this psychological trauma that the entire city experienced after 9-11. That's not what happened. The suicide rate went down.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, went down from pre war levels during the bombings and then went back up after the bombings stopped when officials said, you know, it's amazing, we have neurotics driving ambulances. What it seems to be is that the communal”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of the many ironies of war is that it's savage and it's violent and it's completely anti-human, but it produces an intensity of human connection that you really can't, you're hard-pressed to find in peacetime. So during the blitz, and I looked a lot at the blitz in London, and 30,000 people were killed by German bombs in around six months in and around London. The society didn't collapse, but it contracted sort of into itself. People were sleeping shoulder to shoulder with complete strangers in the tube stations. Fire brigades were rushing around trying to put out fires after the bombing raids. It was a brutal time. And the government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties. Forget about the physical casualties, mass psychiatric casualties. But what happened was admissions to psychiatric wards”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hom Groups that we evolved from that we were for hundreds of thousands of years all of the evidence that anthropologists, archaeologists have been able to assemble is that they were extremely egalitarian groups. Partly you can't carry much wealth, right? If you're a mobile nomadic society, how much wealth can you really carry? In a society that lives in groups of 40 or 50 that is mobile, it's extremely hard to accumulate differences of wealth and therefore status.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, managed to escape and make their way back to their adopted families. And this happened over and over and over again as the frontier marched across America. There were constantly these stories of people who were taken by the Indians and didn't want to come home. And the reason that was given was that it was an egalitarian society. It was not stratified by class, by income, by inherited wealth, by inherited power. Everyone was equal. There were leaders. But there were leaders who were followed voluntarily. And if you didn't like the leadership style of Chief Pontiac, well, you know, you could just take your family and move up Muskegon Creek and move in with your wife's cousin's family with this other group. And so authority was never imposed. Authority was accepted. And that led to a really basic equality in native societies. And I should say as an anthropologist, the sort of”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were given to a family that had lost someone on the battlefield, and you were the replacement for that person's son or daughter. And these people I mean, there were two young women who were repatriated because of this peace accord after Pontiac's rebellion. And two young women...”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my book, Tribe starts with this story of Pontiac's Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and Chief Pontiac fought the colonial powers for years very effectively, but eventually they sued for peace. And one of the deals was, the main part of the deal was that he give up 200 and some white captives that had been taken from the frontiers. And a significant number of the captives did not want to be returned to their home to their homes, to their society. And they actually weren't slaves. And what's interesting about, I mean, the people thought that that's what happened to them. In fact, what happened to them is that the captives who weren't killed and some were killed out of revenge for losses that the Indians had taken on the battlefield. But the ones who weren't killed were adopted. And as soon as you were adopted, you were considered absolutely one of the tribe. There was no distinction whatsoever.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Constantly, the frontier was constantly sort of bleeding young people who went off, drifted off to live with the Indians. I mean, the movement that the sort of societal movement, I mean, it was a trickle, but it was significant, constantly towards the tribes. And the Indians were never running off to join white society, right? And then there were even weirder cases.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was this sort of strange phenomenon, right? I mean, the Christian society settled the eastern seaboard of the New World in the 1600s, 1700s. And beyond the tree line were the savages, right? They weren't Christian. They weren't civilized. They ran about almost naked and they hunted wild animals and fornicated and everything else, right? I mean, it's sort of Satan's den, right? Sounds pretty fun. Sounds pretty great, right? Maybe that's just me. So for the Christian civilized Christian society of that era. They clearly felt that they were the superior godly society. But what happened was that superiority, that very quality of civilization and Christianity was also quite stifling, right? We didn't evolve to live. We didn't evolve as the human.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That, but it does call for very maybe even conflicting traits in a single person. The wisdom and the gentleness of a peacetime leader, the empathy of a peacetime leader, and the capacity for violence and effectiveness and decisiveness in a wartime leader, you're asking someone to be almost schizophrenic if they can do both of those well.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was basically the supreme leader. He was the military leader in the colonies when they were fighting the British. gave up control to the civilian government. It was a very, very important thing to do because otherwise he could have continued on as, quote, king, and that would not be a democracy. And my guess is that he took that idea from the Iroquois. Military thinking and peace thinking are very, very require very different sensibilities, very different calculations of cost and benefit. And the conundrum for us right now is we elect a president who in time of war is also the military leader. And I think in a democracy, the idea that you have a non-military person at the top of the chain of command is very, very sensible. You do not want a society run by the military. That's a military dictatorship. We do not want to make a military military”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a very interesting question. The Iroquois sort of figured it out, as you said, in peacetime, they had sachems who were partly elected by women. So the female voice was found in this selection of Sachems. They ran peaceful society. When war started, the Sachems stepped down and war leaders took over. And if the people they were fighting sued for peace, it was not the war leaders who considered the deal. It was the Seychelles. And if peace was accepted, the war leaders stepped down immediately. And it's really interesting because the U.S. Constitution, parts of it are based on the Iroquois law of peace. And Thomas Paine did a lot of work sort of incorporating the natural rights of man as were exemplified by Iroquois society into the intellectual basis for American governance. But as soon as the British surrendered, George Washington”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way that women are known for. And society sort of needs both of these gender roles and it doesn't really care if an actual man or an actual woman fills them.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Women were considerably more likely to make that decision than men were. So what happens is that if you have say a group of coal miners who are stuck in a coal mine for a week, the first kind of spontaneous leaders you get are the classically male sort of action-oriented grab a pickaxe and start digging when those efforts fail, another kind of leader takes over, they're way more empathic, they're way more affiliative, they reach negotiated solutions. They try to make people feel good. They're in a classically female role. And what's so interesting about that is that the male and female roles will be filled regardless of the sex. So a group of women with no men around, a woman will jump in, will jump onto the railroad tracks and to save the kid if there are no men around. If there are no women around, a man will step forward and act in that wonderfully moral impact.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very good at that, and they did a study during World War II of who helped hide Jewish families who were fleeing the Nazis, Gentiles who helped Jewish families who were fleeing the Nazis. That's not something that takes muscular action in the moment. But if you're busted, you know, if you're a Dutch farmer and you have a Jewish family in your basement, you're dead. You're executed.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In something like 95% of bystander rescues are performed by men. So when you have a society that's encountering a difficulty, and that can either be the blitz in London, which I write about, or that could be a group of coal miners who are trapped in a coal mine disaster in the 1950s in Canada, you need people who are in the, quote, male role of rescuing and risk-taking. But then this other thing is important and it's a kind of moral courage. And it does not require spontaneous muscular action with complete disregard for your own life, right? That's not what's required. As important as that is, there's something else, moral courage. You basically are like providing so the moral fiber for the group and you act as a kind of conscience for the group. And women are very”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of impulsive risk taking that sort of on the spot in the moment decision to jump onto some railroad tracks while train's coming. It's not that they're braver. It's that they have psychological and physical predispositions and capacities that allow them, in fact, promote them to do that. So if you look at these stories”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of the things that's interesting is that if you take passersby in a moment of crisis, I mean, everyone will jump into a burning building to save their child, maybe to save their spouse, possibly their parents-in-law, you know, but whatever. You have familiar relations and people will risk their lives to help the people that they love. It makes sense, right? But if you look at situations in public, in this anonymous society that we have, and someone's in danger, Who goes to their aid happens all the time in New York. Someone falls onto the subway tracks and the train is coming. Who jumps down onto the tracks to help them? Almost invariably, it's a man. Now, I feel like I'm very sexist in saying that, but statistics aren't sexist, and they've done studies of this. And men are, for a number of physical and psychological reasons, very, very prone towards that.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Infuriating, but it's a funny thing. It's infuriating, even though it's trying to do the right thing, but it's still infuriating.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're also the product of our biology and our evolution. And the two are not easy partners. I mean, throughout the mammalian world, males and females are built differently and do different things and are good at different things. That's just a fact of nature. If we want the sexes to be equal in our society, those inherent differences become potentially problematic. And as a result, instead of trying to figure out how to reconcile those very real differences in an equitable system, people and well-meaning people, some of them are good friends of mine would just rather you not acknowledge the differences. There's a short-term logic to that, but there's a long-term loss. And eventually we won't have really quality in this society until those unnegotiable differences are actually incorporated into our equality. At any rate, that's, you know, what you brought up about sort of PC thinking, it can be very...”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think our society, which really, I feel really does strive, I mean, just to address your earlier point about political correctness, I think we really are in a very righteous way striving for fairness and equality throughout our society. I think we really are.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moments of these things and of these skinwalkers. And as I wrote about it in my thesis, I said, you know, the skinwalkers are basically the universal human fear that you can defend yourself as a society, as a community. You can defend yourself against all outside enemies, but you're completely vulnerable to one madman in your midst. One psychopath, one sociopath, basically that has no feeling of protectiveness, of humanity towards his neighbors can kill more people than the enemy can. And that made me think of the awful spate of mass shootings in this country that have suddenly become so commonplace in the last 10 or 15 years. And it gave me the idea that the mass shooters in Aurora, Colorado and at Sandy Hook, and we all know the names. that they are our society's version of the Skinwalkers”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“we're basically adopting the skills and powers of a warrior, except they were using it against their own people and that they would kill their fellow Navajo and eat them in the middle of the night. And the Navajo in 1983 on the reservation where I lived were absolutely terrified of this phenomenon, as terrified as they, I'm sure they were 100 years prior. And I got to say, the desert out there is a big, lonely place. I started to feel their terror. You know, I didn't literally believe that these things exist, but the belief system that was around me still made me deeply, deeply scared of them. It was extraordinary experience for a rationalist like myself, my father's a physicist. And I don't believe in God. He didn't believe in anything but what he could measure and observe. And all of a sudden, there I was in my trailer very, very scared at certain times.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Skinwalk Were this thing that I never heard of that I first encountered when I was on the Navajo Reservation in 1983 as a 19-year-old, 20-year-old, whatever I was. And basically the Navajo believed in something that other cultures would call werewolves. The belief was that there were certain Navajo, mostly men, who had basically turned. They'd lost their humanity and they'd become animals. But animals are a source of power in a lot of native societies. They became animals in the sense that they had no human affiliation. And they did this by putting on the hide of a wolf. And that gave them the powers of a wolf, the powers of being able to run very, very fast for a long distance, the powers of being invisible, of being very, very ferocious when need be, being incredible hunters. They were called skinwalkers and that these skinwalkers”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“for their people. And that's adulthood. And that's manhood. And I'd hit 30 and other than a chainsaw injury here or there. I hadn't really been tested in a real way. And my father grew up in Europe during World War II. And war is this sort of archetypal ordeal. It's a sort of ancient, in some ways, ancient thing. And it's a very, very lot of societies, it is the gate for better or worse. I mean, I know there's a political conversation here that we can have, but for better or worse, many societies sort of see it as the gateway to adulthood, to manhood specifically for men. And I went off to Bosnia partly because I wanted to become a war reporter. And I was sort of at a loss as to how to make a living and live an adult life, partly because I felt like I was still a child and that war would transform me in some ways that nothing else could.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About specifically, there's a few things. You know, I grew up in a pretty affluent suburb of Boston. I grew up in a very physically protected way. I got to 18. I felt like I'd never been challenged. I'd never been faced with a situation that I didn't know I could survive. And having studied a lot of anthropology, you know, through college, as I moved through my 20s, I thought this is ridiculous. I'm not at all yet. I'm not a man yet. I mean, you cross that threshold into adulthood into manhood by facing something that could destroy you. And initiation rights around the tribal societies around the world, their main purpose is to confront young men and women have a different challenge that they have to face. It's equally daunting. But young men face this challenge of in these initiation rights of sort of demonstrating that they will face the most painful, scariest things possible for their community.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think there's other language you can use where you're not issuing a directive, but you're saying you're giving some wisdom. So what I would say to someone like that is what worked for me was to read an enormous amount to think about what I read and why I liked it or didn't like it. Anthropology is an amazing discipline that gives you tools to understand almost every cultural social situation in the world. Mostly you must have an enormous appetite for humanity and for life and for the world. I mean, you really have to feel like you cannot fill yourself up enough with this amazing place that we live in. Like if you have that feeling and sincerely have it, you'll do okay, if not at writing at something.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the path that I took is the one I know best, obviously. And I would say what worked for me, I mean, as a journalist, I'm very hesitant to actually give advice to people in my book Tribe. I really try not to tell the country what I think we all should do.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in. You have to do the hardest thing that you have not been prepared for in this school or any school. You have to be prepared to fail. And that's how you're going to expand yourself and grow. And then you really... You work through that process of failure and learning, then you will really deepen into the human being you're capable of being. Man, four years ago, who knows how it's going for them.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was speaking at a very kind of elite school, private school in New York City. These kids were going off either to college or to high school. I can't remember. At any rate, these are very, very privileged, very smart, very educated children. And exceedingly accomplished merits. And I said to them something like, the hardest thing you're ever going to do, I was like, your program to succeed. You guys are programmed to succeed. The hardest thing you're ever going to do in your life is fail at something. And if you don't start failing at things, you will not live a full life. You'll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just bullshit. And, you know, literary writers, I like to think of myself as a literary writer. I think sometimes think that language is so magical and so powerful that you should be able to sort of do almost anything with it. It's not true and it shouldn't be true.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT