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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“Yeah, because I don't have the ammo. I don't have the goods. I have not gone out into the world and brought back the goods that I'm writing about. And you never want to solve a research problem with language. You never want to be such a fine writer that you can sort of thread the needle and get through a thin patch in your research just because you're such a great prose artist.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah That feeling of urgency might come six months out if it's a book deadline or it might be the next morning if it's you're trying to finish up a magazine piece, but that intensity, it's like athletes, athletes in the big game or the big race or whatever. I mean, that intensity can bring out something that you didn't even know you had access to much less embodied. So the time of day, you know, I have a cup of coffee and I sit down and I write for a couple hours till I get bored. If I feel that I'm blocked in my writing usually with that blocked meaning I can't write the next section. I keep rewriting and it doesn't work and it's stuck. It's not that I'm blocked, it's that I don't have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic. It's not that I can't find the right words. It's that I don't have the ammunition.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the interest in the reader gathers and builds and then achieves some sort of catharsis towards the end. And it's a very intuitive process. But I got to say, I could never do it without writing it down. I'm literally moving ideas around on a piece of paper until they look right. And that's the part of writing that to me is almost closer to art than a sort of intellectual pursuit.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I read through all my interviews with a red magic marker and I redline the stuff, the good quotes, and I read through all of the research material and I underline the stuff that's interesting to me. And then I go through everything I've underlined and I just write lists of what I consider the assets that I have to work with. And once I have those lists, they cover many pieces of paper, then I'll start to clump them into sort of general topics. history of fishing in New England and the physics of wave motion referencing topics in the perfect storm nightlife in Gloucester, you know, whatever. And then once I have those big chunks, I start to, and this is where the visualness comes in, visuality comes in, I start to try to picture how could I arrange those in a way where the energy”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just say, McPhee, I mean, you're very lucky to have taken it to us within. He was a mentor that I didn't personally know for me. His works, he was. And it's very interesting to hear what you said about him mapping out structure because I think good structure is an extremely visual thing. I think when people who are good at structure, I'd like to think I am. He definitely is. I think they arrive at the structure with the visual part of their brain. I mean, I think you've probably mapped his brain while it was at work. You would see that part light up. And that's just what I'm guessing. When I write out structure, it looks more like a diagram to a circuit board or something. It's not quite architectural, like geometric shapes, but it's very visual. It represented completely visually. And I feel it. Like when I get at the right shape to something, I feel it. It's a very interesting process that for me it's something that feels like the divine spark that is finally sort of like bless me with its presence.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Desk every morning because you never know when God's going to talk to you. And I mean God figuratively, I don't believe in God, but the creative gods. But for a journalist, it's much more like carpentry. You get the lumber, you get the bricks, you build the basement, you start putting it together. I mean, there's a process and there's a lot of inspiration in the actual language that you use, but it's much more procedural than I think fiction writing probably is.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, really, there's two kinds of writing there's fiction and there's nonfiction. And the first step, if you're a journalist, which I consider all nonfiction should be journalism should be considered journalism. There aren't other rules for literary nonfiction or anything. It's all journalism as far as I'm concerned. If you're a journalist, the first thing you have to do is do your research because you need something you're writing about the real world and you need facts and quotes and interviews and all that. My writing process really starts out in the world as I'm researching a story or in a library or on the internet or whatever as I'm researching a story. Fiction writers, they depend on this weird sort of pipeline to God, right? I mean, they're trying to reimagine the world in a way that's never been done before and reproduce it on the page and have people enter this fictional world and be riveted by it. And that's where inspiration comes in. And that's where you have to really be at your.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was he saw something there, and I'm eternally grateful to him. But so I gave him my book proposal based on the article. And then I went off to Bosnia. I wanted to be a war reporter in case the author thing didn't work out when there was no reason to think it was going to work out. And I didn't want to do tree work my whole life. So I went off. It was a civil war in Bosnia. And I went off to learn how to be a war reporter. And I was there. I finally came home in 94 because Stuart sent me a fax saying I managed to sell your book. You got to come home. And I came home.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he got the message that his arguably smallest clients, college roommate's son wanted to be a writer and would he read some stuff? And Stuart was like, that's about as bad as it gets. That is about as unpromising as it gets in the agent world. But he's a great, you know, Stuart's a great guy and he has an open mind. And he read some stuff that I'd written and really liked it. And he took another 10 years for him to make any money off me. But he saw something turned.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I met him. His name's Stuart Krachevsky, and where he's still my agent, we're really good friends. And he said it was the way he met me was sort of the ultimate sort of agent's nightmare. A client of his who wrote academic papers, in other words, not a big pain gig, but he sort of handled the academic career of this guy who was a Shakespeare scholar. It took him three hours a year, you know, whatever. That guy's college roommate was my father.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I did tree work throughout. I mean, I didn't, my advance was pretty small. And as was appropriate, I mean, I was totally unknown writer and it was totally bizarre topic at the time, right? So I'm not complaining, but the advance was quite small. So I did tree work a couple of days a week. I'd be up in the trees. But I also, after I finished my book proposal, by some miracle, I had an agent, by the way. I hadn't made a dime for him for 10 years, right? But he liked my writing, right? God bless him. How did he get?”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the first story that I placed in the Boston Phoenix, which when I was 23 was like a big deal, was about tugboats in Boston Harbor. And they didn't commission that. Why would they? Right. But I just, I moved to Boston and I just thought, what's the coolest thing in Boston? Maybe it's tugboats. So I just started hanging out on tugboats. And I sent them a pretty nice piece of writing. And it was my first published piece up there. And it was called towing the line. And that was my sort of entry into journalism.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I already had a Bill Craig full of notes and, you know, whatever. I mean, I already done years worth of work on this. Was used to, I mean, everything I'd ever written, I'd written on my own time and then tried to sell it. I was constantly sort of peddling finished pieces of writing. Yeah, I never got an assignment. The first assignment I did.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I worked on the story for about a year. And just sort of on my own dime. I wrote a magazine piece that outside magazine took. And then I got a book contract from WWN, a very, very modest book contract. But, you know, it got me going.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's incredible. I didn't really think that I wrote, yeah. You know, I wrote some articles with Boston Phoenix, and then I got into a couple of magazines, but it was not, I couldn't even come close to stitching together an income I could live on.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eventually, in between, I was a pretty bad waiter in Washington, DC and then Cambridge. And, you know, like, I mean, it took a while. I mean, my first book came out when I was 35. And I had virtually no income from writing before that.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and then turn it into words that people will read and be moved by, informed by and moved by and maybe changed by. That to me was just such an extraordinary idea. And so I thought maybe I'll be a journalist. This sounds like journalism. Maybe I'll try to be a journalist. And I literally graduated with, you know, my graduation plan, postgraduation plan was maybe I'll try to be a journalist. That was literally the plan I had in my head.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happened quite suddenly. I was a good distance runner in college and I had to write a thesis and I'd heard that the Navajo had this very strong tradition, ancient tradition of running. They were sort of still at it in a kind of traditional way. And they were amazing to track and cross country athletes. And they had blended the two disciplines. And so I did my fieldwork on the Navajo Reservation. I spent a summer there. I trained with their best runners. You know, it was up at six, 7,000 feet. I lived in Fort Defiance, Arizona. And I wrote a thesis about Navajo long distance running. That was the name of the thesis. Apparently thesis titles are supposed to have a colon in them, and I didn't know that. It's called a Navajo Long Distance Running. And I just came alive academically doing that. I mean, I was a pretty indifferent student. I was much more of an athlete than a student. I just came alive. And the idea that you could go out into the world and gather information, gather research, interview people, and bring it back.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I would read a book that I liked, I would think about like John McPhee. I would think about why is it I like it? What is it about the writing that appeals to me? And even more importantly, when I read books I didn't like, I tried to figure out what was it about that sentence, about that paragraph that repels me. And that was how I learned to write. It's a sort of process of natural selection. I just kept reading things that reinforced the style that I was drawn to anyway, and I kept writing more and more in that style. And I think if you know those writers and you read me, you can see my literary ancestry pretty clearly.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I never studied English and I never studied writing in college or after, but I read a lot. I grew up in a household with a lot of books. My father was educated in Europe. He grew up in Europe. And reading was this sort of imperative. I mean, I mean, it was, you just, you don't not read, you know, and I read John McPhee, Joan Dideon, Peter Matheson, Ernest Hemingway, of course, a little bit of Faulkner. I could go on, but I gravitated towards. Language that was efficient and lean and innovative.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I read 904 for the two mile 2405 for five miles and a 221 marathon. Those are my sort of set of distance records that I had.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many good stories, it started in a bar. I was broke and I was at a bar one evening and I was sitting next to this guy and we just started talking. And he said he owned a tree company. And he said he was looking for a climber. And I was a pretty athletic kid. And he said, listen, I'll train you to climb if you'll work for me, but I can't give you full-time work. And I was like, yeah, absolutely. So I started, he sort of trained me on a climb. And the great thing about climbing was that I could make, I mean, for an unemployed freelance writer in the late 80s, I could make a couple hundred dollars a day cash. I could make 500 bucks a day, even $1,000 a day, depending on the job. So I could work one day a week and sort of live off it. It was the perfect job for someone who was trying to do something else and needed some time.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was so relieved to see it intact, but I was still pretty messed up leg. And I repelled down to the ground, and my crew took me to the hospital. And as I was recovering, I had this thought that people die all the time doing dangerous jobs in this country. They're mostly working class men. They work in industries that are very dangerous, drilling for oil, logging, commercial fishing, that the nation needs done. Dying numbers comparable to soldiers in war, actually, but they don't get acknowledged, they don't get honored. And I thought, maybe I'll write about dangerous jobs. And that set me on course to ride my first book called The Perfect Storm about a huge storm that, among other things, like a commercial fishing boat at sea.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I managed to drag it across the back of my ankle right where the Achilles is. I turned the chainsaw, and I was way up in a tree, you know, on a rope, and I turned the chainsaw off and I clipped it to my belt and looked down and I pulled the wound open because I wanted, you know, you go into shock and you get very clinical immediately, right? I pulled the wound open and I wanted to see if the Achilles was intact. Indeed it was, by the way, and Achilles is about the thickness of a number two pencil and it's white. Just in case you ever wanted to know what your Achilles looks like.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was very reassuring, and it also trained me to really focus on being in the present moment. Well, at one point, I wasn't in the present moment and the chainsaw hit the back of my leg and tore open the back of my leg. And I'd been a marathon runner and stuff. And I was super worried about my Achilles tendon.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wesleyan University in Connecticut. I had no interest in being an anthropologist, but it actually helped me throughout my career as a writer. After I got out of college, I sort of wallowed around, weighted tables, I did various things to earn money while I was trying to become a writer. And I was very slowly getting into journalism, but I didn't pay very well. And I got a job eventually as a climber for tree companies. And I would work 80, 90 feet in the air with a chainsaw on a rope taking trees down in pieces, bringing branches and lowering them as I cut them and taking off the tops of trees and taking them down all the way to the ground. It was extremely dangerous work, or I should say, it's dangerous if you make a mistake. There isn't any random danger in the top of a tree. And I realized at one point, if I get killed doing this and plenty of people do, if I get killed doing this, it will be because I killed myself by accident. It's not a situation where something random will kill me.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the Greek Stoics were greatly abired by pain. I didn't know much about them. I knew the word. And I'd heard of Seneca, but I'm incredibly, I'm sort of half illiterate or untutored. And what the book said about the Stoics was amazing. And, you know, I'm not religious. I didn't grow up going to church. I don't believe in God. And so if you're like me, you're always looking for a way to sort of order the universe that's inspiring or reassuring and sort of makes sense of things. And so what they said about the Stoics, I really identified with, I'm like, oh, I got to learn more about the Stoics. And then here I was before I took a nap on your couch. I sort of pawed through your book collection over there. And there was the letters of Seneca and I grabbed it and sat down and I almost started whooping with pleasure. I mean, the things that he was writing 2,000 years ago were so modern, so amazing, so essential.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm reading the biography of Thomas Paine, one of the intellectual fathers of American independence from Britain in the 1770s.”
2024-06-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #744: Jocko Willink and Sebastian Junger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT