Be Necessary with war journalist Sebastian Junger | A Bit of Optimism Podcast

1. 0:00 – 12:09

   Surviving an aneurysm

   1. SSSimon Sinek0:00

      You recently survived an aneurysm

   2. SJSebastian Junger0:02

      And I woke up in the ICU the next morning very confused, and the nurse said to me, "Well, congratulations, Mr. Junger. You almost died. We almost lost you last night. No one can believe you're alive." I was shocked. I, I was completely horrified and shocked. She said, "Try this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred." And then she walked out, and I've been trying to do that ever since. The day I almost died was an utterly ordinary day. I was an extremely fit and healthy 58-year-old man, and yet it almost happened. And if you can live with the kind of presence, the veneration for existence, you really will be truly living a rich life. It doesn't happen by accident. You have to choose to do it. [upbeat music]

   3. SSSimon Sinek0:47

      Sebastian, such a pleasure to meet you.

   4. SJSebastian Junger0:50

      Oh, likewise. Thanks for having me on.

   5. SSSimon Sinek0:52

      I've been an admirer of you and your work for many, many years, and we've never met before.

   6. SJSebastian Junger0:57

      Yeah. Thank you. I app- I really appreciate that.

   7. SSSimon Sinek1:00

      You recently survived an aneurysm, and the feeling you had, and the fears you had, and the sense of survival you had was more profound from that than all the other experiences you've had where your life was at risk.

   8. SJSebastian Junger1:14

      Yeah. I mean, specifically, I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my abdomen, uh, in my pancreatic artery. And so an aneurysm, for the- your listeners who may not know, is a, it's a ballooning of the blood vessel, right? It's not, uh, high cholesterol. It's not a, you know, whatever. It's not a, a, a, a, a, uh, [chuckles] lifestyle issue. It's a, it's a, it's a structural abnormality. Uh, it was very, it's very rare, the kind that I had, and it's asymptomatic, and it's hard to diagnose until it ruptures. And when it ruptures, you basically bleed out as if you've been stabbed in the stomach, except you're bleeding out internally into your own abdomen. Once the blood's out of your arteries and into your abdominal ca- cavity, it's of no use whatsoever, and you could die of blood loss and not, and not have a single drop of blood on the floor, right? I- if you've been stabbed, the advantage to being stabbed or what... or, or, or shot or whatever, is that the doctors when they finally get you at the hospital, they know where to sort of put their finger, right? They know how to plug the leak 'cause the le- the, the, the wound shows them where the leak is. With internal hemorrhage, they have no idea. Your abdomen's a big bowl of spaghetti, right? Trying to find a, a bleed in your abdomen is extremely hard. So what happens, um, I felt this sort of sudden pain in my abdomen, and it was my... the aneurysm that I didn't know I had ru- it had ruptured. In mid-sentence with talking with my wife, I went, "Oh my God. What is that?" Immediately, I was losing, uh, a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes. Now, there's about 10 pints of blood in the human body, and I lived one hour away from the hospital. You could do the math, right? I was a human hourglass. And by the time I got to the hospital, um, I was minutes from dead. I was conscious. I was going into end-stage hemorrhagic shock. I was con- convulsing, uh, very confused. And, um, the doctors, the doctors stuck a large gauge needle straight into my neck, into my jugular to transfuse me. My blood pressure was 60 over 40, which is like you're running on fumes at that point. And, um, as they were working on me, this black pit opened up underneath me. And let me just say right now that I'm an atheist. I've been an atheist my entire life. I'm still an atheist. My father was an atheist and a physicist, and there's nothing mystical in me. I... Woo woo just gi- gives me the creeps. Like, I mean, I just have no tendency in that direction, right? A black pit opened up underneath me, and I started to get pulled into it, and I started to panic. I had no idea I was dying, absolutely none. But I was getting pulled into this black pit, and I started to panic. And as I panicked, my dead father appeared above me in this strange sort of energy form, and he, and he basically, he was like, "It's okay. You don't have to fight it. You can come with me. I'll take care of you." And I was horrified. I was like, "You're dead. I'm alive. I'm not going anywhere with you." Like, it was... the suggestion was grotesque to me. And I said to the doctor, "You gotta hurry. You're losing me right now. I'm going." And it took them about six hours, but they finally managed to, um, embolize the... They, they got a catheter from my groin into the ruptured artery, and they blo- they embolized it with a coil. It stopped the bleeding, and they managed to save my life. And I woke up in the ICU the next morning. I had no idea that I'd almost died. And I woke up very confused, and the nurse said to me, "Well, congratulations, Mr. Junger. You almost died. We almost lost you last night. In fact, no one can believe you're alive." And I, I was shocked. I had no idea that I'd almost died. I mean, I, I was completely horrified and shocked, and then suddenly I remembered my father, that I'd seen my dead father, and I remembered the pit. And the woman, the nurse came back, you know, an hour later and said, "How are you doing?" And I said, "You know, not that well, frankly, because what you told me is terrifying, and I can't stop thinking about it." And she said, "Try this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred." And then she walked out, and I've been trying to do that ever since. I was allowed to go to the precipice. I was allowed to look over the edge, and I was allowed to come back. I've been going to front lines my whole life, coming back with information that I thought could be of use to people, of service to people. I went to the ultimate, the final front line, and I was allowed to come back. What did I learn? What did I have for other people that might help them with their fears, help, help them live dignified, courageous lives? And so that, my, my book, In My Time of Dying- About this process was an attempt to answer, to do what she told me to do, to, to, you know, like think about it as something sacred, and also to explain in rational terms what the hell I saw as I was dying. Um, and but one of the interesting things about it was that in the weeks and months following, I, I had classic post- post-trauma disorder, and I w- I had a massive anxiety problem and, uh, real depression. And it was way worse than, you know, the pretty significant trauma that I had from the combat that I experienced. It was way worse than that, and I was... It, it took me really a couple years to recover from it so that it was sort of firmly in my rear view mirror and not affecting me on a daily basis.

   9. SSSimon Sinek6:51

      What did you learn about yourself from your aneurysm that you never learned about yourself in all those years in combat?

   10. SJSebastian Junger6:58

       Well, I learned that all of us, when we wake up in the morning, every single one of us could be dead by dinnertime. I didn't really know that. I mean, in a- abstractly I knew that. I didn't really know it. And, um, I also learned that I'm, uh, uh, you know, I've fostered [chuckles] the virtues of, of strength and toughness and courage in my life, not with enormous success, but I've at least tried to foster those values. And what I realized is that it doesn't take much, and truth is, I'm incredibly fragile, and that we're all incredibly fragile. And in that fragility is actually our salvation. When you f- when you realize how fragile you are, you realize how precious life is, and you don't, you... Religion is a fine way to understand the pre- the, the, the, the value of life. No problem. I don't use religion for that purpose or for any purpose. But when you realize how precious life is, then you really are experiencing life, and you're not really experiencing it fully until you've connected to your fragility and for the just, the incredible beauty and preciousness of life. And it took that and having children, um, for me to finally sort of get myself there.

   11. SSSimon Sinek8:12

       Do you find that being aware of your own fragility has made it easier for you to be necessary to others?

   12. SJSebastian Junger8:19

       Well, yes. I, I mean, I, w- if you're, [chuckles] if you're under the illusion that you're not fragile, it's, it, it's, it, it allows for all kinds of, um, all kinds of sort of grandiose and macho posturing, which is just a waste of everybody's time. You know what I mean? Like, uh, it just like, I sort of understand it and I understand why young men particularly, and I was a young man once, I understand the allure of that, and it actually sometimes is rewarded. But eventually, eventually, if you don't, if you don't understand how fragile you are, you're, you're missing out on a sort of great opportunity to be kind to yourself, to forgive yourself, to just give yourself a freaking break. You know? To like stop and appreciate the moment. And, um, I found this incredible story. Uh, so the great Russian writer Dostoevsky, when he was in his 20s, before he was a well-known writer, he was a bit of a political agitator, and he was... You know, this is in the 1840s, and he was sort of speaking out against, uh, serfdom. He was sort of articulating, uh, the, you know, the idea that the, the serfs should be freed. And so he and his buddies would get together and sort of talk this, you know, talk about l- liberating the serfs. Well, the, the tsar wasn't that keen on such talk, and so they, so the tsar's police rounded, rounded Dostoevsky up and his buddies up and, and, and sent them to prison for eight months. And you know, it wa- no one took it particularly seriously, right? I mean, they were just... It was like a chat group that they had when they talked about these, these ideas. And you know, one morning the, the, the warden showed up and loaded him and his, like, six buddies into a carriage, and they just assumed they were gonna be released after doing their penance of eight months in whatever prison it was. Instead, they were driven to a town square and, uh, a city square, and tied to posts. And a firing squad was, was, uh, uh, um, uh, lined up in front of them, and they charged their weapons and leveled their weapons. And Dostoevsky realized in, you know, in a m- in two minutes they went from young men who were being released from prison to, "Oh my God, we're all about to die." So what we know what people think in those moments, because he survived that. At the last moment, I mean, literally after they'd cocked their guns, a, a rider cantered into the square and said this, that the tsar had... And this was all th- you know, this was all theater, of course, right? But a rider cantered into the square and said that the tsar had forgiven them. But what Dostoevsky said was that as he stood there waiting for the end, he saw sunlight glinting off the roof, and he realized, "My God, in a few moments I'm gonna be part of the sunshine. I'm gonna be part of all things. I'm gonna, I'm gonna join the world. And if I should somehow survive this, I will turn every moment into an infinity. I will treat every moment like the miracle that it actually is." And, um, through incredible luck, he was actually able to do that. But you know, you don't need to face the tsar's firing squad to understand that life is pres- precious, every moment's precious, because none of us know, as I said, if we're gonna be alive by the end of the day. The day I almost died was an utterly ordinary day. I was an extremely fit and healthy 58-year-old man. I had no reason to think that I was, that I was at any risk of dying, and I wasn't driving anywhere, right? So... And yet it almost happened. And that's true for everybody. And if you can live with the kind of presence, um, the veneration for existence that Dostoevsky achieved in those moments, you really will be l- truly living a rich life. And it takes focus and concentration. It doesn't happen by accident. You have to choose to do it.

2. 12:09 – 20:28

   Becoming a war reporter

   1. SSSimon Sinek12:09

      You seem to like putting yourself into dangerous situations. [laughs] Where did that come from? [laughs] Like, as a war journalist, how did you find yourself, you know, writing about difficult situations and putting yourself in them?

   2. SJSebastian Junger12:25

      Well, I just, you know, the, just to start with a disclaimer, there are thousands of, uh, r- journalists who are really in the trenches month in, month out, year in, year out, much more than I've ever been. So i- in my population, I'm at the very low end of the sort of risk-taking journalist. But I'm also kind of high profile as an author, so I get a lot of sort of attention. I grew up in a, you know, pretty affluent suburb of Boston. And, you know, understand that humans are wired to deal with a lot of adversity and a lot of danger, and young males particularly, in every society in the world, are sort of trained to deal with some of the, the, the riskier things that society needs done, including in our society. Firemen, it's almost all men. Drilling for oil, almost all men. The, the, uh, mortality rate and the accident rate in the workplace is virtually all males. And I had this sense as a young man that I just had never been tested. Like, I just didn't even... I didn't know if I was brave or not, if I would, would act on behalf of others if it was incurred any risk to me. I didn't know any of these essential things that most young men throughout thousands, hundreds of thousands of years have had to, had to deal with and, and have wanted to deal with. And so, um, one of the first risks that I started taking, other than a bit of traveling that got a little dodgy sometimes, was I was a climber for tree companies. And so I would be working 70, 80, 100 feet in the air on a, on a line with a chainsaw taking trees down in sections, and it was just inherently risky work. And, um, after getting hurt doing that, I thought, "I gotta get out of this. I gotta ma- I want to be a writer, and I'm gonna write a book about dangerous jobs." And one chapter of that book that I imagined became The Perfect Storm. It was a, it was a chapter that was gonna be on commercial fishing. I was living in the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and a local bo- boat was sunk in a huge storm in 1991. But another chapter was gonna be on war reporters. And my dad had grown up in Europe. Uh, he, he was a refugee from two wars. He was born in 1923. Uh, they, they left Germany. His dad was Jewish. They left Germany in, in, in '33, the year of the Reichstag fire. They went to Spain. They left Spain when the fascists came in in '36 with Franco, and they went to Paris, and of course they left Paris when the Nazis rolled in [laughs] uh, in the spring of, what was it? Spring of '40. So, so then he came to this country. So war has been a, sort of an idea in my mind because for family reasons my whole childhood. And there was a civil war in Bosnia. Sarajevo was besieged by the Bosnian Serbs, a modern army shooting civilians like fish in a barrel for years. And I just thought, "I wanna know how that works. I wanna know what it's like. I wanna, I wanna be a journalist in that situation. I, and I wanna know about myself, like how will I react in a situation of danger and risk and hardship?" It's things that young people have had to a- questions they've had to answer for eons, and this was my chance. And so I went off and became a freelance war reporter in Sarajevo in, in the summer of 1993.

   3. SSSimon Sinek15:27

      What did you learn about yourself?

   4. SJSebastian Junger15:29

      I learned that I was completely vulnerable to being addicted to a life of meaning, and the life that I led before that didn't seem very meaningful. I waited tables. I was a climber for tree companies. I was writing short stories. None of it really mattered very much to anyone. And suddenly I'm in a situation where even though I'm the bottom of the food chain as a, a freelance, like, radio stringer, I mean, that's plankton on the food- journalistic food chain. But I was part of this thing, right? Th- we were... It was a cadre of foreign reporters in Sarajevo and in Bosnia telling the world what was happening. It was ethnic cleansing. It was genocide. Whatever you wanna describe it, it was horrific, and I was part of the system that communicated that to the rest of the world, and that was completely addictive. What I also learned was that I was naturally drawn to situations where people were reliant on each other and putting the group's concerns ahead of their own, right? And we saw this in the suburbs of Sarajevo. They had these sort of local militias that were defending completely home dug front lines, right? And these are teenagers, you know, fighting in, within sight of their apartment blocks. And, and I just thought, "Oh, that..." And when I... And as, as an anthropologist, I realized, "Oh, of course, that's the human norm." Right? What I'm seeing right now in a modern city is the way humans have lived for 200 thousands of years. There's a reason that this is attractive, uh, to me, and frankly, to many people.

   5. SSSimon Sinek16:58

      So one of the things I understand about military, especially with those with combat experience, which is though nobody sort of, quote-unquote, "likes combat," they have weird warmth, a weird, weirdly warm feelings towards their experience in combat, predominantly because of the relationships they form and, and the intense camaraderie. You know, that you put your life in someone else's hands and your life, uh, uh, and you hold the lives of others in your hands. And, and that, that intensity people have warm feelings towards. Now, as a journalist, you're not part of a unit, you know? So did the journalists have that kind of protect and pr- you know, protect you, protect me thing, or were you very much, um, an island?

   6. SJSebastian Junger17:38

      Right. Well, you know, the, uh, the human tendency is to affiliate with the people who are around you, and that happens to men in prison, and that happens to soldiers, and it happens to journalists who are with, uh, w- with combat forces in any war, right? You're dependent on them for mobility, for food, often for your own safety, and you very, very quickly affiliate with them. And so I would say that you, and, and certainly when I was with American soldiers in the Korangal Valley in eastern Afghanistan, I made a documentary called Restrepo about that year, and I wrote a book called War.

   7. SSSimon Sinek18:10

      I know Restrepo. It's an incredible, incredible film.

   8. SJSebastian Junger18:12

      Thank you. Thank you. That was a-

   9. SSSimon Sinek18:14

      That, that was recommended to me by a soldier, uh, back when it came out.

   10. SJSebastian Junger18:18

       Oh, good. Oh, nice. Um, no, I was enormously affiliated with those guys, right? I mean, that just, that just happens. It's what humans do. It's, humans don't survive- By themselves in the world, they die almost immediately. You drop a human into the wilderness by himself, by herself, a week later they're probably dead. Um, but we thrive in groups. We're social primates, and when you put the group's efforts, the group's, um, concerns ahead of your own, you would think that that would feel like a loss. Uh, it actually is kind of intoxicating to do that. Um, it means you're making yourself necessary to the group, which means that you're safe. Like, you, the group's not gonna help you if you don't make yourself necessary, if you're not helpful, if you're not altruistic. And when you have the opportunity to do that, it feels very, very good for some very ancient human reasons. And so that's why people, you know, after The Blitz in London, people were enormously nostalgic. I know after, uh, Hurricane Katrina, the go- on the, on the co- uh, coast of Mississippi, I have friends from there. They said after Ca- people really missed the terrible days after Katrina because everyone banded together. And-

   11. SSSimon Sinek19:28

       Yeah

   12. SJSebastian Junger19:28

       ... and finally, let me just say, a lot of the soldiers and a lot of the fighters in the wars that I've been in, in West Africa and in, in, in, uh, in Afghanistan in the '90s, and then with American soldiers, a lot of young men like combat enormously. I mean, love combat, right? And when I went back to Sarajevo a few years ago, it was, you know, during peacetime. It was nine- 2015, and I was going to a film festival, and I was picked up. You know, I got a taxi out of the air- airport, and the taxi driver spoke a little English and, you know, I said, "Oh, I haven't been here since the war." And you know, he, he, and, and he, and he punched the dashboard. And he said, "During the war, I was a special forces soldier." This is a Bosnian soldier. He said, "I was special forces, and my job was to infiltrate the Serb front lines and, um, uh, and, and we were operating behind the enemy lines," right? "We were special forces." And he punched the dashboard and he said, "Now I'm just a f- now I'm just a fucking taxi driver," right? He missed it.

3. 20:28 – 25:14

   The need to feel necessary

   1. SSSimon Sinek20:28

      Yeah.

   2. SJSebastian Junger20:28

      So it actually, there's a complicated relationship there for people who are in combat, and, and an enormous number of young men are horrifyingly fond of fighting.

   3. SSSimon Sinek20:38

      Yeah. I, I, uh, but what you said is worth, it's worth digging deeper, and what you said is making yourself necessary. Which is, which is it's not so much the combat, it's that I felt necessary to the group, and the group felt that I was-

   4. SJSebastian Junger20:50

      Yeah

   5. SSSimon Sinek20:50

      ... necessary to them. And it's that sense of belonging and that sense of, um, uh, uh, some higher calling that is the thing that I think they miss, not the fighting-

   6. SJSebastian Junger20:59

      Yeah

   7. SSSimon Sinek20:59

      ... per se.

   8. SJSebastian Junger21:00

      Right.

   9. SSSimon Sinek21:01

      And but this idea of making yourself necessary, and if we look at our society today, right? It seems that our nation, especially America, uh, but I think we could say this about, you know, much of the world, but especially America, over the past 30, 40 years we've sort of overemphasized, um, uh, uh, rugged individualism. And, uh, and at the expense of, as you put it, making yourself necessary to the group. And you look at, um, just the, the sense of loneliness that people have now and, and people latching onto any kind of cause they can find-

   10. SJSebastian Junger21:36

       Yeah

   11. SSSimon Sinek21:36

       ... to give them some sense of purpose. So can you g- given, given your remarkable experience of, of understanding people who become necessary to the group and feeling that feeling yourself, like, I, I'd love to hear you sort of philosophize about the, the state of the world now g- through this lens of are we necessary to each other?

   12. SJSebastian Junger21:58

       Yeah. So modern society, um, has, uh, has, has been able to achieve this incredible triumph, which is it has liberated most people, most of its inhabitants, from the daily needs of survival. And this is true for much of the world, and certainly almost the entire West, West. Uh, we get our food from supermarkets, our security's outsourced to, uh, the police for- the police, to the military. Uh, when our houses catch fire, the fire department comes to our rescue. And, um, so these things have been outsourced, and we don't, um, we don't actually depend on the people immediately around us for our survival and for our security and our safety, and that's new, right? That's a new, uh, occurrence in human affairs. But for most of human history, the survival group was 30 or 40 or 50 people. Um, these groups were highly mobile. Um, they were quite egalitarian, in part because you just can't accumulate that much wealth and transport it, right? If you're a mobile society, it sort of keeps wealth accumulation to a minimum. The Sioux Nation in, in the Dakotas, um, they had a rule that you could not, you could not inherit, you could not inherit anything that could be made smaller by division. In other words, any material goods that you could make smaller by dividing in two or dividing in four, you could not inherit that. You can only inherit the good name and the honor of your father or your mother or what have you. Uh, but not something that could be made smaller by division.

   13. SSSimon Sinek23:36

       Hmm.

   14. SJSebastian Junger23:36

       And what that does is it creates a really kind of radical equality between people. And leaders are leaders because people are willing to follow them, right? Not because the leaders have some kind of power and authority and extra rights where they can impose their will on others.

   15. SSSimon Sinek23:51

       Mm-hmm.

   16. SJSebastian Junger23:51

       Uh, that doesn't work so well in a small survival group. And so, uh, I, I, in my book Tribe, I looked at a situation in Italy where this terrible earthquake struck in around, in Abruzzo around 19, I think, 15, something like that. Something like 95% of the population of, uh, uh, uh, the local population was killed in under a minute. It was like they'd been hit by a nuclear weapon, right? And the people that survived this had to make it for many days until help could get there, and they depended on each other, right? They dug each other, uh, each other out of the, out of the rubble, and salvaged food, and whatever, whatever they had to do. And one of the men who survived this said, "The earthquake ... produced what the law promises but cannot in fact deliver, which is the equality of all men.

   17. SSSimon Sinek24:37

       Mm.

   18. SJSebastian Junger24:37

       Um, criminals, non-criminals, wealthy, poor, you, you know, good-looking, ugly, you know, whatever. None of those awful distinctions that we make in society mattered in this dire situation. And that-

   19. SSSimon Sinek24:47

       Mm

   20. SJSebastian Junger24:47

       ... once it was over, people really missed it. They missed being valued for, for who they, who for-

   21. SSSimon Sinek24:55

       Mm

   22. SJSebastian Junger24:55

       ... for who they can turn themselves into.

   23. SSSimon Sinek24:58

       Yeah.

   24. SJSebastian Junger24:58

       Right? All right, maybe I was, maybe I, maybe I was a criminal, but I'm helping you right now. That's who I really am, right?

   25. SSSimon Sinek25:04

       Yeah.

   26. SJSebastian Junger25:05

       And that's, that's what society takes away, is the opportunity that individuals have for making themselves in their own, uh, sort of best image.

4. 25:14 – 30:21

   Honor and underdogs

   1. SJSebastian Junger25:14

      So I spent a year off and on with a, a platoon Amer- of American soldiers in, in pretty intense combat in eastern Afghanistan. And you know, tho- they were up, they were up on a hilltop for a year, basically. Like, there was no internet, there was no communication with the outside world. There was no running water. There was no women. It was all men. There was no nothing, right? And for a while there wasn't even electricity. They didn't even have a generator. And they were in, they were in contact with the enemy virtually every day. They were sleeping in the dirt. I mean, it was as rough as it gets. Those guys missed it, by the way. Many of those guys missed it when they came home. But, um, s- so it was interesting in the group, right? It was racially mixed. There were atheists, the guys who were religious. There were Democrats, there were Republicans. Um, statistically there were probably a couple ga- guys who were gay, right? No one cared.

   2. SSSimon Sinek26:01

      Yeah.

   3. SJSebastian Junger26:01

      Right? Like, those divisions did not matter because they all needed each other on that hilltop, and really the way men were judged was by how willing you were to, to ignore risk to yourself-

   4. SSSimon Sinek26:13

      Yeah

   5. SJSebastian Junger26:13

      ... to help your brothers.

   6. SSSimon Sinek26:14

      Yeah.

   7. SJSebastian Junger26:14

      Like, that was the only metric for honor, and everyone had access to honor.

   8. SSSimon Sinek26:19

      Yeah.

   9. SJSebastian Junger26:19

      Even me, and I wasn't carrying a weapon. But just in my conduct in that group, they were measuring me. Uh, uh, like, "Okay, is he one of us in terms of being willing to risk himself to help others? Yeah, I, we think so. Yeah, pretty much. I think he is." Like, and so then I was accepted. Um, so h- so, uh, you know, how do you transfer... I mean, if a bunch of grunts on a hilltop-

   10. SSSimon Sinek26:39

       Yeah

   11. SJSebastian Junger26:39

       ... can do that with each other-

   12. SSSimon Sinek26:40

       Yeah

   13. SJSebastian Junger26:40

       ... why can't we pick up that core human value and place it back down in this country? It's a good question.

   14. SSSimon Sinek26:46

       Oh, but you, the, the, this is so good. This is so good, Sebastian, because basically I've always lamented the loss, for a while I've been lamenting the loss of honor, you know, as a currency in our society. You know, you can go back a few hundred years in the times of chivalry. You know, honor was the thing you had, and your word was true because you didn't wanna lose honor. And we have-

   15. SJSebastian Junger27:05

       Yeah

   16. SSSimon Sinek27:05

       ... shame-based societies like in, in, in, in the East or in the Middle East where honor and family honor is a thing, and you keep your word and you do things out of, because of honor. We're not a shame-

   17. SJSebastian Junger27:15

       Yeah

   18. SSSimon Sinek27:15

       ... based society in the United States. We don't talk about honor. We don't do things for honor.

   19. SJSebastian Junger27:19

       Yeah.

   20. SSSimon Sinek27:19

       We do things that are dishonorable every day. It's one of the things I love about the military, which is, you know, somebody will introduce me to somebody and be like, "Hey, should I talk to this, this person?" And they'll be like, "Yeah, totally honorable guy." You know?

   21. SJSebastian Junger27:31

       Right.

   22. SSSimon Sinek27:31

       It's, it's a currency. So the question is, is what's honor? The question is what's honor? And I think what I'm learning from you is that honor is the willingness to be necessary.

   23. SJSebastian Junger27:41

       Yep. Yeah. That's right.

   24. SSSimon Sinek27:43

       The choice.

   25. SJSebastian Junger27:44

       Yeah.

   26. SSSimon Sinek27:44

       'Cause you talked about choice before, that honor is the choice to be necessary and that people recognize that you are willing to make the choice to be necessary.

   27. SJSebastian Junger27:52

       Yeah. I mean, you have moral, you have moral standards that you're willing to make sac- real sacrifices for.

   28. SSSimon Sinek27:57

       Yeah.

   29. SJSebastian Junger27:58

       Even sacrifice your life.

   30. SSSimon Sinek27:59

       Yeah.
5. 30:21 – 35:00

   Do you miss combat?

   1. SJSebastian Junger30:21

      thing in a group.

   2. SSSimon Sinek30:22

      Do you miss Restrepo? Do you miss combat?

   3. SJSebastian Junger30:26

      Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Uh, I, I missed it enormously w- when, when the deployment was finished. And, um, and I real- and I really struggled to come back to quote, you know, quote, "normal life." Uh, where I wasn't part of a group like that, and where the stakes seemed remarkably banal

   4. SSSimon Sinek30:43

      Did you go through depression? Did you find people intolerable because they were concerned about stupid things?

   5. SJSebastian Junger30:49

      [laughs] Well, I, I, I wouldn't put it that harshly, but I, I, I felt unconnected to people around me, including to the woman, to my wife, the woman I was married to. And my, my marriage broke up, you know, f- I mean, it had its own internal problems, but one of the problems was that I didn't feel like my life back home was my real life. It felt unreal, and it felt insubstantial and inconsequential. And the people that I, that I loved, I felt like I couldn't reach them. I, I felt like I was encased in sort of bulletpr- bulletproof plexiglass. It was a very, very... It was, you know, classic post-trauma depression, actually. And, uh, you know, I eventually came... And then my, my buddy Tim that I was out at Restrepo with, that I ma- that I made the film Restrepo with, you know, he was killed in combat in Libya right after we'd gone to the Academy Awards for Restrepo, and, you know, an assignment that I was supposed to have been on with him, and at the last moment I couldn't go, and he got himself killed. And, uh, you know, I went, I plunged into this, like, crisis of grief and, and guilt, enormous guilt that he had died and that I hadn't died. And, you know, he, if he'd died in a car accident, I wouldn't have had felt that, and had we never been in combat together and he'd died in combat, I wouldn't have felt that. But if you're in combat with another man and they die in combat, uh, you are going to feel guilty for the rest of your life even though you know it's irrational.

   6. SSSimon Sinek32:07

      Yeah. And I hear this from the teams, the guys on the SEAL teams, you know, which is they fear letting down their fellow team members more than they fear death.

   7. SJSebastian Junger32:16

      Yeah, absolutely.

   8. SSSimon Sinek32:17

      You know, that-

   9. SJSebastian Junger32:17

      And, yeah

   10. SSSimon Sinek32:18

       ... that death is a lower standard than letting somebody down. And this idea of being necessary, you know, like, "Was I necessary to the last minute?"

   11. SJSebastian Junger32:25

       Yeah.

   12. SSSimon Sinek32:25

       Is this intense sense of belonging-

   13. SJSebastian Junger32:28

       Yeah

   14. SSSimon Sinek32:28

       ... you know, to feel necessary. I find it so, it's such a great framing for purpose, that to have-

   15. SJSebastian Junger32:35

       Yeah

   16. SSSimon Sinek32:35

       ... purpose is to be necessary, not to myself, not to the company, but to a group of people who rely on me for their survival, not their profit-

   17. SJSebastian Junger32:44

       Right

   18. SSSimon Sinek32:44

       ... but their survival. And that's important. You know, I'm necessary to the wealth generation of the C- No, no, no, no, no.

   19. SJSebastian Junger32:49

       Yeah. That's right.

   20. SSSimon Sinek32:49

       This is not shareholder bullshit rationalization. You know, it's survi- it's, it's necessary to the survival. And you talked about it, which is great leadership, which is forgoing my bonus at Christmas so that others may not suffer, th- I am becoming necessary to the survival of others.

   21. SJSebastian Junger33:03

       That's right, and there's a great honor, great honor in that.

   22. SSSimon Sinek33:05

       And people find purpose when they have children because I become necessary to the survival of another human being.

   23. SJSebastian Junger33:10

       Right. But, but understand that really the most profound, in some ways the most profound form of being necessary, I mean, you're, with children, you're perpetuating your own DNA. I mean, there's a very powerful evolutionary imperative-

   24. SSSimon Sinek33:21

       Yeah, yeah

   25. SJSebastian Junger33:21

       ... to do that. Humans are the only species where an adult, I, I'll just say male because all the combat I've been in, I, I've been surrounded by men. We're, we're the only species where an adult male will sacrifice himself for another man that he's not related to.

   26. SSSimon Sinek33:39

       Yeah.

   27. SJSebastian Junger33:39

       Like, chimpanzees do not do that. No other animal do that. I mean, animals will d- will sacrifice themselves for their, for their, their offspring, and sometimes-

   28. SSSimon Sinek33:46

       Right

   29. SJSebastian Junger33:46

       ... their mate.

   30. SSSimon Sinek33:48

       Yeah.

Episode duration: 35:01