In this episode, we talk about the pros and cons of social media, and how it affects our mental health. We also talk about how technology has changed the way we live our lives, and whether or not we should be worried about it. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. Additional production by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Editing: Ben Kuklinski Mixer: Haley Shaw Special thanks to our sponsor, Amazon Prime Video Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music: Jeff Kaale. We are part of the Gimlet Media Podcast Network. The opinions expressed in this episode are our own and do not necessarily those of our employers. If you have a dilemma you want us to address, please reach out to us at gimlet.media@whatiwatchedtonight.co.nz and we will try our best to solve it. Thank you for all the support we can do so. Thank you so much for the support the podcast, thank you for your support, good vibes and support, and support the cause of this podcast. Timestamps: 5:00:00 - 3:30 - 6:40 - 6:00 - 7:00- 8:15 - 9:00 | 9: 11:00 + 12:30 14: 15:00 // 16: 16:30 + 17:30 | 17:40 18:40 | 18:20 - 19:00 & 21:00 / 22:30 // 21:40 + 23:30 & 26:00 = 25:00+ 27:00 ? 24:00 @ 3: Is it possible to be happy? 35: 36:00? 37:00 Is it a problem? 39:30 ? 35:00 , 45: ? 41:00 # 47:00 Or 44:00 etfeu? 45 :00 & 45:00 : 48:00 )
00:00:56.000You get along very well with my friend Ari.
00:00:58.000He went back to a flip phone, and he looks disdainfully, sort of like former alcoholics look at everybody with a drink, like, there's no way you could just enjoy one drink, you loser.
00:01:10.000Yeah, no, I... I just look around at this.
00:01:15.000I mean, I'm an anthropologist, and I'm interested in human behavior, and I look at the behavior, like literally the physical behavior of people with smartphones, and it looks antisocial and unhappy and anxious, and I don't want to look like that, and I don't want to feel like I think those people feel.
00:01:35.000You know, it's really interesting because I was at a restaurant the other day and I was looking around and literally everyone in the restaurant was looking at their phone.
00:01:43.000And I was thinking, what if there was a drug that did that?
00:01:46.000What if there was a drug that didn't kill you, but it just sucked up all your time and you just stared blankly at your hand and did everything that you do while you're using a phone?
00:02:11.000And it has a lot of uses and whatever, but it's not social in any human sense.
00:02:15.000And if you look at suicide rates, depression rates, PTSD rates, anxiety rates, They're doing nothing but going up in our society.
00:02:25.000Mass shootings, you know, just something tragic just happened yesterday.
00:02:30.000All those things, they're indicators of something and they're all going up in our society despite the fact that we're a very wealthy, powerful, relatively peaceful society.
00:02:39.000I can't prove that it's, you know, the internet or social media or whatever.
00:02:43.000I mean, obviously, but the fact that those things are happening at the same time Does make me wonder that these new devices certainly don't bring happiness, because the numbers are going in the wrong direction.
00:02:54.000Well, I don't think they're designed to bring happiness, but they're certainly designed to give you access to information.
00:02:59.000Perhaps maybe with some discipline, they can be used in some sort of a way that benefits us and not...
00:03:09.000I mean, I think the problem is when people want to be socially connected constantly, no matter what they're doing.
00:03:19.000And that, I think, keeps people from actually fully experiencing whatever they're actually doing.
00:03:25.000I think there's definitely some truth to that, but I do like the fact that I can ask my phone questions.
00:03:30.000Like, if I don't know anything, then I can ask.
00:03:32.000There's a new feature on this Google Pixel where you squeeze the side of it, and the Google Assistant comes up, and you can ask it questions.
00:04:06.000But if you look, again, if you look at mental health statistics in this country, we're doing something wrong because they're all going in the wrong direction.
00:04:31.000I mean, we were talking the other day about, we were at the airport, we were waiting to fly home, and there was some girl, and she was talking, we were just eavesdropping, and she was talking about, like, The Amazing Race, and how she, you know, oh, this show's so boring now, and I can't wait to...
00:04:46.000And I'm going to eat this, and then I'm going to eat that, and I'm supposed to get a raise at work.
00:04:51.000It's like all nonsense, non-engaging, not interesting.
00:04:55.000There's no real life to anything she's talking about.
00:04:58.000This is most of our country, or a large part of our country.
00:05:04.000I mean, the thing about social media is that it sort of weaponizes blandness.
00:05:08.000It gives people a platform for the most mundane, uninteresting, Because they have to constantly be producing some kind of output of communication.
00:05:21.000Well, and if not producing it, certainly absorbing it, right?
00:08:16.000I just think that all things move in an ever more complex direction and that whatever a person is now is not going to be the same thing a thousand years from now or a hundred years from now even.
00:08:26.000I think there's going to be some sort of symbiotic We're good to go.
00:08:48.000Is it for human fulfilled lives or is it for the human race as an entity to produce the highest technological achievements and scientific insights?
00:08:56.000I don't have a vote either way, but that does sort of seem to be the question.
00:09:01.000And that technology, I mean, we know does not lead to fulfillment and happiness, but it does lead to scientific insight and to, you know, incredible...
00:09:10.000I mean, a profound understanding of how the universe works in a physical sense.
00:09:15.000I wonder if what we're doing is just being caught up in the momentum of all this innovation and instead of, like, using discipline or using some sort of rational, objective analysis of, like, what it takes to be happy and then maybe...
00:09:32.000Pushing some of that stuff aside and engaging in actual physical activities, going out and doing things and making that almost like a prescription.
00:09:40.000Like, hey, let's look at your daily chart.
00:09:42.000Hey, you didn't get enough vitamins, buddy.
00:09:44.000And hey, you didn't get enough activity.
00:09:46.000You need that in order to feel right, to feel balanced.
00:10:52.000I mean, look, if we are finite life forms, if you're only going to be lived to be, you know, if you're lucky, 90 years, and your health's going to fail and then you're going to die, what should be our goal is to feel good, right?
00:11:18.000Yeah, I've been getting a lot of – I keep getting a lot of good responses to it.
00:11:22.000And I think partly – I mean whether you're a Democrat or Republican, this is a pretty unsettling time in this country.
00:11:28.000And I think people are coming to the book a little bit just partly because they're wondering what is the glue that holds us all together and is there?
00:11:55.000The need to have something on the line.
00:12:00.000The need to be in situations where there's real consequences.
00:12:05.000It seems that this is part of the glue that holds us together.
00:12:09.000Well, I mean the thing about technology is it buffers us from real consequences in the physical world, which is what's great about it, right?
00:12:16.000But the downside is that as humans get buffered from consequences, they need each other less and less in order to survive.
00:12:23.000So now it's sort of modern Homo sapiens in a suburban house with an iPhone and a garage door opener and all that stuff.
00:12:30.000You know, you get a paycheck at work and you don't need your neighbors, you know, to help you gather food or hunt food or defend yourself from the gang from the other neighborhood.
00:12:39.000I mean, it all kind of gets taken care of, which is a great liberation from your neighbors, from your community.
00:12:46.000But it deprives you of that essential...
00:13:11.000Yeah, I think that lack of community is a very confusing thing when you see most people just sliding into their garage and shutting the door or going into their house and they don't even know their neighbors.
00:13:21.000That's really highlighted in your book, how alien that is to the human experience until fairly recently.
00:14:27.000You say it was crushing to live the American dream.
00:14:30.000I mean, a lot of people's ideas, the American dream is living in a nice, quiet suburb.
00:14:35.000Yeah, and listen, there's a lot that's dreamlike about it, but the data will tell you that people in those situations are not happy.
00:14:46.000The metrics by which we measure human fulfillment, human happiness, mental health, they suck in the suburbs.
00:14:54.000And generally in modern society, as affluence goes up in society, the suicide rate goes up.
00:15:01.000The depression rate, PTSD rate, all that stuff goes up with affluence.
00:15:07.000Yeah, I've noticed that in some of the circles that I'm hanging around with now because of nice people, but the children of my children, my children's friends' parents.
00:15:21.000So I'm interacting with these people that I don't know from work, I don't know from social circles, and most of them are great, but a lot of them Everyone's
00:16:12.000And it's a really well-known phenomenon.
00:16:14.000If you introduce a disaster into that environment, if you introduce the blitz in London or an earthquake or what have you, a flood, a tidal wave, a war...
00:16:26.000I mean they're in a kind of dream state and for some people that's induced by pills and some people it's just induced by isolation.
00:16:35.000But they're in a kind of dream state where they're not part of society in a meaningful way.
00:16:41.000A catastrophe wakes them up out of that.
00:16:44.000And people – I mean over and over again you can hear testimony of people saying, well, I really miss those days, the days after the earthquake, during the blitz.
00:16:52.000I mean from generation after generation that goes through their things, right, their tough things, those days are missed.
00:16:59.000And they're missed because people – the thing they actually like most is being an essential part of a small group that is struggling to survive.
00:17:06.000Like that is the human – We're good to go.
00:17:29.000In the face of hardship and danger, we're the descendants of those people inevitably.
00:17:32.000And because the people that didn't act well didn't survive as well, right?
00:17:51.000The trick is, how can we have that close communal connection that buffers us from mental health problems, that makes us feel meaningful and fulfilled?
00:18:00.000How can we have that and have the benefits of modern society?
00:19:15.000I mean, there's nothing to sustain you out of that.
00:19:18.000Well, I've found, for me personally, that people get a lot of fulfillment out of tribes, for lack of a better word, of like-minded people doing similar things that are difficult.
00:21:13.000What they cared is how you acted in that situation and would you put the group, the welfare of the group, ahead of your own welfare?
00:21:23.000And there was this basic human question.
00:21:26.000Is the group more important to you than you are to you?
00:21:28.000And if we all answer that question with a yes, then we're good.
00:21:56.000Being freed from those things you're not responsible for and are not judged for, that is a huge liberation and it really makes people feel close to each other.
00:22:06.000Yeah, so people need, and it's also, do you think that a lot of what's going on today is just the fact that I don't think people are supposed to work in an office all day.
00:22:15.000I think it's probably bad for your biology.
00:22:18.000I think it's sitting in a chair all day is terrible for you.
00:22:21.000I think staring at a computer all day is terrible for you.
00:22:24.000All these things that people do are just counter to, they're contrary to what your body was designed for.
00:22:31.000And that must cause a lot of depression and anxiety in people.
00:22:36.000Yeah, I mean, if you want to know what we were evolved for, you can look at modern-day hunter-gatherers, who more or less, anthropologists agree, represent our evolutionary past, and you'll find that...
00:22:49.000There's at least two hours of pretty vigorous movement every day, you know, fast walking basically.
00:22:54.000Two hours a day by virtually everyone in the community.
00:22:59.000You are almost never out of contact with – I mean out of physical proximity with other people that you know extremely well.
00:23:09.000There is about four or five hours a day devoted to survival.
00:23:29.000High protein, no processed foods, obviously.
00:23:34.000I mean, the diet, obviously, it's a very pure diet.
00:23:37.000And people who live like that have extraordinarily good health.
00:23:42.000And if they survive You know, childbirth in those first early years often live into their 70s, 80s to 90. I mean, you know, basically live as long as Westerners do with no medical intervention.
00:23:56.000That is extraordinary when you think about it.
00:23:58.000I saw an article, and I didn't read the article, but the headline was something along the lines of, it was talking about artificial intelligence, and it was whether or not the rise of artificial intelligence will even out inequality.
00:24:15.000And I remember looking at that and went, boy, that's like giving in to the hive mind.
00:24:21.000Like, artificial intelligence is going to cure all the woes of the world.
00:24:25.000Like, let the computer think for you, and everything's going to be even.
00:24:28.000And you know, now that I'm thinking about it, the two guys we were walking behind in San Francisco, it wasn't robots, it was artificial intelligence they were talking about.
00:25:31.000My understanding of physics is that it was It's incalculably unlikely that the universe would exist and that life would start on this particular planet or on any planet.
00:25:46.000And so it's hard to say that anything would be important to a system that – That statistically shouldn't have happened and that doesn't have a conscious and moral mind behind it.
00:26:03.000Like, I mean, no, of course we're not important.
00:26:04.000I mean, if we were sitting on the moon and you watched a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States that obliterated civilization, if you were sitting on the moon, you'd barely be able to see it.
00:26:14.000You would barely notice anything happened.
00:27:23.000They're training for hunting in war and they're getting rewarded with dopamine, which is exactly what should have been happening for 500,000 years.
00:27:30.000And now there's nothing to hunt, nothing to fight.
00:27:32.000They're still doing the behavior as they should because they're wired for it but there's no useful purpose for it and they're making themselves irrelevant.
00:27:41.000They're human casualties of this technology and I find it really tragic.
00:27:46.000Trevor Burrus Are they more irrelevant than someone who plays sports?
00:27:51.000I mean, I think our relevance comes from our relationship with our community and with society.
00:28:52.000Well, you know, if you look at humans, you look at chimpanzees, we clearly need the proximity of others, like the physical proximity of others.
00:28:58.000So, I mean, the only way I can evaluate that is to say that's awesome training for hunting in war.
00:29:21.000Either depressive people are seeking that as a refuge or that activity makes people withdrawn and depressed.
00:29:27.000Either way, it's a problem that needs to be solved.
00:29:29.000I have no idea what the data is, but that's where I would look.
00:29:32.000Now, when you're researching all this data and you're putting together a book like Tribe and you're putting it out, are you thinking to yourself that you have That it's not just an interesting study on human behavior, but it's also probably important for people to read,
00:29:48.000to kind of get an understanding, and to get an understanding of what it is that's causing people to have all this depression and anxiety, that maybe this is something that needs to be said.
00:30:00.000I mean any – that's a categorical statement I shouldn't make.
00:30:04.000But a lot of authors when they write books, it's their firm conviction that their book needs to be read by the public and that it will help the public in some way, right?
00:30:11.000It will illuminate life, illuminate America, illuminate the world in some way that's important.
00:30:15.000I mean that's just a starting point for the two years of work that a book takes, right?
00:30:20.000Your assumption is the child is going to be a good person in the world, not a terrible person and wind up shooting up a church, right?
00:30:26.000It's just a starting basic assumption.
00:30:29.000For me, when I was writing Tribe, I was trying to make sense of a number of different things.
00:30:35.000I mean, one was that the soldier I was with in Afghanistan, I was really struck some months later that a lot of them wanted to go back to this sort of flea-bitten, godforsaken outpost where they got shot at every day and didn't want to come home to the U.S. It's like, that needs explaining.
00:31:01.000He was born in 1929, out west, and he had a very rough, interesting life, and he was very well-read.
00:31:08.000And I remember him telling me, he was a sort of mentor figure for me, and I remember him telling me when I was in my 20s, he said, you know, all throughout the history of the United States, along the frontier, and this is how he put it, he said, white people were always running off to join the Indians.
00:31:22.000And the Indians never ran off to join the white people.
00:31:24.000And so here was this fact again, like, oh, no one wants to go back to or go to the sort of modern world.
00:31:32.000And this wasn't even the modern world.
00:31:33.000This is the modern world in 1865, right?
00:31:41.000At the time, it was the modern world, right?
00:31:45.000It's basically the post-agricultural revolution world, the industrial world, the world of organized religion, organized government, of industrial economy, and an agriculture-based system where people had jobs,
00:32:02.000and you got up at dawn and plowed the fields all day and went to bed, and your minister and your king told you what to do, and whatever.
00:32:09.000That's the modern world, and that's what nobody wants to be part of, including the soldiers I was with at Restrepo, right?
00:32:15.000And so it just made me think, maybe what the soldiers are missing isn't war, although that certainly has its charms for some people, but it's community.
00:32:31.000Likewise for the Native Americans, for the tribal societies in North America, maybe what the young men and some young women along the frontier were looking for, I think?
00:33:10.000By the Indians, kidnapped from their log homes along the frontier and abducted and forcibly adopted into these tribal societies.
00:33:20.000When given the chance to come home to be repatriated some years later, very often these people refused to go.
00:35:03.000But then if you introduce a crisis, the Blitz in London, for example, an earthquake in Italy that I studied, What happens is that money doesn't matter anymore when the floodwaters are rising, when the bombs are falling.
00:36:28.000It's so bizarre, but it also so makes sense.
00:36:30.000One of the things that I also thought was fascinating in your book, we were talking about PTSD sufferers and how people in these veterans' hospitals would be absolutely furious if they thought someone was faking their symptoms and that they had to be physically restrained to keep from attacking people that they thought were just juking the system and how many people were on PTSD benefits.
00:36:56.000Yeah, I mean, the numbers are really elusive, but what I have sort of anecdotally from veterans as well as people within the VA administration who are acting as therapists or whatever, group counselors, Is that there's a certain number of people,
00:37:12.000and I don't know what the fraction is, but there's a certain number of people who were not traumatized in war, and PTSD is hard to prove or disprove, and it's sort of obviously wide open for either an unintentional misdiagnosis or an intentional misdiagnosis.
00:37:31.000I mean of course any bureaucratic system gets scammed and PTSD benefits are no different.
00:37:37.000But it really is traumatizing – I mean seriously angering and traumatizing to soldiers who really were traumatized because they really were in combat.
00:37:45.000And keep in mind only about 10 percent of the US military experiences direct combat.
00:37:51.000How would they know if someone was seriously traumatized?
00:37:55.000And the other thing that's fascinating is that, as you were talking about in these small societies, freeloaders are looked down upon, as are the greedy alpha males who try to dominate the wealth.
00:38:07.000In these societies, egalitarian ideas are much more openly expressed.
00:38:13.000It's much more important that this is represented by these people that are legitimately suffering, seeing someone scamming the system and angry.
00:38:22.000Whereas, say, if you had a hurt knee or something like that and you were going to a doctor and you saw someone who was faking a back injury, you wouldn't be upset.
00:38:32.000They were just robbing money from the insurance company and just getting free benefits.
00:38:36.000Well, yeah, I mean, because a hurt knee doesn't have a sort of emotional cargo to it, right?
00:38:41.000I mean, if you're in combat and you lost your best buddy, And you got trauma from that, as well you should.
00:38:48.000And then you're in some group therapy thing at the VA with some guy who was on a rear base the whole time and is claiming 100% PTSD disability for something that never happened.
00:38:57.000Like, yeah, that would make you angry.
00:39:52.000That's one of the things – that's one of the characteristics of humans.
00:39:56.000Is that because we live in collective societies where we have to sort of trust one another, we're extremely good at smelling out misrepresentation and fraud.
00:40:41.000Well, I mean, it all completely makes sense.
00:40:44.000It particularly makes sense, the idea that these people who were real combat vets, who saw real action, would be instantaneously able to discern whether or not someone was faking it.
00:40:55.000But that this, it sort of mirrors what you were saying about these small tribes, that in these small tribes, someone who's a freeloader Is extremely dangerous to the group.
00:41:15.000And this is like what you're saying about combat troops, that what they want to know is that you're going to be willing to put your own safety secondary to the safety of the troop.
00:42:14.000It seems like a contradiction, but what then I go on to say to them is, look, if war can get a room full of pacifists to go pay money to watch it, there's something important going on in that narrative.
00:42:27.000You're not going to the movies to watch people get killed, right?
00:42:34.000You're going to the movies to see these very ancient human concerns of who's loyal to the group, who's a coward, who's brave, who's willing to risk their life for someone else.
00:42:45.000I mean, these are things that have kept humans alive or endangered them, as the case may be.
00:43:08.000In war, that happens every day, right?
00:43:11.000So it gives you this sort of like human narrative in this incredibly compressed, intense form, which reconfirms the human values we all have about, okay, if you're in a group, You have to love that group, even if you dislike some of the people in it.
00:43:27.000Like, that's what it means to be part of a group, and that's what has kept humans alive for a very long time.
00:43:32.000You even see that narrative in science fiction, futuristic movies like The Matrix, right?
00:43:37.000The one guy who sells out the other humans to The Matrix and just says, look, I want to be in The Matrix.
00:43:45.000I want to have a great life and eat good food.
00:43:48.000Yeah, I mean, listen, once you are aware of this narrative, you see it everywhere.
00:44:09.000They would screen films for audiences and then ask the audiences questions about the ending, about the characters, about how to construct the plot.
00:44:18.000They were sort of trying to figure out what's the public want to see, right?
00:44:21.000So what they found was that in disaster films, very typically...
00:44:25.000Where a community was facing a disaster, right?
00:44:29.000A plague or a flood or a war or whatever.
00:44:33.000When the community had to rally to survive, right?
00:44:43.000There's usually a male figure that takes the lead to physically defend the space, right?
00:44:50.000There is often a female figure that's connected to him that sort of takes place of the community that's being defended, takes care of the—dresses the wounds, dresses the emotional wounds.
00:45:05.000I mean, sort of takes care of all that stuff while the man or the men are sort of physically defending the place.
00:45:12.000And then there's a guy who often was really wealthy or well-off before the catastrophe who's continuing to act in a self-serving way, even during the catastrophe when everyone's needed.
00:45:40.000Keep in mind that these narratives are formed by public opinion.
00:45:44.000This isn't the studios trying to make the public...
00:45:47.000And force feed the public gender roles and whatever.
00:45:51.000This is the public saying, I like that, I don't like that.
00:45:53.000So the studios are responding to the questionnaires that these researchers give out.
00:45:58.000So one of the really interesting things, and this is totally inflammatory, but...
00:46:03.000The role of the person defending, like physically defending the community, when they try to put a woman in that role, people have a problem with it.
00:46:13.000And frankly, often women have a problem with it.
00:46:18.000And women are just as important as men in a crisis or in anything, right?
00:46:23.000But what the public seems to want is the guy with the sword and the woman with the bandage.
00:46:29.000You know, or with the sort of reassuring – you know, like it gets divided like that and it's not – again, it's not the studios forcing something on people.
00:46:38.000It's the people watching these films saying – just voting on what they – the narrative that they like best.
00:46:43.000But the other character that I thought was really hilarious, there's often that there's an estranged husband who's betrayed his wife and family in some way.
00:48:04.000Pretty soon, they're just sitting in darkness, not knowing not only if they'll survive, not knowing if their bodies will ever even be recovered.
00:49:04.000When they realized they couldn't dig their way out and they ran out of batteries and they're sitting in darkness, a new kind of leader was required.
00:49:11.000And that was someone who was able to keep people's spirits up, who was empathic, who listened.
00:49:16.000If a guy was really scared, was able to say, hey, listen, man, it's going to be all right.
00:49:25.000Now, typically in society, The male role would be the guy with the pickaxe attacking the problem.
00:49:32.000The female role would be the person sort of like trying to keep the group emotionally together and functioning.
00:49:41.000But what happens in a situation where there's all of one sex, Those gender roles will be filled no matter what.
00:49:50.000It'll just be filled by people of the same sex.
00:49:52.000So if it was all women down there, some woman would have grabbed the pickaxe and taken on what would be typically considered a, quote, male role, but she's female.
00:50:03.000So the gender roles that society needs to survive in adversity, in war, in nature, in a collapsed coal mine, It needs both gender roles, but either sex can fill those roles.
00:51:01.000One guy was trapped, his arm was trapped between two collapsed timbers and they were, you know, it was a pretty lively conversation about, and he was begging them to cut his arm off so that he could at least be free.
00:51:11.000And there was a pretty lively conversation with the other men in the group, like, do we do that or not?
00:51:41.000And so, you know, I mean, not to, whatever, to steer this conversation too much, but, I mean, that's a microcosm in some ways for America, right?
00:51:49.000I mean, every country is potentially trapped in a coal mine trying to figure out how to survive.
00:51:58.000And the only way for any group of people Whether it's 330 million or 18 people as it was in that coal mine, the only way for any group of people to survive is to act collectively, right?
00:52:11.000Humans don't survive in nature by themselves.
00:52:15.000And so in that coal mine, both kinds of people were needed.
00:52:20.000They happened to be all men, but it didn't need to be whatever.
00:52:51.000So when you look at the politics in this country, You need both conservatism and liberalism, right?
00:52:58.000You cannot – I mean a completely conservative America will be well defended, right?
00:53:03.000No one's going to mess with us, right?
00:53:05.000America first, like no one will mess with us.
00:53:08.000But what will be left unaddressed is some of the internal dynamics of this country, which is, you know, frankly, not at the foremost of conservative thought.
00:53:17.000I mean, sort of racial disparity, economic disparity, all that stuff.
00:53:21.000Like, you know, I mean, that's not at the foremost of the conservative agenda.
00:53:27.000It doesn't need to be because it's at the forefront of the liberal agenda.
00:53:30.000And God forbid You have a country that's completely run by liberals.
00:53:33.000It'll get overrun immediately by the nearest armed neighbor, right?
00:53:37.000Liberals just aren't wired that way to be suspicious of the world.
00:53:41.000But what liberals do quite well is to try to figure out a sort of system of fairness within the group that gets – you know, just tries to equalize things and get everyone to sort of participate and to be valued and taken care of.
00:53:56.000Like I mean that – It's all lovely, right?
00:53:59.000And so every country is at its best when you have both of those dynamics going on, and they're in a kind of dynamic tension with each other, but neither completely takes over.
00:54:08.000And one of the things that breaks my heart watching this country is this idea on both sides, on the liberal side and on the conservative side, that the other not only is totally wrong, but it's totally immoral and shouldn't exist.
00:54:23.000And this country is not going to find peace until both sides of that political equation sort of reach across and shake the other person's hand and say, look, I disagree with you on almost everything, but I'm glad you're with us.
00:54:39.000And until this country figures out how to do that, we're going to be in this sort of awful partisan strife that eventually will destroy us.
00:54:46.000Like bullets are not going to take down this country.
00:54:49.000And it just breaks my heart to see this dynamic not only going on and on but getting worse and worse.
00:54:56.000It does seem to be getting worse and worse and what seems to be new is the idea from the liberals to silence people on the right and to think that free speech is important.
00:55:07.000What's important is their ideas and that their ideas are especially I think now that Trump is president and I think people feel even more emboldened and locked up in this.
00:55:19.000I mean, honestly, I think it's equally both sides.
00:55:24.000I mean, the problem with the left for me – and again, I'm a Democrat, so I love evaluating my own side's problems because they drive me – they make me more upset than the right-wing's problems, right?
00:55:36.000I'm like, come on, can you act a little better, please?
00:55:39.000Do you see the irony, though, that you've chosen a tribe and the tribe of people that you don't even know and that these people are just – it's a political tribe?
00:55:46.000Well, I mean, listen, I share some of those political ideals and the conservative ideals I don't share.
00:55:53.000But I would hate to live in a country that didn't have conservatives in it.
00:56:11.000So I think both sides try to silence...
00:56:14.000The voices of the other side, frankly.
00:56:16.000That's a sin, I think, that's committed equally on both sides.
00:56:19.000But one thing I wanted to bring up because I've actually made a mistake last time I was on your on your show I mentioned a book and I got the name wrong and it's such a good book and I wanted to I just saw on Twitter that people trying to find it and they couldn't because I got the name wrong it's called our political our political nature and it's by a guy named Avi Tushman and he collected an awful lot of data about the fact that political opinion is about 50% determined by genetics in other words you inherit About half of
00:57:31.000But the point of this, to me, is that—and he knows this.
00:57:35.000I mean, scientists know this because when they look at— Identical twins that share almost all of their DNA. Identical twins later in life are far more likely To have the same political opinion than fraternal twins which don't share all their DNA. You understand what I'm saying?
00:57:54.000When they look at identical twins, there's a much higher concordance of a political opinion later in life than for fraternal twins.
00:58:00.000That's how they know that it's around 50% of your political view is determined by genetics.
00:58:05.000If it's determined by genetics, that means it had survival value.
00:58:09.000That means that liberalism And conservatism both had survival value in our evolutionary past and as a result has become encoded in our DNA like other behaviors like generosity, other character traits like generosity.
00:58:26.000Those are all encoded in our DNA because they had survival value.
00:58:28.000Well, likewise conservatism and liberalism, which means that in the argument, the discussion in this country about politics, you can disagree with people.
00:58:53.000That assertion is completely contradictory to evolution, and if it's contradictory to evolution, it won't work.
00:59:00.000Well, it seems to me that people have a really difficult time managing conflict, even managing verbal conflict, that when someone disagrees with them, they want to silence that person, they want to yell at that person, they want to scream.
00:59:11.000They think about their own thoughts rather than putting themselves in the position of the other person or objectively recognizing that there is an important factor.
01:00:48.000And I think if you really take in the reality, this truth, that half of our political opinions are genetically wired, you got to get rid of the contempt.
01:02:04.000They're actually trying to destroy it.
01:02:06.000They're trying to destroy this country.
01:02:07.000The same thing happened at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
01:02:10.000My father grew up in Spain and I studied the Spanish Civil War quite a lot.
01:02:14.000The democratic reforms that were coming in the 30s, you know, land redistribution, things like, you know, the vote for women, you know, pretty normal things.
01:02:22.000But they were a threat to the power structure in Spain.
01:02:26.000And the military and the sort of far right in Spain, the fascist, basically said that those democratic reforms were people who were trying to destroy Spain.
01:02:34.000So you create an enemy that consolidates your power and you go on to win the election.
01:04:01.000And it's been that way for a very long time.
01:04:03.000And you can even see some of those same behaviors like in sort of chimpanzee society, right?
01:04:07.000So this is very, very ancient behavior.
01:04:09.000So like I don't know, I think you have two groups, but that doesn't mean that the two groups have to act so abysmally with each other.
01:04:16.000And I really think that if you want to sort of save this country morally, politically, nationally, maybe...
01:04:26.000You know, really what you need is a bipartisan committee in Congress that calls people out and calls them out for doing and saying things that undermine our sense of unity as a nation.
01:04:39.000So when Democrats say, he's not my president...
01:04:42.000That undermines the understanding of what democracy is.
01:04:58.000I didn't vote for him, but I hate when people say that.
01:05:01.000And likewise, when Donald Trump, when Citizen Trump Was accusing Barack Obama, and I understand not liking Obama, I don't really care if you don't like him or don't like him, but when Citizen Trump accused Barack Obama of not being a citizen?
01:06:05.000But that doesn't mean the two political parties have to stay silent in the face of things that are completely toxic to our democracy.
01:06:12.000And they really should have spoken out.
01:06:13.000And I think some kind of bipartisan commission in Congress that would call out the worst outrages and call on the political parties to denounce them That that would be an enormously positive thing in this country.
01:06:25.000I agree with you, but I think it would take a truly exceptional person to look at the other side's faults and not capitalize on it.
01:06:34.000Even if it's a false thing, like the Obama thing with Trump, or any number of things you could find in that regard.
01:06:44.000It seems to me like this is like the perfect time.
01:06:46.000If there was ever going to be a time where a third party, some sort of a centrist type party would come around, this would be the perfect time.
01:06:54.000And we also, I think people recognize that what we're seeing on the right and the left...
01:06:59.000In regards to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, is you're seeing people that are pretending to be this thing, right?
01:07:05.000With Donald Trump, he's a lifelong Democrat, and then all of a sudden he's a Republican, he's talking about God, and I mean, it's a show.
01:07:13.000It's a little dog and pony show on the right, and on the left, You got this woman who was part of the Clinton Foundation.
01:07:19.000It was essentially a pay-to-play scheme.
01:07:22.000They were making millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of dollars for bullshit speeches that they would give to banks.
01:07:27.000And this is not some sort of a real liberal.
01:07:30.000This is not the ideas that you were embracing about liberal values.
01:07:36.000I mean, no, I mean, the two parties basically have become sort of cartels to keep themselves in power.
01:08:13.000From scratch and get up to speed in time to win an election, that's very, very hard to do.
01:08:18.000But at the very least, I mean, a centrist party could fall prey to that kind of toxic rhetoric as well.
01:08:23.000I mean, but I feel like there should be norms where freedom of speech is an absolute, I mean, we get it, but that the parties don't, they have a moral obligation to denounce things that they know undermine the unity of this country.
01:08:39.000I don't mean people in disagreement with one another.
01:08:41.000I mean a basic level of respect for the other person's personhood, for their citizenship, for their right to participate in the democratic process.
01:08:50.000And when someone accuses the president of not being a citizen of the US, they're basically saying, I don't respect this system.
01:08:56.000Like, I think the entire system is a lie.
01:09:00.000And I don't even think Donald Trump thought it was true.
01:11:25.000I'm also surprised that the Democrats that within my lifetime went from being a party that was deeply concerned with the poor, with the working poor, with people working in factories.
01:11:39.000I mean, those were at least the highest ideals, right?
01:11:42.000In my lifetime, they became a completely elitist organization.
01:11:47.000They didn't give a shit about those people, right?
01:12:15.000This is, as Martin Luther said, here I stand for I can do no other.
01:12:19.000A lot of places that Trump stands I don't agree with, but I'm actually impressed by his ability to say something no matter what the repercussions.
01:14:50.000Well, I think it speaks to what you were talking about in your book, that no one is looking at this like a real tribe.
01:14:56.000This is an enormous tribe of 350 million people, but there's no one person that's standing out as a real leader.
01:15:03.000And at least what Obama was, I mean, whether you agree with his policies, and there's a lot that I don't agree with, particularly the way he flip-flopped about whistleblowers and freedom of the press.
01:15:14.000Those things disturb me greatly, because I know how intelligent he is.
01:15:54.000I mean, he was probably one of the best ever at that.
01:15:57.000But I think that what we need now is someone who genuinely wants to help the country be unified.
01:16:05.000Someone who genuinely wants to help the country, not help their party, not help themselves, not just think, well, hey, when this is all done, I'm going to make a fucking million dollars a year doing speaking fees or whatever, however much they make when they do that.
01:16:20.000Well, yeah, and you're going to – I mean, we need that to stay – To remain a country.
01:16:27.000I mean, it really is headed towards a bad place, I think.
01:16:34.000That person is going to have to overcome the reflexive reaction of the left wing, you know, he's not my president.
01:16:43.000And the reflexive reaction of the right wing.
01:16:45.000The right wing hated Obama in ways that were completely out of proportion to Obama's actual policies.
01:16:51.000And, you know, when Mitch McConnell said, you know, the Republicans' job in Congress, their foremost job is to make sure that Barack Obama is a complete failure as a president.
01:17:33.000But you're not going to undermine this country without being called out by this commission.
01:17:39.000And I was talking with someone in government pretty high up about this.
01:17:44.000And I said, you know, I said my thing, you know, bullets aren't going to destroy this country.
01:17:48.000Al-Qaeda is never going to destroy this country.
01:17:50.000But our own words can destroy our democracy.
01:17:54.000Like that actually could do it if we play this hand wrong.
01:17:57.000And I said that makes partisan rhetoric actually a matter of national security.
01:18:02.000And when you think about it as a national security concern, Then you actually have a sort of political and legal basis performing a commission that addresses it.
01:18:13.000And I really truly think that should happen.
01:18:15.000And if it doesn't, hopefully something else will happen that works.
01:18:19.000But it's the only thing I can think of that will begin to address – that can rise up above the partisan interests of both parties because the parties clearly don't seem capable of doing it on their own.
01:18:31.000Now, when you write a book like Tribe and you outline all these issues that people have and all these issues historically that people have had, do you try to consider a solution?
01:18:41.000I mean, do you have a solution or are you just examining all the various problems that we have?
01:18:48.000So, I mean, Tribe was me trying to make sense of sort of what ails us, right?
01:18:56.000You know, people hemorrhaging off the frontier to the American Indians and on up to the soldiers I was with, mass shootings.
01:19:04.000Something's not working for us, right?
01:19:10.000And towards the end, I talked a little bit about solutions.
01:19:15.000And one of the solutions I talked about was making a concerted effort to get rid of contemptuous partisan rhetoric in government.
01:19:21.000And I really felt that, like, That trickles down and pollutes – it pollutes the water stream downstream.
01:19:28.000It pollutes everything so that everyone – all us citizens are drinking toxic water from that rhetoric and wondering if the unity can survive.
01:20:02.000Don't speak with contempt about someone you share a combat outpost with.
01:20:05.000And that's what this country potentially is.
01:20:07.000Don't you think also with the mom and dad analogy that it also shows you how to behave in your own life?
01:20:14.000And I think that's one of the things that's really important about the president is the president does sort of represent the best example of what we can be.
01:20:21.000When we were kids growing up, that was the thing.
01:20:32.000So you're supposed to be the best person ever, which is why we hold someone to such an incredible microscope, which is almost even more impressive that Trump won after that grab the pussy audio recording.
01:20:43.000And then he could just brush that off as locker room talk.
01:20:58.000I mean, you know, my problem with him was that, like, if I look at the worst of his behavior, I mean people send – society sends people to jail for the worst thing that they did.
01:21:11.000So it is actually legitimate to judge people's worst behavior and evaluate them on that basis.
01:21:17.000So if I look at the worst of his behavior, even if I was a diehard Republican who adhered to all of the things he says he believes in, if I looked at the worst of his behavior, mocking a Gold Star family, like mocking a disabled person – That wasn't real though.
01:21:33.000You know that mocking a disabled person was sort of trumped up.
01:22:26.000With my close friends, someone who was acting like that, who started doing that at my dinner table, I'd walk around, I'd get up, I'd walk around the table, I'd put him in a headlock, and I'd drag him out of my house, right?
01:22:39.000I don't want to think that about my president.
01:22:41.000I want my president to be someone I'd be, like, glad to have at my dinner table.
01:22:46.000I didn't vote for George Bush, but I'd love to have that guy at my dinner table.
01:22:50.000Ronald Reagan did all, you know what I mean?
01:23:15.000And, you know, my worry, like, in this conversation is that it will somehow seem partisan.
01:23:21.000And, like, I would be saying the same things if Trump were a Democrat.
01:23:24.000Well, you said something about George Bush that you would be happy to have him over.
01:23:27.000And I just think, I hope that what comes out of this is that a hero will rise.
01:23:32.000And that someone who's really a legitimately good person will say, look, this is a fucking travesty.
01:23:39.000Someone who actually could assume the role correctly will step into place and will see that very clearly in comparison.
01:23:47.000Well, I mean, to get back to your question, one of the solutions that I talk about, it's not in my book, but I talk about this, is compulsory national service.
01:25:17.000There's also an upside which is it makes everyone feel like they're part of this thing called the United States and it puts white people and black people and rich and poor and everyone – it puts them all in a big pot and stirs them up just like the military does and they get to know each other.
01:25:29.000And so everything's – there's an upside and a downside to everything, right?
01:25:34.000So national service has a very obvious downside but the upside isn't discussed much which is that it creates an American identity.
01:25:43.000A shared experience that all Americans have, like in Israel, there's compulsory service.
01:25:49.000And that is a common ground that every single Israeli has.
01:25:53.000Wherever they fall in the political spectrum, they all have that shared experience.
01:25:57.000And it's an enormously potent thing in that country, keeping it bound together.
01:26:03.000And this country, I think, needs something like that.
01:26:05.000I think it would be very, very helpful.
01:26:07.000Well, it would be nice if people did have some sort of connection to what it takes to keep things running, whether it's help fix the streets, whether it's help do something.
01:26:20.000But the problem that I would have with it is the idea that someone from the government would be able to require you to do something, and that if you didn't do it, they could treat you the same way the IRS treats you if you don't pay your taxes and just lock you in a cage, which is...
01:26:36.000Well, I mean, one way to do it might be to incentivize it by—instead of making it mandatory, incentivizing it by giving people really large tax breaks for doing it.
01:26:45.000Yeah, but young people aren't going to think about tax breaks.
01:26:47.000They're going to think about, fuck that, man.
01:27:00.000I mean, the government does—the government puts red lights at intersections, and you have to fucking stop.
01:27:06.000I agree, but to try to do that today, it'd be extremely difficult.
01:27:10.000The distrust of the government is so high, and if the government comes along and says, you have to do all these things, and then we go, wait a minute, are you doing these things?
01:30:14.000So if you want to gin up a sort of like anti-government screed, like it's easy to play on that misperception because it's an easy misperception to have.
01:30:21.000I mean, you get a $200 parking ticket in New York and it definitely feels like the parking bureau is like...
01:30:43.000You know, we're talking about solutions for the woes of society and particularly the individual.
01:30:49.000You have sort of found your own solution in journalism and in embedded journalism in these very dangerous environments that this is how you have sort of reinforced your tribe and you talk about that in the book about how you know how well you slept in this very tight confines in these bases with all these like very loud snoring men but but the fact that you guys were all together in this very hostile environment that was your solution Well,
01:31:18.000I mean, it wasn't a long-term solution, but it did give me this experience of sort of a shared fate, right?
01:31:29.000I mean, sort of a collective effort, right?
01:31:33.000And my welfare was tied to the welfare of the group.
01:31:38.000My actions could help or hinder the group.
01:31:40.000I was judged by how I behaved in the group, right?
01:31:44.000And that's our evolutionary past, and it felt great, right?
01:31:48.000And so, you know, the trick is, you know, we live in a dispersed modern society where that's just not going to be the 24-hour-a-day reality for most people throughout their lives.
01:32:23.000I mean, I'm not religious, but I understand church to be A profoundly communal activity.
01:32:28.000And so I'm not saying burn down the suburbs and ban the car, although that would work pretty well.
01:32:36.000Maybe for your own personal sense of sort of meaning and fulfillment in life, find that collective experience in little bits and pieces, and a little goes a long way.
01:33:56.000It's what we're missing in our sort of like modern lives and you don't need a huge amount of it to feel better.
01:34:04.000Another thing that seems to make people feel very fulfilled is creating things, working with their hands, creating anything, whether it's furniture, art, just making something, doing something, where your mind is involved in an actual task of bringing forth something into existence that didn't exist before.
01:35:55.000I mean, there is no church in the land that doesn't have art on the walls, right?
01:36:01.000The depictions of Christ or whatever, or one of the visual aids that helps bind people into a group, like, oh, we all believe in the same thing, right?
01:36:26.000So what I would say, and I'm just guessing here, but I would say is that the arts that are so intoxicating to be engaged in, their survival value is that it makes the group cohere around a unified idea.
01:37:36.000If you walk down the street and you give someone $5, he's a random dude, you just give him $5, and you measure the neurochemicals in his brain and your brain, you get more of a high than he does.
01:37:56.000So that art, like when you create something amazing, what you're realizing is that someone's going to see that and go, wow, that's incredible.
01:38:02.000Like they're going to get a great feeling off of seeing your art.
01:38:05.000Yeah, you have the same vision, right?
01:38:06.000Like, oh, I painted that tree and this other person or that antelope or that bison or whatever you find in the walls of Lascaux.
01:38:14.000And this other person comes like, oh my god, that's an incredible bison.
01:38:17.000You did something that the other person connected to.
01:38:20.000Now the two of you are joined in your understanding of what that painting means.
01:38:27.000So if you drew that bison and no one else in the world ever saw it, I'm guessing that the chemical rewards for that creativity would be lower.
01:38:58.000Take a musician, measure their neurochemicals while they're practicing in a room by themselves, and then put them in a stadium filled with 10,000 people and see what happens.
01:39:07.000I'm guessing that the guy in the stadium with Bruce Springsteen in front of 10,000 people is experiencing a neurochemical reality that he's not getting in his living room.
01:39:17.000Not only that, probably a neurochemical reality that very few human beings will ever experience.
01:40:07.000I mean, Bruce Springsteen isn't a shaman literally, but he occupies that space in a modern secular society that doesn't have shamans.
01:40:14.000But in the old days, that's what he would be.
01:40:17.000Do you feel that way when you put a book out?
01:40:20.000Like when you put the book out, when you know it's done, you read it, it's done, and you send it out there, what kind of weird feeling that you get?
01:40:25.000Are all these people going to read that?
01:40:26.000It's an interesting thing about a book because you actually never observe in real time people's reaction to it.
01:43:19.000And we have all seen their videos, heard of their videos where they're beheading people in front of a video camera and ghastly, ghastly things.
01:43:43.000You know, after my friend Tim Hetherington was killed, Tim obviously I made Restrepo with and he was a brother and a good friend and a colleague and he was killed in Libya in 2011 on an assignment that I was supposed to be on with him at the last minute I couldn't go and he got killed.
01:43:58.000And so I stopped war reporting after that, frontline reporting.
01:44:01.000Syria was so dangerous that you couldn't think of going in there.
01:44:05.000I mean, the numerous kidnappings and beheadings, it was basically a suicide.
01:44:10.000By the time we started working on the story, it was a suicide mission.
01:44:12.000So we actually worked with Syrians in Syria who were documenting their own war.
01:44:43.000And a very nondescriptal cell phone camera.
01:44:45.000And they self-documented life under ISIS and the decision to leave and their flight through the ISIS checkpoints, through the front lines, all the way to Turkey.
01:45:51.000A lot of these people are people that are experiencing these horrible conditions Much like many of the people that originally made it to America in the first place.
01:45:59.000Yeah, I mean, our country is immigrants.
01:47:19.000Are you concerned, because this is something that's been bothering me, I was concerned about my own reaction to yesterday's mass shooting, that I was almost nonchalant about it.
01:47:29.000I was like, well, there's another one.
01:47:31.000Like, that we're getting numb to mass shootings.
01:47:34.000You know, I asked myself two questions, and I didn't mean to ask them, and I'm just being honest in telling people this.
01:47:42.000I asked myself, I wonder if it was a white church or a black church?
01:47:45.000And I asked myself, I wonder if the attacker was an Islamic radical and a foreigner, or was he a homegrown American?
01:49:04.000And what I found, and I did a lot of research into it, that those kinds of mass shootings typically happen in middle-class communities, like otherwise safe middle-class communities or small, low-crime Christian communities.
01:49:20.000They have never happened in the inner city.
01:50:59.000Like, there was a study that, see if you could find it, Jamie.
01:51:03.000They connected all the mass shootings that have happened over the last two decades with all the different medications that people were on, and every single one of them was on something, or was withdrawing from something.
01:51:59.000It could be the depression is rising in alienated communities, and the depression is getting unsuccessfully treated with drugs.
01:52:07.000So all these people are on drugs, but really what's happening is that—and this is true—suicide, depression, PTSD, anxiety— Alienation, all of these things are going up in society.
01:52:18.000I mean, that's just statistically true.
01:52:20.000The question that I would have about this, though, is that when I've talked to psychiatrists about it, they say that the dissociative aspect of the psychiatric medications are part of the problems that people do not feel.
01:52:31.000They don't feel the connection even to their actions, that they can do something horrific, like shoot people.
01:52:37.000And they might be even doing that to try to get some feeling.
01:52:57.000I don't know, but I'm just saying what you just described happening in the streets of America is exactly duplicated digitally in video games.
01:53:06.000Right, but the video games doesn't keep you from feeling things in the real world, where the psych medications do.
01:53:12.000Right, but the experience of shooting at human targets that aren't real.
01:53:17.000If you incorporate that into how you feel about shooting, then you go out into the real world.
01:53:22.000It may not be that hard, particularly with the aid of psych drugs and whatever depression is sort of endemic in this society right now.
01:53:29.000It might not be hard to transpose that dissociated experience in a video game with digital images, transpose it onto actual humans in the real world if you're sufficiently disturbed.
01:53:41.000That's a very good connection and an interesting question because I've heard it discussed when they talk about war and how kids that grow up playing Call of Duty and things along those lines, they get really good at it, would be actually better in combat.
01:53:55.000They would have the tactics mapped out in their mind better.
01:54:19.000They watch for entertainment, recreations of acting shooting incidents that are, I think, partly the result of the kind of deep alienation that happens In a media-obsessed society where no one's talking to each other.
01:54:30.000I mean, it's the perfect circle, right?
01:54:34.000I mean, we had the event in New York where the guy runs over all those people, and then a couple of days later, we're having the one in Texas.
01:54:41.000This is happening not over the scale of one a year or one every few years.
01:55:44.000The whole thing is just, it doesn't even make sense.
01:55:47.000And I don't know if he was on any psych medication or if they know he was, but just the staggering numbers of broken individuals that are committing these crimes is just very, very confusing.
01:55:58.000And you think that it's tied to what you were saying, too, about communities about inner cities where you have impoverished high crime areas, but they're not seeing these things.
01:56:10.000Do you think because in these high crime communities are dealing with much more life and death and the struggles much more real that they feel more connected?
01:56:22.000It's just that the truth is that those awful sort of school shootings and mass shootings in the streets have never happened in a high crime It's possible that for all the very real stresses and traumas of poverty,
01:56:41.000That for all of those things, there is also more face-to-face communal connection in poor neighborhoods than in wealthy neighborhoods or in middle-class neighborhoods.
01:56:52.000And that communal connection, I mean, literally meeting people on the landing of your apartment building, meeting people on the door stoop, on the street, that those kinds of human interactions, even in an economically stressed neighborhood, That those create enough of a sense of community that people who might otherwise go crazy and turn their guns in this nihilistic way on innocent people,
01:57:28.000And if you're doing that in the streets of the neighboring town, clearly there's been some loss of some idea of what we belong to.
01:57:37.000And that's where National Service or a Congressional Commission that really calls out rhetoric that undermines our sense of who we are as a nation.
01:57:51.000Do you think there's any incentive that these people experience to be someone who creates this big event where everybody has to look at them?
01:58:02.000I mean, I'm guessing, but I'm imagining that someone like that feels powerless and insignificant and abused by society, and at least they'll be...
01:58:16.000Famous in their last acts, in their death.
01:58:19.000They're going to cause a lot of reaction.
01:58:21.000They're like, oh, you messed with me my whole life?
01:58:24.000At least for the last five minutes of my life, you guys are the ones who are going to be scared.
01:58:28.000You're going to be begging me for mercy now.
01:58:40.000I mean, this has been a very common conversation lately as to whether or not you discuss these people and even bring up their names.
01:58:49.000I know in some places and some even media outlets, they don't want to report on the person.
01:58:55.000The individual is creating this chaos.
01:58:58.000Well, you know, one of the things I think is a problem is that if you love this country, there is a certain pressure to think it's the best possible country ever.
01:59:28.000In China, there's a rash of knife attacks, right?
01:59:30.000I mean, it's not that it doesn't happen at all.
01:59:32.000But if you really look over the last like 20 years, more than that, since the 80s when this shit started, like we're the only country that does this regularly to ourselves.
01:59:40.000It's regularly to the point where it's like every month practically.
02:00:01.000You know, and you can dismiss me as a, like, bleeding heart liberal, you know, whatever, I don't mean you, but one could dismiss me as a bleeding heart liberal, like, okay, well then what's your question then?
02:00:12.000My question is, why are we in so much pain?
02:00:17.000That's the question that I think might begin to lead to an answer of why there's such high suicide rates in such a wealthy society, why there's mass killing rates.
02:00:25.000You know, that would begin to answer those questions.
02:00:27.000If you don't like that question, what's your question to answer those terrible tragedies?
02:00:33.000Well, what you're saying is very compelling, and it's an aspect of this that I don't think is being considered, and I think your book is very important when it comes to that.
02:00:43.000I think the questions that you raise and all the various examples that you give It's really food for thought.
02:00:53.000And I don't think it's being discussed in very many other circles.
02:00:56.000Everyone's looking at the psychiatric drugs.
02:00:58.000Everyone's looking at the white men with guns and the gun problem, the NRA and all these various aspects.
02:01:04.000They're not looking at the root cause of this depression, anxiety and this detachment that we have from our neighbors and our community.
02:01:11.000Look, I mean, Somalia's got a lot more guns than we do, right?
02:01:14.000And there's plenty of violence in Somalia, but no one's walking down the streets of their own neighborhood massacring their own people.
02:01:43.000There are peaceful Muslim societies and very violent Christian ones, and you can't correlate it with Christianity.
02:01:49.000I think the one thing you can—there are oppressive societies that are very low violence, and there are full democracies like us with lots of violence.
02:01:59.000So it's not the democratic system, right?
02:02:01.000And my guess—and it's only a guess—my guess is that a certain amount Of the high suicide rates, the high depression, anxiety, drug addiction, porn addiction, child abuse, mass shootings in the streets.
02:02:15.000My guess is that the common denominator in all those things is the sort of catastrophic lack of communal connection that many Americans experience.
02:02:27.000Well, it's a very compelling argument.
02:02:29.000It's a very compelling point that, again, I don't see being discussed in very many other areas.