In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, I speak with a man who almost died last year. He talks about his miraculous recovery from a massive aneurysm in his pancreas, and how his family and friends helped him get back on the road to recovery. He also talks about what it was like to be in the ICU, and what it meant to be a part of the team that saved his life. It's an incredible story, and I know you're going to want to listen to it. I hope you enjoy it, and that it inspires you to keep going and keep doing what you do every single day. -Joe Rogan is a standup comedian, standup comic, writer, and podcaster. He's been in the entertainment industry for a long time, and is one of the funniest people I've ever met. I really enjoyed getting to know him, and hope you do too! Thank you for listening to this episode, Joe! -Jon Sorrentino and I hope that you enjoy this one, and if you do, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to our podcast! If you haven't already done so, please do so, share it with a friend, and tell a friend about it! or tell me what you think of it on your favorite podcasting platform! if it's a good one! I'll be listening to it on Insta: or tweet me if you're a podcaster and/tweet me what a good podcaster you're having a good time :) Thanks for listening! Timestamps: 5 stars! 5 stars is a star! 6 stars is much appreciated and a review! 7 stars is enough? 8 stars is appreciated! 9 stars is very much appreciated, please spread the word about it helps me spread it around the word! 10 stars is really good, thank you! 11 stars means a good day! 12 stars is more than enough, right? 13 stars is good enough, good day, good night! 14 stars? 15 stars is better than good night, bye bye bye! 16 stars are much better than I'll see you next week, bye, bye Bye bye bye Bye Bye Bye, bye x bye bye bye, Bye Bye bye! x bye! bye bye.
00:00:25.000We were talking before, there's so much to talk about, but we were talking before and you were saying that over the last year you almost died because you had some crazy internal, you had an aneurysm in your pancreas?
00:00:40.000Yeah, I had an undiagnosed asymptomatic aneurysm, which is a sort of ballooning in the blood vessel in the artery, in my pancreatic artery.
00:00:49.000And out of the blue, it was a congenital thing.
00:00:52.000Like, apparently it developed during my whole life.
00:00:54.000It was just from a structural problem.
00:00:58.000And one afternoon, one beautiful June afternoon last year it burst.
00:01:06.000I just felt this pain shoot through my stomach.
00:03:18.000So coming out of that, once you regained your health, you must have had an incredible newfound appreciation for all the people in your life and just everything.
00:05:13.000I don't think any of us, few of us, I certainly didn't quite understand what a miracle it is that we're alive, that we exist, that we draw breath, that we can think about ourselves, that we're here for even one day is a freaking miracle.
00:05:28.000And you can forget that because your life gets busy.
00:05:32.000All of a sudden, I feel like life was sort of returned to me, meaning that I understood how sacred it is.
00:07:02.000And that makes you part of this sort of web of life in a way that when I gave blood for the first time, after this happened, I gave blood and it made me feel so good.
00:09:24.000And now I'm left with this sort of psychological residue of the experience, which is I have this, you know, renewed, reinvigorated appreciation for life.
00:11:55.000And so they have all these, you know, release of ketamine and like they have all these DMT and they have all these sort of neurochemical explanations for the subjective experience of dying for the person.
00:12:07.000And we only know this because people come back like I do and report what they saw and it's usually pretty weird.
00:12:13.000But it's pretty weird in predictable ways.
00:12:26.000So I want to sort of explain what happens in ways that he would respect scientifically.
00:12:31.000And so one of the things they said is that you can take low oxygen, ketamine, all these things that physically could happen in the brain, you can subject a healthy person to those things and they don't have the same kinds of hallucinations.
00:12:47.000Those hallucinations are particular only to the dying.
00:12:50.000And I want to know, I want to try to figure out what is going on in that weird twilight space.
00:12:58.000You should see if someone will do a therapeutic DMT trip with you.
00:13:07.000They were doing it out of the University of New Mexico.
00:13:15.000Rick Strassman was doing it, and he had full federal approval for these studies.
00:13:22.000There was a book called DMT, The Spirit Molecule, that he wrote about the experience of taking these people and doing an IV drip Dimethyltryptamine, but they all had these insanely profound experiences that stayed with them for,
00:13:37.000you know, depending on the person, but for long periods of time afterwards and profoundly changed their lives.
00:13:42.000Well, an endogenous form of DMT is released in the brain of dying people.
00:13:49.000They speculated on it, so what the problem was for the longest time is the pineal gland, and the pineal gland is what, you know, ancients used to call the seed of the soul, and it's this small gland that they think...
00:14:06.000In reptiles, it actually has a retina and a cornea, and I think even a lens.
00:14:17.000I think the pineal gland in reptiles has, it definitely has a retina, I believe, and I think it has a lens.
00:14:26.000But it's like the third eye, the concept of the third eye, it actually is an eye in some strange way.
00:14:32.000And it also, just recently they confirmed, here it goes, the pineal complex of reptiles is a morphologically and functionally connected set of organs.
00:15:30.000The Cottonwood Research Foundation was the first group that they actually discovered that for sure the pineal gland does produce DMT in living rats.
00:15:42.000Because before, they knew that it was produced by the liver and the lungs, and there was a lot of anecdotal evidence that pointed to the pineal gland, but they couldn't prove it because you'd have to actually cut into someone's head.
00:15:51.000There was a lot of problems just based on the structure of the brain and getting in there.
00:15:56.000But through this Cottonwood Research Foundation, which was working on different DMT studies.
00:16:05.000So they don't know why and they don't know what it is, but they think that this is also responsible for dreams.
00:16:11.000They think it's responsible for some of the insane visuals and weird things to experience in dreams, but they also...
00:16:17.000The really spiritual, the people that are, like, willing to go way out on a limb, think it's a chemical doorway to the afterlife.
00:16:27.000Well, let me tell you, I mean, that's a pretty stunning thought.
00:16:32.000And we all, I mean, I'm not a mystic, but also we all need to be humble about what we know and don't know.
00:16:37.000And we have no idea what there is after death.
00:16:42.000We might not even be able to be capable of understanding it with the brains that we have.
00:16:46.000So maybe that's why we keep bumping into the unknowable because it's just unknowable to us.
00:16:50.000At any rate, let me tell you that two nights before I almost died, I had a pain in my abdomen for a year that I ignored.
00:18:45.000And on the morning of the day that it happened, you know, we live partly in New York City and partly in a really remote area at the end of a long, dead-end dirt road in the woods.
00:21:01.000Or is this a thing that you do over and over and over again until you get it right?
00:21:07.000I had that conversation with a friend of mine once.
00:21:09.000And they were really, really bummed out about it.
00:21:12.000And I said, if this is life, if the life that we all live, like right now, just you have to do this over and over again for infinity until you get it right.
00:22:40.000If there's one primary factor, mental illness is a big one.
00:22:44.000It's usually from traumatic childhood.
00:22:47.000But overall, Fairly resilient because of the fact they have to deal with adversity constantly.
00:22:56.000Most people don't deal with the kind of adversity that you deal with when you're bombing or you go on stage and you're dealing with hecklers and stuff.
00:24:44.000And he was saying that there could have been, he was a Robin Williams fan as well, and he was saying that there probably could have been a correlation between Robin Williams going through that heart attack, having open heart surgery, and then depression following afterwards.
00:24:56.000Then there was the Lewy body syndrome, and then all this medication they had to take, which also had profound side effects.
00:25:04.000I lost a very dear friend who was the funniest man that I knew and pretty much I think the funniest person on the planet.
00:25:10.000He just wasn't a professional comedian.
00:25:12.000But he had a long, long illness and some serious mental instability and he took his own life.
00:26:01.000You remember those little film booths, photo booths that people would go to?
00:26:05.000Back in the old days, you youngsters, we would have a camera, and the camera would have film in it, and you'd have to bring the film to a place for processing.
00:26:45.000And it costs them sometimes, but we all need those people, you know?
00:26:50.000Yeah, to be a guy like that, to be dealing with the kind of RPMs he was dealing with.
00:26:57.000He would spit out these amazing works, but just a cost on himself.
00:27:09.000It's pretty clear that it wasn't scripted because there's this kid in the control booth.
00:27:14.000I mean, the conceit is that it's a military DJ, a radio announcer during Vietnam, right?
00:27:21.000And the military command didn't really like him because he was saying things that were sort of like not sufficiently sort of respectful of the war or whatever.
00:27:38.000It wasn't scripted because the kid in the sound booth behind him, you could watch him react to this three-minute outpouring from Robin Williams where he's channeling different people and it's all coming out.
00:28:45.000You know, he decided he wanted to come see me.
00:28:48.000Maybe somebody told him I was funny and he came to and then he waited in line to meet me and then wanted to talk about individual bits and how he loved how I put this one together and that one.
00:30:42.000There was a leader during the Easter Rising in Ireland that I write about, and the head of the whole Easter Rising in Dublin, the head of the whole thing, I mean the General Petraeus of the Irish rebels.
00:30:55.000Would go out into gunfire in the street to figure out where to put the positions and the guns and the sandbags and everything with bullets smacking all around him.
00:31:26.000Like when you use your position of power to protect yourself, to insulate yourself from things that everyone else is going through, you're actually not a leader.
00:32:19.000And when someone like Robin Williams comes along and does not privilege himself in a comedy club and just is like everyone else, I really tip my hat to that.
00:32:43.000And I think if there was one in the past election, it was Tulsi Gabbard, because you're talking about a woman who had served overseas twice in medical units, had literally worked with people who had been shot and blown up, and had served as a congresswoman for six years,
00:33:12.000And they had to pick a horse that they weren't exactly excited about.
00:33:16.000And that's what led us to what we have in the White House currently.
00:33:21.000It's like this fake excitement about this supposed leader that doesn't really exhibit any of these characteristics that we would be hoping to see when someone was running the show.
00:33:34.000Well, you know, I think the willingness to tell the truth as a political leader, even if it puts you in disfavor with your own party, Is a strong indicator of moral courage.
00:33:45.000And, you know, both parties, I think, have a deficit of that.
00:33:50.000And, you know, I mean, I'm a registered Democrat, you know, I've, whatever, not that it really matters, but just to be, like, in the open about it.
00:33:59.000I think that Liz Cheney – I mean she's possibly destroyed her political future.
00:34:06.000And I don't know what the truth about anything is.
00:34:08.000But the fact that she's willing to go against this sort of Republican orthodoxy to me means that she's putting what she believes to be the truth ahead of her own political future.
00:34:20.000I'm not totally aware of what's going on.
00:35:18.000It's putting what you believe to be the welfare of the group ahead of your own personal interests.
00:35:23.000That is what I would look for in a leader.
00:35:27.000Yeah, and that's what—I just think by the time someone gets to the position that they're going to run for president, you've already been compromised.
00:35:35.000You've already gotten through all of the checks and balances that they've laid in place to make sure that you represent the interests of the special interest groups and all the powerful lobbyists and corporations and everybody who's gotten you to the position you're at.
00:36:24.000So what are you going to do with that politically?
00:36:29.000And then someone like Liz Cheney comes along and sort of calls out the lie.
00:36:33.000And that's a very tough position for the GOP to be in.
00:36:38.000And I think in the short term, it was probably a...
00:36:40.000I think it's a disreputable but smart move politically.
00:36:44.000In the long term, I don't think it's a good move.
00:36:46.000I think at the end of the day, truth wins out and it will catch up with them as things have caught up with the Democrats as well.
00:36:53.000When they say that 70% think – is this just based on a narrative or is it based on something they believe in in terms of like they think there's an actual – I mean,
00:37:09.000I don't know if poll takers can distinguish that.
00:37:15.000I mean, I don't know how you would phrase the question to sort of split that.
00:37:18.000I would like just that answer, even multiple choice.
00:37:23.000What makes you think the election was stolen?
00:37:25.000I mean I think a lot of it is just sort of what's called virtue signaling.
00:37:29.000Like I will say the election is stolen because that means I am part of the current sort of conservative ethos.
00:37:38.000And so they might not even personally themselves think it was literally stolen but that kind of mythic truth can be more powerful politically than the literal truth.
00:38:19.000If you believe, if you really believe that the other side is cheating, and you say, well, we have to cheat, because we have to win this back, because we were the rightful winners of the 2020 election, and they stole it from us.
00:40:08.000And the extremes on both sides have poisoned it.
00:40:12.000And I feel like if we were all in a big life raft and someone poisoned the water, we would throw them overboard.
00:40:20.000And at some point, this country is going to have to do that politically speaking with the extremists on both sides because they're basically rejecting the idea that we can all get along.
00:40:30.000I couldn't agree more and I think it highlights some of the problems with communicating in text form over the internet and social media websites because a lot of what these people have, whether it's the QAnon people or the woke people, you have extremely low status people who want to import information.
00:41:07.000It's just they've adopted different ideologies.
00:41:09.000But it's almost all low-status people who have sought...
00:41:15.000New meaning and virtue out of this form of control, attacking the left or attacking the right or attacking what they perceive to be outside of the boundaries of the accepted ideology that they like to enforce on everyone else.
00:41:49.000They'll hope that you come to their way of thinking.
00:41:52.000But when you're told – and this is one of the things I don't like about religion.
00:41:55.000When you're told – I mean organized, established religion – When you're told you have to think like this and if you don't think like this, you are Satan's spawn or you are an enemy of the country or you're a racist or you're this or that.
00:42:09.000When you're told how to think and speak or you're unworthy of being part of this community, that's how you know that that person does not mean the country well.
00:42:36.000Both of those sides, with the far right people who want death to the far left and the far left people who want the far right to be ostracized, it's the same thing.
00:42:44.000It's like there's a complete lack of empathy.
00:42:46.000And a complete unwillingness to accept that the other side are just human beings with differing opinions, and maybe there's some common ground.
00:42:53.000We all have common ground, especially people with children, right?
00:42:56.000Your common ground is you want the world to be a safer place for these delicate little creatures that you love more than anything in life itself.
00:43:04.000And I, you know, my fear is that, I mean, I feel like right now the sort of radical voice is now speaking for a large proportion of the GOP politically.
00:43:15.000I mean, that 70% figure is like pretty alarming.
00:43:33.000I don't think he thinks that way, but I think he thinks it's a good political strategy to get the really aggressive radicals on the left to go along with them, the perceived progressive, like the extreme end of it, like the tribe, like AOC and those type of people that really want a much more progressive,
00:43:53.000much more socialist, It's a different strategy in terms of control of the left.
00:44:02.000And he's complying with that, I think, to try to get a little bit of their base.
00:44:07.000Well, I mean, listen, every politician has to somehow collect as much of the caucus as possible under one tent.
00:44:13.000And so if you completely ignore that voice, of course, you're creating a splinter group that could be really dangerous to the party and the country.
00:45:48.000And if you think it is good for them, then I get how you would want it to be inclusive and you would want everyone to just feel fully accepted, but we have to look at sports as a different thing.
00:46:03.000There's a reason why boys don't compete against girls.
00:46:05.000You know, one thing that helps for me when I think about any kind of conflict or disagreement is to start out assuming that the other person or the other group that appears to be proposing something outrageous Just start with the assumption they're trying to achieve something good,
00:46:22.000and they're doing it through means that you don't think will work.
00:46:30.000I mean, I could look at a bunch of policies that came in under Trump and think, oh my god, that just seems cruel, or that seems this or that, the border stuff.
00:47:34.000Who was a elite male power lifter who transitioned over to female and now is going to compete in the Olympics.
00:47:44.000I think for New Zealand, I think that's the, Australia or New Zealand, I forget which, but everyone's kind of freaking out about this because this person is just going to dominate.
00:47:55.000Especially in things like power lifting where there's so many advantages to being male.
00:48:04.000So one of the things that I say in my book is that there's like three ways of maintaining your freedom, your autonomy in the face of a greater power.
00:48:12.000And one of them is literally running, like staying so mobile that the heavier entity, the bigger guy – The bigger, the empire just cannot, like, find you.
00:48:23.000And that was what the Apache did in the Southwest.
00:48:25.000So at any rate, I looked at the difference between male and female world records in running events compared to weight events.
00:48:33.000And the difference, if I'm remembering correctly, the difference in running was about 11%.
00:48:39.000In other words, women were much closer to – the top female runners were much closer to the top male runners.
00:48:46.000Then in the weight events, the split was like 30% or 50%.
00:48:50.000So what I sort of hypothesized in my book is that it was more adaptive to have women be able to keep up with the men while they were trying to avoid a threat than to be of equal strength to the men to share in the fight if they couldn't outrun it.
00:49:08.000That there was more adaptive to be mobile than to be big and strong.
00:49:11.000And it's a really interesting difference.
00:49:13.000And the other interesting thing about that is that as you increase body size, if you double body weight...
00:50:45.000And so I looked at all that and it made total sense because humans are pretty much the only mammal where a smaller combatant can defeat a larger one.
00:50:57.000And chimpanzees, the smaller chimpanzee loses to the alpha male, right?
00:51:41.000So if you have a guy who's much, much stronger and you're in an enclosed space, I mean, look, if you and I had a fight in a phone booth, you're going to win, right?
00:51:48.000Like, if we had a fight in a field, I would run away until I ran a 412 mile.
00:52:04.000So if there's too big a difference and you're in an octagon, there isn't a lot of room to move around, eventually weight and strength will dominate.
00:53:32.000So they did a test with Muhammad Ali back in the late 60s or something like that, sort of in his heyday and early 70s, something like that.
00:53:41.000And so they put up a balsa wood board in front of them and they had some crazy camera timer thing, right?
00:53:48.000And they said, okay, hit the board with a jab, right?
00:54:21.000It took longer to perceive the punch, to perceive the signal.
00:54:26.000A lot longer to perceive the signal than to deliver the punch, which means that if you're fighting Muhammad Ali or I'm fighting you or whatever, you're never going to beat a punch, right?
00:54:35.000The punch takes four hundredths of a second.
00:54:37.000Your brain takes eleven hundredths of a second.
00:54:40.000You will get punched every time, except that before you punch, you can't help it.
00:54:46.000Your body sends very subtle signals that you're going to punch, and it sends signals of which hand you're going to punch with.
00:54:55.000And the brain is really good at reading unconscious signals, right?
00:54:59.000So they did this thing where they had a videotape of poker players, right, putting their chips into a bet, right?
00:55:07.000And the people, the test subjects were watching the, like, two-second video clips of people just placing bets.
00:55:13.000And all they did was look at the arm and hand move the chips.
00:55:17.000And people who didn't even know how to play poker were asked to assess the confidence with which they moved the chips.
00:55:24.000And some incredible percentage of the time, they could tell who had the winning hand just by the way they moved the chips.
00:55:30.000In other words, the brain's very perceptive.
00:55:33.000And the body is very, very, not the face, but the body is very, very revealing.
00:55:38.000So that means that in a fight, the big dude comes at you.
00:55:41.000And for any person, there's always a bigger person, right?
00:57:16.000What the statistician said was that size is not a good predictor of a win as long as the differences aren't too extreme.
00:57:23.000And, of course, the smaller the arena, the more size will dominate.
00:57:27.000And, you know, if you and I are in a shower stall, like I said, I'm not going to do very well.
00:57:32.000I would just want to state, like, I'm a big fan of Chael Sonnen.
00:57:35.000I agree with most of the things that he says, and he's a real legend when it comes to fighting, and his prime, a tremendous wrestler, a beast of a fighter.
00:57:45.000But he also, he's a showman, and he says a lot of crazy things sometimes, because I think he thinks it's fun.
00:57:53.000And, you know, he gives hot takes and opinions on things, and some of them are good and some of them aren't, but...
00:57:58.000Well, that fight you were talking about, I think that's when he got out of MMA. No, he fought after that fight.
00:59:50.000And sociability and language and all these things come into play with humans because we're no longer – I mean, no group of humans can be dominated by a single alpha individual because a coalition can always take them down.
01:00:05.000And that makes society livable, right?
01:00:07.000We're not in this sort of like horrible hierarchy where the biggest person gets to decide everything.
01:01:36.000If you talk to most people who actually understand sports, they don't think it's fair.
01:01:40.000But the people that want to support trans people and think this is a good time to make society more inclusive, they're the ones who want to support it.
01:01:50.000What's really fascinating to me is that Caitlyn Jenner is now being accused of being transphobic.
01:01:56.000Because Caitlyn Jenner stood up and said, I don't think it's fair.
01:02:01.000And you're talking about someone who, when she was Bruce, was a fucking Olympic gold medalist and one of the greatest athletes the United States has ever produced was on the cover of Wheaties.
01:02:13.000So that same person is saying that it's a question of fairness and that you shouldn't have biological males competing against biological females.
01:02:36.000Meanwhile, they're calling her transphobic.
01:02:38.000Well, I mean, again, I don't have a dog in this fight, so I don't really...
01:02:43.000I don't really care what happens, particularly, and I understand people are trying to usually do the right thing, but could there be a third competitive category of trans?
01:02:56.000That would be the best way to do it, for sure.
01:03:00.000Even in that category, you would have to say, okay, we're going to have a trans category, but are we going to have trans males and trans females compete together?
01:03:10.000Well, if the answer is no, then that says a lot about trans-competing.
01:03:15.000And also, do we have enough trans females and trans males to have a whole separate category for each of them?
01:03:24.000So you have biological males versus biological males, biological females versus biological females, trans females versus trans females, trans males versus trans males.
01:03:35.000There might be four categories at the Olympics.
01:03:38.000Look, if they do that, I'm 100% in favor of it.
01:03:47.000And I think also there's going to come a time where through CRISPR or through some other much more sophisticated form of manipulating the human body where we're going to be able to change what a person is Really.
01:04:00.000Not just in terms of how they express and how they represent, but actually you can become a biological female.
01:04:08.000I don't know if that's going to be within our lifetime, but I think that's the future.
01:04:33.000And we might be back to male versus female.
01:04:36.000Or, excuse me, male categories versus male, female versus female.
01:04:40.000One thing that gets lost in all this is just what an extraordinary creation the human being is as an athlete.
01:04:49.000I mean, I was sort of looking at athletic performance, particularly with running, because my book is divided into run, fight, and think, like the three ways you can defeat a greater power.
01:04:58.000Or at least have a chance of it, right?
01:05:00.000And if you can't outrun them, outfight them.
01:05:03.000If you can't outfight them, you're going to have to outthink them.
01:05:05.000And that's what happens with social change within a society, like the labor movement in this country a hundred years ago.
01:05:13.000So I was looking at our capacity to run, right?
01:05:17.000And I mean, I'm a former runner, right?
01:05:35.000His time is 14 hours and 9 minutes and he has beaten – and along the same course, they run horse and rider teams, like basically the same course.
01:05:46.000He beat the horse and rider team in his year and – And almost every other year for the previous 20 years, he's a human being on foot.
01:06:28.000So if she took an eight-hour nap, just laid down for eight hours and just yawned, stretched her feet and put her shoes on and had breakfast and drank a cup of coffee, she'd still beat him by two hours.
01:07:14.000They were very mobile, materially poor.
01:07:17.000I mean, they only had what they could carry.
01:07:19.000But no one could sort of catch them, right?
01:07:22.000So when the Spanish arrived in the late 1500s, What happened?
01:07:27.000They defeated the Pueblo communities immediately.
01:07:31.000Like sometimes within hours, they could roll these Pueblos, right?
01:07:36.000The Apache remained free until the last band of wild Apache were finally sort of cornered in 1886. That's almost within my grandmother's lifetime.
01:07:48.000And they did that because they were so mobile.
01:07:51.000The whole community was expected to be able to move...
01:07:58.000The children, if the enemy was near, the children would sleep with food tied around their waist in case they had to run away in the middle of the night.
01:08:07.000And there was finally, the warriors were supposed to be able to go 70 miles in a day if they had to, and they'd keep that up.
01:08:13.000And so there was one war leader NANA, N-A-N-A, NANA. And in the 1880s, I mean, the machine gun's been invented, the light bulb, the, what else,
01:08:28.000the four-stroke engine, like, it was really modern society at that point, right?
01:08:33.000And he led, like, a dozen Apache warriors on a raid that, over six weeks, they covered 1,500 miles.
01:08:48.000So the human being, right, is meant to move.
01:08:53.000It's also really good at fighting and it's also really, really good at thinking.
01:08:57.000But if you just think of us as sort of animals, like one of the things that has allowed people throughout the ages to maintain their autonomy is that we're mobile and big powerful empires aren't that mobile.
01:11:20.000And that comes out in the more organized form of fighting, which is war.
01:11:25.000And again, I mean, I looked at the Montenegrins, who were these sort of wild mountain people in the 1600s, and the Ottoman Empire, which was the most powerful military force in the world at that time, Kept invading Montenegro.
01:11:41.000And, you know, at one point they outnumbered the Montenegrins 12 to 1. They had a cavalry.
01:12:45.000Isn't it funny that someone would say, why is freedom interesting to you?
01:12:50.000That's like saying, why is life interesting to you?
01:12:53.000If you just came back from your experience with your aneurysm, and you realize, oh my god, life is so precious, it's so important, and then some person is just living normally, like, well, what's so important about life?
01:13:13.000Well, we're very lucky that we live in a free society and a democracy and, you know, it's imperfect, obviously, and we're trying – you know, I think we're all trying to improve it.
01:13:24.000But I think it's easy to take that for granted.
01:13:27.000We – Part of the book is about this bizarre trek that I took.
01:13:36.000We walked along the railroad lines from Washington, D.C., me and a few other guys.
01:13:41.000We'd all been in a lot of combat, and we weren't going back to combat, and we were trying to figure out what to do with ourselves.
01:13:46.000We walked along the railroad lines from D.C. to Philly, and we're going to go to New York, then we decided to turn west, and we headed for Pittsburgh.
01:13:53.000We wound up right outside of Pittsburgh.
01:13:55.000So over the course of a year, trips of 50 to 100 miles, we sort of like, We journeyed through America along the road lines.
01:14:02.000We were sleeping under bridges and abandoned houses and cooking over fires.
01:17:44.000They were – often there were people that just didn't want the government – the colonial government breathing down their neck.
01:17:52.000That was one of the more interesting things about the beginning of the book where you were talking about a sign that you found on someone's property that says that they will resist the federal government by any means necessary.
01:19:44.000So the settlers had a kind of mutual defense pact.
01:19:49.000And if you were out there, you owed your life to the common defense of the community.
01:19:54.000And if you didn't do that, you were an outcast.
01:20:00.000In fact, if you were an adult male and you failed to carry a gun and a scalping knife and a tomahawk in your belt at all times, if you didn't do that, you were mocked and you were cast out from the community.
01:20:14.000Which, obviously, is not really a form of freedom.
01:20:17.000I mean, freedom includes the freedom to not fight if you don't want to fight, right?
01:20:21.000So basically, my point is, pick your poison.
01:20:24.000Do you want the government to tell you what to do?
01:20:26.000Or do you want the community to tell you what to do?
01:20:29.000And the more danger you're in, the more you need one or the other.
01:20:34.000And there really is no way to be completely safe, completely comfortable, and completely free without obligation to your tribe.
01:21:59.000It's indomitable until the Europeans showed up.
01:22:03.000And one reason the Europeans couldn't be defeated was because they came with diseases that just decimated the ranks of the native people, right?
01:22:10.000So, you know, you can play the sort of thought experiment.
01:22:13.000If, say, smallpox didn't exist and the native peoples of North America had their original populations, the Iroquois were an extremely well-organized, huge, huge organization.
01:22:58.000Speaking of mobility, they were so mobile.
01:23:01.000That the settlers often thought they were fighting five to ten times as many Iroquois as—or this applied to any of the tribes—five or ten times as many men as they really were.
01:23:12.000That was the tactical advantage of that kind of mobility.
01:23:16.000Well, that was the issue with Texas and the Comanches was the tactical ability of the Comanche to fight off horseback when the settlers hadn't figured out how to do that yet.
01:23:27.000And they were still using muskets and the Comanche could launch multiple arrows.
01:23:32.000They would keep their arrows interlaced in their fingers.
01:23:36.000And they would shoot one arrow and then another arrow.
01:23:39.000So these guys would shoot one musket and then they'd have to reload.
01:23:44.000By the time that happened, the Comanche would be on them and filling them full of arrows.
01:23:47.000The settlers that I wrote about, some of them were able to load their rifle at a dead run.
01:23:55.000And this is with a ramrod, you know, they put the ball in the barrel and the patch and then pour the powder in, or the other way around, the powder and then the ball.
01:24:03.000Anyway, they could do this at a dead run, but still it was no match, in some ways no match for a bow and arrow in the woods.
01:24:09.000But if you had ranks of riflemen who were alternating firing and reloading, You know, it's just suicide to charge them in a field.
01:24:18.000Of course, that's what happened in European warfare.
01:25:00.000And in some ways, unfortunately, the beginning of a stratification of society.
01:25:04.000As soon as you can accumulate wealth, some people are going to accumulate more than others, and they become rulers, and they can oppress people, etc., etc.
01:25:10.000In mobile societies like the Apache, it's very hard to have social classes because you can't accumulate anything.
01:25:16.000And so, in history, the sedentary people, although more powerful where they stood, and more wealthy in material terms, We're good to go.
01:25:59.000That dates back to this era, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
01:26:03.000The sort of eternal clash between the migratory nomadic people, herding cultures, and the farming cultures.
01:26:13.000I do not have a mill with willow trees.
01:26:30.000So, of course, those people lost – I mean, the world is dominated by sedentary people that accumulate wealth and can amass huge armies and blah, blah, blah.
01:26:39.000But it's good to keep in mind that mobility was, for a very, very long time, was a very effective – I think?
01:27:23.000And, you know, even the sort of ancient biblical story of fratricide of Cain and Abel, you know, even – I mean, you know, Cain was a farmer and Abel was a nomad.
01:27:38.000And it goes, you know, the thinking, the ethnographic thinking or the anthropological thinking about this is this story goes back to this original bifurcation between farmers, the sedentary people, and the mobile ones.
01:28:51.000Where we know there's something wrong with sedentary lifestyle and with living in a city and dealing with just the bullshit of traffic and this unnatural environment that we've created with concrete and asphalt and pollution.
01:30:20.000And it's even in the Bible, you know, Cain and Abel.
01:30:25.000It's their seminal story, fratricide, goes all the way back.
01:30:29.000That sort of division goes all the way back in the jealousy of the – the jealousy that we wealthy, sedentary people have for the mobile people.
01:30:41.000One thing I should point out, and I think it's worth talking about, We were talking about a little bit before that our safety in the world comes from the fact that we have people around us that we trust who will help defend our community,
01:31:01.000And because if we don't have a community, if we're not part of a tribe, if we're not part of some group, we're alone in the world, we're very vulnerable, humans die pretty quickly by themselves in the wilderness, right?
01:31:13.000And the larger the group, the safer it is from attack from other groups.
01:31:18.000I mean, just as a basic fact of human existence.
01:31:31.000Freedom works in the sort of simple – the word freedoms or works in the simplest form in the context of freedom from oppression by – freedom from being oppressed by an outside group, by an enemy group, right?
01:31:42.000When you're talking about your own society, the society that you have signed – born into and have signed on to, you're really talking about your rights, right?
01:32:21.000These groups of male raiders would go out and they swept through Europe and they entered the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, about 5,000 years ago.
01:33:03.000All the men, not the women, who clearly were mated with, and the Iberian population now are the descendants of the Yamnaya and the Neolithic women, and then other population groups that moved in,
01:33:22.000But the Neolithic men were completely scrubbed from the gene pool because they could not defend their territory.
01:33:30.000So one point I want to make is, and this isn't a pitch for militarism, it's a pitch for realism, which is a very important part of freedom comes from being able to defend yourself and the people you love.
01:33:43.000And if you can't do that, I mean in ancient historical terms.
01:33:49.000Now there's international laws and there's defense pacts and there's NATO and whatever.
01:33:54.000Like Liechtenstein does not really have to worry about being invaded because it's part of an agreement between nations.
01:34:01.000But throughout most of human history, if you could not defend yourself, you were very, very vulnerable to having your freedom taken away and invariably would.
01:34:11.000There's a resistance in today's culture, particularly from people that are more in line with progressive thinking.
01:34:19.000There's a resistance to accepting the fact that the military is important.
01:34:25.000I mean, I think there's a sort of lovely idea that peace is sort of the default state.
01:34:32.000And if you just don't have a military and start thinking in militaristic terms, that peace will take over and then no one will need a military and then we're all going to be fine.
01:34:44.000I mean, if you look at history and the nations that couldn't defend themselves, I mean, look, Montenegro was not overrun by the Ottomans because it could defend itself.
01:34:58.000And for a lot of human history, and this is true in a playground fight as well, I mean, if you can't defend yourself, you might end up having to do what someone else tells you to do.
01:35:10.000So the trick is, how do you become well enough armed and militaristic enough and sort of badass enough and hierarchical enough because military groups depend on hierarchy in order to fight effectively?
01:35:22.000A hierarchy of command, not of honor, but of command.
01:35:26.000How do you do that and also have a society which is just and egalitarian?
01:35:33.000And as I say in my book, a society that's well enough organized to defend itself can also oppress its own people under the wrong leadership.
01:35:48.000Outsiders, but also not use the apparatus of the military to then oppress your own people the way Pinochet did and Franco did and, you know, etc.
01:35:58.000I mean, that's the history of dictators.
01:36:00.000My father grew up in Spain and left when Franco took, when the fascists took over in Spain.
01:36:07.000I just wrote an article about how that happens.
01:36:11.000You know, Spain had a democratically elected government and Franco came in and said, that's bullshit.
01:36:18.000It was a fraudulent election and we're going to take over.
01:36:22.000So that's an example of a military force that was used improperly to oppress its own people.
01:36:28.000And so for me, that's the eternal human dilemma.
01:36:31.000If you be strong enough to defend yourself and not allow that to oppress your own people.
01:36:38.000Well, it's interesting, too, because what we're talking about here, this utopian concept of peace being a default state, there's a lot of people that they have similar utopian beliefs about policing in the United States,
01:36:55.000and that's one of the reasons why people think we need to defund the police, and that people, if you leave them alone, We're good to go.
01:37:23.000But there's a lot of confusion as to what's the correct way to go about this and what is the correct way of actually ensuring that people are safe and protected and that law and order is achieved and that people respect this rule of land because it makes our society and our culture better and safer for everyone.
01:37:45.000Easier for people to innovate and easier for people to live their lives.
01:38:30.000I kind of know where you're coming from.
01:38:32.000I just don't quite know how it would work.
01:38:34.000So I think what those people are doing is they're saying we have given up trying to reform the police and clearly there are some police departments that need reform.
01:39:34.000So there weren't even, you know, if you want to just put it this way, I mean, one of the constant causes of violence between individual men is competition over women, right?
01:39:44.000I mean, bar fights in all kinds of situations, that is one seed of conflict between men.
01:39:50.000So there were very few women out there to even have conflicts over, right?
01:39:56.000It was so high that, I mean, it completely eclipsed the highest murder rates in the eastern cities.
01:40:03.000There was one town, a railroad town, that killed 7% of the population died by murder in the first three months, if I'm remembering my numbers correctly.
01:40:45.000They're a lot more peaceful when women are there.
01:40:48.000And what started to happen as the frontier filled up with women, and those women had children and families, and there's a very strong correlation between gender imbalance and violence.
01:40:59.000And the worse the gender imbalance is, the more violence there is.
01:41:03.000And as you bring men and women's numbers into line with each other, violence goes down.
01:41:09.000Well, then how do you explain places like Japan or China, where there's far more males in China, I believe, than there are females because of that one-child policy?
01:41:21.000Isn't there a disproportionate amount of males?
01:41:26.000I mean, I don't know anything about China, and, you know, you're talking about a huge, huge country, and I frankly can't answer that question, but they know from the sort of lab experiment of, okay, you take one community, you have it be 99% men.
01:43:58.000We're living on a small street, a through street, a small through street in the way lower east side.
01:44:04.000And there was a cop car pulled over on the sidewalk, and another car pulled up, and a woman inside rolled her window down to ask the policeman some directions, or I don't know what, right?
01:44:13.000So they're talking through their open windows, right?
01:45:34.000He seemed to resist escalation as long as possible and it resolved itself.
01:45:37.000So I think the real conversation is however much funding the police get, how do we make it the best policing possible with the money that we're going to allocate?
01:45:54.000I think the cameras on the phones and the fact that people are willing to film perceived injustices and that this becomes national news, I think that's great.
01:46:17.000I don't know how to shift the public's perception of what a police officer is, though.
01:46:23.000Like, right now, it's in vogue to call cops shitheads and assholes and losers.
01:46:30.000It's like to hate a cop is actually popular, which is unfortunately because of the George Floyd case and because of multiple other cases, it's a thing now and it's a narrative.
01:46:41.000And if you say you support, like, you know, I'm a supporter of law enforcement.
01:46:49.000I'm always respectful to police officers.
01:46:51.000I know that they treat me differently than they would a young black man or in a crime-ridden area or in various situations and various cops are going to treat people more discriminatory.
01:47:02.000And I know that's true, and I wish it wasn't.
01:47:05.000But I think the solution to that is not defunding.
01:47:07.000The solution is better training, picking better qualified applicants.
01:47:11.000And I don't know how you do that at this point.
01:47:14.000It seems like a long uphill road, a long battle to try to get the respect of the general population again, to get the population to respect police officers.
01:47:27.000What de Blasio's done in New York City by hamstringing the police and by telling them to stand down when people are looting and smashing windows, you've just made things more violent and more chaotic and more uncontrollable.
01:47:40.000Well, yeah, and there's a zero-sum game going on.
01:47:43.000I mean, I think if the police unions were even a little bit amenable to disciplining what seem to be rogue cops who have violated their training and their oath and abused people, even in really egregious cases, the police unions really won't acknowledge it.
01:48:00.000I think they think it's a slippery slope.
01:48:04.000But the problem with that, I mean, when I was in Afghanistan, I was in Afghanistan in the 90s and whatever, before 9-11, but my last trip there was with American forces.
01:48:15.000And I was there off and on for a year, and I got to know the military very, very well, and I really liked them.
01:48:28.000But one of the sort of amusing things was the sort of military bureaucracy and that was – the further you got from the, quote, front lines, the stronger their bureaucracy was.
01:48:36.000And one of these public affairs guys – I mean they're – technically they're soldiers but they're not really fighting.
01:48:43.000They're in public affairs and they deal with the press and whatever.
01:48:46.000And he was a really nice guy and he said to me, listen, tell me, how do I get journalists to trust me?
01:49:00.000That makes you look like the military made a mistake at some point.
01:49:03.000Because if you're willing to acknowledge a mistake, if you're willing to acknowledge a mistake, then people will believe.
01:49:11.000I think you're an honest actor in this and they will believe it when you tell the truth, when you say something positive about yourself, right?
01:49:17.000So, you know, I think the – I mean this is how negotiations stop is that neither side thinks the other side is acting in good faith and so they don't give an itch.
01:49:25.000That's what's happening politically right now.
01:49:57.000But if we acknowledge that, all of a sudden, all cops are even for things that were complicated and confusing and, you know, whatever, like this sort of gray area where every fight...
01:50:59.000Both political parties have an original sin.
01:51:01.000But, you know, with the Republicans, just watching this unfold was when Trump was introducing this sort of nonsense about that Barack Obama was not an American citizen.
01:51:39.000So if you have a very powerful figure in American politics saying he's actually an imposter and he's not an American citizen, he isn't really president, that's very dangerous.
01:51:55.000Isn't it kind of crazy, though, when you really stop and think about it, that we're a nation of immigrants and you can't be an immigrant and run the nation of immigrants.
01:52:04.000You have to have been born on this patch of dirt to be legitimate.
01:52:11.000Like Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, who is an American citizen, cannot be the president of the United States because he was not born here.
01:52:18.000Even though he was the governor of California, he could never be the president.
01:52:22.000You have to be through no fault of your own.
01:52:25.000I mean, it has to be like a dumb luck thing where you're born on this patch of dirt.
01:53:27.000And that sort of group allegiance, it doesn't guarantee group allegiance being born here, but it signifies something powerful.
01:53:35.000One of the things I wrote about was, you know, I was talking about how in a dangerous environment, your safety comes from being part of a group.
01:53:47.000That works because each individual in the group is willing to risk their safety, their life, to protect the whole group.
01:53:54.000And if no one's willing to do that, you really don't have a group and no one's safe.
01:53:58.000So the collective deal is that, okay, we're all part of the Hells Angels or we're all part of Second Platoon or whatever it is.
01:54:06.000And we all value the safety of the group more than our own individual groups.
01:54:12.000And our individual safety comes from the fact that we're part of this group.
01:54:15.000So if everyone does that, everyone's safer.
01:54:18.000That's a very ancient human arrangement.
01:54:21.000And I looked at this group in – it was a criminal gang in Chicago in the 1960s called the Vice Lords, right?
01:54:31.000The term didn't mean that they were committing lots of moral vices, though I'm sure they did occasionally, right?
01:54:42.000It meant that once you were in, we had you like you're in a vice.
01:54:47.000It was a strength of brotherhood term, not a sort of moral corruption term, right?
01:54:53.000So the thing about the vice law is a very, very dangerous part of Chicago in the 60s.
01:54:59.000And if you were an unaffiliated young – it was African-American community, unaffiliated young male, that you were not in a gang, you were really in danger.
01:55:59.000They put them in the back of a car and they drove them to the heart of enemy territory of some rival gang and they just pushed them out of the car.
01:56:08.000Like that's what it means to betray your group.
01:56:11.000And – But in exchange, and this is why it works so well, and this is what I wish we could get back to on some level in this country, though it's much harder with this many people.
01:57:07.000And I'll – if I may, I'd like to suggest ways to richly participate in being part of this country.
01:57:13.000I think there's some things that you can do that sort of remind you in very gratifying ways that you're part of this huge, crazy 300 million person enterprise.
01:57:22.000But for the vice lawyers, what they would do is they'd pool their money.
01:57:25.000I mean these kids were always broke, right?
01:57:27.000And they'd pool their money, their dimes, nickels and dimes or whatever and they'd buy a bottle of wine.
01:57:34.000And they'd buy a bottle of cheap wine.
01:57:37.000And everyone in the group would get the same amount of wine regardless of how much money they put in.
01:57:44.000And if you didn't have any money to put in, you still got the same amount of wine.
01:57:49.000And that's the ritual egalitarianism between everyone who has pledged their life in defense of the group.
01:57:56.000And the first thing they did is they poured out a little bit of wine to the vice lords that were in prison and the ones who were dead.
01:58:02.000So you didn't even have to be alive to be part of this brotherhood.
01:58:07.000And that's a very, very powerful thing that humans do naturally in small groups.
01:58:12.000The question for this country and every large country is how do you do that in an eclectic group of 300 million people that is often screaming at each other because they're in disagreement?
01:58:49.000You know, one of the amazing benefits and privileges of an affluent, powerful society is that you're not in fear for your life constantly from an outside enemy.
01:59:01.000And so we're not on a war footing anymore.
01:59:04.000So how do you maintain that cohesion even though circumstances don't require it?
01:59:13.000I've given a lot of thought to it because people keep saying, how can we act like a tribe in this country?
01:59:19.000How can we return to that state of mind?
01:59:22.000And so the three ways, and part of this comes out of what happened to me last June.
02:02:30.000That power is put in the hands of 12 people who hopefully come to a wise, informed decision.
02:02:36.000And it's the jury duty is why we don't live in oppression and tyranny.
02:02:41.000It's the mechanism that keeps us in a relatively fair society.
02:02:46.000You do those three things, jury duty, donate blood, and vote, you will feel like you're part of a country.
02:02:52.000It also would be, if we all relied on this jury system, which we do, it should be incentive to educate people.
02:02:59.000It should be incentive to encourage people to have a more balanced perspective because you're going to maybe one day be on the side of those people while they choose your fate.
02:04:05.000Mostly I just felt sort of sad for him.
02:04:07.000I was like – And we convicted on some counts and not on others.
02:04:13.000And none of us really wanted him to go to jail, but he definitely was a bad cop, right?
02:04:18.000So there was this sort of happy medium where we – when the defense attorney saw where this was going and pled out, no jail time, whatever it was.
02:04:45.000Yeah, it wasn't quite like that, but it was a sad sack version of that.
02:04:48.000But how crazy is that documentary when you realize that this is, at least at the time where Michael Dowd was in the police force, this was how it was run.
02:05:12.000Well, you know, you don't have a democracy, really, at the small scale or at the large scale if you don't have an oversight mechanism that examines the mechanism that has power over us.
02:05:24.000I mean, if the thing that has power over us, which is the military, the government, and the police, if there aren't mechanisms for examining them, Then we're at risk.
02:05:35.000I mean, that's why you have federal investigations and you have congressional investigations and you have journalists with the military and all this other stuff.
02:05:42.000And, you know, people bridle at the oversight and they call it all kinds of nonsense.
02:05:47.000But at the end of the day, that's why we're not living in a friggin' dictatorship.
02:05:52.000Yeah, so when you set out to write this book, you're incorporating a lot of different things, right?
02:05:58.000You're incorporating your personal journey along the railroad lines, and you're also incorporating all your thoughts about sort of the mechanisms of freedom.
02:06:25.000Outside of direct control by society, I mean, we're moving along the margins in the shadows, you know, on this no man's land of the railroad lines.
02:06:34.000But we're dependent on society, right?
02:06:36.000I mean, we're getting our food in town, right?
02:06:39.000I mean, walking to town, we look like shit.
02:06:43.000Buy some supplies, some rice, some oatmeal, some whatever and then we keep moving and then we're out of town again.
02:06:48.000So we're in this weird symbiotic relationship as everyone is and we're trying to figure out like the sort of balance between dependency and autonomy.
02:07:41.000The reason that they were able to fight us to not lose for 20 years is that they were more mobile and we were more heavily armored and slower.
02:08:04.000Fight is when it comes down to a fight, how does the smaller entity win, be it the Montenegrins or a smaller fighter in the ring or, you know, at every scale?
02:09:11.000I mean, almost by definition, no individual is stronger than the U.S. government and the U.S. military and the police and blah, blah, blah.
02:09:17.000So you have to sort of outthink it, right?
02:10:48.000And the other thing is that they brought women into the fight.
02:10:52.000And the interesting thing about women is that the authorities, this is true all around the world and not without exception, but they are more reluctant to kill women than to kill men.
02:11:03.000The political ramifications for killing men are much lighter than for killing women.
02:11:10.000And it's such a powerful factor that if you put women on the front line of a labor strike, the cops don't know what to do.
02:11:18.000And so that's what they did in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on the mill strikes in Lawrence.
02:11:22.000You have to understand how abusive the labor relationship was with the factories back then.
02:11:29.000And their protests were long in coming and completely legitimate.
02:11:34.000And the authorities just put the National Guard out there with fixed bayonets.
02:13:59.000I mean, you could write a thousand pages on this philosophical implications of and metaphysical implications of freedom and you'd never get to the end of the conversation and no one would read it, right?
02:14:10.000I want to do like really physical, animal, visceral terms.
02:14:31.000And what I would say is just to reiterate this point about how much we all need groups to be free – And then you have to maintain your freedom, your rights within that group.
02:14:42.000I mean, that's the sort of the one-two step of being self-defining is the group you're in is not oppressed by someone else.
02:14:49.000And then within the group you're in, you have your rights.
02:16:05.000At any rate, it was going from a left-hand system to a right-hand system, right?
02:16:10.000So my friend—this was like 20 years ago—my friend said to the taxi driver, well, when the big day comes and you change, you know, you change jurisdiction— What are you going to do with the roads, right?
02:16:25.000How are you going to change from the left-hand side to the right-hand side or the other way around?
02:16:30.000And the taxi driver said, oh, we'll do it gradually.
02:16:34.000Imagine what that would look like, right?
02:16:45.000Your group is making decisions about how to keep everyone safe.
02:16:48.000That's one of the obligations is you follow those rules, right?
02:16:51.000And when those rules impinge on your rights, then in a democracy, you have fair recourse through the courts and through elections to make a change.
02:17:00.000What you don't have the ability to do is give yourself rights, right?
02:17:04.000So if you're late for your airplane and you get to the airport and there's a huge line at security, You cannot give yourself the right to go to the front of the line.
02:17:14.000But what you can do is say, it's my daughter's wedding tomorrow.
02:17:48.000It sort of brings me to the right of freedom of speech, because we all agree that it's important that people be able to express themselves, but we also impose at least the limitations on that where you can't yell fire in a crowded theater.
02:18:05.000We have limitations in terms of, I mean, you're able to express yourself, but that's a little slippery, right?
02:18:14.000Like, when do we decide that what you're doing is not technically freedom of speech?
02:18:25.000To violence, it falls under some unprotected category that although we allow you to express yourself freely, we have to maintain some sort of structure and some sort of order.
02:18:36.000Well, you know, I'm not a lawyer, but I'll try to sort of think my way through this with you.
02:19:50.000And so, you know, I don't know how the courts sort of like slice this, but if they feel that a certain kind of inflammatory speech will lead to loss of life—and, you know, I think in a democracy, it's fair to say speech that will undermine—I mean,
02:20:07.000the democracy we have is part of our physical security in the world.
02:20:33.000Democracies are very resilient and they transfer power very, very well.
02:20:36.000So our security in the world comes from – The strength of our – in part from the strength of our democracy and the amazing military that protects it.
02:20:48.000And so I think you could argue that if someone says something which is like immediately, like viscerally, obviously a threat to our democratic system, you can sort of argue – you play that out a few more steps.
02:21:03.000Real lives are actually going to be in danger.
02:21:15.000Should he or should he not have access to The sort of megaphone of Twitter and Facebook if he's saying things that some people believe got some folks killed on Capitol Hill and that are a grave threat to the democratic process.
02:21:53.000And he's got to know that in this insanely volatile situation where people are really thinking that the relationship between the voters and the Politicians and this whole thing is inexorably flawed and that they're stealing the election.
02:22:31.000And that's where it's open to interpretation, right?
02:22:34.000Well, look, yeah, it is open to interpretation.
02:22:36.000But if you don't just look at Donald Trump, but the people who are close around him.
02:22:41.000So his personal – correct me if I'm wrong, but if memory serves, Lin Wood, one of his personal attorneys, literally said before the January 6th insurrection – Insurrection is too dignified a word,
02:23:35.000And there was a lot of rhetoric by other people in that group about what they could do with Nancy Pelosi and other people that they thought had betrayed.
02:24:59.000You got a lot of little tabs on that book there.
02:25:02.000Oh, you know, if I'm doing a radio interview or something and someone says, oh, read me that section about the Apache, I can find it fairly quickly.
02:25:33.000Well, I always enjoy your work, man, and I really enjoy your books on tape because there's something that I always appreciate about an author reading his own work or her own work, and you do an exceptional job of that.
02:26:23.000When they were taking him to the place of his execution, the carriage went right by his own house and he saw his dog.
02:26:32.000And he got to, you know, in the hours before his execution, he wrote to, you know, he had four little children and a wife, and he wrote a letter to them.
02:26:42.000And it's almost kind of stream of consciousness.
02:26:46.000I mean, he's hours from being shot, right?
02:27:55.000Obviously, poor Michael Mallon's never going to know that his letter is still bringing a tear to people's eye, but it is.
02:28:03.000Well, it's also the amazing thing about— It's utilizing language and putting the words together in a way that's going to best represent the way your thoughts are and how to reach someone else's imagination and have them recreate these thoughts in their mind.
02:29:16.000But the medical examiner testified that at the moment where the man stood facing the firing squad, ready, aim, fire, That the only person there who wasn't troubling was the condemned.
02:29:32.000That all these young boys, I mean, they're just 19, 20-year-old boys in the army, right?
02:29:36.000They didn't want to be executing people.
02:31:25.000And the conversation the tank driver and that man could have had, if it were allowed, the conversation they could have, the government they could form, the good they can do in the world, imagine if that were allowed.
02:33:20.000I mean, it's up to you to define it how you want, but the working definition I'm using is freedom means that you are safe from an outside power controlling you, right?
02:33:30.000If you consider the U.S. government to be an outside power, which I don't personally, but if you consider it—if you think of it that way— Then, yes, the word freedom is sort of appropriate in the context of January 6th or whatever.
02:33:43.000But really, when people say, you know, I want my freedoms, right, my freedoms to not pay taxes or not wear a mask or whatever it is, you know, my freedoms to compete in women's sports and I'm trans, you know, whatever it is, they're really talking about their rights.
02:33:57.000And so, you know, the American democratic system is deeply flawed and deeply amazing.
02:34:05.000And, you know, like we're still working at it and we make mistakes, but we're improving it, you know, whatever.
02:34:09.000And the civil rights movement in the 60s was a huge leap forward.
02:34:13.000Clearly, clearly, clearly it was not a just country before those laws were enacted.
02:34:18.000And it's still not entirely just in its application, right?
02:34:26.000And so I would say we are a free country because we are not under the control of another power and that on paper our rights are amazing and transcend the rights of most people throughout almost all of human history.
02:34:50.000We don't apply it in fair ways all the time.
02:34:53.000But is there a better example of what the way society can be structured anywhere else?
02:35:00.000I mean you need – so you need this sort of balance of a country that is – can defend itself and its borders and defend its democracy, a balance between that and a system that's fairly just and egalitarian.
02:35:16.000I mean one of the worrisome things in my opinion in terms of justice, which is another category, Is that the gap between rich and poor in this country, the income gap, what's called the Gini coefficient, is growing larger, not smaller.
02:35:32.000And the larger that gap gets, arguably the less just the society is and the people at the bottom of that gap are arguably not as, quote, free as the people at the top.
02:35:42.000I mean, just in terms of the choices they have available to them.
02:35:45.000And that trend has been going on for decades, and it's correlated with all kinds of things that are dangerous to a society, to a democracy.
02:36:19.000So they're much closer to sort of like complete equality than they are to complete monopoly.
02:36:24.000And as you go up the scale, you start to find country, you know, really corrupt countries have high Gini coefficients, terrible gap between rich and poor.
02:36:36.000America has one of the highest Gini coefficients, I think 42, 41,.41,.42, of any of the Western democracies, right?
02:37:05.000There was a huge labor shortage and that actually brought the Gini coefficient back down.
02:37:14.000And so it's – the weird thing about the Gini coefficient is that – I mean you obviously don't want too high a one because it's not just.
02:37:28.000But really low Gini coefficients typically are not associated with powerful countries.
02:37:33.000So the empires that have dominated world events, the Han Dynasty, the Roman Empire, the Ottomans, on and on, America, the British Empire, they have like fairly high Gini coefficients.
02:37:47.000So as a good lefty, I like to think, oh, well, a just and fair egalitarian society eventually will be the most powerful country in the world because everyone's happy and we all pull together and blah, blah, blah.
02:38:42.000Hunter-gatherers are not democracies, right?
02:38:45.000But they have very low Gini coefficients.
02:38:47.000In other words, in material terms, they're fairly egalitarian.
02:38:52.000And in a lot of those societies, women are in a subordinate role and all kinds of other things that would offend our modern sensibilities.
02:38:58.000What I think we really want is to make sure that the people that are at the very top are not abusing the people at the bottom and that the people at the bottom have a standard of life that's acceptable.
02:39:54.000And just to be clear, I'm not advocating for a high GD coefficient for the United States.
02:39:59.000I'm just sort of pointing out historically that really dominant empires in the world...
02:40:04.000Have had fairly high Gini coefficients, and you can make a very good case for a low Gini coefficient in South America after all those awful dictatorships the United States supported through the 70s and 80s.
02:40:16.000There was initiatives for real economic reforms that brought the Gini coefficients down.
02:40:21.000Those countries are way more stable now because they're fairer countries, economically, politically, legally fairer countries.
02:40:34.000It's just that Ecuador is never going to be a world power.
02:40:36.000The world powers throughout history for the past thousand years have not been very fair societies.
02:40:43.000Is it because insane amounts of money are needed to fund military and to fund these corporations that are innovating and that's going to keep you at the cutting edge of cultures in terms of your ability to change things, your ability to affect things globally?
02:41:01.000Look, there's an accumulation of capital, and very powerful rulers then depend on a huge labor pool to fill enormous armies.
02:41:15.000That labor pool isn't going to be there in an egalitarian society.
02:41:18.000Everyone has more or less the same amount of I think we're good to go.
02:41:41.000I don't know if there is an answer, but I'm just guessing that that kind of top-down hierarchy that comes with the accumulation of wealth also creates a labor pool for your armies.
02:41:49.000And then those armies are then very, very capable of defeating the enemy.
02:41:54.000But once – sometimes it doesn't go the right way.
02:41:57.000So King Darius of Persia, who at the time was the most powerful military leader – of the world.
02:42:04.000Massive, massive army rode north to fight the Scythians who were this sort of wild marijuana-smoking nomadic people, right?
02:42:13.000Completely whacked out, out there people and amazing warriors.
02:42:17.000And they were totally outgunned by Darius, right?
02:42:21.000And the Scythians sort of avoided him for days and Darius finally got them into a position to fight him, right?
02:43:05.000They're all looking at each other right across a football field basically.
02:43:08.000He saw that the Scythian warriors were so calm that they were hunting rabbits in their spare time waiting for the fight to begin and it unnerved him so deeply that he pulled out.
02:46:22.000But I don't think that the society as structured is fair, and I don't think that it's fair that some people grow up in poverty-stricken, crime-ridden, gang-infested inner cities, and some people grow up in the beautiful bird-chirping suburbs,
02:46:38.000But how does one balance these things out to the point where I don't believe in equality of outcome, but I think it would be wonderful if we had equality of opportunity.
02:46:48.000If people had the chance in all walks of life, in all parts of the country to advance with at least similar obstacles.
02:47:00.000But do we make it more difficult for the people that live in the bird-chirping suburbs?
02:47:05.000Do we make it easier for the people that live in the crime-infested cities?
02:47:19.000Completely ignorant when it comes to economics, but I've always found that appealing because I don't think that money should be the motivating factor for someone to choose what to do or not to do with their life, but I do know that for people that were poor, including myself, The incentive to do better is often what spurs you ahead and makes you act and do things.
02:47:40.000And those things wind up being beneficial.
02:47:42.000And some people, if you give them money just for free, they no longer have incentive and they don't do anything.
02:48:17.000My first marriage was to a woman who grew up in Bulgaria, and there were a lot of great things about that society.
02:48:24.000I mean, we could talk about that if you want, but, you know, people were not incentivized to—in fact, they were disincentivized.
02:48:31.000Not only were they not financially incentivized to sort of, like, redouble their efforts, but other people would also look at them with sort of suspicion, like, what are you doing?
02:48:43.000But then on the other hand, if it is so economically unjust, no matter how much effort you put into it, you will never achieve the outcomes that a different kind of person will achieve.
02:49:04.000So, I mean, you can make a pretty good case that if you're like an African-American kid in a really, really poor community with a really shitty school and, you know, in a single-family home, etc., etc., all the correlates to bad outcomes— You can try as hard as you want.
02:49:21.000And, you know, once in a while someone gets through or whatever, but, you know, the odds are stacked so much against you.
02:49:42.000We need good schools everywhere, right?
02:49:45.000Single parents need some help because they can't work and take care of a child.
02:49:51.000I mean, you know, there are structural things we can do that make the society collaborative and just in the way that a small-scale hunter-gatherer society is collaborative and just.
02:50:03.000I mean basically in a small-scale society, there's collective parenting and no one parent or set of parents does all the child raising, which allows people to do other things that the group needs done and the hunter hunts and the basket weaver weaves, you know, whatever.
02:50:18.000We have to institutionalize that in this society because it won't happen organically in the kind of way that it does.
02:50:25.000But even the problem with institutionalizing something like that, you want someone who's actually motivated to help people.
02:50:32.000You don't want someone who's just doing it as a job.
02:50:34.000One of the things that's frustrating for people that, you know, when you see some of the school teachers in these crime-ridden communities, they have no incentive.
02:50:46.000They're not good at what they do and there's no incentive for them either because it's a dangerous job and it's better to just show up and collect your paycheck and just do the minimum amount that you have to do and recognize the fact that this is a shitty situation for everybody, which nothing gets better in that way.
02:51:02.000I mean, I would say that for every teacher that's like that, there's another teacher that's buying, you know, pencils and erasers out of their pocket for the kids.
02:51:18.000You know, I don't think we have time to figure out what that is with the education system, but, you know, theoretically that's the...
02:51:23.000I don't think we do, but I just wish somebody else was, you know?
02:51:26.000And I think you're right that it is the education, that education is the key, but also community is the key, like having a safe area where you can go to, whether it's community centers or something with some kind of counseling, something where you feel like you're a part of something bigger that incentivizes you to continue to try to do better with your life.
02:51:44.000Well, listen, we need to feel community at every level.
02:51:46.000We need to feel it at the macro level in our nation, right?
02:51:49.000All the way down to the micro level of our neighborhood.
02:52:01.000I was on a book tour some years ago in Norfolk, Virginia.
02:52:05.000I'd spoken at the Naval Base and I was coming out of my hotel in the morning and there was this old guy in his mid-70s in a wheelchair and he was missing half his right leg.
02:53:28.000And some people are doing worse than him.
02:53:30.000And don't waste any pity on him because there's other people who need help first.
02:53:35.000And I got to say, you know, I wish I knew who he was so we could put up a statue to him, right?
02:53:42.000Like if we all thought a bit like that, boy, we'd be doing better.
02:53:46.000I just don't know how to get people to do it.
02:53:49.000Well, I think if any way, your work, you know, I mean, I think tribe is a fantastic testament to that.
02:53:55.000And I think you're doing more of the same with freedom.
02:53:57.000And, you know, it's what you always are sort of encouraging people to look at the world in that regard and look at our communities in that way.