In this episode, we talk about what it was like to live with the Native Americans and how they were able to create a society that was much more egalitarian than colonial society. We also talk about the importance of solitude and how it can be a form of isolation and depression. This episode is brought to you by the National Museum of American Indians and the Center for Native American Studies at the University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Baltimore, MD. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: "sponsors" to receive 10% off your entire purchase when you enter the discount code "sponsor" when you sign up for our sponsor discount code: CROWN10 at checkout. Thanks to our sponsor, CROWN! We hope you enjoy listening to this episode and share it with your friends and family! Thank you so much for being a supporter of this podcast and looking forward to hearing from you in the future episodes! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What is a good day in the life of a Native American? 2:30 - What was it like living with the Indians? 3:15 - How did the Native American society really looked like? 4:20 - How was it different from colonial society? 5:40 - What does it mean to live in a group? 6: What are the benefits of living with other people? 7:00- What is it like to be alone? 8:00 9:20- What are we are we wired to serve ourselves? 11:30- How do we belong to a group ? 13:40- How can we live in groups? 14:00 Are we wired for solitude? 15:00 Can we be alone in groups of people in groups by a group and a group of strangers? 16:00 What do we feel like a group or a group in a harsh environment? 17:00 Is it a group that we are wired to feel like we are better than a group by a better place? 18:00 +16: What is the role of the human spirit? 19:00 Should we be lonely? 21:10 - How does that sound like a good thing? 22:00 How does it matter? 23:00 Do you belong to something else? 25:00
00:00:29.000Into the first chapter, I wanted to move in with the Native Americans.
00:00:36.000One of the more interesting aspects of it was something that I didn't know about, which was the European settlers that had been kidnapped and were living with the Native Americans, and then when they were rescued, many of them wanted to go back.
00:00:51.000Yeah, or they would go into hiding so they wouldn't have to be repatriated to colonial society.
00:00:56.000They wanted to stay with their adopted tribes.
00:00:58.000And there was also a lot of young white people, particularly white men, but young women too, who basically absconded across the frontier into tribal society.
00:01:13.000And as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, we have lots of young colonials fleeing to the Indians, and we have not one example of an Indian, as they were called, fleeing to white society.
00:01:25.000Yeah, that was one of the more fascinating aspects of it.
00:01:53.000When you were talking about the women that had moved in with the Native Americans and were expressing how much more freedom they experienced.
00:02:02.000Yeah, I mean, Indian society, Native society, wasn't crushed by Christian morality.
00:02:07.000So you could divorce, you could marry as a woman, you could marry whom you wanted, you could get divorced, you could do whatever you wanted.
00:02:18.000In societies where everyone is necessary for food production, everyone's more or less equal.
00:02:26.000And in agrarian societies, agricultural societies, industrial societies, you have large segments of the population, often women, who are not involved in food production, they're involved in reproduction, and so their equality goes down.
00:02:46.000Society as we've created over the last couple of hundred years is almost totally incompatible with With human genetics or with the human body or the the human spirit or whatever well if you look at I Mean genetics are complicated.
00:03:02.000I mean obviously on some level industrial modern society is very successful.
00:03:05.000We have seven billion of us but As wealth goes up in a society, as modernity goes up in a society, the suicide rate goes up.
00:03:18.000Schizophrenia goes up in urban environments.
00:03:21.000They're not good for the human psyche.
00:03:23.000We are designed, we evolved to live in groups of 30, 40 people in a harsh environment, totally inter-reliant on one another for survival.
00:03:31.000That creates a huge amount of equality within a group and loyalty within a group.
00:03:35.000That's what we are designed for genetically.
00:03:38.000Modern society allows the individual to be independent from the group, which is in some ways a great liberation.
00:03:45.000In other ways it can lead to a profound alienation and depression.
00:03:49.000Yeah, it's just a very confusing thing it seems for people to be amongst so many people, but to be alone.
00:03:57.000Yeah, I mean, we're not wired to be confronted with strangers all day long.
00:04:03.000I live in New York City, and I love New York City.
00:04:06.000But all day long, you encounter strangers, and you don't recognize anybody.
00:04:12.000So you can be alone in a crowd, which is not something that human beings have experienced until quite recently in their history.
00:04:19.000Yeah, that was, I think, one of the more disturbing parts about this idea that these people were kidnapped by the Native Americans and wanted to stay with them, was that whatever that Native American life was,
00:04:35.000like, however they were living, that just seemed to just resonate with them.
00:04:53.000In a hunter-gatherer society, you really can't accumulate wealth very well because these societies are often nomadic, so you can only accumulate as much wealth as you can carry, which isn't much.
00:05:04.000And ultimately, in societies like that, I think?
00:05:24.000That's a whole other evolutionary imperative, which is also important.
00:05:28.000But in our society, it's way out of whack.
00:05:29.000So we are wired to serve ourselves, and we are wired to serve the group.
00:05:34.000And in a healthy society, those two are in a dynamic tension with each other and in balance.
00:05:39.000In modern society, there really is no group to serve.
00:05:43.000And it leads to a really profound sense of meaninglessness for a lot of people.
00:05:48.000Yeah, I also found it pretty fascinating that when you were really young, when you were working, I think you said you were working construction, is that what it was?
00:05:58.000I'm trying to remember the story you were about to refer to.
00:06:01.000You were just saying that you were talking to someone you were working with and they were telling you to slow down because some of us have to do this for a lifetime.
00:06:50.000It was really interesting that you were longing for something, you were saying, almost to go wrong, so everybody had a band together, whether it was a hurricane or something, and that that mundane life of just work and doing things you don't really want to do...
00:07:08.000Well, I mean, the irony about modern society is that it has removed hardship and danger from everyday life, and it's in the face of hardship and danger that people come to understand their value to their society.
00:07:19.000And they get their sense of meaning from that.
00:07:22.000And so what you have is when, you know, during the Blitz in London, for example, 30,000 people were killed by German bombs.
00:07:29.000It was a horror show over the course of six months.
00:07:32.000But people were sleeping shoulder to shoulder in the tube stations and putting out fires with bucket brigades and digging people out of rubble.
00:07:38.000And they were acting as a unified society.
00:07:41.000And the English government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties because there's a civilian population getting bombed to bits.
00:07:49.000Admissions to psych wards went down during the Blitz and then back up after the bombing stopped.
00:07:54.000And then afterwards, there was enormous nostalgia in England for the Blitz for those days, as tragic as they were, because English society felt, people felt like they were together.
00:08:09.000Later, I went back to Sarajevo, where I'd been during the siege of Sarajevo in the early 90s, and civilians would tell me, you know, this is 20 years later, 20 years after the war, people would say, you know, a lot of us missed the war because we were better people back then.
00:09:41.000People suddenly feel that they're needed by their society, by their people.
00:09:44.000And if you feel needed, you are able to ignore your own personal troubles.
00:09:50.000As once someone in England, an English official said during the Blitz in London, he said, it's amazing we have the chronic neurotics of peacetime driving ambulances.
00:10:02.000And if you think about it in terms of evolution, if adversity and danger produced bad human behaviors, we wouldn't be here today.
00:10:09.000Another way to say that is we are the descendants of the individuals 100,000 years ago who acted well in a crisis.
00:10:15.000The people that acted badly in a crisis and just took care of themselves and didn't take care of their people, their group, those groups died out.
00:10:24.000It's people, it's groups that encourage a form of altruism and self-sacrifice of individuals for the group during a crisis.
00:10:36.000Did you gain a deep appreciation for this because of your time as a war journalist?
00:10:41.000Did it sort of manifest itself in your mind because of that?
00:10:46.000Well, this book came to me in a sort of two-step process.
00:10:49.000You know, first of all, when I was a young man, I had a surrogate uncle figure in my life, a very important person to me named Ellis Settle.
00:10:56.000He was half Lakota Sioux, half Apache, and he was born in 1929 on a wagon out west.
00:11:04.000He was very, very educated, self-educated.
00:11:06.000And at one point he said to me, you know, it's so funny, all throughout the history of this country, white people were always running off to join the Indians, and the Indians never ran off to join the white people.
00:12:02.000And by the time I got caught up with them again in Vicenza and interviewed them, many of them said that they didn't want to come back to America.
00:12:09.000They wanted to go back out to Restrepo.
00:12:11.000And it reminded me of what Ellis had said.
00:12:13.000And I thought, why is it that no one wants to come home?
00:12:17.000And I realized, it's not that they want war.
00:12:47.000And so of course it resonated with them, resonated genetically with them.
00:12:51.000And I got to say, as tough as it was out there, there was a weird, also a weird, I don't quite want to call it a euphoria, but a strange sense of well-being out there that I missed enormously when I left as well.
00:13:35.000That was not coincidental, by the way.
00:13:37.000I now realize that the timing was significant.
00:13:40.000It took me a while to understand that—and I sank into a real depression— And it took me a while to understand that my depression was partly connected to the fact that I was no longer part of a group.
00:13:52.000But it took a long time for me to figure that out.
00:13:55.000While I was experiencing all that, I just felt like I was in some kind of...
00:14:00.000that I was behind bulletproof plexiglass.
00:14:04.000And I was on the inside, and everyone I cared about was on the other side of the plexiglass, and I couldn't reach them.
00:14:09.000That they were somehow inaccessible to me.
00:14:37.000You know, I just, I had a year or so in the wilderness, I think, psychologically, and, you know, humans are evolved, obviously, to deal with trauma.
00:14:46.000I mean, eventually, I mean, if trauma was incapacitating to people, For years or lifetimes, we wouldn't exist, right?
00:14:55.000I mean, our history as a species involved a huge amount of trauma.
00:15:00.000So we are designed to react to trauma by protecting ourselves emotionally and physically for a certain amount of time, for some weeks or months, maybe a year or two, and then to slowly come out of it and continue functioning.
00:15:17.000I mean, obviously it's a terrible experience to be depressed for that long and to go through all that, but did you get some sort of an understanding of yourself out of it?
00:15:47.000No, it just sort of happened, you know, financially, emotionally.
00:15:50.000I wasn't working as a reporter for a while.
00:15:54.000I'd stopped reporting after Tim got killed.
00:15:56.000And I just sort of hit the reset button on myself as a person.
00:16:00.000And I sort of, when I came back from that, the things I added to my life were very solid.
00:16:09.000We're very very good things and I sort of started from zero again and that really kind of worked and And I also I mean, I didn't have a drinking problem, but I but I stopped drinking and I stopped drinking alcohol and that The drinking alcohol I mean me drinking alcohol made me feel good,
00:16:27.000I'm a really happy drunk and when I was depressed for For a bunch of reasons if I drank I felt great and so there's a real incentive to do that and And I realized that it was depriving me of experiencing my actual life.
00:16:40.000Like, my actual life was filled with some very tough things at the moment.
00:16:43.000And if you self-medicate your way through them, those things are taken from you.
00:17:15.000I was talking to someone professional about how I felt because I was a little worried about myself.
00:17:21.000But as I said to her, I said, you know, if I was on antidepressants, it might make me feel good enough to accept a life that isn't really working very well.
00:19:18.000And if you sort of think about it, think about us as a species, as an animal.
00:19:23.000If you're presented with a challenge and you get a little dose of endorphins, of dopamine, or some feel-good chemicals, when you do a task well...
00:19:32.000That will encourage you to keep doing that task and keep looking for success, small successes in your life, which is exactly how people adapt and survive in harsh circumstances.
00:19:41.000The problem with affluent modern society is it takes away all of the tasks of survival, right?
00:19:49.000No one in this room, I don't think, is having to figure out every morning how to literally physically survive.
00:19:55.000Where am I going to get the berries I'm going to eat today?
00:20:06.000I mean, it's an enormous luxury to live like that.
00:20:08.000The downside is you don't get this sense of mastery over your circumstances.
00:20:13.000You actually don't feel responsible for your own survival.
00:20:15.000You don't feel like you are earning your own survival in the world.
00:20:20.000You feel like it's being handed to you.
00:20:22.000And I grew up in an affluent suburb, and I never had a sense as a young man that I was contributing in any way to the fact that I was physically alive on the planet.
00:20:30.000Well, that's very, very recent in human history that young men could afford to feel that way.
00:20:38.000Again, it's a blessing, but also a bit of a curse.
00:20:42.000It's the most disconnected amongst us are always spoiled rich kids that get handed everything to them and don't have an understanding at all about the consequences of their behavior.
00:20:52.000Yeah, and that kind of life is correlated with depression.
00:21:00.000And the suicide rate is rising fastest among middle-aged white men who, if you listen to some people, are apparently, arguably, the demographic that are most privileged in this society.
00:21:16.000Yes, doing the best with this civilization that we've constructed, doing the worst biologically, in terms of how they adapt to it.
00:21:28.000Big part of the biology right and the thing about this this quest for stuff You know and one of the things I thought was really interesting in the book we were outlining the key factors for happiness and That wealth is not the primary one but being good at something being recognized for being good at something Being a part of a group like all these things were primary Yeah,
00:21:50.000I mean if you think about it and again in evolutionary terms We are safest when we are needed.
00:21:57.000Yeah, so if you're in a group and the group needs you Your status in the group is secure.
00:22:04.000And it had better be because humans do not survive alone in the wild.
00:22:09.000A lone human in nature is a dead human, right?
00:22:34.000And we get our safety and our dominance in the natural world from our ability to work in a group.
00:22:39.000So if you're necessary to that group, you're safe.
00:22:42.000So people get very depressed when circumstances in their life change and they're suddenly not needed, right?
00:22:47.000When people get old and retire, they're at very, very high risk of depression and sometimes suicide.
00:22:53.000When people lose their job and can't find a job, they're at extremely high risk of depression and suicide.
00:22:59.000So when the economy takes a downturn, as it did in 2008, and the unemployment rate goes up, the suicide rate immediately goes up.
00:23:08.000It tracks the unemployment rate almost exactly.
00:23:11.000And one of the points I make in my book is that a very small number of mostly men collapsed the U.S. economy in 2008, and most of them working on Wall Street.
00:23:22.000And there was a direct—I read an article in an academic journal on epidemiology, That there was a directly attributable to the financial collapse,
00:23:37.000there were 5,000 or 6,000 additional suicides in the United States, mostly middle-aged white men, okay?
00:23:44.000And sort of professional people of all classes.
00:24:35.000When that guy starts questioning those economics professors, the guys who eventually got jobs in the government, or went from there and got jobs at big corporations, and you see them folding under the weight of the actual truth of what they've done.
00:25:05.000And the corporate leaders, the corporate heads of those companies who had bankrupted their countries and asked the country to bail them out, While they were getting bailed out, these men were taking year-end bonuses of $10,
00:26:52.000I mean, we do seem to be in a deep state of confusion.
00:26:55.000And I think one of the things you're seeing with people, even like Trump supporters, people that are these online frog people, you know, the little frog avatars, I think one of the things that they like about it is that they've become a part of a troublesome little group.
00:28:28.000Which shows that we live in safety and luxury, which is lovely, but it deprives people of a sense of purpose and meaning.
00:28:36.000Not just safety and luxury, but this staggering change in what has been a normal way of living for people for thousands and thousands of years.
00:28:44.000When you were writing this book and you were thinking about all the ways that human beings have altered the environment around them, You were saying that, and I've read this before, that genetics essentially were riding on the same genetics that were 10,000 years ago from the same people.
00:29:30.000And the only way genetic change happens in a population is that there is a difference in survival between people with one trait and people with another trait.
00:29:38.000So if you have a certain genetic trait and it leads to you having fewer children...
00:29:47.000Eventually, 10,000 years from now, people with your genetic trait will tend to die out because you're passing on less DNA to the next round, right?
00:29:55.000And if you have a trait that allows you to raise more children to maturity, they carry your DNA and then they'll be more successful and that trait tends to spread.
00:30:05.000So does unhappiness lead to lower fertility rates?
00:30:30.000There must be some way where human beings are going to become accustomed to this bizarre way we're living, stacked on top of each other, constantly in traffic.
00:31:04.000I've always just looked at all this reliance upon electronics and our fascination with innovation, and I've wondered if that's where we're headed.
00:31:12.000I mean, it's almost like it's priming us for some sort of a symbiotic relationship with machines, that we become more reliant on technology, stack more and more people into places, make it easier and easier to survive.
00:31:25.000That's the one constant, is that we're constantly embedded in technology.
00:32:13.000Now when you live in this life, when you're a war journalist and you're in these insane places, and then you come back to New York City, what kind of like a decompression period do you have to go through?
00:32:25.000Well, you know, often the developing world that I've worked in, I'm no longer covering wars, by the way, but the developing world is often a very chaotic urban mix of, you know, poverty and cars and pollution and buildings that are, you know, whatever.
00:32:39.000I mean, it's not necessarily not urban.
00:32:43.000But what I would say is that there's a...
00:32:48.000There's something I would describe as a kind of disappointment to have the...
00:32:53.000If you wake up in the morning and your survival is a kind of question mark and you know that you have to act well and with sort of clarity and precision and quickness in order to survive, that is intoxicating,
00:33:18.000It's a relief, but it's also a disappointment.
00:33:21.000Because you're no longer earning anything, right?
00:33:24.000So it's a relief, but it's also kind of disappointing.
00:33:26.000And in that disappointment, you can get quite depressed.
00:33:28.000So I know that the depression rate, like when Peace Corps volunteers come back from two years service overseas, they're not in war zones, but they're in the developing world.
00:34:12.000And not just challenge, but challenge in the context of a community of people.
00:34:17.000Here we have ease in the context of oneself or one's individual family, but not in the context of the community.
00:34:25.000And so, you know, if you look at catastrophes, Hurricane Katrina, I was just in Mississippi, and I was amazed, not amazed, actually, in some ways, to have people, many people say, well, we really miss Hurricane Katrina.
00:34:59.000There's a group of friends that I have that are bow hunters, and one of the things that people have gotten really addicted to is solo hunting, where even regular bow hunting is not quite difficult enough for these psychos, so they go deep, deep, deep, 20 miles plus into the wilderness by themselves.
00:35:16.000And one of the things they say about it is how profoundly lonely and sad it is.
00:35:23.000And even though they know they could walk those 20-plus miles back anytime they want, but there's something about being out there by themselves that when they do return, they just feel invigorated and alive and energized, and they feel like they've accomplished something,
00:35:38.000especially if they come back with an animal.
00:35:41.000Well, listen, I mean, that's an ancient narrative, right?
00:35:43.000I mean, the hunter goes out and kills the game and brings it back and feeds his people.
00:35:47.000I mean, that's a beautiful story, and it has kept human beings alive for decades.
00:35:53.000You know, for hundreds of thousands of years.
00:35:55.000You know, some hunting is well done in groups, and some hunting is a solo enterprise, depending on the animal.
00:36:00.000And there absolutely is a role for that sort of solo endeavor.
00:36:04.000Scouts, you know, often work by themselves because—I mean, in a Native context— Like, for example, the American Indians, the scouts often worked by themselves because they were just harder to detect.
00:36:16.000And I'm sure a terrifying endeavor, but you're doing it for your people.
00:36:21.000And so you come back from that solo experience, which is so frightening.
00:36:27.000I mean, we're a social species, so being alone and in danger is terrifying.
00:36:31.000You come back from that to your community, you've served your community and you're among your people again.
00:37:26.000Did you feel compelled at all to come up with a solution?
00:37:29.000I mean, in deeply describing and Just going over the various aspects of these problems that we're facing as a culture as a society Did you did you have some sort of a need?
00:37:44.000I didn't I mean listen if I thought if there was a solution that I was capable of thinking of I would have put it in the book Either I'm not smart enough or there's no solution.
00:37:53.000I don't know which it is Yeah, I think there's some things we can do around the edges that will help But we're talking about a systemic problem in society that got its start 10,000 years ago and really got its start in the Industrial Revolution and really got going in the technological revolution.
00:38:14.000I mean, we're not going to ban the car, right?
00:38:17.000The Amish in Pennsylvania don't use cars.
00:38:19.000They have a very low rate of suicide and depression because they spend most of their lives within their community, right?
00:38:34.000The biggest community that we have is the nation, is the country.
00:38:37.000And I think one thing that would help enormously is to treat our nation as if we all belong to it, and as if we all respected it, and that it was meaningful to all of us.
00:38:46.000And which means, among other things, it means insisting that politicians who denigrate We're good to go.
00:39:19.000Feeling like you're a child in a family where the parents might get divorced.
00:39:23.000I remember during the campaign between Donald and Hillary, I sort of felt like, wow, are mom and dad going to split up?
00:39:29.000Like, what's happening in this country?
00:39:39.000And I think it's extremely demoralizing and unsettling for people.
00:39:42.000Well, it's also extremely irresponsible.
00:39:44.000Like, the type of person that should be a leader is not the type of person that puts that idea out there to the point where it gets into the zeitgeist and people say, well, hey, maybe we really are in trouble.
00:39:59.000And, you know, these are ancient human behaviors, and if you tell...
00:40:03.000Your people, that there's a threat, your people will rally behind you.
00:40:07.000I mean, it's an adaptive behavior, right?
00:40:11.000The problem is, as a politician, if you tell your people that the enemy Right.
00:40:34.000And if you start slicing off parts of the country, demographic groups in the country, political groups in the country, say, you know, you're actually not really American?
00:40:43.000Like, you really shouldn't be part of this?
00:40:45.000When you start doing that, you destroy the country.
00:40:47.000You're way more of a threat to our democracy than ISIS is, than Al-Qaeda is.
00:40:51.000I mean, we're such a powerful country.
00:40:53.000We are the only force that can destroy us.
00:41:00.000And we will destroy ourselves through rhetoric.
00:41:03.000It was one of the things that was most disturbing about the debates when Donald Trump said that if Hillary Clinton won, he wouldn't necessarily accept the decision.
00:41:40.000But I really didn't like it when some of my fellow Democrats, after he was elected, and he was elected, right?
00:41:45.000I mean, one way or another, I mean, you can investigate Russia if you want or whatever, but the fact is that he got the most electoral votes and he's our president.
00:41:54.000And I really disliked it when some of my fellow Democrats said, he's not my president.
00:42:05.000And it was equally disgusting when the shoe was on the other foot with Barack Obama and some conservatives started saying that Barack Obama wasn't really American or he wasn't really their president or that he was an enemy of the state,
00:42:21.000that he was a secret Muslim spy who wanted to destroy America.
00:42:31.000Do you think in that case that maybe it's good that we have a guy like Donald Trump in the president because he is kind of like almost like a human hurricane.
00:43:30.000He already is and will be a completely failed president, but he may actually help this country in his failure.
00:43:39.000The GOP, I think, has abandoned all of its core values and core moral principles and seems to have decided that anything that will help the party...
00:43:52.000Is more important than things that will help the country.
00:43:55.000And that is a very, very undemocratic way to think.
00:43:59.000I think if Hillary Clinton had been elected and these things were coming out, the same kind of things about Russia, etc., were coming out, the GOP would be Prosecuting her up to her eyeballs, right?
00:44:12.000So they have a complete double standard.
00:44:13.000And what I'm hoping is that the Trump administration is such a failure that it gets the GOP to reevaluate its policy of partisan politics as a way to win power.
00:44:25.000And I hope it makes the entire country realize that the only way to really win power is through bipartisan politics.
00:44:32.000You can argue all you want, but you have to put the welfare of the country first.
00:44:36.000I read an amazing book called Our Political Selves, I think it was called, that about half of our political opinion is genetically determined.
00:44:50.000So liberalism and conservatism Basically, liberalism is concerned with fairness within the group and equality within the group and acceptance of outsiders for possible inclusion in the group.
00:45:01.000Conservatism is focused on hierarchy and sort of law and order and a suspicion of outsiders.
00:45:07.000And they're very, very powerful evolutionary, adaptive evolutionary reasons for Both of those worldviews.
00:45:14.000And they've done studies with identical twins that were adopted at birth and compared them to fraternal twins.
00:45:22.000And there's a far higher concordance of a political opinion In identical twins that were adopted at birth and put in different kinds of families than with fraternal twins.
00:45:32.000So that means that our political, apparently it's around 50% of our political beliefs are genetically determined, which means that those beliefs had adaptive value in our evolutionary past, which means that the argument, I'm right, you're completely wrong and you shouldn't exist,
00:45:49.000That the country actually needs both parties Very, very badly in that a healthy society has conservatism and liberalism in a kind of dynamic tension where, yes, they might fight, they might argue, but they are roughly proportional in the population,
00:46:05.000and equal weight is given to those two competing values.
00:46:08.000Was it taken into consideration that when these people are adopted, that growing up adopted without your biological parents puts you in a certain mindset automatically?
00:46:15.000And that maybe it wasn't necessarily a genetic thing, but it was a circumstantial or a nurture thing?
00:46:20.000Well, they compared identical twins who were genetically identical, of course, that were adopted to fraternal twins who were adopted.
00:46:56.000So the twins that shared identical DNA were far more likely to have the same political beliefs than the fraternal twins.
00:47:07.000In other words, the genetic component was influencing their beliefs, and the environmental component was not as much compared to the fraternal twins.
00:47:19.000Like, both worldviews clearly were needed to keep our society healthy and strong and safe.
00:47:24.000I mean, a country that was run completely by liberals would get overrun by, you know, the enemy state next door immediately, right?
00:47:31.000A country that was completely run by conservatives would never get overrun by the enemy, but it would be a heartless and brutal society, right?
00:47:40.000Where the poor weren't taken care of and et cetera, et cetera.
00:47:44.000You need both in a kind of dynamic tension.
00:47:46.000So it makes genetic sense that it works that way.
00:47:49.000Just like there would be genetic variations and all sorts of different aspects of people, height and personality and all those different things.
00:47:56.000Yeah, I mean, sort of character traits, right?
00:47:58.000I mean, they're partly genetic and they're partly determined by experience.
00:48:02.000So, you know, courage or whatever, generosity, sensation-seeking, right, is a genetic trait.
00:51:52.000You know, I mean, if you've ever seen like a Floyd Mayweather fight, it is incredibly clear that not only is he ridiculously skillful, but he's got some stupendous speed advantage over most human beings.
00:52:04.000I also, I was watching a fight of his, it was sort of slow-mo, I mean, I sort of slowed it down so I could really watch, and he got hit full in the face by somebody, I mean, right in the face, and his eyes never blinked.
00:52:33.000The amount of training you would have to do to overcome the end, it's one of the more important reasons why it's so critical to learn striking, in particular, at a very young age.
00:52:44.000Some people can pick it up late in life and still be really successful at it, but I don't think you ever really get a real elite boxer that doesn't start training before puberty or around puberty.
00:52:57.000There's just something about the development of the body, like your body growing and maturing with this task, learning how to strike and move and explode with combinations.
00:53:07.000Well, likewise for music and languages.
00:53:09.000If you're not learning that before puberty, you will never be...
00:53:13.000Like, at a top, top, top, world-class level.
00:53:42.000Well, when they start talking to you, man, that's when it gets weird.
00:53:46.000I have a 3, a 20, a 9, and a 7. And what's really fascinating is watching the traits that you know have come directly from DNA. Like, parts of you emerge out of the kid.
00:54:32.000Well, I tell you what it is, is that the dogs that weren't reflexively fearful of something that looked like a snake died more often than it produced offspring.
00:54:41.000And so they'll bark at a crooked stick, too, just to be on the safe side.
00:54:45.000Likewise, humans are scared of heights.
00:55:13.000Yeah, that must have been incredibly common.
00:55:15.000It's just all the different things that people are afraid of, arachnophobia, phytophobia, fear of spiders and snakes, I mean, those are directly related to poison.
00:56:09.000Or do you think maybe is it possible that someone in your past, some ancestor, passed that through the DNA? Well, I mean, we're all predisposed towards being reasonably fearful of those things.
00:58:18.000Yeah, it was totally horrifying to me.
00:58:20.000I mean, it really messed me up for a few days.
00:58:21.000It's just so strange that there's particular things that resonate like that, like particular things, whether it's a snake or a spider.
00:58:30.000Just, I mean, I really wonder if, like, the things that human beings have, like, and that also animals have, these instincts, if we just don't totally understand what memory is.
00:59:10.000I mean, you can obviously watch it at the time, but is it going to be available on Netflix or Apple TV or something like that?
00:59:15.000I haven't even thought that far ahead.
00:59:19.000I mean, it's owned by National Geographic, so I'm sure you'll be able to get it on their website at some point, but it's airing on Sunday.
00:59:26.000And what was your experience doing that?
00:59:28.000Well, you know, I was home writing Tribe, actually, and so I wasn't overseas.
00:59:32.000You couldn't really get into Syria anyway.
00:59:34.000I mean, it was a suicidal thing to do.
00:59:36.000And so what we did, my colleague Nick, the guy who was here earlier, we basically sort of worked the border areas around Syria Yeah.
01:00:07.000Hell on Earth, trying to explain how really quite peaceful democratic protests turn into violent demonstrations and finally into a civil war.
01:00:17.000And of course, it was the repressive government.
01:00:20.000I mean, people protest in the street and they're met with machine gun fire and eventually civilians are going to get some machine guns themselves and fight back and that's how you get a civil war.
01:00:29.000How do you take thousands of hours like that and boil it down to one show?
01:00:36.000I mean, that's what filmmaking is and it's figuring out what's the 1% that goes into the film and how do I structure it?
01:00:43.000How much time does it take to do something?
01:00:45.000We had a really good I mean, this is the first I've made this is my fifth film most of the films I've made it was me and an editor and so another person in the room or whatever This we had a big team and so we had some very very smart young people who are going through all this footage and Categorizing it like here.
01:01:00.000This is a section about you know, this material is about Whatever, escaping ISIS. And this is about trying to find food, you know, whatever.
01:01:07.000They would sort of put it into categories.
01:01:09.000And then I would start to look through some of that material and we could gradually sort of build a structure.
01:01:17.000The situation in Syria seems to be, for someone who just hasn't studied it that much, but just looks at it from the outside, one of the bleaker, darker situations that we have here in the world.
01:01:28.000I mean, it's the tragedy of this generation, I think.
01:01:32.000Over 400,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, have died.
01:01:36.000The equivalent death toll in this country would be, I think, seven or eight million Americans, the sort of equivalent amount of people.
01:01:43.000And half the country, half the Syrian population has been displaced from their homes and millions are outside the country's borders in Europe and even in this country.
01:01:55.000What did you take out of the documentary?
01:01:57.000I mean, it seems like no one has a solution for Syria.
01:02:01.000No, I mean, civil wars are tough that way.
01:02:04.000I think ISIS eventually is going to be defeated on the battlefield.
01:02:10.000They're going to be eradicated, and I hope they are because they're a ghastly, brutal group.
01:02:17.000And Assad, who's killed way more people than ISIS, he just didn't do it publicly like they did.
01:02:28.000He's propped up by Iran and by Russia, and so he's not going anywhere.
01:02:32.000I mean, if you have those two countries as your allies, you're not going anywhere.
01:02:36.000So I think what's going to happen ultimately is that ISIS will be defeated and the country will be partitioned along sectarian lines.
01:02:44.000And eventually there may be a kind of delicate peace.
01:02:50.000It seems like with all those Middle Eastern countries, any country that's run by a brutal dictator, as soon as that dictator's removed, or as soon as somebody dies, there's this massive power vacuum.
01:03:16.000I mean, basically, it's sort of a utilitarian argument from John Stuart Mill.
01:03:21.000Like, what's going to cause the least human suffering or promote the most human happiness?
01:03:25.000And, you know, sometimes I can understand the reasoning behind, look, the guy's a dictator, but we should leave him in place because the alternative is a lot of other innocent people suffering.
01:03:39.000When we remove him and the country collapses.
01:03:41.000This country has already collapsed, so the question is, okay, we make a tentative peace deal with him, we'll leave you in power, we won't try to topple you, but let's stop fighting.
01:03:51.000I mean, I could support that, yeah, personally.
01:05:01.000I like the sort of game of ideas, right?
01:05:03.000Like I like exploring a topic and starting to make sense of it and starting to see connections between things.
01:05:09.000So when I was writing Tribe, when the central thesis of it sort of occurred to me, And all these disparate facts suddenly align themselves in an orderly way.
01:05:20.000And I felt like I'd shown a little bit of light onto the world and shown how it worked.
01:05:25.000Like, that's totally intoxicating to me.
01:05:26.000And likewise, when you're making a documentary, you suddenly start to see themes and structures in the film, in human affairs...
01:05:33.000They sort of come out, and when you work on that level, to me it's incredibly gratifying.
01:05:43.000Because that means that I've now made sense of something, there's a disorderly confusing world, Manage to organize it in an understandable way.
01:05:52.000And that means other people can understand it.
01:05:54.000And then we can have a conversation about how the world works and how people work.
01:05:57.000And that, to me, is the point of journalism.
01:06:00.000It's the point of all intellectual endeavor.
01:06:02.000And to be even a small part of it, to me, is incredibly exciting.
01:06:06.000You nailed it, and you definitely nailed it with the thing I was talking about, how just beginning the first chapter, I had a real urge to get out of the city.
01:06:37.000Or chemical, maybe even a chemical problem.
01:06:40.000Well, you know, I studied anthropology in college, and my understanding of humans is that we are social primates that prefer to live in groups of about 50 people in a challenging environment.
01:07:33.000It was that I was having a healthy reaction to circumstances in society that humans were not adapted for.
01:07:40.000And even that was enough to bring a kind of peace of mind for me.
01:07:46.000I also very consciously and deliberately try to live in places where there is the possibility of a sort of close communal neighborhood.
01:07:54.000I live in a very poor neighborhood in New York City, which for some of the hassles at least has the sort of rich fabric of human connection that you just don't get in wealthy neighborhoods.
01:09:33.000It just seems weird to make the choice to live in a community like that because of those factors.
01:09:38.000Well, my wife lived there and I moved in with her.
01:09:40.000But the reason I was happy to move in with her, one of the reasons I was happy to move in with her is precisely because it wasn't an affluent neighborhood like the kind I grew up in.
01:09:52.000I mean, it's just, I grew up in an affluent suburb and it's just the most boring neighborhood.
01:09:58.000Thing on the planet like it's just deadly to me and and I you know like had I not grown up like that Maybe I'd be living in a neighborhood like that.
01:10:05.000I mean I get it right But I did grow up like that and the one thing that I just cannot survive Is that kind of complacent affluence like it just kills me?
01:10:14.000It's so funny because that's the one thing that people try to achieve when they grow up in that sort of poor community They want to get out and live in that big house the big yard Look at their suicide rates, their addiction rates, their depression rates.
01:10:27.000I mean seriously, if you look at those alcoholism, depression, suicide in affluent neighborhoods, I mean it's astronomical.
01:11:10.000These are totally healthy instincts, of course, right?
01:11:13.000But we didn't evolve in a world where you could actually achieve that 100% of the time.
01:11:19.000I mean, dogs are programmed, and a lot of dog species are programmed, will eat until they've eaten so much that they'll kill themselves eating, right?
01:11:27.000It's because there wasn't enough food.
01:11:28.000Like, the programming to keep eating as long as their food is great if there's a scarcity of food.
01:11:34.000As soon as there's a plenitude of food, that becomes maladaptive and the dog dies.
01:11:38.000Likewise, people put fat on very easily because in a harsh environment with not much food, you have to be able to put fat on easily or you'll die.
01:11:47.000Now, the reason there's so many obese people is because we have that impulse to eat and eat and eat.
01:11:54.000And the food's there to do it with, and we don't have a mechanism for stopping it.
01:11:58.000And so that's why there's so many fat people.
01:12:03.000But our taste for sugar and for fat is programmed by evolution, right?
01:12:09.000Because there wasn't much of those things.
01:12:10.000So now you can have as much as you want, and suddenly people weigh 350 pounds, right?
01:12:14.000I mean, it's evolutionary programming run amok in a world where there's too much of something that is very good but was very scarce.
01:12:22.000You highlight some really profound issues with culture in your book, but I would wonder how many people come up to you after they've read it and go, what do I do?
01:12:31.000Like, you're right, you're right, but what do I do?
01:12:34.000I mean, here I am, I'm this guy, I have this house, I have a mortgage, I have kids, I have a job that's good, and I don't want to leave it, but what do I do?
01:12:46.000I mean, you know, it's a question if you can't have it all.
01:12:51.000And what I would say to them is, sell your house, sell your car if you can, move into a community where you have to be inter-reliant with the people around you, and you have to interact with them every day.
01:14:03.000So you, regardless of how much money you would make, you would always move into a neighborhood where people are relying upon each other and stay tight to each other?
01:15:16.000Those kind of material possessions also, I mean, again, evolution, right?
01:15:22.000Particularly for males in the society, if you control resources, you have a reproductive advantage over males that don't control resources, and girls will like you better, right?
01:15:32.000So when you're an 18-year-old boy, the instinct to get a car, to get a boat, maybe one day to get a private airplane, whatever, that instinct has huge...
01:15:44.000Evolutionary advantage because it gives you access to women, right?
01:15:47.000Not all women, but enough so that it's a great strategy for meeting girls, right?
01:15:51.000The problem is that once you're sort of further on in your life and you have children, you have a family, If you don't have a community, and what you have instead is a huge lawn, an overpowered boat,
01:16:08.000and a ridiculously expensive car, you have taken things that were a definite reproductive advantage at 18, and you have dragged them into midlife, where instead of making you feel good,
01:16:24.000In my opinion, that's what happens to those guys.
01:16:27.000So it's not that those things are a stupid idea at an earlier point in your life, but definitely when you're 50 years old, again, I'm sure if you did the proper study, you could make a correlation between those kinds of material possession and alcohol abuse,
01:16:46.000I wonder if that's the case with like rappers and people that grow up in these poor black communities that go on to have insane material wealth.
01:16:55.000I've always been fascinated by the ridiculous hip-hop culture of just giant houses and 50 cars and throwing money up into the air and just this celebration of excess coming from a place of nothing and having this deep desire to achieve all those things that seemed unattainable.
01:17:13.000Look, I mean, I think athletes have the same problem, too.
01:17:15.000You know, and particularly, I mean, they have the fraternity of their team until they retire.
01:17:20.000And apparently, retired athletes, professional athletes, are at real risk of depression.
01:17:25.000And, I mean, listen, I met a young woman who had survived cancer, and she said to me rather sheepishly, she said, you know, when I was six, she was on a cancer ward, and she knew all the other cancer sufferers on the ward.
01:17:39.000And her family and basically her tribe rallied around her.
01:17:41.000She didn't know if she was going to survive.
01:17:43.000She was going chemo and all that awful, awful stuff.
01:17:45.000And she looked at me sheepishly and said, I survived and now I miss being sick.
01:17:51.000She missed the community of cancer sufferers on that ward and her own community that rallied around her.
01:18:08.000Well, there's a struggle that's missing for sure.
01:18:11.000You know, in my own life, I'm a very addictive person.
01:18:15.000I have an addictive personality, and I've found a lot of happiness in martial arts.
01:18:21.000And one of the things about martial arts, particularly in jiu-jitsu, because it's one of the rare martial arts that you could practice going 100% and not really hurt each other too much because you're not hitting each other.
01:18:32.000You're just choking each other and tapping each other out and stuff.
01:18:35.000But there's a camaraderie and a bond between people that choke each other all the time that you just don't see with other men or I don't see.
01:19:46.000You were judged in there not for whether you're young and black and poor or wealthy and affluent and white or whatever, but how you act in the gym.
01:19:55.000And there's no prejudice that I can see against the young black kids that are in there, but there's also no prejudice against the wealthy white guys.
01:20:01.000As long as you leave it at the street...
01:20:04.000You're whoever you are in that space, and you get all the respect you want if you act well.
01:20:09.000And that is the deep egalitarianism of a tribal society.
01:20:12.000You're judged by how you act, and that's it.
01:20:15.000That's the same thing with jiu-jitsu schools.
01:20:17.000You're judged by your effort and how well you can perform on the mats.
01:21:05.000But I was in a lot of psychic pain and I needed it.
01:21:09.000Yeah, I really feel like, especially physical struggle, I mean, there's a lot of people that are averse to exercise, and I'm like, I can't stress it enough.
01:21:18.000I think the body needs physical struggle.
01:21:20.000I think if you don't, I think there's an overflow of energy and stress that's unmanaged, and it manifests itself in a very physical way.
01:21:28.000There was a study that I read of, I mean, there are a few hunter-gatherer societies that are still in existence, and The average amount of physical activity in subsistence-level hunter-gatherer societies, which of course is our evolutionary past, I mean that's what we are designed to do,
01:21:45.000is something like two hours of hard walking per day.
01:21:50.000On average, men and women moved vigorously for two hours a day, usually walking quickly.
01:21:57.000That's what our bodies are designed for, and if we do that, we're tuned up at that level.
01:22:04.000Our mind feels good, our bodies feel good.
01:22:06.000And if you don't do that, I mean, you can lay around all day, but you will experience a psychological deficit and a physical deficit.
01:22:17.000Yeah, I think that, I mean, there's no way to make people do it.
01:22:22.000But I think if you could give people advice, that would be one of the big ones.
01:22:25.000And, you know, in Western society, the older you get, the more money you tend to have and the more sedentary you are.
01:22:32.000And there's a corresponding decline in testosterone levels in males, right?
01:22:36.000What they found in these very mobile physical societies is that testosterone levels in males really didn't decline until the 70s.
01:22:45.000I mean, it declined slowly, but it didn't go off a cliff like it does in our society at 35 or whatever it is.
01:22:50.000Like, it was a gradual decline, and if there was a cliff, it was in the mid-70s.
01:22:54.000And that's because, I mean, the theory was that it was because that constant, intense physical activity, testosterone allows for it, but that activity actually keeps those levels high.
01:23:06.000I mean, it's a symbiotic relationship.
01:23:10.000I mean, one of the things that they prescribe to middle-aged men is sprints, you know, run up hills, like carry heavy things, do squats, do things that stimulate your entire body.