The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1034 - Sebastian Junger

00:00:02.000 Four, three, two...

00:00:09.000 Welcome back, man.

00:00:10.000 Hey, thank you.

00:00:11.000 Good to be here.

00:00:11.000 Great to see you again.

00:00:12.000 Yeah, I like your new spot.

00:00:14.000 Thank you.

00:00:14.000 Thank you very much, man.

00:00:15.000 You have a real flip phone.

00:00:16.000 I do have a real flip phone.

00:00:18.000 And you said that you didn't go back to it.

00:00:20.000 You never left.

00:00:21.000 I never left her.

00:00:22.000 So you never went like iPhone, Android, never?

00:00:25.000 No.

00:00:25.000 No, I never even thought about it.

00:00:27.000 Never even thought about it?

00:00:28.000 No.

00:00:29.000 You see people taking pictures and using apps.

00:00:31.000 Nothing?

00:00:32.000 Nothing.

00:00:32.000 I don't need the apps.

00:00:34.000 I'm good.

00:00:36.000 There's no draw at all?

00:00:38.000 Using the internet?

00:00:39.000 Answering email?

00:00:40.000 I have a laptop at home and I do access the internet, yes.

00:00:45.000 But when you're out, you don't want to mess with it.

00:00:48.000 No, when I'm out, I want to be out.

00:00:50.000 I'm in the world, you know?

00:00:51.000 Right.

00:00:52.000 And if you're looking at your phone, you're not in the world, and so you don't get either.

00:00:55.000 You don't get either thing.

00:00:56.000 You get along very well with my friend Ari. 0.99

00:00:58.000 He went back to a flip phone, and he looks disdainfully, sort of like former alcoholics look at everybody with a drink, like, there's no way you could just enjoy one drink, you loser. 0.99

00:01:09.000 Right. 0.98

00:01:09.000 You know that? 0.98

00:01:10.000 Right.

00:01:10.000 Yeah, no, I... I just look around at this.

00:01:15.000 I mean, I'm an anthropologist, and I'm interested in human behavior, and I look at the behavior, like literally the physical behavior of people with smartphones, and it looks antisocial and unhappy and anxious, and I don't want to look like that, and I don't want to feel like I think those people feel.

00:01:32.000 Wow, that's deep.

00:01:33.000 I'm a junkie.

00:01:35.000 You know, it's really interesting because I was at a restaurant the other day and I was looking around and literally everyone in the restaurant was looking at their phone.

00:01:42.000 No one was talking to anybody.

00:01:43.000 And I was thinking, what if there was a drug that did that?

00:01:46.000 What if there was a drug that didn't kill you, but it just sucked up all your time and you just stared blankly at your hand and did everything that you do while you're using a phone?

00:01:55.000 People would be terrified.

00:01:56.000 Like, you're staring at your hand and crashing into cars.

00:01:59.000 You're staring at your hand and walking into poles.

00:02:02.000 Yeah.

00:02:02.000 I mean, there is a drug.

00:02:03.000 It's that.

00:02:04.000 It's social media.

00:02:05.000 I mean, I think the big lie of our generation is the phrase social media.

00:02:09.000 It really isn't.

00:02:09.000 It's anti-social media.

00:02:11.000 And it has a lot of uses and whatever, but it's not social in any human sense.

00:02:15.000 And if you look at suicide rates, depression rates, PTSD rates, anxiety rates, They're doing nothing but going up in our society.

00:02:25.000 Mass shootings, you know, just something tragic just happened yesterday.

00:02:30.000 All those things, they're indicators of something and they're all going up in our society despite the fact that we're a very wealthy, powerful, relatively peaceful society.

00:02:38.000 Like something's going on.

00:02:39.000 I can't prove that it's, you know, the internet or social media or whatever.

00:02:43.000 I mean, obviously, but the fact that those things are happening at the same time Does make me wonder that these new devices certainly don't bring happiness, because the numbers are going in the wrong direction.

00:02:54.000 Well, I don't think they're designed to bring happiness, but they're certainly designed to give you access to information.

00:02:59.000 Perhaps maybe with some discipline, they can be used in some sort of a way that benefits us and not...

00:03:05.000 Well, yeah.

00:03:05.000 I mean, all that information is available on your laptop at your desk at home.

00:03:09.000 Right.

00:03:09.000 I mean, I think the problem is when people want to be socially connected constantly, no matter what they're doing.

00:03:19.000 And that, I think, keeps people from actually fully experiencing whatever they're actually doing.

00:03:25.000 I think there's definitely some truth to that, but I do like the fact that I can ask my phone questions.

00:03:30.000 Like, if I don't know anything, then I can ask.

00:03:32.000 There's a new feature on this Google Pixel where you squeeze the side of it, and the Google Assistant comes up, and you can ask it questions.

00:03:39.000 You squeeze it and ask it questions. 0.99

00:03:40.000 I mean, that's some space-age shit, man. 0.99

00:03:43.000 Yeah, or it's downright creepy. 0.99

00:03:45.000 I mean, you know, that's how you look at it.

00:03:47.000 I mean, you know, I get it.

00:03:49.000 Like, I mean, you have all of human knowledge in your front pocket.

00:03:52.000 Yeah.

00:03:53.000 Accessible at every moment.

00:03:54.000 Like, I do understand the power of it and the appeal of it.

00:03:58.000 I'm not saying there aren't great things about it.

00:04:00.000 Of course there are.

00:04:02.000 It's just, for me, the downside outweighs the upside.

00:04:05.000 For other people, I guess it doesn't.

00:04:06.000 But if you look, again, if you look at mental health statistics in this country, we're doing something wrong because they're all going in the wrong direction.

00:04:13.000 Yeah.

00:04:29.000 I agree with you.

00:04:29.000 Accentuates that problem.

00:04:31.000 I mean, we were talking the other day about, we were at the airport, we were waiting to fly home, and there was some girl, and she was talking, we were just eavesdropping, and she was talking about, like, The Amazing Race, and how she, you know, oh, this show's so boring now, and I can't wait to...

00:04:46.000 And I'm going to eat this, and then I'm going to eat that, and I'm supposed to get a raise at work.

00:04:51.000 It's like all nonsense, non-engaging, not interesting.

00:04:55.000 There's no real life to anything she's talking about.

00:04:58.000 This is most of our country, or a large part of our country.

00:05:03.000 Absolutely.

00:05:04.000 I mean, the thing about social media is that it sort of weaponizes blandness.

00:05:08.000 It gives people a platform for the most mundane, uninteresting, Because they have to constantly be producing some kind of output of communication.

00:05:21.000 Well, and if not producing it, certainly absorbing it, right?

00:05:25.000 Yeah, we're both.

00:05:25.000 I always feel like I'm mining when I'm on Twitter.

00:05:28.000 Like, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. 0.97

00:05:31.000 Oh, rape. 1.00

00:05:32.000 Oh, murder. 0.94

00:05:33.000 Oh, look at this.

00:05:35.000 The monkey found.

00:05:36.000 Oh.

00:05:37.000 I mean, there's other people you could have on the show that could speak more intelligently to this, but I know that...

00:05:42.000 I mean, I've heard that...

00:05:44.000 Risk of suicide and Facebook are correlated.

00:05:49.000 In other words, people that are on Facebook and social media, they are at an increased risk of depression and thoughts of suicide.

00:05:56.000 And that's terrifying.

00:05:58.000 Do you think that that's correlation equals causation though?

00:06:01.000 You know what I mean?

00:06:01.000 Like do you think that people on Facebook all the time are doing that because they're already depressed?

00:06:06.000 Well, right.

00:06:06.000 I mean, that's the question.

00:06:08.000 But the correlation means we have to look at something more closely.

00:06:12.000 Anxiety rates in teenagers have skyrocketed.

00:06:16.000 Anxiety partly comes from a sort of painful self-awareness.

00:06:19.000 And, of course, that's amplified by social media because you can never escape the opinions of your peers.

00:06:23.000 I mean, that's crippling to people.

00:06:25.000 I mean, you know, I wasn't the most popular kid in class by a long shot.

00:06:28.000 I mean, when I came home, whatever my issues were were on hold until, you know, when I was a kid in high school.

00:06:35.000 Those issues are on hold until 8am the next morning, right?

00:06:37.000 You got a 12 hour break from your problems and now you don't and it's really tough on kids.

00:06:41.000 Yeah.

00:06:42.000 I could only imagine growing up today.

00:06:45.000 You know, I think we got very lucky that we experienced the internet in adulthood.

00:06:50.000 You know, for me, I think I was 27 the first time I ever got online.

00:06:55.000 And that's nice.

00:06:57.000 And no one knew what online was back then.

00:06:59.000 You weren't leaving any traces.

00:07:00.000 You were just going out and looking at stuff.

00:07:02.000 Yeah.

00:07:03.000 That's right.

00:07:04.000 That's right.

00:07:05.000 Yeah, I was...

00:07:05.000 How old was I? I was about 36. I remember a girl asked me, she said, you ever logged on?

00:07:12.000 And I was like, logged on?

00:07:13.000 Logged on on what?

00:07:15.000 She had to explain to me what that meant.

00:07:17.000 And then I literally said to her, oh, that's never going to catch on.

00:07:20.000 Come on.

00:07:21.000 Really?

00:07:22.000 Yeah.

00:07:22.000 Wow.

00:07:23.000 Isn't that what they said about the first computers?

00:07:26.000 That was one of IBM's initial reactions to the idea of the personal computer.

00:07:32.000 I think that's the reaction to the first of everything, except maybe the bow and arrow.

00:07:36.000 I mean, when they invented the bow and arrow, everyone was like, no, that is going to catch on.

00:07:39.000 That is cool, right?

00:07:40.000 But everything else, I think that's skepticism.

00:07:43.000 We don't need anything more.

00:07:44.000 We're good.

00:07:45.000 And then you realize, I mean, that's the amazing thing about the human mind, is that we invent this stuff.

00:07:50.000 And it doesn't mean that it's good.

00:07:52.000 I mean, we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to live in a very different environment than we live now.

00:07:56.000 So these things that we invent, it doesn't mean...

00:07:59.000 That they're sort of psychologically good for us, but they definitely are incredible.

00:08:03.000 I mean, they're definitely amazing things.

00:08:05.000 Yeah, I don't think that necessarily they're good for us, but I don't think...

00:08:08.000 This is going to sound weird, but I don't even think they're necessarily designed for us.

00:08:12.000 I think they're designed for the future.

00:08:14.000 And I don't even think it's a design.

00:08:16.000 I just think that all things move in an ever more complex direction and that whatever a person is now is not going to be the same thing a thousand years from now or a hundred years from now even.

00:08:26.000 I think there's going to be some sort of symbiotic We're good to go.

00:08:48.000 Is it for human fulfilled lives or is it for the human race as an entity to produce the highest technological achievements and scientific insights?

00:08:56.000 I don't have a vote either way, but that does sort of seem to be the question.

00:09:01.000 And that technology, I mean, we know does not lead to fulfillment and happiness, but it does lead to scientific insight and to, you know, incredible...

00:09:10.000 I mean, a profound understanding of how the universe works in a physical sense.

00:09:14.000 Yeah.

00:09:15.000 I wonder if what we're doing is just being caught up in the momentum of all this innovation and instead of, like, using discipline or using some sort of rational, objective analysis of, like, what it takes to be happy and then maybe...

00:09:32.000 Pushing some of that stuff aside and engaging in actual physical activities, going out and doing things and making that almost like a prescription.

00:09:40.000 Like, hey, let's look at your daily chart.

00:09:42.000 Hey, you didn't get enough vitamins, buddy.

00:09:44.000 And hey, you didn't get enough activity.

00:09:46.000 You need that in order to feel right, to feel balanced.

00:09:52.000 Right.

00:09:53.000 And if feeling right is the point of existence, then Iphones are probably not a good development.

00:09:58.000 If the exchange of data, if the exchange of information is the point, then they're a great innovation.

00:10:05.000 So it really depends on what we're all here for.

00:10:07.000 I was in San Francisco with my wife and we were walking behind these two kids who were talking about robots.

00:10:14.000 And they were sort of geek kids that were sort of in the know about all this stuff.

00:10:18.000 And one guy was saying, you know, they're taking over.

00:10:20.000 In 50 years, humans are going to be completely unnecessary.

00:10:25.000 And I said to my wife, you know, we always were unnecessary.

00:10:29.000 Like none of this had to happen.

00:10:30.000 It's not like the world needs human beings to exist and for some purpose, right?

00:10:34.000 We are here.

00:10:36.000 But we didn't have to be here.

00:10:38.000 And so if robots replace us, we go right back to where we would have been if we hadn't evolved.

00:10:46.000 And it was just a funny way of thinking about it.

00:10:48.000 Like none of this is actually necessary.

00:10:49.000 It doesn't have to be happening.

00:10:51.000 No, it certainly doesn't.

00:10:52.000 I mean, look, if we are finite life forms, if you're only going to be lived to be, you know, if you're lucky, 90 years, and your health's going to fail and then you're going to die, what should be our goal is to feel good, right?

00:11:05.000 To have community and relationship.

00:11:07.000 And that's a big part of that book, Tribe.

00:11:09.000 Your book's fantastic, by the way.

00:11:11.000 I've read it twice since I read it again.

00:11:13.000 I read it before, and then I read it again since our first podcast.

00:11:17.000 Oh, thank you very much.

00:11:18.000 Yeah, I've been getting a lot of – I keep getting a lot of good responses to it.

00:11:22.000 And I think partly – I mean whether you're a Democrat or Republican, this is a pretty unsettling time in this country.

00:11:28.000 And I think people are coming to the book a little bit just partly because they're wondering what is the glue that holds us all together and is there?

00:11:37.000 Does that exist still?

00:11:38.000 I mean I think there's a real question in people's minds about what is it that binds us together.

00:11:42.000 Well, there certainly is and you really covered a lot of the – Sort of just not commonly discussed aspects of it.

00:11:51.000 Like the need for real community.

00:11:55.000 The need to have something on the line.

00:12:00.000 The need to be in situations where there's real consequences.

00:12:05.000 It seems that this is part of the glue that holds us together.

00:12:09.000 Well, I mean the thing about technology is it buffers us from real consequences in the physical world, which is what's great about it, right?

00:12:16.000 But the downside is that as humans get buffered from consequences, they need each other less and less in order to survive.

00:12:23.000 So now it's sort of modern Homo sapiens in a suburban house with an iPhone and a garage door opener and all that stuff.

00:12:30.000 You know, you get a paycheck at work and you don't need your neighbors, you know, to help you gather food or hunt food or defend yourself from the gang from the other neighborhood.

00:12:39.000 I mean, it all kind of gets taken care of, which is a great liberation from your neighbors, from your community.

00:12:46.000 But it deprives you of that essential...

00:12:54.000 Yeah.

00:13:11.000 Yeah, I think that lack of community is a very confusing thing when you see most people just sliding into their garage and shutting the door or going into their house and they don't even know their neighbors.

00:13:21.000 That's really highlighted in your book, how alien that is to the human experience until fairly recently.

00:13:27.000 This idea of living in these...

00:13:30.000 I was in New York City this past weekend and this enormous apartment...

00:13:34.000 My friend Jim was talking about this.

00:13:37.000 Jim Norton lives in this enormous apartment building.

00:13:39.000 He goes, I don't know anybody there.

00:13:40.000 He goes, I live in a house, a building essentially, a house with a thousand people.

00:13:45.000 I don't know any of them.

00:13:46.000 Yeah, and listen, I mean, I live in a little tenement building, but it's the same idea, these little cubby holes we all live in.

00:13:52.000 But, you know, I got to say, and I grew up in a suburb, but I got to say, at least in the building I live in, I'm in the Lower East Side.

00:13:58.000 At least in the building I live in, I run into people on the landing and the staircase.

00:14:01.000 There's no elevator in the staircase.

00:14:03.000 And you get to know them a little bit.

00:14:05.000 The problem with the suburbs is that everything's a stone – everyone's a stone's throw away behind a big hedge.

00:14:10.000 And you don't have to share an elevator with anyone.

00:14:14.000 You can be totally isolated.

00:14:16.000 And I grew up in that environment.

00:14:18.000 It was crushing.

00:14:19.000 And I was – in a material sense, I was lucky.

00:14:22.000 We were an affluent family.

00:14:24.000 But I was not lucky in any human sense.

00:14:26.000 That's so fascinating.

00:14:27.000 You say it was crushing to live the American dream.

00:14:30.000 I mean, a lot of people's ideas, the American dream is living in a nice, quiet suburb.

00:14:35.000 Yeah, and listen, there's a lot that's dreamlike about it, but the data will tell you that people in those situations are not happy. 0.68

00:14:46.000 The metrics by which we measure human fulfillment, human happiness, mental health, they suck in the suburbs.

00:14:54.000 And generally in modern society, as affluence goes up in society, the suicide rate goes up.

00:15:01.000 The depression rate, PTSD rate, all that stuff goes up with affluence.

00:15:07.000 Yeah, I've noticed that in some of the circles that I'm hanging around with now because of nice people, but the children of my children, my children's friends' parents.

00:15:21.000 So I'm interacting with these people that I don't know from work, I don't know from social circles, and most of them are great, but a lot of them Everyone's

00:15:52.000 driving a Mercedes.

00:15:54.000 Everyone's living in a gated community.

00:15:56.000 Everybody's It's all smooth edges and nerfed corners.

00:16:02.000 Everything is very soft and easy, and the big appeal seems to be the newest objects.

00:16:10.000 Chase the newest objects.

00:16:12.000 And it's a really well-known phenomenon.

00:16:14.000 If you introduce a disaster into that environment, if you introduce the blitz in London or an earthquake or what have you, a flood, a tidal wave, a war...

00:16:25.000 People wake up out of their dream.

00:16:26.000 I mean they're in a kind of dream state and for some people that's induced by pills and some people it's just induced by isolation.

00:16:35.000 But they're in a kind of dream state where they're not part of society in a meaningful way.

00:16:41.000 A catastrophe wakes them up out of that.

00:16:44.000 And people – I mean over and over again you can hear testimony of people saying, well, I really miss those days, the days after the earthquake, during the blitz.

00:16:52.000 I mean from generation after generation that goes through their things, right, their tough things, those days are missed.

00:16:59.000 And they're missed because people – the thing they actually like most is being an essential part of a small group that is struggling to survive.

00:17:06.000 Like that is the human – We're good to go.

00:17:29.000 In the face of hardship and danger, we're the descendants of those people inevitably.

00:17:32.000 And because the people that didn't act well didn't survive as well, right?

00:17:37.000 They didn't pass on their genes.

00:17:39.000 And so that's one of the things we're missing.

00:17:42.000 And the big trick is, I mean, I'm not saying burn down the suburbs, ban the car, and live in a lean-to.

00:17:46.000 I mean, no one would say that.

00:17:48.000 Huge benefits to this society, too.

00:17:51.000 The trick is, how can we have that close communal connection that buffers us from mental health problems, that makes us feel meaningful and fulfilled?

00:18:00.000 How can we have that and have the benefits of modern society?

00:18:05.000 Can we do both?

00:18:07.000 And I think that's the big challenge.

00:18:10.000 What I see in America, I love this country, but what I see in my lifetime, I mean, when I grew up, we didn't have mass shootings.

00:18:17.000 I mean, you know, like that didn't happen.

00:18:19.000 You go into a church with a machine gun and kill as many people as you can. 0.97

00:18:23.000 That just didn't happen. 0.98

00:18:24.000 What is going on?

00:18:25.000 I mean to me, it's a country in kind of – I mean those things are all a symptom of a country that's in the kind of psychic pain.

00:18:33.000 All the people on their iPhones, I sort of get it but also it makes me think you're anxious.

00:18:39.000 Like you're so anxious that you can't bear not to look at your feed for more than 20 seconds.

00:18:43.000 Well, it's an addiction, for sure.

00:18:45.000 I mean, you're literally getting dopamine shots every time you check your feed.

00:18:50.000 And they're very small.

00:18:52.000 It's a trickle.

00:18:54.000 It's not really worth it.

00:18:55.000 You don't get any real good feeling, very rarely.

00:18:58.000 It's like fast food.

00:18:59.000 At the end of it, you go to the drive-in, get your cheeseburger and fries and shake or whatever.

00:19:06.000 Afterwards, you're full, but you didn't get any nutrients.

00:19:09.000 And social media is the same way.

00:19:10.000 You're sort of socially full.

00:19:12.000 But actually, it's all calories.

00:19:14.000 There's no nutrition.

00:19:15.000 I mean, there's nothing to sustain you out of that.

00:19:18.000 Well, I've found, for me personally, that people get a lot of fulfillment out of tribes, for lack of a better word, of like-minded people doing similar things that are difficult.

00:19:30.000 Absolutely.

00:19:31.000 Like, I see it amongst, like, rock climbers.

00:19:33.000 A lot of rock climbers, they find, like, real community in other rock climbers, and runners get it.

00:19:40.000 Jiu-jitsu, it's huge in the jiu-jitsu community.

00:19:42.000 Of course, of course.

00:19:43.000 You know, and I experienced it in a deep way the first time I ever went hunting.

00:19:49.000 Because hunting was almost like I had a wall that I didn't know there was a door on it.

00:19:54.000 And I opened up the door and, oh, there's a whole new area back here.

00:19:57.000 Your DNA goes, oh, we know what to do with this.

00:20:01.000 We're hunting now.

00:20:02.000 And you feel like, wow, this is crazy.

00:20:05.000 This is lighting up parts of my brain or parts of my genetics.

00:20:10.000 Yeah.

00:20:11.000 Listen, I went through that same door when I started boxing.

00:20:14.000 I mean, I started late in life.

00:20:15.000 I was 50. I was going through a big life change.

00:20:17.000 My first marriage ended and I needed something a little different.

00:20:21.000 And I think one of the things that really works for people is a situation where they're evaluated differently.

00:20:30.000 For their behavior rather than for how and where they were born.

00:20:34.000 Yes.

00:20:35.000 Or how much money they have.

00:20:37.000 Right.

00:20:37.000 Which is a function to some degree of how you were born, where you were born.

00:20:44.000 Yeah, but so in high school you were evaluated for the family you come from, for how you look, for all that stuff.

00:20:50.000 You don't have control over any of that stuff.

00:20:52.000 But in the boxing ring, out hunting, whatever, there's a million things like this.

00:20:57.000 You're evaluated by your peers for your conduct and that you have complete control over.

00:21:02.000 Soldiers are the same way.

00:21:03.000 You know, and I was with this platoon in combat off and on for a year in eastern Afghanistan.

00:21:07.000 Those guys didn't care if you were good-looking or bad-looking, if your dad was in prison or not. 0.99

00:21:11.000 They just didn't give a shit, right? 0.99

00:21:13.000 What they cared is how you acted in that situation and would you put the group, the welfare of the group, ahead of your own welfare? 0.99

00:21:23.000 And there was this basic human question.

00:21:26.000 Is the group more important to you than you are to you?

00:21:28.000 And if we all answer that question with a yes, then we're good.

00:21:56.000 Being freed from those things you're not responsible for and are not judged for, that is a huge liberation and it really makes people feel close to each other.

00:22:06.000 Yeah, so people need, and it's also, do you think that a lot of what's going on today is just the fact that I don't think people are supposed to work in an office all day.

00:22:15.000 I think it's probably bad for your biology.

00:22:18.000 I think it's sitting in a chair all day is terrible for you.

00:22:21.000 I think staring at a computer all day is terrible for you.

00:22:24.000 All these things that people do are just counter to, they're contrary to what your body was designed for.

00:22:31.000 And that must cause a lot of depression and anxiety in people.

00:22:36.000 Yeah, I mean, if you want to know what we were evolved for, you can look at modern-day hunter-gatherers, who more or less, anthropologists agree, represent our evolutionary past, and you'll find that...

00:22:49.000 There's at least two hours of pretty vigorous movement every day, you know, fast walking basically.

00:22:54.000 Two hours a day by virtually everyone in the community.

00:22:59.000 You are almost never out of contact with – I mean out of physical proximity with other people that you know extremely well.

00:23:09.000 There is about four or five hours a day devoted to survival.

00:23:13.000 Food gathering, that kind of thing.

00:23:15.000 We work eight, ten hours a day, right?

00:23:17.000 The most, quote, primitive hunter-gatherers in some of the harshest environments in the world spend around four hours a day surviving.

00:23:23.000 But survival is a group endeavor.

00:23:26.000 It brings everyone together.

00:23:27.000 Everyone's needed.

00:23:29.000 High protein, no processed foods, obviously.

00:23:34.000 I mean, the diet, obviously, it's a very pure diet.

00:23:37.000 And people who live like that have extraordinarily good health.

00:23:42.000 And if they survive You know, childbirth in those first early years often live into their 70s, 80s to 90. I mean, you know, basically live as long as Westerners do with no medical intervention. 0.78

00:23:55.000 I mean, it's pretty extraordinary.

00:23:56.000 That is extraordinary when you think about it.

00:23:58.000 I saw an article, and I didn't read the article, but the headline was something along the lines of, it was talking about artificial intelligence, and it was whether or not the rise of artificial intelligence will even out inequality.

00:24:15.000 And I remember looking at that and went, boy, that's like giving in to the hive mind.

00:24:21.000 Like, artificial intelligence is going to cure all the woes of the world.

00:24:25.000 Like, let the computer think for you, and everything's going to be even.

00:24:28.000 And you know, now that I'm thinking about it, the two guys we were walking behind in San Francisco, it wasn't robots, it was artificial intelligence they were talking about.

00:24:34.000 I mean, obviously they're connected.

00:24:37.000 But yeah, it was AI. I mean, AI is either the final blossoming of the human mind or it's the end.

00:24:45.000 I don't think anyone knows which it is.

00:24:47.000 It could easily be the end.

00:24:48.000 I've been thinking for the last few years that we're some sort of electronic caterpillar that's giving birth to some new butterfly.

00:24:56.000 And what we're doing is we're the biological thing that makes the electronic thing.

00:25:01.000 And that the electronic thing is going to go, thanks, we got it now.

00:25:05.000 I mean, we assume that...

00:25:08.000 The things that we hold dear, like emotions and camaraderie and this feeling that we have of community, that that's important.

00:25:15.000 But if we live and we die, it's important to us while we're alive.

00:25:21.000 But if we didn't exist, is it important to the universe?

00:25:26.000 Is it important to the planet?

00:25:28.000 Not necessarily.

00:25:29.000 It's just important as a human.

00:25:31.000 My understanding of physics is that it was It's incalculably unlikely that the universe would exist and that life would start on this particular planet or on any planet.

00:25:41.000 That it was extremely unlikely.

00:25:43.000 That even the universe would exist.

00:25:45.000 Yeah.

00:25:46.000 And so it's hard to say that anything would be important to a system that – That statistically shouldn't have happened and that doesn't have a conscious and moral mind behind it.

00:26:03.000 Like, I mean, no, of course we're not important.

00:26:04.000 I mean, if we were sitting on the moon and you watched a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States that obliterated civilization, if you were sitting on the moon, you'd barely be able to see it.

00:26:14.000 You would barely notice anything happened.

00:26:16.000 Yeah.

00:26:16.000 Right?

00:26:17.000 That's the moon.

00:26:17.000 And that's pretty close.

00:26:18.000 Of course it doesn't matter.

00:26:19.000 Yeah.

00:26:19.000 So keep in mind that all those emotions, everything we are, We're good to go.

00:26:52.000 And so those emotions, we find them meaningful, but actually what they are is they helped us survive.

00:27:00.000 And now we have so altered our circumstances that survival is no longer a question.

00:27:07.000 And so what do we do with those feelings?

00:27:09.000 What do we do with those capacities, the ability to hunt, the dopamine that you get from hitting a target?

00:27:15.000 I mean, teenage boys will sit in a basement for hours, days, years playing video games.

00:27:21.000 They're training for hunting, right?

00:27:23.000 They're training for hunting in war and they're getting rewarded with dopamine, which is exactly what should have been happening for 500,000 years.

00:27:30.000 And now there's nothing to hunt, nothing to fight.

00:27:32.000 They're still doing the behavior as they should because they're wired for it but there's no useful purpose for it and they're making themselves irrelevant.

00:27:41.000 They're human casualties of this technology and I find it really tragic.

00:27:46.000 Trevor Burrus Are they more irrelevant than someone who plays sports?

00:27:51.000 I mean, I think our relevance comes from our relationship with our community and with society.

00:27:57.000 Right.

00:27:57.000 And I mean, at least if you play sports, you're part of the human community.

00:28:03.000 And when you're playing a video game by yourself, you're really not.

00:28:07.000 Right.

00:28:07.000 By yourself.

00:28:08.000 But a lot of kids, what they're doing now is they're playing these online games.

00:28:12.000 They're playing against other people.

00:28:13.000 They talk to each other online.

00:28:15.000 They have, like, headsets.

00:28:16.000 I mean, esports is a big, growing thing.

00:28:21.000 And it's a fascinating thing because it's also sort of based on your ability to perform.

00:28:28.000 You know, the ones who are the heroes are the ones who are like...

00:28:31.000 When I was playing Quake, there was this dude named Fatality was his name.

00:28:36.000 He'd just kill everybody.

00:28:37.000 He was awesome.

00:28:38.000 But he was the king because he was just the best at the game.

00:28:44.000 So in the community of people that were only judged by their performance, he had risen to this very high level.

00:28:50.000 But it was a community.

00:28:52.000 Well, you know, if you look at humans, you look at chimpanzees, we clearly need the proximity of others, like the physical proximity of others.

00:28:58.000 So, I mean, the only way I can evaluate that is to say that's awesome training for hunting in war.

00:29:03.000 Right.

00:29:04.000 And the military does use those games to train their soldiers.

00:29:07.000 And so I get it.

00:29:09.000 It's effective.

00:29:10.000 What I would do is look at suicide and depression rates in gamers and see are they above or below the national average for that age group.

00:29:16.000 And if they're above, then there's a problem.

00:29:20.000 Yeah.

00:29:21.000 Either depressive people are seeking that as a refuge or that activity makes people withdrawn and depressed.

00:29:27.000 Either way, it's a problem that needs to be solved.

00:29:29.000 I have no idea what the data is, but that's where I would look.

00:29:32.000 Now, when you're researching all this data and you're putting together a book like Tribe and you're putting it out, are you thinking to yourself that you have That it's not just an interesting study on human behavior, but it's also probably important for people to read,

00:29:48.000 to kind of get an understanding, and to get an understanding of what it is that's causing people to have all this depression and anxiety, that maybe this is something that needs to be said.

00:30:00.000 I mean any – that's a categorical statement I shouldn't make.

00:30:04.000 But a lot of authors when they write books, it's their firm conviction that their book needs to be read by the public and that it will help the public in some way, right?

00:30:11.000 It will illuminate life, illuminate America, illuminate the world in some way that's important.

00:30:15.000 I mean that's just a starting point for the two years of work that a book takes, right?

00:30:19.000 You have a child.

00:30:20.000 Your assumption is the child is going to be a good person in the world, not a terrible person and wind up shooting up a church, right?

00:30:26.000 It's just a starting basic assumption.

00:30:29.000 For me, when I was writing Tribe, I was trying to make sense of a number of different things.

00:30:35.000 I mean, one was that the soldier I was with in Afghanistan, I was really struck some months later that a lot of them wanted to go back to this sort of flea-bitten, godforsaken outpost where they got shot at every day and didn't want to come home to the U.S. It's like, that needs explaining.

00:30:50.000 Right?

00:30:52.000 And it made me think of this uncle that I had, a sort of surrogate uncle named...

00:30:57.000 He's a guy named Ellis, Ellis Settle.

00:30:59.000 He was Lakota Sioux and Apache.

00:31:01.000 He was born in 1929, out west, and he had a very rough, interesting life, and he was very well-read.

00:31:08.000 And I remember him telling me, he was a sort of mentor figure for me, and I remember him telling me when I was in my 20s, he said, you know, all throughout the history of the United States, along the frontier, and this is how he put it, he said, white people were always running off to join the Indians.

00:31:22.000 And the Indians never ran off to join the white people. 0.69

00:31:24.000 And so here was this fact again, like, oh, no one wants to go back to or go to the sort of modern world.

00:31:32.000 And this wasn't even the modern world.

00:31:33.000 This is the modern world in 1865, right?

00:31:36.000 Right, or 1755 or whatever.

00:31:38.000 Right.

00:31:41.000 At the time, it was the modern world, right?

00:31:45.000 It's basically the post-agricultural revolution world, the industrial world, the world of organized religion, organized government, of industrial economy, and an agriculture-based system where people had jobs,

00:32:02.000 and you got up at dawn and plowed the fields all day and went to bed, and your minister and your king told you what to do, and whatever.

00:32:09.000 That's the modern world, and that's what nobody wants to be part of, including the soldiers I was with at Restrepo, right?

00:32:15.000 And so it just made me think, maybe what the soldiers are missing isn't war, although that certainly has its charms for some people, but it's community.

00:32:25.000 It's that they were with each other.

00:32:27.000 Community with consequences.

00:32:29.000 That's right, exactly.

00:32:30.000 Community with consequences.

00:32:31.000 Likewise for the Native Americans, for the tribal societies in North America, maybe what the young men and some young women along the frontier were looking for, I think?

00:33:10.000 By the Indians, kidnapped from their log homes along the frontier and abducted and forcibly adopted into these tribal societies. 0.92

00:33:20.000 When given the chance to come home to be repatriated some years later, very often these people refused to go.

00:33:30.000 They didn't want to go back.

00:33:32.000 They wanted to stay with their adopted tribe, their adopted community.

00:33:35.000 That's amazing to me.

00:33:37.000 And it says a lot about the way humans are wired to want to live.

00:33:40.000 Yeah, that was one of the craziest aspects of your book.

00:33:43.000 I'd never heard that before.

00:33:45.000 And how many people had done that, where they were kidnapped, and then they said, we like it here better.

00:33:50.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:33:51.000 And again, we're talking about more than 100 years ago.

00:33:54.000 So what we think of...

00:33:57.000 As modern society today has only escalated those anxieties and woes and all the things that separated them from the tribal world.

00:34:04.000 That's right.

00:34:05.000 And one of the things about tribes is that they're sort of inherently egalitarian.

00:34:12.000 It's very hard to pass on I think we're good to go.

00:34:43.000 A little bit of food here, a little bit of whatever there.

00:34:46.000 Both of those sins against the community are really harshly punished.

00:34:50.000 So it's very egalitarian.

00:34:52.000 And egalitarianism is something we are all wired for, right?

00:34:55.000 And I think one of the distresses of a modern capitalist society is that it can't be egalitarian.

00:35:01.000 And that's painful for people.

00:35:03.000 But then if you introduce a crisis, the Blitz in London, for example, an earthquake in Italy that I studied, What happens is that money doesn't matter anymore when the floodwaters are rising, when the bombs are falling.

00:35:17.000 Social class doesn't matter at all.

00:35:19.000 It's like being in the boxing gym.

00:35:22.000 How you conduct yourself with respect to the others around you is actually what gets evaluated.

00:35:27.000 And a poor man can be brave and generous just as easily as a rich man.

00:35:33.000 There's no advantage to being wealthy or powerful when it comes to those basic human things.

00:35:46.000 Yeah.

00:36:02.000 The violent crime rate went down.

00:36:04.000 Vietnam vets in New York who suffered from PTSD said that their symptoms disappeared after 9-11.

00:36:12.000 Everyone was needed.

00:36:13.000 And everyone for a while, everyone was equal because we were all facing some danger that terrified us.

00:36:18.000 And that, for all of its tragedy, that is an intoxicating social state to be in for human beings.

00:36:26.000 That's so bizarre.

00:36:28.000 It's so bizarre, but it also so makes sense.

00:36:30.000 One of the things that I also thought was fascinating in your book, we were talking about PTSD sufferers and how people in these veterans' hospitals would be absolutely furious if they thought someone was faking their symptoms and that they had to be physically restrained to keep from attacking people that they thought were just juking the system and how many people were on PTSD benefits.

00:36:56.000 Yeah, I mean, the numbers are really elusive, but what I have sort of anecdotally from veterans as well as people within the VA administration who are acting as therapists or whatever, group counselors, Is that there's a certain number of people,

00:37:12.000 and I don't know what the fraction is, but there's a certain number of people who were not traumatized in war, and PTSD is hard to prove or disprove, and it's sort of obviously wide open for either an unintentional misdiagnosis or an intentional misdiagnosis.

00:37:31.000 I mean of course any bureaucratic system gets scammed and PTSD benefits are no different.

00:37:37.000 But it really is traumatizing – I mean seriously angering and traumatizing to soldiers who really were traumatized because they really were in combat.

00:37:45.000 And keep in mind only about 10 percent of the US military experiences direct combat.

00:37:51.000 How would they know if someone was seriously traumatized?

00:37:55.000 And the other thing that's fascinating is that, as you were talking about in these small societies, freeloaders are looked down upon, as are the greedy alpha males who try to dominate the wealth.

00:38:07.000 In these societies, egalitarian ideas are much more openly expressed.

00:38:13.000 It's much more important that this is represented by these people that are legitimately suffering, seeing someone scamming the system and angry.

00:38:22.000 Whereas, say, if you had a hurt knee or something like that and you were going to a doctor and you saw someone who was faking a back injury, you wouldn't be upset.

00:38:32.000 They were just robbing money from the insurance company and just getting free benefits.

00:38:36.000 Well, yeah, I mean, because a hurt knee doesn't have a sort of emotional cargo to it, right?

00:38:40.000 But combat does.

00:38:41.000 I mean, if you're in combat and you lost your best buddy, And you got trauma from that, as well you should.

00:38:48.000 And then you're in some group therapy thing at the VA with some guy who was on a rear base the whole time and is claiming 100% PTSD disability for something that never happened.

00:38:57.000 Like, yeah, that would make you angry.

00:38:59.000 It would make me angry.

00:39:00.000 Because combat is extremely emotional.

00:39:02.000 And again, I don't know, is it one in a million, one in a hundred, one in a thousand?

00:39:06.000 I have no idea what the rates are.

00:39:08.000 I'm not even sure if the VA does.

00:39:10.000 And there's, you know, in some ways incentivized not to find out.

00:39:13.000 But I can tell you from like the real deal combat vets, that happens. 0.62

00:39:18.000 They smell it instantly.

00:39:20.000 And one way it gets sorted out is that those guys who are misrepresenting themselves get questioned by the combat vets.

00:39:26.000 Oh, so what were you with?

00:39:28.000 Like, so what happened exactly?

00:39:30.000 Oh, a mortar hit the other side of the base?

00:39:31.000 That's a pretty big base.

00:39:32.000 I've been there.

00:39:33.000 You know, I was a mile away and you're traumatized?

00:39:35.000 Are you kidding?

00:39:35.000 Yeah.

00:39:35.000 Like they'll get questioned, right?

00:39:39.000 So I mean like you might question someone who's bullshitting you about how much fighting he's done with MMA or whatever.

00:39:47.000 Wherever your area of expertise is, I'm sure you can smell a fraud instantly, right?

00:39:51.000 Well, everyone can.

00:39:52.000 That's one of the things – that's one of the characteristics of humans.

00:39:56.000 Is that because we live in collective societies where we have to sort of trust one another, we're extremely good at smelling out misrepresentation and fraud.

00:40:03.000 We're really, really good at it.

00:40:05.000 And it's one of the things that feels intolerable is to have someone who was unfairly gaining from the hard work of the rest of us.

00:40:14.000 Right.

00:40:15.000 And I should just say, when I say egalitarianism, I don't mean that there's no hierarchy, right?

00:40:20.000 I mean, complicated systems need hierarchy, need order, right?

00:40:24.000 I mean, groups need hierarchy so that not everyone's a general, not everyone's a private.

00:40:29.000 I mean, you need organization within the group.

00:40:31.000 But egalitarian means that nobody gets extra rights, you know?

00:40:37.000 Like, we all have basically the same rights in the group.

00:40:39.000 That's what that means.

00:40:41.000 Well, I mean, it all completely makes sense.

00:40:44.000 It particularly makes sense, the idea that these people who were real combat vets, who saw real action, would be instantaneously able to discern whether or not someone was faking it.

00:40:55.000 But that this, it sort of mirrors what you were saying about these small tribes, that in these small tribes, someone who's a freeloader Is extremely dangerous to the group.

00:41:06.000 You looked at as a liability.

00:41:08.000 You looked at as someone who just can't be trusted.

00:41:11.000 And you need trust.

00:41:13.000 You need community.

00:41:15.000 And this is like what you're saying about combat troops, that what they want to know is that you're going to be willing to put your own safety secondary to the safety of the troop.

00:41:26.000 Right.

00:41:26.000 And if everyone does that, everyone's safer.

00:41:29.000 But if no one, if some one person doesn't do that, I mean, that's always in the movies, right?

00:41:34.000 It's always the one guy who runs away or the one guy who sells out or...

00:41:39.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:41:40.000 And, you know, those human themes are enduring and very powerful.

00:41:44.000 So sometimes I speak to a lot of liberal audiences, right?

00:41:47.000 And so I love doing this to them.

00:41:50.000 And I'm a Democrat, so I sort of know those people pretty well, right?

00:41:53.000 I grew up in Massachusetts, and I get it, you know?

00:41:55.000 And so, you know, I'll say to them, okay, who here is against war and doesn't want to know anything, have anything to do with war?

00:42:02.000 And of course, everyone raises their hand, right?

00:42:05.000 And...

00:42:06.000 And then I say, okay, who here has paid money to go be entertained by a Hollywood war movie?

00:42:12.000 And everyone raises their hand.

00:42:14.000 It seems like a contradiction, but what then I go on to say to them is, look, if war can get a room full of pacifists to go pay money to watch it, there's something important going on in that narrative.

00:42:27.000 You're not going to the movies to watch people get killed, right?

00:42:31.000 You're not...

00:42:32.000 You guys aren't all sociopaths.

00:42:34.000 You're going to the movies to see these very ancient human concerns of who's loyal to the group, who's a coward, who's brave, who's willing to risk their life for someone else.

00:42:45.000 I mean, these are things that have kept humans alive or endangered them, as the case may be.

00:42:51.000 For a million years.

00:42:52.000 Of course they're compelling narratives.

00:42:54.000 And in war, you see those things happen like in a sort of accelerated intense rate.

00:43:00.000 I mean you grew up in a suburb.

00:43:02.000 You almost never see someone have to choose between their own safety and the community.

00:43:06.000 It never happens.

00:43:07.000 That's the problem with the suburbs.

00:43:08.000 In war, that happens every day, right? 0.53

00:43:11.000 So it gives you this sort of like human narrative in this incredibly compressed, intense form, which reconfirms the human values we all have about, okay, if you're in a group, You have to love that group, even if you dislike some of the people in it.

00:43:27.000 Like, that's what it means to be part of a group, and that's what has kept humans alive for a very long time.

00:43:32.000 You even see that narrative in science fiction, futuristic movies like The Matrix, right?

00:43:37.000 The one guy who sells out the other humans to The Matrix and just says, look, I want to be in The Matrix.

00:43:45.000 I want to have a great life and eat good food.

00:43:48.000 Yeah, I mean, listen, once you are aware of this narrative, you see it everywhere.

00:43:52.000 And, I mean, one part...

00:43:54.000 There was some research that I did that didn't actually make it into the book.

00:43:56.000 I couldn't quite fit it in.

00:43:57.000 But I interviewed someone who had a consulting firm in Hollywood that did basically sort of like market research for the big studios.

00:44:08.000 And they would...

00:44:09.000 They would screen films for audiences and then ask the audiences questions about the ending, about the characters, about how to construct the plot.

00:44:18.000 They were sort of trying to figure out what's the public want to see, right?

00:44:21.000 So what they found was that in disaster films, very typically...

00:44:25.000 Where a community was facing a disaster, right?

00:44:29.000 A plague or a flood or a war or whatever.

00:44:33.000 When the community had to rally to survive, right?

00:44:37.000 An alien invasion.

00:44:38.000 There's a million scenarios, but it's all the same basic story.

00:44:41.000 You have these different characters.

00:44:43.000 There's usually a male figure that takes the lead to physically defend the space, right?

00:44:50.000 There is often a female figure that's connected to him that sort of takes place of the community that's being defended, takes care of the—dresses the wounds, dresses the emotional wounds.

00:45:05.000 I mean, sort of takes care of all that stuff while the man or the men are sort of physically defending the place.

00:45:12.000 And then there's a guy who often was really wealthy or well-off before the catastrophe who's continuing to act in a self-serving way, even during the catastrophe when everyone's needed.

00:45:25.000 And everybody gets mad at that guy.

00:45:26.000 Well, that guy always dies.

00:45:28.000 Yeah.

00:45:30.000 Yeah.

00:45:31.000 Always dies.

00:45:32.000 And then there's another character.

00:45:34.000 And again, this is just very common in these narratives.

00:45:36.000 The Weasley beta male.

00:45:38.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:45:40.000 Keep in mind that these narratives are formed by public opinion.

00:45:44.000 This isn't the studios trying to make the public...

00:45:47.000 And force feed the public gender roles and whatever. 1.00

00:45:51.000 This is the public saying, I like that, I don't like that.

00:45:53.000 So the studios are responding to the questionnaires that these researchers give out.

00:45:58.000 So one of the really interesting things, and this is totally inflammatory, but...

00:46:03.000 The role of the person defending, like physically defending the community, when they try to put a woman in that role, people have a problem with it.

00:46:13.000 And frankly, often women have a problem with it. 1.00

00:46:16.000 Like it's really, really interesting.

00:46:18.000 And women are just as important as men in a crisis or in anything, right?

00:46:23.000 But what the public seems to want is the guy with the sword and the woman with the bandage.

00:46:29.000 You know, or with the sort of reassuring – you know, like it gets divided like that and it's not – again, it's not the studios forcing something on people.

00:46:38.000 It's the people watching these films saying – just voting on what they – the narrative that they like best.

00:46:43.000 But the other character that I thought was really hilarious, there's often that there's an estranged husband who's betrayed his wife and family in some way.

00:46:51.000 He's on the outs, right?

00:46:52.000 Right.

00:46:53.000 With his family and with his wife.

00:46:55.000 And then the crisis happens.

00:46:57.000 The Martians invade, the floodwaters rise, whatever it is. 0.95

00:46:59.000 And he comes to the rescue and does the right thing and saves his wife and family and maybe even the wife's new boyfriend.

00:47:07.000 I mean, he even could have gotten to that stage, right?

00:47:09.000 And because he does the right thing, she takes him back.

00:47:15.000 It's funny, man.

00:47:16.000 It's really just playing out these ancient archetypes.

00:47:19.000 It's exactly what it's doing.

00:47:20.000 I mean, those storylines resonate because they're ancient and because those roles in society helped us survive.

00:47:27.000 And there's always the woman who, in absence of the strong male figure, rises to the occasion herself.

00:47:33.000 Right.

00:47:33.000 I mean, with some of the research I did with Tribe, what I found, I studied this coal mine disaster in Canada.

00:47:38.000 So it was all men trapped two miles down in these collapsed passageways.

00:47:44.000 Two miles down?

00:47:45.000 Two miles down.

00:47:46.000 I mean, two miles down an angled shaft.

00:47:49.000 But two miles down.

00:47:51.000 Yeah.

00:47:52.000 So they had an explosion, some gases ignited, and the passageways collapsed.

00:47:55.000 So they're two miles in.

00:47:57.000 They're gaslight.

00:47:59.000 Their batteries last 24 hours.

00:48:02.000 Their water lasts 48 hours.

00:48:04.000 Pretty soon, they're just sitting in darkness, not knowing not only if they'll survive, not knowing if their bodies will ever even be recovered.

00:48:10.000 They have no way.

00:48:11.000 They're sitting in darkness trying.

00:48:13.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:48:14.000 This is what happened.

00:48:15.000 I mean, obviously, a situation like that needs leadership.

00:48:18.000 So in the first minutes and hours, there were these sort of alpha males that weren't necessarily crew bosses, right?

00:48:25.000 They weren't within the traditional hierarchy.

00:48:27.000 They were just guys who grabbed a pickaxe and a shovel and said, come on, guys, we're going to try to dig our way out.

00:48:32.000 And they basically, I mean, literally attacked the problem of these collapsed mine shafts.

00:48:39.000 There was too much rubble to dig through.

00:48:41.000 They were two miles down.

00:48:42.000 So they dug and dug and dug and it required these guys – again, it was all men down there. 0.96

00:48:51.000 But there was one sort of leader was this very aggressive.

00:48:54.000 He didn't care how anyone else felt.

00:48:56.000 Oh, you're scared? 1.00

00:48:57.000 I don't give a shit. 1.00

00:48:57.000 Grab a shovel. 1.00

00:48:59.000 We got to solve this problem.

00:49:00.000 Like totally unempathic, right?

00:49:04.000 When they realized they couldn't dig their way out and they ran out of batteries and they're sitting in darkness, a new kind of leader was required.

00:49:11.000 And that was someone who was able to keep people's spirits up, who was empathic, who listened.

00:49:16.000 If a guy was really scared, was able to say, hey, listen, man, it's going to be all right.

00:49:20.000 It's okay to be scared.

00:49:21.000 We're all scared.

00:49:22.000 You know, that kind of voice.

00:49:23.000 It's a different kind of leadership.

00:49:25.000 Now, typically in society, The male role would be the guy with the pickaxe attacking the problem.

00:49:32.000 The female role would be the person sort of like trying to keep the group emotionally together and functioning. 1.00

00:49:41.000 But what happens in a situation where there's all of one sex, Those gender roles will be filled no matter what. 1.00

00:49:50.000 It'll just be filled by people of the same sex. 1.00

00:49:52.000 So if it was all women down there, some woman would have grabbed the pickaxe and taken on what would be typically considered a, quote, male role, but she's female. 1.00

00:50:03.000 So the gender roles that society needs to survive in adversity, in war, in nature, in a collapsed coal mine, It needs both gender roles, but either sex can fill those roles. 0.99

00:50:16.000 It's amazing.

00:50:17.000 And we will sort it out.

00:50:18.000 So it doesn't matter who's male and female.

00:50:20.000 What matters is that those two basic kinds of leadership and caretaking get taken care of.

00:50:26.000 Wow.

00:50:27.000 So how did those guys get out?

00:50:29.000 They eventually, I mean, the rescuers eventually got to them.

00:50:33.000 How long were they down there for?

00:50:35.000 They're over a week.

00:50:36.000 It might have even been two weeks.

00:50:37.000 I mean, eight days.

00:50:39.000 I can't remember, actually.

00:50:40.000 Something like a week.

00:50:42.000 How did they survive?

00:50:44.000 I mean, barely.

00:50:45.000 I mean, they ran out of water.

00:50:47.000 They were eating the bark off the timbers, the support structures.

00:50:51.000 They were eating coal.

00:50:53.000 Eating coal?

00:50:54.000 They were trying to, yeah.

00:50:55.000 They were drinking their own urine.

00:50:57.000 I mean, the guys died.

00:50:59.000 I mean, not everyone survived.

00:51:01.000 One guy was trapped, his arm was trapped between two collapsed timbers and they were, you know, it was a pretty lively conversation about, and he was begging them to cut his arm off so that he could at least be free.

00:51:11.000 And there was a pretty lively conversation with the other men in the group, like, do we do that or not?

00:51:16.000 Right.

00:51:17.000 And they decided not to, that if they, all they had was an axe. 0.62

00:51:20.000 They're like, we chop his arm off and free him, he might die from that. 0.88

00:51:23.000 Right.

00:51:24.000 And he was removed from where those guys were.

00:51:26.000 So he was lonely.

00:51:27.000 That was the thing.

00:51:28.000 He was lonely.

00:51:29.000 He was like, cut my arm off.

00:51:30.000 I want to join you guys.

00:51:32.000 And they didn't.

00:51:33.000 And he died.

00:51:34.000 Whoa.

00:51:36.000 Amazing.

00:51:37.000 Yeah, amazing.

00:51:38.000 It's intense.

00:51:39.000 Yeah.

00:51:41.000 And so, you know, I mean, not to, whatever, to steer this conversation too much, but, I mean, that's a microcosm in some ways for America, right?

00:51:49.000 I mean, every country is potentially trapped in a coal mine trying to figure out how to survive.

00:51:52.000 We don't know.

00:51:53.000 I mean, the day before 9-11, we didn't know 9-11 was coming, right?

00:51:56.000 We don't know what's coming, right?

00:51:58.000 And the only way for any group of people Whether it's 330 million or 18 people as it was in that coal mine, the only way for any group of people to survive is to act collectively, right?

00:52:11.000 Humans don't survive in nature by themselves.

00:52:15.000 And so in that coal mine, both kinds of people were needed.

00:52:20.000 They happened to be all men, but it didn't need to be whatever.

00:52:22.000 It doesn't matter.

00:52:22.000 Gender doesn't matter.

00:52:23.000 I mean sex doesn't matter. 0.74

00:52:24.000 They needed both kinds of people.

00:52:26.000 They needed aggressive alphas that attacked the problem and didn't care how people felt.

00:52:31.000 And we're interested in like strict law and order in the group.

00:52:34.000 You do this.

00:52:35.000 You do that.

00:52:35.000 You do what I say.

00:52:36.000 This is a survival.

00:52:37.000 You needed those kinds of people.

00:52:39.000 And you needed the other kind like, hey, we're going to be all right.

00:52:43.000 Are you feeling OK? Yeah, we're like that kind of collaborative, empathic person.

00:52:49.000 You needed that also.

00:52:51.000 So when you look at the politics in this country, You need both conservatism and liberalism, right?

00:52:58.000 You cannot – I mean a completely conservative America will be well defended, right?

00:53:03.000 No one's going to mess with us, right?

00:53:05.000 America first, like no one will mess with us.

00:53:08.000 But what will be left unaddressed is some of the internal dynamics of this country, which is, you know, frankly, not at the foremost of conservative thought.

00:53:17.000 I mean, sort of racial disparity, economic disparity, all that stuff.

00:53:21.000 Like, you know, I mean, that's not at the foremost of the conservative agenda.

00:53:25.000 And it shouldn't be.

00:53:26.000 It doesn't need to be.

00:53:27.000 It doesn't need to be because it's at the forefront of the liberal agenda.

00:53:30.000 And God forbid You have a country that's completely run by liberals.

00:53:33.000 It'll get overrun immediately by the nearest armed neighbor, right?

00:53:37.000 Liberals just aren't wired that way to be suspicious of the world.

00:53:41.000 But what liberals do quite well is to try to figure out a sort of system of fairness within the group that gets – you know, just tries to equalize things and get everyone to sort of participate and to be valued and taken care of.

00:53:56.000 Like I mean that – It's all lovely, right?

00:53:58.000 I mean, that's needed also.

00:53:59.000 And so every country is at its best when you have both of those dynamics going on, and they're in a kind of dynamic tension with each other, but neither completely takes over.

00:54:08.000 And one of the things that breaks my heart watching this country is this idea on both sides, on the liberal side and on the conservative side, that the other not only is totally wrong, but it's totally immoral and shouldn't exist.

00:54:21.000 It's just not true.

00:54:23.000 And this country is not going to find peace until both sides of that political equation sort of reach across and shake the other person's hand and say, look, I disagree with you on almost everything, but I'm glad you're with us.

00:54:34.000 I need you.

00:54:35.000 And I need you because I don't think like you do.

00:54:37.000 I need you to think like you do.

00:54:39.000 And until this country figures out how to do that, we're going to be in this sort of awful partisan strife that eventually will destroy us.

00:54:46.000 Like bullets are not going to take down this country.

00:54:47.000 Words will.

00:54:48.000 And they're going to be our words.

00:54:49.000 And it just breaks my heart to see this dynamic not only going on and on but getting worse and worse.

00:54:56.000 It does seem to be getting worse and worse and what seems to be new is the idea from the liberals to silence people on the right and to think that free speech is important.

00:55:07.000 What's important is their ideas and that their ideas are especially I think now that Trump is president and I think people feel even more emboldened and locked up in this.

00:55:19.000 I mean, honestly, I think it's equally both sides.

00:55:23.000 But I agree with you.

00:55:24.000 I mean, the problem with the left for me – and again, I'm a Democrat, so I love evaluating my own side's problems because they drive me – they make me more upset than the right-wing's problems, right?

00:55:35.000 Because they're my people, right?

00:55:36.000 I'm like, come on, can you act a little better, please?

00:55:39.000 Do you see the irony, though, that you've chosen a tribe and the tribe of people that you don't even know and that these people are just – it's a political tribe?

00:55:46.000 Well, I mean, listen, I share some of those political ideals and the conservative ideals I don't share.

00:55:53.000 But I would hate to live in a country that didn't have conservatives in it.

00:55:57.000 Right.

00:55:57.000 Even though I disagree.

00:55:58.000 I mean, because I disagree with them.

00:56:00.000 Right?

00:56:00.000 I don't want to be surrounded by people I agree with.

00:56:02.000 Right.

00:56:03.000 And there are conservatives that do not want liberals in this country.

00:56:06.000 Right?

00:56:07.000 Shame on them.

00:56:08.000 Sure.

00:56:08.000 Right?

00:56:08.000 And likewise for liberals.

00:56:09.000 Like, I may hear it on both sides.

00:56:11.000 So I think both sides try to silence...

00:56:14.000 The voices of the other side, frankly.

00:56:16.000 That's a sin, I think, that's committed equally on both sides.

00:56:19.000 But one thing I wanted to bring up because I've actually made a mistake last time I was on your on your show I mentioned a book and I got the name wrong and it's such a good book and I wanted to I just saw on Twitter that people trying to find it and they couldn't because I got the name wrong it's called our political our political nature and it's by a guy named Avi Tushman and he collected an awful lot of data about the fact that political opinion is about 50% determined by genetics in other words you inherit About half of

00:56:49.000 your political opinion.

00:56:50.000 And the other half is acquired through experience, through exposure.

00:56:54.000 So if you grew up in a liberal family, you're about 50% likely to wind up being a liberal because you absorb that way of seeing the world.

00:57:03.000 And I'm a Democrat.

00:57:04.000 Had I grown up in a conservative family, I think I'd be a conservative.

00:57:09.000 And I actually think, having read this book, I think I'm actually a genetic conservative.

00:57:16.000 That adopted liberal values because of my environment.

00:57:18.000 And I think there's a lot of people who are genetic liberals who have adopted conservative values.

00:57:22.000 I mean, it's about 50-50.

00:57:24.000 But the point is, so it's Avi Tushman, Our Political Nature.

00:57:28.000 That's the name of the book.

00:57:29.000 I got it wrong.

00:57:30.000 I just wanted to correct that.

00:57:31.000 But the point of this, to me, is that—and he knows this.

00:57:35.000 I mean, scientists know this because when they look at— Identical twins that share almost all of their DNA. Identical twins later in life are far more likely To have the same political opinion than fraternal twins which don't share all their DNA. You understand what I'm saying?

00:57:53.000 So that's how they know this.

00:57:54.000 When they look at identical twins, there's a much higher concordance of a political opinion later in life than for fraternal twins.

00:58:00.000 That's how they know that it's around 50% of your political view is determined by genetics.

00:58:05.000 If it's determined by genetics, that means it had survival value.

00:58:09.000 That means that liberalism And conservatism both had survival value in our evolutionary past and as a result has become encoded in our DNA like other behaviors like generosity, other character traits like generosity.

00:58:24.000 Courage, things like that.

00:58:26.000 Those are all encoded in our DNA because they had survival value.

00:58:28.000 Well, likewise conservatism and liberalism, which means that in the argument, the discussion in this country about politics, you can disagree with people.

00:58:37.000 Go for it.

00:58:38.000 Democracy comes out of disagreement and compromise is great.

00:58:41.000 But what you cannot do is point your finger across the aisle and say, not only are you wrong, but you shouldn't exist.

00:58:49.000 Go away.

00:58:50.000 Disappear. 0.99

00:58:50.000 You're not part of what America is. 0.99

00:58:53.000 That assertion is completely contradictory to evolution, and if it's contradictory to evolution, it won't work.

00:59:00.000 Well, it seems to me that people have a really difficult time managing conflict, even managing verbal conflict, that when someone disagrees with them, they want to silence that person, they want to yell at that person, they want to scream.

00:59:11.000 They think about their own thoughts rather than putting themselves in the position of the other person or objectively recognizing that there is an important factor.

00:59:19.000 It's important to have both sides.

00:59:22.000 It's important to even be challenged on your ideas so you can solidify what's the root cause of your ideas.

00:59:29.000 Where are they coming from?

00:59:31.000 How much have you examined these ideas?

00:59:34.000 Are you just married to them because they were given to you?

00:59:37.000 Are these things you've adopted or are these really well considered thoughts that you've put through the mill?

00:59:46.000 Right.

00:59:46.000 I mean, the thing is, there are rules to contests, right?

00:59:49.000 I mean, there are rules in MMA, right?

00:59:51.000 There are rules in boxing.

00:59:52.000 There were rules in marriages, right? 0.65

00:59:55.000 I mean, you would never stay in a marriage where your spouse treated you the way the political parties treat each other right now.

01:00:04.000 You would never stay, right?

01:00:05.000 I mean, this incredibly contemptuous, mocking, disparaging tone that both sides have.

01:00:10.000 Like, you'd be like, I'm out of here. 0.98

01:00:11.000 You know, my wife clearly just thinks like I'm a complete dirtbag. 1.00

01:00:15.000 You don't talk to someone like that that you have any respect for, right? 0.92

01:00:19.000 I'm out of here.

01:00:20.000 I think no one would stay in a marriage like that. 0.86

01:00:22.000 And what's happened—and this is new, right?

01:00:25.000 We didn't grow up with this.

01:00:26.000 Like, this is a new thing where the political parties— Talk to each other.

01:00:31.000 I mean, disagreement is great, right?

01:00:33.000 You know, eventually you compromise and you figure something out where nobody's happy, but, you know, the machine goes on, right?

01:00:38.000 The ship sails on.

01:00:40.000 What's new now is this contempt.

01:00:43.000 And it's toxic in marriage.

01:00:45.000 And it's toxic in a country, too.

01:00:47.000 And this is a new thing.

01:00:48.000 And I think if you really take in the reality, this truth, that half of our political opinions are genetically wired, you got to get rid of the contempt.

01:01:00.000 I mean, it's part of what we are.

01:01:02.000 I don't think most people are aware of that.

01:01:03.000 No, they're not.

01:01:03.000 Right.

01:01:04.000 That's what I'm talking about.

01:01:05.000 I mean, you know.

01:01:06.000 And Congress plays on this, right?

01:01:08.000 It's a great campaign strategy to like say things that are hateful things about the other side and it consolidates your base.

01:01:16.000 And both sides do this, right?

01:01:18.000 And if you consolidate your base, then you're more likely to win the election.

01:01:23.000 You're in a more solid political position.

01:01:25.000 And we know behavioral psychologists will tell you that one way to Make a group cohere.

01:01:33.000 Make it close ranks and strengthen its group commitment to itself.

01:01:38.000 One way to do that is to introduce an enemy.

01:01:41.000 And when there's no enemy, groups naturally disperse because people just go off to do their individual thing.

01:01:47.000 Of course, you have the freedom to do that.

01:01:48.000 There's no threat anywhere.

01:01:49.000 Introduce a threat, boom, everyone's in a group.

01:01:52.000 So what politicians do is they Create a threat where there is none.

01:01:57.000 You know, they say that other political party they're actually trying to destroy democracy.

01:02:03.000 They're not part of the democracy.

01:02:04.000 They're actually trying to destroy it.

01:02:06.000 They're trying to destroy this country.

01:02:07.000 The same thing happened at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

01:02:10.000 My father grew up in Spain and I studied the Spanish Civil War quite a lot.

01:02:14.000 The democratic reforms that were coming in the 30s, you know, land redistribution, things like, you know, the vote for women, you know, pretty normal things.

01:02:22.000 But they were a threat to the power structure in Spain.

01:02:26.000 And the military and the sort of far right in Spain, the fascist, basically said that those democratic reforms were people who were trying to destroy Spain.

01:02:34.000 So you create an enemy that consolidates your power and you go on to win the election.

01:02:38.000 It's great campaign strategy.

01:02:40.000 It's just terrible for the nation.

01:02:43.000 Yeah, this lock her up, lock her up when Trump was running.

01:02:48.000 That was the big thing, right?

01:02:49.000 The enemy.

01:02:50.000 This was the enemy that was Hillary Clinton. 1.00

01:02:52.000 She represented the evil Democrats who just had been stealing and robbing. 0.90

01:02:57.000 Right.

01:02:58.000 And, you know, listen, I totally understand being in disagreement with Democrats, right?

01:03:02.000 But it's a different matter to say that they're actually antithetical.

01:03:05.000 The Democrats are antithetical to free Democratic ideals.

01:03:10.000 But it just seems to me there's not a good party right now. 0.53

01:03:13.000 The Republicans are a mess. 0.90

01:03:14.000 The Democrats are a mess. 0.99

01:03:15.000 It's just... 0.97

01:03:16.000 There's not, right? 1.00

01:03:17.000 No, they both suck. 1.00

01:03:18.000 And so reform them, right? 1.00

01:03:20.000 I mean, or create a new...

01:03:21.000 Yeah, isn't there also an issue with just having two sides, right?

01:03:25.000 Having the Yankees versus the Red Sox every year in the World Series?

01:03:28.000 Well, those two sides do represent the sort of genetic strains in our...

01:03:33.000 Liberal and conservative.

01:03:33.000 Yeah, I mean, it's going to break down one way or another...

01:03:37.000 In that direction.

01:03:38.000 Right.

01:03:39.000 And so, I mean, it is sort of a binary.

01:03:41.000 I mean, our brains are sort of binary in that way.

01:03:43.000 I mean, as humans, surviving in the wild, you have to defend your group and you need fairness within the group.

01:03:49.000 Those are the two things you have to do to survive and remain a group, right?

01:03:54.000 And so those tasks have been sort of like subcontracted out.

01:03:59.000 To conservatives and to liberals.

01:04:01.000 And it's been that way for a very long time.

01:04:03.000 And you can even see some of those same behaviors like in sort of chimpanzee society, right?

01:04:07.000 So this is very, very ancient behavior.

01:04:09.000 So like I don't know, I think you have two groups, but that doesn't mean that the two groups have to act so abysmally with each other.

01:04:16.000 And I really think that if you want to sort of save this country morally, politically, nationally, maybe...

01:04:26.000 You know, really what you need is a bipartisan committee in Congress that calls people out and calls them out for doing and saying things that undermine our sense of unity as a nation.

01:04:39.000 So when Democrats say, he's not my president...

01:04:42.000 That undermines the understanding of what democracy is.

01:04:45.000 No, he's your president.

01:04:47.000 Like, he got voted in, man.

01:04:49.000 Like, that's what happens in a democracy is the guy you didn't vote for ends up being your president.

01:04:53.000 That's what a democracy is.

01:04:55.000 So just deal with it, right?

01:04:56.000 I hate that.

01:04:57.000 I hate that.

01:04:58.000 I'm a Democrat.

01:04:58.000 I didn't vote for him, but I hate when people say that.

01:05:01.000 And likewise, when Donald Trump, when Citizen Trump Was accusing Barack Obama, and I understand not liking Obama, I don't really care if you don't like him or don't like him, but when Citizen Trump accused Barack Obama of not being a citizen?

01:05:16.000 And the GOP didn't repudiate that?

01:05:20.000 I mean, think about it.

01:05:23.000 Citizen Trump was telling every veteran and soldier fighting overseas that their commander-in-chief was an imposter.

01:05:32.000 It was a fraud, was not an American citizen and has usurped the White House, right? 0.92

01:05:37.000 That's a terribly destructive thing to tell men and women in uniform or in a trench getting shot at, right? 1.00

01:05:43.000 And the GOP, like the DNC with this stupid, he's not my president thing, the DNC is not rejecting that idea. 0.99

01:05:50.000 They let people say it. 1.00

01:05:51.000 They don't denounce it, right? 1.00

01:05:53.000 The GOP never repudiated that stupid idea that Trump came along with. 1.00

01:05:57.000 And for the good of the nation, they both had to, right? 1.00

01:06:00.000 And this isn't a free speech issue. 0.80

01:06:01.000 Everyone has the legal right to make a fool of themselves. 0.51

01:06:04.000 Go for it.

01:06:05.000 But that doesn't mean the two political parties have to stay silent in the face of things that are completely toxic to our democracy.

01:06:12.000 And they really should have spoken out.

01:06:13.000 And I think some kind of bipartisan commission in Congress that would call out the worst outrages and call on the political parties to denounce them That that would be an enormously positive thing in this country.

01:06:25.000 I agree with you, but I think it would take a truly exceptional person to look at the other side's faults and not capitalize on it.

01:06:34.000 Even if it's a false thing, like the Obama thing with Trump, or any number of things you could find in that regard.

01:06:44.000 It seems to me like this is like the perfect time.

01:06:46.000 If there was ever going to be a time where a third party, some sort of a centrist type party would come around, this would be the perfect time.

01:06:54.000 And we also, I think people recognize that what we're seeing on the right and the left...

01:06:59.000 In regards to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, is you're seeing people that are pretending to be this thing, right?

01:07:05.000 With Donald Trump, he's a lifelong Democrat, and then all of a sudden he's a Republican, he's talking about God, and I mean, it's a show.

01:07:13.000 It's a little dog and pony show on the right, and on the left, You got this woman who was part of the Clinton Foundation.

01:07:19.000 It was essentially a pay-to-play scheme. 0.96

01:07:22.000 They were making millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of dollars for bullshit speeches that they would give to banks. 0.98

01:07:27.000 And this is not some sort of a real liberal. 0.97

01:07:30.000 This is not the ideas that you were embracing about liberal values.

01:07:36.000 I mean, no, I mean, the two parties basically have become sort of cartels to keep themselves in power.

01:07:40.000 Yes, that's a great way to put it.

01:07:42.000 And, you know, Hillary was absolutely part of that on the left. 1.00

01:07:49.000 Yeah.

01:07:51.000 All of it's antithetical to the highest ideals of the framers of the Constitution and the people that established this country.

01:07:58.000 And I mean, I hear you about the centrist party.

01:08:00.000 That would be great.

01:08:01.000 But I mean, the way the power structure works, the way the cartels work is they have access to all the funds, right?

01:08:07.000 All the money, right?

01:08:08.000 Where do you get the money for something like that?

01:08:11.000 You need to build something from...

01:08:13.000 From scratch and get up to speed in time to win an election, that's very, very hard to do.

01:08:18.000 But at the very least, I mean, a centrist party could fall prey to that kind of toxic rhetoric as well.

01:08:23.000 I mean, but I feel like there should be norms where freedom of speech is an absolute, I mean, we get it, but that the parties don't, they have a moral obligation to denounce things that they know undermine the unity of this country.

01:08:39.000 I don't mean people in disagreement with one another.

01:08:41.000 I mean a basic level of respect for the other person's personhood, for their citizenship, for their right to participate in the democratic process.

01:08:50.000 And when someone accuses the president of not being a citizen of the US, they're basically saying, I don't respect this system.

01:08:56.000 Like, I think the entire system is a lie.

01:09:00.000 And I don't even think Donald Trump thought it was true.

01:09:04.000 I think it was a tactic.

01:09:05.000 And that the GOP never called that out is really shameful.

01:09:08.000 You don't think he thought it was true that Obama was actually born in Kenya?

01:09:13.000 Because I think he did.

01:09:14.000 Because I know that he's really good friends with Alex Jones and talks to him all the time.

01:09:17.000 I think he believes a lot of very wacky conspiracies.

01:09:20.000 You know, I think he starts out believing, but by the end, I mean, did he...

01:09:24.000 He did it for seven years.

01:09:27.000 So many people did believe it, though.

01:09:29.000 I know, but the thing is, he was doing something that worked.

01:09:32.000 He's a pragmatist.

01:09:33.000 One of the things I really like about him, in a way...

01:09:35.000 I mean, I find him sort of amoral in the way that gives me the chills, but he's also a pragmatist, right?

01:09:41.000 So I think he's completely capable of advocating a position that he doesn't believe in, but I don't think he needs to believe in.

01:09:49.000 He's like, enough people believe in this, that this is working for me.

01:09:51.000 But what was the benefit for him even chasing that idea down?

01:09:54.000 I mean, he wasn't running for president back then.

01:09:56.000 Do you think he was considering it?

01:09:57.000 I think he was considering it for a long time.

01:10:00.000 So he was doing it to sort of deteriorate the Democratic Party?

01:10:02.000 Yeah, and to see if this, you know, the immigration stuff also.

01:10:06.000 I mean, maybe he believes in that stuff, maybe he doesn't.

01:10:08.000 But it doesn't matter.

01:10:09.000 What he figured out very astutely is he identified a demographic that feels like the country's getting overrun by immigrants, right? 0.99

01:10:18.000 And, you know, statistics don't really bear that out.

01:10:20.000 But people feel that way.

01:10:21.000 If people feel that way, they vote that way.

01:10:23.000 And he figured that out.

01:10:24.000 Right?

01:10:24.000 And so, I mean, more power to him, right?

01:10:28.000 Like, I mean, I'm not questioning his...

01:10:30.000 I mean, it worked for him, right?

01:10:33.000 But the only thing that I would say is, like, please don't say anything that undermines the nation's sense of unity.

01:10:42.000 You know, that's the crucial thing.

01:10:44.000 That's the thing that's keeping us safe in the world, is that we're a unified country.

01:10:48.000 And when you disparage the courts, for example, You're splitting the country apart.

01:10:52.000 And the intelligence agencies.

01:10:55.000 Don't do it.

01:10:56.000 Like you're drilling holes in your own boat, man.

01:10:58.000 Are you astonished that all that works?

01:11:00.000 That he can do that?

01:11:01.000 That he can disparage the intelligence communities?

01:11:03.000 That he can disparage the courts?

01:11:04.000 And that no one calls him out? 0.99

01:11:06.000 No one says, this is fucking outrageous. 1.00

01:11:07.000 This is stupid. 1.00

01:11:09.000 Especially knowing all of his campaign's ties to Russia that are coming out now, even more so. 1.00

01:11:15.000 Well, listen.

01:11:16.000 Some process is happening that we'll eventually catch up with I mean, I don't know how it's going to turn out.

01:11:24.000 Am I surprised?

01:11:24.000 Yes, of course I'm surprised.

01:11:25.000 I'm also surprised that the Democrats that within my lifetime went from being a party that was deeply concerned with the poor, with the working poor, with people working in factories.

01:11:39.000 I mean, those were at least the highest ideals, right?

01:11:42.000 In my lifetime, they became a completely elitist organization. 0.99

01:11:47.000 They didn't give a shit about those people, right? 0.99

01:11:50.000 That surprises me, too. 0.98

01:11:52.000 So along comes Bernie Sanders, who, whatever his issues, he's at least sincere.

01:11:58.000 You know what I mean?

01:11:58.000 At least you trust the guy.

01:11:59.000 That guy is speaking his mind.

01:12:01.000 And the thing about Donald Trump, he's speaking his mind.

01:12:05.000 He doesn't have these awful poll-tested opinions like Hillary did and Jeb did and all those guys.

01:12:10.000 He's like, no, no, no.

01:12:12.000 This is what I think.

01:12:13.000 I don't care how people react.

01:12:15.000 This is, as Martin Luther said, here I stand for I can do no other.

01:12:19.000 A lot of places that Trump stands I don't agree with, but I'm actually impressed by his ability to say something no matter what the repercussions.

01:12:26.000 This is kind of cool.

01:12:27.000 Well, it is definitely a first.

01:12:29.000 I mean, at the debate when he was talking to Hillary Clinton, and I forget exactly what she said, and he said, because you'd be in jail.

01:12:39.000 And the whole place went crazy. 0.99

01:12:40.000 Like, who the fuck has ever done that during a presidential debate? 0.99

01:12:43.000 It's amazing, and it worked. 0.99

01:12:46.000 My hat's kind of off to him, although I disagree with him on almost every political point that he says he holds.

01:12:51.000 But I got to say, like, it worked.

01:12:54.000 And I wrote an essay and I was talking about different kinds of courage.

01:12:58.000 And, you know, there's sort of physical courage, right?

01:13:00.000 And, I mean, literally, you know, being courageous in the face of harm to your body. 0.99

01:13:05.000 And I feel like Trump is, you know, he's a bit of a bully. 0.98

01:13:08.000 And I think that, to me, bullies and cowards are sort of the same thing, right? 0.97

01:13:11.000 They're just two different sides of the same character trait.

01:13:14.000 I said, but that's not all Trump is.

01:13:15.000 He's actually, morally, he's actually very courageous.

01:13:20.000 Like, he's not a moral coward.

01:13:22.000 He will say exactly what he thinks, no matter what the opinion's going to be.

01:13:26.000 He has extreme confidence in who he is. 0.99

01:13:29.000 Or he doesn't give a shit. 0.99

01:13:30.000 I mean, that's moral courage. 0.99

01:13:31.000 Like, this is what I believe, and I'm going to say it.

01:13:33.000 I don't care if I don't win.

01:13:35.000 I don't care if I go to jail.

01:13:36.000 Here I stand, for I can do no other.

01:13:38.000 It's a part of his elitist mentality, because he does believe that he's above.

01:13:42.000 Right.

01:13:43.000 A lot of the repercussions for saying these things. 0.97

01:13:45.000 But a lot of people who are elitists are cowards. 0.93

01:13:47.000 Yes. 0.58

01:13:48.000 And I disagree with Trump on just about all of his policies, right?

01:13:51.000 But the thing I do kind of have to tip my hat to is that he's not a moral coward.

01:13:56.000 He will say a thing that every political pundit in the world will say, no, that's going to destroy you.

01:14:01.000 You're going to attack John McCain and you're going to hope to win the Republican nomination? 1.00

01:14:06.000 You're fucking crazy? 1.00

01:14:07.000 Right. 1.00

01:14:08.000 I know.

01:14:08.000 Right.

01:14:08.000 And he did it and it worked.

01:14:09.000 Not just that, but he attacked him for being captured.

01:14:12.000 Right.

01:14:12.000 I know.

01:14:13.000 Which is insane.

01:14:14.000 And I think Trump truly feels that way.

01:14:16.000 And I don't agree with them.

01:14:17.000 But I do respect the fact that he said it in the face of all political advice. 0.99

01:14:21.000 He didn't give a shit. 0.99

01:14:22.000 He said it because he believed it. 0.99

01:14:23.000 That's moral courage.

01:14:24.000 I just disagree with his opinions.

01:14:26.000 But that moral courage, very few people have it.

01:14:29.000 And he has it.

01:14:30.000 And I just, I wish he used it to unify the country.

01:14:35.000 And he's still splitting the country.

01:14:50.000 Well, I think it speaks to what you were talking about in your book, that no one is looking at this like a real tribe.

01:14:56.000 This is an enormous tribe of 350 million people, but there's no one person that's standing out as a real leader.

01:15:03.000 And at least what Obama was, I mean, whether you agree with his policies, and there's a lot that I don't agree with, particularly the way he flip-flopped about whistleblowers and freedom of the press.

01:15:14.000 Those things disturb me greatly, because I know how intelligent he is.

01:15:18.000 I know he's a lawyer.

01:15:19.000 He was a statesman, though. 1.00

01:15:20.000 He really came across as a guy who you go, oh, well, that guy should be the fucking president. 0.99

01:15:25.000 He sounds like the president. 0.99

01:15:27.000 He has a fantastic vocabulary.

01:15:31.000 He speaks clearly.

01:15:33.000 He's a highly honed human being.

01:15:38.000 That's right.

01:15:39.000 That's right.

01:15:40.000 No, I agree.

01:15:41.000 And, you know, there are things I didn't like, whatever, about him.

01:15:44.000 But absolutely, as a person, I mean, he brought a huge, I thought, he brought a huge sort of gravitas and dignity to the office.

01:15:52.000 Dignity.

01:15:52.000 Yes, definitely.

01:15:53.000 Without a doubt.

01:15:54.000 I mean, he was probably one of the best ever at that.

01:15:57.000 But I think that what we need now is someone who genuinely wants to help the country be unified.

01:16:05.000 Someone who genuinely wants to help the country, not help their party, not help themselves, not just think, well, hey, when this is all done, I'm going to make a fucking million dollars a year doing speaking fees or whatever, however much they make when they do that.

01:16:20.000 Well, yeah, and you're going to – I mean, we need that to stay – To remain a country.

01:16:26.000 Yeah.

01:16:27.000 Right?

01:16:27.000 I mean, it really is headed towards a bad place, I think.

01:16:34.000 That person is going to have to overcome the reflexive reaction of the left wing, you know, he's not my president.

01:16:43.000 And the reflexive reaction of the right wing.

01:16:45.000 The right wing hated Obama in ways that were completely out of proportion to Obama's actual policies.

01:16:51.000 And, you know, when Mitch McConnell said, you know, the Republicans' job in Congress, their foremost job is to make sure that Barack Obama is a complete failure as a president.

01:17:01.000 Right.

01:17:02.000 That's not serving the country.

01:17:04.000 Not at all.

01:17:04.000 Right?

01:17:05.000 So you need a leader who's actually able to overcome that toxic thinking in both parties.

01:17:11.000 Right.

01:17:13.000 I mean, like, is Jesus coming back?

01:17:16.000 Like, who's going to do this?

01:17:18.000 Right?

01:17:18.000 Who is going to do this?

01:17:19.000 But I think the start is a bipartisan commission that starts to call people out.

01:17:23.000 Right?

01:17:24.000 So you have Republicans calling Republicans out because they're on this commission.

01:17:27.000 You have Democrats calling Democrats out.

01:17:29.000 You need it. 0.98

01:17:30.000 You got the free speech to make a fool yourself. 0.97

01:17:33.000 Go for it. 0.96

01:17:33.000 But you're not going to undermine this country without being called out by this commission. 0.96

01:17:39.000 And I was talking with someone in government pretty high up about this.

01:17:44.000 And I said, you know, I said my thing, you know, bullets aren't going to destroy this country.

01:17:48.000 Al-Qaeda is never going to destroy this country.

01:17:50.000 But our own words can destroy our democracy.

01:17:54.000 Like that actually could do it if we play this hand wrong.

01:17:57.000 And I said that makes partisan rhetoric actually a matter of national security.

01:18:02.000 And when you think about it as a national security concern, Then you actually have a sort of political and legal basis performing a commission that addresses it.

01:18:13.000 And I really truly think that should happen.

01:18:15.000 And if it doesn't, hopefully something else will happen that works.

01:18:19.000 But it's the only thing I can think of that will begin to address – that can rise up above the partisan interests of both parties because the parties clearly don't seem capable of doing it on their own.

01:18:31.000 Now, when you write a book like Tribe and you outline all these issues that people have and all these issues historically that people have had, do you try to consider a solution?

01:18:41.000 I mean, do you have a solution or are you just examining all the various problems that we have?

01:18:48.000 So, I mean, Tribe was me trying to make sense of sort of what ails us, right?

01:18:56.000 You know, people hemorrhaging off the frontier to the American Indians and on up to the soldiers I was with, mass shootings.

01:19:04.000 Something's not working for us, right?

01:19:07.000 So it was foremost an analysis.

01:19:10.000 And towards the end, I talked a little bit about solutions.

01:19:15.000 And one of the solutions I talked about was making a concerted effort to get rid of contemptuous partisan rhetoric in government.

01:19:21.000 And I really felt that, like, That trickles down and pollutes – it pollutes the water stream downstream.

01:19:28.000 It pollutes everything so that everyone – all us citizens are drinking toxic water from that rhetoric and wondering if the unity can survive.

01:19:39.000 Like will the center hold?

01:19:42.000 You know, you hear your parents screaming at each other in the bedroom and saying unforgivable things to each other.

01:19:47.000 As a child, you might rightly think, wow, this marriage isn't lasting.

01:19:51.000 This family is not lasting.

01:19:52.000 That's how it feels to be a citizen of the United States right now.

01:19:55.000 Like mom and dad are screaming at each other.

01:19:58.000 So I talked about contempt.

01:20:00.000 Disagree if you want.

01:20:02.000 Don't speak with contempt about someone you share a combat outpost with.

01:20:05.000 And that's what this country potentially is.

01:20:07.000 Don't you think also with the mom and dad analogy that it also shows you how to behave in your own life?

01:20:14.000 And I think that's one of the things that's really important about the president is the president does sort of represent the best example of what we can be.

01:20:21.000 When we were kids growing up, that was the thing.

01:20:23.000 You ask a kid what they want to be. 0.99

01:20:25.000 If someone said, I want to be president, we're like, holy shit, you're really going for it, kid. 0.99

01:20:29.000 You want to be the biggest job. 0.99

01:20:31.000 That's the number one position. 0.99

01:20:32.000 So you're supposed to be the best person ever, which is why we hold someone to such an incredible microscope, which is almost even more impressive that Trump won after that grab the pussy audio recording. 0.99

01:20:43.000 And then he could just brush that off as locker room talk. 0.99

01:20:46.000 Yeah.

01:20:46.000 That's right.

01:20:47.000 In a way, he's kind of right. 0.93

01:20:48.000 I mean, it really is kind of fucked up that they did try to use that on him and pull it out the last minute.

01:20:53.000 But it does give you also an understanding of how he thinks and behaves when no one's around. 0.87

01:20:58.000 Right.

01:20:58.000 I mean, you know, my problem with him was that, like, if I look at the worst of his behavior, I mean people send – society sends people to jail for the worst thing that they did.

01:21:11.000 So it is actually legitimate to judge people's worst behavior and evaluate them on that basis.

01:21:17.000 So if I look at the worst of his behavior, even if I was a diehard Republican who adhered to all of the things he says he believes in, if I looked at the worst of his behavior, mocking a Gold Star family, like mocking a disabled person – That wasn't real though.

01:21:33.000 You know that mocking a disabled person was sort of trumped up.

01:21:36.000 He does...

01:21:37.000 I hate to use that word, trumped up.

01:21:39.000 He does that whenever he's talking about anyone.

01:21:41.000 Like when he acts flustered like, oh, what are you gonna do here?

01:21:46.000 Like that.

01:21:47.000 They tried to say that he was mocking a reporter that it was disabled, but...

01:21:51.000 It's pretty clear that that's not right.

01:21:53.000 Well, I mean, maybe so, but with a question from someone who's visibly disabled, maybe you just don't do that that much.

01:22:00.000 You know what I mean?

01:22:00.000 I think that's a speech pattern he does, though.

01:22:02.000 Well, maybe.

01:22:03.000 Maybe I'm giving him more of the benefit of the doubt than I should.

01:22:05.000 If it was the only example, then I wouldn't be thinking about it.

01:22:08.000 But there is a sort of pattern that a model from Mexico who gained some weight that he was mocking?

01:22:14.000 I mean, like, the mockery of less powerful people is sort of endless.

01:22:18.000 Right.

01:22:19.000 So, to me...

01:22:21.000 I wouldn't have that person at my dinner table.

01:22:24.000 You know what I mean?

01:22:26.000 With my close friends, someone who was acting like that, who started doing that at my dinner table, I'd walk around, I'd get up, I'd walk around the table, I'd put him in a headlock, and I'd drag him out of my house, right?

01:22:39.000 I don't want to think that about my president.

01:22:41.000 I want my president to be someone I'd be, like, glad to have at my dinner table.

01:22:46.000 I didn't vote for George Bush, but I'd love to have that guy at my dinner table.

01:22:50.000 Ronald Reagan did all, you know what I mean?

01:22:51.000 He's the first president.

01:22:53.000 I'd be like, no, man, I don't want to subject my friends to that.

01:22:57.000 You ever read Woody Harrelson's account of a dinner that he had with Trump?

01:23:01.000 No.

01:23:01.000 He said literally he had to get up in the middle and go outside and smoke a joint just to just relax himself.

01:23:07.000 Yeah, I was talking about it.

01:23:08.000 I think he said early 2000 he had dinner with Trump and he said he'd never met someone so narcissistic, so self-obsessed.

01:23:14.000 Yeah.

01:23:15.000 And, you know, my worry, like, in this conversation is that it will somehow seem partisan.

01:23:21.000 And, like, I would be saying the same things if Trump were a Democrat.

01:23:24.000 Well, you said something about George Bush that you would be happy to have him over.

01:23:27.000 And I just think, I hope that what comes out of this is that a hero will rise. 0.99

01:23:32.000 And that someone who's really a legitimately good person will say, look, this is a fucking travesty. 0.81

01:23:39.000 Someone who actually could assume the role correctly will step into place and will see that very clearly in comparison.

01:23:47.000 Well, I mean, to get back to your question, one of the solutions that I talk about, it's not in my book, but I talk about this, is compulsory national service.

01:23:57.000 With a military option.

01:23:59.000 And your question was, how do we make this nation feel like a nation?

01:24:03.000 And the problem, psychologists will tell you, that the more you sacrifice for something, the more you value it.

01:24:10.000 And if you're part of something that doesn't require any sacrifice at all, you just don't value it very highly, right?

01:24:16.000 The advantage of national service And I don't mean the draft.

01:24:20.000 I think...

01:24:21.000 I don't mean military service.

01:24:23.000 I mean national service with a military option.

01:24:25.000 I don't think it's moral to force someone to fight a war that they don't believe in.

01:24:28.000 So what sort of service would you...

01:24:30.000 Whatever it is, the nation needs a lot of stuff done, right?

01:24:33.000 And whatever that may be.

01:24:35.000 But the point of it is, so if you had a military option, but otherwise you could teach in schools, otherwise you could dig ditches.

01:24:42.000 Whatever the nation needs done, this core of workers at 22, 23 years old does it for a year.

01:24:50.000 My first wife was from Eastern Europe.

01:24:53.000 And the young people...

01:24:56.000 We formed work brigades in the summer and helped harvest wheat and stuff.

01:25:00.000 That was what she did when she was a teenage girl.

01:25:03.000 And it was incredibly good for the kids over there.

01:25:07.000 And it made them feel like they're part of something, right?

01:25:09.000 And so what I would say, there's a downside to national service, which is the government's telling people what to do.

01:25:16.000 Of course.

01:25:17.000 There's also an upside which is it makes everyone feel like they're part of this thing called the United States and it puts white people and black people and rich and poor and everyone – it puts them all in a big pot and stirs them up just like the military does and they get to know each other. 0.89

01:25:29.000 And so everything's – there's an upside and a downside to everything, right?

01:25:34.000 So national service has a very obvious downside but the upside isn't discussed much which is that it creates an American identity.

01:25:43.000 A shared experience that all Americans have, like in Israel, there's compulsory service.

01:25:49.000 And that is a common ground that every single Israeli has.

01:25:53.000 Wherever they fall in the political spectrum, they all have that shared experience.

01:25:57.000 And it's an enormously potent thing in that country, keeping it bound together.

01:26:03.000 And this country, I think, needs something like that.

01:26:05.000 I think it would be very, very helpful.

01:26:07.000 Well, it would be nice if people did have some sort of connection to what it takes to keep things running, whether it's help fix the streets, whether it's help do something.

01:26:20.000 But the problem that I would have with it is the idea that someone from the government would be able to require you to do something, and that if you didn't do it, they could treat you the same way the IRS treats you if you don't pay your taxes and just lock you in a cage, which is...

01:26:36.000 Well, I mean, one way to do it might be to incentivize it by—instead of making it mandatory, incentivizing it by giving people really large tax breaks for doing it.

01:26:45.000 Yeah, but young people aren't going to think about tax breaks. 0.99

01:26:47.000 They're going to think about, fuck that, man. 1.00

01:26:48.000 I want a skateboard. 1.00

01:26:49.000 I don't want to go— All right, then they have to.

01:26:51.000 I mean, listen, for most of this nation's history, we've had a draft.

01:26:55.000 That's the government telling people what to do, right?

01:26:58.000 And likewise with taxes.

01:26:59.000 You don't pay your taxes.

01:27:00.000 You go to jail. 0.99

01:27:00.000 I mean, the government does—the government puts red lights at intersections, and you have to fucking stop. 0.99

01:27:06.000 I agree, but to try to do that today, it'd be extremely difficult. 0.76

01:27:10.000 The distrust of the government is so high, and if the government comes along and says, you have to do all these things, and then we go, wait a minute, are you doing these things?

01:27:17.000 Are you going to join the military?

01:27:19.000 You're 55 years old.

01:27:20.000 You're a senator. 1.00

01:27:21.000 Are you going to go pick wheat or fucking... 1.00

01:27:24.000 Fix the roads? 1.00

01:27:24.000 It definitely has to start. 1.00

01:27:26.000 I mean, you're not going to get 60-year-olds in national service, right?

01:27:30.000 They're already involved in their lives.

01:27:31.000 The great thing about 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds, 22-year-olds is their lives haven't really started yet.

01:27:37.000 I mean, that's why it works in Israel.

01:27:39.000 So are people going to object?

01:27:41.000 Of course they are.

01:27:42.000 But the question is, how do we unify this country?

01:27:44.000 The truth is, like, if we wanted to unify communities, you'd ban the car.

01:27:48.000 Right?

01:27:49.000 People can, you know, they're living, they're spending their whole lives within walking distance of their home.

01:27:53.000 That will unify communities.

01:27:55.000 We're just not willing to do that.

01:27:57.000 What will unify the country is national service.

01:27:59.000 We may not be willing to do it, but that's a different conversation from would it work or not.

01:28:05.000 My opinion is that it would help.

01:28:07.000 It's a good opinion.

01:28:08.000 I mean, I definitely see merit in it.

01:28:10.000 I definitely think that it would be something that would be a fascinating debate to have back and forth.

01:28:14.000 I just wonder if people at any point in their lives today would be willing to give up freedom for the government.

01:28:21.000 I think people are used to this kind of like free ride.

01:28:23.000 I pay my taxes and that's all you get from me.

01:28:25.000 I don't have to vote.

01:28:26.000 I don't have to do anything.

01:28:27.000 You know, in Australia, you have to vote.

01:28:29.000 And if you don't vote, you get fined.

01:28:31.000 Well, you know, that's what you said it right there.

01:28:33.000 That's the misconception.

01:28:34.000 It's not for the government.

01:28:36.000 It's for your neighbor.

01:28:38.000 It's for your fellow citizens.

01:28:40.000 You pay your taxes not for the government.

01:28:43.000 You pay your taxes for the country.

01:28:45.000 But you pay them to the government.

01:28:46.000 You pay them to the government.

01:28:47.000 And there's no auditing of your taxes.

01:28:49.000 And I think that's one of the things that freaks people out today.

01:28:51.000 You don't know where that money is going.

01:28:53.000 They don't have to tell you.

01:28:54.000 And if you don't give it to them, they'll lock you up.

01:28:56.000 Right.

01:28:57.000 And that's the problem with a large-scale society is that collective effort.

01:29:01.000 It's not clear that that collective effort is going to the whole entity.

01:29:04.000 It looks like it's going to the tax man, right?

01:29:07.000 And it's not.

01:29:08.000 I mean, that's an illusion, right?

01:29:10.000 But, I mean, the check is to the IRS. Right.

01:29:13.000 The IRS hands it over to the government, then spends it on the country.

01:29:16.000 I mean, that's the reality.

01:29:17.000 But it looks like the IRS is oppressing you.

01:29:21.000 But that's actually not what's happening, right?

01:29:23.000 The IRS is an arm of government that you elected in, right?

01:29:26.000 And it's been charged with getting...

01:29:28.000 Getting money from people.

01:29:29.000 The IRS isn't doing anything.

01:29:32.000 It's like TSA. I was standing in line at TSA and someone was complaining about how long it was taking.

01:29:38.000 And the guy next to her, they didn't even know each other.

01:29:41.000 And the guy next to her said, look, they're not doing it for them.

01:29:45.000 They're doing it for us.

01:29:47.000 They're searching all our stuff.

01:29:48.000 They don't care, right? 0.99

01:29:51.000 They're not on the damn plane. 0.99

01:29:52.000 They're searching our stuff for us. 0.99

01:29:54.000 Likewise with the government.

01:29:56.000 The government isn't doing it for itself.

01:29:59.000 It's doing it for us.

01:30:00.000 Right.

01:30:00.000 We like to think of it as one entity, right?

01:30:02.000 We like to think of the IRS as the government.

01:30:05.000 You know, they are collecting the money.

01:30:06.000 We almost think of it as them spending the money as well.

01:30:09.000 We don't think of it as them distributing it to the rest of the government.

01:30:12.000 That's right.

01:30:12.000 Yeah.

01:30:13.000 That's right.

01:30:14.000 So if you want to gin up a sort of like anti-government screed, like it's easy to play on that misperception because it's an easy misperception to have.

01:30:21.000 I mean, you get a $200 parking ticket in New York and it definitely feels like the parking bureau is like...

01:30:28.000 Is vengeful?

01:30:29.000 You know what I mean?

01:30:30.000 Has targeted you personally?

01:30:32.000 Is it going to take your $200 and spend it on itself?

01:30:34.000 That's what it feels like.

01:30:36.000 The truth is that that $200 fills in the potholes that you're going to be driving across next year.

01:30:41.000 That's the truth of it, right?

01:30:43.000 You know, we're talking about solutions for the woes of society and particularly the individual.

01:30:49.000 You have sort of found your own solution in journalism and in embedded journalism in these very dangerous environments that this is how you have sort of reinforced your tribe and you talk about that in the book about how you know how well you slept in this very tight confines in these bases with all these like very loud snoring men but but the fact that you guys were all together in this very hostile environment that was your solution Well,

01:31:18.000 I mean, it wasn't a long-term solution, but it did give me this experience of sort of a shared fate, right?

01:31:29.000 I mean, sort of a collective effort, right?

01:31:30.000 I was part of this group.

01:31:33.000 And my welfare was tied to the welfare of the group.

01:31:38.000 My actions could help or hinder the group.

01:31:40.000 I was judged by how I behaved in the group, right?

01:31:44.000 And that's our evolutionary past, and it felt great, right?

01:31:48.000 And so, you know, the trick is, you know, we live in a dispersed modern society where that's just not going to be the 24-hour-a-day reality for most people throughout their lives.

01:32:02.000 But it may not need to be.

01:32:04.000 You may just need a little bit of it.

01:32:06.000 Maybe you get a little bit of that sort of collective norm at the boxing gym.

01:32:13.000 Maybe you get it in the military.

01:32:15.000 Maybe you get it hunting.

01:32:16.000 Whatever.

01:32:17.000 There are ways to experience it.

01:32:19.000 And maybe you get it at church.

01:32:23.000 I mean, I'm not religious, but I understand church to be A profoundly communal activity.

01:32:28.000 And so I'm not saying burn down the suburbs and ban the car, although that would work pretty well.

01:32:36.000 Maybe for your own personal sense of sort of meaning and fulfillment in life, find that collective experience in little bits and pieces, and a little goes a long way.

01:32:47.000 Yeah, and doing something.

01:32:49.000 Doing something difficult, I think, is also very important.

01:32:51.000 Absolutely.

01:32:52.000 I mean, getting together to shoot pool with your buddies every Thursday night, that's great, but it's not quite what we're talking about.

01:32:57.000 Yeah, difficult things and things that test you physically and mentally, for some reason, those seem to be a requirement for people.

01:33:05.000 And when people don't...

01:33:06.000 Don't fulfill that requirement.

01:33:08.000 It seems to me that those are the people that are most unhappy.

01:33:12.000 Yeah, I mean, there have to be stakes involved.

01:33:14.000 Yes.

01:33:15.000 There are no stakes to pool, to golf, right?

01:33:17.000 Unless you're gambling.

01:33:18.000 Right.

01:33:19.000 But that's not a collective...

01:33:21.000 You know what I mean?

01:33:22.000 That's not a collective stake.

01:33:23.000 And they're pleasant activities, but what reproduces our evolutionary past is being in a small group where the stakes are...

01:33:34.000 But the stakes are serious, if not life and death.

01:33:36.000 But even if it's not life and death, at least they're real physical consequences.

01:33:41.000 And that collective action makes the group more able to navigate those adversities successfully.

01:33:48.000 And when you do that...

01:33:52.000 It's an intoxicating feeling.

01:33:54.000 It's what we're wired for.

01:33:56.000 It's what we're missing in our sort of like modern lives and you don't need a huge amount of it to feel better.

01:34:04.000 Another thing that seems to make people feel very fulfilled is creating things, working with their hands, creating anything, whether it's furniture, art, just making something, doing something, where your mind is involved in an actual task of bringing forth something into existence that didn't exist before.

01:34:21.000 Well, think about it.

01:34:22.000 I mean, again, in terms of evolution, if doing something successfully Yeah.

01:34:36.000 Yeah.

01:34:39.000 Yeah.

01:34:51.000 To us and lessen our chance for survival don't feel good.

01:34:56.000 So being isolated, being alienated from your group, being an outcast feels bad.

01:35:03.000 And your survival chances go down, right?

01:35:06.000 You don't want to stay in that place.

01:35:07.000 You want to join the group again.

01:35:09.000 And so there's these neurochemical incentives and punishments that get to herd people towards behaviors that help survival.

01:35:18.000 Doing things, accomplishing things, building things, that all feels good.

01:35:22.000 It's clearly what we needed to do in our evolutionary past and it's reinforced.

01:35:28.000 And creativity factors onto that how?

01:35:31.000 Like, say, like art, like painting or something like that.

01:35:34.000 Like, there's something deeply satisfying to people that are painters.

01:35:37.000 Well, yeah, and what they're...

01:35:39.000 I mean, art, they know from the incredible paintings on the caves in France and Spain, Lascaux and the other caves...

01:35:49.000 That art is one of the things that's used to bind communities together in ceremonies.

01:35:54.000 I mean, you can see it in church.

01:35:55.000 I mean, there is no church in the land that doesn't have art on the walls, right?

01:36:01.000 The depictions of Christ or whatever, or one of the visual aids that helps bind people into a group, like, oh, we all believe in the same thing, right?

01:36:08.000 So art is a great binding force.

01:36:10.000 Music is an incredible binding force.

01:36:12.000 So rhythmic, like rhythm, a heavy drumming rhythm will get a whole group of people sort of moving in unison.

01:36:19.000 And Jonathan Haidt has talked about that sort of hive behavior and how it works.

01:36:25.000 Very, very powerful.

01:36:26.000 So what I would say, and I'm just guessing here, but I would say is that the arts that are so intoxicating to be engaged in, their survival value is that it makes the group cohere around a unified idea.

01:36:39.000 And the music does that.

01:36:41.000 The visual arts do that.

01:36:43.000 The spoken word, poetry, song, all those do that as well.

01:36:47.000 And so you have a group of people that are unified on all these different levels.

01:36:52.000 So what happens when the enemy comes?

01:36:54.000 I mean, the music starts, the sort of like visual pageantry starts, like you get, you know, like the...

01:37:01.000 You know, the wartime posters showing heroic soldiers with rifle and bayonet, right?

01:37:05.000 You get the war art, right?

01:37:06.000 You get the martial music.

01:37:08.000 All of that galvanizes the public spirit to face the enemy.

01:37:11.000 And it works extremely well.

01:37:13.000 Wow.

01:37:13.000 So you think that that's one of the reasons why art is so satisfying?

01:37:17.000 I mean, I just assume that our evolution has produced that anything that feels good to us had survival value in our past.

01:37:26.000 So if creating art feels good That's because we are genetically predisposed towards doing things that bind the group together.

01:37:35.000 Generosity feels good.

01:37:36.000 If you walk down the street and you give someone $5, he's a random dude, you just give him $5, and you measure the neurochemicals in his brain and your brain, you get more of a high than he does.

01:37:47.000 So generosity feels good.

01:37:49.000 It's clearly adaptive and helps groups cohere.

01:37:51.000 Right?

01:37:52.000 Yeah.

01:37:53.000 And art as well.

01:37:56.000 So that art, like when you create something amazing, what you're realizing is that someone's going to see that and go, wow, that's incredible.

01:38:02.000 Like they're going to get a great feeling off of seeing your art.

01:38:05.000 Yeah, you have the same vision, right?

01:38:06.000 Like, oh, I painted that tree and this other person or that antelope or that bison or whatever you find in the walls of Lascaux.

01:38:14.000 And this other person comes like, oh my god, that's an incredible bison. 0.99

01:38:17.000 You did something that the other person connected to.

01:38:20.000 Now the two of you are joined in your understanding of what that painting means.

01:38:25.000 And that's a very powerful thing.

01:38:27.000 So if you drew that bison and no one else in the world ever saw it, I'm guessing that the chemical rewards for that creativity would be lower.

01:38:38.000 Yeah.

01:38:39.000 You know, I noticed that in my children.

01:38:40.000 My kids love to draw, and one of the things that they love is showing their drawings.

01:38:44.000 I mean, they love to draw, but they're like, not yet, not yet, not yet.

01:38:47.000 And then when they're done, like, look.

01:38:48.000 That's right.

01:38:49.000 And then they're just like, boom, they're getting that little rush themselves, and you get the rush.

01:38:54.000 I mean, look, I mean, just...

01:38:57.000 It's easy to test.

01:38:58.000 Take a musician, measure their neurochemicals while they're practicing in a room by themselves, and then put them in a stadium filled with 10,000 people and see what happens.

01:39:07.000 I'm guessing that the guy in the stadium with Bruce Springsteen in front of 10,000 people is experiencing a neurochemical reality that he's not getting in his living room.

01:39:17.000 Not only that, probably a neurochemical reality that very few human beings will ever experience.

01:39:22.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:39:22.000 Some sort of a strange...

01:39:25.000 But think about the power of that.

01:39:27.000 I mean, you know, any musician on stage is basically acting sort of in the role of the shaman, right?

01:39:32.000 Like, I'm going to act as a conduit between you all and the divine, right?

01:39:39.000 And my music is going to do it, my words are going to do it, my dancing is going to do it, whatever it is, but I'm the conduit, right?

01:39:44.000 I don't matter.

01:39:45.000 I'm connecting you with a divine feeling.

01:39:47.000 And that feeling is going to unify all of you.

01:39:49.000 And I'm going to play these chords, I'm going to sing this song...

01:39:52.000 And like magic, you all are going to be tapping your feet in unison.

01:39:56.000 Like how do you get 10,000 people to do the same thing at the same time?

01:40:00.000 You sing them a song.

01:40:01.000 It's the only way to do it.

01:40:02.000 That's an incredibly powerful thing.

01:40:04.000 And that's the power of the shaman.

01:40:07.000 I mean, Bruce Springsteen isn't a shaman literally, but he occupies that space in a modern secular society that doesn't have shamans.

01:40:14.000 But in the old days, that's what he would be.

01:40:17.000 Do you feel that way when you put a book out?

01:40:20.000 Like when you put the book out, when you know it's done, you read it, it's done, and you send it out there, what kind of weird feeling that you get?

01:40:25.000 Are all these people going to read that?

01:40:26.000 It's an interesting thing about a book because you actually never observe in real time people's reaction to it.

01:40:33.000 Right.

01:40:34.000 I mean, I'm not perched in someone's armchair watching them read in bed.

01:40:37.000 You know what I mean?

01:40:38.000 The general public...

01:40:39.000 What about like reviews?

01:40:41.000 Yeah, but that's also very...

01:40:42.000 It's very distant.

01:40:43.000 But when I started making documentaries, for the first time I had the experience...

01:40:50.000 The experiencing of watching other people's experience when I'm done.

01:40:55.000 Being in the audience.

01:40:56.000 I'm in the audience and I'm watching people react to Restrepo.

01:40:59.000 Yes. 0.99

01:40:59.000 I never got to see people react to the books I've read because I'm not in their damn bedroom. 0.99

01:41:04.000 Right. 0.95

01:41:05.000 But I am in the movie theater and I'm watching people react to the films I made.

01:41:11.000 And I wouldn't say it's apples or oranges.

01:41:13.000 I don't know which is one's better, one's better, whatever.

01:41:15.000 But it's a very different experience and it's incredibly powerful.

01:41:19.000 Do you like one better?

01:41:21.000 I mean, movies just can't—they don't have enough bits of information.

01:41:26.000 I mean, a book, you can really communicate information, right?

01:41:30.000 Very sophisticated ideas.

01:41:32.000 And they're permanent, right?

01:41:34.000 There they are on the person's bookshelf, and the person can underline that paragraph and go back to it.

01:41:38.000 You know you've actually affected the sort of communal thinking.

01:41:41.000 You've affected the way people understand the world.

01:41:44.000 A film is an experience more than it is a sort of data dump or a philosophical argument.

01:41:52.000 And that experience is very, very powerful.

01:41:54.000 It acts on a different part of the brain than a book does.

01:41:57.000 It's much more emotional.

01:42:00.000 I mean, I've choked up, I've teared up watching my own films, because they're personal to me, you know?

01:42:08.000 I've never done that reading my own book, rereading a book that I've written.

01:42:11.000 So it's a different experience, and I would say there's just different parts of the human mind.

01:42:16.000 Like, you sort of need both.

01:42:17.000 So no, a long answer, I don't have a preference.

01:42:19.000 I feel like I need both.

01:42:21.000 Now, this documentary on Syria, when is this available?

01:42:26.000 Well, it's called Hell on Earth.

01:42:29.000 Our website is hellonearth.com.

01:42:32.000 How'd you get that?

01:42:33.000 Seems like that would have already been taken.

01:42:35.000 Right?

01:42:36.000 Of all the different websites that are available in the English language?

01:42:38.000 That's true.

01:42:39.000 I never even thought about that.

01:42:40.000 I wasn't in charge of getting it.

01:42:42.000 Somebody's a wizard.

01:42:43.000 That's right.

01:42:43.000 They might have to pay for that one.

01:42:45.000 So it's called Hell on Earth.

01:42:46.000 It's about the Syrian Civil War.

01:42:48.000 We made it for National Geographic.

01:42:50.000 I made it with Nick Quested, my partner, and all the films that I've made.

01:42:55.000 And it broadcasts last June.

01:42:58.000 It's going to, you know, Nat Geo rebroadcasts everything that they do, obviously.

01:43:01.000 You can also go to their website and stream it.

01:43:04.000 So you can stream it today.

01:43:05.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:43:06.000 It's about the Syrian civil war, how it started, and particularly how ISIS, why ISIS rose up out of that.

01:43:13.000 And we all know what ISIS is.

01:43:14.000 This is grotesquely violent.

01:43:16.000 Radical jihadist movement.

01:43:19.000 And we have all seen their videos, heard of their videos where they're beheading people in front of a video camera and ghastly, ghastly things.

01:43:28.000 So why did that happen in Syria?

01:43:31.000 How did that mutation occur at this point in history in that place?

01:43:36.000 And so the film examines that.

01:43:40.000 And were you there?

01:43:41.000 Did you go to Syria?

01:43:42.000 No.

01:43:43.000 You know, after my friend Tim Hetherington was killed, Tim obviously I made Restrepo with and he was a brother and a good friend and a colleague and he was killed in Libya in 2011 on an assignment that I was supposed to be on with him at the last minute I couldn't go and he got killed.

01:43:58.000 And so I stopped war reporting after that, frontline reporting.

01:44:01.000 Syria was so dangerous that you couldn't think of going in there. 1.00

01:44:05.000 I mean, the numerous kidnappings and beheadings, it was basically a suicide.

01:44:10.000 By the time we started working on the story, it was a suicide mission.

01:44:12.000 So we actually worked with Syrians in Syria who were documenting their own war.

01:44:18.000 Wow.

01:44:20.000 Including an incredible family that was living in territory under ISIS control.

01:44:26.000 And surviving, and they were trying to figure out, like, do we try to escape or not?

01:44:30.000 And of course, if you try to escape and you're caught, you're dead.

01:44:33.000 They will drag your family out of a pickup truck and line you up on a wall and machine gun you.

01:44:37.000 But they were worried that if they stayed, they'd also die.

01:44:40.000 And they decided to escape.

01:44:41.000 We got a camera to them.

01:44:43.000 And a very nondescriptal cell phone camera.

01:44:45.000 And they self-documented life under ISIS and the decision to leave and their flight through the ISIS checkpoints, through the front lines, all the way to Turkey.

01:44:55.000 And they self-documented.

01:44:56.000 And it's part of, it's the sort of through line in the movie.

01:44:59.000 Absolutely extraordinary family.

01:45:01.000 Wow.

01:45:02.000 And so they're in Turkey now?

01:45:04.000 They're in Turkey now.

01:45:05.000 They tried to get to Greece on a rubber raft, on a Zodiac.

01:45:08.000 They returned.

01:45:08.000 Again, this is also documented by them.

01:45:10.000 It's in the film.

01:45:10.000 They returned back at the last moment by the Turkish Coast Guard.

01:45:14.000 Sent back.

01:45:15.000 And now they're in Greece and they're actually doing really well.

01:45:16.000 They started a small business.

01:45:18.000 They're incredibly hardworking, resourceful, beautiful people.

01:45:21.000 I mean, they're, you know, like, I wish they could come to this country.

01:45:24.000 We'd be lucky to have them.

01:45:25.000 And they'd be lucky to have us.

01:45:26.000 They're an incredible family.

01:45:27.000 And if you see the film, you'll see what I'm talking about.

01:45:30.000 That's a big point that a lot of people felt was missed at all the criticisms of immigrants coming over to this country.

01:45:37.000 You know, stop, close the borders, stop allowing Muslims, stop allowing all these people to come over from these dangerous areas. 1.00

01:45:44.000 Somehow and other these people would be agents of these dangerous areas coming to destroy our democracy.

01:45:48.000 But these people are trapped.

01:45:51.000 A lot of these people are people that are experiencing these horrible conditions Much like many of the people that originally made it to America in the first place. 0.99

01:45:59.000 Yeah, I mean, our country is immigrants.

01:46:00.000 That's what the country is.

01:46:01.000 My father is a two-time war refugee, right?

01:46:04.000 I mean, he fled Spain during the Civil War.

01:46:06.000 I mean, he's passed away.

01:46:07.000 He was born in 1923. He fled Spain during the Civil War, and then he fled France because the Nazis rolled in.

01:46:13.000 He came to this country. 0.94

01:46:14.000 He was a brilliant physicist, and we were lucky to have him, right?

01:46:17.000 And he was eternally lucky to be part of this country as well.

01:46:22.000 So...

01:46:23.000 What was odd about Trump's travel ban is that there were countries that we'd never been attacked by.

01:46:31.000 No one from those countries had ever attacked this country.

01:46:34.000 What are those countries doing on the travel ban?

01:46:37.000 This lunatic that killed people in New York, Uzbekistan, that wasn't on the travel ban.

01:46:42.000 I mean, I understand trying to create a filter that keeps bad people out. 0.67

01:46:47.000 Of course, every country does that.

01:46:48.000 I just didn't understand the specific logic of those countries on the list.

01:46:52.000 It made no sense to me.

01:46:53.000 No, it made no sense to anybody.

01:46:55.000 And it's also, you're assuming that everybody in these areas is bad, including the people that try and escape?

01:47:01.000 That sounds insane.

01:47:03.000 And that sounds, it's just, it's cruel and anti-human.

01:47:09.000 To not want people to have a chance.

01:47:11.000 I'm not saying don't vet these people out.

01:47:12.000 Don't interview them and communicate with them and find out what their backgrounds are.

01:47:15.000 As much information as you can get.

01:47:18.000 Yeah, of course.

01:47:19.000 Are you concerned, because this is something that's been bothering me, I was concerned about my own reaction to yesterday's mass shooting, that I was almost nonchalant about it.

01:47:29.000 I was like, well, there's another one.

01:47:31.000 Like, that we're getting numb to mass shootings.

01:47:34.000 You know, I asked myself two questions, and I didn't mean to ask them, and I'm just being honest in telling people this.

01:47:42.000 I asked myself, I wonder if it was a white church or a black church?

01:47:45.000 And I asked myself, I wonder if the attacker was an Islamic radical and a foreigner, or was he a homegrown American? 0.66

01:47:51.000 I assumed it was a he, obviously.

01:47:54.000 And I don't even know what that says, what those questions say about me or about the country, but it's really interesting.

01:48:01.000 Those are the first things I asked, and I didn't like...

01:48:04.000 I didn't like that those questions came to my mind so quickly.

01:48:07.000 There was something about it that didn't feel good.

01:48:08.000 And they're very obvious questions to ask.

01:48:10.000 I mean, you know, it's clear that those are very important things to know.

01:48:15.000 But I didn't like that it came to me so quickly.

01:48:17.000 Yeah, I asked the exact same questions, but I also felt like it's just these are patterns.

01:48:22.000 They're inescapable patterns, whether it's the Vegas massacre or this one or the Orlando shootings.

01:48:28.000 It's always a man. 1.00

01:48:30.000 And is it a Muslim or is it a crazy white guy? 1.00

01:48:34.000 Well, you know, in Tribe, I write about mass shootings. 1.00

01:48:36.000 They're a very particular thing.

01:48:38.000 I mean, there's gang shootings in Chicago or whatever that may have a kind of logic to them, right?

01:48:42.000 Like, you're controlling turf, there's money involved, drugs, whatever.

01:48:45.000 Yeah, it makes sense.

01:48:46.000 So a bunch of innocent people get shot, that's the price you pay for gang wars.

01:48:50.000 There's a logic to it.

01:48:51.000 Mass shootings are completely nihilistic, right?

01:48:55.000 It's someone killing as many people that he doesn't know as possible before he dies.

01:49:02.000 It's totally nihilistic.

01:49:04.000 And what I found, and I did a lot of research into it, that those kinds of mass shootings typically happen in middle-class communities, like otherwise safe middle-class communities or small, low-crime Christian communities.

01:49:20.000 They have never happened in the inner city.

01:49:23.000 I mean, literally never happened.

01:49:26.000 They happen in communities that are otherwise very safe, very Christian, very boring, frankly. 1.00

01:49:35.000 And it really made me wonder, like, is there...

01:49:38.000 I mean, lots of countries have as many guns as we do. 0.95

01:49:42.000 Every country has crazy people in them, right?

01:49:45.000 We are the only country that does this to ourselves. 0.54

01:49:50.000 And we do it only in a certain kind of community, right?

01:49:53.000 It doesn't happen in high-crime, low-income communities, right?

01:49:57.000 It happens in the most sort of like small, quiet, Christian, low-crime, bland, suburban or rural communities. 0.96

01:50:05.000 That's where it happens.

01:50:06.000 So what does it say?

01:50:07.000 Why is it that these communities are not producing crazy people but somehow those people – I think?

01:50:30.000 The lack of real community effort and the lack of national unity in the past.

01:50:38.000 I mean, the mass killings have risen abruptly in the last 15 years.

01:50:41.000 And, you know, it's hard for me.

01:50:43.000 You don't murder people in your own community.

01:50:45.000 When that happens, it means the community doesn't exist, at least for the murderer.

01:50:49.000 Do you see any connection or do you consider any connection between psych drugs?

01:50:55.000 I mean, I don't know how many of these people are on psych drugs.

01:50:58.000 A tremendous amount.

01:50:59.000 Like, there was a study that, see if you could find it, Jamie.

01:51:03.000 They connected all the mass shootings that have happened over the last two decades with all the different medications that people were on, and every single one of them was on something, or was withdrawing from something.

01:51:16.000 Okay, so here's the question.

01:51:17.000 Are the drugs creating the behavior, or are the drugs treating a mental disorder That itself is tied to the behavior.

01:51:26.000 Very good question.

01:51:27.000 Right?

01:51:27.000 I mean, there's no way to know.

01:51:29.000 Mass shootings of the nihilistic sort that I'm referring to started, abruptly rose in the 80s.

01:51:37.000 Okay?

01:51:39.000 And then doubled since 2006. And I think they're increasing even more since then.

01:51:45.000 Every mass shooting over the last 20 years has one thing in common, and it isn't guns.

01:51:50.000 Yeah, this is it.

01:51:51.000 Right, but that's not just positive.

01:51:56.000 You know what I mean?

01:51:57.000 You're right.

01:51:58.000 It's not correlation.

01:51:59.000 It could be the depression is rising in alienated communities, and the depression is getting unsuccessfully treated with drugs.

01:52:07.000 So all these people are on drugs, but really what's happening is that—and this is true—suicide, depression, PTSD, anxiety— Alienation, all of these things are going up in society.

01:52:18.000 I mean, that's just statistically true.

01:52:19.000 Unquestionably.

01:52:20.000 The question that I would have about this, though, is that when I've talked to psychiatrists about it, they say that the dissociative aspect of the psychiatric medications are part of the problems that people do not feel.

01:52:31.000 They don't feel the connection even to their actions, that they can do something horrific, like shoot people.

01:52:37.000 And they might be even doing that to try to get some feeling.

01:52:42.000 Listen, that's totally possible.

01:52:44.000 I would also offer this idea that the massive national addiction to violent video games is a dissociated experience.

01:52:52.000 You're shooting people.

01:52:53.000 They're not real people.

01:52:54.000 That doesn't happen.

01:52:55.000 You think they're connected somehow?

01:52:57.000 I don't know, but I'm just saying what you just described happening in the streets of America is exactly duplicated digitally in video games.

01:53:06.000 Right, but the video games doesn't keep you from feeling things in the real world, where the psych medications do.

01:53:12.000 Right, but the experience of shooting at human targets that aren't real.

01:53:17.000 Right.

01:53:17.000 If you incorporate that into how you feel about shooting, then you go out into the real world.

01:53:22.000 It may not be that hard, particularly with the aid of psych drugs and whatever depression is sort of endemic in this society right now.

01:53:29.000 It might not be hard to transpose that dissociated experience in a video game with digital images, transpose it onto actual humans in the real world if you're sufficiently disturbed.

01:53:41.000 That's a very good connection and an interesting question because I've heard it discussed when they talk about war and how kids that grow up playing Call of Duty and things along those lines, they get really good at it, would be actually better in combat.

01:53:55.000 They would have the tactics mapped out in their mind better.

01:53:59.000 Yeah.

01:53:59.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:54:00.000 Absolutely.

01:54:01.000 I mean, look, there's a TV program called Active Shooter, right?

01:54:04.000 What is it?

01:54:05.000 I just heard about it.

01:54:06.000 I haven't seen it.

01:54:07.000 I would never watch it.

01:54:08.000 But they go back and they interview everyone who survived an active shooting incident and recreate it.

01:54:14.000 And now people watch for, I mean, in some sense, entertainment, right?

01:54:18.000 TV is entertainment.

01:54:19.000 They watch for entertainment, recreations of acting shooting incidents that are, I think, partly the result of the kind of deep alienation that happens In a media-obsessed society where no one's talking to each other.

01:54:30.000 I mean, it's the perfect circle, right?

01:54:33.000 Well, they're definitely escalating, right?

01:54:34.000 I mean, we had the event in New York where the guy runs over all those people, and then a couple of days later, we're having the one in Texas.

01:54:41.000 This is happening not over the scale of one a year or one every few years.

01:54:45.000 We're getting them once a week.

01:54:47.000 Well, yeah, and what's interesting, I mean, in New York, there was an ideology behind it.

01:54:52.000 So it wasn't nihilistic.

01:54:53.000 I mean, it felt nihilistic to us, but to that guy, he actually believed in what he was doing.

01:54:58.000 But the real mass shooters that they're just out there to kill as many people as possible, it's hard to know what the ideology is.

01:55:05.000 Well, this guy was dishonorably discharged from the military for something.

01:55:09.000 I forget what it was.

01:55:10.000 So he was in a position.

01:55:11.000 What's up?

01:55:11.000 It was abuse on his spouse and child.

01:55:15.000 Right.

01:55:16.000 And he didn't have a license to own a gun.

01:55:20.000 He owned whatever guns that he had, he got them illegally.

01:55:24.000 In Colorado, right?

01:55:25.000 He drove to Colorado?

01:55:26.000 That's what I heard.

01:55:27.000 He got him in Colorado.

01:55:28.000 He was in Texas.

01:55:29.000 I think he got him in Colorado.

01:55:31.000 Did he get him at a gun show or something like that?

01:55:33.000 I don't know.

01:55:33.000 I don't know where he got him.

01:55:35.000 We're looking at little tiny details. 0.99

01:55:37.000 The real question is, how the fuck does a person do something like that? 1.00

01:55:40.000 He shot babies. 1.00

01:55:42.000 He shot five-year-olds.

01:55:44.000 The whole thing is just, it doesn't even make sense.

01:55:47.000 And I don't know if he was on any psych medication or if they know he was, but just the staggering numbers of broken individuals that are committing these crimes is just very, very confusing.

01:55:58.000 And you think that it's tied to what you were saying, too, about communities about inner cities where you have impoverished high crime areas, but they're not seeing these things.

01:56:10.000 Do you think because in these high crime communities are dealing with much more life and death and the struggles much more real that they feel more connected?

01:56:18.000 You know, this is totally a theory.

01:56:21.000 I mean, I have no idea.

01:56:22.000 It's just that the truth is that those awful sort of school shootings and mass shootings in the streets have never happened in a high crime It's possible that for all the very real stresses and traumas of poverty,

01:56:41.000 That for all of those things, there is also more face-to-face communal connection in poor neighborhoods than in wealthy neighborhoods or in middle-class neighborhoods.

01:56:52.000 And that communal connection, I mean, literally meeting people on the landing of your apartment building, meeting people on the door stoop, on the street, that those kinds of human interactions, even in an economically stressed neighborhood, That those create enough of a sense of community that people who might otherwise go crazy and turn their guns in this nihilistic way on innocent people,

01:57:18.000 that they just don't do it.

01:57:19.000 Because why would I do that to my own people?

01:57:21.000 And what I fear in this country is that we're losing the sense of what our own people are.

01:57:27.000 What are our own people?

01:57:28.000 And if you're doing that in the streets of the neighboring town, clearly there's been some loss of some idea of what we belong to.

01:57:37.000 And that's where National Service or a Congressional Commission that really calls out rhetoric that undermines our sense of who we are as a nation.

01:57:47.000 It might start at the top.

01:57:49.000 Changing that might start at the top.

01:57:51.000 It might help.

01:57:51.000 Do you think there's any incentive that these people experience to be someone who creates this big event where everybody has to look at them?

01:58:02.000 Yeah.

01:58:02.000 I mean, I'm guessing, but I'm imagining that someone like that feels powerless and insignificant and abused by society, and at least they'll be...

01:58:16.000 Famous in their last acts, in their death.

01:58:19.000 They're going to cause a lot of reaction.

01:58:21.000 They're like, oh, you messed with me my whole life?

01:58:24.000 At least for the last five minutes of my life, you guys are the ones who are going to be scared.

01:58:28.000 You're going to be begging me for mercy now.

01:58:30.000 I begged you for mercy my whole life.

01:58:32.000 Now you're going to be begging me for mercy.

01:58:34.000 I'm totally guessing, right?

01:58:35.000 I'm just riffing here.

01:58:37.000 But I wouldn't be surprised if there was something of that to it.

01:58:39.000 Well, it's a good guess.

01:58:40.000 I mean, this has been a very common conversation lately as to whether or not you discuss these people and even bring up their names.

01:58:49.000 I know in some places and some even media outlets, they don't want to report on the person.

01:58:55.000 The individual is creating this chaos.

01:58:58.000 Well, you know, one of the things I think is a problem is that if you love this country, there is a certain pressure to think it's the best possible country ever.

01:59:10.000 Yeah.

01:59:23.000 The only one?

01:59:24.000 There's not another country that has?

01:59:25.000 I mean, not at the rate that we do.

01:59:26.000 Right.

01:59:27.000 Not at this level.

01:59:28.000 In China, there's a rash of knife attacks, right?

01:59:30.000 I mean, it's not that it doesn't happen at all. 0.98

01:59:32.000 But if you really look over the last like 20 years, more than that, since the 80s when this shit started, like we're the only country that does this regularly to ourselves. 0.92

01:59:40.000 It's regularly to the point where it's like every month practically. 0.95

01:59:43.000 Right.

01:59:43.000 Right?

01:59:45.000 It's a sign.

01:59:46.000 I mean, if your child was acting out in a violent way and punching kids in the playground, you'd think, okay, he's in pain, right?

01:59:52.000 He's acting out.

01:59:53.000 Like, what's wrong with this kid?

01:59:55.000 Like, he's clearly in pain, in some kind of pain, and he's lashing out.

01:59:58.000 Well, the society is in some kind of pain.

02:00:00.000 Like, what is it?

02:00:01.000 You know, and you can dismiss me as a, like, bleeding heart liberal, you know, whatever, I don't mean you, but one could dismiss me as a bleeding heart liberal, like, okay, well then what's your question then?

02:00:12.000 My question is, why are we in so much pain?

02:00:17.000 That's the question that I think might begin to lead to an answer of why there's such high suicide rates in such a wealthy society, why there's mass killing rates.

02:00:25.000 You know, that would begin to answer those questions.

02:00:27.000 If you don't like that question, what's your question to answer those terrible tragedies?

02:00:32.000 What's your question?

02:00:33.000 Well, what you're saying is very compelling, and it's an aspect of this that I don't think is being considered, and I think your book is very important when it comes to that.

02:00:43.000 I think the questions that you raise and all the various examples that you give It's really food for thought.

02:00:53.000 And I don't think it's being discussed in very many other circles.

02:00:56.000 Everyone's looking at the psychiatric drugs.

02:00:58.000 Everyone's looking at the white men with guns and the gun problem, the NRA and all these various aspects.

02:01:04.000 They're not looking at the root cause of this depression, anxiety and this detachment that we have from our neighbors and our community.

02:01:11.000 Look, I mean, Somalia's got a lot more guns than we do, right? 0.98

02:01:14.000 And there's plenty of violence in Somalia, but no one's walking down the streets of their own neighborhood massacring their own people.

02:01:19.000 Only we do that.

02:01:20.000 And what is, you know, in a sense, it's a cry for help by our society.

02:01:26.000 Not by that person.

02:01:27.000 I'm saying generally the phenomenon within our society is a kind of cry for help.

02:01:31.000 Like we are – something is wrong, psychically, spiritually wrong.

02:01:35.000 Christians will say we're not a Christian enough country.

02:01:37.000 But, you know, that's not true.

02:01:41.000 That's not the problem, right?

02:01:43.000 There are peaceful Muslim societies and very violent Christian ones, and you can't correlate it with Christianity. 1.00

02:01:49.000 I think the one thing you can—there are oppressive societies that are very low violence, and there are full democracies like us with lots of violence.

02:01:59.000 So it's not the democratic system, right?

02:02:00.000 What is it?

02:02:01.000 And my guess—and it's only a guess—my guess is that a certain amount Of the high suicide rates, the high depression, anxiety, drug addiction, porn addiction, child abuse, mass shootings in the streets.

02:02:15.000 My guess is that the common denominator in all those things is the sort of catastrophic lack of communal connection that many Americans experience.

02:02:27.000 Well, it's a very compelling argument.

02:02:29.000 It's a very compelling point that, again, I don't see being discussed in very many other areas.

02:02:35.000 And I really appreciate it, man.

02:02:36.000 I really appreciate your book.

02:02:37.000 I think it's great.

02:02:38.000 And I really suggest anybody who's interested in this subject, please go read it.

02:02:42.000 Tribe, Sebastian Junger.

02:02:44.000 Thank you, brother.

02:02:44.000 Appreciate it, man.

02:02:45.000 I really enjoyed it.

02:02:45.000 Thank you very much.

02:02:46.000 Anytime.

02:02:47.000 Come on by.

02:02:48.000 All right.

02:02:49.000 Thanks, everybody.

02:02:52.000 Awesome.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 06, 2017

Joe Rogan Experience #1034 - Sebastian Junger

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