The Joe Rogan Experience - June 09, 2017


Joe Rogan Experience #975 - Sebastian Junger

Topics
adversity and social behavior political genetics genetic limitations fear and phobias fear of spiders living in poor neighborhoods material possessions evolutionary advantage physical activity and testosterone levels
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Sebastian Junger
Mentioned
Donald Trump Hillary Clinton Ellis Settle Barack Obama Lucy John Stuart Mill Benjamin Franklin Floyd Mayweather Rosie O'Donnell Saddam Hussein Lakota Sioux James Comey Sam Harris Claustrophobia Schizophrenia Categorizing Vicenza Gaddafi Gleason Prozac and 3 more
Joe Rogan Experience #973 - Wheeler Walker, Jr. Joe Rogan Experience - Podcast In Paradise (Audio Only)

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 23 minutes

Words per minute

174.56

Word count

14,651

Sentence count

1,208

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

39

sentences flagged

Hate speech

21

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about what it was like to live with the Native Americans and how they were able to create a society that was much more egalitarian than colonial society. We also talk about the importance of solitude and how it can be a form of isolation and depression. This episode is brought to you by the National Museum of American Indians and the Center for Native American Studies at the University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Baltimore, MD. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: "sponsors" to receive 10% off your entire purchase when you enter the discount code "sponsor" when you sign up for our sponsor discount code: CROWN10 at checkout. Thanks to our sponsor, CROWN! We hope you enjoy listening to this episode and share it with your friends and family! Thank you so much for being a supporter of this podcast and looking forward to hearing from you in the future episodes! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What is a good day in the life of a Native American? 2:30 - What was it like living with the Indians? 3:15 - How did the Native American society really looked like? 4:20 - How was it different from colonial society? 5:40 - What does it mean to live in a group? 6: What are the benefits of living with other people? 7:00- What is it like to be alone? 8:00 9:20- What are we are we wired to serve ourselves? 11:30- How do we belong to a group ? 13:40- How can we live in groups? 14:00 Are we wired for solitude? 15:00 Can we be alone in groups of people in groups by a group and a group of strangers? 16:00 What do we feel like a group or a group in a harsh environment? 17:00 Is it a group that we are wired to feel like we are better than a group by a better place? 18:00 +16: What is the role of the human spirit? 19:00 Should we be lonely? 21:10 - How does that sound like a good thing? 22:00 How does it matter? 23:00 Do you belong to something else? 25:00

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:08.000 Alright, we're live.
00:00:10.000 What's up, man?
00:00:10.000 How are you?
00:00:11.000 Hey, I'm pretty good.
00:00:12.000 I'm excited.
00:00:13.000 I walked in on a pool game.
00:00:14.000 I barely squeaked it out.
00:00:17.000 It was a very nice shot to end it, though.
00:00:19.000 That's the way to end it.
00:00:20.000 So, I've been reading your book, man, Tribe.
00:00:23.000 I really enjoy it.
00:00:24.000 It's really good.
00:00:25.000 And it resonates.
00:00:28.000 It's very interesting.
00:00:29.000 Into the first chapter, I wanted to move in with the Native Americans.
00:00:36.000 One of the more interesting aspects of it was something that I didn't know about, which was the European settlers that had been kidnapped and were living with the Native Americans, and then when they were rescued, many of them wanted to go back.
00:00:51.000 Yeah, or they would go into hiding so they wouldn't have to be repatriated to colonial society.
00:00:56.000 They wanted to stay with their adopted tribes. 0.99
00:00:58.000 And there was also a lot of young white people, particularly white men, but young women too, who basically absconded across the frontier into tribal society.
00:01:10.000 They fled white society.
00:01:12.000 They didn't like it.
00:01:13.000 And as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, we have lots of young colonials fleeing to the Indians, and we have not one example of an Indian, as they were called, fleeing to white society.
00:01:25.000 Yeah, that was one of the more fascinating aspects of it.
00:01:27.000 I didn't anticipate that.
00:01:29.000 I thought that there would be a lot of Native Americans that would be like, wow, this is way better. 1.00
00:01:33.000 Look at all the food.
00:01:34.000 Look at the houses.
00:01:36.000 I mean, they had plenty of food.
00:01:37.000 They were a very successful society.
00:01:41.000 In fact, they had better nutrition than the whites did. 0.99
00:01:45.000 A more varied diet.
00:01:47.000 And a much, much more egalitarian society than colonial society.
00:01:51.000 That was also interesting about it.
00:01:53.000 When you were talking about the women that had moved in with the Native Americans and were expressing how much more freedom they experienced.
00:02:02.000 Yeah, I mean, Indian society, Native society, wasn't crushed by Christian morality.
00:02:07.000 So you could divorce, you could marry as a woman, you could marry whom you wanted, you could get divorced, you could do whatever you wanted. 0.82
00:02:12.000 It was very, very egalitarian.
00:02:15.000 What they've shown is that the...
00:02:18.000 In societies where everyone is necessary for food production, everyone's more or less equal.
00:02:26.000 And in agrarian societies, agricultural societies, industrial societies, you have large segments of the population, often women, who are not involved in food production, they're involved in reproduction, and so their equality goes down.
00:02:42.000 Wow.
00:02:43.000 It's almost like...
00:02:46.000 Society as we've created over the last couple of hundred years is almost totally incompatible with With human genetics or with the human body or the the human spirit or whatever well if you look at I Mean genetics are complicated.
00:03:02.000 I mean obviously on some level industrial modern society is very successful.
00:03:05.000 We have seven billion of us but As wealth goes up in a society, as modernity goes up in a society, the suicide rate goes up.
00:03:15.000 The depression rate goes up.
00:03:18.000 Schizophrenia goes up in urban environments.
00:03:21.000 They're not good for the human psyche.
00:03:23.000 We are designed, we evolved to live in groups of 30, 40 people in a harsh environment, totally inter-reliant on one another for survival.
00:03:31.000 That creates a huge amount of equality within a group and loyalty within a group.
00:03:35.000 That's what we are designed for genetically.
00:03:38.000 Modern society allows the individual to be independent from the group, which is in some ways a great liberation.
00:03:45.000 In other ways it can lead to a profound alienation and depression.
00:03:49.000 Yeah, it's just a very confusing thing it seems for people to be amongst so many people, but to be alone.
00:03:57.000 Yeah, I mean, we're not wired to be confronted with strangers all day long.
00:04:03.000 I live in New York City, and I love New York City.
00:04:06.000 But all day long, you encounter strangers, and you don't recognize anybody.
00:04:12.000 So you can be alone in a crowd, which is not something that human beings have experienced until quite recently in their history.
00:04:19.000 Yeah, that was, I think, one of the more disturbing parts about this idea that these people were kidnapped by the Native Americans and wanted to stay with them, was that whatever that Native American life was,
00:04:35.000 like, however they were living, that just seemed to just resonate with them.
00:04:38.000 It seemed to be what was right.
00:04:42.000 Well, we're wired to want to feel like we belong to a group.
00:04:46.000 Native American society was sexually quite relaxed.
00:04:50.000 It was quite egalitarian.
00:04:53.000 In a hunter-gatherer society, you really can't accumulate wealth very well because these societies are often nomadic, so you can only accumulate as much wealth as you can carry, which isn't much.
00:05:04.000 And ultimately, in societies like that, I think?
00:05:24.000 That's a whole other evolutionary imperative, which is also important.
00:05:28.000 But in our society, it's way out of whack.
00:05:29.000 So we are wired to serve ourselves, and we are wired to serve the group.
00:05:34.000 And in a healthy society, those two are in a dynamic tension with each other and in balance.
00:05:39.000 In modern society, there really is no group to serve.
00:05:43.000 And it leads to a really profound sense of meaninglessness for a lot of people.
00:05:48.000 Yeah, I also found it pretty fascinating that when you were really young, when you were working, I think you said you were working construction, is that what it was?
00:05:58.000 I'm trying to remember the story you were about to refer to.
00:06:01.000 You were just saying that you were talking to someone you were working with and they were telling you to slow down because some of us have to do this for a lifetime.
00:06:09.000 Yeah, I forgot about that story.
00:06:10.000 Yeah, I was on a construction crew.
00:06:12.000 It was the highway department of my town.
00:06:14.000 And a lot of these guys were kind of lifers in the highway department.
00:06:17.000 Not a particularly challenging job.
00:06:20.000 In a sense, but you were on your feet all day long in the sun or whatever.
00:06:24.000 And so I was a young guy and I wanted to sort of prove my mettle or whatever.
00:06:29.000 We were digging a trench and I was digging like crazy.
00:06:32.000 And an older guy came up to me.
00:06:34.000 He was probably in his 60s.
00:06:36.000 He came up to me and clapped me on the shoulder.
00:06:37.000 He said, son, you want to slow down there?
00:06:41.000 Some of us are going to have to do this job our whole lives.
00:06:44.000 And he knew I was a college kid.
00:06:45.000 He knew I wasn't going to.
00:06:46.000 Right.
00:06:47.000 And I said, just slow down.
00:06:49.000 No one needs to work this fast.
00:06:50.000 It was really interesting that you were longing for something, you were saying, almost to go wrong, so everybody had a band together, whether it was a hurricane or something, and that that mundane life of just work and doing things you don't really want to do...
00:07:08.000 Well, I mean, the irony about modern society is that it has removed hardship and danger from everyday life, and it's in the face of hardship and danger that people come to understand their value to their society.
00:07:19.000 And they get their sense of meaning from that.
00:07:22.000 And so what you have is when, you know, during the Blitz in London, for example, 30,000 people were killed by German bombs.
00:07:29.000 It was a horror show over the course of six months.
00:07:32.000 It was ghastly.
00:07:32.000 But people were sleeping shoulder to shoulder in the tube stations and putting out fires with bucket brigades and digging people out of rubble.
00:07:38.000 And they were acting as a unified society.
00:07:41.000 And the English government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties because there's a civilian population getting bombed to bits.
00:07:48.000 And the opposite happened.
00:07:49.000 Admissions to psych wards went down during the Blitz and then back up after the bombing stopped.
00:07:54.000 And then afterwards, there was enormous nostalgia in England for the Blitz for those days, as tragic as they were, because English society felt, people felt like they were together.
00:08:09.000 Later, I went back to Sarajevo, where I'd been during the siege of Sarajevo in the early 90s, and civilians would tell me, you know, this is 20 years later, 20 years after the war, people would say, you know, a lot of us missed the war because we were better people back then.
00:08:22.000 We took care of each other.
00:08:24.000 I've talked about that with September 11th.
00:08:26.000 I went to New York City about, I guess it was maybe six months after September 11th, and I was there a couple times.
00:08:35.000 Before September 11th and after September 11th, there was a very clear difference in the way people were behaving.
00:08:41.000 People seemed to be more friendly, more open.
00:08:45.000 They were really appreciative of first responders.
00:08:50.000 I was there once and a friend of mine, she fainted, and so they called the fire department, came to check her out. 0.98
00:08:55.000 And when the fireman showed up, man, you would think fucking superheroes showed up. 0.97
00:09:00.000 It was amazing. 0.99
00:09:01.000 Everybody was so happy to see him.
00:09:03.000 And it was in stark contrast to the way people used to behave and treat each other.
00:09:08.000 And it was directly because of having experienced this horrific event.
00:09:12.000 Well, adversity produces pro-social behaviors in people.
00:09:18.000 Adversity makes people act well.
00:09:21.000 The lack of adversity, safety, and comfort allow people to act selfishly.
00:09:26.000 So after 9-11, the suicide rate went down in New York.
00:09:30.000 The violent crime rate went down in New York.
00:09:33.000 Vietnam vets reported that their PTSD symptoms went down after 9-11.
00:09:38.000 What happens is...
00:09:41.000 People suddenly feel that they're needed by their society, by their people.
00:09:44.000 And if you feel needed, you are able to ignore your own personal troubles.
00:09:50.000 As once someone in England, an English official said during the Blitz in London, he said, it's amazing we have the chronic neurotics of peacetime driving ambulances.
00:10:02.000 And if you think about it in terms of evolution, if adversity and danger produced bad human behaviors, we wouldn't be here today.
00:10:09.000 Another way to say that is we are the descendants of the individuals 100,000 years ago who acted well in a crisis.
00:10:15.000 The people that acted badly in a crisis and just took care of themselves and didn't take care of their people, their group, those groups died out.
00:10:24.000 It's people, it's groups that encourage a form of altruism and self-sacrifice of individuals for the group during a crisis.
00:10:32.000 Those groups survive.
00:10:34.000 That DNA gets passed on to us.
00:10:36.000 Did you gain a deep appreciation for this because of your time as a war journalist?
00:10:41.000 Did it sort of manifest itself in your mind because of that?
00:10:46.000 Well, this book came to me in a sort of two-step process.
00:10:49.000 You know, first of all, when I was a young man, I had a surrogate uncle figure in my life, a very important person to me named Ellis Settle.
00:10:56.000 He was half Lakota Sioux, half Apache, and he was born in 1929 on a wagon out west.
00:11:02.000 He had lived an extraordinary life.
00:11:04.000 He was very, very educated, self-educated.
00:11:06.000 And at one point he said to me, you know, it's so funny, all throughout the history of this country, white people were always running off to join the Indians, and the Indians never ran off to join the white people.
00:11:15.000 And I filed that away in my mind.
00:11:17.000 I kind of liked the idea of it.
00:11:18.000 I hoped it was true.
00:11:20.000 I didn't know if it was true.
00:11:21.000 And then decades later, I was with American soldiers on a remote outpost in Afghanistan.
00:11:27.000 Yeah.
00:11:32.000 Yeah.
00:11:36.000 Yeah.
00:11:50.000 I think?
00:12:01.000 A real depression set in.
00:12:02.000 And by the time I got caught up with them again in Vicenza and interviewed them, many of them said that they didn't want to come back to America.
00:12:09.000 They wanted to go back out to Restrepo.
00:12:11.000 And it reminded me of what Ellis had said.
00:12:13.000 And I thought, why is it that no one wants to come home?
00:12:17.000 And I realized, it's not that they want war.
00:12:21.000 They're not sociopaths.
00:12:22.000 They don't want to be out there killing people and getting shot at.
00:12:26.000 They missed each other.
00:12:27.000 They missed the intense communalism of life in a platoon on a remote hilltop in combat.
00:12:33.000 And it struck me, I studied anthropology in college, oh my god, a platoon in combat effectively reproduces our human evolution, right?
00:12:42.000 I mean, we evolved to live in groups of that size in a harsh environment.
00:12:46.000 That's what a platoon is.
00:12:47.000 And so of course it resonated with them, resonated genetically with them.
00:12:51.000 And I got to say, as tough as it was out there, there was a weird, also a weird, I don't quite want to call it a euphoria, but a strange sense of well-being out there that I missed enormously when I left as well.
00:13:05.000 You missed it.
00:13:06.000 Oh, enormously, yes.
00:13:08.000 Did you try to rationalize it?
00:13:10.000 Did you sit alone with it and try to figure out what it was, or did you just accept it?
00:13:16.000 I mean, you know, I've been covering war since the early 90s.
00:13:19.000 I started going to Afghanistan in the mid-90s.
00:13:22.000 I came back from Restrepo.
00:13:25.000 You know, we were in a lot of combat.
00:13:27.000 I almost killed a couple of times.
00:13:28.000 So I had some sort of trauma issues.
00:13:30.000 I mean, everybody did.
00:13:32.000 My marriage started to fall apart.
00:13:35.000 That was not coincidental, by the way.
00:13:37.000 I now realize that the timing was significant.
00:13:40.000 It took me a while to understand that—and I sank into a real depression— And it took me a while to understand that my depression was partly connected to the fact that I was no longer part of a group.
00:13:52.000 But it took a long time for me to figure that out.
00:13:55.000 While I was experiencing all that, I just felt like I was in some kind of...
00:14:00.000 that I was behind bulletproof plexiglass.
00:14:04.000 And I was on the inside, and everyone I cared about was on the other side of the plexiglass, and I couldn't reach them.
00:14:09.000 That they were somehow inaccessible to me.
00:14:12.000 I couldn't hear them.
00:14:13.000 I couldn't touch them.
00:14:14.000 I was alone in this plexiglass cage.
00:14:16.000 And that's what it sort of felt like.
00:14:17.000 I was incredibly depressed.
00:14:19.000 And then Tim, my good friend and brother and colleague who I made Restrepo with, he was killed in combat in Libya.
00:14:25.000 And that was the final blow.
00:14:27.000 I mean, then I really crashed.
00:14:29.000 My marriage ended.
00:14:30.000 I mean, I was a real mess for a while.
00:14:32.000 How did you pull out of it?
00:14:37.000 You know, I just, I had a year or so in the wilderness, I think, psychologically, and, you know, humans are evolved, obviously, to deal with trauma.
00:14:46.000 I mean, eventually, I mean, if trauma was incapacitating to people, For years or lifetimes, we wouldn't exist, right?
00:14:55.000 I mean, our history as a species involved a huge amount of trauma.
00:15:00.000 So we are designed to react to trauma by protecting ourselves emotionally and physically for a certain amount of time, for some weeks or months, maybe a year or two, and then to slowly come out of it and continue functioning.
00:15:12.000 That's exactly what happened to me.
00:15:15.000 Did you get something out of it?
00:15:17.000 I mean, obviously it's a terrible experience to be depressed for that long and to go through all that, but did you get some sort of an understanding of yourself out of it?
00:15:25.000 Oh, absolutely.
00:15:26.000 I mean, in some ways, I mean, my marriage ended.
00:15:34.000 I, you know, moved out of my home.
00:15:37.000 I was living in a very sort of threadbare existence for a while.
00:15:41.000 I sort of gave up everything that made me feel safe and protected in the world.
00:15:46.000 Purposely?
00:15:47.000 No, it just sort of happened, you know, financially, emotionally.
00:15:50.000 I wasn't working as a reporter for a while.
00:15:54.000 I'd stopped reporting after Tim got killed.
00:15:56.000 And I just sort of hit the reset button on myself as a person.
00:16:00.000 And I sort of, when I came back from that, the things I added to my life were very solid.
00:16:09.000 We're very very good things and I sort of started from zero again and that really kind of worked and And I also I mean, I didn't have a drinking problem, but I but I stopped drinking and I stopped drinking alcohol and that The drinking alcohol I mean me drinking alcohol made me feel good,
00:16:27.000 right?
00:16:27.000 I'm a really happy drunk and when I was depressed for For a bunch of reasons if I drank I felt great and so there's a real incentive to do that and And I realized that it was depriving me of experiencing my actual life.
00:16:40.000 Like, my actual life was filled with some very tough things at the moment.
00:16:43.000 And if you self-medicate your way through them, those things are taken from you.
00:16:48.000 It's your life.
00:16:49.000 It's the life you're going through.
00:16:51.000 And I realized I might lose the experience of these things.
00:16:56.000 And my ex-wife and I are quite good friends now.
00:16:59.000 And it's partly because I decided to try and experience the loss of the marriage as directly as possible.
00:17:05.000 And that involved not drinking.
00:17:09.000 During this time of depression, did you consider or did you take any antidepressants?
00:17:13.000 No.
00:17:14.000 Likewise.
00:17:15.000 I was talking to someone professional about how I felt because I was a little worried about myself.
00:17:21.000 But as I said to her, I said, you know, if I was on antidepressants, it might make me feel good enough to accept a life that isn't really working very well.
00:17:33.000 Yeah.
00:17:33.000 As a person who's not depressed, it's a slippery argument for me because I'm just an outside observer.
00:17:42.000 And when I talk to people that are depressed, I always wonder, like, how much of what you're doing is life circumstances?
00:17:48.000 How much is an actual, some sort of a mental imbalance, some sort of a chemical imbalance that you just are unfortunately born with?
00:17:56.000 I mean, listen, I'm not a shrink, obviously.
00:17:59.000 There are people that encounter their first depression as teenagers and struggle with a very dangerous illness their whole lives.
00:18:06.000 I'm not talking about that kind of depression.
00:18:08.000 But even that kind of depression, I don't know why.
00:18:10.000 I mean, is it circumstances?
00:18:11.000 There's a lot of genetics involved in that.
00:18:13.000 For me, you know, my depression was a very healthy reaction to some tough circumstances I was going through.
00:18:19.000 I was having a completely healthy, self-protective reaction to what was going on in my life.
00:18:24.000 When you say you started putting positive things in your life, good, solid things in your life, what kind of things?
00:18:29.000 A good relationship.
00:18:30.000 I started working again.
00:18:32.000 I started being physically really active again.
00:18:37.000 I started boxing, actually.
00:18:40.000 And that was inspiring and stuff.
00:18:42.000 And that was incredibly frightening to me.
00:18:46.000 It's very, very hard, among other things.
00:18:49.000 But all that stuff was really, really good for me.
00:18:53.000 One of the things that I've been dwelling on a lot lately is how important struggle is.
00:18:58.000 And for me personally, I do a lot of things.
00:19:01.000 And I do a lot of things that I'm terrible at.
00:19:03.000 And I feel like the more happy I am is when I just get slightly better at these terrible things.
00:19:10.000 Like, that's when I feel like little bits of progress.
00:19:13.000 That is exactly...
00:19:16.000 How we're wired to react to success.
00:19:18.000 And if you sort of think about it, think about us as a species, as an animal.
00:19:23.000 If you're presented with a challenge and you get a little dose of endorphins, of dopamine, or some feel-good chemicals, when you do a task well...
00:19:32.000 That will encourage you to keep doing that task and keep looking for success, small successes in your life, which is exactly how people adapt and survive in harsh circumstances.
00:19:41.000 The problem with affluent modern society is it takes away all of the tasks of survival, right?
00:19:49.000 No one in this room, I don't think, is having to figure out every morning how to literally physically survive.
00:19:55.000 Where am I going to get the berries I'm going to eat today?
00:19:58.000 Where am I going to...
00:19:58.000 Go to kill something that I can eat.
00:20:00.000 How am I going to avoid the enemy? 0.97
00:20:02.000 We're not thinking like that.
00:20:04.000 Which is an enormous blessing, right?
00:20:06.000 I mean, it's an enormous luxury to live like that.
00:20:08.000 The downside is you don't get this sense of mastery over your circumstances.
00:20:13.000 You actually don't feel responsible for your own survival.
00:20:15.000 You don't feel like you are earning your own survival in the world.
00:20:20.000 You feel like it's being handed to you.
00:20:22.000 And I grew up in an affluent suburb, and I never had a sense as a young man that I was contributing in any way to the fact that I was physically alive on the planet.
00:20:30.000 Well, that's very, very recent in human history that young men could afford to feel that way.
00:20:38.000 Again, it's a blessing, but also a bit of a curse.
00:20:42.000 It's the most disconnected amongst us are always spoiled rich kids that get handed everything to them and don't have an understanding at all about the consequences of their behavior.
00:20:52.000 Yeah, and that kind of life is correlated with depression.
00:20:56.000 And drug abuse.
00:20:58.000 Yeah, all that stuff.
00:21:00.000 And the suicide rate is rising fastest among middle-aged white men who, if you listen to some people, are apparently, arguably, the demographic that are most privileged in this society.
00:21:16.000 Yes, doing the best with this civilization that we've constructed, doing the worst biologically, in terms of how they adapt to it.
00:21:24.000 And psychologically, yeah.
00:21:25.000 Yeah, psychologically.
00:21:28.000 Big part of the biology right and the thing about this this quest for stuff You know and one of the things I thought was really interesting in the book we were outlining the key factors for happiness and That wealth is not the primary one but being good at something being recognized for being good at something Being a part of a group like all these things were primary Yeah,
00:21:50.000 I mean if you think about it and again in evolutionary terms We are safest when we are needed.
00:21:57.000 Yeah, so if you're in a group and the group needs you Your status in the group is secure.
00:22:04.000 And it had better be because humans do not survive alone in the wild.
00:22:09.000 A lone human in nature is a dead human, right?
00:22:13.000 We're primates.
00:22:14.000 We're social primates.
00:22:15.000 A lone primate in nature is a dead primate for most of the species.
00:22:20.000 And we get our safety, our protection, From the fact that we work very, very well in groups.
00:22:27.000 We don't have long claws.
00:22:28.000 We don't have sharp teeth.
00:22:30.000 We can't run very fast.
00:22:32.000 We can't climb trees worth a dam.
00:22:33.000 We're extremely vulnerable.
00:22:34.000 And we get our safety and our dominance in the natural world from our ability to work in a group.
00:22:39.000 So if you're necessary to that group, you're safe.
00:22:42.000 So people get very depressed when circumstances in their life change and they're suddenly not needed, right?
00:22:47.000 When people get old and retire, they're at very, very high risk of depression and sometimes suicide.
00:22:53.000 When people lose their job and can't find a job, they're at extremely high risk of depression and suicide.
00:22:59.000 So when the economy takes a downturn, as it did in 2008, and the unemployment rate goes up, the suicide rate immediately goes up.
00:23:08.000 It tracks the unemployment rate almost exactly.
00:23:11.000 And one of the points I make in my book is that a very small number of mostly men collapsed the U.S. economy in 2008, and most of them working on Wall Street. 0.92
00:23:22.000 And there was a direct—I read an article in an academic journal on epidemiology, That there was a directly attributable to the financial collapse,
00:23:37.000 there were 5,000 or 6,000 additional suicides in the United States, mostly middle-aged white men, okay?
00:23:44.000 And sort of professional people of all classes.
00:23:52.000 And I realized that that was...
00:23:57.000 Almost exactly the casualty rate from the two wars from Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:24:03.000 In other words, something that happened at home economically killed just as many Americans as both wars did.
00:24:10.000 And nobody went to prison.
00:24:12.000 Not one of those guys was prosecuted, the people responsible for the collapse of our economy.
00:24:18.000 Nothing happened to those guys.
00:24:19.000 And you could argue they killed just as many people as our enemies did overseas.
00:24:24.000 And there's a real injustice there.
00:24:27.000 I think most people aren't even aware of how screwy the whole thing was.
00:24:30.000 There's a great documentary that I always recommend to people called An Inside Job.
00:24:34.000 It's fantastic.
00:24:35.000 When that guy starts questioning those economics professors, the guys who eventually got jobs in the government, or went from there and got jobs at big corporations, and you see them folding under the weight of the actual truth of what they've done.
00:24:52.000 It's very disturbing.
00:24:53.000 I mean, listen, there were companies that were getting bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of billions of dollars, right?
00:25:04.000 Bailed out.
00:25:05.000 And the corporate leaders, the corporate heads of those companies who had bankrupted their countries and asked the country to bail them out, While they were getting bailed out, these men were taking year-end bonuses of $10,
00:25:20.000 $20, $30 million.
00:25:22.000 Yeah, it was stunning.
00:25:23.000 And then they were trying to put a cap on the bonuses.
00:25:26.000 Like, instead of removing it, they were going to put a cap on the bonuses.
00:25:29.000 Oh, a cap of $20 million.
00:25:30.000 Right.
00:25:31.000 It's insane, right?
00:25:32.000 So you think about that, and it makes me feel like we don't really have a country.
00:25:39.000 Like, an entity, a group that isn't willing to defend itself...
00:25:44.000 Isn't really a group, right?
00:25:45.000 We were attacked by, in some ways, we were attacked by those people economically, right? 0.92
00:25:50.000 The actions of those people, the self-serving actions of a very small number of people cost this country $14 trillion, right?
00:25:59.000 There were no consequences for those people.
00:26:01.000 They were actually rewarded.
00:26:03.000 And it makes a person think, like, Wow!
00:26:07.000 Is there something called America?
00:26:10.000 Like the United States?
00:26:12.000 In the sense that we'll defend ourselves if we're attacked?
00:26:15.000 I mean, that's one of the definitions of a country, of a group.
00:26:18.000 And we didn't defend ourselves.
00:26:20.000 And so, you saw in the recent election, The confusion in the population about what it means to be an American.
00:26:28.000 What do we belong to here?
00:26:31.000 What do we owe our loyalty to?
00:26:32.000 An enormous amount of confusion.
00:26:34.000 And in my opinion, it's increasing, not decreasing, right now in the current administration.
00:26:39.000 But it comes from some of those questions.
00:26:42.000 We're in two wars that no one's paying attention to.
00:26:45.000 We lost $14 trillion and nobody blinked.
00:26:48.000 What is it that we belong to?
00:26:50.000 Yeah, what is it?
00:26:51.000 Yeah.
00:26:52.000 I mean, we do seem to be in a deep state of confusion.
00:26:55.000 And I think one of the things you're seeing with people, even like Trump supporters, people that are these online frog people, you know, the little frog avatars, I think one of the things that they like about it is that they've become a part of a troublesome little group.
00:27:13.000 Oh, totally.
00:27:13.000 Yeah, they have a sense of purpose.
00:27:15.000 Yeah.
00:27:15.000 Yeah, absolutely.
00:27:16.000 I mean, why do you think people join ISIS? I mean, these European, you know, people in Europe joining ISIS, they want a sense of purpose.
00:27:22.000 And, you know, they've been taken in by the propaganda and all that.
00:27:24.000 They don't realize it's a completely bloodthirsty, horrible criminal group.
00:27:29.000 But they want a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose.
00:27:32.000 There was a great band from out here about 15 years ago called Queens of the Stone Age.
00:27:38.000 Sure, I love those guys.
00:27:39.000 Amazing, right?
00:27:39.000 And one of the lines, the line in one of their songs, I'm sorry to quote rock lyrics to you, but...
00:27:44.000 One of the lines is she wanted something to die for to make it beautiful to live.
00:27:51.000 Yeah.
00:27:52.000 Right?
00:27:52.000 Something like that.
00:27:53.000 That's a very profound insight, actually, into what makes people feel like they're leading a worthy life.
00:28:00.000 Yeah, instead of walking through a nerfed world, which is what we're doing on Prozac.
00:28:06.000 So if you walk around and ask people on the street, what would you die for?
00:28:09.000 Like, who or what idea would you die for?
00:28:12.000 I mean, people wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't have an answer for most of human history.
00:28:16.000 The immediate answer would be, well, I'd die for my people, right?
00:28:19.000 Of course.
00:28:20.000 Our encampment gets attacked by the enemy?
00:28:22.000 I would die defending this place.
00:28:25.000 And no one has that answer, right?
00:28:28.000 Which shows that we live in safety and luxury, which is lovely, but it deprives people of a sense of purpose and meaning.
00:28:36.000 Not just safety and luxury, but this staggering change in what has been a normal way of living for people for thousands and thousands of years.
00:28:44.000 When you were writing this book and you were thinking about all the ways that human beings have altered the environment around them, You were saying that, and I've read this before, that genetics essentially were riding on the same genetics that were 10,000 years ago from the same people.
00:29:02.000 Or more, yeah, 20, 25, yeah.
00:29:04.000 Are we going to change that?
00:29:06.000 Like, are we going to become more compatible with this bizarre and artificial world that we've created?
00:29:11.000 Or are we going to get deeper and deeper depressed?
00:29:14.000 Well, okay.
00:29:16.000 So our society, our culture is changing way faster than genetic change can happen.
00:29:21.000 Right.
00:29:21.000 So we haven't even adapted genetically to the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
00:29:28.000 That's pretty crazy.
00:29:29.000 Right.
00:29:30.000 And the only way genetic change happens in a population is that there is a difference in survival between people with one trait and people with another trait.
00:29:38.000 So if you have a certain genetic trait and it leads to you having fewer children...
00:29:47.000 Eventually, 10,000 years from now, people with your genetic trait will tend to die out because you're passing on less DNA to the next round, right?
00:29:55.000 And if you have a trait that allows you to raise more children to maturity, they carry your DNA and then they'll be more successful and that trait tends to spread.
00:30:05.000 So does unhappiness lead to lower fertility rates?
00:30:11.000 Probably not.
00:30:12.000 You know what I mean?
00:30:12.000 Often, depression starts in midlife.
00:30:16.000 By that time, most people have one or two children.
00:30:21.000 They've passed on their DNA. It only acts through reproductive rates. 0.89
00:30:28.000 Is something happening to us then?
00:30:30.000 There must be some way where human beings are going to become accustomed to this bizarre way we're living, stacked on top of each other, constantly in traffic.
00:30:40.000 We are accustomed to it.
00:30:41.000 I mean, humans are very adaptable.
00:30:43.000 I mean, you know, you can put people in solitary confinement in jail.
00:30:47.000 And they're not happy.
00:30:48.000 They're extremely depressed, but it will physically survive for decades, right?
00:30:52.000 So, I mean, evolution doesn't promise happiness.
00:30:55.000 It doesn't mean that we'll evolve towards happiness.
00:30:57.000 It means that we will adapt so that we can reproduce our DNA for the next generation. 0.74
00:31:03.000 That's all evolution means.
00:31:04.000 I've always just looked at all this reliance upon electronics and our fascination with innovation, and I've wondered if that's where we're headed.
00:31:12.000 I mean, it's almost like it's priming us for some sort of a symbiotic relationship with machines, that we become more reliant on technology, stack more and more people into places, make it easier and easier to survive.
00:31:25.000 That's the one constant, is that we're constantly embedded in technology.
00:31:31.000 Yes.
00:31:31.000 I mean, technology is a tool, like the bow and arrow was.
00:31:36.000 But keep in mind, the segment of the world population, which is deeply intertwined with high tech, is very, very small.
00:31:44.000 Most of humanity lives in a pretty simple and very, very poor way.
00:31:48.000 So if you're talking about the human race as a whole, I mean, I'm not talking about Southern California.
00:31:52.000 I'm not talking about New York City.
00:31:53.000 I mean, the human race as a whole, you know, all this technology happened yesterday, right?
00:31:57.000 I mean, it happened 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
00:31:59.000 In 20 years, it's going to be, you know, whatever.
00:32:02.000 I mean, who knows what's coming down the pike. 0.99
00:32:04.000 But that's not even a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.
00:32:08.000 It doesn't even exist.
00:32:09.000 I mean, evolution happens over the course of 10, 20,000 years.
00:32:12.000 Yeah.
00:32:13.000 Now when you live in this life, when you're a war journalist and you're in these insane places, and then you come back to New York City, what kind of like a decompression period do you have to go through?
00:32:25.000 Well, you know, often the developing world that I've worked in, I'm no longer covering wars, by the way, but the developing world is often a very chaotic urban mix of, you know, poverty and cars and pollution and buildings that are, you know, whatever.
00:32:39.000 I mean, it's not necessarily not urban.
00:32:43.000 But what I would say is that there's a...
00:32:48.000 There's something I would describe as a kind of disappointment to have the...
00:32:53.000 If you wake up in the morning and your survival is a kind of question mark and you know that you have to act well and with sort of clarity and precision and quickness in order to survive, that is intoxicating,
00:33:09.000 right?
00:33:10.000 The challenge of that's intoxicating and you feel like you're sort of, in a way, earning your existence.
00:33:15.000 And when you leave that...
00:33:18.000 It's a relief, but it's also a disappointment.
00:33:21.000 Because you're no longer earning anything, right?
00:33:24.000 So it's a relief, but it's also kind of disappointing.
00:33:26.000 And in that disappointment, you can get quite depressed.
00:33:28.000 So I know that the depression rate, like when Peace Corps volunteers come back from two years service overseas, they're not in war zones, but they're in the developing world.
00:33:38.000 They're living in small communities.
00:33:39.000 They're living a much more difficult, physically difficult existence than most people in our society.
00:33:46.000 When they come back to America... 0.94
00:33:48.000 The land of cars and everything you can want in the supermarket and nice beds and everything that you think people want.
00:33:57.000 When Peace Corps volunteers come back to this lovely environment, around 25% of them get profoundly depressed.
00:34:05.000 So clearly what makes people feel good is challenge, not ease.
00:34:10.000 That's the conclusion I draw.
00:34:12.000 And not just challenge, but challenge in the context of a community of people.
00:34:17.000 Here we have ease in the context of oneself or one's individual family, but not in the context of the community.
00:34:25.000 And so, you know, if you look at catastrophes, Hurricane Katrina, I was just in Mississippi, and I was amazed, not amazed, actually, in some ways, to have people, many people say, well, we really miss Hurricane Katrina.
00:34:35.000 We were all so close afterwards.
00:34:38.000 You know, this is a society with a lot of racial division and all kinds of stuff.
00:34:41.000 None of that mattered after Hurricane Katrina.
00:34:43.000 Everyone cooperated, everyone helped each other, made people feel great.
00:34:47.000 That's what human beings want.
00:34:48.000 So what we've done by making things too safe, we've...
00:34:53.000 Dropped off the hills and just made everything flat, and people long for those hills.
00:34:58.000 Absolutely.
00:34:59.000 There's a group of friends that I have that are bow hunters, and one of the things that people have gotten really addicted to is solo hunting, where even regular bow hunting is not quite difficult enough for these psychos, so they go deep, deep, deep, 20 miles plus into the wilderness by themselves.
00:35:16.000 And one of the things they say about it is how profoundly lonely and sad it is.
00:35:23.000 And even though they know they could walk those 20-plus miles back anytime they want, but there's something about being out there by themselves that when they do return, they just feel invigorated and alive and energized, and they feel like they've accomplished something,
00:35:38.000 especially if they come back with an animal.
00:35:41.000 Yeah.
00:35:41.000 Well, listen, I mean, that's an ancient narrative, right?
00:35:43.000 I mean, the hunter goes out and kills the game and brings it back and feeds his people. 0.53
00:35:47.000 I mean, that's a beautiful story, and it has kept human beings alive for decades.
00:35:53.000 You know, for hundreds of thousands of years.
00:35:55.000 You know, some hunting is well done in groups, and some hunting is a solo enterprise, depending on the animal.
00:36:00.000 And there absolutely is a role for that sort of solo endeavor.
00:36:04.000 Scouts, you know, often work by themselves because—I mean, in a Native context— Like, for example, the American Indians, the scouts often worked by themselves because they were just harder to detect.
00:36:16.000 And I'm sure a terrifying endeavor, but you're doing it for your people.
00:36:21.000 And so you come back from that solo experience, which is so frightening.
00:36:27.000 I mean, we're a social species, so being alone and in danger is terrifying.
00:36:31.000 You come back from that to your community, you've served your community and you're among your people again.
00:36:36.000 It must be completely intoxicating.
00:36:38.000 I envy those people, that experience.
00:36:40.000 Yeah, just having the experience of being in danger and then coming back and being at peace makes you appreciate that peace.
00:36:46.000 But constantly and consistently being at peace has a numbing effect.
00:36:49.000 That's right.
00:36:50.000 It's like constantly and consistently being well-fed.
00:36:52.000 I mean, it's not bad to feel hungry once in a while.
00:36:55.000 I think you really appreciate food.
00:36:57.000 Safety, food, warmth, being rested or tired.
00:37:03.000 I mean, we're adapted to get through situations where we don't have enough of what we want and what we need.
00:37:10.000 And if we're not deprived of those things, we stop appreciating them.
00:37:14.000 And those things are what make up life.
00:37:16.000 So we're actually losing our appreciation, our enjoyment of the things that make life what it is.
00:37:23.000 There's a real irony there.
00:37:24.000 There is a real irony there.
00:37:26.000 Did you feel compelled at all to come up with a solution?
00:37:29.000 I mean, in deeply describing and Just going over the various aspects of these problems that we're facing as a culture as a society Did you did you have some sort of a need?
00:37:44.000 I didn't I mean listen if I thought if there was a solution that I was capable of thinking of I would have put it in the book Either I'm not smart enough or there's no solution.
00:37:53.000 I don't know which it is Yeah, I think there's some things we can do around the edges that will help But we're talking about a systemic problem in society that got its start 10,000 years ago and really got its start in the Industrial Revolution and really got going in the technological revolution.
00:38:14.000 I mean, we're not going to ban the car, right?
00:38:17.000 The Amish in Pennsylvania don't use cars.
00:38:19.000 They have a very low rate of suicide and depression because they spend most of their lives within their community, right?
00:38:24.000 Right?
00:38:24.000 That buffers them from suicide and depression.
00:38:26.000 We're not going to ban the car, right?
00:38:28.000 We're not going to burn down the suburbs and live in lean-tos. 1.00
00:38:30.000 We'd probably be happier if we did, but we're not going to do it.
00:38:33.000 But what can we do?
00:38:34.000 The biggest community that we have is the nation, is the country.
00:38:37.000 And I think one thing that would help enormously is to treat our nation as if we all belong to it, and as if we all respected it, and that it was meaningful to all of us.
00:38:46.000 And which means, among other things, it means insisting that politicians who denigrate We're good to go.
00:39:19.000 Feeling like you're a child in a family where the parents might get divorced.
00:39:23.000 I remember during the campaign between Donald and Hillary, I sort of felt like, wow, are mom and dad going to split up?
00:39:29.000 Like, what's happening in this country?
00:39:31.000 You know what I mean?
00:39:32.000 Like, okay, you can argue, but you guys are really talking as if the country's not going to stay together.
00:39:37.000 And that's terrifying.
00:39:39.000 And I think it's extremely demoralizing and unsettling for people.
00:39:42.000 Well, it's also extremely irresponsible.
00:39:44.000 Like, the type of person that should be a leader is not the type of person that puts that idea out there to the point where it gets into the zeitgeist and people say, well, hey, maybe we really are in trouble.
00:39:54.000 Well, exactly.
00:39:55.000 I mean, I think it...
00:39:57.000 It's fear-mongering in a lot of ways.
00:39:58.000 It is.
00:39:59.000 And, you know, these are ancient human behaviors, and if you tell...
00:40:03.000 Your people, that there's a threat, your people will rally behind you.
00:40:07.000 I mean, it's an adaptive behavior, right?
00:40:11.000 The problem is, as a politician, if you tell your people that the enemy Right.
00:40:34.000 And if you start slicing off parts of the country, demographic groups in the country, political groups in the country, say, you know, you're actually not really American?
00:40:43.000 Like, you really shouldn't be part of this?
00:40:45.000 When you start doing that, you destroy the country.
00:40:47.000 You're way more of a threat to our democracy than ISIS is, than Al-Qaeda is. 0.96
00:40:51.000 I mean, we're such a powerful country.
00:40:53.000 We are the only force that can destroy us.
00:40:56.000 No one else can touch us.
00:40:57.000 They can hurt us.
00:40:58.000 They can't really destroy us.
00:40:59.000 We can destroy us.
00:41:00.000 And we will destroy ourselves through rhetoric.
00:41:03.000 It was one of the things that was most disturbing about the debates when Donald Trump said that if Hillary Clinton won, he wouldn't necessarily accept the decision.
00:41:11.000 Yeah, absolutely.
00:41:13.000 That was completely antithetical to democracy.
00:41:19.000 To the concept of a country.
00:41:22.000 To the concept of a democratic country.
00:41:23.000 Yeah, absolutely.
00:41:24.000 Because he's a part of it.
00:41:25.000 So if she becomes the president, she's his president.
00:41:27.000 And we're all supposed to look at the president as, this is the one person that we've elected as leader.
00:41:32.000 But he's essentially saying, it's either me or nothing.
00:41:35.000 That's right.
00:41:35.000 And I'm a Democrat.
00:41:37.000 I didn't vote for Donald Trump.
00:41:40.000 But I really didn't like it when some of my fellow Democrats, after he was elected, and he was elected, right?
00:41:45.000 I mean, one way or another, I mean, you can investigate Russia if you want or whatever, but the fact is that he got the most electoral votes and he's our president.
00:41:54.000 And I really disliked it when some of my fellow Democrats said, he's not my president.
00:41:59.000 He is, actually.
00:42:00.000 And if you don't like that, work harder next time and get someone else elected.
00:42:04.000 But he is your president.
00:42:05.000 And it was equally disgusting when the shoe was on the other foot with Barack Obama and some conservatives started saying that Barack Obama wasn't really American or he wasn't really their president or that he was an enemy of the state, 0.98
00:42:21.000 that he was a secret Muslim spy who wanted to destroy America. 0.99
00:42:25.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.99
00:42:26.000 I mean, he's totally irresponsible.
00:42:27.000 And it's the opposite of patriotism. 0.77
00:42:30.000 It's revolting.
00:42:31.000 Do you think in that case that maybe it's good that we have a guy like Donald Trump in the president because he is kind of like almost like a human hurricane.
00:42:37.000 He's something to rally against.
00:42:39.000 He's a problem that's occurred where there's the eroding confidence in the president now.
00:42:46.000 I mean, it's palpable.
00:42:48.000 People know he lies.
00:42:49.000 He lies all the time.
00:42:50.000 I mean, he just accused James Comey today of lying under oath when he talked about their conversations. 0.99
00:42:57.000 You know, I think Donald Trump is a very damaged and unhealthy person.
00:43:02.000 I think he causes a lot of pain to people around him, and I'm guessing that he's in an enormous amount of psychic pain himself. 0.83
00:43:10.000 Well, it's the only thing that makes sense for all the hate tweets and all the things.
00:43:13.000 He's constantly going after Rosie O'Donnell, and why?
00:43:16.000 I mean, what I've learned in my life is that if someone's acting badly, they're in pain.
00:43:20.000 Yeah.
00:43:21.000 I mean, it's a really simple rule, right?
00:43:22.000 They're either scared or they're in pain.
00:43:24.000 I think he's both.
00:43:25.000 And on some level...
00:43:27.000 I feel a kind of compassion for him.
00:43:30.000 He already is and will be a completely failed president, but he may actually help this country in his failure.
00:43:39.000 The GOP, I think, has abandoned all of its core values and core moral principles and seems to have decided that anything that will help the party...
00:43:52.000 Is more important than things that will help the country.
00:43:55.000 And that is a very, very undemocratic way to think.
00:43:59.000 I think if Hillary Clinton had been elected and these things were coming out, the same kind of things about Russia, etc., were coming out, the GOP would be Prosecuting her up to her eyeballs, right?
00:44:12.000 So they have a complete double standard.
00:44:13.000 And what I'm hoping is that the Trump administration is such a failure that it gets the GOP to reevaluate its policy of partisan politics as a way to win power.
00:44:25.000 And I hope it makes the entire country realize that the only way to really win power is through bipartisan politics.
00:44:32.000 You can argue all you want, but you have to put the welfare of the country first.
00:44:36.000 I read an amazing book called Our Political Selves, I think it was called, that about half of our political opinion is genetically determined.
00:44:47.000 Genetically determined?
00:44:48.000 Yeah, which makes sense.
00:44:50.000 So liberalism and conservatism Basically, liberalism is concerned with fairness within the group and equality within the group and acceptance of outsiders for possible inclusion in the group.
00:45:01.000 Conservatism is focused on hierarchy and sort of law and order and a suspicion of outsiders.
00:45:07.000 And they're very, very powerful evolutionary, adaptive evolutionary reasons for Both of those worldviews.
00:45:14.000 And they've done studies with identical twins that were adopted at birth and compared them to fraternal twins.
00:45:22.000 And there's a far higher concordance of a political opinion In identical twins that were adopted at birth and put in different kinds of families than with fraternal twins.
00:45:32.000 So that means that our political, apparently it's around 50% of our political beliefs are genetically determined, which means that those beliefs had adaptive value in our evolutionary past, which means that the argument, I'm right, you're completely wrong and you shouldn't exist,
00:45:48.000 is a false argument.
00:45:49.000 That the country actually needs both parties Very, very badly in that a healthy society has conservatism and liberalism in a kind of dynamic tension where, yes, they might fight, they might argue, but they are roughly proportional in the population,
00:46:05.000 and equal weight is given to those two competing values.
00:46:08.000 Was it taken into consideration that when these people are adopted, that growing up adopted without your biological parents puts you in a certain mindset automatically?
00:46:15.000 And that maybe it wasn't necessarily a genetic thing, but it was a circumstantial or a nurture thing?
00:46:20.000 Well, they compared identical twins who were genetically identical, of course, that were adopted to fraternal twins who were adopted.
00:46:29.000 You understand?
00:46:30.000 Yes.
00:46:30.000 And fraternal twins are not genetically identical.
00:46:33.000 But they still come from the same body.
00:46:35.000 No, no, no, but their DNA is different, right?
00:46:38.000 They're two individuals, right?
00:46:39.000 So both sets of twins were adopted, so they all went through that, whatever that is, that process.
00:46:46.000 The effects of that, whatever they are.
00:46:48.000 One shared DNA, exact duplicates of their DNA. The other set of twins don't.
00:46:55.000 They're fraternal.
00:46:56.000 So the twins that shared identical DNA were far more likely to have the same political beliefs than the fraternal twins.
00:47:07.000 In other words, the genetic component was influencing their beliefs, and the environmental component was not as much compared to the fraternal twins.
00:47:16.000 It's an amazing book.
00:47:17.000 And it really, to me, it makes sense.
00:47:19.000 Like, both worldviews clearly were needed to keep our society healthy and strong and safe.
00:47:24.000 I mean, a country that was run completely by liberals would get overrun by, you know, the enemy state next door immediately, right?
00:47:31.000 A country that was completely run by conservatives would never get overrun by the enemy, but it would be a heartless and brutal society, right?
00:47:40.000 Where the poor weren't taken care of and et cetera, et cetera.
00:47:42.000 So you can't have one or the other.
00:47:44.000 You need both in a kind of dynamic tension.
00:47:46.000 So it makes genetic sense that it works that way.
00:47:49.000 Just like there would be genetic variations and all sorts of different aspects of people, height and personality and all those different things.
00:47:56.000 Yeah, I mean, sort of character traits, right?
00:47:58.000 I mean, they're partly genetic and they're partly determined by experience.
00:48:02.000 So, you know, courage or whatever, generosity, sensation-seeking, right, is a genetic trait.
00:48:09.000 But you can...
00:48:12.000 Your impulse towards sensation-seeking is also determined by your experiences in life.
00:48:18.000 I don't know what the proportions are, but in terms of political belief, it's roughly 50-50.
00:48:23.000 Your experience in life is about 50% responsible for your political beliefs, and the other 50% is genetics.
00:48:31.000 We're always looking for one reason, right?
00:48:33.000 We're always looking for nature or nurture.
00:48:35.000 We're not looking at this whole soup of different entangled influences that create a person.
00:48:42.000 Yeah, and it's really interesting when I tell people that genetics determine half of their political view, they get really upset.
00:48:48.000 They want to be completely self-determining.
00:48:50.000 Right?
00:48:51.000 I mean, people want to think that they're completely...
00:48:53.000 Whatever they are, they've created themselves.
00:48:56.000 And certainly something as emotional as political belief, they don't want to think that it's wired into their DNA at all.
00:49:02.000 But, you know, that's the truth of it.
00:49:05.000 Well, just determinism in general.
00:49:06.000 I mean, I remember the first time it was ever really deeply explained to me by Sam Harris.
00:49:10.000 I was rejecting it.
00:49:11.000 Like, almost realizing I was.
00:49:15.000 Like, I didn't want to just be open-minded about it.
00:49:17.000 I wanted to go, you know, you could...
00:49:20.000 Pull yourself up.
00:49:23.000 It's willpower.
00:49:23.000 You decide what you want to do with your life, but not really necessarily.
00:49:27.000 I mean, listen, when I was young, I was a really good distance runner, right?
00:49:30.000 And I ran half mile, mile on up to 10,000 meters, marathon, whatever.
00:49:34.000 I ran 412 for the mile.
00:49:36.000 It was a pretty decent time in college.
00:49:37.000 That's very fast.
00:49:37.000 I really wanted to be the fastest miler in the world.
00:49:41.000 And I trained as fast as anyone has ever trained, as hard as anyone's ever trained.
00:49:45.000 And my ceiling was 412. I mean, that was genetically determined.
00:49:50.000 Sorry, you can run 130 miles a week like I did for months on end and still not go to the Olympics.
00:49:56.000 Yeah.
00:49:57.000 There's no doubt about it.
00:49:58.000 I mean, as a mixed martial arts commentator, the big factor that you can't do anything about is power.
00:50:04.000 Some people are born with striking power, and it doesn't make any sense.
00:50:09.000 They look exactly the same.
00:50:10.000 They look just like a person who can't hit nearly as hard as them.
00:50:13.000 Right.
00:50:14.000 Right.
00:50:14.000 Yeah, I mean, my understanding is the sort of sequencing of muscle groups in coordination that result in that kind of power is amazing.
00:50:20.000 It's bone structure as well.
00:50:21.000 There's a lot of variables.
00:50:22.000 There's actually the geometry of the shoulder, like how wide your shoulders are in terms of The hips to waist ratio.
00:50:29.000 There's a lot of different factors.
00:50:30.000 No kidding.
00:50:31.000 Yeah.
00:50:31.000 That's one of the reasons why men can hit so much harder than women is literally the shape of the hips.
00:50:36.000 Women's hips are wider. 1.00
00:50:37.000 The legs go inward more.
00:50:39.000 It's a different sort of mechanical advantage.
00:50:41.000 Which is probably connected to the speed you can throw a baseball at.
00:50:44.000 Yeah.
00:50:45.000 Oh, for sure.
00:50:46.000 It's connected to the same skeletal...
00:50:47.000 Yeah.
00:50:48.000 Apparently, boys and girls can throw pretty much the same until puberty, and then it really splits.
00:50:53.000 And so it's probably for that reason.
00:50:56.000 That'd be interesting.
00:50:57.000 I would like to see what they do with transgender women to men who start taking testosterone. 0.51
00:51:03.000 I don't think it changes the shape of your pelvis.
00:51:05.000 No.
00:51:05.000 I mean, testosterone isn't going to change your...
00:51:09.000 It does have some effects on bone density, and I think the width of the shoulders changes, and the face obviously changes.
00:51:19.000 Yeah, and just the explosive power of the muscles.
00:51:23.000 I mean, as you get old, you lose explosive power as a man, right?
00:51:26.000 So, I mean, testosterone is sort of key.
00:51:29.000 You're at your peak in your early 20s, I guess.
00:51:32.000 Yeah, but anyway, what we're saying is that there really are genetic limitations.
00:51:36.000 There's no doubt about it.
00:51:37.000 And this idea of like a fair fight, sometimes it's not fair.
00:51:44.000 It's just not going to be.
00:51:46.000 And with you, it's the mile.
00:51:48.000 With some people, it's the ability to hit hard.
00:51:51.000 For some people, it's just speed.
00:51:52.000 You know, I mean, if you've ever seen like a Floyd Mayweather fight, it is incredibly clear that not only is he ridiculously skillful, but he's got some stupendous speed advantage over most human beings.
00:52:03.000 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
00:52:04.000 I also, I was watching a fight of his, it was sort of slow-mo, I mean, I sort of slowed it down so I could really watch, and he got hit full in the face by somebody, I mean, right in the face, and his eyes never blinked.
00:52:14.000 Yeah.
00:52:15.000 Yeah.
00:52:15.000 I mean, he couldn't get out of the way, and he watched that thing come in and hit him square in the face, and his eyes never closed.
00:52:21.000 Yeah.
00:52:21.000 It's incredible.
00:52:22.000 Yeah, really good boxers can do that.
00:52:24.000 As they're getting punched in their face, their eyes are wide open, and they're looking for the counter.
00:52:28.000 It's really incredible.
00:52:29.000 Yeah, it's amazing.
00:52:30.000 No flinch at all.
00:52:31.000 Nothing.
00:52:32.000 Absolutely nothing.
00:52:33.000 The amount of training you would have to do to overcome the end, it's one of the more important reasons why it's so critical to learn striking, in particular, at a very young age.
00:52:43.000 The body develops.
00:52:44.000 Some people can pick it up late in life and still be really successful at it, but I don't think you ever really get a real elite boxer that doesn't start training before puberty or around puberty.
00:52:56.000 You're probably right.
00:52:57.000 There's just something about the development of the body, like your body growing and maturing with this task, learning how to strike and move and explode with combinations.
00:53:07.000 Well, likewise for music and languages.
00:53:09.000 If you're not learning that before puberty, you will never be...
00:53:13.000 Like, at a top, top, top, world-class level.
00:53:15.000 Oh, that makes sense.
00:53:16.000 In terms of languages, you will not be able to speak with a perfect accent.
00:53:20.000 Really?
00:53:21.000 Yep.
00:53:21.000 After puberty, the brain is finished wiring itself, and it cannot exactly mimic a foreign accent.
00:53:29.000 And if you learn French or whatever, any language, you know, eight, nine, ten, you can sound exactly like a native.
00:53:35.000 And after puberty, you can't.
00:53:37.000 Wow.
00:53:38.000 Do you have kids?
00:53:39.000 Yes, I have a three-and-a-half-month-old daughter.
00:53:41.000 Oh.
00:53:42.000 Well, when they start talking to you, man, that's when it gets weird.
00:53:46.000 I have a 3, a 20, a 9, and a 7. And what's really fascinating is watching the traits that you know have come directly from DNA. Like, parts of you emerge out of the kid.
00:54:02.000 Yeah.
00:54:04.000 Maybe one kid and then the other kid, none of it.
00:54:07.000 Some of it will be your wife.
00:54:10.000 It's so strange.
00:54:13.000 Because you try to piece it together.
00:54:14.000 What are instincts?
00:54:16.000 Why are dogs barking at snakes? 0.98
00:54:19.000 They don't know what the fuck a snake is, but they know something's wrong. 0.98
00:54:22.000 There's something deep in their memory banks that say, this is an issue. 0.99
00:54:25.000 Whereas a stuffed animal on the ground is not an issue.
00:54:27.000 Right.
00:54:28.000 Yeah, that's right.
00:54:29.000 That's right.
00:54:30.000 We don't know what that is entirely.
00:54:32.000 Well, I tell you what it is, is that the dogs that weren't reflexively fearful of something that looked like a snake died more often than it produced offspring.
00:54:41.000 And so they'll bark at a crooked stick, too, just to be on the safe side.
00:54:45.000 Likewise, humans are scared of heights.
00:54:48.000 Yeah.
00:54:49.000 And if you're not scared of heights, you're more likely to fall and you won't pass on your genes.
00:54:53.000 Right.
00:54:54.000 Lucy, the famous early, early human skeleton in East Africa.
00:55:00.000 I mean, do you know Lucy from your science classes?
00:55:03.000 Yeah.
00:55:04.000 She died by falling out of a tree.
00:55:06.000 Wow.
00:55:07.000 Yeah.
00:55:07.000 They just figured that out from the fractures and stuff in her bone structure.
00:55:11.000 Wow.
00:55:12.000 Yeah.
00:55:13.000 Yeah, that must have been incredibly common.
00:55:15.000 It's just all the different things that people are afraid of, arachnophobia, phytophobia, fear of spiders and snakes, I mean, those are directly related to poison.
00:55:23.000 I'm terrified of spiders.
00:55:25.000 So you feel it's genetic?
00:55:26.000 Like maybe someone in your past or some ancestor?
00:55:29.000 Well, I tell you, the range of things, the common phobias that people have, Those things have a sort of survival significance, right?
00:55:41.000 So people usually aren't phobic of chairs because chairs were not a survival threat in our evolutionary past.
00:55:48.000 But heights, spiders, snakes, those kinds of things were a threat.
00:55:55.000 And so when children get phobias, they're choosing something that makes genetic sense.
00:56:01.000 Why I chose spiders, I don't know.
00:56:03.000 I was probably just exposed to a frightening spider at the wrong moment in my insecure little life.
00:56:07.000 Do you think you were exposed to it?
00:56:09.000 Or do you think maybe is it possible that someone in your past, some ancestor, passed that through the DNA? Well, I mean, we're all predisposed towards being reasonably fearful of those things.
00:56:21.000 Right.
00:56:22.000 A phobia is a panic disorder.
00:56:24.000 Yeah.
00:56:25.000 So we're all nervous around...
00:56:28.000 Barking dogs, snakes, spiders, heights, those kinds of things, right?
00:56:34.000 Claustrophobia, being trapped in a small space.
00:56:36.000 That's all normal things to be worried about.
00:56:38.000 But when it crosses the threshold to a phobia, that's a panic disorder.
00:56:42.000 And that is a function of Something going on in your childhood where...
00:56:48.000 But is it absolutely in your childhood?
00:56:50.000 I mean, phobias start in childhood, yeah.
00:56:52.000 But, I mean, is it possible that someone could have aphidiophobia, arachnophobia, and not have experienced spiders or snakes?
00:56:59.000 So one of the things that happened to me when I was hosting Fear Factor is I would see people that were pretty risk-taking.
00:57:05.000 And they would be willing to do the heights.
00:57:08.000 They would be willing to jump a car off the top of a building.
00:57:11.000 They would take chances.
00:57:12.000 They were risk-takers. 0.99
00:57:13.000 But you'd put them in front of a snake, and they would freak the fuck out. 0.70
00:57:17.000 And it was a deep, cellular thing. 0.99
00:57:20.000 Like, you could see with some people that they weren't cowards.
00:57:26.000 They weren't timid folks.
00:57:27.000 But they would see that one thing, whatever that thing is.
00:57:31.000 Right.
00:57:32.000 Well, I don't know.
00:57:33.000 I will tell you, though, that once—I don't have a television, but I was in the hotel.
00:57:37.000 So, like, I watch TV when I'm traveling because of the— I'm in a hotel.
00:57:41.000 And I saw Fear Factor.
00:57:44.000 And so keep in mind, I've been terrified of spiders my entire life.
00:57:48.000 And there was one...
00:57:50.000 I mean, this was actually quite traumatizing to me.
00:57:53.000 I mean, seriously, like, traumatizing.
00:57:54.000 Like, it affected me for days.
00:57:56.000 There was, like, a very hot young woman in a bikini, and you put her in a glass, like, a glass box. 0.96
00:58:02.000 Yeah.
00:58:03.000 And you dumped a 55-gallon drum of tarantulas onto her.
00:58:06.000 Yeah, I remember that.
00:58:07.000 Her boyfriend threw up.
00:58:08.000 It was so...
00:58:09.000 And she finally stood up with tarantulas falling off her. 1.00
00:58:12.000 I mean, she couldn't take it.
00:58:13.000 And I was like in the fetal position in the corner of my hotel room.
00:58:18.000 Wow.
00:58:18.000 Yeah, it was totally horrifying to me.
00:58:20.000 I mean, it really messed me up for a few days.
00:58:21.000 It's just so strange that there's particular things that resonate like that, like particular things, whether it's a snake or a spider.
00:58:30.000 Just, I mean, I really wonder if, like, the things that human beings have, like, and that also animals have, these instincts, if we just don't totally understand what memory is.
00:58:41.000 We don't totally understand genetic memories.
00:58:43.000 Right.
00:58:44.000 Yeah, well, it's all stuff that helped us survive.
00:58:46.000 Those were all threats in our primordial past.
00:58:50.000 Now, you've got a documentary out that you're working on as well?
00:58:54.000 Well, it's out.
00:58:55.000 No, it's airing on Sunday.
00:58:56.000 It's called Hell on Earth.
00:58:58.000 It's about the Syrian Civil War and the rise of ISIS. And it's out on National Geographic Channel.
00:59:05.000 9 Eastern, 8 Central, this Sunday.
00:59:08.000 Is it going to be available?
00:59:10.000 I mean, you can obviously watch it at the time, but is it going to be available on Netflix or Apple TV or something like that?
00:59:15.000 I haven't even thought that far ahead.
00:59:19.000 I mean, it's owned by National Geographic, so I'm sure you'll be able to get it on their website at some point, but it's airing on Sunday.
00:59:26.000 And what was your experience doing that?
00:59:28.000 Well, you know, I was home writing Tribe, actually, and so I wasn't overseas.
00:59:32.000 You couldn't really get into Syria anyway.
00:59:34.000 I mean, it was a suicidal thing to do.
00:59:36.000 And so what we did, my colleague Nick, the guy who was here earlier, we basically sort of worked the border areas around Syria Yeah.
01:00:07.000 Hell on Earth, trying to explain how really quite peaceful democratic protests turn into violent demonstrations and finally into a civil war.
01:00:17.000 And of course, it was the repressive government.
01:00:20.000 I mean, people protest in the street and they're met with machine gun fire and eventually civilians are going to get some machine guns themselves and fight back and that's how you get a civil war.
01:00:29.000 How do you take thousands of hours like that and boil it down to one show?
01:00:34.000 Well, that's it's very very hard.
01:00:36.000 I mean, that's what filmmaking is and it's figuring out what's the 1% that goes into the film and how do I structure it?
01:00:43.000 How much time does it take to do something?
01:00:45.000 We had a really good I mean, this is the first I've made this is my fifth film most of the films I've made it was me and an editor and so another person in the room or whatever This we had a big team and so we had some very very smart young people who are going through all this footage and Categorizing it like here.
01:01:00.000 This is a section about you know, this material is about Whatever, escaping ISIS. And this is about trying to find food, you know, whatever.
01:01:07.000 They would sort of put it into categories.
01:01:09.000 And then I would start to look through some of that material and we could gradually sort of build a structure.
01:01:17.000 The situation in Syria seems to be, for someone who just hasn't studied it that much, but just looks at it from the outside, one of the bleaker, darker situations that we have here in the world.
01:01:28.000 I mean, it's the tragedy of this generation, I think.
01:01:32.000 Over 400,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, have died.
01:01:36.000 The equivalent death toll in this country would be, I think, seven or eight million Americans, the sort of equivalent amount of people.
01:01:43.000 And half the country, half the Syrian population has been displaced from their homes and millions are outside the country's borders in Europe and even in this country.
01:01:55.000 What did you take out of the documentary?
01:01:57.000 I mean, it seems like no one has a solution for Syria.
01:02:01.000 No, I mean, civil wars are tough that way.
01:02:04.000 I think ISIS eventually is going to be defeated on the battlefield. 0.98
01:02:10.000 They're going to be eradicated, and I hope they are because they're a ghastly, brutal group.
01:02:17.000 And Assad, who's killed way more people than ISIS, he just didn't do it publicly like they did. 0.98
01:02:24.000 He's the president of Syria.
01:02:28.000 He's propped up by Iran and by Russia, and so he's not going anywhere.
01:02:32.000 I mean, if you have those two countries as your allies, you're not going anywhere.
01:02:36.000 So I think what's going to happen ultimately is that ISIS will be defeated and the country will be partitioned along sectarian lines.
01:02:44.000 And eventually there may be a kind of delicate peace.
01:02:50.000 It seems like with all those Middle Eastern countries, any country that's run by a brutal dictator, as soon as that dictator's removed, or as soon as somebody dies, there's this massive power vacuum.
01:03:01.000 Yeah.
01:03:02.000 Yeah, I mean, that would be the argument for not trying to remove him. 1.00
01:03:04.000 I mean, he's a complete criminal and sadist, and he's horrible. 0.96
01:03:11.000 Well, it was the argument for keeping Saddam Hussein in power. 0.98
01:03:13.000 It was the argument for keeping Gaddafi in power.
01:03:16.000 Yeah.
01:03:16.000 I mean, basically, it's sort of a utilitarian argument from John Stuart Mill.
01:03:21.000 Like, what's going to cause the least human suffering or promote the most human happiness?
01:03:25.000 And, you know, sometimes I can understand the reasoning behind, look, the guy's a dictator, but we should leave him in place because the alternative is a lot of other innocent people suffering.
01:03:39.000 When we remove him and the country collapses.
01:03:41.000 This country has already collapsed, so the question is, okay, we make a tentative peace deal with him, we'll leave you in power, we won't try to topple you, but let's stop fighting.
01:03:51.000 I mean, I could support that, yeah, personally.
01:03:55.000 Wow, isn't that crazy?
01:03:57.000 The idea of keeping that guy in power just so less people suffer. 0.96
01:04:00.000 You keep a brutal, murderous dictator in power. 0.89
01:04:04.000 Yeah. 0.97
01:04:04.000 And we're better off that way. 0.97
01:04:05.000 Yeah.
01:04:06.000 Well, I mean, you know, the war killed almost half a million people.
01:04:08.000 So if you want that to continue, like, you know, yeah, I mean, those are the awful moral choices.
01:04:15.000 It's very frustrating for people, though, because we'd like to see some solution, but that doesn't seem like a solution.
01:04:23.000 Well, it's a solution to the violence, right?
01:04:25.000 I mean, any peace deal is a solution to the violence.
01:04:28.000 And the first thing that has to happen, I think, is that the violence stops so that people stop dying.
01:04:35.000 The pursuit of justice is important, but it's a secondary matter after that.
01:04:42.000 I know you're running out of time here.
01:04:44.000 What brings you satisfaction when you do something like this documentary or your book, Tribe?
01:04:55.000 I really like the...
01:05:01.000 I like the sort of game of ideas, right?
01:05:03.000 Like I like exploring a topic and starting to make sense of it and starting to see connections between things.
01:05:09.000 So when I was writing Tribe, when the central thesis of it sort of occurred to me, And all these disparate facts suddenly align themselves in an orderly way.
01:05:20.000 And I felt like I'd shown a little bit of light onto the world and shown how it worked.
01:05:25.000 Like, that's totally intoxicating to me.
01:05:26.000 And likewise, when you're making a documentary, you suddenly start to see themes and structures in the film, in human affairs...
01:05:33.000 They sort of come out, and when you work on that level, to me it's incredibly gratifying.
01:05:43.000 Because that means that I've now made sense of something, there's a disorderly confusing world, Manage to organize it in an understandable way.
01:05:52.000 And that means other people can understand it.
01:05:54.000 And then we can have a conversation about how the world works and how people work.
01:05:57.000 And that, to me, is the point of journalism.
01:06:00.000 It's the point of all intellectual endeavor.
01:06:02.000 And to be even a small part of it, to me, is incredibly exciting.
01:06:06.000 You nailed it, and you definitely nailed it with the thing I was talking about, how just beginning the first chapter, I had a real urge to get out of the city.
01:06:20.000 I had a real urge.
01:06:21.000 There's this thought, like, can I live in the woods?
01:06:23.000 Can I live in a tribal society?
01:06:25.000 It seems...
01:06:28.000 It seems like you were outlining almost like a mathematical problem.
01:06:33.000 Yeah.
01:06:37.000 Or chemical, maybe even a chemical problem.
01:06:40.000 Well, you know, I studied anthropology in college, and my understanding of humans is that we are social primates that prefer to live in groups of about 50 people in a challenging environment.
01:06:51.000 That's what human beings are.
01:06:54.000 And to the extent that we depart from that, we lead lives of dissatisfaction and frustration.
01:07:04.000 And that's how I understand life.
01:07:06.000 How do you manage that in your own life?
01:07:10.000 I mean, I wish I was part of a communal group fighting to survive in the wilderness.
01:07:16.000 Like, I mean, I had some taste of that with the platoon that I was with, and that was intoxicating.
01:07:22.000 It has downsides, obviously.
01:07:25.000 You can't stay out there forever.
01:07:26.000 But it made me at least understand that the source of my dissatisfaction in life wasn't internal.
01:07:32.000 It made sense.
01:07:33.000 It was that I was having a healthy reaction to circumstances in society that humans were not adapted for.
01:07:40.000 And even that was enough to bring a kind of peace of mind for me.
01:07:46.000 I also very consciously and deliberately try to live in places where there is the possibility of a sort of close communal neighborhood.
01:07:54.000 I live in a very poor neighborhood in New York City, which for some of the hassles at least has the sort of rich fabric of human connection that you just don't get in wealthy neighborhoods.
01:08:04.000 So you do it on purpose?
01:08:05.000 Oh, yeah.
01:08:07.000 I don't want you to say where you...
01:08:09.000 Do you want to say where you live?
01:08:09.000 I live in the Lower East Side in Manhattan.
01:08:11.000 And I mean, it's not very, very poor, but it's a Dominican neighborhood. 1.00
01:08:15.000 Half the people in that neighborhood really don't speak English very well.
01:08:18.000 So it's a very rich or ethnic neighborhood.
01:08:20.000 People are quite poor.
01:08:22.000 And I know everybody.
01:08:23.000 I mean, everyone knows each other by sight, and we look out for each other.
01:08:26.000 And during Hurricane Sandy hit New York, I mean, a lot of the people that had young children had to leave because there was no light.
01:08:34.000 There was no water.
01:08:35.000 The power was out, right?
01:08:36.000 Half of Manhattan was completely dark.
01:08:38.000 It was actually quite dangerous at night in the dark half of Manhattan.
01:08:43.000 And where there was no streetlights.
01:08:44.000 And so this building, it's a tenement building that I live in with my wife.
01:08:49.000 And a lot of the people left and they were worried about being robbed.
01:08:55.000 And these are poor people, right?
01:08:56.000 This is not a wealthy building at all.
01:08:58.000 It's quite a poor building.
01:09:09.000 Wow.
01:09:10.000 Wow.
01:09:15.000 You know, I wasn't associated with the building at that time, but boy would that have made me feel good to be part of that.
01:09:21.000 You know what I mean?
01:09:21.000 That is what human beings, that's what they are.
01:09:24.000 It's that, right?
01:09:25.000 And you didn't see that in a wealthy neighborhood, partly because the wealthy neighborhoods actually had light.
01:09:32.000 Right.
01:09:33.000 It just seems weird to make the choice to live in a community like that because of those factors.
01:09:38.000 Well, my wife lived there and I moved in with her.
01:09:40.000 But the reason I was happy to move in with her, one of the reasons I was happy to move in with her is precisely because it wasn't an affluent neighborhood like the kind I grew up in.
01:09:49.000 That to me is just soul death, right?
01:09:52.000 I mean, it's just, I grew up in an affluent suburb and it's just the most boring neighborhood.
01:09:58.000 Thing on the planet like it's just deadly to me and and I you know like had I not grown up like that Maybe I'd be living in a neighborhood like that.
01:10:05.000 I mean I get it right But I did grow up like that and the one thing that I just cannot survive Is that kind of complacent affluence like it just kills me?
01:10:14.000 It's so funny because that's the one thing that people try to achieve when they grow up in that sort of poor community They want to get out and live in that big house the big yard Look at their suicide rates, their addiction rates, their depression rates.
01:10:27.000 I mean seriously, if you look at those alcoholism, depression, suicide in affluent neighborhoods, I mean it's astronomical.
01:10:36.000 It's brutal.
01:10:38.000 Boy, but try to convince people to abandon that way.
01:10:41.000 That's where it's really odd.
01:10:42.000 It seems like so counterintuitive to them.
01:10:45.000 It's like, no, no, no.
01:10:46.000 You're going to live in a safe neighborhood.
01:10:48.000 No, no, no.
01:10:48.000 You're going to have a big house.
01:10:49.000 You're going to have a nice car and a great job.
01:10:50.000 You're going to do great.
01:10:51.000 Well, think about it in evolutionary terms.
01:10:53.000 The impulse towards safety and luxury is a totally healthy one in a situation where nature doesn't offer that very often.
01:11:00.000 Right.
01:11:00.000 Right?
01:11:00.000 So we're programmed to go for those things, right?
01:11:03.000 Right.
01:11:04.000 What we're not prepared for is to go for those things and have it happen all the time.
01:11:09.000 You see what I'm saying?
01:11:10.000 These are totally healthy instincts, of course, right?
01:11:13.000 But we didn't evolve in a world where you could actually achieve that 100% of the time.
01:11:19.000 I mean, dogs are programmed, and a lot of dog species are programmed, will eat until they've eaten so much that they'll kill themselves eating, right?
01:11:27.000 It's because there wasn't enough food.
01:11:28.000 Like, the programming to keep eating as long as their food is great if there's a scarcity of food.
01:11:33.000 Right.
01:11:34.000 As soon as there's a plenitude of food, that becomes maladaptive and the dog dies.
01:11:38.000 Likewise, people put fat on very easily because in a harsh environment with not much food, you have to be able to put fat on easily or you'll die.
01:11:47.000 Now, the reason there's so many obese people is because we have that impulse to eat and eat and eat.
01:11:54.000 And the food's there to do it with, and we don't have a mechanism for stopping it.
01:11:58.000 And so that's why there's so many fat people.
01:12:00.000 Well, it's also sugar.
01:12:01.000 That's a big one.
01:12:01.000 Process sugar.
01:12:03.000 Absolutely.
01:12:03.000 But our taste for sugar and for fat is programmed by evolution, right?
01:12:09.000 Because there wasn't much of those things.
01:12:10.000 So now you can have as much as you want, and suddenly people weigh 350 pounds, right?
01:12:14.000 I mean, it's evolutionary programming run amok in a world where there's too much of something that is very good but was very scarce.
01:12:22.000 You highlight some really profound issues with culture in your book, but I would wonder how many people come up to you after they've read it and go, what do I do?
01:12:31.000 Like, you're right, you're right, but what do I do?
01:12:34.000 I mean, here I am, I'm this guy, I have this house, I have a mortgage, I have kids, I have a job that's good, and I don't want to leave it, but what do I do? 0.96
01:12:41.000 Because you're right, I'm fucking miserable. 0.85
01:12:43.000 What do I do? 0.99
01:12:45.000 What do you tell those people?
01:12:46.000 I mean, you know, it's a question if you can't have it all.
01:12:51.000 And what I would say to them is, sell your house, sell your car if you can, move into a community where you have to be inter-reliant with the people around you, and you have to interact with them every day.
01:13:05.000 That is what makes people feel good.
01:13:08.000 But the thing is, people are understandably not willing to give up the pleasures of an affluent life in order to have social connection.
01:13:14.000 I mean, I get it, right?
01:13:15.000 But you really can't have both very successfully.
01:13:18.000 It's extremely hard to.
01:13:20.000 Yeah, I have a buddy of mine who lived in Venice in a real nice tight-knit community.
01:13:25.000 They had this cul-de-sac and everybody lived in the cul-de-sac.
01:13:27.000 Everyone knew everybody.
01:13:28.000 I live in a cul-de-sac.
01:13:29.000 They're great.
01:13:30.000 And he started doing well.
01:13:32.000 And the first thing he did, he moved out.
01:13:34.000 And he got this really nice house and this big yard. 0.99
01:13:36.000 He fucking hates it. 1.00
01:13:37.000 And he's miserable. 1.00
01:13:38.000 When we talk about it, he goes, I fucking hate it. 0.99
01:13:39.000 He goes, I don't know my neighbors. 0.99
01:13:41.000 He goes, I have this big yard.
01:13:43.000 I just stare at it and go back inside my house.
01:13:45.000 He goes, I used to know everyone on the block.
01:13:47.000 I knew everyone in the community.
01:13:48.000 Yeah.
01:13:49.000 That's right.
01:13:49.000 That lifestyle is correlated with higher depression and suicide rates.
01:13:55.000 I mean, he's literally at a statistical risk, increased statistical risk of suicide and depression because of that change.
01:14:02.000 Wow.
01:14:03.000 So you, regardless of how much money you would make, you would always move into a neighborhood where people are relying upon each other and stay tight to each other?
01:14:12.000 Oh yeah, I'm not, yeah, absolutely.
01:14:14.000 Wow.
01:14:15.000 I mean, it's not even a, yeah.
01:14:16.000 No way, like...
01:14:18.000 It's not even a choice, yeah.
01:14:19.000 I mean, I just get instantly depressed in affluent neighborhoods.
01:14:23.000 Wow, that's so crazy.
01:14:24.000 Yeah, I mean, I crash.
01:14:25.000 I mean, hard.
01:14:26.000 Do you accumulate any material possessions?
01:14:29.000 Are you one of those dudes who has like a notebook and a couple pairs of shoes?
01:14:32.000 You know, I mean, minimally, but yeah, I mean, we live in a very small apartment, so there's not room for much, but...
01:14:38.000 And you're happy with that?
01:14:41.000 Oh, yeah.
01:14:42.000 I mean, listen, the less you have, the happier you are.
01:14:44.000 At the end of the day, you can probably make that as an empirically true statement.
01:14:50.000 I'm not talking about poverty, lack of food, lack of resources.
01:14:55.000 I'm obviously not talking about that.
01:14:58.000 I'm talking about material possessions.
01:14:59.000 Right.
01:15:00.000 Stuff. 0.98
01:15:00.000 Cars and boats and shit. 0.98
01:15:02.000 I always feel like once you get a boat, you're probably falling apart. 0.95
01:15:08.000 Unless you're a fisherman, you're going out there and getting a boat.
01:15:12.000 What are you doing?
01:15:15.000 Well, you know, it's interesting.
01:15:16.000 Those kind of material possessions also, I mean, again, evolution, right?
01:15:22.000 Particularly for males in the society, if you control resources, you have a reproductive advantage over males that don't control resources, and girls will like you better, right?
01:15:32.000 So when you're an 18-year-old boy, the instinct to get a car, to get a boat, maybe one day to get a private airplane, whatever, that instinct has huge...
01:15:44.000 Evolutionary advantage because it gives you access to women, right? 1.00
01:15:47.000 Not all women, but enough so that it's a great strategy for meeting girls, right? 0.91
01:15:51.000 The problem is that once you're sort of further on in your life and you have children, you have a family, If you don't have a community, and what you have instead is a huge lawn, an overpowered boat,
01:16:08.000 and a ridiculously expensive car, you have taken things that were a definite reproductive advantage at 18, and you have dragged them into midlife, where instead of making you feel good,
01:16:23.000 they will depress you.
01:16:24.000 In my opinion, that's what happens to those guys. 0.78
01:16:27.000 So it's not that those things are a stupid idea at an earlier point in your life, but definitely when you're 50 years old, again, I'm sure if you did the proper study, you could make a correlation between those kinds of material possession and alcohol abuse, 0.92
01:16:45.000 depression, suicide, all that stuff. 0.96
01:16:46.000 I wonder if that's the case with like rappers and people that grow up in these poor black communities that go on to have insane material wealth.
01:16:55.000 I've always been fascinated by the ridiculous hip-hop culture of just giant houses and 50 cars and throwing money up into the air and just this celebration of excess coming from a place of nothing and having this deep desire to achieve all those things that seemed unattainable.
01:17:13.000 Look, I mean, I think athletes have the same problem, too.
01:17:15.000 You know, and particularly, I mean, they have the fraternity of their team until they retire.
01:17:20.000 And apparently, retired athletes, professional athletes, are at real risk of depression.
01:17:24.000 Yes.
01:17:25.000 And, I mean, listen, I met a young woman who had survived cancer, and she said to me rather sheepishly, she said, you know, when I was six, she was on a cancer ward, and she knew all the other cancer sufferers on the ward.
01:17:39.000 And her family and basically her tribe rallied around her.
01:17:41.000 She didn't know if she was going to survive.
01:17:43.000 She was going chemo and all that awful, awful stuff.
01:17:45.000 And she looked at me sheepishly and said, I survived and now I miss being sick.
01:17:51.000 She missed the community of cancer sufferers on that ward and her own community that rallied around her.
01:18:00.000 She was lonely.
01:18:02.000 Now, if soldiers are missing war and cancer survivors are missing cancer, like something's missing.
01:18:07.000 Yeah.
01:18:08.000 Well, there's a struggle that's missing for sure.
01:18:11.000 You know, in my own life, I'm a very addictive person.
01:18:15.000 I have an addictive personality, and I've found a lot of happiness in martial arts.
01:18:21.000 And one of the things about martial arts, particularly in jiu-jitsu, because it's one of the rare martial arts that you could practice going 100% and not really hurt each other too much because you're not hitting each other.
01:18:32.000 You're just choking each other and tapping each other out and stuff.
01:18:35.000 But there's a camaraderie and a bond between people that choke each other all the time that you just don't see with other men or I don't see.
01:18:44.000 Well, yeah, listen, I hear you, man.
01:18:45.000 I mean, when my marriage started falling apart, I started boxing, right?
01:18:51.000 And I just needed something.
01:18:52.000 I'd always been a pretty intense athlete when I was young, and I sort of smoked cigarettes and drank for a while.
01:18:57.000 And then suddenly, my life's in crisis at 50, and I started going to a boxing gym, Mendez Boxing in New York City.
01:19:02.000 So at 50, you learn how to box.
01:19:04.000 Yeah.
01:19:05.000 That's crazy.
01:19:06.000 I'd always had a pretty intense relationship with my body as an athlete, right?
01:19:09.000 So I wasn't starting from zero.
01:19:10.000 I've always been in really good shape.
01:19:12.000 Right.
01:19:13.000 But I'd never boxed before.
01:19:15.000 I'd never done anything like that.
01:19:16.000 And what I loved about Mendez, it's an old gym in New York, and it's like Gleason's.
01:19:21.000 It's in Manhattan.
01:19:22.000 And what I loved about it is that there were some very tough kids from the outer boroughs, right?
01:19:27.000 There was, like, suits that would come in from Wall Street at lunchtime to box.
01:19:31.000 There was women. 1.00
01:19:32.000 There was all kinds of people.
01:19:33.000 Wealthy people, poor people, black, white, whatever.
01:19:36.000 Everyone's in there, right?
01:19:37.000 What I loved about it is that no one brought their street identity into the Into the gym, right?
01:19:45.000 It's just like a platoon in combat.
01:19:46.000 You were judged in there not for whether you're young and black and poor or wealthy and affluent and white or whatever, but how you act in the gym.
01:19:55.000 And there's no prejudice that I can see against the young black kids that are in there, but there's also no prejudice against the wealthy white guys.
01:20:01.000 As long as you leave it at the street...
01:20:04.000 You're whoever you are in that space, and you get all the respect you want if you act well.
01:20:09.000 And that is the deep egalitarianism of a tribal society.
01:20:12.000 You're judged by how you act, and that's it.
01:20:15.000 That's the same thing with jiu-jitsu schools.
01:20:17.000 You're judged by your effort and how well you can perform on the mats.
01:20:20.000 Right.
01:20:21.000 And listen, I'm a middle-aged guy, right?
01:20:23.000 I mean, I'm never going to win a championship.
01:20:25.000 I mean, what am I going to do professionally with boxing?
01:20:27.000 It's not happening.
01:20:28.000 But I work out really, really hard.
01:20:30.000 I'm not afraid to get hit.
01:20:31.000 And I have all the—I mean, everyone in the gym knows me, and I have all the respect I could ever want.
01:20:36.000 And through that struggle, also, you achieve some feeling of peace.
01:20:41.000 Because it's a brutal struggle, boxing, for people who've never tried it.
01:20:46.000 It's unbelievably exhausting.
01:20:48.000 I mean, I thought a 412 mile was the hardest thing I could imagine.
01:20:52.000 I had no idea what a one-hour session was.
01:20:55.000 Like a really intense one-hour training session was like much less sparring.
01:20:59.000 Jesus.
01:20:59.000 Yeah, much less getting hit in the liver.
01:21:01.000 Yeah.
01:21:01.000 Yeah.
01:21:02.000 I just, I mean, annihilating.
01:21:05.000 But I was in a lot of psychic pain and I needed it.
01:21:09.000 Yeah, I really feel like, especially physical struggle, I mean, there's a lot of people that are averse to exercise, and I'm like, I can't stress it enough.
01:21:18.000 I think the body needs physical struggle.
01:21:20.000 I think if you don't, I think there's an overflow of energy and stress that's unmanaged, and it manifests itself in a very physical way.
01:21:28.000 There was a study that I read of, I mean, there are a few hunter-gatherer societies that are still in existence, and The average amount of physical activity in subsistence-level hunter-gatherer societies, which of course is our evolutionary past, I mean that's what we are designed to do,
01:21:45.000 is something like two hours of hard walking per day.
01:21:50.000 On average, men and women moved vigorously for two hours a day, usually walking quickly.
01:21:57.000 That's what our bodies are designed for, and if we do that, we're tuned up at that level.
01:22:04.000 Our mind feels good, our bodies feel good.
01:22:06.000 And if you don't do that, I mean, you can lay around all day, but you will experience a psychological deficit and a physical deficit.
01:22:17.000 Yeah, I think that, I mean, there's no way to make people do it.
01:22:22.000 But I think if you could give people advice, that would be one of the big ones.
01:22:25.000 And, you know, in Western society, the older you get, the more money you tend to have and the more sedentary you are.
01:22:32.000 And there's a corresponding decline in testosterone levels in males, right?
01:22:36.000 What they found in these very mobile physical societies is that testosterone levels in males really didn't decline until the 70s.
01:22:44.000 70s?
01:22:45.000 70s.
01:22:45.000 I mean, it declined slowly, but it didn't go off a cliff like it does in our society at 35 or whatever it is.
01:22:50.000 Like, it was a gradual decline, and if there was a cliff, it was in the mid-70s.
01:22:54.000 And that's because, I mean, the theory was that it was because that constant, intense physical activity, testosterone allows for it, but that activity actually keeps those levels high.
01:23:06.000 I mean, it's a symbiotic relationship.
01:23:09.000 No, it completely makes sense.
01:23:10.000 I mean, one of the things that they prescribe to middle-aged men is sprints, you know, run up hills, like carry heavy things, do squats, do things that stimulate your entire body.
01:23:19.000 Right, yeah, or boxing.
01:23:20.000 Yeah, or boxing, yeah.
01:23:22.000 All those things.
01:23:23.000 Listen, man, I've taken up enough of your time, and I really appreciate it.
01:23:26.000 And I'm really enjoying your book, and I'm looking forward to your documentary.
01:23:30.000 And it's Hell on Earth, and it's available this Sunday.
01:23:33.000 What time is it?
01:23:34.000 Does it say up there what time it is?
01:23:36.000 11...
01:23:36.000 Oh, June 11th, 9 Eastern, 8 Central.
01:23:40.000 And I've enjoyed your work over the years, man.
01:23:43.000 So it was a real pleasure to sit down and talk to you.
01:23:44.000 Thank you.
01:23:44.000 I really enjoyed this conversation.
01:23:46.000 Thanks, man.
01:23:46.000 It was a really, really nice, great conversation.
01:23:48.000 All right, man.
01:23:49.000 Thank you very much.
01:23:49.000 Appreciate it.
01:23:50.000 My pleasure.
01:23:50.000 That's it, folks.
01:23:51.000 See ya.
01:23:53.000 See ya.