Why Modern Society Makes Us Depressed - Sebastian Junger
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 8 minutes
Harmful content
Misogyny
4
sentences flagged
Toxicity
11
sentences flagged
Hate speech
17
sentences flagged
Summary
Sebastian Goldstein is a journalist, writer, and podcaster. He s also the author of the new book, Trigonometry, a memoir about his experience with PTSD and depression, and how he managed to come out the other side.
Transcript
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It's clear that our society, for all of its wonderful benefit, it's clear that our society
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is not providing enough human connection to keep people happy. We're way out on a limb here with
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this individuality. I mean, humans have never survived as individuals. It's not possible.
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You take someone, you put them down in the wilderness by themselves, they die almost
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immediately. As a species, we are social primates and we owe our lives to the group and we have to
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participate. We have a duty to the group in order to stay alive. That's what being human means.
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If you can simultaneously understand that you are part of a community of humans, you're lucky to be so, what do you owe them?
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Because the more you give them, the happier you will be, the more affluent in society, the higher the levels generally of anxiety, depression, suicide, addiction.
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It's great to have you here. We want to talk about your book and the broader questions that
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come out of it. But before we do, tell us a little bit about who you are. How are you
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sitting here? What's been your journey through life?
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I grew up in Boston. I moved to New York in my 30s. I was a freelance war reporter for
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many years. I also wrote a number of books. My first one was a bestseller, The Perfect Storm.
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and but as soon as that came out I went back overseas and I covered the civil wars in West
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Africa I was in Afghanistan in 1996 then again in 2000 with Masood and then later with American
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Forces and um eventually I had the great good fortune to work with a British photographer named
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Tim Hetherington and he he and I shot and directed and produced a documentary together
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called Restrepo about an outpost in Afghanistan that we were at off and on for a year and then
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And we were nominated for an Oscar, and a few weeks later, Tim, we were going to go
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Tim went on his own, because I had to delay the trip, and he was killed outside of the
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And after he was hit by shrapnel from a mortar fired by Qaddafi's forces.
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So after that, I got out, I sort of had my fill.
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I couldn't imagine going back to war, not because I was worried about being killed.
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I mean, I was sort of worried about how it would affect my family, my friends, right?
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I suddenly realized watching Tim's family, like, what I was actually gambling with their
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I had two children, two little girls who are now nine and six.
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And now I make my living in quieter ways, so as a writer.
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And the last book that came out was called In My Time of Dying.
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I've never thought that I would ever go to the ER for anything other than a car accident or a chainsaw accident or something.
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I had an aneurysm in my abdomen that I didn't know about, an eruption, and I lost half my blood, and I came extremely close to dying.
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And I didn't know I was dying, but I got to the hospital in the last phases of hemorrhagic shock, you know, convulsing on the table and stuff like that, and they barely saved me.
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But one of the last things I remember was that they were working to put a large-gauge needle through my neck into my jugular to transfuse me.
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And as they were doing that, I'm an atheist, right?
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My dad was a physicist and an atheist, like atheist squared, basically.
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And the universe kind of cracked open underneath me, and I started to get pulled into it.
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And then my dead father appeared above me to comfort me.
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and says okay you don't have to fight it you can come with me i'll take care of you i said to the
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doctor you gotta hurry because i'm going i didn't know where i was going but i knew i was i was
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leaving and uh so that you know i'm still an atheist and i'm happy to talk about that but but
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that really rearranged some of my assumptions about the nature of uh of life and consciousness
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and time and life and death and all those all those big things and now here i am well it's
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really fascinating but uh coming back to to the war correspondent years and that side of things
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things. What did you learn from doing that for a very long time? I imagine it's a very
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unusual experience that most people don't have. And I imagine it draws quite unusual
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Yeah. I mean, I don't know in other countries, in the United States, the military
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is filled. I mean, in some ways it's our most democratic and diverse organization, right?
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I mean, it's kind of extraordinary that way. Combat itself is a very select group. It's
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all male. I mean, the combat infantry is all male. Probably 70 or 80% white, sort of working
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class, middle class kids, right? And they really, unlike during Vietnam, they really wanted to be,
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I was with the 173rd Airborne. You don't get sucked into the 173rd Airborne by accident,
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right? They really wanted to be soldiers and to be in combat. And of course, they traumatized them
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and all kinds of other things, but it was really interesting.
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So we were out at Restrepo, which was an outpost
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I'm not a little bit bigger, but it was very small,
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For the first few months, there was no generators,
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and high casualty rates, absolutely brutal existence.
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But the boys were out there for 15 months straight
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and no contact with the outside world, nothing, right?
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And when they got back, they got back to Vicenza, Italy.
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after the partying that you can imagine happened,
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where they're dependent on each other for their lives. And that is, you know, as an anthropologist,
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former anthropologist, that's basically our evolutionary past. And it resonated very deeply
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with them. And they were very confused. Like, what's wrong with me? Why would I want to go
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back to that place? But I do. And my book, Tribe, is about the sort of anthropological reality
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that produces that kind of reaction. Is it partly an addictive existence whereby
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by you experiencing huge highs, huge lows in the way and a sense of camaraderie that you simply
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don't get in real life. Yeah, it is. But you know what I would say is the adrenaline junkie thing
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is a little overstated. I mean, you can skydive, you can rock climb. There's lots of ways of like
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getting adrenaline in this. But those are all quite sort of self-serving or enterprises, right?
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there for you, right? I'm going to skydive. But the thing about the military, the thing about being
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in combat is when you're in combat, you don't feel like you're there for yourself. You feel
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like you're there for everybody else, right? And that sort of, that brotherhood is that actually,
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the end of the day, I think that is what's intoxicating. I think that's what pulls up
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our sort of evolutionary past. And I think you could, maybe you could say it's addictive,
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but it's certainly something that once you acquire it,
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there's guys in the platoon who straight up hate each other,
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Especially when you think about in society at the moment, we're talking about the crisis
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of meaning, where even ordinary people who've never experienced that type of intense bond
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or extreme situation is looking at their life and going, I don't know what this means.
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So it must be even more of a contrast if you've experienced war to what we're going through
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I mean, if you think about for most of our evolutionary past, the fighters, the warriors
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that came back, the Cheyenne, the Sioux, the Comanche, the Apache, when they came back from
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their combat, they were coming back to a close community that was also living on the edge of
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survival, right? So there wasn't that transition from survival to ease and luxury. It was all
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survival, right? And everyone was involved in all of it. And that's how, in evolutionary terms,
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that's how it should be. In our society, I mean, there are a lot of blessings here. Let's not
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forget. To live in a society where our safety and our daily survival needs are basically mechanized
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and taken care of and outsourced is a huge blessing, right? I mean, you know, let's acknowledge
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it, but there are downsides even to blessings. And one of the downsides is that people can feel
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very alienated because they're not needed by their group and vice versa until there's a crisis. So
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the Blitz in London, I write about this in my book, Tribe. It shocked the authorities because
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they were prepared. I mean, this is quite well-known, right? The authorities were prepared
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for mass psychiatric casualties when the German Air Force started bombing London and other British
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cities, right? And in fact, the admissions to psych wards went down during the bombings because
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people had a purpose. They had something they had to do. They were digging people out of the rubble.
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They were sleeping side by side in the tube stations. They were doing all of the sort of
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urgent survival things that our human ancestors have always done and in circumstances like that
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there's a great um relief and be able to forget about your own concerns our anxiety comes from
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our own concern and when we're in situations where we're concerned about others and others need us
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it's almost like a painkiller it's like oh i feel no fear i'm good but i just have to make sure
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everyone else is good it happened in new york on 9 11 after 9 11 right hurricanes and earth
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It was an earthquake in Italy that I looked at in, you know, 1916, I think it was.
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And it killed something like 95% of the population in a minute, right?
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And the people that survived it had to make it another four or five days until help could get there.
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And this guy wrote, he said, during, I mean, one of the amazing things about crises like this is everyone's the same.
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So all these awful social strata, sort of like rich, poor, white, black, whatever, every conceivable category just goes away, right?
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And so this guy said, it's such an amazing sentence, he said that the earthquake had produced what the law promises, but cannot in fact deliver, which is the equality of all men.
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Wow. And as I was listening to your book, it made me think about something, and I'd love to explore it with you, which is...
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In civilian life, it's very difficult to become a hero for the average person.
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The average person doesn't get the chance to be heroic, particularly the male, which is important to us to be the hero.
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But war, particularly something like the Blitz, provides the ordinary, regular, everyday person with the chance to be a hero.
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And what I would say in those circumstances, you're absolutely right.
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But I would say the word hero is like a civilian concept, right?
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In combat itself, no one thinks of being a hero.
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They just, you know, I mean, the people that have received,
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and I know some of them that have received the Medal of Honor,
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our highest medal in this country, they're like, universally,
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like without exception, they're like, I didn't do, I just did,
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I did the minimum that I was supposed to do for a brother
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And it brings me to this idea that I've been thinking about, about duty.
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Like, actually, I think it's a kind of secret to something good.
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It's actually what you owe your community, right?
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And so, you know, Bronze Age England, your community would have been some 100 or 200
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In, you know, modern America, it's, you know, $340 million, right?
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And I think we're the first, and what's their duty to you?
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And that reciprocal arrangement of duty is core to making people feel safe.
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Every other question is sort of like unimportant compared to these.
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And duty, this charging of duty to the individual and from the society and to the society is
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at the core of answering those three questions in the affirmative, right?
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And so when I say to people in this country, what's your duty to the country?
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And I think we're probably the first society in history, I mean modern Western society, where people don't have a ready answer for that very obvious and ancient human question.
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I think you go back 1,000 years, 5,000 years, you ask a Native American in 1750, what's your duty to the Iroquois, your tribe?
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We can't answer that question. I think until we can, all of us individually will feel unsatisfied
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and in some ways fearful because we don't have a safe place in the world.
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One of the fascinating things is I think on the flip side, if you ask people what they're entitled
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to, they will give you a list as long as they're arm, which is a relationship that seems to me to
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have become distorted because you are, as a member of a group, of course, entitled to certain things,
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but that is the flip side of the duties that you have to that group. And we now have a long list
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of entitlements and very little idea of what our duty is. Yeah. I mean, Western society,
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it's a mass society that had to scale up and come up with answers that aren't very finely tuned to
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actual human needs. But basically, you pay taxes, and then the society's duty to you is to basically
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keep you safe from harm, to render aid if you're in a crisis. It all sort of makes sense, right?
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And I think the conversation, and the conversation between liberals and conservatives, is where is
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that line, right? The idea of a society that owes nothing to the individuals is barbaric,
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Right. I mean, someone's dying on the sidewalk and there's no ambulance to call.
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Right. Or they kick him out of the hospital because he can't pay the ten thousand dollars, you know, for the appendectomy is a porperic.
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Right. On the other hand, there's a you know, there's a real consequence for society when people sort of game the system and try to take, you know, more than I'll just put it this way, more than they should.
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Right. You know what? And I've looked at the sort of origins, the human, the origins of moral behavior in humans.
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Right. Which they just sort of start in, you know, we're social primates and you can see some sort of moral behavior in chimpanzees.
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But really, with the advent of language, people could really talk about what is right and what is wrong.
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And there were two main—there was a wonderful anthropologist called Melvin, I think his first name, Connor, and he wrote a book called Moral Origins.
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And he said there's two main crimes that survival groups are on the lookout for.
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One is abusive leadership, like leaders that abuse their position and enrich themselves, advantage themselves, hurt other people, right, that are lower than them, right?
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And those people, that was one of the things that would elicit capital punishment.
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So there are rock drawings of one guy bristling with arrows and 10 men standing around him with their bows, right?
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Clearly an execution by the men of a group of the theory as an abusive leader.
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The other sort of crime that survival communities are constantly on the lookout for is free riders.
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People that really aren't contributing to the pot, right, to survival, and they're taking more than their share of the chestnuts or the meat or whatever, right?
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But, you know, we live in societies where leaders can be very abusive, right, can think they're above the law, right, that they're beyond the reach of ordinary justice and enrich themselves, right?
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I can understand people saying, you know what, look what he's doing, right?
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I'm going to jail because I stole $100 sneakers.
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He ripped off the government for $500 million, and he's fine.
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So I think part of the problems of freeloading, which is real in our society, and it's very
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damaging to the freeloaders psychologically, emotionally, super destructive to them, right?
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terrible for their self-esteem. But part of the problem is that we have sometimes leaders in our
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governments that are clearly corrupt and unethical and self-serving. Well, no one would argue with
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that, I think. If you own gold, you probably bought it for the same reason I did. Because
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you looked at what central banks are doing to currencies and decided you wanted something they
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can't print. Good reasoning. But here's the thing nobody talks about after you make that decision.
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Your gold is just sitting there. It's not doing anything.
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You're paying to store it, you're paying to insure it,
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and in the meantime, it earns precisely nothing.
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What you're about to hear is not a normal gold advert.
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They've figured out something that once you hear it, seems obvious.
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But almost nobody in the gold world is doing it.
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Monetary Metals connects gold owners with productive businesses,
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companies that actually need physical gold to operate.
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Those businesses lease your gold and pay you a yield.
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costing you money, it's out in the real economy
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If you already own gold, this is the logical next step.
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we've been coming to the United States for a long time
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and we've observed a lot of interesting things.
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I mean, one of the things I was gonna ask you is,
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you know, America is a hyper-individualistic society
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Because I imagine if you optimize for the individual, actually you are taking away many
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of the things that you're talking about as being necessary for human flourishing.
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I mean, look, we're way out on a limb here with this individuality.
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I mean, humans have never survived as individuals.
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You take someone, you put them down in the wilderness by themselves, they die almost
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And so within Western society, none of us are surviving without the supply chain, right?
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without the you know lots of other people that to do the stuff that we need done to survive while
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we're doing one thing that we're good at that other people need to survive right you're an eye
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doctor you're a dentist you're a construction worker it's just how it works so the idea that
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like oh i'm just an individual and i don't need anything from anyone and so stay away from me and
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i don't want to pay any taxes whatsoever and blah blah blah like it's you know it's a fantasy right
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human society has never worked that way and you can go to a you know there are some tribal societies
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current day that i thought to represent very closely what our evolutionary origins are
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and um you know the the idea that in those in those just the hadza in east africa for example
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you're very well studied peoples um you know they would just say it's absolutely absurd like the
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idea you could could survive on your own or would want to like and so in america there's this myth
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of individuality but actually all these people all these sort of cowboys that think they're like
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these rugged individuals are enormously independent on the supply chain and the government that
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oversees it so it's a it's a fantasy right it's a kind of immature fantasy and what's fascinating
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to me is that hyper individualism which i like aspects of if i'm honest you know i i do enjoy
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the freedom to do what i think is the right thing with you know within limits of course
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seems to be paired with a hyper tribalism increasingly when it comes to things like
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politics is there a connection between those two or are they separate issues i i mean you know i'm
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not a political expert but just as a citizen of this country um one of the things that is odd
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in both the left and the right i vote mostly democratic okay but i'm enormously frustrated
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even outraged by the left uh occasionally terrified by the right and very disappointed in them as well
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so i'm i i'm sort of nicely in the middle and i have friends on perfect guest for our show right
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But one of the things that's quite odd is the, particularly on the right wing, the sort
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of insistence on individuality, but as you say, also on an insistence that conservatives
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are the tribe that's right about things, and the left are the sort of forces of evil
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and dissolution that have to be fought against.
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So they're both being hyper individualistic, but also acting collectively as a tribe in ways that I think are kind of frightening.
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I mean, you know, they would never organize January 6th, right?
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this hyper hyper liberal thought where you really it's dictated to you how you must speak and how
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you must think about things that are very complicated and nuanced that really no one
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has is in consensus about but the dictating your thoughts uh that that you only find on the left
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and it's and it's absolute to me i mean i grew up in the 60s and 70s where left-wing thought
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The conservatives, the left wing were the rebels, right?
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Like, the left wing is now dictating your thoughts to you.
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Does it worry you when you look at this country through the lens of tribe,
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where you go, we simply can't hold this amount of people together
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Well, I mean, there's always going to be stresses
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and then there's outward pressure to keep it together.
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And when those stresses get to be too much, it can fracture,
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but there's huge downsides to fracturing, right?
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So there's a lot of sort of pressure to keep it together,
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even as you're fighting like cats and dogs, right?
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Like, I mean, likewise, the marriage or any kind, all kinds of groups are like this, right?
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Listen, yeah, this is intense, but we'd both be worse off if we weren't alone, if we weren't with each other.
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But what I would say is that you can conceptually say my strongest identity is as a citizen of this country.
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I happen to be of Italian origin or I happen to be female or black or whatever you whatever it is.
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It doesn't matter. Right. Or trans or anything like. But but first and foremost, I'm an American.
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And, you know, one of the great virtues of this country is that when people are come here, what's offered,
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what's on offer to them is that you actually don't have to bring with you your tribal identity from your other from your homeland,
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your country of origin. You can really become American.
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You know what? At our best, we're not going to care where you came from or what you are.
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Just work hard. Don't commit a crime. Be a good citizen. And you're good.
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Whether you're an Irish immigrant or Somali or your family's been here since the Mayflower, it doesn't matter.
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It's how you act right now that matters. And that's true in a platoon in combat, by the way.
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Oh, your dad's in prison, but you're a really good fighter? You're good with us. You're brave and courageous.
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You're good-looking and rich, and you suck in a firefight. I don't have anything to do with you, right?
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So there is a little bit of that deal offered in this country, which I think is extraordinary.
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So and I think one of the challenges is in this country now and in our country and right
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the way through the Western civilization as a whole is we talk about tribes, but we're
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not we don't really acknowledge that there's now digital tribes.
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I mean, I think that the ability of social media and the algorithms that drive people's
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opinion towards greater and greater extremes is tremendously dangerous.
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And we were talking before, you saw my flip phone and, you know, we just, I have a flip
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phone because I, you know, frankly, I think smartphones are dangerous.
00:27:03.460
They're dangerous like handguns are dangerous, right?
00:27:08.800
They're important in some moments like handguns, but they're also very, very dangerous.
00:27:13.220
And, and so I just want nothing to do with them.
00:27:15.180
So I think that's part of what's been happening in Western society and in the United States recently.
00:27:22.400
But what I would say, I sort of never finished this thought, but you can conceive of a greater identity than your natural political affiliation.
00:27:31.140
But after 9-11, we were attacked and we had to band together.
00:27:34.560
And those differences stopped mattering for a while.
00:27:39.320
And I'll just, if I could, give you a quick anecdote about someone that did that.
00:27:43.660
In the moment, he did this thing that was totally extraordinary as an example of that kind of intellectual courage of espousing a national identity.
00:27:56.160
And it doesn't mean you're without criticism of your country at all, but do you have a duty to it?
00:28:04.180
You have to articulate what your duty to your country is, or you will die an unhappy person, in my opinion.
00:28:11.180
So with this guy, I was outside of a hotel in Norfolk, Virginia, and this guy came out, he was in a wheelchair, he's a sort of very handsome 75-year-old guy, right? And his right leg ended at the knee, and it was swaddled in bandages, like he had just lost half of his right leg at age 75.
00:28:28.940
And he came out on his own, and he tried to get into a car that happened to be in the passenger seat, and it was locked. So I went over to him, I was like, hey, can I help you?
00:28:37.520
I was like, no, I just have to wait till my wife gets here.
00:28:41.200
And I said, it seems pretty complicated what you're dealing with.
00:28:44.100
He was like, well, it takes some getting used to.
00:28:51.720
And he said, there's young people in this country missing both their legs.
00:29:01.540
He said, there's young people in this country missing both their legs.
00:29:05.400
right that's someone who's thinking not thinking about himself right and so there there are small
00:29:15.440
symbolic but powerful ways to act as part of this amazing country any amazing country right
00:29:21.320
um you have to vote right you live in a democracy you're one of the few and the privileged in
00:29:27.760
history to live in a democracy where you have power over your rulers through rule of law right
00:29:33.000
and elections. So don't stay home, right? Don't squander that. Millions of people have died trying
00:29:39.920
to achieve the rights that you have, right? So vote. You have to serve on jury duty. Jury duty
00:29:45.120
is what separates us from authoritarianism. No one person with a jury system, no one person can
00:29:50.900
decide the fate of another person. Only a jury of your peers. No sheriff, no president, no general,
00:29:56.340
no nothing. Only a jury of your peers. And if you're accused of a crime and you don't serve
00:30:02.060
on jury duties, you'll still get a jury, right? But you won't deserve one, but you'll still get
00:30:07.280
one. So serve on jury duty. And finally, give blood. We cannot manufacture blood. We all need
00:30:14.020
it to live. There are fathers, there are daughters, wives, grandparents, like who are dying, who will
00:30:20.800
die if there isn't blood to put into their veins at a crucial moment. I needed 10 units to stay
00:30:25.280
alive, right? We cannot manufacture it. And it makes you part of this human race. The wonderful
00:30:31.080
thing about blood one of the many wonderful things first of all when you donate blood your body
00:30:34.760
replaces it within a week or two so it's a total free lunch right and it doesn't care who you are
0.79
00:30:40.840
what you are rich poor white black gay straight does not matter we all need blood and when we get
0.70
00:30:47.320
wounded blood comes out of us we're all the same in that way and it's really quite a profound thing
00:30:51.560
to do and i do it regularly and we're talking about the rights and i think a lot of what we're
00:30:58.120
talking about as well is being grounded in a reality accepting that you there there are things
00:31:03.800
that are greater than you and one of the ways that we can do that in society is through sport
00:31:10.760
yeah and that's where the tribe thing gets the tribe phenomenon gets activated again and it's
00:31:15.880
fascinating to see yeah and how much overlap is there between sports and the military and so on
00:31:23.000
i don't know i mean i i'm guessing that a lot of the i mean i was in a unit that was all male so
00:31:28.700
i'm just i'm going to say the boys the guys because that's what i would that was my reality
00:31:32.960
but you know i i think probably most of them were either involved in sports in a lot of bar fights
00:31:40.040
or both bar fights are kind of a sport right so yeah so you know they were those guys right i mean
00:31:46.200
we all know those guys right we avoided them in in the playground because they were tough
00:31:54.960
But, you know, sports is a reenactment, a practice for combat.
00:32:00.240
It's all, I mean, you know, this isn't my idea.
00:32:08.280
And a lot of child's play trains them for hunting, right?
00:32:11.200
I mean, you know, the hide-and-seek and all that stuff.
00:32:13.000
You know, very, very clearly, sports are a way of grooming children to step into adult roles of hunting and warfare.
00:32:20.640
and playing house, you know, and kids play house too.
00:32:25.820
for the things that they'll be doing as adults.
00:32:28.020
But sports, I know I read that with young women
0.54
00:32:31.220
who are part of a team, soccer team, lacrosse team,
00:32:35.820
longitudinal studies have shown that they do better
00:32:43.160
emotionally, psychologically they do better.
0.95
00:32:49.500
in ways that are very, very positive, and I think young men as well.
00:32:52.780
And it's also the element of ritual within sport that is super important,
00:32:58.020
and that you also see within the military as well.
00:33:00.960
And I think one of the problems of our society is now that a lot of us are atheists
00:33:06.200
and we have a secular society, we've forgotten the importance of ritual.
00:33:09.760
Yeah, I mean, look, I'm an atheist, and I'm not in the military,
00:33:12.620
and I don't play team sport, and I'm aching for ritual, right?
00:33:17.360
I mean, I don't believe in God, but the experience of church for me is quite pleasant.
00:33:21.920
And sometimes I'll go to church just because it feels good, right?
00:33:24.520
And you don't need to believe in God to enjoy church, you know, particularly if there's
00:33:27.660
music there and a really good speaker, a really good minister, right?
00:33:31.100
And you can be a total stone-cold atheist and really enjoy that hour quite a lot because
00:33:36.700
It's about connecting laterally, not, you know, to God, right?
00:33:45.560
We're all the same before God or before each other.
00:33:48.480
And that's like a super moving thing to experience.
00:33:51.840
I mean, one of my favorite quotes is, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
00:33:55.200
Do you think that the fact that we've been able to solve so many of our basic need, material
00:34:01.260
problems, is one of the reasons that we're actually struggling for the spiritual side
00:34:10.180
I mean, the word spiritual is sort of a tricky one.
00:34:15.560
Um, I think the, the, it's adaptive for humans. It's been adapt for hundreds of thousands of
00:34:24.560
years. It's been adaptive to contribute to the common good, because if the group is good,
00:34:30.240
you're good. Right. And so it's adaptive to have that sort of affiliation, that desire to, to have
00:34:36.880
a duty to be of, to be of service. Right. And, um, you know, all evolution is sort of selfish,
00:34:44.060
Right. And so those behaviors are self-serving, even though they look altruistic, but they're altruistic in a self-serving way or they wouldn't exist. Right.
00:34:52.520
And so I think, yes, I think the tradeoff of modern society is that all of a sudden we are not individually needed by our group.
00:35:02.700
In fact, we can't even identify our group. What's your survival group? Like, what is it? Right.
00:35:07.320
Like, it's your neighborhood? Probably not, right?
00:35:09.860
You're, what? Like, the PTA, the parents' organization, the kids' school? No.
00:35:20.120
And so there's enormous loss of connection there.
00:35:24.120
And, you know, they've done studies where they've shown that the more affluent a society,
00:35:29.920
the higher the levels generally of anxiety, depression, suicide, addiction, right? So
00:35:38.880
affluent Western society has incredibly high levels of all those things. And really poor
00:35:43.060
societies, I think the comparison was rural Nigeria to North America, I think was the study
00:35:47.980
that I read, you know, now 20 years old, but I think it was rural Nigeria, the poorer the community
00:35:53.200
in rural Nigeria, the more collectively people had to act, right? There was, as it were, one well
00:36:10.720
even though there are great, great stresses to poverty,
00:36:14.760
But those afflictions of depression, suicide, anxiety,
00:36:17.860
just, you know, when people are banding together to survive,
00:36:22.580
you know, suicide in some ways is a selfish act, right?
00:36:28.340
anxiety likewise and when you're needed those things sort of go away and and um so it's always
00:36:35.620
the trick is to be in a community that is struggling enough that you are needed on a daily
00:36:40.340
basis and your mental health will probably improve there's a window with hair loss most men find out
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finasteride it's so interesting that you say that because i noticed when i was teaching i taught in
00:37:57.240
a very you know exclusive all girls grammar school where every kid came in wanted to learn
00:38:03.300
every lesson was easy and the moment you walked into the staff from the teachers were each other's
00:38:08.380
throats but when you taught in a terrible school where every day was it felt like war except the
00:38:15.240
kids had the upper hand because they could throw chairs at you and you couldn't do anything the
00:38:19.120
the camaraderie was never better amongst the staff that's how i mean listen that's adaptive right i
00:38:24.160
mean you think about humans like that we have behaviors that allow us to survive of course
00:38:29.040
as things get better we act as things get worse we act better if that weren't true we wouldn't be
0.81
00:38:33.200
here yeah right i i talked to a woman who had survived cancer like bad cancer right and she
00:38:39.040
barely survived and thank god you know and she and and and she said but you know the one thing
00:38:45.040
she said the one thing about it is that i'm i miss the cancer ward she missed being in the
00:38:50.960
cancer ward with her fellow sufferers because she had never felt closer to anybody right so if you
00:38:56.400
have young young woman who misses being having cancer because it connects her to other people
00:39:01.200
who have cancer you it's clear that our society for all of its wonderful benefits and i'm happy to
00:39:06.560
run through the list with you guys if you want but it's clear that our society is not providing
00:39:12.000
enough human connection to keep people happy and one of the things you talk a lot about in tribe
00:39:16.160
is and you've addressed already a little bit is the importance of being necessary uh to other
00:39:22.160
people i'm curious if you've thought about the impact of ai and other things that are coming
00:39:28.160
down the pipe the new technology that is increasingly going to make human beings less
00:39:32.560
necessary and how that's likely to impact our society i mean i'm not a tech expert but just as
00:39:37.520
human being, it sounds horrible. It sounds terrifying. It sounds dismal. It sounds depressing.
00:39:44.080
It sounds bewildering. And a friend of mine was like, oh, it's okay, because then AI will make
00:39:50.960
all the money, and then no one will need to work, and we can just sit around. I'm like, oh,
00:39:56.240
that worked great with welfare, didn't it? I mean, the psychological consequences of
00:40:00.400
uselessness, of not participating, are devastating. I mean, the suicide rate goes up when people
00:40:06.640
retire, right? When men retire. When men retire particularly, yeah. Yeah, I think it's much more
0.89
00:40:12.460
likely for men than for women. Women, I think, are fine with retirement. I think they're not okay
0.99
00:40:18.140
when their husband retires. Right, yeah. He's at home a lot more. Yeah, right. That's really
00:40:24.200
annoying. Right. No, but it's, you know, it's a danger point, right? And so I was in Sarajevo in
00:40:41.040
which were unheated, and there wasn't enough food,
00:40:43.920
There were things that needed to be done at home.
00:40:50.300
And they have been for hundreds of thousands of years
00:40:53.420
until Western society invented the nanny, you know, or whatever.
00:40:57.220
But so in Sarajevo, the role of the grandparents
00:40:59.120
was crucial just and and and during those terrible years of the war you know in the cemeteries you
00:41:05.360
see the gravestones they're all young people because they were out they were getting water
00:41:08.480
they're in the food they're working they're socializing a mortar would come in it was more
00:41:12.400
likely to kill young people than old people who stayed home right and the people the old people
0.59
00:41:16.320
were needed at home as soon as the war ended you started seeing gravestones for older people people
0.84
00:41:21.440
in their 60s 70s 80s basically the war ended they weren't needed anymore and they didn't need to
00:41:26.640
stay alive any longer and they died they were not needed and um very different from suicide right
00:41:32.240
this is just they hung on long enough to be of service and then when they weren't of service
00:41:36.880
anymore the war ended and conditions improved what it seemed to me from the gravestones was
00:41:43.440
that they checked out like okay i got my family across the finish line i'm good right and the
00:41:48.960
danger but the danger of having an entire generation an entire community entire nation
00:41:53.760
not be needed is um that's new territory for the human race like no one knows how that will go but
00:41:59.600
i i have my doubts they'll go and a lot of people go oh you know you'll be able to be so creative
00:42:05.200
and you can finally i think there's a big difference between doing something because
00:42:10.400
you enjoy doing it and being absolutely necessary if you're a man providing for your family yeah
00:42:17.120
like that you know you take that away from a lot of guys i don't think it goes well i really don't
00:42:23.040
No, I mean, listen, our wiring, our neurological wiring, our emotional, psychological wiring
00:42:32.480
I mean, we have not changed at all in 20,000 years, right?
00:42:35.620
I mean, we are adapted to living in groups of 50, 100, 150 people maximum, fighting and
00:42:43.580
hunting, fighting for our survival and hunting and being totally interdependent in a group
00:42:51.000
and um modern society hasn't changed that at all you know clearly the amount of um disaffiliation
00:42:58.680
from the group that we've already experienced is taking is hard on our mental health when we're
00:43:03.720
just not needed at all um i mean i think that's when despair will will will will will come in i
00:43:12.680
mean that's when the sort of big questions of what is life for i mean when you start if you're
00:43:16.680
depressed and you start asking what is life for anyway like you're at risk of suicide that's how
00:43:21.560
you get russian literature i'm from russia hence the joke um you know and do you think that there's
00:43:28.280
anything that we can do to mitigate some of the effects of modern society uh on us and on our
00:43:35.400
community so this is apart from ai just like right now well i think ai but also where we've already
00:43:42.600
got to because i would argue i don't know if you'd agree with this sebastian that uh i mean in some
00:43:47.240
ways we already have ai i mean algorithms that drive our content consumption patterns a kind of
00:43:52.680
ai and i would argue a lot of where we are societally and politically is a product of those
00:43:59.720
technologies that are now driving you know political polarization anxiety all of this other stuff
00:44:06.040
yeah they're all stressed those are all stressors on our society and our connectedness yeah um but
00:44:11.480
being rendered obsolete next level that's still that's next level that's still in the future and
00:44:16.280
we'll see if it happens right i mean i i i hope it doesn't in some ways but um i what can we do
00:44:23.080
well i i would say first of all the smartphone is a dangerous object right uh psychologically
00:44:30.360
dangerous particularly for young people i mean the statistic jonathan height i'm sure who was
00:44:35.320
sitting at this very table last time we were here okay yeah so i don't you know i don't need to run
00:44:39.000
through his brilliant arguments but you know i think i think it's pretty pretty much accepted
00:44:43.880
and people talk about so you know social media in terms of addiction they say oh i went cold turkey
00:44:48.600
i didn't look at my phone i mean they talk about it like addiction so it's a let's just say it's
00:44:52.200
an addiction right so i think the first thing we need to do is protect the children the young
00:44:55.960
people from the effects of this um and you know i think we need to really reorient reorient society
00:45:03.000
so that those the phones and that way of thinking is not the focal point of every single person
00:45:15.600
I think there should be courses in grade school,
00:45:19.560
about how to use social media and technology safely
00:45:24.960
I mean, you need to take classes to drive a car.
00:45:35.100
Um, I think there probably are ways to design buildings and communities that are more inward
00:45:43.380
Um, I think there should be a sort of public awareness campaign of this, as there was with
00:45:49.560
smoking and all, you know, drunk driving and all these other ills of the damaging effects
00:45:56.960
Like, I mean, I think, I think you can really raise the public consciousness.
00:46:00.620
And when you do, people will act in more affiliated ways.
00:46:04.360
like they're capable of it and they're all dying to that's the tragic thing is there everyone's
00:46:09.200
waiting to be like called to be needed to serve right and uh and i think national service in this
00:46:15.420
country like mandatory national service not the draft not a you know man national service with
00:46:21.360
a military option if that's your if that's your scene right but but national service for young
00:46:25.900
people i think would be incredibly good for them and i'm glad we're talking about the issue of young
00:46:31.500
people because at the moment we've got a population crisis happening in the states and right the way
00:46:36.220
through the western world yeah people are having fewer and fewer kids what do you think of that
00:46:41.100
about that if you look through the lens of tribe what does it mean for a tribe i mean there's the
00:46:45.100
obvious when we're not having enough kids what does that show about what does it display about
00:46:50.600
the tribe what's going on i mean i'm going to be simplistic and sort of facile here but i'm going
00:46:56.300
to say you know having children is an act of belief in the future and if people have less
00:47:00.600
children i think on some level like future is there really a future right i mean you know we're
00:47:06.220
we're armed to the teeth with nukes the climate is changing in terrifying ways and you know
00:47:12.280
whatever there's five different scenarios that could bring all this to a halt and like
00:47:15.380
and i think it's unconscious thinking right and and like why why would we do that right and and
00:47:21.560
also i think that just the experience of community brings out an ethos that values children right and
00:47:29.440
And the more and more fractured our communities, I think that ethos just never really has a
00:47:38.140
And having children, I didn't have children until I was in my 50s.
00:47:53.980
And I think when people experience community, the hurricane, the blitz of London, the earthquake
00:47:59.280
and Avanzano that whatever right like oh this is like this is real life this is what people are
00:48:06.120
talking I think this is why we're alive to experience this right and I think we have to
00:48:11.440
figure out how to reintroduce people to that way to that reality and then we can do it but we have
00:48:18.220
to go out of our way to do it because I think a lot of the problems that we're seeing in society
00:48:23.000
is that people don't have kids they don't have a family's families and therefore they lack purpose
00:48:31.380
So you can pay money to a landlord for your flat or whatever it may be.
00:48:36.660
And after a while, after you've done the whole single thing and you've been dating,
00:48:40.980
I mean, what's the point unless you're doing it for someone?
00:48:44.100
I mean, what I would say is that there are people that didn't have kids that decided
00:48:46.980
to devote their life to the poor in Tanzania or whatever.
00:48:51.820
I mean, they found their duty to the human race, right?
00:48:55.200
If you're not doing that, I think there are people that fall into despair because they don't know what they're serving, right? And so, you know, I just wrote an article on my Substack. And it's about disconnection, right? I wrote a piece called Breathe With Me, and then I wrote a piece about its opposite, right?
00:49:18.140
And what I found was that, and this has been in the papers and stuff, the size of the average
00:49:22.500
American home has grown, it's doubled in my lifetime. And what they found was that the bigger
00:49:26.860
the home, the more likely the people were that lived there to be depressed. And that great empty
00:49:32.020
spaces in a house, which is all the trend right now, were correlated with depression. In 1900,
00:49:40.200
98% of homes had more than one occupant, right? Apartments, houses, whatever, more than one
00:49:47.340
occupant. Sometimes strangers slept in the same bed, right? I mean, there are boarding houses and
00:49:51.480
sort of rough places for working men where they sort of were crowded into camps and stuff.
1.00
00:49:56.860
Yeah, right. So people live collectively, right? And now one third of American homes
00:50:03.680
are occupied by a single person. And another third are occupied by a childless couple
00:50:09.520
or a single parent, right? That is a, the piece is called The Great Abandonment.
00:50:15.660
and that is that's the tragedy of my of you know some ways the tragedy of affluence has allowed us
00:50:22.300
to live far apart from each other and the consequences particularly for children are
00:50:27.180
devastating you know it's such a good point because i remember reading an article about
00:50:31.260
kurt cobain the very famous rock star from the 1990s um and a lot of people said that when he
00:50:37.500
became successful he moved into this mansion it's when he really started to fall apart and he
00:50:43.360
literally lived in one room of his mansion because he simply couldn't cope with the isolation yeah
00:50:49.840
I mean he clearly had struggles as well but but but that I mean that isolation can tip the balance
00:50:56.020
on someone who's already struggling then you take Kurt Cobain and you put him in the infantry and
00:50:59.940
send him to Afghanistan whatever whatever the downsides of that are and they're easy to list
00:51:04.360
right the upside is that you you know you don't have room to be lonely you don't have room to be
00:51:10.220
selfish. You don't have room to be depressed. No one commits suicide in Afghanistan. Some do when
00:51:15.240
they come back, right? But one of the theories is that they do that because they've lost the
00:51:21.420
community, right? It's not the result of trauma. It's the result of a loss of connection. But over
00:51:26.460
there, it never happens because you know, however much you're struggling, everyone needs you.
00:51:33.360
It's like the grandparents in Sarajevo. I'm needed. I'm not going anywhere.
00:51:37.340
In that sense of purpose, I remember, I think it's Rambo when there's this scene and he
00:51:41.960
says, you know, I used to operate million dollar equipment and stuff.
00:51:47.620
I think purpose is a thing that's been so not appreciated in our society.
00:51:55.520
And now, of course, you see people looking for purpose and a lot of the time it's in
00:51:59.780
all the right places, but sometimes it gets kind of misallocated to places where it's
00:52:04.440
not adaptive, as you say. I'm curious, by the time this episode goes out, who knows what the
00:52:11.080
hell will be happening with the war in Iran and all of that. But with your experience of covering
00:52:16.280
different conflicts, being there, I mean, one of the things that a lot of people have argued is a
00:52:21.760
lot of this meaningless has come since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The West had an enemy. There
00:52:27.360
was a purpose collectively. There was something we were dealing with. And now it doesn't seem to
00:52:34.220
be like that now and that when there is a war even the war on terror it that communal effect
00:52:38.700
didn't last very long did it look i'll be honest with you i was skeptical a green powder that
00:52:45.200
claims to do everything sounds exactly like something i'd tear apart i've seen enough people
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pushing miracle solutions to know what that looks like but i take ag1 every morning and i'm not
00:52:55.860
someone who sticks with those things out of habit if they're not delivering one scoop in water that's
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it over 75 vitamins minerals and nutrients designed to support your energy mood and digestion
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in the conversations we have on this show that foundation matters to me i'm not dragging myself
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through the afternoons the way i used to with ag1 i feel like i'm actually running on a full tank
00:53:23.620
and this isn't just marketing copy ag1 is clinically backed every study on their website
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is openly available for you to read if you're a trigonometry listener you don't take things on
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00:54:00.440
I mean, it sort of lasted as long as it needed to until we got to a place where we, again,
00:54:08.100
So just because we were fighting in Afghanistan doesn't mean that people back in this country
00:54:11.100
were like, oh, my God, they're coming for us, right?
00:54:13.440
In the days and weeks afterwards, we did feel that way.
00:54:16.440
And there was a collective taking of responsibility in New York that was really quite amazing
00:54:29.040
It took me a while to get back, maybe a couple of weeks.
00:54:31.220
So I got back to New York and I'm walking down the street by Penn Station.
00:54:33.940
It's a crazy midtown, you know, soulless kind of area, right?
00:54:37.700
And you could still smell the, you know, the burnt smell in the air.
00:54:41.200
And it just, it was a wartime city still, right?
00:54:46.460
He was this like white guy in a nice suit with a briefcase.
00:54:52.360
And he, you know, he worked out, I'm sure he worked downtown, right?
00:54:54.740
And whatever had happened on 9-11, like he, and he had frozen.
00:54:58.680
He was just like frozen on the sidewalk thinking.
00:55:05.140
And this young black guy who was a bike messenger
00:55:12.040
And he was like on his bike and he saw this guy.
00:55:18.000
from completely different communities in New York City, right?
00:55:20.720
And he saw this guy and he went up to him and he said,
00:55:28.540
for a while right it ended when the threat felt like it ended right and um you know hurricane
00:55:35.020
sandy brought some of it back the whole half the city went dark and downtown was pretty scary and
00:55:40.460
you know some of the poorer buildings organized sort of watch groups to watch the building from
00:55:44.780
robbers i mean i live in a neighborhood like that i've been quite a poor neighborhood in the lower
00:55:48.540
east side and they you know the the community the community spirit the community action during
00:55:54.060
hurricane sandy was quite extraordinary right um and uh so it comes back in a heartbeat right
00:56:01.260
but it doesn't last longer than it's needed because it's cost in evolutionary terms it's
00:56:05.100
costly right it costs you opportunity it costs you energy it costs you you know so you don't
00:56:09.580
want to do it longer than you need to like in sort of evolutionary terms do you think
00:56:14.620
sebastian we just every now and again we just need to be reminded that we're human
00:56:19.740
every now and again. I think if we were reminded of that all day long, we'd be a lot better off,
00:56:27.640
a lot happier, a lot more productive, a lot safer. Why do you think that is? Do you think
00:56:33.100
it's just the acknowledgement that we are mortal? I genuinely think that's one of the issues,
00:56:38.400
and correct me if I'm wrong, is that people treat the next day as if it's a given,
00:56:43.380
when the reality is it simply isn't. Yeah. I mean, so as a species,
00:56:47.500
We are social primates, and we owe our lives to the group, and we have to participate.
00:56:52.280
We have a duty to the group in order to stay alive.
00:56:54.880
That's what being human means, right, is to be part of a group.
0.72
00:56:58.680
We're the only species where an individual will die protecting a same-sex peer.
00:57:05.700
Not their kids, not their mate, but a young man will die protecting another young man from harm, right?
0.77
00:57:16.360
only humans. And so that is what we are. And if you participate in that reality,
00:57:22.820
it takes the focus away from you, right? It puts it on others. And there's a blessed relief in
00:57:29.700
that. I mean, the problem with our society is that there's enough safety and leisure
00:57:34.780
and convenience that we can indulge in excessive thoughts of ourselves. It's called rumination,
00:57:43.620
right obsessive rumination and it leads to depression and anxiety it's known to right
00:57:48.320
and ptsd and the other part of being human is that yes we are biological beings and we will die
00:57:54.500
and not only that we could die we could be dead by dinner from natural causes being complete and i
00:58:02.980
know this from personal experience right i was in mid-sentence with my wife i'm not a walking
00:58:08.300
heart attack right i'm a really healthy guy i had something going on in my abdomen i didn't know
00:58:12.780
about. It shows mid-sentence to rupture. I was losing a pint of blood into my abdomen every 10
00:58:18.080
minutes, 15 minutes, and I barely, barely survived. And it was an utterly ordinary day. So if you can,
00:58:25.300
if you can simultaneously understand that you are part of a community of humans,
00:58:30.720
you're lucky to be so, what do you owe them? Because the more you give them, the happier you
00:58:36.340
will be, the more meaning you will get out of life. And also, all you get is right now. Like
00:58:43.600
really right now, right? The past is gone. It's irrecoverable. You have no idea if you're going
00:58:48.460
to have any sort of future whatsoever, even 10 minutes from now. So what is it like to be alive
00:58:53.660
now and now and now? That's all you ever get. And for me, the point how I answered that question
00:59:01.960
was like to be alive now is I need to be with people I love. I need to be with my family. That's
00:59:08.260
the point of the whole damn thing, right? And if you can, when you get distracted from that truth
0.99
00:59:15.420
is when, in my opinion, at least for me, life starts to seem tedious and puzzling and maybe
00:59:23.120
not quite worth the effort. It's such a profound moment to end the show, Sebastian. It's been a
00:59:58.680
What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?
01:00:17.920
I think that Western society has a little bit forgotten those truths.
01:00:21.460
And I think what we're not talking about is how we can function in a healthy way as a nation.
01:00:27.320
America is not doing so right now. And that is not a political conversation, right? That's not
01:00:33.380
a left versus right. That's a conversation about human dignity and democracy. And we need to go
01:00:40.360
back to that conversation in ways that are nonpartisan because literally our survival
01:00:44.440
depends on it. It's such a profound point because I saw a clip that the White House released,
01:00:50.240
which was like a cartoon almost about the bombing in Iran.
01:00:55.480
And whether you were pro or anti-Republican or Democrat,
01:00:59.040
you think to yourself, people are losing their lives over this.
01:01:01.320
Is this really the moment to release a cartoon of a kid
01:01:06.300
sending a bowling ball down an alley and getting a strike?
01:01:11.740
I mean, the immaturity that this administration is capable of
01:01:19.960
even people that voted for Trump, I think they kind of, I'm guessing very few people are really
01:01:24.380
thrilled with that move. Well, right. For them, it will be part of the package. And the other
01:01:30.320
package was worse for other reasons. But I take your point, I won't speak for the US, but in the
01:01:36.520
UK, that sense that the caliber of person, forget about their politics, just the caliber of human
01:01:43.560
being uh who now leads our countries has plummeted so sharply uh it's terrifying actually
01:01:53.560
the piece that i wrote breathe with me on substack um i talk about this extraordinary
01:01:59.160
photo of bobby kennedy when he was shot he was shot in 1968 during the presidential uh campaign
01:02:05.880
and it's a black and white photograph i can't remember the photographer's name it's a famous
01:02:09.240
photographed and bobby kennedy's on the ground and a young a young cuban emigre named juan romero
01:02:15.800
he's 17 years old is kneeling by bobby kennedy you know bobby kenny's this beautiful you know he's
01:02:20.760
handsome amazing amazing leader uh dying on the floor right bleeding out like i was and juan
01:02:30.120
romero 17 year old from cuba cuba is cradling his head and the last thing bobby so leaders
01:02:36.120
must put themselves last. They must put everyone else's concerns first, or they're not leaders,
01:02:43.060
they're just managers. But our leader puts their own interests last, right? So think about
01:02:48.120
that in this context, the last thing Bobby Kennedy said. He looked at everyone standing
01:02:53.760
around him paralyzed. He said, don't worry, it's going to be okay. He made his best case for the
01:03:00.480
presidency in the last thing he ever said he was not thinking about himself um those people are
01:03:06.700
out there the guy with the you know with the amputated leg who said i'm not brave there's
01:03:11.740
people miss those people are out there right and the question is how do you how do you convince
01:03:18.900
them uh to serve the public good because it's such a nasty environment you know there's such
01:03:24.940
good people you almost don't want to do that to them well that's what i was going to say maybe
0.99
01:03:28.180
you stop throwing shit at them all the time. Because I hold us responsible. I hold the electorate
0.98
01:03:33.220
responsible. I hold the media responsible for that. Because if you create an environment where
01:03:37.840
only ego-driven narcissists will tolerate the horrific torrent of shit you have to put up with
1.00
01:03:46.580
to be in politics, then that's who you're going to get. Yeah. I agree. And there's a process here,
1.00
01:03:59.960
you can't even believe videos you see anymore, right?
01:04:15.600
might bring people back, I'm gonna get his name wrong,
01:04:20.740
know he's a he's sort of espousing a politics of love which sounds kind of corny but in his in his
01:04:25.940
words it's a pretty powerful message right and he said you have to understand that everyone is human
01:04:31.540
and you know he's addressing democrat liberals he's like including donald trump everybody right
01:04:35.940
i know you don't like this but you know we have to we we have to engage people with love even
01:04:41.060
people we hate right and and uh and i you know i think he is maybe the beginning of a change
01:04:47.220
change of mentality in the public where we're just disgusted with where this has gone.
01:04:57.500
And it might come back, it might swing back in kind of quite profound ways, I think.
01:05:02.500
That's a really hopeful message because it's amazing how quickly this has happened because
01:05:07.500
whether you agree with his politics or not, you can't deny that Barack Obama had that
01:05:15.380
You might say he had terrible policies, and some people will think that.
01:05:18.660
But in terms of his posture towards the world, it was not about demonizing other people.
01:05:23.680
It was about appealing to people's sense of what America could be.
01:05:35.440
And I've got some problems with his policies, but I met him.
01:05:39.300
I was in the same room with him once, and he was at a Medal of Honor ceremony
01:05:44.600
He was the first living Medal of Honor recipient since Vietnam.
01:05:47.380
Well, there was a woman in the audience who was the mother of a young man who was killed in the same firefight.
01:05:54.840
She lost her son in the same action that produced this Medal of Honor.
01:05:59.480
So, during this ceremony, this woman was brought forward.
01:06:08.340
Hugo Mendoza was the young man's name who lost his life.
01:06:11.000
And his mom, I don't know, I can't remember her first name.
01:06:13.660
And Mrs. Mendoza was brought forward to meet the president.
01:06:22.040
And the president just put his arms around her.
01:06:26.620
Only in a democracy, like fascist countries don't produce touching between the leader and a commoner, right?
01:06:33.880
The kings and queens of Europe would never have done such a thing, right?
01:06:36.960
The totalitarian regime, the Genghis Khan, the works, right?
01:06:43.620
beautiful democracy in action he just wrapped his arms around her and she he held her for five or
01:06:50.260
ten minutes everything stopped he just held her until she stopped crying as long as she needed
01:06:57.220
and eventually she got herself together and then she hugged michelle obama and then stepped back
01:07:02.420
in the line now that's that's a leader that's a democracy that's a beautiful thing right and we
01:07:07.860
have to get back to that. I can't imagine Hillary doing that. I can't imagine Kamala doing it. I
1.00
01:07:13.860
certainly can't imagine Trump doing it, right? You know, whatever, the whole cast of characters,
01:07:18.200
no. That is the minimum, the minimum requirement for leadership, is that your heart be capable of
01:07:26.680
that. You want to do that for someone who's suffering and who incurred a grave loss for
01:07:32.220
your country, the country you run. Like, come on. Like, and that's, that's what we need. We need
01:07:37.860
someone like the guy in the wheelchair who lost his leg. We need someone like Bobby Kennedy. You
01:07:44.260
know, I'd be fine with a Republican Bobby Kennedy. I don't care. I really don't. As long as it's that
01:07:49.980
caliber of person. Sebastian, thank you for coming on the show. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk
01:07:55.440
where we're going to ask Sebastian your questions.