The Joe Rogan Experience - #1034 - Sebastian Junger

Episode Date: November 6, 2017

Sebastian Junger is the author of The Perfect Storm, War, and Tribe. He also is the co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Restrepo.” His latest documentary “Hell On Earth” can been seen on NatGeo.

four three two welcome back man hey thank you good to be here great to see you again yeah I like your new spot thank you thank you very much man you have a real flip phone I do have a real flip and you said that you you didn't go back to it you never left I never left her so you never went like iPhone Android never no no I never left her. So you never went like iPhone, Android, never? No, no, never, never even thought about it. Never even thought about it? No. You see people taking pictures and using apps, nothing? Nothing. I don't need the apps. I'm good. There's no draw at all, nothing using the internet, answering email when you have spare time? I have a laptop at home and I do access the internet. Yes.

But when you're out, you don't want to mess with it. No. When I'm out, I want to be out. I'm in the world, you know. Right. And if you're looking at your phone, you're not in the world. And so you don't get either. You don't get either thing.

You'd get along very well with my friend Ari. He went back to a flip phone. And he looks disdainfully. Sort of like former alcoholics look at everybody with a drink like there's no way you could just enjoy one drink, you loser. You know that? Right. Yeah. No, I just look around at this. I mean, I'm an anthropologist and I'm interested in human behavior. And I look at the behavior, like literally the physical behavior of people with smartphones and it doesn't, it looks antisocial and unhappy and anxious, and I don't want to look like that,

and I don't want to feel like I think those people feel. Wow, that's deep. I'm a junkie. You know, it's really interesting because I was at a restaurant the other day, and I was looking around, and literally everyone in the restaurant was looking at their phone. No one was talking to anybody, and I was thinking, what if there was a drug that did that?

What if there was a drug that didn't kill you, but it just sucked up all your time and you just stared blankly at your hand and did everything that you do while you're using a phone? People would be terrified. Like you're staring at your hand and crashing into cars. You're staring at your hand and walking into poles. Yeah. I mean, there is a drug.

It's that. It's social media. I mean, I think the big lie of our generation is the phrase social media. And it really isn't. It's anti-social media. And it has a lot of uses and whatever, but it's not social in any human sense. And if you look at suicide rates, depression rates, PTSD rates, anxiety rates, they're doing nothing but going up in our society. Mass shootings, you know, just something tragic just happened yesterday. All those things, they're indicators of something, and they're all going up in our society, despite the fact that we're a very wealthy, powerful, relatively peaceful society.

Like something's going on. I can't prove that it's, you know, the Internet or social media or whatever. I mean, obviously. But the fact that those things are happening at the same time does make me wonder that these new devices certainly don't bring happiness because the numbers are going in the wrong direction. Well, I don't think they're designed to bring happiness, but they're certainly designed to give you access to information.

Perhaps maybe with some discipline they can be used in some sort of a way that benefits us and not. Well, yeah. I mean, all that information is available on your laptop at your desk at home. Right. I mean, I think the problem is when people want to be socially connected constantly, no matter what they're doing. And that, I think, keeps people from actually fully experiencing whatever they're actually doing. I think there's definitely some truth to that.

But I do like the fact that I can ask my phone questions. Like if I don't know anything, I can ask. There's a new feature on this Google Pixel where you squeeze the side of it and the Google Assistant comes up and you can ask it questions. You squeeze it and ask a question. I mean, that's some space age shit, man. Yeah. Or it's downright creepy. I mean, you know, that's all you look at. I mean, that's some space age shit, man. Yeah. Or it's downright creepy. I mean, you know, that's all you look at. I mean, you know, I get it. Like, I mean, you have all

of human knowledge in your front pocket. Yeah. Accessible at every moment. Like, I do understand the power of it and the appeal of it. I'm not saying there aren't great things about it. Of course there are. It's just, for me, the downside outweighs the upside. For other people, I guess it doesn't. But if you look, again, if you look at mental health statistics in this country, we're doing something wrong because they're all going in the wrong direction. I agree with you. I just wonder if the mental health statistics are indicative of other issues. You know, I think lifestyle, what you do with your time during the day. A lot of people live very deeply unsatisfying lives. And I don't know if the phone accentuates that problem.

I mean, we were talking the other day about we were at the airport. We were waiting to fly home, and there was some girl, and she was talking. We were just eavesdropping. And she was talking about, like, the amazing race and how she, you know, oh, this show is so boring now and i can't wait to and i'm gonna eat this and then i'm gonna eat that and i i'm supposed to get a raise at work it's like all nonsense non-engaging not interesting there's no real life to anything she's talking about like this is most of our country or a large part of our country. Absolutely. I mean, the thing about social media is that it sort of weaponizes blandness.

I mean, it allows, it gives people a platform for the most mundane, uninteresting aspects of their lives because they have to constantly, constantly be producing some kind of output of communication. Well, and if not producing it, certainly absorbing it, right? Yeah, both. I always feel like I'm mining when I'm on Twitter. Like, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Oh, rape.

Oh, murder. Oh, look at this. A monkey found. Oh. I mean, there's other people you could have on the show that could speak more intelligently to this, but I know that, I mean, I've heard that risk of suicide and Facebook are correlated. In other words, people that are on Facebook and social media, they are at an increased risk of depression and thoughts of suicide. And that's terrifying.

Do you think that that's correlation equals causation though? You know what I mean? Like, do you think that people on Facebook all the time are doing that because they're already depressed? Well, right. I mean, that's, that's the question. And, and, but the correlation means we have to look at something more closely. Anxiety rates in teenagers have skyrocketed. Anxiety partly comes from a sort of painful self-awareness. And of course that's amplified by social media because you can never escape the opinions of your peers. I mean, that's crippling to people. I mean, when I, you know, I wasn't the most popular kid in class by a long shot. And when I came home, whatever my issues were, were on hold until, you know, when I was a kid in high school.

Those issues were on hold until 8 a.m. the next morning, right? You got a 12-hour break from your problems. Now you don't. And it's really tough on kids. Yeah. I could only imagine growing up today. don't and it's really tough on kids. Yeah I could only imagine growing up today. You know I think we got very lucky that the we experienced the internet in adulthood. You know for me I was I think I was 27 the first time I ever got online and that's a that's nice you know and no one knew

what online was back then. You weren't leaving any traces you were just going out looking at stuff. Yeah you know it wasn't. That's right. How old was I? I was about 36. I remember a girl asked me, she said, have you ever logged on? And I was like, logged on? Logged on to what? She had to explain to me what that meant. And then I literally said to her, oh, that's never going to catch on. Come on. Really? Wow. Isn't that what they said about the first computers? Like that was one of IBM's initial reactions to the idea of the personal computer.

I think that's the reaction to the first of everything. Except maybe the bow and arrow. I mean, like when they invented the bow and arrow, everyone was like, no, that is going to catch on. That is cool. Right. But everything else, I think that's skepticism. Like we don't need anything more. We're good. And then you realize, I mean, that's the amazing thing about the human mind is that we

invent this stuff. And it doesn't mean that it's good. I mean, we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to live in a very different environment than we live now. So these things that we invent, it doesn't mean that they're sort of psychologically good for us, but they definitely are incredible. I mean, they're definitely amazing things. Yeah, I don't think that necessarily they're good for us, but I don't think, this kind of sound weird, but I don't even think they're necessarily designed for us. I think they're designed for the future. I think, and I don't even think it's a design. I just think that all things move in an ever more complex direction and that whatever a person is now is not going to be the same thing a thousand years from now or a hundred years from now even. I think there's going to be some sort of symbiotic

connection between us and electronics. Like we're going to have it installed in our bodies. Well, you know, that gets to a kind of profound question. Like what is the point of existence, of human existence? What's the point of it? Is the point for as many humans as possible to lead safe, human fulfilled lives? Or is it for the human race as an entity to produce the highest technological achievements and scientific insights? You know, and I don't have a vote either way. But that does sort of seem to be the question. And that technology, I mean, we know does not lead to fulfillment and happiness, but it does lead to scientific insight and to, you know, incredible, I mean, a profound understanding of how the universe works in a physical sense. Yeah. I wonder if what we're

doing is just being caught up in the momentum of all this innovation and instead of like using discipline or using some sort of a rational objective analysis of like what it takes to be happy and then maybe pushing some of that stuff aside and engaging in actual physical activities, going out and doing things and making that almost like a prescription. Like, hey, you know, let's look at your daily chart. Hey, you didn't get enough vitamins, buddy. And hey, you didn't get enough activity. You need that in order to feel right, to feel balanced. Right. And if feeling right is the point of existence, then iPhones are probably not a good development. No.

Right? If the exchange of data, if the exchange of information is the point, then they're a great innovation. So it really depends on what we're all here for. I was in San Francisco with my wife and we were walking behind these two kids who were talking about robots. And they were sort of geek kids. I was sort of in the know about all this stuff. And one guy was saying, you know, they're taking over, you know, in 50 years, you know, we're going to be, humans are going to be completely unnecessary. And I said to my wife, you know, we always were unnecessary. Like none of this had to happen. It's not like the world needs human beings to exist. And for some purpose, right? We just, we are here. But we didn't have to be here. And so if robots replace us, we go right back to where

we would have been if we hadn't evolved. Yeah. And it was just a funny way of thinking about it. Like none of this is actually necessary. It doesn't have to be happening. No, it certainly doesn't. I mean, look, if we are finite life forms, if you're only going to live to be, you know, if you're lucky 90 years

and when your health is going to fail and then you're going to die, what should be our goal is to feel good, right? To have community and relation. That's a big part of that book, Tribe. Your book's fantastic, by the way. I've read it twice since I read it again. I read it before, and then I read it again since our first podcast. Oh, thank you very much. Yeah, I've been getting a lot of, I keep getting a lot of good responses to it. And I think partly, I mean, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, this is a pretty unsettling time in this country. And I think people are coming to the book a little bit just partly because they're wondering what is the glue that holds us all together. And is there?

Does that exist still? I mean, I think there's a real question in people's minds about what is it that binds us together. Well, there certainly is. in people's minds about what is it that binds us together? Well, there certainly is. And you really covered a lot of the sort of just not commonly discussed aspects of it, like the need for real community, the need to really, and the need to have something on the line, you know, the need to be in situations where there's real consequences and that it seems that this is part of the glue that holds us together. Well, I mean, the thing about technology

is it buffers us from real consequences in the physical world, which is what's great about it, right? But the downside is that as humans get buffered from consequences, they need each other less and less in order to survive. So now sort of modern Homo sapiens in a suburban house with an iPhone and a garage door opener and all that stuff, you know, you get a paycheck at work and you don't need your neighbors, you know, to help you gather food or hunt food or defend yourself from the gang from the other neighborhood. I mean, it all kind of gets taken care of, which is a great liberation from your neighbors, from your community. But it deprives you of that essential human reliance on other people around you.

That's what makes people feel good and safe and like they're leading meaningful lives. And so that transition to having a life that's not part of any community, that is a really tough one for people. And I think that's part of the reason for high depression rates and such and high PTSD rates in our society. Yeah, I think that lack of community is a very confusing thing when you see most people just sliding into their garage and shutting the door or going into their house and they don't even know their neighbors. And that's really highlighted in your book, how alien that is to the human experience until fairly recently. Like this idea of like living in these, in like, I was in New York city this past weekend and this enormous apartment, like my friend Jim was talking about

this. He lived, Jim Norton lives in this enormous apartment building. He goes, I don't know anybody there. He goes, I live in a house, a building, essentially a house with a thousand people. I don't know any of them. Yeah. And listen, I mean, I live in a little tenement building, but it's the same idea. There's a little cubby holes we all live in. But I got to say, and I grew up in a suburb, but I got to say, at least in the building I live in, I'm in the Lower East Side, and at least in the building I live in, I run into people on the landing, on the staircase. There's no elevator in the staircase. And you get to know them a little bit. The problem with the suburbs is that everything's a stone, you know, everyone's a stone's throw away behind a big hedge. And you don't have to share an elevator with anyone.

You can be totally isolated. And I grew up in that environment. It was crushing. And, you know, I was, you know, in a material sense, I was lucky. We were an affluent family. But I was not lucky in any human sense. That's so fascinating you say it was crushing to live the American dream. I mean a lot of people's ideas, the American dream is living in a nice, quiet suburb. Yeah, and listen, there's a lot that's dreamlike about it. But the data will tell you that people in those situations are not happy. The data will tell you that people in those situations are not happy.

I mean the metrics by which we measure human fulfillment, human happiness, mental health, they suck in the suburbs. And generally in modern society, I mean as affluence goes up in society, the suicide rate goes up. The depression rate, PTSD rate, all that stuff goes up with affluence. Yeah, I've noticed that in some of the circles that I'm hanging around with now because of nice people, but the children of my children, my children's friends, parents. So I'm interacting with these people that I don't know from work. I don't know from social circles. Most of them are great, but a lot of them are on pills.

A lot of them. Half of them are on pills. They're taking Adderall. They're taking anxiety medication. They're taking antidepressants. They're mixing it all together with alcohol. There's some new freak out every week.

And there's literally no physical fear for anything. Everyone's driving a Mercedes. Everyone's living in a gated community. Everybody's, it's all smooth edges and nerfed corners. Everything is very soft and easy. And the big appeal seems to be the newest objects. Chase the newest objects. And it's a really well-known phenomenon.

If you introduce a disaster into that environment, if you introduce the Blitz in London or an earthquake or what have you, a flood, a tidal wave, a war, people wake up out of their dream. I mean, they're in a kind of dream state. And for some people, that's induced by pills. And some people, it's just induced by isolation. But they're in a kind of dream state where they're not part of society in a meaningful way. And a catastrophe wakes them up out of that. And people, I mean, over and over again, you can hear testimony of people saying, well, I really miss those days, you know, the

days after the earthquake, during the blitz. I mean, from generation after generation that goes through their things, right, their tough things, those days are missed. And they're missed because people, the thing they actually like most is being an essential part of a small group that is struggling to survive. Like that is the human experience for hundreds of thousands of years. We're wired for it. We're wired to like it. The people that responded to that challenge tended to pass on their DNA. The people that didn't respond well, didn't pass on their DNA, were the descendants of the people that sort of took some thrill from that challenge and acted well and with sort of vigor and with community in the face of hardship and danger.

We're the descendants of those people, inevitably. And because the people that didn't act well didn't survive as well, right? They didn't pass on their genes. And so that's one of the things we're missing. And the big trick is, I mean, I'm not saying burn down the suburbs, ban the car, and live in a lean-to. I mean, no one would say that. Huge benefits to this society too. But the trick is how can we have that close communal connection that buffers us from mental health problems,

that makes us feel meaningful and fulfilled, how can we have that and have the benefits of modern society? You know, like, can we do both? And I think that's the big challenge because what I see in America, I love this country, but what I see in my lifetime, I mean, when I grew up, we didn't have mass shootings. I mean, you know, like that didn't happen. You go into a church with a machine gun and kill as many people as you can. That just didn't happen. What is going on?

I mean, to me, it's a country in kind of – I mean, those things are all a symptom of a country that's in the kind of psychic pain. Yeah. You know? And all the people on their iPhones. I sort of get it. But also it makes me think you're anxious. Like you're so anxious that you can't bear not to look at your feed for more than 20 seconds. Well, it's an addiction for sure.

I mean you're literally getting dopamine shots every time you check your feed. Yeah. And they're very small. It's a trickle. It's not like a real – like it's not really worth it. You don't get any real good feeling very rarely. It's like fast food. At the end of it, you go to the drive-in, get your cheeseburger and fries and shake or whatever.

Afterwards, you're full, but you didn't get any nutrients. And social media is the same way. You're sort of socially full. But actually, it's all calories. There's no nutrition. I mean there's nothing to sustain you out of that. for me personally that people get a lot of fulfillment out of uh tribes for lack of a better word of of like-minded people doing similar things that are difficult absolutely like i see it amongst like rock climbers a lot of rock climbers they they find like real community and other rock

climbers and runners get it uh jujitsu it's huge jiu-jitsu community of course you know um and uh i experienced it in a deep way the first time i ever went hunting yeah because hunting was almost like like i had a wall that i didn't know there was a door on it and i opened up the door and oh there's a whole new area back here like your your dna like goes up we know what to do with this we're hunting now and you feel like wow wow, this is crazy. Like this is lighting up parts of my brain or parts of my genetics. Yeah. Listen, I went through that same door when I started boxing.

I started late in life. I was 50. I was going through a big life change. My first marriage ended. And I needed something a little different. They need something a little different. And I think one of the things that really works for people is a situation where they're evaluated for their behavior rather than for how and where they were born. Yes.

Right? Or how much money they have. Right. Which is a function of, to some degree, of how you were born, where you were born. Yeah. But so in high school, you're evaluated for the family you come from, for how you look, for all that stuff. You don't have control over any of that stuff.

But in the boxing ring, out hunting, you know, whatever, there's a million things like this. You're evaluated by your peers for your conduct. And that you have complete control over. Soldiers the same way. You know, and I was with this platoon in combat off and on for a year in eastern Afghanistan. Those guys didn't care if you were good-looking or bad-looking, if your dad was in prison or not. They just didn't give a shit, right? What they cared is how you acted in that situation

and would you put the group, the welfare of the group, ahead of your own welfare? And that was this basic human question. Is the group more important to you than you are to you? And if we all answer that question with a yes, then we're good. And so, you know, when you're in situations, hunting, in the gym, jiu-jitsu, whatever it is, where you're not bringing your street identity in there, you're just a human being trying to act as well as possible with dignity and respect for others. You're good. And it doesn't matter if you suck at

jujitsu, right? As long as you have that basic respect and hard work ethic and being freed from those things you're not responsible for and are not judged for it. That is a huge liberation. And it really makes people feel close to each other. in a chair all day is terrible for you. I think staring at a computer all day is terrible for you. All these things that people do are just counter to, they're contrary to what your body was designed for. And that must cause a lot of depression and anxiety in people. Yeah. I mean, if you want to know what we were evolved for, you can look at modern day hunter gatherers who more or less anthropologists agree represent our evolutionary past, and you'll find that there's at least two hours of pretty vigorous movement every day, you know, fast walking basically, two hours a day by virtually everyone in the community.

You are almost never out of contact with, I mean, out of physical proximity with other people that you know extremely well. There's about four or five hours a day devoted to survival, food gathering, that kind of thing. We work eight, 10 hours a day, right? The most, quote, primitive hunter-gatherers in some of the harshest environments in the world spend around four hours a day surviving. But survival is a group endeavor. It brings everyone together. Everyone's needed. High protein, low, you know, no processed foods, obviously.

I mean, the diet, obviously, it's a very pure diet. And people who live like that have extraordinarily good health. And if they survive, you know, childbirth in those first early years, often live into their 70s, 80s to 90. I mean, basically live as long as Westerners do with no medical intervention. I mean, it's pretty extraordinary. That is extraordinary when you think about it.

I mean, I saw an article, and I didn't read the article, but the headline was something along the lines of, it was talking about artificial intelligence, and it was whether or not the rise of artificial intelligence will even out inequality. And I remember looking at that and just, boy, that's like giving in to the hive mind. Like artificial intelligence is going to cure all the woes of the world. Like let the computer think for you, and everything is going to be even. And now that I'm thinking about it, the two guys we were walking behind in San Francisco, it wasn't robots.

It was artificial intelligence they were talking about. I mean obviously they're connected. But yeah, it was AI. I mean it's either – AI is either the final blossoming of the human mind or it's the end. I don't think anyone knows which it is. It could easily be the end. I've been thinking for the last few years that we're some sort of electronic caterpillar that's giving birth to some new butterfly. And what we're doing is we're the biological thing that makes the electronic thing.

And that the electronic thing is going to go, thanks, we got it now. makes the electronic thing and that the electronic thing is going to go, thanks, we got it now. And then, I mean, we assume that the things that we hold dear, like emotions and camaraderie and this feeling that we have of community, that that's important. But if we live and we die, like it's important to us while we're alive. But if we didn't exist, is it important, in air quotes, to the universe? Is it important to the planet? Not necessarily. It's just important as a human. My understanding of physics is that it was incalculably unlikely that the universe would exist and that life would start on this particular planet or on any planet. That it was extremely

unlikely. That even the universe would exist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's hard to say that anything would be important to a system that statistically shouldn't have happened and that doesn't have a conscious and moral mind behind it. Like, I mean, no, of course we're not important. I mean, if we were sitting on the moon and you watched a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States that obliterated civilization, if you were sitting on the moon, you'd barely be able to see it.

You would barely notice anything happened. Yeah. Right? That's the moon. And that's pretty close. Of course it doesn't matter. Yeah. So keep in mind all those emotions.

So keep in mind that all those emotions, everything we are had survival value in our past or we wouldn't have those things, right? We're the legacy of an evolutionary process that went on for two million years. of those things had survival value for humans and the individuals that had the capacity for those emotions made better citizens within their little community, were better hunters, were better whatever. And so those emotions, we find them meaningful, but actually what they are is they helped us survive. And now we have so altered our circumstances that survival is no longer a question and so what do we do with those feelings what do we do with those capacities the ability to hunt the the dopamine that you get from hitting a target i mean teenage boys will sit in a basement for hours days years playing video games their practice their training for hunting right they're training for hunting in

war and they're getting rewarded with dopamine, which is exactly what should have been happening for 500,000 years. And now there's nothing to hunt, nothing to fight. They're still doing the behavior as they should because they're wired for it, but there's no useful purpose for it. And they're making themselves irrelevant. They're human casualties of this technology. And it's, I find it really tragic. Are they more irrelevant than someone who plays sports? I mean, I think our relevance comes from our, um, our relationship with our community and with society. And, and, and, I mean, at least if you play sports, you're part of, you're, you're, you're part of the human community. And when you're in you know when you're playing

a video game by yourself you're really not by yourself but a lot of kids what they're doing now is they're playing these online games they're playing against other people they talk to each other online they have like headsets and they i mean e-sports is a big growing thing and it's uh i mean it's it's a fascinating thing because it's also sort of based on your ability to perform. You know, the ones who are the heroes are the ones who are like, when I was playing Quake, there was this dude named Fatality was his name.

He'd just kill everybody. He was awesome. But it was, you know, he was the king because he was just the best at the game. So in the community of people that were only judged by their performance, he had risen to this very high level. But it was a community. Well, you know, if you look at humans, you look at chimpanzees, we clearly need the proximity of others, like the physical proximity of others. So, I mean, the only way I can evaluate that is to say that's awesome training for hunting in war.

Right. And the military does use those games to train their soldiers. And so I get it. It's effective. What I would do is look at suicide and depression rates in gamers and see are they above or below the national average for that age group. And if they're above, then there's a problem. Either depressive people are seeking that as a refuge

or that activity makes people withdrawn and depressed. And, you know, like either way, it's a problem that needs to be solved. And I have no idea what the data is, but that's where I would look. Now, when you're researching all this data and you're putting together a book like Tribe and you're putting it out, are you thinking to yourself that you have – that it's not just an interesting study on human behavior, but it's also probably important for people to read, to kind of get an understanding. And to get an understanding of what it is that's causing people to have all this depression and anxiety, that maybe this is something that needs to be said. I mean, any categorical statement I shouldn't make, but a lot of authors when they write books, it's their firm conviction that their book needs to be read by the public and that will help the public in some way.

It will illuminate life, illuminate America, illuminate the world in some way that's important. I mean, that's just a starting point for the two years of work that a book takes. You have a child. Your assumption is the child is going to be a good person in the world, not a terrible person, wind up shooting up a church, right? It's just a starting basic assumption. So for me, when I was writing Tribe, I was trying to make sense of a number of different things. I mean one was that the soldier that I was with in Afghanistan, I was really struck some months later that a lot of them wanted to go back to this sort of flea-bitten, God-forsaken outpost where they got shot at every day and didn't want to come home to the U.S. It's like, that needs explaining. Yeah. Right? And it made me think of this uncle that I had,

a sort of surrogate uncle named Ellis, Ellis Settle. He was Lakota Sioux and Apache. He was born in 1929 out West. And he had a very rough, interesting life. And he was very well read. And I remember him telling me, he was a sort of mentor figure for me. And I remember him telling me when I was in my 20s, he said, you know, all throughout the history of the United States, along the frontier, this is how he put it. He said, white people were always running off to join the Indians. And the Indians never ran off to join the white people. running off to join the Indians, and the Indians never ran off to join the white people. And so here was this fact again, like, oh, no one wants to go back to or go to the sort of modern world.

And this wasn't even the modern world. This is the modern world in 1865, right? Right, or 1755 or whatever. I mean, at the time, it was the modern world, right? Right. At the time, it was the modern world. Right. Right. But so no one, no one. It's basically the post agricultural revolution world, the industrial world, the world of organized religion, organized government of industrial economy and an agriculture based system where people had jobs. And you got up at dawn and plowed the fields all day and went to bed and your minister and your king told you what to do and whatever. That's the modern world. And that's what nobody wants to be part of, including the soldiers I was with at Restrepo, right? And so it just made me think maybe what the soldiers are missing isn't war,

although that certainly has its charms for some people, but it's community. It's that they were with each other. Community with consequences. That's right. Exactly. Community with consequences. Likewise, for the Native Americans, for the tribal societies in North America, maybe what the young men and some young women along the frontier were looking for was an escape from the sort of oppressiveness of the congregation on Sunday mornings, the oppressiveness of the society that they were toiling in, the regimented nature of an agrarian society. Maybe what they longed for was the closeness and freedom of a tribal society. And indeed, I mean, there was this incredible sort of hemorrhaging of people from the frontier to the tribes.

And even when people were kidnapped on raids by the Indians, kidnapped from their log homes along the frontier and abducted and forcibly adopted into these tribal societies, communities, when given the chance to come home to be repatriated some years later, very often these people refused to go. They didn't want to go back. They wanted to stay with their adopted tribe, their adopted community. That's amazing to me. And it says a lot about the way humans are wired to want to live. Yeah, that was one of the craziest aspects of your book. I'd never heard that before.

And how many people had done that, where they were kidnapped, and then they said, we like it here better. Yeah, that's right. And again, we're talking about more than 100 years ago. So what we think of as modern society today has only escalated those anxieties and woes and all the things that separated them from the tribal world. That's right. those anxieties and woes and all the things that separated them from the tribal world. That's right.

And one of the things about tribes is that they're sort of inherently egalitarian. It's very hard to pass on wealth in a non-capitalist society. In a mobile nomadic society, it's impossible to pass on wealth because you can't carry it. I mean, there's no way to carry wealth when you're in a nomadic hunter-gatherer society. So they're very, very egalitarian. And they also guard against the sort of abuses of power, sort of one alpha male trying to sort of like bully people and take more than his share. Or for that matter, people sort of freeloading and not contributing to the group survival effort and sort of scamming a little bit of food here, a little bit of whatever there. Both of those sins against the community are really harshly punished.

So it's very egalitarian. And egalitarianism is something we are all wired for, right? And I think one of the distresses of a modern capitalist society is that it can't be egalitarian. And that's painful for people. But then if you introduce a crisis, the blitz in London, for example, an earthquake in Italy that I studied, what happens is that money doesn't matter anymore when the floodwaters are rising, when the bombs are falling. Social class doesn't matter at all. It's like being in the boxing gym. How you conduct yourself with respect to the others around you is actually what gets evaluated. And a poor man can be brave and generous just as easily as a rich man.

There's no advantage to being wealthy or powerful when it comes to those basic human qualities. And that is a huge liberation. And so I live in New York City. And after 9-11, there was a bit of that in New York City. I mean, you know, there's a lot of poor people in New York, a lot of rich people, you know, whatever. Obviously, we all know that. But after 9-11, no one was rich or poor or anything. We were all New Yorkers wondering if there was going to be another bomb dropped on us, basically, another attack on the city.

So what happened in New York? The suicide rate went down. The violent crime rate went down. rate went down. The violent crime rate went down. Vietnam vets in New York said, who had, who suffered from PTSD, said that their symptoms disappeared after 9-11. Everyone was needed and people and everyone for a while, everyone was equal because we were all facing some danger that terrified us. And that, for all of its tragedy, that is an intoxicating social state to be in for human beings. That's so bizarre. It's so bizarre, but it also so makes sense. One of the things that I also thought was fascinating in your book, we were talking about PTSD sufferers and how people in

these veterans hospitals would be absolutely furious if they thought someone was faking their symptoms and that they had to be physically restrained to keep from attacking people that they thought were just juking the system. And how many people were on PTSD benefits? Yeah, I mean, the numbers are really elusive, but what I have sort of anecdotally from veterans as well as people within the VA administration who are acting as therapists or whatever, group counselors, is that there's a certain number of people, and I don't know what the fraction is, but there's a certain number of people who were not traumatized in war, and PTSD is hard to prove or disprove. And it's, you know, sort of obviously wide open for either an unintentional misdiagnosis or an intentional misrepresentation, whatever. And so, I mean, of course, any bureaucratic system

gets scammed and PTSD benefits are no different. But it really is traumatizing. I mean, seriously angering and traumatizing to soldiers who really were traumatized because they really were in combat. And keep in mind, only about 10% of the US military experiences direct combat. How would they know if someone was seriously traumatized? And the other thing that's fascinating is that as you were talking about in these small societies, freeloaders are looked down upon, as are the greedy alpha males who try to dominate the wealth like that in these societies like egalitarian ideas are much more much more openly expressed it's much more important that this is represented by these people that are legitimately

suffering seeing someone who's scamming the system and angry whereas like say if you had a hurt knee or something like that and you were going to the doctor and you saw someone who was scamming the system and angry. Whereas, like, say if you had a hurt knee or something like that and you were going to the doctor and you saw someone who was faking a back injury, you wouldn't be upset. Right. They were just robbing money from the insurance company and just getting free benefits. Well, yeah, I mean, because a hurt knee doesn't have a sort of emotional cargo to it, right? But combat does.

I mean, if you're in combat and you lost your best buddy and you got trauma from that, as well you should. And then you're in some group therapy thing at the VA with some guy who was on a rear base the whole time and is claiming 100% PTSD disability for something that never happened. Like, yeah, that would make you angry. It'd make me angry, you know? Because combat is extremely emotional. And again, I don't know, is it one in a million, one in a hundred, one in a thousand? I have no idea what the rates are. I'm not even sure if the VA does.

And there's, you know, in some ways incentivized not to find out. But I can tell you from like the real deal combat vets, that happens. They smell it instantly. And one way it gets sorted out is that those guys who are misrepresenting themselves get questioned by the combat vets. Oh, so what unit were you with? Like, so what happened exactly? Oh, a mortar hit the other side of the base? That's a pretty big base. I've been there.

You know, I was a mile away and you're traumatized? Are you kidding? Like, you know, they'll get questioned, right? So, I mean, like you might question someone who's bullshitting you about how much, you know, how much fighting he's done with the MMA or whatever, you know, wherever your area of expertise is. I'm sure you can smell a fraud instantly, right? Well, everyone can. That's one of the things that's one of the characteristics of humans is that because we live in collective societies where we have to sort of trust one another, we're extremely good at smelling out misrepresentation and fraud. We're really, really good at it.

other, we're extremely good at smelling out misrepresentation and fraud. We're really, really good at it. And it's one of the things that feels intolerable is to have someone who is unfairly gaining from the hard work of the rest of us. And I should just say, when I say egalitarianism, I don't mean that there's no hierarchy, right? I mean, complicated systems need hierarchy, need order, right? I mean, groups need hierarchy so that not everyone's a general, not everyone's a private. I mean, you need organization within the group. But egalitarian means that nobody gets extra rights. You know? Right.

Like, we all have basically the same rights in the group. That's what that means. Well, I mean, it all completely makes sense. that means. Well, I mean, it all completely makes sense. It particularly makes sense, the idea that these people who were real combat vets, who saw real action, would be instantaneously able to discern whether or not someone was faking it. Yeah. And that this, but that this, it sort of mirrors what you're saying about these small tribes, that in these small tribes, someone who's a freeloader is extremely dangerous to the group. You're looked at as a liability.

You're looked at as someone who just can't be trusted. And you need trust. You need community. And this is like what you're saying about combat troops, that what they want to know is that you're going to be willing to put your own safety secondary to the safety of the troop. Right.

And if everyone does that, everyone's safer. But if no one, if some one person doesn't do that, I mean, that's always in the movies, right? It's always the one guy who runs away or the one guy who sells out or. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, those human themes are enduring and very powerful. So sometimes I speak to a lot of liberal audiences, right? And so I love doing this to them.

And I'm a Democrat, so I sort of know those people pretty well, right? I grew up in Massachusetts and I get it, you know. And so, you know, I'll say to them, okay, who here is against war and doesn't want to know anything, have anything to do with war? And of course, everyone raises their hand, right? anything have anything to do with war and of course everyone raises their hand right and um and then i say okay who here has paid money to go be entertained by a hollywood war movie and everyone raises their hand it seems like a contradiction but then i go on to say to them is look if if if war can get a room full of pacifists to go pay money to watch it. So there's something important going on in that narrative. You're not going to the movies to watch people get killed, right? You guys aren't

all sociopaths. You're going to the movies to see these very ancient human concerns of who's loyal to the group, who's a coward, who's brave, who's willing to risk their life for someone else. I mean, these are things that have kept humans alive or endangered them, as the case may be, for a million years. Of course, they're compelling narratives. And in war, you see those things happen like in a sort of accelerated intense rate. I mean, you grow up in a suburb, you almost never see someone have to choose between their own safety and the community. It never happens. That's the problem with the suburbs.

In war, that happens every day, right? So it gives you this sort of like human narrative in this incredibly compressed, intense form, which reconfirms the values, the human values we all have about, okay, if you're in a group, you have to love that group, even if you dislike some of the people in it. That's what it means to be part of a group. And that's what has kept humans alive for a very long time. You even see that narrative in science fiction, futuristic movies like The Matrix, right? The one guy who sells out the other humans to The Matrix and just says, look, I want to be in, I want to be in the matrix. I want to have a great life and eat good food. Yeah. I mean, listen, once you, once you are aware of this narrative, you see it everywhere. Uh, and I mean, one part, there's some research

that I did that didn't actually make it into the book. I couldn't quite fit it in, but I, I, I, um, interviewed someone who, um, had a consulting firm in Hollywood that did basically sort of like market research for the big studios. And they would screen films for audiences and then ask the audiences questions about the ending, about the characters, about how to construct the plot. They were sort of trying to figure out what's the public want to see, right? So what they found was that in disaster films, very typically, where a community was facing a disaster, right? So what they found was that in disaster films, very typically, where a community was facing a disaster, right? A plague or, you know, a flood or a war or whatever, when, you know, when the community had to rally to survive, right? An alien invasion, what does a million scenarios, but it's all the same basic story. You have these different characters. There's usually a male figure that takes the lead to physically defend the space, right? There is often a female

figure that's connected to him that sort of takes place of the community that's being defended, takes care of the, dresses the wounds, dresses the emotional wounds. I mean, sort of takes care of all that stuff while the man or the men are sort of physically defending the place. And then there's a guy who often was really wealthy or well off before the catastrophe who's continuing to act in a self-serving way even during the catastrophe when everyone's needed. And everybody gets mad at that guy. Well, that guy always dies. Yeah.

Always dies. And then there's another character. And again, this is just very common in these narratives. The Weasley beta male. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. No, but keep in mind that these narratives are formed by public opinion. No, but keep in mind that these narratives are formed by public opinion.

This isn't the studios trying to make the public force feed the public like gender roles and whatever. This is the public saying, I like that. I don't like that. So the studios are responding to the questionnaires that these researchers give out. So one of the really interesting things, and this is totally inflammatory, but the role of the person defending like physically physically defending the community when they try to put a woman in that role people have a problem with it and and and frankly often women have a problem with it like it's really it's really really interesting and women are just as important as men in a crisis or in anything, right? But what the public seems to want is the guy with the sword

and the woman with the bandage, you know, or with the sort of reassuring, you know, like it gets divided like that. And it's not, again, it's not the studios forcing something on people. It's the people watching these films saying, just voting on what they, the narrative that they like best.

But the other character that I thought was really hilarious, there's often that there's an estranged husband who's betrayed his wife and family in some way. He's on the outs, right, with his family and with his wife. And then the crisis happens. The Martians invade, the floodwaters rise, whatever it is. And he comes to the rescue and does the right thing and saves his wife and family and maybe even the wife's new boyfriend. I mean, he even could have gotten to that stage, right? And because he does the right thing, she takes him back. It's funny, man.

It's really just playing out these ancient archetypes. It's exactly what it's doing. I mean, those storylines resonate because they're ancient and because those roles in society helped us survive. And there's always the woman who, in absence of the strong male figure, rises to the occasion herself. Right. I mean, with some of the research I did with Tribe, what I found, I studied this coal mine disaster in Canada. So it was all men trapped two miles down in these collapsed passageways. Two miles down? Two miles down. I mean, two miles down in these collapsed passageways. Two miles down. Two miles down.

I mean, two miles down an angled shaft. But two miles down. Yeah. So they had an explosion. Some gases ignited and the passageways collapsed. So they're two miles in. Their gas light, their batteries last 24 hours. Their water lasts 48 hours.

Pretty soon they're just sitting in darkness, not knowing not only if they'll survive, not knowing if their bodies will ever even be recovered. They have no way of sitting in darkness trying. So this is what happened. I mean, obviously, a situation like that takes needs leadership. So in the first minutes and hours, there were these sort of alpha males that weren't necessarily crew bosses, right? They weren't within the traditional hierarchy. They were just guys who grabbed a pickaxe and a shovel and said, come on, guys, we're going to try to dig our way out. And they basically, I mean, literally attacked the problem of these collapsed mine shafts.

There was too much rubble to dig through. They were two miles down. So they dug and dug and dug. And it required these guys. And again, it was all men down there. But there was one sort of leader was this very aggressive. He didn't care how anyone else felt. Oh, you're scared? I don't give a shit. Grab a shovel.

We got to solve this problem. Like totally unempathic, right? When they realized they couldn't dig their way out, and they ran out of batteries, and they're sitting in darkness, a new kind of leader was required. And that was someone who was able to keep people's spirits up, who was empathic, who listened. If a guy was really scared, was able to say, hey, listen, man, it's going to be all right. It's okay to be scared. We're all scared. You know, that kind of voice. It's a different kind of leadership. Now, typically in society, the male role would be the guy with the pickaxe attacking the problem.

The female role would be the person sort of like trying to keep the group emotionally together and functioning. But what happens in a situation where there's all of one sex, those gender roles will be filled no matter what. It'll just be filled by people of the same sex. So if it was all women down there, some woman would have grabbed the pickaxe and taken on what would be typically considered a, quote, male role. But she's female. Right. considered a, quote, male role, but she's female. Right.

So the gender roles that society needs to survive in adversity, in war, in nature, in a collapsed coal mine, it needs both gender roles, but either sex can fill those roles. It's amazing. And we will sort it out. So it doesn't matter who's male and female. What matters is that those two basic kinds of leadership and caretaking get taken care of. Wow. So how did those guys get out? They eventually, I mean, the rescuers eventually got to them. How long were they down there for? They're over a week. It might even have been two weeks. I mean, they, oh, eight days. I can't remember actually. Something like a week.

How did they survive? I mean, barely. I mean, you know, they ran out of water. They were eating the bark off the timbers, you know, the support structures. They were eating coal. Eating coal? They were trying to, yeah. They were drinking their own urine. I mean, you know, and the guys died.

I mean, not everyone survived. One guy was trapped. His arm was trapped between two collapsed timbers. And they were, you know, it was a pretty lively conversation about, and he was begging them to cut his arm off so that he could at least be free. And there was a pretty lively conversation with the other men in the group, like, do we do that or not? Right. And they decided not to, that if they, all they had was an ax. They're like, we chop his arm off and free him, he might die from that.

Right. And he was removed from where those guys were He might die from that. And he was removed from where those guys were. So he was lonely. That was the thing. He was lonely. He was like, cut my arm off. I want to join you guys. And they didn't. And he died. Amazing.

It's intense. And so, you know, I mean, not to whatever, to steer this conversation too much, but I mean, that's a microcosm in some ways for America, right? I mean, every country is potentially trapped in a coal mine trying to figure out how to survive. We don't know. I mean, the day before 9-11, we didn't know 9-11 was coming, right? We don't know what's coming, right? any group of people, whether it's 330 million or 18 people as it was in that coal mine,

the only way for any group of people to survive is to act collectively, right? Humans don't survive in nature by themselves. And so in that coal mine, both kinds of people were needed. They happened to be all men, but it didn't need to be whatever. It doesn't matter. Gender doesn't matter. I mean, sex doesn't matter. They needed both kinds of people. They needed aggressive alphas that attacked the problem and didn't care how people felt and were interested in like strict law and order in the group. You do this, you do that. You do what I say. This is a survival. You needed those kinds of people and you needed the other kind like, hey, we're going to be all right. Are you feeling okay? Yeah, we're, you know, like that kind of collaborative, empathic person. You needed that also.

So when you look at the politics in this country, you need both conservatism and liberalism, right? You cannot, I mean, a completely conservative America will be well defended, right? No one's going to mess with us, right? America first, like no one will mess with us. But what will be left unaddressed is some of the internal dynamics of this country, which is, you know, frankly, not at the foremost of conservative thought. I mean, sort of racial disparity, economic disparity and all that stuff. Like, you know, I mean, that's not at the foremost of the conservative agenda and it shouldn't be. It doesn't need to be. It doesn't need to be because it's at the forefront of the liberal agenda. And God forbid you have a country that's completely run by liberals, it'll get overrun immediately by the nearest armed neighbor, right? Which liberals just aren't wired that way to be suspicious of the world.

But what liberals do quite well is to try to figure out a sort of system of fairness within the group that gets – you know, just tries to equalize things and get everyone to sort of participate and to be valued and taken care of. Like, I mean, that – it's all lovely, right? I mean, that's needed also. And so every country is at its best when you have both of those dynamics going on and they're in a kind of dynamic tension with each other, but neither completely takes over. And one of the things that breaks my heart watching this country is there's this idea on both sides, on the liberal side and on the conservative side, that the other not only is totally wrong, but it's totally immoral and shouldn't exist. It's just not true. And this country is not going to find peace until both sides of that political equation sort of reach across and shake the other person's hand and say, look, I disagree with you on almost everything, but I'm glad you're with us. I need you. And I need you because I don't think like you do. I need you to think like you do. And until this country

figures out how to do that, we're going to be in this sort of awful partisan strife that eventually will destroy us. Like bullets are not going to take down this country, words will. And they're going to be our words. And it just breaks my heart to see this dynamic, not only going on and on, but getting worse and worse. It does seem to be getting worse and worse. And what seems to be new is the idea from the liberals to silence people on the right and to think that free speech is important. What's important is their ideas and that their ideas are, especially I think now that Trump is president and I think people feel even more emboldened and locked up in this. I mean, listen, I mean, I think it's both. I mean, honestly, I think it's equally both sides, but I agree with you. I mean, the problem with the right, with the left for me, and again, I'm a Democrat.

So, you know, I love evaluating my own side's problems because they drive me. They make me more upset than the right wing's problems. Right. Because they're my people. Right. And I'm like, come on, can you act a little better, please? Do you see the irony, though, that you've chosen a tribe and the tribe of people that you don't even know and that these people are just it's a political tribe well i mean listen i i share those political some of those political ideals and the conservative ideals i don't i don't share and but i would hate to live

in a country that didn't have conservatives in it right even though i disagree i mean because i disagree with them right i don't want to be surrounded by people i agree with right and there are conservatives that do not want liberals in this country. Shame on them. And likewise for liberals. I may hear it on both sides. So I think both sides try to silence the voices of the other side, frankly. That's a sin I think that's committed equally on both sides.

But one thing I wanted to bring up because I actually made a mistake. Last time I was on your show, I mentioned a book and I got the name wrong. And it's such a good book. And I just saw on Twitter that people were trying to find it and they couldn't because I got the name wrong. It's called Our Political Nature. And it's by a guy named Avi Tushman. And he collected an awful lot of data about the fact that political opinion is about 50% determined by genetics. In other words, you inherit about half of your political opinion. And the other half is acquired through experience, through exposure. So if you grew up in a liberal family, you're about 50% likely to wind up being

a liberal because you absorb that way of seeing the world. And I'm a Democrat. Had I grown up in a conservative family, I think I'd be a conservative. And I actually think, having read this book, I think I'm actually a genetic conservative that adopted liberal values because of my environment. And I think there's a lot of people who are genetic liberals who have adopted conservative values. I mean, it's about 50-50. But the point is, so it's Avi Tushman, Our Political Nature. That's the name of the book. I got it wrong. I just wanted to correct that. But the point of this to me is that, and he knows this, I mean, scientists know this because when they look at identical twins that share almost all of their DNA, identical twins later in life are far more likely to have the same political opinion than fraternal twins, which don't share all their DNA.

You understand what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. So that's how they know this. When they look at identical twins, there's a much higher concordance of a political opinion later in life than for fraternal twins. That's how they know that it's around 50% of your political view is determined by genetics. If it's determined by genetics, that means it had survival value. That's how they know that it's around 50% of your political view is determined by genetics. If it's determined by genetics, that means it had survival value. That means that liberalism and conservatism both had survival value in our evolutionary past and as a result has become encoded in our DNA, like other behaviors, like generosity, other character traits, like generosity, courage, things like that. Those are all encoded in our DNA because they had behaviors, like generosity, other character traits like generosity, courage, things like that.

Those are all encoded in our DNA because they had survival value. Well, likewise, conservatism and liberalism, which means that in the argument, the discussion in this country about politics, you can disagree with people, go for it. Democracy comes out of disagreement and compromise is great. But what you cannot do is point your finger across the aisle and say, not only are you wrong, but you shouldn't exist. Like, go away, disappear. You're not part of what America is.

That assertion is completely contradictory to evolution. And if it's contradictory to evolution, it won't work. Well, it seems to me that people have a really difficult time managing conflict, even managing verbal conflict, that when someone disagrees with them, they want to silence that person. They want to yell at that person. They want to scream. And they think about their own thoughts rather than putting themselves in the position of the other person or objectively recognizing that there is an important factor. It's important to have both sides. It's important to even be challenged on your ideas so you can solidify what's the root cause of your ideas. Where are they coming from?

How much have you examined these ideas? Are you just married to them because they were given to you? Are these things you've adopted or are these really well-considered thoughts that you've put through the mill? Right. I mean, the thing is there are rules to contests, right? I mean, there are rules in MMA, right? There are rules in boxing. There were rules in marriages, right?

I mean, you would never stay in a marriage where your spouse treated you the way the political parties treat each other right now. You would never stay. Right. I mean, this incredibly contemptuous, mocking, disparaging tone that both sides have. Like, you were like, I'm out of here. You know, my wife clearly just thinks like I'm a complete dirtbag or no one talked. You don't talk to someone like that, that you have any respect for. Right. I'm out of here. I think no one would stay in a marriage like that. And what's happened. And this is new, right? We didn't grow up with this.

Like this is a new thing where the political parties talk to each other. I mean, disagreement is great, right? Eventually you compromise and you figure something out where nobody's happy, but the machine goes on, right? The ship sails on. What's new now is this contempt. And it's toxic in marriage. And it's toxic in marriage. And it's toxic in a country, too. And this is a new thing.

And I think if you really take in the reality, this truth, that half of our political opinions are genetically wired, you've got to get rid of the contempt. I mean, it's part of what we are. I don't think most people are aware of that. No, they're not. Right. That's why I'm talking about it. I mean, you know.

And Congress plays on this, right? It's a great campaign strategy to, like, say things that are hateful things about the other side and consolidates your base. And both sides do this, right? And if you consolidate your base, then you're more likely to win the election. You're in a more solid political position. And we know behavioral psychologists will tell you that one way to make a group cohere, make it close ranks and strengthen its group commitment to itself, one way to do that is to introduce an enemy.

And when there's no enemy, groups naturally disperse because people just go off to do their individual thing. Of course, you have the freedom to do that. there's no enemy, groups naturally disperse because people just go off to do their individual thing. Of course, you know, you have the freedom to do that. There's no threat anywhere. Introduce a threat, boom, everyone's in a group. So what politicians do is they create a threat where there is none. You know, they say that other political party, they're actually trying to destroy democracy. They're not part of the democracy. They're actually trying to destroy it. They're trying to destroy this country. The same thing happened at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. My father grew up in Spain and I studied the Spanish Civil

War quite a lot. The democratic reforms that were coming in the 30s, you know, just land redistribution, things like, you know, the vote for women, you know, pretty normal things. But they were a threat to the power structure in Spain. And the military and the sort of far right in Spain, the fascists, basically said that those democratic reforms were people who were trying to destroy Spain. So you create an enemy that consolidates your power and you go on to win the election. It's great campaign strategy. It's just terrible for the nation. You know, this lock her up, lock her up. When,

when, uh, Trump was running, that was the big thing, right? The enemy that she, this was the enemy that was Hillary Clinton. She represented the evil Democrats who just had been stealing and robbing. Right. And I, you know, I, listen, I totally understand being in disagreement with Democrats. Right. But it's a different matter to say that they're actually antithetical. The Democrats are antithetical to free Democratic ideals. But it just seems to me there's not a good party right now. The Republicans are a mess. The Democrats are a mess.

There's not, right? No, they both suck. And so reform them, right? I mean, or create a new party. Yeah, but isn't there also an issue with just having two sides, right? Having the Yankees versus the Red Sox every year in the World Series. Well, those two sides do represent the sort of the genetic strains in our liberal and conservative. Yeah. I mean, it's going to it's going to break down one way or another in that direction.

Right. And so, I mean, it is sort of a binary. I mean, our brains are sort of binary in that way. I mean, as humans surviving the wild, you have to defend your group and you need fairness within the group. The two things you have to do to survive and remain a group. Right. Right. And so those tasks have been sort of like subcontracted out to conservatives and to liberals. And it's been that way for a very long time. And you can even see some of those same behaviors like in chimpanzee society, right? So this is very, very ancient behavior. So like it or not, I think you have two groups, but that doesn't mean that two groups have

to act so abysmally with each other. And I really think that if you want to save the, if you want to sort of save this country morally, politically, nationally, maybe, you know, really what you need is a bipartisan committee in Congress that calls people out and calls them out for doing and saying things that undermine our sense of unity as a nation. So when Democrats say, he's not my president, that undermines the understanding of what democracy is. No, he's not my president, that undermines the understanding of what democracy is. No, he's your president. He got voted in, man. That's what happens in a democracy, is the guy you didn't vote for ends up being your president. That's what a democracy is. So just deal with it, right? I hate that. I hate that. I'm a Democrat. I didn't vote for him, but I hate when

people say that. And likewise, when Donald Trump, when Citizen Trump was accusing Barack Obama, and I understand not liking Obama, I don't really care if you don't like him or don't like him. But when Citizen Trump accused Barack Obama of not being a citizen, and the GOP didn't repudiate that? I mean, think about it. Citizen Trump was telling every veteran and soldier fighting overseas that their commander in chief was an imposter, was a fraud, was not an American citizen and has usurped the White House, right? That's a terribly destructive thing to tell men and women in uniform or in a trench getting shot at, right? And the GOP, like the DNC with this stupid he's not my president thing, the DNC is not rejecting that idea.

They let people say it. They don't denounce it, right? The GOP never repudiated that stupid idea that Trump came along with. And for the good of the nation, they both had to, right? And this isn't a free speech issue. Everyone has the legal right to make a fool of themselves. Go for it. But that doesn't mean the two political parties have to stay silent in the face of things that are completely toxic to our democracy. And they really should have

spoken out. And I think some kind of bipartisan commission in Congress that would call out the worst outrages and call on the political parties to denounce them, that that would be enormously positive thing in this country. I agree with you, but I think it would take a truly exceptional person to look at the other side's faults and not capitalize on it. Yeah. You know, and especially even if it's a false thing like the Obama thing with Trump or any number of things you could find in that regard.

But it seems to me like this is like the perfect time, if there was ever going to be a time where a third party, some sort of a centrist-type party would come around, this would be the perfect time where people are so... And we also, I think, people recognize that what we're seeing on the right and the left in regards to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is you're seeing people that are pretending to be this thing. With Donald Trump, he's a lifelong Democrat.

And then all of a sudden he's a Republican and he's talking about God. It's like it's a show. It's a little dog and pony show on the right. And on the left, you've got this woman who was part of the Clinton Foundation. It was essentially a pay-to-play scheme. They were making millions of dollars

and hundreds of thousands of dollars for bullshit speeches that they would give to banks. And this is not some sort of a real liberal. This is not the ideas that you were embracing about liberal values. I mean, no. I mean, the two parties basically have become sort of cartels to keep themselves in power. Yes. That's a great way to put it. Yes.

And, you know, Hillary was absolutely part of that on the left. And, you know, all of it's antithetical to the highest ideals of the framers of the Constitution and the people that established this country. And I mean, I hear you about the centrist party, that would be great. But there's, you know, I mean, the way the power structure works, the way the cartels work is they got all, they have access to all the funds, right? All the money, right? Where do you get the money for something like that? You need to build something from scratch and get up to speed in time to win an election. That's very, very hard to do. But at the very least, I mean, a centrist party could fall prey to that kind of toxic

rhetoric as well. I mean, but I feel like there should be norms where freedom of speech is an absolute. I mean, we get it, but that the parties don't, they have a moral obligation to denounce things that they know undermine the unity of this country. I don't mean people in disagreement with one another. people in disagreement with one another. I mean, a basic level of respect for the other person's personhood, for their citizenship, for their right to participate in the democratic process. And when someone accuses the president of not being a citizen of the U.S., they're basically saying, I don't respect this system. I think the entire system is a lie. And I don't even think Donald Trump thought it was true. I think it was a tactic, and that the GOP never called that. I was really shameful.

You don't think he thought it was true that Obama was actually born in Kenya? Because I think he did, because I know that he's really good friends with Alex Jones and talks to him all the time. I think he believes a lot of very wacky conspiracies. You know, I think he starts out believing it, but by the end, I mean, did he? He did it for seven years. So many people did believe it though. I know, but the thing is, he was doing something that worked. He's a pragmatist. One of the things I really like about him in a way, I mean, I hate, I find him sort of amoral in the way that gives me the chills, but he's also a pragmatist, right? So I think he's completely capable of advocating a position that he doesn't believe in, but I don't think he needs to believe in.

He's like, enough people believe in this, that this is working for me. What was the benefit for him even chasing that idea down? I mean, he wasn't running for president back then. Do you think he was considering it? I think he was considering it for a long time. So he was doing it to sort of deteriorate the Democratic Party? Yeah, and to see of this immigration you know, the immigration stuff also. I mean, maybe he believes in that stuff.

Maybe he doesn't. But it doesn't matter. What he figured out very astutely is he identified a demographic that feels like the country is getting overrun by immigrants. Right. And, you know, statistics don't really bear that out. But people feel that way. And people feel that way. They vote that way.

And he figured that out. Right. And so, I mean, more power to him. Right. Like, I mean, I'm not questioning his. I mean, it worked for him. Right. But the only thing that I would say is, like, please don't say anything that undermines the nation's sense of unity. Right. You know, that's the crucial thing. That's the thing that's keeping us safe in the world, is that we're a unified country. Yeah. And when you disparage the courts, for example, you're splitting the country apart. And the intelligence agencies.

Don't do it. Right. Like you're drilling holes in your own boat, man. But are you astonished that all that works? That he can do that? That he can disparage the intelligence communities? That he can disparage the courts? And that no one calls him out.

No one says this is fucking outrageous. This is stupid, especially knowing all of his campaign's ties to Russia that are coming out now even more so. Well, listen, I mean, some process is happening that will eventually catch up with him. I mean, I don't know how it's going to turn out. Am I surprised? Yes, of course I'm surprised. I'm also surprised that the Democrats that, you know, within my lifetime went from being a party that was deeply concerned with the poor, with the working poor, with people working in factories,

you know, I mean, those were at least the highest ideals, right? In my lifetime, they went to, they became a completely elitist organization. They didn't give a shit about those people, right? So, like, that surprises me too, right? So along comes Bernie Sanders who, whatever his issues, he's at least sincere. You know what I mean? At least you trust the guy. Like, that guy is speaking his mind.

And the thing about Donald Trump, he's speaking his mind. He doesn't have these awful poll-tested opinions like Hillary did and Jeb did and all those guys. He's like, no, no, no. This is what I think. I don't care how people react. This is, as Martin Luther said, here I stand for I can do no other. A lot of places that Trump stands, I don't agree with. But I'm actually impressed by his ability to say something no matter what the repercussions. This is kind of cool.

Well, it is definitely a first. Yeah. You know, I mean, he's, I mean, at the debate when he was talking to Hillary Clinton, and I forget exactly what she said, you know, and he said, because you'd be in jail. And the whole place went crazy. Like, who the fuck has ever done that during a presidential debate? It's amazing. And it worked. And I, you know, like, my hat's kind of off to him, although I disagree with him on almost every political point that he says he holds. But I

got to say, like, it worked. And I wrote an essay, and I was talking about different kinds of courage. And, you know, there's sort of physical courage, right? And, I mean, literally, you know, being courageous in the face of harm to your body. And I feel like Trump is, you know, being courageous in the face of harm to your body. And I feel like Trump is, you know, he's a bit of a bully. And I think that to me, bullies and cowards are sort of the same thing. Right. They're just two different sides of the same character trait. I said, but that's not all Trump is. He's actually morally he's actually very courageous. Like he's not a moral coward. He will say exactly what he thinks, no matter what

the opinion is going to be. He has extreme confidence in who he is. Or he doesn't give a shit. I mean, that's moral courage. You're like, this is what I believe, and I'm going to say it. I don't care if I don't win. I don't care if I go to jail. Here I stand for I can do no other. It's a part of his elitist mentality because he does believe that he's above a lot of the repercussions for saying these things. But a lot of people who are elitists are cowards. And the thing, and I disagree with Trump on just about all of his policies, right?

But the thing I do kind of have to tip my hat to is that he's not a moral coward. He will say a thing that every political pundit in the world will say, no, that's going to get, that's going to destroy you. You're going to attack John McCain and you're going to hope to win the republican nomination and you're fucking crazy right now right and he did it and it worked not just that but he attacked him for being captured i know which is insane and i think trump truly feels that way and i don't agree with them but i do respect the fact that he said it in the face of all political advice he didn't give a shit he said it because he believed it that's moral courage i just disagree with his opinions but but that moral courage, very few people have it,

and he has it. And I just, I wish he used it to unify the country, and he's still splitting the country. I don't think he has any desire to unify the country. I know. He's very self-serving. I agree. And I don't think Hillary did either. No, none. You know what I mean? And that's the problem with our parties right now is that they're serving themselves before they serve the country. Well, I think it speaks to what you were talking about in your book that no one is looking at this like a real tribe. This is an enormous tribe of 350 million people, but there's no one person that's standing out as a real leader. And at least what Obama was, I mean, whether you agree with his policies, and there's a

lot that I don't agree with, particularly in the way he flip-flopped about whistleblowers and freedom of the press. Those things disturb me greatly because I know how intelligent he is. I know he's a lawyer. He was a statesman, though. I mean, he really came across as a guy who you go, Oh, well that, that guy should be the fucking president. He sounds like the president. He's, he's, he has a fantastic vocabulary. He speaks clearly. He, he's a very, he's a highly honed human being.

That's right. That's right. No, I, no, I agree. And I, you know, there, there are things I didn't like, whatever about him, but, but absolutely as a, as a person, I mean, he brought a huge, I thought, he brought a huge sort of gravitas and dignity to the office. Dignity. Yes, definitely. Without a doubt. I mean, he was probably one of the best ever at that. But I think that what we need now is someone who genuinely wants to help the country be unified. is someone who genuinely wants to help the country be unified.

Someone who genuinely wants to help the country, not help their party, not help themselves, not just think, well, hey, when this is all done, I'm going to make a fucking million dollars a year doing speaking fees or whatever, however much they make when they do that. Well, yeah. And you're going to – I mean we need that that to stay to remain a country. Yeah. Right. I mean, like, I mean, it really is headed towards a bad place, I think. And so that person is going to have to overcome the sort of the reflexive reaction of the left wing. You know, he's not my president, like, and the reflexive reaction of the right wing, the right wing hated Obama, in ways that were completely out of proportion to Obama's actual policies. Right. And, you know, when Mitch McConnell said, you know, the Republicans job in Congress, their foremost job is to make sure that Barack Obama is a complete failure as a president, like, that's not serving the country. Not at all. Right. So you need a leader who's actually able to overcome that toxic thinking in both parties. Right. Right. I mean,

like, is Jesus coming back? Like, who's going to do this? Right. Who is going to do this? But I think the start is a bipartisan commission that starts to call people out. Right. So you have Republicans calling Republicans out because they're on this commission. You have Democrats calling Democrats out. You need it. You got the free speech to make a fool of yourself. Go for it. But you're not going to undermine this country without being called out by this commission. And I was talking with someone in government pretty high up about this. And I said, you know, I had said my thing, you know, bullets aren't going to destroy this country. Al-Qaeda is never going to destroy this country.

But our own words can destroy our democracy. Like that actually could do it if we play this hand wrong. And I said that makes partisan rhetoric actually a matter of national security. actually a matter of national security. And when you can think about it as a national security concern, then you actually have a sort of political and legal basis for forming a commission that addresses it. And I really, truly think that should happen. And if it doesn't, hopefully something else will happen that works. But it's the only thing I can think of that will begin to address, that can rise up above the partisan interests of both parties, because the parties clearly don't seem capable of doing it on their own.

Now, when you write a book like Tribe, and you outline all these issues that people have, and all these issues historically that people have had, do you try to consider a solution? I mean, do you have a solution? Or are you just examining all the various problems that we have? So, I mean, tribe was me trying to make sense of sort of what ails us. Right. Starting with, you know, people hemorrhaging off the frontier to the American Indians and on up to the soldiers I was with, mass shootings, you know, something's not working for us, right?

So it was foremost an analysis. And towards the end, I talked a little bit about solutions. And one of the solutions I talked about was making a concerted effort to get rid of contemptuous partisan rhetoric in government. And I really felt that that trickles down and pollutes, you know, it pollutes the water stream down, like downstream, it pollutes everything so that everyone, all us citizens are drinking toxic water from that rhetoric and wondering if the unity can survive, like will the center hold? You know, you hear your parents screaming

at each other in the bedroom and saying unforgivable things to each other. As a child, you might rightly think, wow, this marriage isn't lasting. This family is not lasting. That's how it feels to be a citizen of the United States right now. Like mom and dad are screaming at each other. And so I talked about contempt. Disagree if you want. Don't speak with contempt about someone you share a combat outpost with.

And that's what this country potentially is. Don't you think also with the mom and dad analogy that it also shows you how to behave in your own life? And I think that's one of the things that's really important about the president is the president does sort of represent the best example of what we can be. When we were kids growing up, that was the thing. Like you ask a kid what they want to be. If someone said, I want to be president, we're like, holy shit, you're really going for it, kid. You want to be the biggest job. That's the number one position. So you're supposed to be the best person ever, which is why we hold someone to such an incredible microscope, which is almost even more impressive that Trump went after that grab the pussy audio recording,

and then he could just brush that off as locker room talk. Yeah, that's right. In a way, he's kind of right. I mean, it really is kind of fucked up that they did try to use that on him and pull it out the last minute. But it does give you also an understanding of how he thinks and behaves when no one's around. Right. I mean, you know, my problem with him was that, like, if I look at the worst of his behavior, I mean, people send, society sends people to jail for the worst thing that they did. So it is actually legitimate to judge people's

worst behavior and evaluate them on that basis. So if I look at the worst of his behavior, even if I was a diehard Republican who adhered to all of the things he says he believes in, Even if I was a diehard Republican who who adhered to all of the things he says he believes in if I looked at the worst of his behavior Mocking a gold star family. Mm-hmm like mocking a disabled person That wasn't real though. You know that mocking a disabled person was sort of trumped up He does hate to use that word trumped up. He does that whenever he's talking about anyone like he's like when he acts flustered like oh whenever he's talking about anyone. Like when he acts flustered, like, oh, what are you going to do here?

Like that. They tried to say that he was mocking a reporter, that it was disabled, but it's pretty clear that that's not right. Well, I mean, maybe so, but with a question from someone who's visibly disabled, maybe you just don't do that that much. You know what I mean? I think that's a speech pattern he does, though. Well, maybe. Maybe I'm giving him more of the benefit of the doubt than I should.

If it was the only example, then I wouldn't be thinking about it. But there is a sort of pattern that a model from Mexico who gained some weight, that he was mocking. I mean, like the mockery of less powerful people is sort of endless. Right. So to me, I wouldn't have that person at my dinner table. Right. You know what I mean? Like I just, with my close friends, like someone who was acting like that, he started acting, started doing that at my dinner table.

I'd walk around, I'd get up, I'd walk around the table. Right. I'd put him in a headlock and I'd drag him out of my house. Right. Right. I don't want to think that about my president. Right. I want my president to be someone I'd be glad to have at my dinner table.

I didn't vote for George Bush, but I'd love to have that guy at my dinner table. Ronald Reagan did it. You know what I mean? He's the first president. I'd be like, no, man. I don't want to subject my friends to that. You ever read Woody Harrelson's account of a dinner that he had with Trump? No.

He said literally he had to get up in the middle and go outside and smoke a joint just to just relax himself. Yeah. I was talking about it. I think he said early 2000, he had a dinner with Trump and he said he'd never met someone so narcissistic, so self-obsessed. Yeah. And you know, the, you know, my worry like in this conversation is that it will somehow seem partisan. And like, I would be saying the same things if Trump were a Democrat. Well, you said something about George Bush that you would be happy to have him over. And I just think I hope that what comes out of this is that a hero will rise and that someone will someone who's really a legitimately good person will say look this is a this is a fucking travesty like someone who actually could assume the role correctly will step

into place and it will see that very clearly in comparison. Well, I mean, to get back to your question, one of the solutions that I talk about, it's not in my book, but I talk about this, is compulsory national service with a military option. And your question was, how do we make this nation feel like a nation? Right. Your question was how do we make this nation feel like a nation, right? And the problem, psychologists will tell you that the more you sacrifice for something, the more you value it. And if you're part of something that doesn't require any sacrifice at all, you just don't value it very highly, right? The advantage of national service – and I don't mean the draft. I think – I don't mean military service. I mean national service with a military option. I

don't think it's moral to force someone to fight a war that they don't believe in. So what sort of service would you? Whatever it is, the nation needs a lot of stuff done, right? And whatever that may be. But the point of it is, so if you had a military option, but otherwise you could teach in schools, otherwise you could dig ditches. I don'tes. Whatever the nation needs done, this core of workers at 22, 23 years old does it for a year. My first wife was from Eastern Europe. And the young people formed work brigades in the summer and helped harvest wheat and stuff. That was what she did when she was a teenage girl. And it was incredibly good for the kids over there. And it made them feel like they're part of something, right? And so

what I would say, there's a downside to national service, which is the government's telling people what to do. Of course. There's also an upside, which is it makes everyone feel like they're part of this thing called the United States. And it puts white people and black people and rich and poor and everyone puts them all in a big pot and stirs them up just like the military does and they get to know each other. And so everything's, there's an upside and a downside to everything, right? So national service has a very obvious downside, but the upside isn't discussed much, which is that it creates an American identity, a shared experience that all Americans have, like in Israel, there's compulsory service, and that is a common ground that every single Israeli has.

Wherever they fall on the political spectrum, they all have that shared experience, and it's an enormously potent thing in that country, keeping it bound together. And this country, I think, needs something like that. I think it would be very, very healthful. Well, it'd be nice if people did have some, I mean, some sort of connection to what it takes to keep things running, whether it's help fix the streets, whether it's help do something. But the problem that I would have with it is the idea that someone from the government would be able to require you to do something. And that if you didn't do it,

they could treat you the same way the IRS treats you if you don't pay your taxes. They just lock you in a cage, which is... Well, I mean, one way to do it might be to incentivize it by, instead of making it mandatory, incentivizing it by giving people really large tax breaks for doing it. Yeah, but young people aren't going to think about tax breaks. They're going to think about, fuck that, man. I want to skateboard. All right, then they have to. I mean, listen, for most of this nation's history, we've had a draft.

That's the government telling people what to do, right? And likewise with taxes. You don't pay your taxes, you go to jail. I mean, the government puts red lights at intersections and you have to fucking stop. I agree, but to try to do that today, it'd be extremely difficult. The distrust of the government is so high. And if the government comes along and says,

you have to do all these things, and then we go, wait a minute, are you doing these things? Are you going to join the military? You're 55 years old, you're a senator. Are you going to go pick wheat or fucking fix the roads? It definitely has to start. I mean, you can't, you're not senator, are you going to go pick wheat or fucking fix the roads? It definitely has to start.

I mean, you can't, you're not going to get 60-year-olds in national service, right? They're already involved in their lives. The great thing about 18, 19, 20-year-olds, 22-year-olds is their lives haven't really started yet. I mean, that's why it works in Israel. So are people going to object? Of course they are. But the question is, how do we unify this country?

The truth is, like, if we wanted to unify communities, you'd ban the car. Right? People can, you know, they're living, they're spending their whole lives within walking distance of their home. That will unify communities. We're just not willing to do that. What will unify the country is national service. We may not be willing to do it, but that's a different conversation from would it work or not. My opinion is that it would help.

It's a good opinion. I mean, I definitely see merit in it. I definitely think that it would be something that would be a fascinating debate to have back and forth. I just wonder if people at any point in their lives today would be willing to give up freedom for the government. I think people are used to this kind of like free ride. I pay my taxes and that's all you get from me. I don't have to vote. I don't have to do anything. You know, in Australia, you have to vote. And if you don't vote, you get fined. Well, that, you know, that's what you said it right there. That's the misconception. It's not

for the government. It's for your neighbor. It's for your fellow citizens. Everything you, you pay your taxes, not for the government. You pay your taxes for the country. But you pay them to the government. You pay them to the government. And there's no auditing of your taxes. And I think that's one of the things that freaks people out today. Like you don't know where that money is going. They don't have to tell you.

And if you don't give it to them, they'll lock you up. Right. And that's the problem with a large-scale society is that collective effort. It's not clear that that collective effort is going to the whole entity. It looks like it's going to the tax man. Right. And it's not. I mean, that's an illusion, right? But I mean, the check is to the IRS. The IRS hands it over to the government that then spends it on the country. I mean, that's the reality, but it looks like the IRS is oppressing you. But that's actually not what's happening, right? The IRS is an arm of government that you elected in, Yeah. next to her they didn't even know each other and the guy next to her said look they're not doing it for them they're doing it for us right they're searching all our stuff they don't care right

they're not on the damn plane they're searching our stuff for us likewise with the government the government isn't doing it for itself it's doing it for us right we like to think of it as one entity right we like to think of the irs as the government right you know they are collecting the money we almost think of it as them spending the money as well right we don to think of it as one entity, right? We like to think of the IRS as the government. Right. You know, they are collecting the money. We almost think of it as them spending the money as well. Right. We don't think of it as them distributing it to the rest of the government. That's right.

Yeah. That's right. So if you want to gin up a sort of like anti-government screed, like it's easy to play on that misperception because it's an easy misperception to have. Right. misperception to have. I mean, you get a $200 parking ticket in New York and it definitely feels like the parking bureau is like, is, is vengeful is, you know what I mean? Has targeted you personally and is going to take your $200 and spend it on itself. That's what it feels like. Right. The truth is that that $200 paves the, you know, fills in the potholes that you're going to be driving across next year. Yeah. That's the truth of it, right? You know, we're talking about solutions for the woes of society and particularly the individual. You have sort of found your own solution in journalism and in embedded journalism in these very dangerous environments, that this is how you have sort of reinforced your tribe.

And you talk about that in the book, about how how you know uh how well you slept in this very tight confines in these bases with all these like very loud snoring men but but the fact that you guys were all together in this very hostile environment that was your solution well i mean it wasn't a solution in this i mean it wasn't a long-term solution, but it did give me this experience of sort of shared fate, right? I mean, sort of collective effort, right? I was part of this group, and my welfare was tied to the welfare of the group. My actions could help or hinder the group. I was judged by how I behaved in the group, right?

And that's our evolutionary past, and it felt great, right? And so, you know, the trick is, you know, we live in a dispersed modern society where that's just not going to be the 24-hour-a-day reality for most people throughout their lives. But it may not need to be. You may just need a little bit of it. Maybe you get a little bit of that sort of collective norm at the boxing gym. Maybe you get it in the military. Maybe you get it hunting, whatever. There are ways to experience it, and maybe you get it at church.

I mean, I'm not religious, but I understand church to be a profoundly communal activity. And so I'm not saying burn down the suburbs and ban the car, although that would work pretty well. Maybe for your own personal sense of sort of meaning and fulfillment in life, find that collective experience in little bits and pieces. And the little goes a long way. Yeah. And doing something and doing something difficult, I think is also very important. Absolutely. I mean, getting together to shoot pool with your buddies every Thursday night, that's great, but it's not quite what we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Difficult things and things that test you physically and mentally, for some reason, those seem to be a requirement

for people. And when people don't fulfill that requirement, those seem to be a requirement for people. And when people don't fulfill that requirement, it seems to me that those are the people that are most unhappy. Yeah. I mean, there have to be stakes involved. Yes. There are no stakes to pool, to golf, right? They're pleasure- Unless you're gambling.

Right. But that's not a collective, you know what I mean? That's not a collective stake. Right. But that's not a collective, you know what I mean? That's not a collective state. And they're pleasant activities, but what reproduces our evolutionary past is being in a small group where the stakes are serious, if not life and death. But even if it's not life and death, at least they're real physical consequences. And that collective action makes the group more able to navigate those adversities successfully. And when you do that, it's an intoxicating feeling. It's what we're wired for. It's what we're missing in our sort of like modern lives. And you don't need a huge amount of it

to feel better. Another thing that seems to make people feel very fulfilled is creating things, working with their hands, creating anything, whether it's furniture, art, just making something, doing something where your mind is involved in an actual task of bringing forth something into existence that didn't exist before. Well, think about it. into existence that didn't exist before. Well, think about it. I mean, again, in terms of evolution, if doing something successfully produces a chemical reaction that feels good, a little bit of dopamine, or in terms of communal connection, a little bit of oxytocin, the trained monkey that we are will continue doing that good thing. So basically the tasks that helped with survival get rewarded with neurochemicals that feel good. And the things that are dangerous to us and lessen our chance for survival don't feel good. So being isolated, being alienated from your group, being an outcast

feels bad. And your survival chances go down, right? Right. You don't want to stay in that place. You want to join the group again. And so there's these neurochemical incentives and punishments that get to herd people towards behaviors that help survival. Doing things, accomplishing things, building things, that all feels good. It's clearly what we needed to do in our evolutionary past and it's reinforced. And creativity factors onto that how? Say like art, like painting or something like that.

There's something deeply satisfying to people that are painters. Well, yeah. I mean art, they know from the incredible paintings on the caves in France and Spain, Lescaut and the other caves, that art is one of the things that's used to bind communities together in ceremonies. I mean, you can see it in church. I mean, there is no church in the land that doesn't have art on the walls. Right. Right. The depictions of Christ or whatever or one of the visual aids that helps bind people

into a group, like, oh, we all believe in the same thing, right? So art is a great binding force. Music is an incredible binding force. So rhythmic, like rhythm, a heavy drumming rhythm will get a whole group of people sort of moving in unison. And Jonathan Haidt has talked about that sort of hive behavior and how it works works and very, very powerful. So what I would say, and I'm just guessing here, but I would say is that the arts that are so intoxicating to be engaged in, their survival value is that it makes the group cohere around a unified idea. And the music does that. The visual arts do that. The spoken word, poetry, song, those do that as well.

And so you have a group of people that are unified on all these different levels. So what happens when the enemy comes? I mean, the music starts, the sort of like visual pageantry starts. Like you get, you know, like the wartime posters showing heroic soldiers with rifle and bayonet. You get the war art, right? You get the you know, like the, you know, the wartime posters showing heroic soldiers with rifle and bayonet, right? You get the art, the war art, right? You get the martial music. All of that galvanizes the public spirit to face the enemy.

And it works extremely well. Wow. So you think that that's one of the reasons why art is so satisfying? I mean, I just assume that our evolution has produced that anything that feels good to us had survival value in our past. So if creating art feels good, that's because we are genetically predisposed towards doing things that bind the group together. Generosity feels good, right? If you walk down the street and you give someone $5, it's a random dude. You just give him five bucks and you measure the neurochemicals in his brain and your brain, you get more of a high than he does. Right?

So generosity feels good. It's clearly adaptive and helps groups cohere. Right? Yeah. And art as well. So that art, like when you create something amazing, what you're realizing is that someone's going to see that and go, wow, that's incredible. Like they're going to get a great feeling off of seeing your art. Yeah. You have the same vision, right? Like, oh, I painted that tree and this other person or that antelope or that bison or whatever you find in the walls of Lescaut. And this other

person comes like, oh my God, that's an incredible bison. There's not like you did something that the other person connected to. Now you, the two of you are joined in your understanding of what that painting means, right? And that's a very powerful thing. So if you drew that bison and no one else in the world ever saw it, I'm guessing that the chemical rewards for that creativity would be lower. Yeah.

You know, I noticed that in my children. My kids love to draw. And one of the things that they love is showing their drawings. I mean, they love to draw, but they're like, not yet, not yet, not yet. And then when they're done, like, look. That's right. And then they're just like, boom. They're getting that little rush themselves, and you get the rush.

I mean, look. I mean, just do it. It's easy to test. Like, take a musician, measure their neurochemicals while they're practicing in a room by themselves, and then put them in a stadium filled with 10,000 people and see what happens. I'm guessing that the guy in the stadium with Bruce Springsteen in front of 10,000 people is experiencing a neurochemical reality that he's not getting in his living room. Not only that, probably a neurochemical reality that very few human beings will ever experience.

Yeah, that's right. Some sort of a strange... But think about the power of that. I mean, you know, any musician on stage is basically acting sort of in the role of the shaman. Yeah. Right? Like, I'm going to act as a conduit

between you all and the divine, right? And my music is going to do it, my words are going to do it, my dancing is going to do it, whatever it is, but I'm the conduit, right? I don't matter. I'm connecting you with a divine feeling. And that feeling is going to un it. My words are going to do it. My dancing is going to do it. Whatever it is. But I'm the conduit, right? I don't matter. I'm connecting you with a divine feeling. And that feeling is going to unify all of you.

And I'm going to play these chords. I'm going to sing this song. And like magic, you all are going to be tapping your feet in unison. Like how do you get 10,000 people to do the same thing at the same time? You sing them a song. It's the only way to do it. That's an incredibly powerful thing. And that's the power way to do it. That's an incredibly powerful thing. And that's the I

Mean, that's the power of the shaman I mean Bruce Springsteen isn't the shaman literally but he occupies that space in a modern secular secular society Doesn't have shamans but it but in the old days, that's what he would be Do you feel that way when you put a book out? Like when you put the book out when you know, it's done you read it It's done and you send it out there, what kind of weird feeling that you get? Are all these people going to read that? It's an interesting thing about a book because you actually never observe in real time people's reaction to it.

Right. I mean, I'm not perched in someone's armchair watching them read in bed. You know what I mean? The general public. What about like reviews? Yeah, but that's also very, it's very distant. like reviews yeah but that's also very it's very distant but when i started making documentaries for the first time i had the experience i had the experiencing of watching other people's experience when i'd done right i'm not watching the audience i'm in the audience and i'm watching

people react to ristrepo yes right i never got to see people react to the books i've read because i'm not in their damn bedroom. Right. Right? But I am in the movie theater and I'm watching people react to the things that – the films I made. And I wouldn't say it's apples or oranges. I don't know which is one better, one's – you know, whatever. But it's a very different experience and it's incredibly powerful. Which – do you like one better? I mean movies just can't – they don't have enough bits of information. I mean, a book,

you can really communicate information, right? Very sophisticated ideas. And they're permanent, right? There they are in the person's bookshelf and the person can underline that paragraph and go back to it. You know, you've actually affected the sort of communal thinking. You've affected the way people understand the world. A film is an experience more than it is a sort of communal thinking. You've affected the way people understand the world. A film is an experience more than it is a sort of data dump or a philosophical argument. And that experience is very, very powerful. It acts on a different part of the brain than a book does. It's much more emotional. I mean, I've choked up, I've teared up, uh, watching my own films cause they're personal to me. You know, I've never done that reading my own book, rereading a book that I've written.

So it's a different experience. And I would, and I would say this is different parts of the human mind. Like you need, you sort of need both. So no, a long answer. I don't have a preference. I feel like I, I need both. Now this documentary on Syria. Yeah.

Um, when is this available? Well, it's called Hell on Earth. Our website is hellonearth.com. How'd you get that? Seems like that would have already been taken. Right? Of all the different websites that are available in the English language? That's true.

I never even thought about that. I wasn't in charge of getting it. Somebody's a wizard. That's right. They might have to pay for that one. So it's called Hell on Earth. It's about the Syrian civil war. We made it for National Geographic.

I made it with Nick Quested, my partner, and all the films that I've made. And it broadcasts last June. It's going to, you know, Nat Geo rebroadcasts everything that they do, obviously. You can also go to their website and stream it. So we can stream it today. Yeah, absolutely. It can also go to their website and stream it. So you can stream it today? Yeah, absolutely. It's about the Syrian civil war, how it started, and particularly how ISIS, why ISIS rose up out of that.

And we all know what ISIS is. This is a grotesquely violent, radical jihadist movement. And we have all seen their video, heard of their videos where they're beheading people in front of a video camera and ghastly, ghastly things. So why did that, you know, why did that happen in Syria? How did that mutation occur at this point in history in that place? And so the film examines that. And were you there?

Did you go to Syria? No. You know, after my friend Tim Hetherington was killed, Tim obviously I made Restrepo with. And he was a brother and a good friend and a colleague. And he was killed in Libya in 2011 on an assignment that I was supposed to be on with him. The last minute I couldn't go and he got killed. And so I stopped war reporting after that, frontline reporting. Syria was so dangerous that you couldn't think of going in there.

I mean, the numerous kidnappings and beheadings, it was basically a suicide. By the time we started working on the story, it was a suicide mission. So we actually worked with Syrians in Syria who were documenting their own war. Wow. Including an incredible family

that was living in territory under ISIS control and surviving. And they were trying to figure out, like, do we try to escape or not? And, of course, if you try to escape and you're caught, you're dead. They will drag your family out of a pickup truck and line you up on a wall and machine gun you. But they were worried that if they stayed, they'd also die. And they decided to escape. We got a camera to them and a very nondescript little cell phone camera and they self-documented life under ISIS

and the decision to leave and their flight through the ISIS checkpoints, through the front lines, all the way to Turkey and they self-documented and it's part of, it's the sort of through line in the movie. Absolutely extraordinary family.

Wow. And so then they're in Turkey now? They're in Turkey now. They tried to get to Greece on a rubber raft, on a Zodiac. They returned. Again, this is also documented by them. It's in the film. They returned back at the last moment by the Turkish Coast Guard, sent back.

And now they're in Greece and they're actually doing really well. They started a small business. They're incredibly hardworking, resourceful, beautiful people. I mean, they're, you know, like I wish they could come to this country. We'd be lucky to have them. And they'd be lucky to have us. They're an incredible family. And if you see the film, you'll see what I'm talking about. That's a, that's a big point that a lot of people felt was missed at all the criticisms of immigrants coming over to this country. You know, the stop, close the borders,

stop allowing Muslims, stop allowing all these people to come over from these, these dangerous areas. Somehow or another, these people would be agents of these dangerous areas coming to destroy our democracy. But these people are trapped. A lot of these people are people that are experiencing these horrible conditions, much like many of the people that originally made it to America in the first place. Yeah, I mean, our country is immigrants. That's what the country is. My father is a two-time war refugee, right? I mean, he fled Spain during the Civil War. I mean, he's passed away. He was born in 1923. He fled Spain during

the Civil War, and then he fled France because the Nazis rolled in. He came to this country. He was a brilliant physicist, and we were lucky to have him, right? And he was eternally lucky to be part of this country as well. So what was odd about Trump's travel, I mean, not to get political again, but I got to say what was odd about Trump's travel ban, that there were countries that we'd never been attacked by. Like no one from those countries had ever attacked this country. Like, I don't really, like, what are those countries doing on the travel ban? This lunatic that killed people in New York, Uzbekistan, like that wasn't on the travel ban. Like, I mean, I understand trying to create a filter that keeps bad people out.

Of course, every country does that. I just didn't understand the specific logic of those countries on the list. It made no sense to me. No, it made no sense to anybody. And it's also you're assuming that everybody in these areas is bad, including the people that are trying to escape. That sounds insane. including the people that are trying to escape. That sounds insane.

And that sounds, it's cruel and anti-human to not want people to have a chance. I'm not saying don't vet these people out. Don't interview them and communicate with them and find out what their backgrounds are. As much information as you can get. Yeah, of course. Are you concerned, because this is something that's been bothering me. I was concerned about my own reaction to yesterday's mass shooting, that I was almost nonchalant about it. I was like, well, there's another one. Like, we're getting numb to mass shootings.

You know, I asked myself two questions, and I didn't mean to ask them, and I'm just being honest in telling people this. I asked myself, I wonder if it was a white church or a black church. And I asked myself, I wonder if the attacker was an Islamic radical and a foreigner, or was he a homegrown American? I assumed it was a he obviously. Yeah. Um, and I don't even know what that says, what those questions say about me or about the country, but it's really interesting. Those are the first things I asked and I didn't like, I didn't like that those questions came to my mind so quickly. There was something about it

that didn't feel good and they're very obvious questions to ask. I mean, you know, it's clear that those are very important things to know but I didn't like that it came to me so quickly. Yeah, I asked the exact same questions but I also felt like it's just,

these are patterns. They're inescapable patterns whether it's the Vegas massacre or this one or the Orlando shootings. It's always a man. And is it a Muslim or is it a crazy white guy? Well, you know, in Tribe, I write about mass shootings. They're a very particular thing. I mean, there's gang shootings in Chicago or whatever that may have a kind of logic to them, right?

Like you're controlling turf. There's money involved, drugs, whatever. Yeah, it makes sense. So it would show you a bunch of innocent people get shot. That's the price you pay for gang wars. There's a logic to it. Mass shootings are completely nihilistic, right? It's someone killing as many people that he doesn't know, right, as possible before he dies.

It's totally nihilistic. As possible before he dies. It's totally nihilistic. And what I found, and I did a lot of research into it, that those kinds of mass shootings typically happen in middle class communities, like otherwise safe middle class communities or small, low crime Christian communities. They have never happened in the inner city. I mean, literally never happened. They happen in communities that are otherwise very safe, very Christian, very boring, frankly. And it really made me wonder, like, is there – I mean, lots of countries have as many guns as we do.

Every country has crazy people in it, in them, right? We are the only country that does this to ourselves. And we do it only in a certain kind of community, right? It doesn't happen in high crime, low income communities, right? It happens in the most sort of like small, quiet, Christian, low crimecrime, bland, suburban, or rural communities. That's where it happens. So what does it say? Why is it that these communities are not producing crazy people, but somehow those people come to a place where they think this is a good thing to do? Like, why is that happening?

My theory is that the deep alienation of the suburbs, of sort of small town America, the lack of real community effort, and the lack of national unity in the past, I mean, the mass killings have risen abruptly in the last 15 years. And, you know, it's hard for me, it's, you don't murder people in your own community. When that happens, it means the community doesn't exist, at least for the murderer. Do you see any connection or do you consider any connection between psych drugs? I mean, I don't know how many of these people are on psych drugs. A tremendous amount.

Yeah. Like there was a study that, see if you could find it, Jamie. There's a study that – see if you can find it, Jamie. They connected all the mass shootings that have happened over the last two decades with all the different medications that people were on. And every single one of them was on something or was withdrawing from something. Okay. So here's the question. Are the drugs creating the behavior or are the drugs treating a mental disorder that itself is tied to the behavior? Very good question.

Right? I mean, there's no way to know. Mass shootings of the nihilistic sort that I'm referring to started abruptly rose in the 80s. Okay? And then doubled since 2006. And I think they're increasing even more since then. So every mass shooting over the last 20 years has one thing in common and isn't guns. Yeah, this is it.

Right. But that's not that's not just positive. Right. You know what I mean? Right. So you're right. It's not correlation. It could be the depression is rising in alienated communities, and the depression is getting unsuccessfully treated with drugs.

So all these people are on drugs, but really what's happening is that, and this is true, suicide, depression, PTSD, anxiety, alienation, all of these things are going up in society. I mean, that's just statistically true. Unquestionably. The question that I would have about this, though, is that when I've talked to a psychiatrist about it, they say that the dissociative aspect of the psychiatric medications are part of the problems that people do not feel. They don't feel the connection even to their actions, that they can do something horrific like shoot people. And they might be even doing that to try to get some feeling. Listen, that's totally possible. I would also offer this idea that the massive national addiction to violent video games is a dissociated experience. You're shooting people. They're not real people.

That doesn't happen. You know? I mean. Do you think they're connected somehow? I don't know. But I'm just saying what you just described happening in the streets of America is exactly duplicated digitally in video games. Right. But the video games doesn't, it doesn't keep you from feeling things in the real world where the psych medications do. Right. But the experience of shooting at human targets

that aren't real. Right. If you incorporate that into how you feel about shooting, then you go out into the real world. It may not be that hard to, particularly with the aid of aid of psych drugs and whatever depression is sort of endemic in this society right now. It might not be hard to transpose that dissociated experience in a video game with digital images, transpose it onto actual humans in the real world if you're sufficiently disturbed. That's a very good connection and an interesting question because I have heard it discussed when they're talking about war and how kids that grow up playing like Call of Duty and things along those lines, they get really good at it, would be actually better in combat. They would have the tactics mapped out in their mind better. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. I mean, look, there's a TV program called Active Shooter, right? What is it? I just heard about it. I haven't seen it. I would never watch it. But they go back and recreate. They interview everyone who survived an active shooting incident and recreate it. And now people watch for, I mean, in some sense, entertainment, right? of acting shooting incidents that are, I think, partly the result of the kind of deep alienation that happens in a media-obsessed society that where no one's talking to each other. You know, I mean, it's the perfect circle, right? Well, they're definitely escalating, right? I mean, we had the event in New York where the guy runs over all those people, and then

a couple of days later, we're having the one in Texas. Look, this is happening not over the scale of one a year, one every few years. We're getting them once a week. Well, yeah. And what's interesting, I mean, in New York, there was an ideology behind it. So it wasn't nihilistic. I mean, it felt nihilistic to us, but to that guy, he actually believed in what he was doing. But the real mass shooters that they're just out there to kill as many people as possible, it's hard to know what the ideology is. Well, this guy was dishonorably discharged from the military for something. I forget what it was.

So he was in a position. What's up? It was abuse on his spouse and child. Right. And he didn't have a license to own a gun. Right. He owned whatever guns that he had. He got them illegally.

In Colorado, right? He drove to Colorado? That's what I heard. He got them in Colorado. He was in Texas. He was in Texas. I think he got them in Colorado. Did he get them at a gun show or something like that?

I don't know. I don't know where he got them. But, yeah, I mean, we're looking at little tiny details. The real question is, how the fuck does a person do something like that? I mean, he shot babies. You know, he shot five-year-olds. And the whole thing is just, it doesn't even make sense. And I don't know if he was on any psych medication or if they know he

was, but you know, just the staggering numbers of broken individuals that are committing these crimes is just very, very confusing. Right. And you think that it's tied to what you were saying too about communities, about inner cities where you have impoverished high crime areas, but they're not seeing these things. Do you think because in these high crime communities are dealing with much more life and death and the struggles much more real that they feel more connected? I mean, I, you know, I, this is totally a theory. I mean, I have no idea. It's just the truth is that those awful sort of school shootings and mass shootings in the streets have never happened in a high crime neighborhood. poverty, that for all of those things, there is also more face-to-face communal connection in poor neighborhoods than in wealthy neighborhoods or in middle-class neighborhoods.

And that communal connection, I mean, literally meeting people on the landing of your apartment building, right? Meeting people on the doorstoop, on the street, you know, that those kinds of human interactions, even in an economically stressed neighborhood, that those create enough of a sense of community that people who might otherwise go crazy and turn their guns in this nihilistic way on innocent people, that they just don't do it. Because why would I do that to my own people? And what I fear in this country is that we're losing the sense of what our own people are. What are our own people? And if you're doing that in the streets of the neighboring town, clearly there's been some loss of some idea of what we belong to.

And that's where national service or a congressional commission that really calls out rhetoric that undermines our sense of who we are as a nation. Like, you know, it might start at the top. Changing that might start at the top. It might help. Do you think there's any incentive that these people experience to be someone who creates this big event where everybody has to look at them? like i mean i i don't i mean i'm guessing but i'm i'm imagining that someone like that feels powerless and insignificant and abused by society and at least they'll be famous in their last acts in their death they're going to cause a lot of reaction they're going to they're like oh you you messed with me my whole life at least for the last five minutes of my life you you guys are the ones that are going to be. They're going to, they're like, oh, you messed with me my whole life. At least for the last

five minutes of my life, you guys are the ones that are going to be scared. You're going to be begging me for mercy now. I've begged you for mercy my whole life. Now you're going to be

begging me for mercy. I mean, I'm totally guessing, right? I'm just like riffing here, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was something of that to it.

Well, it's a good guess. I mean, this, this has been a very common conversation lately as to whether or not you discuss these people and even bring up their names. I know in some places and some even media outlets, they don't want to report on the person, the individual that's creating this chaos.

Well, you know, one of the things I think is a problem is that if you love this country, there is a certain pressure to think it's the best possible country ever. Right. Yeah. And I think it's very painful for Americans to actually look at the actual statistics and say, you know, for example, with mass shootings, we're the only country that does this to ourselves. The only one? There's not another country that has? I mean, not at the rate that we do. Right. Not at this level. In China, there's a rash of knife attacks, right? I mean, it's not that it doesn't happen at all. But if you really look over the last 20 years, more than that, since the 80s, when this shit

started, we're the only country that does this regularly to ourselves. And regularly to the point where it's like every month, practically. So it's a sign. I mean, if your child was acting out in a violent way and punching kids in the playground, you'd think, okay, he's in pain, right? He's acting out like, what's wrong with this kid? Like he's clearly in pain and some kind of pain and he's lashing out. Well, the society is in some kind of pain. Like, what is it? You know? And, you know, you can, you know, you can dismiss me as a like bleeding heart liberal, you know, whatever. I don't mean you, but one could dismiss me as a bleeding heart liberal. Like, okay, well then what's your question then? My question is, why are we in so much pain?

That's the question that I think might begin to lead to an answer of why there's such high suicide rates in such a wealthy society, why there's mass killing, you know, that would begin to answer those questions. If you don't like that question, what's your question to answer those terrible tragedies? What's your question? Well, what you're saying is very compelling. And it's an aspect of this that I don't think is being considered. And I think your book is very important when it comes to that. I think the questions that you raise and all the various examples that you give, it's really food for thought. And I don't think it's being discussed in very many other circles. Everyone's looking at the psychiatric drugs. Everyone's looking at the white men with guns and the gun problem, the NRA and all these various aspects. They're not looking at the root cause of this depression, anxiety, and this detachment that we have from our neighbors

and our community. Look, I mean, Somalia has got a lot more guns than we do, right? And there's plenty of violence in Somalia, but no one's walking down the streets of their own neighborhood massacring their own people. Only we do that. And what is, you know, in a sense, it's a call, it's a cry for help by our society, like not by that person. I'm saying generally the phenomenon within our society is a kind of cry for help. Like we are, something is wrong, psychically, spiritually wrong. Christians will say we're not a Christian enough country, but you know, like that's not true. That's not the problem, right? There are peaceful Muslim societies and very violent Christian ones, and you can't correlate it with Christianity.

I think the one thing you can—there are oppressive societies that are very low violence, and there are full democracies like us with lots of violence. So it's not the democratic system, right? What is it? democratic system, right? What is it? And my guess, and it's only a guess, my guess is that a certain amount of the high suicide rates, the high depression, anxiety, drug addiction, porn addiction, child abuse, mass shootings in the streets, my guess is that the common denominator in all those things is the sort of catastrophic lack of communal connection that many Americans experience. Well, it's a very compelling argument. It's a very compelling point that, again, I don't see being discussed in very many other areas. And I really appreciated it, man.

I really appreciate your book. I think it's great. And I really suggest anybody who's interested in this subject, please go read it. Tribe, Sebastian Younger. Thank you, brother. Appreciate it, man. I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much. Anytime. Come by. Bye. All right. Thanks, everybody. Awesome.