The Joe Rogan Experience - #1655 - Sebastian Junger

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

Sebastian Junger is a bestselling author, journalist, and an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker. His latest book, "Freedom", is available now.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Good to see you, man. How are you? Really good. Very good to see you, too. I see you're very prepared. Yeah, look at all those notes on those note cards. Yeah, serious stuff. We were talking before. There's so much to talk about, but we were talking before and you were

saying that, uh, over the last year you almost died because you had some crazy internal and, uh, you had an aneurysm in your pancreas. Is that what you said it was? Yeah. I had an undiagnosed asymptomatic aneurysm, which is a sort of ballooning in the blood vessel, in the artery, in my pancreatic artery. And out of the blue, it was a congenital thing. Like I apparently had developed during my whole life. It was just from a structural problem. And one afternoon, one beautiful June afternoon last year, it burst. And, you know, I just felt this pain shoot through last year at first. And, um, you know, I just felt this pain shoot through my stomach. I was like, damn, what is that?

And within a few minutes I couldn't stand up. And within about 10 minutes I was started to go blind and my wife called the ambulance and, um, those guys got there and, and, um, you know, I was tanking really fast and the hospital is an hour away. And I said, by a miracle, I don't even think the doctors understand it, but by a miracle, I was still alive when I got to the hospital, I lost 90% of my blood into my abdomen. Um, and, um, I didn't know I was dying, but I was dying and I was right in that sort of twilight zone. And, um, the, uh, a black pit opened up underneath me and I felt myself starting to get pulled down into it. And I, I didn't want to go like it was cold and dark and black and bottomless. And I just knew like, do not go down there. I was getting pulled down into it. And right at that moment,

down into it. And right at that moment, my father, who passed away in 2012, my father sort of appeared next to me and started trying to communicate, trying to communicate with me and comforting me. And I sort of waved him away. And the last thing I remember saying to the doctor, I was sort of losing consciousness. And the last thing I said to the doctor was, you're losing me right now. You got to hurry. He was trying to put a, he'd cut my neck open. He was trying to put a line into my neck to, you know, they pumped 10, 10 units of blood into me. And that's what brought me back.

It was really close. Wow. Um, when you say you, you felt like you were sinking into a pit, like, do we seeing this? I, I, yeah, I mean? I mean, your perceptions are very weird because there's very little oxygen in the brain. I had a hemoglobin count of 1.2. If you're a doctor, you know what that is. It's almost unheard of.

And so I just felt this pit underneath me and it was pulling me into it and I didn't want to go. And you can see a pit? Yeah, I mean, again, see slash feel. Your perceptions are very weird when you're like that. And then my father a pit? Yeah. I mean, again, see slash feel. Your perceptions are very weird when you're like that. And then my father also was sort of floating above me. He was a presence. I don't know if seeing him is quite the word. It's another perception. Wow. Yeah. So coming out of that, once you regained your health, you must have had an incredible newfound appreciation for all

the people in your life and just everything. It was a long path. You know, I mean, I'm a really healthy guy. Later, the doctor said, you know, it was your, you know, I was a marathon runner when I was young and, um, I don't drink. I'm, I'm athletic and I use my body pretty vigorously. And he said that saved your life. Like you didn't have a heart attack. Like you owe your life to that. Wow, wow. But the next morning, you know, I didn't know that I'd almost died. I had no idea.

I have two little girls. I have a four-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old. And the most precious things to me, I mean, I can't even describe it, obviously. And the fact that they almost lost their dad was just devastating. When the ICU nurse came in and said, how are you doing, Mr. Junger? You're one lucky guy. You almost died yesterday. I had no idea.

And then she came back an hour later. And she said, how are you doing? And I said, you know, physically, and I was throwing up blood. I was not doing very well physically, but I said I was. I said, but, you know, I'm really struggling with what you told me. And it's really terrifying. I didn't know. And, I mean, I said I almost died in my own driveway in front of my family.

And I didn't even know. Like, I said, I keep thinking about it. I can't stop. And she said, the wisest things, one of the wisest things I've ever heard. She said, stop thinking of that moment as scary and start thinking of it as sacred. And she didn't elaborate. She didn't need to. And the next five days in the ICU, I thought about that word sacred and what the experience was now giving me access to. And, you know, not to sound sort of like trite, but life is a frigging miracle.

And I'm not religious. You know, whatever. I don't think any of us, few of us, I certainly didn't quite understand what a miracle it is that we're alive, that we exist, that we draw breath, that we can think about ourselves, that we're here for even one day is a freaking miracle. And you can forget that because your life gets busy. And all of a sudden, I feel like life was sort of returned to me, meaning that I understood how sacred it is. And again, I'm an atheist. I don't mean sacred in a religious sense. I mean, in the sense that it has a profound value and you mustn't forget.

It's so easy to lose sight of that when you're caught up in your bills or traffic or your bullshit. Yeah. There's so much of life that is essential in order for you to just keep on existing in society, but not really important. Yeah. And, you know, we're humans. I mean, we're wired to react to things. You know, someone pisses you off or you're tired. It's not that we shouldn't have those reactions. Those reactions also keep us alive. I mean, our emotional and physical reactions are adaptive and they protect us, right? But at the end of the day, you don't want them to run away with your experience of life. You want to reclaim it and just go right, you know, all I have to do is go back to that moment of what happened in that driveway and that I was spared

getting pulled into that pit. That didn't happen. And my daughters get to have a father. I get to experience whatever the rest of my life is, whatever it is. Who knows how long I'll live, but that gift was returned to me. And I don't even know who to say thank you to other than I've started giving blood. 10 people donated blood and saved my life. I'll never know who they are. And that, um, you know, it makes you part of this sort of web of life, um, in a way that it's, you know, when I gave blood for the first time, you know, like after this happened, I gave blood and I've made me feel so good. Uh, and now I've, I can't wait to do it again. Like you're, I'm part of something bigger. And, and, and that's one of the most profound human joys is to be part of something greater than

yourself. That is a beautiful thing and a beautiful way to think about it and i think i'm fine if this is true maybe someone told me this is giving blood actually good for you i think your body having the opportunity to replenish its blood supply actually stimulates some aspects of your system? Yeah, I can. I mean, I'm not a doctor, but I can imagine. You're not a doctor? I don't know if this is even true, though. I mean, it's one of those things where I'm like,

it's in a dusty corner of my brain. I'm like, what is that? Is that real or is that horse shit? There's a lot of those things in my brain, by the way. Here it goes. Benefits of donating blood, side effects, advantages, and more. Side effects of donating blood, donation. This part here.

Okay. Health benefits of donating blood, including good health and reduced risk of cancer, hemochromatosis. It helps in reducing the risk of damage to the liver and the pancreas. Donating blood may help in improving cardiovascular health and reducing obesity. So yeah. Okay, good.

I'm always worried about my fucking memory. So there you go. I knew there was something there. Yeah, yeah. That's good news. It's actually good for people for you to donate blood and good for you as well. All right, let's donate blood, Jamie.

And lower blood pressure. What do you got for what what kind of blood would type? Great question. You don't know he's how do you not know you're fucking grown-ass man now Sebastian and I know I Just found out a year ago Yeah, that's awesome though So this this experience, how long did it take you before you were fully recovered? Well, I had a gallon of blood in my abdomen. A gallon?

Well, whatever the amount of blood in your body is. How do they get it out? Something like that. They can't. It's a hematoma and my body had to gradually reabsorb it. Whoa. So that takes months. had to gradually reabsorb it. So, you know, that takes months. And now I'm left with this sort of psychological residue of the experience, which is I have this, you know, renewed, reinvigorated

appreciation for life. But also the truth about life is that none of us know for sure we're going to be alive at sunset. You know, I mean, we all know you can get cancer or you can die in a car accident or whatever. But really the truth is the thing, we're alive because the tiniest membranes in your body are not rupturing. You know what I mean? Like the system that your body is, is like incredibly complex. And if something goes wrong, you can be dead in minutes. And you can be totally healthy and that can happen. And the fact that the universe can just randomly take you out for no apparent reason, that's pretty startling news if you think about it.

I didn't know it worked that way. And it can make you kind of paranoid. Did it make you paranoid? No, totally. Yeah? I mean, I just – every day I was like, I mean, this is gradually going away, but I just, I realized, like, you don't know.

You just don't know that you're going to be alive in an hour from now. And you're going running, you're reading a book to your daughter, you're whatever, having dinner with some friends, and now, I was like, an hour from now, I could be dead, or the guy I'm talking to could be dead, and none of us know, and none of us can do anything about it.

And that's just what life is. We're living on a rock hurtling through the universe. I mean we're part of the universe and we exist at its mercy really. Were you afterwards contemplating what that pit was and what it means and what it means to slide into that? You know, I started to do a little research into the death. I want to write a book about this. I think I'm going to call it Pulse. Oh, I like that. The thing that keeps us alive. It's a good name. And why we're alive and what happens when you die. And I've just started doing some research into this. And the visitation by dead ancestors is very common for people.

And often, I mean, there's all kinds of reasons that you might hallucinate when your brain's low on oxygen. But, you know, I didn't hallucinate anyone in my family. I didn't hallucinate my dead father. Right. And that's very, very common. And I didn't know I was dying. So it's not like I conjured him up because I knew I was headed somewhere. I was very confused. And there he was trying to comfort me. And that's a really common experience. So I looked into it. And so they have all these, you know, release of ketamine and all

like they have all these DMT and they have all these sort of neurochemical explanations for the subjective experience of dying for the person. And we have all these sort of neurochemical explanations for the subjective experience of dying for the person. And we only know this because people come back like I do and report what they saw. And it's usually pretty weird. But it's pretty weird in predictable ways. Like a lot of people see the dead. It's as if they show up to help. And I want to repeat, I'm an atheist. I'm not religious. I don't believe in anything. My dad was a physicist. So I want to sort of explain what happens in ways that he would respect scientifically. And so one of the things they said is that you can take low oxygen, ketamine, all these things that physically could happen in the brain.

You can subject a healthy person to those things and they don't have the same kinds of hallucinations. Those hallucinations are particular only to the dying. And I want to know, I want to try to figure out what is going on in that weird twilight space. You should, um, you should see if someone will do a therapeutic DMT trip with you. I've heard about that. Yeah. Yeah. They'll do it.

You know, they were doing it out of University of New Mexico. Rick Strassman was doing it, and he had full federal approval for these studies and there was a book called DMT the spirit molecule that he wrote about the the experience of taking these people and doing an IV drip dimethyltryptamine but they all had these insanely profound experiences that stayed with them for you know depending on the person but for long periods of time afterwards and profoundly changed their lives well an endogenous form of DMT is released in the brain of dying people. Maybe he wrote about that. But he, they speculated on it.

So what the problem was for the longest time is the pineal gland. And the pineal gland is what, you know, ancients used to call the seed of the soul. And it's this small gland that they think in in reptiles it actually has a retina and a cornea and i think even a lens it literally is a third eye yeah google that i think the pineal gland in reptiles has it definitely has a retina, I believe, and I think it has a lens. But it's like the third eye, the concept of the third eye, it actually is an eye in some strange way. And it also, just recently they confirmed, here it goes. The pineal complex of reptiles is a morphologically and functionally connected set of organs.

and functionally connected set of organs and originates in an evagination? Evagination? Evagination? Hmm. Of the roof of the, oh boy. It's formed by two structures, the pineal organ and the parietal eye. Parietal?

Parietal? Parietal eye? Parietal. Parietal? Yeah. Both the pineal gland and the parietal eye are photosensitive yeah it it actually go there which reptile has a third eye like that um so there literally are well anyway point is this is always been thought of as the third eye if you look at you know eastern

mysticism and whenever people are enlightened or depicted they're depicted with that third eye and this organ the Cottonwood Research Foundation was the first group that they actually discovered that for sure the pineal gland does produce DMT in living rats because before they knew that it was produced by the liver and the lungs, and there was a lot of anecdotal evidence that pointed to the pineal gland, but they couldn't prove it because you'd have to actually cut into someone's head. There was a lot of problems just based on the structure of the brain and getting in there.

But through this Cottonwood Research Foundation, which was working on different DMT studies. So they don't know why and they don't know what it is, but they think that this is also responsible for dreams. They think it's responsible for some of the insane visuals and weird things you experience in dreams, but they also, the really spiritual, the people that are willing to go way out on a limb, think it's a chemical doorway to the afterlife.

Well, let me tell you, I mean, that's a pretty stunning thought. And we all, I mean, I'm not a mystic, but also we all need to be humble about what we know and don't know. And we have no idea what there is after death. And I mean, we might not even be able to be capable of understanding it with the brains that we have, you know. So maybe that's why we keep bumping into the unknowable because it's just unknowable to us. At any rate, let me tell you that two nights before I almost died, I had a pain in my abdomen for a year that I ignored. How bad was the pain? You know, it was – I could tolerate it, which to me meant, okay, well,

if you can bear it, then it's not going to kill you. You know what I mean? And the other, the corollary to that is if you can't bear it, you should learn to bear it because you know what I mean? Like, so toughness will kill you. If it doesn't save you, it will kill you. And, um, so it just sort of came and went right in the area where the bleed happened. And I ignored it and ignored it. And then it kind of stopped happening for a month or so. And I had a dream right around dawn. And my family and I, we all sleep in the same, it's not even a bed. It's a, you know, like pad on the floor. And so I woke up, I was woken up around 6 a.m. by this dream. And the dream was that I died. And I died unnecessarily. I died. I made a? And I can't go back because I've crossed over and I'm, I'm just thinking, you stupid asshole, you, you screwed up and now you're dead and there's nothing you can do about it. And I woke up with a start.

Oh, thank God I'm not dead. I'm alive. And here's my, my daughter was right next to me. I put my arm around her. I was like, oh, thank God. About 36 hours later, I was dying. Wow. Yeah. Do you think that that was your body trying to tell you, hey, man, this shit's about to blow? Listen, I mean, for a year,

my body tried to tell me with pain that something was wrong and I ignored it. And then 36 hours left to go, it sent me a dream. And on the morning of the, um, on the morning of the day that it happened, you know, I, I, we live in a, I live partly in, we live partly in New York city and partly in a really remote area at the end of a long dead end dirt road in the woods. And it gets overgrown, right? And the fire department said, listen, you got to clear that because we can't get trucks in there. You're going to have to clear that dirt road.

You know, it's a small town. Everyone knows each other. It's like, listen, clear that stuff. And that morning, you know, I'd been meaning to do this for two years, right? I was an arborist for a long time. I know I've used chainsaws my whole life. Like I do all that work myself.

And I'd been meaning to do it for two years. And that morning I was like, I've got to clear that damn driveway. And I took I'd been meaning to do it for two years. And that morning I was like, I've got to clear that damn driveway. And I took my chainsaw and I took a few hours and I cleared the whole length. There's a long dirt driveway through the woods. I cleared the whole thing. So emergency vehicles could get in. And a few hours, like three hours later I was dying. So imagine if you didn't do that. Well, exactly. Right. And so the thing is like the body, I think can communicate with the unconscious mind. And then the unconscious mind tries to communicate with the conscious mind.

But your conscious mind's a freaking idiot. Right. And it doesn't take little hints. It doesn't take clues. Bomb it with pain. It ignores it. Bomb it with dreams. It's like, wow, that was weird.

But at the end of the day, your body's trying to keep you alive, and it sent me out there with a chainsaw. And I don't, you know, I'm actively avoidant of mystical explanations for things, but I honestly don't know how to explain any of this. And I'm going to try to with my book Pulse. Like my whole life as a journalist, I've gone to front lines in wars in foreign countries and come back and reported what I saw there. Right. And this is the ultimate front line. It's that twilight place between life and death. And I was privileged that I could go there and come back. I made it back.

And I want to report what I saw. Wow. I want to read it. It's a, it's the thing that we all wonder, what is this? Is this a pit stop or is this the life, you know, is the life a never ending infinite experience that goes on forever in many forms or is it just this, or is this a thing that you do over and over and over again until you get it right? I had that conversation with a friend of mine once and they were really, really bummed out about it. And I said, if this is life, if the life that we all live like right now, just you have to do this over and over again for infinity until you get it right. They're like, oh, fuck that.

I don't want to keep doing this. I'm like, but wait a minute, don't you wanna do this right now? Because I wanna do this right now. I love life, I have great friends, I love my family, I love what I do for a living, I'm enjoying life. Why wouldn't I wanna keep doing this? Because if you told me I was gonna die tomorrow,

I'd be like, shit, not yet, I have too much to do. But if you told me I have to do this forever, I'd be like, oh my God my god that's forever that's so long why why what is what is this is it the concept of infinity or infinite time is so enormous it's impossible for our puny little brains to grasp so we just we think of it as like a run that you can never end or an exercise program that's just going to drag you into the depths of hell. You're never going to get out of it. What is it that bothers us about the idea of living this life forever and ever?

That's a good question. I mean, for a lot of people, life is painful, and it may just be that they don't want to go through that their whole life. Yeah, but my friend doesn't have a painful life. Yeah, okay. Well, right. He's fine. He's a comedian. He's fine. I hear that comedians are in the most pain and they deal with it through comedy. Don't believe that.

No. Okay. No. There's a lot of mental illness. Right. Strong mental illness lines. That's probably the underlying... If there's one primary factor, mental illness is a big one.

It's usually from traumatic childhood. Yeah, right. Yeah, but overall, you know, fairly resilient because of the fact they have to deal with adversity constantly. Most people don't deal with the kind of adversity

that you deal with when you're bombing or you go on stage and you're dealing with hecklers and stuff. You're dealing with, it's a different level of adversity. And the adage of the tears of a clown, they're really depressed and on stage is the only place they get to be. Not really true either.

You get us together when we're around our people, pretty fun. I bet. We have a good time. I bet. That's awesome to hear. I'm glad to hear that. There's a tremendous amount of camaraderie in the comedy community. Right, right.

Because it's not that many of us. There's maybe on earth, I don't know, 1,000. I mean, I don't know. Maybe in other countries. I miss it. But I can tell you in America. In America, there might be legitimately 1,000 professional comedians. Out of those 1,000, maybe 500 of them are good.

So I might even be overestimating there. Like in terms of like who can make a living on the road. And it's not that many of us. I just watched on YouTube the beginning of Good Morning Vietnam. Oh, yeah. It's just sheer genius. I know he was in a lot of pain. He suffered, right?

Well he had some serious physical problems. He had Lewy body syndrome, he had a heart attack. And then a friend of mine who's a doctor actually wrote a paper about the effects of long-term anesthesia. When someone's put under for a long period of time for like a heart attack, things like that, oftentimes depression follows. Yes. Yeah. And he was talking about that in terms of the impact on your endocrine system.

So he was writing about that and he was saying that there could have been, he was a Robin Williams fan as well, and he was saying there probably could have been a correlation between Robin Williams going through that heart attack, having open-heart surgery, and then depression following afterwards. Then there was the Lewy body syndrome,

and then all this medication they had to take, which also had profound side effects. I lost a very dear friend who was the funniest man that I knew and pretty much, I think, the funniest person on the planet. You know, he just wasn't a professional comedian. But, you know, he had a long, long illness and some serious mental instability, and he took his own life. And, you know, he was the most brilliant among us.

You know what I mean? And so you guys, you comedians, there must be every once in a while like a real tragedy to process. That must be very hard. Yeah, I mean, it's not that common that comedians take their own lives. I mean, it does happen with Robin.

Robin was a big one for a lot of people because he was not just a comedian. He was like a cultural icon in terms of like his films, you think all the different movies that guy was in. And he had such just a comedian. He was like a cultural icon in terms of his films, all the different movies that guy was in. He had such a range, too. To me, when you know how brilliant a person really is, do you remember that film that he did about the crazy film processing guy?

It was like a 24-hour film. You remember those little film booths, photo booths that people would go to? Back in the old days, you you youngsters we would have a camera and the camera would have film in it and you'd have to bring the film to a place for processing and robin williams did a film about a guy who was a psychopath who was obsessed with someone from processing their picture one hour photo that's what it was nice it was fucking great and you just from that film you realize the range this man had right right you know i mean from goodwill hunting from you know so many different yeah he was he was a genius yeah yeah and the human race

is so lucky to have geniuses in it you know what i mean like we all feed off them yeah we do we get we they elevate us and it costs them sometimes but we all need we need those people you know yeah to be a guy like that to be is dealing with the kind of rpms he was dealing with yeah you know like it he would spit out these amazing works but you know just the cost on himself. You know, in Good Morning Vietnam, in the initial, you know, few minutes, like, it's pretty clear that it wasn't scripted because, you know, there's this, like, kid in the control booth. I mean, the conceit is that it's a military DJ, a radio announcer during Vietnam, right? And the military command didn't really like him because he was saying things that

were sort of like not sufficiently sort of respectful of the war or whatever. But of course, the troops loved him. He was a real guy, right? And so Robin Williams, it was pretty clear if you watch the beginning, it's worth watching. It wasn't scripted because the kid in the sound booth behind him, you could watch him react to this like three minute, like the outpouring from Robin Williams, where he's like channeling different people and it's all coming out. It's totally insane. And this kid can't even stand up. He's laughing so hard. I'm like, that's not acting. That's a guy who actually had no idea this was coming. Right, right, right. It's amazing. Yeah.

I met him only once, and I met him after one of my shows. I didn't know I was talking to him until a couple minutes into the conversation. He had a crazy big white beard, and he waited in line with everybody else to meet me. Wow. And I was talking to him, and he was telling me, I was telling him, oh, I love this bit, I love that, and I love how you put that together. I was like, oh, thanks, man. Thanks. I love that and I love how you put that together. I was like, oh thanks man, thanks for pre.

I'm like, holy shit, this is Robin Williams. I didn't know, I literally had no idea until like several minutes into our conversation. He must have loved that. That was pretty cool, man. Yeah, very cool. It was cool that, you know, first of all it was cool that he just went to the show by himself right you know

he decided he wanted to come see me maybe somebody told him i was funny and he came to and then he waited in line to meet me and then wanted to talk about individual bits and how he loved how i put this one together and that one it was crazy it was like i realized in the middle and i'm like oh my god that's awesome it was it was pretty, but that just shows you what kind of thoughtful person he was You know, he wasn't into being seen In fact, he had a baseball hat on and glasses and the crazy big white bushy beard couldn't even recognize him He snuck around. I mean, I think I think prominent people Have even more of a duty to be humble than people that aren't prominent. I mean the burden is more on them. Yeah, for sure. Right. It's a part of the responsibility of this unusual position.

So it is, you, you need to be in that sense. You need to be an example. Yeah. If you can. Absolutely. Absolutely. Do your best. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think just for his mental health, I think it was probably important to, I. I mean, the amount of fame that that guy experienced for the amount of decades that he had experienced. That's a it's a crazy intoxicant. It's not healthy. You know. Right. Right.

Yeah. I mean, there's something I write about a little bit in Freedom. I mean, I will be talking about that later. But just to sort of mention it, like real leadership, real leadership is someone who is willing to sort of put themselves last, you know. And you can see it in the military. Like I was watching this one officer, Lieutenant Piosa, and we were in a very bad situation. And he stood up in this situation. It was hard to imagine doing that. And he stood up because he needed to know where everyone was on the side of the mountain and we were about to get absolutely hammered and um

and the sergeant said sir please sit down you it's our job to get shot at it's your job to stay alive and direct this show right and that's real leadership um there was a leader during the Easter Rising in Ireland that I write about and the head of the whole Easter Rising in Dublin, the head of the whole thing. I mean, the general Petraeus of the Irish rebels would go out into gunfire in the street to figure out where to put the positions and the guns and the sandbags and everything with bullets smacking all around him. He was head of the whole damn thing. And his like aides were like, sir, please take cover. We need you. And he wouldn't do it. That's real leadership. And that can be a military leader. It can be a comedian who's beloved by people. Like if you make yourself one of everyone else, then you're really, really a leader. Make yourself one of everyone else.

you're really, really a leader. Make yourself one of everyone else. Like when you use your position of power to protect yourself, to insulate yourself from things that everyone else is going through, you're actually not a leader. You're an opportunist. That's interesting. So how would you guide one to do that? How would you guide one to be a leader in that situation? You know, I think there are people that have that in them and people that don't. And I think there are people who want leadership positions because it gives them opportunity. I think there are people that are cowards that wind up in leadership positions, you know, and they're not going to do that. They're going to protect themselves. And that, you know, in Western society, we have huge margins between where we are and survival, right? Huge margins.

So we can have bad leadership that's sort of like opportunistic and self-serving, and it doesn't matter. We're going to muddle along okay. But the Easter Rising couldn't afford to do that. And when someone like Robin Williams comes along and does not privilege himself in a comedy club and just is like everyone else. I'm like, I really tip my hat to that. Like that's real grace and dignity. Yeah, I do as well. And this way you're describing leadership, like I think this is what everybody wishes we could recognize in our political leaders. Like we wish there was a shining example. And I think if there was one in the past election, it was Tulsi Gabbard,

because you're talking about a woman who had served overseas twice in medical units, had literally worked with people, had been shot and blown up, and had served as a congresswoman for six years, or I guess eight years at the end. So she really was an example of that. But other than that, you saw just a lot of more of the same.

And it was really frustrating for people. So they had to pick a horse and they had to pick a horse that they weren't exactly excited about. And that's what led us to what we have in the White House currently. It's not, it's like this fake excitement about this supposed leader that doesn't really exhibit any of these characteristics that we would be hoping to see in someone who's running the show. Well, you know, I think the, the, the willingness to tell the truth as a political leader, even if it puts you in disfavor with your own party is a, um, a strong indicator of, of moral courage. And, you know,

both parties, I think, have a deficit of that. And, you know, I mean, I'm a registered Democrat, you know, I've, whatever, not that it really matters, but just to be like in the open about it. But I think, you know, that, you know, Liz Cheney, I mean, she's possibly destroyed her political future i don't know and i i don't know what the truth about anything is but the fact that she's willing to go against the sort of republican orthodoxy to me means that she's putting what she believes to be the truth ahead of her own political um uh future i'm not totally aware of what's going on. Can you explain that? Oh, she, oh yeah. So she's been calling out, um, the, um, the January 6th uprising and calling out the sort of big lie, the election was stolen. Right. And you know, the entire Republican leadership has, has acknowledged

that it was a free and fair election. And then there's been a lot of sort of hemming and hawing and Liz Cheney is like, look, the democracy is more important than either political party. The country is more important than either political party. And the country will collapse if we keep feeding lies to it. And this is a really dangerous lie. And so she's like, I mean, I don't know where you are politically. It doesn't matter to me. None of this matters really other than to point out that she was saying something that she was gravely punished for.

And she did it knowing she would be punished for it. And she did it anyway because she really believed in something. And, you know, there's examples on the left as well of that. And that to me is like that's leadership. It's putting what you believe to be the welfare of the group ahead of your own personal interests. And that is what I would look for in a leader. Yeah. And that's what it's, I just think by the time someone gets to the position that they're going to run for president, you've already been compromised. You've already gotten

through all of the checks and balances that they've laid in place to make sure that you represent the interests of the special interest groups and all the powerful lobbyists and corporations and everybody who's gotten you to the position you're at. Well, right. I mean, the GOP yanked Liz from her position, from her role, right? So she does not have the establishment behind her. And without that, you're never going to be president. I don't know if she wants to be, but- Is it because they want to keep that narrative out there that the election was stolen? Or is it because they don't want to take credit or take responsibility for the Capitol Hill riot?

I think it's a mix of things. I mean, honestly, they're in a really tough place. And I think it's a tough place of their own devising. But they're in a tough place. Something like 70% of Republican voters think the election was stolen. Is that real? Yeah.

70%? Seven-zero, right. So what are you gonna do Is that real? Yeah. 70%. 7-0. Right. So what are you going to do with that politically? And then someone like Liz Cheney comes along and sort of calls out the lie. And that's a very tough position for the GOP to be in. And I think in the short term, it was probably a disreputable but smart move politically. In the long term, I don't think it's a good move. I think at the end of the day, truth wins out and it will catch up with them,

you know, as if things have caught up with their Democrats as well. When they say that 70% think that, is this just based on a narrative or is it based on something they believe in in terms of like they think there's an actual, like event that took place or series of events

that took place that stole the election or is it just a narrative that gets out there like the lib stole the election you know that kind of shit i mean i don't know if poll takers can make distinguish that i mean i don't know how you would phrase the question to sort of split that like what makes you i would like just to add that answer or even multiple choice what makes you think the election was stolen? Right. I mean, I think a lot of it is just sort of what's called virtue signaling. Like, I will say the election is stolen because that means I am part of the current sort of conservative ethos. Yeah.

I'm part of the tribe, right? And so they might not even personally themselves think it was literally stolen, but that kind of mythic truth can be more powerful politically than the literal truth. And people go with it. We're humans. We're emotional creatures. So- Yeah, we love being tribal like that too. Right. So I think there's a lot of tribalism there, but nevertheless, people are saying the election was stolen. 70% of the GOP is saying it was stolen. So that's a tough demographic to go up against if you're a Republican politician who wants to get elected. Like, what are you going to do with that? You're going to kind of have to go along with it. Well, conceivably, what you would say is we have to try to steal it next time.

That's where it gets really scary. you believe, if you really believe that the other side is cheating and you say, well, we have to cheat because we have to win this back because we were the rightful winners of the 2020 election and they stole it from us. Right. It could get real squirrely. Oh, totally. And then you get, I mean, as I said, I'm a Democrat, but I'm particularly harsh with wrongdoing by my people, particularly harsh with wrongdoing by my people, right? And some of the, you know, sort of far lefty fringe woke stuff is really scary to me, you know, like, and I feel like they're a direct equivalent of the crazies on the far right. Like they kind of, they're sort of the mirror image of each other. And, oh, you might like this actually. I thought, I was like, there's MAGA, we know the word MAGA.

There should be a word for the sort of the mirror image of that on the left. Like, what is it? And I came up with WAGA. Woke America gets angry. Right. And the thing about them is, I mean, there was much smaller percentage of the Democratic vote. But it's the same kind of channeled thinking. of the Democratic vote, but it's the same kind of channeled thinking. Like on both sides,

the extremes feel like they personally own the truth and that they can dictate what this country should be. Right. And they sort of poison the like well of public discourse by rejecting any legitimacy to the other side. Yes. You know? And that public discourse is the only thing at the end of the day that's going to keep this country together and save us. And it's like we all get most, the vast majority of people that voted for Trump or voted for Biden are good, righteous, decent people. We need clean water to drink in our our public discourse, like we get thirsty, we need

to drink out of that well, and the extremes on both sides have poisoned it. And I feel like if we were all in a big life raft and someone poisoned the water, we would throw them overboard. And at some point, this country is going to have to do that with the, politically speaking, with the extremists on both sides, because they're basically rejecting the idea that we can all get along. I couldn't agree more. And I think it highlights some of the problems with communicating in text form over the internet and social media websites because a lot of what these people have, whether it's the QAnon people or the woke people, you have extremely low status people who want to impart some control on other people. They want to get other people to listen to them.

They want to get other people to comply with whatever rules they're setting forward. They want to enact change. They want to grab power. Again, whether it's the people that storm the Capitol Hill or the wokesters, it's the same kind of mentality, it's just they've adopted different ideologies. But it's almost all low status people who have sought new meaning and virtue out of this form of control, attacking the left or attacking the right or attacking what they perceive to be outside of the boundaries of the right or attacking what they perceive to be outside

of the boundaries of the accepted ideology that they'd like to enforce on everyone else. Totally. And you can tell it's not a good faith effort because they will... No good faith actor will tell you how you have to think. Exactly. actor will tell you how you have to think. Exactly. Right. They'll, you know, they will, they will make, give you their best pitch. They'll hope that you come to their, to their way of thinking. But when you're told, and this is one of the things I don't like about religion, when you're told, I mean, organized, established religion, when you're told you have to think like this, and if you don't think like this, you are Satan's spawn, or you are an

enemy of the country, or you're a racist, or you're this or that. When you're told how to think and speak, or you're unworthy of being part of this community, that's how you know that that person does not mean the country well. Yeah, I think you just nailed it. I think that's exactly what's missing in both sides, the far left and the far right. And a big part of that is one of the core tenets of being a human being, which is compassion, compassion and empathy. Both of those sides with the far right people want death to the far left and the far left people want the far right to be ostracized. It's the same thing. It's like there's a complete lack of empathy and a complete unwillingness to accept that the other side are just human beings with differing opinions. And maybe there's some common ground.

We all have common ground, especially people with children, right? Your common ground is you want the world to be a safer place for these delicate little creatures that you love more than anything in life itself. Yeah, that's right. And I, you know, my fear is that, I mean, I feel like right now the sort of radical voice is now, is now speaking for a large proportion of the GOP politically. I mean, that 70% figure is like pretty, it's pretty alarming, right? My fear is that that will happen on the left. I mean, whatever you think about Joe Biden, he's not like that kind of liberal radical. But that way of thinking, that woke way of thinking, God forbid, that completely take over the Democrats.

He's complying with it, though. I don't think he thinks that way, but I think he thinks it's a good political strategy to get the really aggressive radicals on the left to go along with him. The perceived progressive, like the extreme end of it, like the tribe, like AOC and those type of people that really want a much more progressive,

much more socialized medicine. It's a different strategy in terms of control of the left. Right. And he's complying with that, I think, to try to get a little bit of their base. Well, I mean, listen, I mean, every politician has to somehow collect as much of the caucus as possible under one tent. And so if you completely ignore that voice, of course, you're creating a splinter group that could be really dangerous to the party and the country. So I think he, you know, more, you know, he's, to me, he's a pretty

centrist Democrat. Well, one of the first things he did in office, he's a pretty centrist Democrat. Well, one of the first things he did in office though was make it so that biological girls had to compete against trans girls in sports. Right. I was so horrified by that. I actually thought that's – I mean I'm a former athlete, right? And I just – like the role of hormones. I mean you know more about this than me, but the role of hormones in athletics of testosterone is so dominant.

And I mean, that's why at 59, I'm not the runner I was at 20. I used to have lower testosterone, right? And what that could do to girls' sports, to me, seems like really, really puzzling. Like, are you sure you want to do that? It's just ideologically driven. It's not not driven by science it's not driven by logic it's certainly not driven by compassion for biological women it's it's driven by what you would call the oppression spectrum right like who's at the highest end of the oppression spectrum trans people maybe interracial trans people would like,

maybe black trans people would trump that. What is the top perceived most oppressed? Everyone else has to sort of capitulate. Everyone else has to sort of figure out a way to comply with whatever rules are going to benefit them. Biological women are clearly not going to benefit from trans girls competing in girls' sports. They're just not. It's not good for them. Biological women are clearly not going to benefit from trans girls competing in girls' sports. They're just not. It's not good for them. And if you think it is good for them, then

I get how you would want it to be inclusive and you would want everyone to just feel fully accepted. But we have to look at sports as a different thing. There's a reason why boys don't compete against girls. Right, right. You know, one thing that helps for me when I think about any kind of conflict or disagreement is to start out assuming that the other person or the other group that appears to be proposing something outrageous. Just start with the assumption they're trying to achieve something good and they're doing it through means that you don't think will work. And I do that with the right wing. I mean I can look at a bunch of policies that came in under Trump and think, oh, my God, that just seems cruel or that seems this or that. The border stuff. I mean there's so many things.

The world is complicated, right? And the solutions are complicated and messy and imperfect. But I really tried to think, okay, so are they just evil or are they trying to achieve a good thing by means that I don't quite understand or agree with? And I would say that about the gender issues. Some of it makes no sense to me. I mean, look, I'm an older white guy. I'm in a really lucky place in the world, you know? And I mean, people will tell me that, right? So I'm not even really going to judge, but what I would say is what are they trying to achieve that's good that we can maybe achieve without other girls paying a price in athletics? And

maybe it's not possible. I don't think it's possible right now because I think right now we have to wait until the water hits the wall before it pushes back. Right. Because right now the water is about to hit the wall in the Olympics because they are allowing this woman who was a elite male power lifter who transitioned over to female

and now is going to compete in the Olympics. I think for New Zealand, I think that's the Australia or New Zealand, I forget which, but everyone's kind of freaking out about this because this person is just going to dominate. Especially in things like powerlifting, where there's so many advantages to being male. You know, I looked at that in my book, Freedom. So one of the things that I say in my book is that, you know, there's like three ways of maintaining your freedom, your autonomy in the face of a greater power. And one of them is literally running, like staying so

mobile that the heavier, like the heavier entity, the bigger guy, the bigger the empire just cannot like find you. And that was the apache did in the southwest so at any rate i looked at the difference between male and female world records in running events compared to weight events and the difference if i'm remembering correctly the difference in running was about 11 in other words women were much closer to me that the top man the top female runners were much closer to the top male runners the top female runners were much closer to the top male runners than in the weight events that the split was like 30% or 50%. And so what I sort of hypothesized in my book is that it was more adaptive to have women be able to keep up with the men while they were

trying to avoid a threat than to be of equal strength to the men to share in the fight if they couldn't outrun it, that there was more adaptive to be mobile than to be big and strong. And it's a really interesting difference. And the other interesting thing about that is that as you increase body size, if you double body weight, you don't double strength, If you double body weight, you don't double strength, right? So if you go from 150 pounds to 300 pounds, the amount you bench press doesn't double, which is really interesting. But dependent upon what? See, because you could double your bench press if you don't lift weights.

It's like if you don't lift weights and you weigh 150 pounds and you bench 150, you could get up to 300 pounds in a few years. Oh, of course. But if you look at the world records for those weights, right? I see what you're saying. If you look at the world records, a 150 pound man can bench about two thirds of the weight of a 300 pound man. So the 300 pound man is stronger for sure. He's definitely stronger, But he has doubled his body weight, which means that he's a lot less mobile. And he burns through a lot more oxygen in a fight or in anything. So there's this interesting negative payoff for being stronger, which is that you burn through less oxygen. So if you don't win a fight in the first minutes, right, you're now struggling in terms of oxygen debt compared to the guy who weighs less than you. And there's a sort of sweet spot where you're smaller and have an oxygen saving but you're not completely dominated physically.

There's a sort of sweet spot where being a little bit smaller is actually a sort of tactical advantage in a fight. And so I looked at all that, and it made total sense because humans are pretty much the only mammal where a smaller combatant can defeat a larger one. You know, in chimpanzees, the smaller chimpanzee loses to the alpha male, right? Humans, that's not true. The smaller individual can win and wins about 50% of the time. I called ESPN and they're amazing. They gave me a statistician who looked at all this stuff, right? And he said, yeah, the larger, that size is not a predictor of weight.

Yeah, but in what sport? Boxing? No, MMA. In MMA? Yeah. Really? That's what he said. That doesn't make sense because there's weight classes. And on top of that, in the heavyweight division, the scariest guy is the biggest guy. The scariest guy is Francis

Ngannou. He has to cut weight to make the 265-pound weight limit. Right. I mean, there are limits, of course. So if you have a guy who's much, much stronger and you're in an enclosed space, I mean, look, if you and I had a fight in a phone booth, you're going to win, right? Like if we had a fight in a field, I would run away until you were – I ran a 412 mile. I'm going to outrun you, right? And when you're really exhausted, I'm going to turn around, right? Like that would be the tactic of the smaller adversary and it scales up. smaller, the smaller adversary and it's, and it scales up. Uh, so if there's too big a difference and you're in an octagon, there isn't a lot of room to move around. Eventually weight and strength

will dominate, but it doesn't always, I know what you're saying. It's like, there's, there's a borderline. Like for instance, there's a guy, uh, his name is Israel Adesanya. He's a middleweight stylebender is in my opinion, one of the most impressive and most interesting fighters. And he's so fucking smart. And one of the reasons why he's so interesting is how smart he is. He was facing this guy, Paulo Costa, who's this just behemoth of a man. Just supremely muscled, looks like an Adonis. I mean, he looks like a superhero.

And Stylebender, although he's you know He's obviously very impressive He doesn't look like that and he doesn't have like this kind of same one strike knockout power But he said look everybody has power I have precision and I'm gonna fuck this guy up and he said just watch and in the fight He did and he did it by not hitting him as hard but hitting him much more than he could hit him right yeah and it's more technique right and you know as you as you as you use up oxygen your movements get slower and less precise right and yeah it takes less effort to slip a punch

than to punch right so if a guy if a guy if the big dude tries to punch you 10 times in a row and you slip all of them right he. He's going to be tired. He's going to be exhausted. So I looked at, I mean, this is really interesting. So I looked at reaction time, right? So they did a test with Muhammad Ali back in the late 60s or something like that. He was sort of in his heyday and early 70s, something like that. And so they put a balsa wood board in front of them, and they had some crazy camera timer thing, right? And they said, okay, hit the board with a jab,

right, when you see the light flash. So the light would flash, and 15 hundredths of a second later, his glove would hit the board. So they broke it down. It took 11 hundredths of a second for his brain to perceive the flashing light and to trigger the punch. And only four hundredths of a second for the punch to travel from his resting position to the board. You see what I'm saying? It took longer to perceive the punch, to perceive the signal, a lot longer to perceive the signal than to deliver the punch, which means that if you're fighting Muhammad Ali or I'm fighting you or whatever, you're never going to beat a punch, right? The punch takes four hundreds of a second. Your brain takes 11 hundreds of a second. You will get punched every time, except that before you punch, you can't help it. Your body sends very subtle signals that you're going to punch. And it sends signals of which hand you're going to punch with.

And the brain is really good at reading unconscious signals, right? So they did this thing where they had a videotape of poker players, right, putting their chips into a bet, right? And the people, the test subjects were watching the like two-second video clips of people just placing bets. And all they did was look at the arm and hand, move the chips. And people who didn't even know how to play poker were asked to assess the confidence with which they moved the chips. were asked to assess the confidence with which they moved the chips. And some incredible percentage of the time, they could tell who had the winning hand just by the way they moved the chips.

In other words, the brain's very perceptive. And the body is very, very, not the face, but the body is very, very revealing. So that means that in a fight, the big dude comes at you. And for any person, there's always a bigger person, right? I mean, I don't care how big you are. There's always a bigger guy out there, right? So that person comes at you and is about to throw a sort of haymaker right to end your life. Your brain will see that coming a mile away, and it's very easy to slip. And that's where a smaller person, if they really are adept at this can just win the guy and

i interviewed a mma former mma fighter named kyle sonnet and he spoke about this really eloquently kyle sonnet son and son and chael sonnen is that oh chael yeah i'm sorry i didn't know how to pronounce it yeah chael sonnen yeah uh so he said you want to fight a guy that's one weight class above you that's the sweet spot he's out of his fucking mind. Let me tell you something right now John Jones beat the shit out of him and John Jones is bigger than him This I know I know what you're saying here, but in absolutes it's not applicable right this this thing of like there's actually an adage and that the bigger bet the bigger fighter will beat a smaller, better fighter.

Well, statistically, it's 50-50. I don't know what that means, though, because there's weight classes. How is it possible that it's 50-50? It really depends on the skill level. There's incredibly skillful big guys, and then there's small guys that are fast, but they're not as technical. They're not as good. Well, of course. And that's why size doesn't always dominate. And either the split is within the weight class or mixing weight classes. Either way, what the statistician said was that size is not a good predictor of a win, as long as the differences aren't too extreme. And of course, the smaller the arena, the more size will dominate. And if you and I are in a shower stall, like I said,

I'm not going to do very well. I just want to state, I'm a big fan of Chael Sonnen. I agree with most of the things that he says, and he's a real legend when it comes to fighting. And his prime, a tremendous wrestler and a beast of a fighter yeah yeah but he also he's a showman and he says a lot of crazy things sometimes because i think he thinks it's fun right and you know he gives hot takes and opinions on things and some of them are good and some of them aren't but well that fight you were talking about that's when he i think that's when he got out of mma i mean he was like no he fought after that fight oh did he yeah there was one there was one fight that really like put him MMA. I mean, he was like... No, he fought after that fight. Oh, did he? Yeah. He fought after that fight.

There was one fight that really put him over the edge, and his wife was like, you know, what are you doing? Well, I go back to the fight. He fought Nate Marquardt, and Nate Marquardt was in his prime, and he worked him. And Chael Sonnen came that close to beating Anderson Silva for the middleweight title. I mean, he's a beast.

He's a beast. But a good big man will almost always beat a smaller better man There's there's just things about size and strength and power and in MMA It's even more prevalent because there's so many things that go on like like you can slip a punch, right? But if you slip a punch that's designed to set you up for a leg break of course You're still stationary. You're gonna get cracked is but here's the thing is the guy you're fighting punch right but if you slip a punch that's designed to set you up for a leg right of course you're still stationary and you're going to get cracked is but here's the thing is the guy you're fighting one dimensional or does he have a comprehensive game is he throwing that punch

not really because he wants to hit you because he wants to set you up for a takedown is he throwing that punch because he wants to kick the outside of your calf like what is he actually doing with that punch well that well right and that's why fighting is so fascinating. It's complex. Right. And that's the difference between us and chimpanzees. Yeah, we can think about it and learn. And yeah, listen.

The smaller chimpanzee will never win. You know what I'm saying? I mean, that's the difference. And we can go around and around about how it breaks down. But the fact that a smaller human ever wins, that's what's uniquely human. What if you could teach a chimp jujitsu? Well, then you'd have a very scary chimp. Get a smaller chimp who decides, no, bitch, I'm the alpha.

No, that's right. Takes the big chimps back and strangles them. That's right. Listen, what will work with chimps is a coalition of males can dominate an alpha male. And it's crazy that they actually organize. That's right. Now, listen, what will work with chimps is a coalition of males can dominate an alpha male. And it's crazy that they actually organize. That's right. And that's where sociability and language and all these things come into play with humans because we're no longer – I mean, no group of humans can be dominated by a single alpha individual. Right.

Because a coalition can always take them down. And that makes society livable, right? We're not in this sort of horrible hierarchy where the biggest person gets to decide everything. Yes, yes. But what we're talking about, I mean, there's just, I just hate absolutes when it comes to fighting,

because the variables are so extreme, and there's so many things that go into play. There's so many styles. I mean, there's a big man that will beat a better, smaller man in one way. And then a better, smaller man who has a different skill set will beat that big man in a different scenario. And then the way they interact will change. If they fight 10 times, one guy might win six. Right. And then the other guy might win four.

And you can't predict. You have no idea. Right. Well, someone at ESPN crunched all the numbers and said that size wins about half the time. But when they say that, how much size are they talking about? Because of the fact that we're talking about weight classes, that's why I'm confused.

Unless they study only the heavyweight division, which has the largest disparity in weight. It might have been that. I didn't ask him specifically, but he was pretty clear about it. It was like it's not, you know, if you're going to put your money on someone, weight is not necessarily the best variable. Skill is the best variable. Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, exactly.

But that's exactly what I'm saying about humans. It's skill. Yeah. It's not best variable. Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, exactly. But that's exactly what I'm saying about humans. It's skill. It's not physical dominance, necessarily. The problem that we were talking about with this trans athlete thing is just a problem of ideology. It's not a problem of fairness. If you talk to most people who actually understand sports, they don't think it's fair. But the people that want to support trans people and think this is a good time to make society more inclusive, they're the people that want to support trans people and think this is a good time to make society more inclusive, they're the ones who want to support it. Even though, like what's really fascinating to me

is that Caitlyn Jenner is now being accused of being transphobic. Because Caitlyn Jenner stood up and said, I don't think it's fair, it's a question of fairness. And you're talking about someone who, when she was Bruce, was a fucking Olympic gold medalist, one of the greatest athletes the United States has ever produced, was on the cover of Wheaties. 1976, I remember, yeah, amazing, big athlete.

That same person is saying that it's a question of fairness and that you shouldn't have biological males competing against biological females. And they came after her yeah right which is crazy i mean this is if there is an icon in the 21st century uh of a true icon of transgender rights and of transgender acceptance it's caitlin jenner right no right i mean while they're calling her transphobic well what i mean what i mean you know again i don't have a dog in this fight so i don't really you know i i don't i don't really care what happens particularly, and I understand people are trying to usually do the right thing.

But, I mean, could there be a third competitive category of trans? That would be the best way to do it, for sure. But here's the problem. Even in that category, you would have to say, okay, we're going to have a trans category, but are we going to have trans males and trans females compete together? Well, if the answer is no, then that says a lot about trans competing in... Right. Right. I mean...

Well, and also, do we have enough trans females and trans males to have a whole separate category for each of them? So you have biological males versus biological males, biological females versus biological females, trans females versus trans females, trans males versus trans males. I mean- There might be four categories at the Olympics. Look, if they do that, I'm 100% in favor of it. Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting idea. I mean, these are very much first world problems, I think, right? Yeah, in many ways. And I think

also there's going to come a time where through CRISPR or through some other much more sophisticated form of manipulating the human body where we're going to be able to change what a person is, really, not just in terms of how they express and how they represent, but actually you can become a biological female. I don't know if that's going to be within our lifetime, but I think that's the future. Right. And then that really is a biological female, right? A hundred percent. Exactly. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, the things that they can do now in terms of genetic manipulation are witchcraft compared to a hundred years ago, 200 years ago. So if we go into the future, another 100, 200 years, we might have no problem with this.

It might all go away. And we might be back to male versus female. Or, excuse me, male categories versus male, female versus female. You know, one thing that gets lost in all this is just what an extraordinary creation the human being is as an athlete. I mean, I was looking at athletic performance, particularly with running, because, you know, my book is divided into run, fight and think. Like the three ways you can defeat a greater power or at least have a chance of it. Right. And if you run, if you cannot run them, outfight them. If you cannot fight them, you're going to have to outthink them. And that's what happens with social change within a

society like the labor movement in this country 100 years ago. But so I was, you know, I was looking at our capacity to run, right? And I mean, I'm a former runner, right? I ran competitively in college. I didn't even realize how amazing we are. There's an ultra-marathoner named Jim Walmsley who has won the Western States 100 a bunch of times. It's 100 miles over the Sierra Nevada, right? A huge elevation gain. His time is 14 hours and nine minutes, and he has beaten, and along the same course, they run horse and rider teams, like basically the same course. He beat the horse and rider team in his year and in almost every other year for the previous 20 years. He's a human being on foot.

Can you imagine? That's so crazy. And the 1,000-mile world record is 10 days. God. A guy ran 1, thousand miles in 10 days. Do you know what the Moab 240 is? No, but I can almost guess by the name. It's a run through the Moab mountains.

Right. There's a woman named Courtney DeWalter. I interviewed her in my book. She's in my book. She's a fucking monster. She's amazing. She's amazing. Yeah, she's incredible.

She beat the second place man by 10 hours. Yeah. 10 fucking monster. She's amazing. She's amazing. Yeah, she's incredible. She beat the second place man by 10 hours. Yeah. 10 fucking hours. So if she took an eight hour nap, just laid down for eight hours and just yawned, stretched her feet and put her shoes on and had breakfast and drank a cup of coffee, she's still beat him by two hours, which is fucking bananas. Well, think about this. So in the American Southwest, just that same area, right? There were two kinds of people when the whites showed up, when Europeans showed up, right? There were the Pueblo people who were very wealthy. And they irrigated. They cultivated.

They lived in towns. Towns that looked a lot like small towns in Europe, right? Up on top of mesas, very well defended. In material terms, they were doing very well, right? And then there were the Apache in the Navajo. They were complete nomads, very mobile, materially poor. I mean, they only had what they could carry, but no one could sort of catch them, right? So when the Spanish arrived in the late 1500s, what happened? They defeated the Pueblo communities immediately. Like sometimes within hours, they could roll these Pueblos, right? The Apache remained free until the last band of wild Apache were finally sort of cornered in 1886.

That's almost within my grandmother's lifetime. And they did that because they were so mobile. The whole community was expected to be able to move 40 miles a day on foot, whatever. The children, if the enemy was near, the children would sleep with food tied around their waist in case they had to run away in the middle of the night. And there was finally, the warriors were supposed to be able to go 70 miles in a day if they had to, and they'd keep that up, right?

And so there was one war leader named Nana, N-A-N-A, Nana. And in the 1880s, I mean, the machine gun's been invented, the light bulb, the, what else, the four-stroke engine. Like, it was really modern society at that point, right? And he led like a dozen Apache warriors on a raid that over six weeks, they covered 1,500 miles. And Nana was 75 years old. So the human being, right, is meant to move. It's also really good at fighting. And it's also really, really good at thinking.

But if you just think of us as sort of animals, like one of the things that has allowed people throughout the ages to maintain their autonomy is that they were mobile. And big, powerful empires aren't that mobile. I saw that in Afghanistan. I mean, the American army is invincible until it's fighting a bunch of guys, you know, barefoot guys in the mountains who don't have an air force. You know, and then we're not so invincible. It's because they were so mobile. So this sort of like the discussion we had about MMA, it scales up, right? Like a small

insurgency can defeat an empire. And if that weren't true, if the empire always won, or if the largest person in the room always won, you mean there would be really no chance for freedom. And, you know, we defeated the British in 1776 precisely because a small mobile force can sometimes squeak out a victory. It's interesting that we keep bringing this back to fighting because I think in many ways fighting is an analogy. There's many comparisons for life. There's a lot of what takes place in life. It plays out in fighting and choices that you make in terms of strategy and also what you bring to the day, what skills. Like we were talking about Chael Sonnen before. Chael Sonnen was an elite wrestler. And in my opinion, wrestling

is the single best skill for MMA because Right. Because the great wrestler dictates where the fight takes place. Right. He can decide to take the opponent down or if he's like a Chuck Liddell who's a superior striker who's also a wrestler, he can decide you have to strike with him. You can't take him down.

Right. So it's just the single pillar. And it's, in life, there's things that you can be good at and there's strategies that you can apply that really they're it's very similar in that way it's like what you choose to be strong with you know whether it's strong with your willpower or your education or your your kindness your approach to life it's like these are all like interconnected skills and strategies that help you get through life. And you see this play out through one-on-one martial arts combat.

Right. You see there's analogies there. There's things. There's comparisons there. Right. No, it's an amazing analogy for life. And that comes out in the more organized form of fighting, which is war. And again, I mean, like I looked at the Montenegrins who were these sort of wild mountain people in the 1600s.

And the Ottoman Empire, which was the most powerful military force in the world at that time, kept invading Montenegro. And at one point, they outnumbered the Montenegrins 12 to 1. They had a cavalry, they had artillery, they had everything. And the Montenegrins just handed them their hat. I mean, they just destroyed them. They killed a third of the Ottoman forces. So it's just that has allowed humans, some groups of humans to maintain their autonomy in the face of a great power. And often great powers are very oppressive. And, I mean, sometimes people ask me, like, why write about freedom? Like, why now? What is it about freedom that's interesting to you?

And, you know, my last book was called Tribe, and we talked about that. And I realized people are willing to die for their community, for their tribe, for their people, right? And people are willing to die for their community, for their tribe, for their people, right? And people are willing to die for their freedom. These two core things that without which life can seem not worth living. And people have struggled and died to defend both. And to me, if you start to understand both of those things, you start to get towards the sort of core of the human experience. Isn't it funny that someone would say why do you why is freedom interesting to you like that's that's like saying why is life interesting to you if you're if you just came back from your experience like you're with your aneurysm yeah and you realize like oh my god life is so precious it's so important right and then some person is just living normally like, well, what's so important about life? Like, what do you know? When, when, when freedom is taken away from

you, then you realize how crucial it is. That's right. That's right. Well, we're very lucky that we live in a, in a free society and a democracy and you know, it's imperfect obviously. And we're trying, you know, I think we're all trying to improve it. Most people are trying to improve it, but I think it's easy to take that for granted. We walked, part of the book is about this bizarre trek that I took. We walked along the railroad lines from Washington, D.C., me and a few other guys. We'd all been in a lot of combat and we weren't going back to combat and we were trying to figure out what to do with ourselves. And we walked along the railroad lines

from DC to Philly and we're going to go to New York. Then we decided to turn West and we headed for Pittsburgh. We wound up right outside of Pittsburgh. So over the course of a year, trips of 50 to a hundred miles, we sort of like journeyed through America along the railroad lines. We were sleeping under bridges and abandoned houses and cooking over fires. It's really interesting. I just started it a few days ago, but it's really interesting. I'm enjoying it very much.

Thank you. When you did this, how old were you? A few years ago. And you just decided this would be a thing to do? I was taking the Amtrak down to D.C. with my buddy Tim that I'd been over in Afghanistan with. We made a film called Restrepo. And I was looking out the window.

We were trying to think of our next project. And I was looking out the window. I was like, Tim, man, you could walk this whole damn thing. Like there's a dirt bike trail or a maintenance road or a cornfield or whatever. And the thing about Railroad Line is it goes right through the middle of everything, right? Right through the ghettos, right through the suburbs, right through the farms. You see America from the inside out. And it's this weird swath of

no man's land. Like the cops aren't really out there and it's illegal. So, you know, eventually people will spot you and you have to hide from them. We had a helicopter looking for us at one point. Why? I think they were worried we were up to no good. I mean, it was like, sometimes we walked at night when it was hot or if people were looking for us, we'd walk at night. And, you know, one in the morning, we were like along railroad lines that passed near an Air Force base, I think. I don't know. We were in some sensitive area. I mean, we didn't know that. We were just moving. And all of a sudden, this helicopter came riding up on us. And they didn't see us. We kind of crouched down and

it did its grid and missed us with its floodlight. But the thing is, it's this weird no man's land. So you can sleep out, right? You can pump your water out of creeks. You can build a fire. You have to stay low. And we'd walk through towns and get food and we'd keep moving. And it was just this weird experiment in autonomy. And autonomy, I got to say, it's hard. It's physically hard, right? I mean, the safer and more comfortable you are, the more entangled you are in society, right? And in some ways, the less free you are. We were, like every night, we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. But that was hard one. We were carrying 70 pounds on our back and we were walking all day long and we were dodging the police. And you know, sometimes we drank pretty shitty water and it made us sick.

Really? Did you have filters? We had a pump filter, but sometimes, I mean, we drank the Yucca Ganey River outside Connellsville, and one guy was sick for a week. I wasn't. I have a pretty strong stomach, but it really wrecked him. So it's a hard one, but look, we were on our own. No one knew where we were, and that's one definition of freedom. There are many, right?

I mean, there are many definitions of freedom, but that's one of them. How long did you guys do? Like, how long was this journey? It was off and on for years, 400 miles. Wow. Yeah. And so part of my book, Freedom, is about that trek because it was my own personal experience with being physically autonomous. And it was hard.

Like I said, it was a hard one. I write about the frontier as well, cause we walked through the, what used to be the Pennsylvania frontier. We, we, the railroad lines go along the Juniata river. It's the only, uh, waterway that trends East West in Pennsylvania. And, um, you know, the river is sort of carved through the mountains. And so the Indian trails follow the rivers and then the settlers roads follow the Indian trails. And so the Indian trails followed the rivers and then the settlers roads followed the Indian trails and eventually the railroads followed the settlers roads. And so we were walking up the Juniata River going west. And I wrote in the book, I write it because that was the heart of like the Indian Wars along the Pennsylvania frontier in the 1700s.

And, you know, a lot of people that went out there, they were very poor. They were often immigrants. hundreds. And a lot of people that went out there, they were very poor. They were often immigrants. They were... And often there were people that just didn't want the colonial government breathing down their neck. That was one of the more interesting things about the beginning of the book where you were talking about a sign that you found on someone's property that says that they will resist the federal government by any means necessary. That's right. So fast forward 300 years, we pass a sign nailed to a tree, like along the Juniata Waterway.

And it's very wild there, right? It's very, very beautiful. Yeah. And the sign saying, yeah, this is private property. We will resist the federal authority by any means necessary. How old do you think that sign was? Oh, it was contemporary, right? And this was a few years ago.

This is 2012, 2013 that we saw that sign was? Oh, it was contemporary. And this was a few years ago. This is 2012, 2013 that we saw that sign. But 300 years ago, the people that settled that area were absolutely like that was what they wanted. But the price that that came with was horrific. So basically, you go into the wilderness and you're a lot more free, but you're in a lot more danger. You go into the wilderness and you're a lot more free, but you're in a lot more danger. And danger is a loss of freedom, right? It's its own kind of loss of freedom. And so what the settlers did was they, for example, of course, there's no fire department.

These are people who are living in log cabins in the wilderness. So their chimneys were made out of wood, right? They're interlocking logs that they caked with mud, and the mud insulated the wood. It was like little tiny log cabins that ran up the side of the house. That was the chimney. And so they had ropes at the top of the chimneys, because if the chimneys caught fire, the whole house would go up. And if a chimney caught fire, they would pull the whole stack down with that rope. That was their fire department, was having a rope at the top of the chimney, right? So, but when it came to the Indian Wars, I mean, just you can't imagine how bloody this was, right? And no mercy given on anybody. People were tortured to death on both sides, right? It was absolutely horrific. So, what they did,

there was no colonial militia. There was nothing out there. They just had each other. So the settlers had a kind of mutual defense pact. And if you were out there, you owed your life to the common defense of the community. And if you didn't do that, you were an outcast. In fact, if you were an adult male and you failed to carry a gun and a scalping knife and a tomahawk in your belt at all times, if you didn't do that, you were mocked and you were cast out from the community, which obviously is not really a form of freedom. I mean, freedom includes the freedom to not fight if you don't want to fight, right? And so basically my point is pick your poison your poison you want the government to tell you what to do or do you want the community to tell you what to do and the more danger you're in you're in the more you need one or the other and there really is no way to be completely safe completely

comfortable and completely free without obligation to your tribe right Right. When you wrote this, how much studying did you wind up doing on the various North American tribes and their strategies? Because that's also something that you talk about in the Iroquois, and you go pretty deep into a lot of that as well. Yeah. I mean, I researched that after the trip. I mean, I did the trip years ago,

and I wanted to write about freedom. And I thought, wow, interesting to – in the book itself, there's a lot of research into topics, right? So like MMA and the Apache and all that. I thought, well, it would be really interesting to sort of weave my narrative about this walking trip. We called it high-speed vagrancy. I mean, we really moved, right? 10, 20, 25 miles a day sometimes. We were really interesting to weave this trip

into the research that I did. And so that's how I came to form the book. But so the native tribes of that area, they were dominated by the Iroquois. And so this is where this great truth about freedom comes in. The more people you're with, the more – the better you can defend yourself, right? So the Iroquois were indomitable until the Europeans showed up. until the Europeans showed up.

And one reason the Europeans couldn't be defeated was because they came with diseases that just decimated the ranks of the native people, right? So, you know, you can play the sort of thought experiment. If, say, smallpox didn't exist and the native peoples of North America had their original populations, the Iroquois were an extremely well-organized, huge, huge organization.

And, you know, you can make a pretty good argument that the Europeans actually could not have defeated them militarily. But, you know, what was their strategy? I mean, for all those native people, the strategy was why fight a, quote, fair fight in the open when you could ambush people, surprise attacks, creep up on them at dawn? You know, like you're just going to lose more people if you fight in the open, you know, bows and arrows against firearms. Why would you do that? Yeah, of course. Yeah. And they were extremely effective at it.

And the Iroquois as, or this applied to any of the tribes, five or 10 times as many men as they really were. That was the tactical advantage of that kind of mobility. Well, that was the issue with Texas and the Comanches was the tactical ability of the Comanche to fight off horseback when the settlers hadn't figured out how to do that yet. And they were still using muskets and the Comanche could launch multiple arrows. They would keep their arrows interlaced in their fingers and they would shoot one arrow and then another arrow. So these guys would shoot one musket and then they'd have to reload. It took

like 30 seconds. By the time that happened, the command sheet would be on them and filling them full of arrows. The settlers that I wrote about, some of them were able to load their rifle at a dead run. And this is with a ramrod, put the ball in the barrel and the patch and then pour the powder in or the other way around, the powder and then the ball. Anyway, they could do this at a dead run. But still, it was no match, in some ways, no match for a bow and arrow in the woods. But if you had ranks of riflemen who were alternating, firing and reloading, that is just suicide to charge them in a field. Of course, that's what happened in European warfare. The casualties were horrific.

It's really interesting about the Comanche. I'm sure you know Empire of the Summer Moon. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Yeah, yeah. Amazing writer. Amazing book. There's a direct equivalent in Genghis Khan in East Asia, a horseback culture that the European powers really didn't know how to deal with militarily. And in my book, Freedom, I talk about the sort of basic difference between mobile societies

and sedentary ones. You know, like about 10,000 years ago, people started planting grains and settling down. And it allowed for an accumulation of wealth and in some ways, unfortunately, the beginning of a stratification of society. As soon as you can accumulate wealth, some people are going to accumulate more than others and they become rulers and they can oppress people, et cetera, et cetera. In mobile societies like the Apache, it's very hard to have social classes because you can't accumulate anything.

And so in history, the sedentary people, although more powerful where they stood and more wealthy in material terms, often had this sort of like strange insecurity and about their – like if they were – like are we living better lives than the nomads? And the nomads themselves had an incredible arrogance about the settled people, right? And they just thought they were badasses and that the farmers were not. And it was very clear. There was a group called the Yamut in Northern Iran. And they had, I'm doing this by memory, but they had this sort of saying, this sort of song that dates back to this era, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago. The sort of eternal clash between the migratory nomadic people, herding cultures and the farming cultures. I do not have a mill with willow trees. I have a horse and a court. I will kill you and go. and a court, I will kill you and go.

I will kill you and go. Wow. So, of course, those people lost. I mean, the world is dominated by sedentary people that accumulate wealth and can amass huge armies and blah, blah, blah. But it's good to keep in mind that mobility was, for a very, very long time, was a very effective and rational choice that some societies made and that they felt themselves to be superior to the wealthy settled people in the valleys. Yeah, that was Genghis Khan's thing. Yeah, totally. He had massive disdain for anyone who didn't live in a tent.

Oh, totally. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And they thought they were weak. Yeah, that's right. And I mean, you can make an argument that wealth and sedentary life make people weak, right? I mean, you can make that argument, certainly from the eyes of a nomadic culture. That's what it looks like, right? And, you know, even the sort of ancient biblical story of fratricide of Cain and Abel, you know, even, I mean, you know, Cain was a farmer and Abel was a nomad. And it goes, you know, the thinking, the ethnographic thinking

or the anthropological thinking about this is this story goes back to this original bifurcation between farmers, the sedentary people and the mobile ones. But Cain kills Abel because Abel is a shepherd and has sheep. And when it comes time to make a sacrifice to God, Abel can sacrifice a fat sheep and all Cain has is vegetables. And he's jealous. And he kills his nomad brother because he's jealous of what Abel can offer God. And there you see the affluence, but the insecurity that wealthy sedentary people have for those who, quote, have nothing left to lose. There's a great allure to the kind of freedom that we're describing, right? To the ability to just live off your back and go hiking and, and, and live in the mountains and,

and do that kind of thing. It's like, it appeals to us in a strange way where we know there's something wrong with sedentary lifestyle and with living in a city and dealing with the, just the bullshit of traffic and, and this unnatural environment that we've created with concrete and asphalt and pollution, there's something massively appealing. Almost like your DNA, like your essence calls out for a time where life was simpler and more pure and more interconnected with nature.

So when you see someone who's doing that, there's a part of you that goes, ah, I want to do that. Right. Well, you know, it's the mobile, I mean, it's the mobile groups that we see as romantic, right? I mean, you know, motorcycle gangs and stuff like that.

I mean, you know, they're bad actors, right? I mean, some of those guys don't necessarily bring a lot of joy and happiness to the world. Some do, I suppose. But whatever. The point is they're romanticized. Yes.

Right? And the mobile groups are often romanticized. I mean, you know, the sort of like guerrilla fighters, you know, whatever. I mean, over and over again in our imagination. Like that's an appealing thing is the group that is over – that they're overmatched, they're the underdog, but they're so skilled and mobile that they eventually win. Like that's very, very appealing to humans. Yeah, that is, right? It's a classic tale. That's right. That's right. And it's even in the Bible, you know, that Cain and Abel,

the sort of seminal story of fratricide goes all the way back. That sort of division goes all the way back in the jealousy of the – the jealousy that we wealthy sedentary people have for the mobile people. Like it's very, very ancient. One thing I should point out, and I think it's worth talking about, we were talking about a little bit before that our safety in the world comes from the fact that we have people around us that we trust who will help defend our community, right? And because if we don't have a community, if we're not part of a tribe, if we're not part of some group, we're alone in the world.

We're very vulnerable. Humans die pretty quickly by themselves in the wilderness. And the larger the group, the safer it is from attack from other groups. I mean just as a basic fact of human existence. And so one of the things that – I mean, you can sort of divide it up in an interesting way. When you use the word freedom, freedom works in its sort of simple, the word freedoms works in the simplest form in the context of freedom from oppression by, freedom from being oppressed by an outside group, by an enemy group, right? When you're talking about your own society, the society that

you have signed on, born into and have signed onto, you're really talking about your rights. They're kind of different things. So as an example, I looked at a group called the Yamnaya and the Yamnaya were these nomadic horse culture from the eastern steppe, from the Russian steppe, 5,000 years ago. Okay? And they fought on horse-drawn chariots with battle axes. And they traveled without their women. They traveled without women. These groups of male raiders would go out and they swept through Europe.

And they entered the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, about 5,000 years ago. And they had a real warrior culture. And when they rode into Neolithic Spain, and they're very, very mobile, and they're very good fighters. And they rode into Neolithic Spain. And that society didn't even know what a horse was, right? They were completely overmatched. And over the course of about 100 years, the Yamnaya completely eliminated all the men in Iberia. Just think about that.

True. All the men in Iberia. Just think about that. True. All the men, not the women, who clearly were mated with. And the Iberian population now are the descendants of the Yamnaya and the Neolithic women and then other population groups that moved in, the Moors and et cetera, et cetera. et cetera, et cetera. But the Neolithic men were completely scrubbed from the gene pool because they could not defend their territory. So one point I want to make is, and this isn't a pitch for militarism, it's a pitch for realism, which is a very important part of freedom comes from being able to defend yourself and the people you love. And if you can't do that, I mean,

in ancient historical terms, you know, now there's international laws and there's defense pacts and there's NATO and, you know, whatever. Like, Lichtenstein does not really have to worry about being invaded because it's part of a, you know, an agreement between nations. But throughout most of human history, if you could not defend yourself, you were very, very vulnerable to having your freedom taken away and invariably would. There's a resistance in today's culture, particularly from people that are more in line with progressive thinking. There's a resistance to accepting the fact that the military is important. Right. I mean, I think there's a sort of lovely idea that peace is sort of the default state.

And if you just don't have a military and start thinking in militaristic terms, that peace will take over and then no one will need a military and then we're all going to be fine. But that clearly has not been true throughout history. and then we're all going to be fine. But that clearly has not been true throughout history. I mean, you look at history and the nations that couldn't defend themselves. I mean, look, Montenegro was not overrun by the Ottomans because it could defend itself. Right. Right. Right.

And for a lot of human history, and this is true in a playground fight as well. I mean, if you can't defend yourself, you might end up having to do what someone else tells you to do, right? That's just an eternal human truth. And so the trick is, how do you become well enough armed and militaristic enough and sort of badass enough and hierarchical enough because military groups depend on hierarchy in order to fight effectively? on hierarchy in order to fight effectively. A hierarchy of command, not of honor, but of command. How do you do that and also have a society which is just and egalitarian? And as I say in my book, a society that's well enough organized to defend itself can also oppress its own people under the wrong leadership. So how do you have it both ways? How do you defend yourself against outsiders, but also not use the apparatus of the military to then oppress your own people the way Pinochet did and Franco did and et cetera? I mean, that's the

history of dictators. My father grew up in Spain and left when Franco took when the fascists took over in Spain I just wrote an article about how that happens you know the Spain had a democratically elected government and Franco came in and said that's bullshit that the it was a fraudulent election and we're going to take over

and he took over with the military so that's an example of a military force that's used that was used improperly to oppress its own people. And so for me, that's the eternal human dilemma. If you'd be strong enough to defend yourself and not allow that to oppress your own people. Well, it's interesting too because what we're talking about here, this utopian concept of peace being a default state, there's a lot of people that they have similar utopian beliefs about policing in the United States. And that's one of the reasons why people think we need to defund the police.

And that people, if you leave them alone, they're probably not going to commit the same amount of crime and will find a default state. And if you have social workers that deal with people that have domestic disputes instead of police officers, we'll probably have less confrontation. And I think there's also a deep resistance to avoid militarizing our police department. Right, right. our police department. Right, right. But there's a lot of confusion as to what's the correct way to go about this and what is the correct way of actually ensuring

that people are safe and protected and that law and order is achieved and that people respect this rule of land because it makes our society and our culture better and safer for everyone. It makes it easier for people to innovate and easier for people to live their lives. But how does that balance out? And how does that balance out without the kind of leadership that you do see being necessary in the military?

Well, I mean, here's what I think is happening. I think the people that say defund the police i'm not even quite sure what that means right i mean i remember like during covid there was like a there was a phrase like abolish rent and i'm like what i'm not even sure what that means like what how would you implement that like what do you specifically you're talking about but likewise with the defund the i mean i sort of i get the gist of the idea like people are hurting abolish rent but then that has crazy unintended consequences. Right. Right. So likewise, with defund the police, I kind of know where you're coming from. I just don't quite know how it would work.

So I think what those people are doing is they're saying we have given up trying to reform the police. And clearly there are some police departments that need reform. We all remember Rodney King. Right. Yeah. And, you know, many, many other disgraceful incidents since then. I think what they're saying is we have given up trying to reform the police, police unions block any reform. All right, you know what? Fuck it. We're just going to defund you, right? Again, I don't think that's the right solution. There's good policing, bad policing, and no policing. We can look at situations with no policing. So one of the things I looked at in my book was,

you know, on the frontier in the 1840s, 50s, 60s, 1870s, on the American frontier out west, there was little to no policing. You know, a sheriff, you know, one sheriff in 500 square miles, whatever it was, minimal policing. And it was a largely male population. Okay. So there weren't even, you know, if you want to just put it this way, I mean, one of the constant causes of violence between individual men is competition over women, right? I mean, bar fights in all kinds of situations, that is one seed of conflict between men. So there were very few women out there to even have conflicts over, right? The murder rate was so high that, I mean, it completely eclipsed the highest murder rates in the eastern cities. There was one town, I mean, it completely eclipsed the highest murder rates in the eastern cities. There was one town, a railroad town, that killed 7% of the population died by murder in the first three months, if I'm remembering my numbers correctly.

7%, right? Holy shit. Right. So, you know, in, what, a of years, if at that rate, without more people, the town's gone. They've killed them. That's so crazy. Bodies were piling up so fast. And these were virtually all male towns, right? With no police force. So you got to be careful about saying, oh, you know, if you take the police out of the equation, people will be peaceful. No.

We know that they won't be. They're a lot more peaceful when women are there. And what started to happen as the frontier filled up with women, and those women had children and families, and there's a very strong correlation between gender imbalance and violence. And the worse the gender imbalance is, the more violence there is. And as you bring men and women's numbers into line with each other, violence goes down. Well, then how do you explain places like Japan or China where there's far more males in China, I believe, than there are females because of that one-child policy? Isn't there a disproportionate amount of males? You know, not on the – I mean, I don't know anything about China. And, you know, you're

talking about a huge, huge country. And I frankly can't answer that question. But they know from the sort of lab experiment of, okay, you take one community, you have it be 99% men. I mean, look what happens. There'll be more violence. There'll be more. I mean, look what happens in prison, right? Okay. Right. So then you introduce women to these communities. In the 1870s, 1880s, more and more women were going out west and they were having families. So what happens is that in those situations, men want women to like them. And on some level, they understand that if they act too badly, they will not get a mate. Women are the balancing act. They are.

And the other thing is that men get married and they have children. And the last thing they want is violence. That's a threat to everything they live for. And I have two young kids. I mean, if I'm on the New York subway, a couple of years ago, my oldest daughter was two years old. And I'd go on the subway with her and a carrier. And if some guy was acting weird, I mean, I'd got in another car. I wanted nothing to do with it.

Right. Right? Without her, I might not have. I'd be like, all right, this will be interesting. Let's see what happens. Right. You know what I mean? But God, with your child on your chest, you're out of there.

Right. You know what I mean? But God, with your with your child on your chest, you're out of there. Right. You know. Yeah. I couldn't agree more about this idea that defunding the police and having no police is going to lead to horrific violence because, look, that's what you're seeing in New York City. They've already tried it. Right. I mean, you live there. Right. How much difference is it like where you are? Have you noticed? Well, you know, fortunately, the violence isn't a very common thing. But what you can see are all these sort of social indicators of violence. They're correlated with violence. Like there's a lot more sort of visible drug abuse. Visible how so? Oh, just people shooting up on the street. Really? Yeah. I never saw that. I rarely saw that before. Now, you know, it just really whacked out people, people walking down the street completely out of their mind screaming, you know, I mean, there's stuff that would happen, you know, whatever, it's New York city, you see everything eventually, but it just happens a lot

more. And, you know, I live in the Lower East Side and it's, you know, a pretty, you know, Um, and, uh, you know, I live in the Lower East Side and it's, you know, a pretty, you know, mixed income area. There's a lot of different stuff going on there, you know. Um, but yeah, I saw an really interesting, you know, in terms of the police restraint. I mean, I, like, I saw this amazing thing. I live on a small street and, and this through street, small through street in the way Lower East Side. And, and there was a cop car pulled over on the sidewalk and another car pulled up and a woman inside rolled her window down to ask the policemen some of the directions or I don't know what, right?

So they're talking through their open windows, right? But that's stopping traffic. So the car behind, I mean, I can't imagine doing this. The car behind the woman who stopped starts honking at her. She's talking to a cop right he's swearing like like get the fuck out of the get your car out of the street then he gets out of his car and goes over and starts screaming at the woman while she's talking to the cop right and uh everyone involved was african-american just so happens right

everyone involved in that situation was african-american and the cop didn't get out of the car um nothing like and i was just amazed at like i think it was probably a that guy he was obviously a little off and i was like that was probably a smart move. Like no one was being threatened with violence yet. And he de-escalated. He stayed in the car. Eventually the woman drove on. Way, way better solution than the cop getting out of the car with his belly club. And then you don't know what's going to happen.

Right. Right. So I think my point is in that situation, to me, I was looking out the window. To me, it looked like good policing good wise policing and he he resisted escalation he seemed to resist escalation as long as possible and it resolved itself so I think the real conversation is however much funding the police get how do we make it the best policing possible with the money that we're going to allocate? I do think that there is a great benefit to these police officers realizing that you can't abuse people anymore.

Yes. I think the cameras on the phones and the fact that people are willing to film perceived injustices and that this becomes national news, I think that's great. I really do. I think that's great for all involved. But I don't think defunding the police is the way to get out of this mess. I think you've got to fund them. And I think you've got to train them much better. And you've got to make higher standards for people to get into it.

And you've got to – it's got to be – I don't know how to shift the public's perception of what a police officer is, though. Like right now, it's in vogue to call cops shitheads right assholes and losers and it's like to hate a cop is is actually popular which is unfortunately because of the George Floyd case and because of multiple other cases it's it's a thing now and it's a narrative and if you say you support like you know I'm I'm a supporter of law law enforcement I always have been I think it's a narrative and if you say you support like you know i'm i'm a supporter of law law enforcement i i always have been i think it's important i i i'm always respectful to police

officers i know that they treat me differently than they would a young black man or you know in a crime ridden area or you know in various situations and various cops are going to treat people more discriminatory and i know i know that's true and I wish it wasn't. But I think the solution to that is not defunding. The solution is better training, picking better qualified applicants. And I don't know how you do that at this point. It seems like a long uphill road, a long battle to try to get the respect of the general population again, to get the population to respect police officers. But I think that has to take place. You can't have, like what de Blasio's done in New York City

by hamstringing the police and by telling them to stand down when people are looting and smashing windows. You've just made things more violent and more chaotic and more uncontrollable. Well, yeah, and there's a zero-sum game going on. I mean, I think if the police unions were even a little bit amenable to disciplining, you know, what seemed to be rogue cops who have who have violated their training and their oath. Yes. And abused people, even in really egregious cases, the police unions really won't acknowledge it. I think they think it's a slippery slope. Oh, I'm sure they do. I'm sure they do. But the problem with that, I mean, when I was in Afghanistan with American, you know,

I was in Afghanistan in the 90s and whatever before 9-11. But when, you know, my last trip there was with American forces and, you know, I was there off and on for a year and I got to know the military very, very well. And I really liked them. Right. I really liked the U.S. military. I grew up during Vietnam. I hadn't really expected to have that reaction. I just love them. But one of the sort of amusing things was the sort of military bureaucracy. And that was the further you got from the, quote, front lines, the stronger their bureaucracy was. And one of these, you know, public affairs guys, you know, I mean, they're, you know, they're technically they're soldiers, but they're not really fighting. They're in public affairs and they deal with the press and whatever.

And he was a really nice guy and he said to me, listen, tell me, how do I get journalists to trust me? I was like, oh, that's easy. Offer them something. Tell them something true that makes you look bad, right? That makes you look like the military made a mistake at some point. Right. That makes you look like the military made a mistake at some point, because if you're willing to acknowledge a mistake, if you're willing to acknowledge a mistake, then people will believe. But think you're an honest actor in this and they will believe it when you tell the truth, when you when you say something positive about yourself. Right. So, you know, I think the I mean, this is how negotiations stop is that neither side thinks the other side is acting in good faith and so they

don't give an itch that's what's happening politically right now with our two political parties was the same thing i think but the police unions are like uh-uh i mean yeah secretly i know the election wasn't stolen if you're you know maga whatever but i can't say that because if i admit that it wasn't stolen that's a slippery slope suddenly, who knows what's going to happen? You know, the commies are going to take over, whatever they're telling themselves. You know, likewise, if you're in the police union, like, no, no, no. Okay, I know this guy. This cop really shouldn't have done what he did.

It's pretty clear from the video. of a sudden all cops are even for things that were complicated and um and confusing and you know whatever like this sort of gray area where i mean every fight gets into a gray area where no one quite knows what's going on you know i mean a lot of fights do right and and i know a lot of cops and they have a they they're in some really bad situations i think the police union is probably worried about that all that stuff that will start to come up under review. And then nobody's career is safe. So you can't do that. You have to call out bad actions.

Yes, always. Always. Everywhere. The union's got to step up. The left has to step up. The right has to step up. The only thing saving this country is if we can all decide that there is ways to act that are okay and ways to act that aren't. And if you don't call out your own, then we're all screwed.

And that was, I feel like the original sin with the Republicans was, and everybody's got, both political parties have an original sin, but with the Republicans is watching this unfold was when Trump was introducing this sort of nonsense about that Barack Obama was not an American citizen. I mean, come on. The entire GOP, elected GOP, knew that that's nonsense. But no one said it was nonsense. But he was doing that before he was running for president. Yeah, yeah.

No, exactly. Right. Right. When was he doing that? He was. But he kept doing it while he was a GOP candidate. Yeah. Right.

And the institution of the GOP. Was he really? When he was running for president, he was doing that? Yeah. Yeah. Of course he was. Right. He was doing that. He was. But he kept doing it while he was a GOP candidate. Yeah. Right. And the institution of the GOP. Was he really running for president? Yeah. Yeah. Of course he was. Right. The whole time. And that's an important thing. Like we're fighting a war. The commander in chief has to be perceived by our soldiers as being legitimate. He's the head of the whole thing. Right. So if you have a very powerful figure in American politics saying he's actually an imposter and he's not an American citizen, isn't really president, that's very dangerous. And the GOP didn't call that out. And there's equivalent sins on the left, you know, and like you have to call it out. Isn't it kind of crazy though, when you really stop and think about it, that we're a nation of immigrants and you can't be an immigrant and run the nation of immigrants. You have to have been born on this patch of dirt to be legitimate.

It's very weird. You can't be an immigrant. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, who is an American citizen, cannot be the president of the United States because he was not born here. Even though he was the governor of California, he could never be the president. You have to be through no fault of your own. I mean, it has to be like a dumb luck thing where you're born on this patch of dirt. Isn't that bizarre? Well, I think it's to preempt, and it doesn't really do this, obviously, as we just saw with

Barack Obama. I think it's to preempt sort of like suspicions that this is a bad actor who has come here expressly to take over our country. Some charismatic Russian who sneaks over here and ruins it on purpose. It would be a great movie, right? So I kind of – I mean there's something very powerful about this idea of a birth in your community and for us a community of 330 million. But still, it's a community, right? It's unwieldy. It's at odds with itself. But it is a form of community that we're trying to make work. And maybe the only identifier to it is that you were born here. So I kind of understand

that the ultimate, that sort of like paramount leader of this whole crazy circus that we have was also has to be born here. I kind of get it. And that sort of group allegiance, it doesn't guarantee group allegiance being born here, but it signifies something powerful. One of the things I wrote about was, you know, I was talking about how you're in a dangerous environment, your safety comes from being part of a group. how you're in a dangerous environment, your safety comes from being part of a group. And that works because each individual in the group is willing to risk their safety, their life, to protect the whole group.

And if no one's willing to do that, you really don't have a group and no one's safe. So the collective deal is that, okay, we're all part of the Hell's Angels, or we're all part of Second Platoon, or whatever it is. And we all value the safety of the group more than our own individual safety. And our individual safety comes from the fact that we're part of this group. So if everyone does that, everyone's safer. That's a very ancient human arrangement. And I looked at this group in, it was a criminal gang in Chicago in the 1960s called the Vice Lords, right? The term didn't mean that they were committing lots of moral vices, though I'm sure they did occasionally, right? It meant that once you were in, Did occasionally, right. It meant that once you were in, we had you like you're in a vice.

It was a strength of brotherhood term, not a sort of moral corruption term, right. So the thing about the vice lord is a very, very dangerous part of Chicago in the 60s. And if you were an unaffiliated young – it was African-American community, unaffiliated young male, that you were not in a gang, you were really in danger, right? To other predation by other gangs. They would rob you. They would beat you up, whatever. You were in danger. You had to join a gang to stay safe. Once you joined that gang, you owed your life to that gang and everybody did.

and everybody did. And if you failed that the litmus test of being a vice lord was that there were constant fights and fracases and shootings and knifing. I mean, it was a very violent time, right? And one of the litmus tests of being a vice lord, I mean, you fail this, like you're really in trouble, is if you see another vice lord in a fight, even if he's completely outnumbered, if you don't run to his aid, you are not a vice lord. There's a completely functional definition of what it means to be a vice lord is you run towards the fight if any of your brothers are in danger. And if you go the other way, by definition, you're not a vice lord. And what they did with those guys, they didn't beat them up. They didn't nothing.

They put them in the back of a car and they drove them to the heart of enemy territory of some rival gang and they just pushed them out of the car. Like that's what it means to betray your group. And in exchange, and this is why it works so well, and this is what I wish we could get back to on some level in this country, though it's much harder with this many people. There was no rank in the vice lords. There was a leader. He had more responsibility. He had the responsibility of sort of organizing people, but he didn't have extra rights. You know what I mean? He couldn't boss people around. He didn't get more money. He didn't get more wine. He didn't, you know, whatever. Like there was no, he had no advantages, personal advantages to being a leader. He just had more responsibility. And so what that meant

is that they were all, it was a completely egalitarian society in that sense. And when they drank, a really interesting ritual, when they drank, I mean, you can do ritual things that signify that you're part of a group, right? And those rituals are very important. And I'll, if I, you know, if I may, I'd like to suggest ways to ritually participate in being part of this country. I think there's some things that you can do that sort of remind you in very gratifying ways that you're part of this huge, crazy 300 million person enterprise. But for the vice lords, what they would do is they'd pull their money. I mean, these kids were always broke, right? And they'd pull their money, their dimes, nickels and dimes or whatever, and they'd buy a bottle of wine. They drank wine. And they'd buy a bottle of cheap wine. And everyone in the group would get the same amount

of wine regardless of how much money they put in. And if you didn't have any money to put in, you still got the same amount of wine. And that's the ritual egalitarianism between everyone who has pledged their life in defense of the group. And the first thing they did is they poured out a little bit of wine to the vice lords that were in prison and the ones who were dead. So you didn't even have to be alive to be part of this brotherhood. And that's a very, very powerful thing that humans do naturally in small groups. The question for this country and every large country is, how do you do that in an eclectic group of 300 million people that is often screaming at each other because they're in disagreement? How do you do that? How do you do that? So glad you asked. Well, what we know is that the more adversity there is,

the more people band together. And so there was incredible coming together after 9-11 in this country. And very briefly, there was distinctions of race and class were sort of like took a back seat to we are all Americans. We were attacked. We have to defend ourselves. There's a very natural human reaction. One of the amazing benefits and privileges of an affluent, powerful society is that you're not in fear for your life constantly from an outside enemy. And so we're not on a war footing anymore. So how do you maintain that cohesion, even though circumstances don't require it? And I've given a lot of thought to it because people keep saying, how can we act like a tribe within this country? How can we return to that state

of mind? And so the three ways, and part of this comes out of what happened to me last June. I'm alive. My daughters will have a father because 10 people, I needed 10 units of blood. It's an unbelievable amount of blood. 10 people donated blood, right? So the first thing you can do to experience being part of this place, this nation, is donate blood. The amazing thing about blood is it has no – it doesn't discriminate, right? Like blood is blood is blood. Rich, poor, white, black, it doesn't matter, right? All blood saves all people if you're within the blood type.

And all of these awful distinctions between people that are so painful to society, they disappear when it comes to blood. And when you donate blood, you might be a Republican. You might be saving the life of a Democrat or vice versa. I don't know whose blood is in my veins, right? I don't care. We're all human and they saved me. I owe them. I owe the universe 10 units.

I can't wait. I've donated once and they saved me. I owe them. I owe the universe 10 units. I can't wait. I've donated once. I'm going to keep doing it. How many units do you donate at a time? One. One. And how much is that? Like a quart?

I think it's about a pint. Pint. Quart. What am I talking about? Donate a quart of blood? Jesus, that's a lot. How much do you carry in your body at any one time? About 10 units.

I needed, I lost all my blood basically. Wow. And I was still talking. That's wild. My heart was still beating, right? So that's why that nurse said, think of it as a sacred moment. Something powerful happened to you and don't think about it in fearful terms. But anyway.

And we also learned today that it's actually good for you. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And lose weight. Yeah. So the other way is vote. Vote. When you vote, it means that you need your nation

and that your nation needs you, right? You're part of a collective that's collectively coming to hopefully wise decisions. Some days you're going to lose, and your candidate's not going to win, and some days he or she is going to win. But if you just don't vote, what you're kind of doing is saying, you know what, I don't really care what happens. I don't really feel part of this thing. And so you all do whatever you want.

I'm not in. And that's, you know what, you're one person part of this thing. And so you all do whatever you want. I'm not in. And that's, you know what? You're one person out of 330 million. The nation's not going to notice. You're really depriving yourself of the experience, the very profound human experience of being part of something greater. And, you know, and finally, finally, jury duty. Finally, jury duty.

The jury duty is the only thing that keeps one person from deciding the fate of another person. We do not have a system where someone who's accused of a crime may or may not have committed it. We do not have a system where that accused person comes before one other person, they just decide what to do with them. That's too much power in one person. That power isn't put in the hands of 12 people who hopefully come to a wise, informed decision. And jury duty is why we don't live in oppression and tyranny. It's the mechanism that keeps us in a relatively fair society. You do those three things, jury duty, donate blood, and vote, you will feel like you're part

of a country. It also would be, if we all relied on this jury system, which we do, it should be incentive to educate people. It should be incentive to encourage people to have a more balanced perspective because you're going to maybe one day be on the side of those people while they choose your fate. Absolutely. Yeah. And listen, you're put right into the middle of the American drama, right? I mean, it's like a subway car in New York City, right? There's rich people, there's poor people, you know, whatever. And it's amazing. I mean, I was on a jury once. I mean I was on a jury once. There was a corrupt cop in New York City and the experience of it was really, really fascinating.

What did the cop do? Oh, he was like – he would go to these like illegal street vendors and he would like extort them to pay him off to not bust them or he'd confiscate their goods and then he knew this like russian guy like somewhere downtown and he would sell the stole the the confiscated goods to the russian guy and he'd sell them on the street i mean it was a whole scam and then and he was like this sort of sad sack overweight cop who you know abused the systems of the tune of you know six thousand dollars right it wasn't that much money, you know? So, you know, mostly I just felt sort of sad for him. I was like, and we convicted on some counts and not on others. And he, you know, none of us really wanted him to go to jail, but he definitely was a bad cop, right?

So there was this sort of happy medium where we, when the defense attorney saw where this was going and pled out, no jail time, you know, whatever, whatever it was. But it was a righteous decision. I mean, it was- Did he get removed from the police force? Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm sure a bunch of stuff happened to him, but he didn't do jail time. Have you ever seen the documentary, The 7-5? No. Oh, yes. I'm sorry. Yes, I have. Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah yeah it wasn't quite like that but it was a sad sack version of that but how crazy is that documentary when you realize that this is

at least at the time where michael dowd was in the police force this was how it was run yeah and from the very first day on the job he was introduced to this kind of corruption the fact that there was this sort of brotherhood of silence and of acceptance of this corruption, and you had to participate in it so you could be trusted. Right. Well, you don't have a democracy really at the small scale or at the large scale if you don't have an oversight mechanism that examines the mechanism that has power over us. Yeah. Right? I mean, if the thing that has power over us, which is the military, the government, and the police, if there aren't mechanisms for examining them,

then we're at risk. Yeah. Right? I mean, and that's why you have federal investigations and you have congressional investigations and you have journalists with the military and all this other stuff. And, you know, people bridle at the oversight and they

call it all kinds of nonsense. But at the end of the day, that's why we don't, we're not living in a frigging dictatorship. Yeah. Yeah. When, so when you set out to write this book, you're, you're incorporating a lot of different things, right? You're incorporating your personal journey along the railroad lines, and you're also incorporating all your thoughts about sort of the mechanisms of freedom like how did you organize this how did you so the the account of my trip um i we just pop up here and there throughout the narrative um and you know we are And, you know, we are outside of direct control by society. I mean, we're moving along the margins in the shadows, you know, on this no man's land of the railroad lines.

But we're dependent on society, right? I mean, we're getting our food in town, right? I mean, walking to town, we look like shit. We go to a store, buy some supplies, some rice, some oatmeal, some whatever some whatever and then we keep moving and then we're out of town again so we're in this weird symbiotic relationship as everyone is and we're trying to figure out like the sort of balance between dependency and autonomy that's true for everybody right it was just true in very raw physical terms for us so that so so the journey comes and goes throughout the book. And it talks about that level of freedom.

And then the rest of it, the research material, is divided into run, fight, and think. Mobility gives people freedom from an oppressor. Oppressors are often, they're more powerful. They're more in sort of like military terms are often more mechanized, like a more mechanized army. And again, oppression is in the eye of the beholder. The Taliban felt oppressed by the US military. They are now free. They have their quote, freedom. The reason that they were able to fight us to not lose for 20 years, that they were more mobile and we were more heavily armored and slower. And it costs us a lot more. Like a bigger fighter uses more oxygen, a bigger military uses more money for every day

that they're fighting. The insurgents use much, much, much less so they can sustain it indefinitely. That's run. Fight is when it comes down to a fight, how does the smaller entity win, be it the Montenegrins or a smaller fighter in the ring or, you know, at every scale. And then finally, think. And what I looked at there is how does change come like if you're part of a society you're it's not you're really not talking about freedom I mean you can be free of our society you could go or I could go to Somalia and be free of the authority of the United States it's basically a failed state uh Maybe there's some corners in Alaska where the government wouldn't find you or whatever. You can get your freedom from your

country by simply leaving, right? If you're going to stay within your community, you're really talking about your rights. So how do you maintain your rights or gain the rights you should have within the community that you're in? And so the and that requires I mean, almost by definition, no individual is stronger than the U.S. government and the U.S. military and the police and blah, blah, blah. So you have to sort of outthink it. Right. So in the Easter Rising in Ireland, the Irish rebels were completely outgunned, right? And they lost the initial fight and they took over Dublin. And the English army came in and just rolled them up, right? But they were playing the long game. And eventually, it was too costly for the British to keep control of Ireland and they gave them their freedom.

And, you know, likewise in this country, you know, around 100 years ago, the labor conditions in this country were horrific. And the, you know, unions were not legal. And I mean, you know, unions commit tons of abuses of their authority. And so I know they're very problematic. But if you go back 100 years, what happened to labor in the absence of unions was really horrific. And so the striker, you know, they started going on strike. And these are very, very poor people. A lot of them were immigrants, right? And they were facing the U.S., the National Guard, the U.S. government.

I mean they were facing unbelievable odds and they out-thought them. And one way they out-thought them was by, and this is super important, they had leadership that was willing to die for the cause, like literally willing to die. Like Michael Connolly in Dublin during the Easter Rising, leadership that was willing to die. They did not put themselves behind the people, the front line people. They were with them, right? And the other thing is that they brought women into the fight. And the interesting thing about women is that the authorities, this is true all around the world and not without exception, but they are more reluctant to kill women than to kill men. The political ramifications for killing men are much lighter than for killing women.

And it's such a powerful factor that if you put women on the front line of a labor strike, the cops don't know what to do. And so that's what they did in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on the mill strikes in Lawrence. And, you know, I mean, just you have to understand how abusive the labor relationship was with the factories back then. And they were, the protests were long and coming and completely legitimate. And, you know, they just, you know, the authorities just put the National Guard out there with fixed bayonets. You know, what were the guys going to do? And then they put women out there and the strikers put women out there and you know these boys

in uniform they had mothers they had sisters they weren't going to start bayoneting women they were tactically stymied and this one cop police captain in Lawrence Massachusetts said it's such a wonderful line he said

one cop can handle ten men but it takes 10 cops to handle one woman. And that started to change the dynamic. And the other advantage that women had is that their social relations tend not to be hierarchical like men are. I mean, you need a hierarchy. If you're going to ask people to charge machine guns, you need a hierarchy, right? You need command and control, mass on the street and charge, right? Women tend to have more lateral social relations and lateral social relations are really hard for the authorities to penetrate. You can't just take out one person and the whole thing collapses, right? It's a spider web. And so the lateral female relations in the sort of slums of Lawrence, Massachusetts,

the authorities could not penetrate. They couldn't get any intelligence. And so they used women for this sort of like information sharing, planning, strategy stuff. They used women for that and the authorities just could not get inside it. They couldn't get ahead of it. So that's the sort of think part of this. It's like how do you – freedom really means freedom from being controlled by a stronger power, a bigger power. And how do you do that? You can run. You can fight. At the end of the day, you might have to think. And that for thousands of years, that's how humans have done it. And that for thousands of years, that's how humans have done it. When you're putting this all together, are you thinking of this as a study on freedom?

Is it a guidebook? Is it a series of personal experiences and historical references to freedom? You know, it's in the eye of the beholder. I mean, it's all of those things. I wanted to figure out with this – using as few words as possible what allows human beings to be free. And this is what I came to understand about it. And if you – it's one would read it, right? I want to do like really physical, animal, visceral terms. Why are we self-defining? How can humans be self-defining either as a group or as an individual?

And this is what I came up with. And, you know, what I would say is, just to reiterate this point about how much we all need groups to be free, and then you have to maintain your freedom, your rights within that group. I mean, that's the sort of the one-two step of being self-defining is the group you're in is not oppressed by someone else. And then within the group you're in, you have your rights. So two-step process. But the higher the obligations within the group, the more autonomy people have within the group.

And so what I would say is that the freedom means you don't – you have the right to not be oppressed by your leaders. But you don't have the right to be free of obligations. but you don't have the right to be free of obligations. So the question for a modern nation is what are reasonable obligations to ask of people in a crisis and not in a crisis? What is reasonable? As a very simple example, we don't have the right to drive on the left-hand side of the road because we'll frigging kill people, right? That's not a diminishment of your freedom.

It means that you're part of a group and you understand that its rules keep human life as sacred. If you don't think so, you really shouldn't be here. And this is one way we keep people from dying in the highways is that everyone drives on the right-hand side of the road. I had a journalist friend who was in Goa, I think, which was a Portuguese colony and eventually reverted to India. I can't quite remember the details. At any rate, it was going from a left-hand system to a right-hand system, right? So my friend, this is like 20 years ago, my friend said to the taxi driver, well, when the big day comes and you change jurisdiction, what are you going to do with the roads, right? How are you going to

change from the left-hand side to the right-hand side or the other way around? And the taxi driver said, oh, we'll do it gradually. Imagine what that would look like, right? Sometimes left, sometimes right. This part of town, you're right. That part of town, you're right. What the fuck? We'll do it gradually, yeah. So basically, you're part of a group. Your group is making decisions about how to keep everyone safe. That's one of the obligations is you follow those rules. Right. Right?

And when those rules impinge on your rights, then you, in a democracy, you have fair recourse through the courts and through elections to make a change. What you don't have the ability to do is give yourself rights. Right? So if you're late for your airplane and you get to the airport and there's a huge line at security, you actually are not, you cannot give yourself the right to go to the front of the line. But what you can do is say, it's my daughter's wedding tomorrow. I'm going to miss my plane.

So all you guys, do you mind if I go first? Rights are given to you. Right. You can't take them. You can take power, right, through violence, and you can take your freedom through violence from an enemy. But rights are given by the group to the individual. And you have to go to that line and say, would you mind? And they all say, no, of course not. Go for it.

Congratulations. That's what rights are. It sort of brings me to the right of freedom of speech, because we all agree that it's important that people be able to express themselves. But we also impose at least the limitations on that where you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. Right. We have limitations in terms of, I mean, you're able to express yourself, but that's a little slippery, right? Like when do we decide that what you're doing is not technically freedom of speech? It falls under incitement to violence. It falls under some

unprotected category that although we allow you to express yourself freely, we have to maintain some sort of structure and some sort of order. Well, I'm not a lawyer, but I'll try to sort of think my way through this with you. You're not a doctor or a lawyer? No. Can you believe I just – This is crazy. What did I do with my life?

Okay. Continue in my disappointment. So Donald Trump said an untruth, right? He said our president, Barack Obama, is not a U.S. citizen. He has every right as a matter of free speech to say that, right? I think it was unwise for the GOP to not call him out on it. But regardless, that's a political question. But as a matter of free speech, he was allowed to say something that was demonstrably not true, right? Had he said, Barack Obama is not a citizen, someone should

kill him. He does not have the right to say that, right? He has crossed over into incitement to violence and God knows what else. And he will undoubtedly would have been arrested for that. He, you know, just to be clear, he didn't say that. I'm sure he would never say that. But just as a sort of thought experiment, that's where that line is. And so, you know, I don't know how the courts sort of like slice this, but if they feel that a certain kind of inflammatory speech will lead to loss of life. And, you know, I think in a democracy, it's fair to say speech that will undermine, I mean, the democracy we have is part of our physical security in the world. Democracies

are very strong systems. Dictatorships don't do very well. I mean, they're very unstable. I mean, for all of the obsession with control that dictators have, dictatorships are usually very short-lived regimes, rarely transition power to like the son of the dictator or whatever. It just doesn't work very well. Democracies are very resilient and they transfer power very, very well. And so our security in the world comes from the strength of our – in part from the strength of our democracy and the amazing military that protects it. And so I think you could argue that if someone says something which is like immediately, like viscerally, obviously a threat to our democratic system, you can sort of argue, you know, you play that out a few more steps, real lives are actually going to be in danger.

You know, you play that out a few more steps, real lives are actually going to be in danger. And so then you are sanctioned. And, you know, that's the big argument with Donald Trump. That's the big argument with the Capitol Hill. Exactly. Yeah. That's right. Should he or should not? Should he not have access to the sort of megaphone of Twitter and Facebook if he's saying things that some people believe got some folks

killed on Capitol Hill and that are a grave threat to the democratic process. I'm not going to weigh in. That's not a journalist role, but I think that seems to be what the discussion is about. It's a great discussion. It's an one because um he didn't exactly say do that right but he didn't say don't do it right right yeah exactly no he's got to know that in this insanely volatile situation where people are really thinking that the relationship between the voters and the politicians and this whole thing is like inexorably flawed and that they're stealing the election and it's over everything democracy is crashed we're gonna lose the Republic this is all madness storm the Capitol Hill right like you got it like what are

we saying here right do what when you get there? What happens when you get there? You got to show a force? Show a force. Okay. What does that mean? And that's where it's open to interpretation, right? Well, look, yeah, it is open to interpretation, but if you don't just look at Donald Trump, but the people who are close around him. So his personal, correct me if I'm wrong, but if memory serves, Lin Wood, one of his personal attorneys, literally said before the January 6th insurrection, insurrection is too dignified a word, whatever that mob was, literally said, Mike Pence, the vice president, should be tried for treason and hung. Right?

This is the lawyer to the president speaking. Now, did Donald Trump say that or okay it? No. I'm pretty sure he didn't. Mike Pence should be tried for treason and hung. Check me on Google if you want. Please do. What was the premise?

Because he validated the election results. Because he validated the election results. An election that the Republican leadership eventually admitted was free and fair. That was the context? Yes. Tried for treason and hung. That is a crazy thing to say. And there was a lot of rhetoric by other people in that group about what they could do with Nancy Pelosi and other people that they thought had betrayed what? and other people that they thought had betrayed what?

But imagine if a real mob got to Mike Pence and murdered him after that. Yeah. Oh, exactly. And really did believe that he was a treasonous person. Right, exactly. So, I mean, again, if I'm wrong, I stand corrected, but that's my memory of what he said. It says he should be executed by a firing squad.

Oh, it was firing squad. Dude, you're way off. My bad. That's the same. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the personal attorney to the American president. That's so crazy.

Firing squad. While he was still president. I mean, he's still president at this point. Jesus Christ. And he didn't, you know, the president, While he was still president. I mean, he's still president at this point. Jesus Christ. And he didn't, you know, the president, ex-president Trump did not say, oh, wait a second. What do you, you know, he let it go. Right. So what's this have to do with free speech? Well, free speech is there because it's closely tied to human dignity and self-definition and autonomy and all that stuff. But if your free speech undermines the dignity and the autonomy and the safety and the lives of other people, you stop having that right. You cannot drive on the left-hand side of the road. It's the equivalent of that situation.

Yeah. That makes sense. You got a lot of little tabs on that book there. Oh, you know, it's like if I'm doing a radio interview or something and someone says, oh, read me that section about the Apache. And I can find it fairly quickly. That's all that is. Did you have anything in those notes that you wanted to bring up that we hadn't discussed yet? No. We're covering most of it. I mean, most of it's in my head, but sometimes I worry that I'm going to forget something important to bring up.

And so that's just my – it's like a security blanket. Like if I can put that next to me, then I never need to look at it. That's how it works. Well, I always enjoy your work, man. And I really enjoy your books on tape because there's something that I always appreciate about an author reading his own work or her own work. And you do an exceptional job of that. You got a great voice for it. Thank you. Thank you. Reading is hard. They put you basically in something the size of a phone booth and you read for hours and hours and

hours. But I'm proud that I can do it well. It's very, very gratifying to read your own work. very gratifying to like read your own work. And, um, you know, there's a section in my book about a guy named Michael Mallon, um, who was one of the insurrectionists in Dublin. And, um, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, you know, the dozen or so top insurrectionists were executed by firing squad by the Brits. And Michael Mallon was one of them. When they were taking him to the place of his execution, the carriage went right by his own house and he saw his dog and he got to, you know, in the hours before his execution, he wrote to, you know, he had four little children and a wife and he wrote a letter to them. And it's almost kind of stream of consciousness. I mean, he's hours from being shot, right?

He's never going to see them again. He's never going to see nothing. It's over, right? And he gave his life for Ireland. And he writes this letter. And it's in my book. I reproduce it in my book. I quote it in my book.

The words that he said, the last words that he said to his beloved family, and it's almost stream of consciousness. He's very upset, right? And he repeats things and he's, oh my God, my God, I'll never hold you again. I mean, it just, I mean, particularly if you're a parent, it's just heartbreaking. At any rate, I was reading that, that section and I got so choked up and the engineer got so choked up that we actually had to stop for a while. I mean, you know, this is a hundred years later. This man's words that he wrote in the hours before he was tied, they stood in front of a firing squad and shot that they can still produce so much empathy in us that we cry. That's what humans are. Like that's the amazing thing about humans.

And so it just, I don't know. Obviously, poor Michael Mallon is never going to know that his letter is still bringing a tear to people's eye. But it is. Still bringing a tear to people's eye, but it is. Well, it's also the amazing thing about utilizing language and putting the words together in a way that's going to best represent the way your thoughts are and how to reach someone else's imagination and have them recreate these thoughts in their mind. That's right. these thoughts in their mind. That's right. And you know, when you have a sort of certainty of purpose, like he did, a sort of sense of meaning of what you're doing, it gives you courage. And hopefully a courage that you'll use justly. And so apparently there was a medical examiner

at all the executions. It was in the Stonebreaker's Yard in the central prison in Dublin. And the executions were held in the Stonebreaker's Yard. And it's a sort of stone enclosure, I mean, a very small place. And there was a medical examiner sort of witnessing this. And, you know, one after another, there was one woman slated for execution at the last moment. This is what I was saying. They withdrew the execution because they knew that executing a woman, the Brits knew it would make their lives, their job much, much harder in Ireland. They didn't dare do it. The men were no problem. But the medical examiner testified that at the moment before, at the moment where the man stood facing the firing squad, ready, aim, fire,

that the only person there who wasn't troubling was the condemned. That all these young boys, I mean, they're just 19, 20 year old boys in the army, right? They didn't want to be executing people. They didn't sign up for that. And they were all trembling and they could hardly hold their rifle barrels still. Imagine. Imagine giving that responsibility to a person based on what your government is telling you is right or wrong. It's time for you to take a life. And you know what? If you don't do it, the next person up in front of the firing squad is going to be you. Yeah. It's always been fascinating to me too, how one person will get blanks. Yeah, that's right. You don't know. That's right. And you know, like if society really wants to take moral responsibility for killing, they should make

sure no one has, you know, no one has blanks. And then we really have a real conversation about if we want to be in this business or not. One of the, someone pointed out, I wish I could claim this thought, but I can't. It's so brilliant. That amazing photograph of Tenement Square where there's that man standing in front of a column of tanks, not moving. huge, right? I mean, they crush you in a second, right? I mean, they're scary things, right? And he's standing in front of this tank and he's not moving. And the tanks have stopped. And someone pointed out, you know, there's two brave people in that photograph. There's the guy in front of the tank. And then there's the driver of the lead tank. There it is. There's the driver of the lead tank. And he's risking possibly being executed by his own government for insubordination. And he's not running that guy over. And he's the other unseen

courageous person in that photo is the guy who's not. Look, look at that. Think of the courage for both of them. Think of that that think of the courage and the conversation the tank driver and that man could have had if they were if it were allowed the conversation they could have the government they could form the good they can do in the world imagine if that were allowed that is such an intense video is he going to climb up? I don't even remember this. Yeah.

Now, that's someone who believes in democracy more than his own life. Or someone who's just fucking losing his shit. Yeah, but why, right? Well, because he's being oppressed. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But that's someone who does not care what happens to himself or herself, right? That's someone who has put their society, their people ahead of their own welfare.

And that, I mean, if you can watch that in Art Stock Ryan, you're, you know, like, it's incredible. How does this play out? I don't remember. Eventually they got him out of there. I think he negotiated something with the tech. Yeah, it got resolved. Something got resolved something got resolved he i mean something was said that made him able to save his own life beautiful right yeah

it's heavy and heavy to think that that government to this day is still a dictatorship yeah and they killed thousands of people in Tenement Square. They're old people. They machine-gunned them. Yeah. And you can't find out about it. No. So you live there and you try to research it online. It's unavailable.

Yeah, that's right. Is there a better example of freedom in the world than the United States? Okay, so freedom and democracy are not the same thing. Right. Right. And democracy gives people rights within a country, right? Freedom really is, um, I mean, it's up to you to define it how you want, but the working definition I'm using is freedom means that you are safe from an outside power controlling you, right? If you consider the U.S. government to be an outside power, which I don't personally, but if you consider it – if you think of it that way, then yes, the word freedom is sort of appropriate in the context of January 6th or whatever. But really what – when people say, you know, I want my freedoms, right? My freedoms to not pay taxes or not wear a mask or whatever it is. You know, my freedoms to compete in women's sports and I'm trans.

You know, whatever it is. They're really talking about their rights. And so, you know, the American democratic system is deeply flawed and deeply amazing. And, you know, like we're still working at it and we make mistakes, but we're improving it, you know, whatever. I mean, the civil rights movement in the 60s was a huge leap forward. Clearly, clearly, clearly, it was not a just country before those laws were enacted. And it's still not entirely just in its application, right? Freedom is really a different matter. And so I would say we are a free country because we are not under the control of another power. And that on paper,

our rights are amazing and transcend the rights of most people throughout almost all of human history. But obviously, we're flawed, we're human, we're racist, we're biased, we're this, we're that, we're rich, we're poor. We don't apply it in fair ways all the time. But is there a better example of what the way society can be structured anywhere else? I mean, you need, so you need this sort of balance of a country that is – can defend itself and its borders and defend its democracy, a balance between that and a that the gap between rich and poor in this country, the income gap, what's called the Gini coefficient, is growing larger, not smaller. And the larger that gap gets,

arguably the less just the society is and the people at the bottom of that gap are arguably not as quote free as the people at the top. Right, I mean just in terms of the choices they have available to them. And that trend has been going on for decades and it's correlated with all kinds of things that are dangerous to a society, to a democracy.

And exacerbated by the pandemic. Oh, of course, yeah. Yeah, but it's been going on for a long time. So the Gini coefficient is named for an Italian economist around 100 years ago. And it measures the gap, the income gap between rich and poor. What's really interesting is that you have a hunter-gatherer societies that are, you know, really very egalitarian. They have a Gini coefficient of 0.25.

It's on a scale from 0 to 1.0. So they're much closer to sort of like complete equality than they are to complete monopoly. So they're much closer to sort of like complete equality than they are to complete monopoly. And as you go up the scale, you start to find country – really corrupt countries have high Gini coefficients, terrible gap between rich and poor. America has one of the highest Gini coefficients, I think 42, 41, 0.41, 0.42 of any of the Western democracies, right? It's on a par with the Roman Empire. One of the highest genie coefficients was in medieval Europe. And that was rectified by the Black Death, the Great Plague.

It killed so many people. The Black Death killed one third of the population of Europe. One out of three people died. There was a huge labor shortage. And that actually brought the Gini coefficient back down. And so it's – the weird thing about the Gini coefficient is that – I mean you obviously don't want too high one because it's not just. It has its own instability. But really low Gini coefficients typically are not associated with powerful countries.

So the empires that have dominated world events, the Han Dynasty, the Roman Empire, the Ottomans, on and on, America, the British Empire, they have like fairly high Gini coefficients. So as a good lefty, I like to think, oh, well, a just and fair egalitarian society eventually will be the most powerful country in the world because everyone's happy and we all pull together and blah, blah, blah. It's really not true. Like typically the really, really large dominant empires have like moderately high Gini coefficients. So it ruined my liberal fantasies about all that. Is that because it's never been attempted successfully in a better way? Or is it like, think about democracy, right? We didn't have democracy until the 1700s,

didn't exist in terms of like a global leadership, like a global government. But now we have it and it's thought to be the shining example. But if you look at 1776 to the rest of human history, we're talking about a drop in the bucket, a blink of an eye, right? Right. Comparison of the hundreds of thousands of years that people lived under the bloody rule of dictatorship and monarchies. Well, I mean, here's the thing. Hunter-gatherers are not democracies, right? But they have very low Gini coefficients. In other words, in material terms, they're fairly

egalitarian. And in a lot of those societies, women are in a subordinate role and all kinds of other things that would offend our modern sensibilities. What I think we really want is to make sure that the people that are at the very top are not abusing the people at the bottom and that the people at the bottom have a standard of life that's acceptable. That's right. So even if you're fairly poor, but if you have access to good housing, safe communities, and good food, that's what you want. That's what everybody wants, right?

If you're not a person who wants the trappings of financial success, you don't want a giant house and the cars and all the stress and all the hassle that goes along with it. This Gini coefficient. I mean, does it relate to those things? Well, some of that stuff. Yeah. I mean, some of those decisions are personal decisions. Like, you know, some people don't want to be a corporate lawyer or whatever and work for— They don't even want to be wealthy. They just want to be okay. Yeah, exactly. I mean, as Mike Tyson said, I was freest when I was poor.

Right? And just to be clear, I'm not advocating for a high Gini coefficient for the United States. No, I know. I'm just sort of pointing out historically that really dominant empires in the world have had fairly high Gini coefficients. And you can make a very good case for a low Gini coefficient in South America after all those awful dictatorships the United States supported through the 70s and 80s. There was initiatives for real economic reforms that brought the Gini coefficients down. Those countries are way more stable now because they're fairer countries,

right? Economically, politically, legally fairer countries. The Gini coefficients have come down. It's just that Ecuador is never going to be a world power. I mean, the world powers throughout history for the past thousand years have not been very fair societies. And that's- Is it because insane amounts of money are needed to fund military and to fund these corporations that are innovating and that's going to keep you at the cutting edge of cultures in terms of like your ability to change things, your ability to affect things globally? I mean, look, there's an accumulation of capital and that rule, very powerful rulers, uh, then depend on a huge sort of, uh, um, labor pool to fill enormous armies. Um, that labor pool isn't going to be there in an egalitarian society. Everyone has more or less

the same amount of, of material wealth. So, but you know, you need a sort of unfair system to put people in a position of accepting the rule of a despot. And let's be clear about it. Through most of human history, empires were run by despots and had absolute power. So I mean, I don't know. I don't know if there is an answer, but I'm just guessing that that kind of top-down hierarchy that comes with the accumulation of wealth also creates a labor pool for your armies. And then those armies are then very, very capable of defeating the enemy. But once – sometimes it doesn't go the right way. who at the time was the most powerful military leader of the world, massive, massive army, went road north to fight the Scythians, who were this sort of wild marijuana-smoking nomadic people, right?

Completely whacked out, out there people, and amazing warriors. And they were totally outgunned by Darius, right? And the Scythians sort of avoided him for days, and Darius finally got them into a position to fight him, right? And this is mobility versus strength. It's exactly that, right? He finally got them in a position to fight him. And right before the battle, I mean, imagine how scared and nervous everybody is, right? The huge armies are drawn up facing each other. At the last moment, the Scythians noticed that there were a lot of rabbits hopping around in the underbrush. And they took their bows and arrows and they started hunting the rabbits so that they would have something to eat for dinner. And Darius saw this.

And, you know, back in the day, armies were drawn up within sight of each other, right? This isn't a big standoff. They're all looking at each other right across a football field basically. He saw that the Scythian warriors were so calm that they were hunting rabbits in their spare time waiting for the fight to begin. And it unnerved him so deeply that he pulled out. He retreated and they fled. That wild? That is wild. Yeah yeah just the rabbit hunting

he was like anyone who can hunt rabbits before a battle like this has got to be sure they're going to win i want no part of it now there must be an equivalent in mma right the guy that yawns before the fight or whatever like i mean those those MMA guys must communicate confidence in a variety of ways. There is a way that you can tell someone's overwhelmed by the moment. You can feel it and see it, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to lose. Right. No, but I mean before the fight. Before they put themselves together.

Before – Yeah. That's a lot of what psychological warfare that a lot of fighters engage in. The whole point of it is to get the other person thinking and get them upset. There's a lot of unconscious dominance and submission with humans and all the social primates. And so they did this one study. It's fascinating. They looked at those sort of pre-fight like poses where they have the fighters in boxing.

They sort of like stand next to each other and face each other. And they examine those for like unconscious sort of body language, those kind of visual cues. And sometimes, so one signal, it's called an appeasement cue, right? It's a little signal like, I'm not a threat to you, don't hurt me, right? And an appeasement cue is usually used by someone who feels that the other person is a threat to them, can hurt them, and they don't

want to get into a fight. So a smile, and we've all seen people do this, we've all done it ourselves to cops or whatever, like when someone seems to be more powerful than you, what you do is, what people do is they sort of do a sort of forced smile. It's called an appeasement cue. What they found when they looked at these videos was that once in a while these fighters would sort of briefly smile. And that was overwhelmingly correlated with losing the fight. Is that wild? It is wild. I don't even think they know they do it.

It's an unconscious thing. Wow. So they're trying to find some peace in a place where they're 100% committed to violence. Right. But they're sending a signal, don't hurt me. I'm not a threat to you. I'm like, it's an appeasement cue. Like, I'm not a threat to you. You don't need to kill me.

Wow. Right. Which is what we all do that with cops. Oh, sorry, officer. I didn't know. You know, whatever. I mean, it's automatic. We're primates, right? It's wired into us. Right. Which is what we all do that with cops. Oh, sorry, officer. I didn't know. You know, whatever. I mean, it's automatic. We're primates, right?

It's wired into us. Yeah. Right. So what the Scythians were doing was the opposite of an appeasement cue. They were basically yawning before a big fight like, oh, what, is it time to fight now? Okay, well, let me kill a rabbit so that I have dinner afterwards. Right. How badass is that?

That's pretty badass. One more thing i just wanted to i wanted to know what your thoughts are on i mean i i like what we're saying here in terms of the imbalance of income in society but i'm also a person that believes in motivation and i believe that people have to be incentivized to do things absolutely Absolutely. But I don't think that the society as structured is fair. And I don't think that it's fair that some people grow up in poverty-stricken, crime-ridden, gang-infested inner cities and some people grow up in the beautiful bird-chirping suburbs. Right?

But how does one balance these things out to the point where I don't believe in equality of outcome, but I think it would be wonderful if we had equality of opportunity. If people had the chance in all walks of life, in all parts of the country to advance with at least similar obstacles. But do we make it more difficult for the people that live in the bird chirping suburbs? Do we make it easier for the people that live in the crime infested cities? How do we do that? And do we do that through things like universal basic income, which in my mind, like I'm completely ignorant when it comes to economics.

But I've always found that appealing because I don't think that money should be the motivating factor for someone to choose what to do or not to do with their life. But I do know that for people that were poor, including myself, the incentive to do better is often what spurs you ahead and makes you act and do things.

And those things wind up being beneficial. Yeah. And some people, they don't, if you give them money just for free, they no longer have incentive and they don't do anything. It's just a part of human nature. Oh, totally. How does that balance out?

Well, I mean, you said it, it has to balance, right? So if you had a system where everyone got the same amount of money no matter what they did, you're disincentivizing effort. Yes. You can't have equality of outcome. Right. So, I mean, that was the big experiment with communism.

Yes. Right? It didn't work very well. My first marriage was to a woman who grew up in Bulgaria. And there were a lot of great things about that society. I mean, we could talk about that if you want. But, you know, people were not incentivized to – in fact, they were disincentivized. Not only were they not financially incentivized to sort of like redouble their efforts,

but other people would also look at them with sort of suspicion like, what are you doing, right? You're throwing – you know, you're destabilizing everything. So – but then the other hand, if it is so economically unjust, no matter how much effort you put into it, you will never achieve the outcomes that a different kind of person will achieve. That is just that that doesn't incentivize effort either, right? So, I mean, you can make a pretty good case that if you're like an African-American kid in a really, really poor community with a really shitty school

and in a single family home, et cetera, et cetera, all the correlates to bad outcomes, you can try as hard as you want. And once in a while, someone gets through or whatever, but the odds are stacked so much against you. I mean you can make this case. The odds are stacked so much against you that it's not an unreasonable thought to have, which is, well, fuck it. I'm not going to even try, right?

Yeah. So how do you equalize that? Education. We need good schools everywhere, right? Single parents need some help because they can't work and take care of a child. I mean, you know, there are structural things we can do that make the society collaborative and just in the way that a small-scale hunter-gatherer society is collaborative and just. I mean, basically in a small-scale society, there's collective parenting and no one parent or set of parents does all the child raising,

which allows people to do other things that the group needs done. And the hunter hunts and the basket weaver weaves, you know, whatever. We have to institutionalize that in this society because it won't happen organically in the kind of way that it does among the Cone. But even the problem with institutionalizing something like that, you want someone who's actually motivated to help people. You don't want someone who's just doing it as a job. One of the things that's frustrating for people that, you know, when you see some of the school teachers in these crime-ridden communities, they have no incentive. They're not motivated or incentive. They're not motivated or motivating. They're not good at what they do. And there's no incentive for them either,

because it's a dangerous job. And it's better to just show up and collect your paycheck and just do the minimum amount that you have to do and recognize the fact that this is a shitty situation for everybody, which nothing gets better in that way. Well, yeah. I mean, I would say that for every teacher that's like that, there's another teacher that's buying pencils and erasers out of their pocket for the kids, whatever. It's hard to generalize. But my answer would be, well, that's an institutionalized solution that's not working. We need one that works. I don't think we have time to figure out what that is with the education system. But theoretically, that's the- I don't think we do, but I just wish somebody else was. And I think you're right that it is the education system. But, you know, theoretically, that's the... I don't think we do, but I just wish somebody else was, you know? And I think you're right,

that it is the education, that education is the key. But also, community is the key, like having a safe area where you can go to, whether it's community centers or something with some kind of counseling, something where you feel like you're a part of something bigger that incentivizes you to continue to try to do better with your life. Well, listen, we need to feel community at every level. We needed to feel at the macro level in our nation, right? All the way down to the micro level of our neighborhood. And it's lacking at every level. I will, I mean, let me just quickly tell a story that sort of exemplifies this. I was on a book tour some years ago in Norfolk, Virginia.

I'd spoken at the Naval base, and I was coming out of my hotel in the morning, and there was this old guy in his mid-70s in a wheelchair, and he was missing half his right leg, and it clearly—you know, he was bandaged. He clearly had just lost half his right leg. He was in a wheelchair, and he was trying to get into a car. It was like 7 in the morning. I was going to the airport, and he was trying to get into his car, and it was locked. the morning. I was going to the airport and he was trying to get into his car and it was locked. And I went up to him and I said, sir, can I help you? And I was waiting for my ride. There was no one else out there. And he said, oh, I'm okay. I'll just wait for my wife to come out. She's got the keys. And I looked down

at the situation, right? And I said, wow, that seems really, really hard, you know, what you're doing. I mean, you're missing your right leg. And he said, you know, zero self-pity, which is an enormously noble thing, right? He said, well, I don't know if it's hard, but it's interesting. It's different. Getting used to it, you know. I was like, all right, you're a tough old bird. Wow. You know, I'll try again.

And I said, wow, well, I got to say, you're a tough old bird. Like, you know, I'll try again. And I said, I said, wow, well, I got to say, you seem really brave about it. And he looked at me like I was the biggest fool that he'd met in a long time. And he said, brave about it. There's young people in this country missing both their legs. Don't think I'm brave. There's a person who's thinking about the entire country, that he's part of a country. And some people are doing worse than him. And don't waste any pity on him because there's other people who need help first. And I got to say, you know, I wish I knew who he was so we could put up a statue to him, right? Like if we all thought a bit like that, boy, we'd be doing better.

I just don't know how to get people to do it. Well, I think of any way your work, you know, I mean, I think tribe is a fantastic testament to that. And I think you're doing more of the same with freedom. And, you know, it's what you always are sort of encouraging people to look at the world in that regard and look at our communities in that way. Thank you. Thank you. That and my children are the most profound satisfactions of my lives, and my family, I should say. I feel very honored, very privileged to be able to do this.

It comes through. It comes through in your work. I appreciate you very much. Thank you, man. Thank you. I love talking to you. I love talking to you, too. I can't wait to write another book and come back and do it again. All right. Let's do it again. Pulse. And freedom is out right now. Thank you. Thanks, man. Bye, everybody.