The Joe Rogan Experience - #975 - Sebastian Junger

Episode Date: June 9, 2017

Sebastian Junger is the author of The Perfect Storm, War, and Tribe. He also is the co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Restrepo." His latest documentary "Hell On Earth" can been seen on NatGeo on June 11.

All right, we're live. What's up, man? How are you? Hey, I'm pretty good. I'm excited. I walked in on a pool game. I barely squeaked it out. That was a very nice shot to end it, though. That's the way to end it. So I've been reading your book, man, Tribe. I really enjoy it. It's really good. And it's so, it resonates. It's very interesting. Into the first chapter, I wanted to move in with the Native Americans. It was such a, I mean, it was one of the more interesting aspects of it was

something that I didn't know about, which was the European settlers that had been kidnapped and were living with the Native Americans. And then when they were rescued, many of them wanted to go back. Yeah. Or they would go into hiding so they wouldn't have to be repatriated to colonial society. They wanted to stay with their adopted tribes. And there was also a lot of young white people, particularly white men, but young women too, who basically absconded across the frontier into tribal society. They fled white society. They didn't like it. And as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, we have lots of young colonials fleeing to the Indians, and we have not one example of an Indian, as they were called, fleeing to white society. Yeah, that was one of the more fascinating aspects of it.

I didn't anticipate that. I thought that there would be a lot of Native Americans that would be like, wow, this is a way better. Look at all the food. Look at the houses. I mean, they had plenty of food. You know, whatever. They were a very successful society. In fact, they had better nutrition than the whites did.

A more varied diet, and a much, much more egalitarian society than colonial society. That was also interesting about it. When you were talking about the women that had moved in with the Native Americans and were expressing how much more freedom they experienced. Yeah. I mean, Indian society, Native society, wasn't crushed by Christian morality. So you could divorce, you could marry as a woman, you could marry whom you wanted, you could get divorced, you could do whatever you wanted.

It was very, very egalitarian. What they've shown is that in societies where everyone is necessary for food production, everyone's more or less equal. And in agrarian societies, agricultural societies, industrial societies, you have large segments of the population, often women, who are not involved in food production. They're involved in reproduction. And so their equality goes down. Wow.

goes down Wow it's just it's almost like society as we've created over the last couple of hundred years is almost totally incompatible with with human genetics or with the human body or the the human spirit or whatever well if you look at I mean genetics are complicated I mean obviously genetics are complicated. I mean, obviously, on some level, industrial modern society is very successful. We have seven billion of us. But as wealth goes up in a society, as modernity goes up in a society, the suicide rate goes up. The depression rate goes up. Schizophrenia goes up in urban environments. They're not good for the human psyche.

We are designed, we evolved to live in groups of 30, 40 people in a harsh environment, totally inter-reliant on one another for survival. That creates a huge amount of equality within a group and loyalty within a group. That's what we are designed for genetically. Modern society allows the individual to be independent from the group, which is in some ways a great liberation. And other ways it can lead to a profound alienation and depression. Yeah, it's just a very confusing thing, it seems, for people to be amongst so many people, but to be alone. Yeah, I mean, we're not wired to be confronted with strangers all day long. And I live in New York City City and I love New York City.

But all day long, you encounter strangers and you don't recognize anybody. So you can be alone in a crowd, which is not something that human beings have experienced until quite recently in their history. Yeah, that was, I think, one of the more disturbing parts about this idea that these people were kidnapped by the Native Americans and wanted to stay with them was that whatever that Native American life was, like however they were living, that just seemed to just resonate with them. It seemed to be what was right. Well, we're wired to want to feel like we belong to a group. Native American society was sexually quite relaxed. It was quite egalitarian. In a hunter-gatherer society, you really can't accumulate wealth very well because these societies are often nomadic.

So you can only accumulate as much wealth as you can carry, which isn't much. So you can only accumulate as much wealth as you can carry, which isn't much. And ultimately, in societies like that, as in a platoon in combat, which is another part of my book, obviously, you're primarily valued for your contribution to the group. And that has been lost in modern society. People are enormously self-serving. Capitalism basically instructs us to do so. That's a whole other evolutionary imperative, which is also important. But in our society, it's way out of whack. So we are wired to serve ourselves and we are wired to serve the group. And in a healthy society,

those two are in a dynamic tension with each other and in balance. In modern society, there really is no group to serve. And it leads to a really profound sense of meaninglessness for a lot of people. Yeah. I also found it pretty fascinating that when you were really young, when you were working, I think you said you were working construction. Is that what it was? I'm trying to remember the story you're about to refer to. You were just saying that you were talking to someone you were working with and they were telling you to slow down because some of us, some of us have to do this for a lifetime. That's right. Yeah. I forgot about that story. Yeah. Yeah. I was on a construction crew. It was a highway department of my town. And, you know, a lot of these guys were kind of lifers in the highway department, not a particularly challenging job in a sense.

in a sense, but you were on your feet all day long in the sun or whatever. And so, you know, I was a young guy and I wanted to sort of prove my mettle or whatever. We were digging a trench and I was digging like crazy. And an older guy came up to me. You know, he's probably in his 60s. He came up to me and clapped me on the shoulder. He said, son, you want to slow down there. You know, some of us are going to have to do this job our whole lives. And he knew I was a college kid.

He knew I wasn't going to. Right. And I said, just slow down. You know, no one needs to work this fast. It's just, it was really interesting that you were longing for something. You were saying like almost to go wrong. So everybody had a band together, whether it was a hurricane or something. And that that mundane life of just work and doing things you don't really

want to do well i mean the irony about modern society is that it has removed hardship and danger from everyday life and it's in the face of hardship and danger that people come to understand their value to their society and their sense they get their sense of meaning from that and so what you have is when you know during the blitz Blitz in London, for example, 30,000 people were killed by German bombs. It was a horror show over the course of six months. It was ghastly. But people were sleeping shoulder to shoulder in the tube stations and putting out fires with bucket brigades and digging people out of rubble. And they were acting as a unified society.

And the English government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties because there's a civilian population getting bombed to bits. And the opposite happened. Admissions to psych wards went down during the Blitz and then back up after the bombing stopped. And then afterwards, there was enormous nostalgia in England

for the Blitz for those days, as tragic as they were, because English society felt, people felt like they were together. Later, I went back to Sarajevo, where I'd been during the siege of Sarajevo in the early 90s, and civilians would tell me, you know, this is 20 years later, 20 years after the war, people would say, you know, a lot of us missed the war because we were better people back then. We took care of each other. I've talked about that with September 11th. I went to New York City about, I guess it was maybe six months after September 11th. And I was there a couple of times. And before September 11th and

after September 11th, there was a very clear difference in the way people were behaving. People seemed to be more friendly, more open. They were, uh, really appreciative of first responders. Um, I was there once in a friend of mine, she fainted. And, uh, so they called the fire department, came to check her out. And, and when the firemen showed up, man, you would think fucking superhero showed up. It was amazing. Everybody was so happy to see him. And it was in stark contrast to the way people used to behave and treat each other. And it was directly because of having experienced this horrific event. Well, adversity produces pro-social behaviors in people. Adversity makes

people act well. The lack of adversity, safety and comfort allow people to act selfishly. So after 9-11, the suicide rate went down in New York. The violent crime rate went down in New York. Vietnam vets reported that their PTSD symptoms went down after 9-11. What happens is people suddenly feel that they're needed by their society, by their people. And if you feel needed, you are able to ignore your own personal troubles. As someone in England, an English official said during the Blitz in London, he said, it's amazing we have the chronic neurotics of peacetime driving ambulances. And if you think about it in terms of evolution, if adversity and danger produced

bad human behaviors, we wouldn't be here today. Another way to say that is we are the descendants of the individuals 100,000 years ago who acted well in a crisis. The people that acted badly in a crisis and just took care of themselves and didn't take care of their people, their group, those groups died out. It's people, it's groups that encourage a form of altruism and self-sacrifice of individuals for the group during a crisis. Those groups survive. That DNA gets passed on to us. And did you gain a deep appreciation for this because of your time as a war journalist? Did it sort of manifest itself in your mind because of that? Well, this book came to me in a two-step process.

First of all, when I was a young man, I had a surrogate uncle figure in my life, a very important person to me named Ellis. Ellis Settle, he was half Lakota Sioux, half Apache. And he was born in 1929 on a wagon out west. He had lived an extraordinary life. He was very, very educated, self-educated. And at one point he said to me, you know, it's so funny. All throughout the history of this country, white people were always running off to join the Indians.

And the Indians never ran off to join the white people. And I filed that away in my mind. I kind of liked the idea of it. I thought it was, I hoped it was true. I didn't know if it was true. And then decades later, I was with American soldiers on a remote outpost in Afghanistan called Restrepo. And I made a documentary film by that name with my colleague, Tim Hetherington. And there was almost daily combat. There was no link to the outside world, no internet. There was no electricity for a while. They just slept in the

dirt. They got shot at every day. We got shot at every day. There was no women out there. There was nothing but combat and tarantulas and pallets of water and MREs and ammo. That was it for a year. Those boys were out there for over a year. And they were very psyched to come back to Italy where they're based at the end of their deployment. You can imagine they had some pretty good parties planned. But after that died down, a real depression set in. And by the time I got caught up with them again in Vicenza and interviewed them, many of them said that they wanted to go, they didn't want to go come back

to America. They wanted to go back out to Restrepo. And it reminded me of what Ellis had said. And I thought, what is it that's, why is it that no one wants to come home? Like, what is it? And I realized it's not that they, they want war. They're not sociopaths that, you know, like they don't, they don't want to be out there killing people and getting shot at. They missed each other. They missed the intense communalism of life in a platoon on a remote hilltop in combat. And it struck me. I studied anthropology in college.

Oh, my God, a platoon in combat effectively reproduces our human evolution, right? I mean, we evolved to live in groups of that size in a harsh environment. That's what a platoon is. And so, of course, it resonated with them, resonated genetically with them. And I got to say, as tough as it was out there, there was a weird, also a weird, I don't quite want to call it a euphoria,

but a strange sense of well-being out there that I missed enormously when I left as well. You missed it. Oh, enormously. Yes. Did you try to rationalize it? Did you try to, when, did you sit alone with it and try to figure out what it was or did you just accept it? I mean, I, you know, I, I've been covering wars since the early nineties. I started going to Afghanistan in the mid nineties. I came back from, from Restrepo, uh, you know, we were in a

lot of combat. I almost, almost killed a couple of times. So I had some sort of trauma issues. I mean, everybody did, uh, my marriage started to fall apart. Um, that was not coincidental by the way. I now realize that the timing was significant. Um, it took me a while to understand that. And I sank into a real depression and it took me a while to understand that, and I sank into a real depression. And it took me a while to understand that my depression was partly connected to the fact that I was no longer part of a group. And it took a long time for me to figure that out. While I was experiencing all that, I just felt like I was in some kind of, that I was behind bulletproof plexiglass. And I was on the inside, and everyone I cared about was on the other side of the plexiglass, and I couldn't reach them, that they were somehow inaccessible to me.

I couldn't hear them. I couldn't touch them. I was alone in this plexiglass cage. And that's what it sort of felt like. I was incredibly depressed. And then Tim, my good friend and brother and colleague who I made Restrepo with, he was killed in combat in Libya. And that was the final blow. I mean, then I really crashed.

My marriage ended. I mean, I was a real mess for a while. How did you pull out of it? I, you know, I just, I had a year or so in the wilderness, I think, psychologically. And, you know, humans are evolved, obviously, to deal with trauma. I mean, eventually, I mean, if trauma was incapacitating to people for years or lifetimes, we wouldn't exist, right? I mean, our history as a species involved a huge amount of trauma. So we are designed to react to trauma by protecting ourselves emotionally and physically

for a certain amount of time, for some weeks or months, maybe a year or two, and then to slowly come out of it and continue functioning. That's exactly what happened to me. What do you, did, did you get something out of it? I mean, obviously it's a terrible experience to be depressed for that long and to go through all that, but did you get some sort of an understanding of yourself out of it? Oh, absolutely. I mean, in some ways, I mean, my marriage ended. I moved out of my home. I was living in a very sort of threadbare existence for a while. I sort of gave up everything that made me feel safe and protected

in the world. I mean, financially, no, it just sort of happened, you know, financially, emotionally. Uh, I wasn't doing, I wasn't working as a reporter for a while. I'd stopped reporting after Tim got killed and I just, I sort of hit the reset button on myself as a person. And, and, and I sort of, um, when I came back from that, I, I from that, the things I added to my life were very solid, were very, very good things. And I sort of started from zero again. And that really kind of worked. And I also, I mean, I didn't have a drinking problem, but I stopped drinking. I stopped drinking alcohol.

And that, drinking alcohol, drinking alcohol made me feel good drinking alcohol, I mean, drinking alcohol made me feel good, right? I mean, I'm really happy drunk. And when I was depressed for, for a bunch of reasons, if, if I drank, I felt great. And so there's a real incentive to do that. And I realized that it was depriving me of experiencing my actual life. Like my actual life was filled with some very tough things at the moment. And if you self-medicate your way through them, you actually, those things are taken from you. It's your life. It's the life you're going through. And I realized I might lose the experience of these things.

And, you know, my ex-wife and I are like quite good friends now. And it's partly because I decided to try and experience the loss of the marriage as directly as possible. And that involved not drinking. Did you, during this time of depression, did you consider or did you take any antidepressants? No, likewise. Like, I mean, I was, you know, I was talking to someone professional about how I felt because I was a little worried about myself. But as I said to her, I said, you know, if I was on antidepressants, it might allow me to accept, it might make me feel good enough

to accept a life that isn't really working very well. Yeah, that's, as a person who's not depressed, it's a very, it's a slippery argument for me because I'm just an outside observer. And when I talk to people that are depressed and I always wonder, like how much of what you're doing is life circumstances? How much is an actual, some sort of a mental imbalance,

some sort of a chemical imbalance that you just are unfortunately born with? I mean, listen, I'm not a shrink, obviously. There are people that encounter their first depression as teenagers and struggle with a very dangerous illness their whole lives. I'm not talking about that kind of depression.

But even that kind of depression, I don't know why. I mean, is it circumstances, is it nature, is it nurture? There's a lot of genetics involved in that. For me, my depression was a very healthy reaction to some tough circumstances I was going through. I was having a completely healthy, self-protective reaction to what was going on in my life. And when you say you started putting positive things in your life to what was going on in my life.

And when you say you started putting positive things in your life, good, solid things in your life, what kind of things? A good relationship. I started working again. I started being physically really active again. I mean, I started boxing, actually. And that was inspiring and stuff. And that was incredibly frightening to me. It just, you know, that kind of, it's very, very hard, among other things. But all that stuff really was really, really good for me.

One of the things that I've been dwelling on a lot lately is how important struggle is. And for me personally, I do a lot of things. And I do a lot of things that I'm terrible at. I do a lot of things and I do a lot of things that I'm terrible at. And I feel like the more happy I am is when I just get slightly better at these terrible things. Like that's when I feel like little bits of progress. That is exactly how we're wired to react to success. And if you sort of think about it, think about us as a species, as an animal.

If you're presented with a challenge and you get a little dose of endorphins, of dopamine, or some feel-good chemicals when you do a task well, that will encourage you to keep doing that task and keep looking for success, small successes in your life, which is exactly how people adapt and survive in harsh circumstances. The problem with affluent modern society is it takes away all of the tasks of survival, right? No one in this room, I don't think, is having to figure out every morning how to literally physically survive. Where am I going to get the berries I'm going to eat today? Where am I going to go to kill something that I can eat? How am I going to avoid the enemy? We're not thinking like that, which is an enormous blessing, right? I mean, it's enormous luxury to live like that. The downside

is you don't get this sense of mastery over your circumstances. You actually don't feel responsible for your own survival. You don't feel like you are earning your own survival in the world. You feel like it's being handed to you. And I grew up in an affluent suburb and I never had a sense as a young man that I was contributing in any way to the fact that I was physically alive on the planet. Well, that's very, very recent in human history that young men could afford to feel that way. Again, it's a blessing, but also a bit of a curse. It's the most disconnected amongst us are always spoiled rich kids that get handed everything to them and don't have an understanding at all

about the consequences of their behavior. Yeah, and that kind of life is correlated with depression. Yeah. And drug abuse. Yeah, all that stuff. And the suicide rate is rising fastest among middle-aged white men who, if you listen to some people, are apparently, arguably the demographic that are most privileged in this society. Yes. Doing the best with this civilization that we've constructed, doing the worst biologically in terms of how they adapt to it.

And psychologically, yeah. Yeah, psychologically is a big part of the biology, right? And the thing about this quest for stuff, you know, and one of the things that I thought was really interesting in the book where you were outlining the key factors for happiness and that wealth is not the primary one, but being good at something, being recognized for being good at something, being a part of a group. Like all these things were primary.

Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, and again, in evolutionary terms, we are safest when we are needed. Yeah. So if you're in a group and the group needs you, your status in the group is secure. And it had better be because humans do not survive alone in the wild. A lone human in nature is a dead human, right? We're primates. We're social primates. A lone primate in nature is a dead primate for most of the species.

And we get our safety, our protection protection from the fact that we work very, very well in groups. We don't have long claws. We don't have sharp teeth. We can't run very fast. We can't climb trees worth of dam. We're extremely vulnerable and we get our safety and our dominance in the natural world from our ability to work in a group. So if you're necessary to that group, you're safe. So people get very depressed when circumstances in their life change and they're suddenly not needed, right? When people get old and retire, they're at very, very high risk of depression and sometimes suicide. When people lose their job and can't find a job, they're at extremely high risk of depression and suicide. So when the economy

takes a downturn, as it did in 2008, and the unemployment rate goes up, the suicide rate immediately goes up. It tracks the unemployment rate almost exactly. And one of the points I make in my book is that a very small number of mostly men collapsed the U.S. economy in 2008. And most of them living – working on Wall Street. most of them working on Wall Street. And there was a direct, I read an article in an academic journal on epidemics, that there was a directly attributable to the financial collapse, there were 5,000 or 6,000 additional suicides in the United States, mostly middle-aged white men, Okay. And sort of professional,

professional people and, um, of, of all, of all classes. And, um, and the, uh, and I realized that that was almost exactly the casualty rate from the two wars from Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, something that happened at home economically killed just as many Americans as both wars did. And nobody went to prison. Not one of those guys was prosecuted, the people responsible for the collapse of our economy. Nothing happened to those guys. And you could argue they killed just as many people as our enemies did overseas. And there's a real injustice there. I think most people aren't even aware of how screwy the whole thing was.

There's a great documentary that I always recommend to people called An Inside Job. It's fantastic. When that guy starts questioning those economics professors, the guys who eventually got jobs in the government or went from there and got jobs at big corporations. And you see them, like, folding under the weight of the actual truth of what they've done. It's very disturbing. I mean, listen, there were companies that were getting bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of billions of dollars, right? The taxpayer, to the tune of billions of dollars, right, bailed out. And the corporate leaders, the corporate heads of those companies who had bankrupted their countries and asked the country to bail them out, while they were getting bailed out, these men were taking year-end bonuses of $10, $20, $30 million.

Yeah, it was stunning. And then they were trying to put a cap on the bonuses. Like, instead of. And then they were trying to put a cap on the bonuses. Like instead of removing it, they were going to put a cap on the bonuses. A cap of 20 million. Right. It's insane. Right. So you think about that and it makes me feel like we don't really have a country. Like an entity, a group that isn't willing to defend itself isn't really a group, right?

We were attacked by, in some ways, we were attacked by those people economically, right? The actions of those people, the self-serving actions of a very small number of people cost this country $14 trillion, right? There were no consequences for those people. They were actually rewarded. There were no consequences for those people. They were actually rewarded. And it makes a person think like, wow, is there something called America, like the United States, like in the sense that we'll defend ourselves if we're attacked? I mean, that's one of the definitions of a country, of a group.

And we didn't defend ourselves. And so you saw in the recent election this sort of the confusion in the population about what it means to be an American. Like who like what what do we belong to here? Like what do we owe our loyalty to? An enormous amount of confusion. And in my opinion, it's increasing, not decreasing right now in the current administration. But it comes from some of those questions. Like we're in two wars that no one's paying attention to. We you know, we lost 1414 trillion and nobody blinked.

Like, what is it that we belong to? Yeah. What is it? Yeah. I mean, we do seem to be in a deep state of confusion. And I think one of the things you're seeing with people, even like Trump supporters, people that are these online frog people, you know, the little frog avatars. I think one of the things that they like about it is that they've become a part of a

troublesome little group. Oh, totally. Yeah. They have a sense of purpose. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, why do you think people join ISIS? I mean, these European, you know, people in Europe joining ISIS, they want a sense of purpose and, you know, they've been taken in by the propaganda and all that. They don't realize it's a completely bloodthirsty, horrible criminal group. But they want a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose. There was a great band from out here about 15 years ago called Queens of the Stone Age. Sure, I love those guys.

They're amazing, right? And one of the lines, the line in one of their songs, I'm sorry to quote rock lyrics to you, but one of the lines is she wanted something to die for to make it beautiful to live. Yeah. Right? Something like that. That's a very profound insight, actually, into what makes people feel like they're leading a worthy life. Yeah, instead of walking through a nerfed world, which is what we're doing on Prozac. So if you walk around and ask people on the street, what would you die for? Like who or what idea would you die for?

I mean, people wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't have an answer. For most of human history, you know, the immediate answer would be, well, I'd die for my people, right? Of course, like our encampment gets attacked by the enemy, I would die. I would die defending this place, you know, and, and no, no one has that answer. Right. And, and, and, and which is shows that we live in safety and luxury, which is lovely, but it deprives people of a sense of purpose and meaning. Not just safety and luxury, but this staggering change in what, what has been a normal way of living for people for thousands and thousands of years. When you were writing this book and you were thinking about all the ways that human beings have altered the environment around them, you were saying that, and I've read this before,

that genetics essentially were riding on the same genetics that were 10,000 years ago from the same people. Or more, yeah, 20, 25, yeah. Are we going to change that? Like, are we going to become more compatible with this bizarre and artificial world that we've created? Or are we going to get deeper and deeper depressed? Are we going to...

Well, okay. So our society, our culture is changing way faster than genetic change can happen. Right. So we haven't even adapted genetically to the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. That's pretty crazy. Right.

So, yeah. And the only way genetic change happens in a population is that there is a difference in survival between people with one trait and people with another trait. So if you have a certain genetic trait and it leads to you having fewer children, eventually 10,000 years from now, people with your genetic trait will tend to die out because you're leaving fewer, you're passing on less DNA to the next round, right? And if you

have a trait that allows you to raise more children to maturity, they carry your DNA and then they'll be more successful. And that trait tends to spread. So does human unhappiness lead to lower fertility rates? Probably not. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, often depression starts in midlife. By that time, most people have one or two children. They've passed on their DNA. So I don't it only acts through reproductive

rates. Is something happened to us then? There must be some way where human beings are going to become, going to become accustomed to this bizarre way we're living, stacked on top of each other, constantly in traffic. We are accustomed to it. I mean, humans are very adaptive, adaptable. I mean, you know, people, you can put people in solitary confinement in jail, and they're not happy. They're extremely depressed, but it will physically survive for decades, right? So, I mean, evolution doesn't promise happiness. It doesn't mean that we'll evolve towards happiness. It means that we will adapt so that we can reproduce our DNA for the next generation. That's all evolution means. so that we can reproduce our DNA for the next generation. That's all evolution means. I've always just looked at all this reliance upon electronics and our fascination with innovation, and I've wondered if that's where we're headed.

It's almost like it's priming us for some sort of a symbiotic relationship with machines, that we become more reliant on technology, stack more and more people into places, make it easier and easier to survive. That's the one constant is that we're constantly embedded in technology. Yes. I mean, technology is a tool like the bow and arrow was. But, you know, keep in mind the segment of the world population, which is deeply intertwined with high tech, is very, very small.

Most of humanity lives in a pretty simple and very, very poor way. So if you're talking about the human race as a whole, I mean, I'm not talking about Southern California. I'm not talking about New York City. I mean, the human race as a whole, you know, all this technology happened yesterday, right? I mean, it happened 10 years ago, 20 years ago. In 20 years, it's going to be, you know, whatever.

I mean, who knows what's coming down the pike? But that's not even a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. It doesn't even exist. I mean, evolution happens over the course of 10,000, 20,000 years. Now, when you live in this life, when you're a war journalist and you're in these insane places, and then you come back to New York City, what kind of like a decompression period do you have to go through? come back to New York City, what kind of like a decompression period do you have to go through? Well, you know, often the developing world that I've worked in, I'm no longer covering wars, by the way, but the developing world is often a very chaotic urban mix of, you know, poverty and cars and pollution and buildings that are, you know, whatever. I mean, it's not necessarily

not urban. But what I would say is that there's something I would describe as a kind of disappointment to have the— if you wake up in the morning and your survival is a kind of question mark, and you know that you have to act well and with sort of clarity and precision and quickness in order to survive, that is intoxicating, right? The challenge of that's intoxicating, and you feel like you're sort of, in a way, earning your existence. And when you leave that, it's a relief, but it's also a disappointment because you're no longer earning anything, right?

So it's a relief but it's also kind of disappointing and in that disappointment you can get quite depressed so i know that the depression rate like when people when peace corps volunteers come back from two years service overseas they're not in war zones but they're in the developing world they're living in small communities they're living a much more difficult, physically difficult existence than most people in our society. When they come back to America, the land of cars and everything you can want in the supermarket and nice beds and everything that you think people want. When Peace Corps volunteers come back to this lovely environment,

around 25% of them get profoundly depressed. Wow. So clearly what makes people feel good is challenge, not ease. Yeah. That's the conclusion I draw. And not just challenge, but challenge in the context of a community of people. Here we have ease in the context of oneself or one's individual family, but not in the context of the community. And so, you know, if you look at catastrophes, Hurricane Katrina, I was just in Mississippi and I was amazed, not amazed actually in some ways, to have people, many people say, well, we really miss Hurricane Katrina. We were all so close afterwards. You know, this is a society with a lot of racial

division and all kinds of stuff. None of that mattered after Hurricane Katrina. Everyone cooperated, everyone helped each other. It made people feel great. That's what human beings want. So what we've done by making things too safe, we've dropped off the hills and just made everything flat. And people long for those hills. Absolutely.

There's a group of friends that I have that are bow hunters. And one of the things that people have gotten really addicted to is solo hunting, where even regular bow hunting is not quite difficult enough for these psychos. So they go deep, deep, deep, 20 miles plus into the wilderness by themselves. And one of the things they say about it is how profoundly lonely and sad it is. And even though they know they could walk those 20 plus miles back anytime they want, but there's something about being out there by themselves that when they do return, they just feel invigorated and alive and energized. And they feel like they've accomplished something, especially if they come back with an animal.

Yeah. Well, listen, I mean, that's an ancient narrative, right? I mean, the hunter goes out and kills the game and brings it back and feeds his people. I mean, that's a beautiful story and it's, it has kept, um, human beings alive for, you know, for hundreds of thousands of years. You know, some hunting is well done in groups and some hunting is a solo enterprise depending on the animal. And there absolutely is a role for that sort of solo endeavor um scouts uh you know are often work by themselves because i mean in a native in a native context um like for example the american indians the scouts often work by themselves because they were just harder to detect

and i'm sure a terrifying endeavor um but you're doing it for your people and so you you come back from that um that solo experience, which is so frightening. I mean, we're a social species. So being alone and in danger is terrifying. You come back from that to your community, you've served your community and you're among your people. Again, I must be completely intoxicating. I envy those people that experience. Yeah. Just having the experience of being in danger and then coming back and being at peace makes you appreciate that peace. But constantly and consistently being at peace has a numbing effect. That's right.

It's like constantly and consistently being well fed. I mean, it's not bad to feel hungry once in a while. You really appreciate food. Yeah. Safety, food, warmth, being rested or tired. I mean, we're adapted to get through situations where we don't have enough of what we want, what we need. And if we're not deprived of those things, we stop appreciating them. And those things are what make up life. So we're actually losing

our appreciation or enjoyment of the things that make life what it is. And there's a real irony there. There is a real irony there. Did you feel compelled at all to come up with a solution? I mean, in deeply describing and just going over the various aspects of these problems that we're facing as a culture, as a society, did you have some sort of a need? I didn't. I mean, listen, if i thought if there was a solution that i was capable of thinking of i would have put it in the book either i'm not smart enough

or there's no solution i don't know which it is yeah i think there's some things we can do around the edges that will help um but we're talking about a a systemic problem in society that got its start 10,000 years ago and really got its start in the Industrial Revolution and really got going in the Technological Revolution. I mean, we're not going to ban the car, right? The Amish in Pennsylvania don't use cars. They have a very low rate of suicide and depression because they spend most of their lives within their community, right? And that buffers them from suicide and depression. We're not going to ban the car, right? We're not going to burn down the suburbs and live in lean

twos. We'd probably be happier if we did, but we're not going to do it. So, but what can we do? The biggest community that we have is the nation, is the country. And I think one thing that would help enormously is to treat our nation as if we all belong to it and as if we all respected it and that it was meaningful to all of us. And which means, among other things, it means insisting that politicians who denigrate other politicians, who denigrate segments of the population, who rank American citizens in terms of value, in terms of being, quote, American, whatever that means. Politicians who do that are undermining our sense of national community. And I think that has a trickle down effect, which is extremely demoralizing and makes gives you the equivalent

of feeling like, wow. If you're feeling like you're a child in a family that might where the parents might get divorced, I remember during the campaign between Donald and Hillary, I sort of felt like, wow, are mom and dad going to split up? Like, what's happening in this country? You know what I mean? Right. Like, okay, you can argue, but you guys are really talking as if the country's not going to stay together. Right. Yeah.

And that's terrifying. And I think it's extremely demoralizing and unsettling for people. Well, it's also extremely irresponsible. extremely demoralizing and unsettling for people. Well, it's also extremely irresponsible. Like the type of person that should be a leader is not the type of person that puts that idea out there to the point where it gets into the zeitgeist and people say, well, hey, maybe we really are in trouble. Well, exactly.

I mean, I think it's fear mongering in a lot of ways. It is. And, you know, these are ancient human behaviors. And if you tell your people that there's a threat, your people will rally behind you. I mean, it's an adaptive behavior, right? The problem is, as a politician, if you tell your people that the enemy is actually the other political party, you are effectively splitting the country in half. So you can act tribally all you want. I mean, tribalism has a very negative connotation

as well. You can act in that tribal way all you want, as long as you define your tribe as the country, the entire country, right? And if you start slicing off parts of the country, demographic groups in the country, political groups in the country, say, you know, you're actually not really American. Like you really shouldn't be part of this. When you start doing that, you destroy the country. You're way more of a threat to our democracy than ISIS is, than Al-Qaeda is. I mean, we're such a powerful country. We are the only force that can destroy us. No one else can touch us. They can hurt us, but they can't really destroy us. We can destroy us. And we will destroy ourselves through rhetoric. It was one of the things that was most disturbing about the debates when Donald Trump said that if Hillary Clinton won, he wouldn't

necessarily accept the decision. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was completely antithetical to democracy and to the concept of a country. To the concept of a democratic country. Yeah, absolutely. Because he's a part of it. So if she becomes the president, she's his president. And we're all supposed to look at the president as this is the one person that we've elected as leader. And what he's essentially saying, it's either me or nothing. But I really didn't like it when some of my fellow Democrats after he was elected and he was elected. Right. I mean, one way or another. I mean, if you can investigate Russia, if you want or whatever. But but the fact is that he he got the most electoral votes and he's our president. And I really disliked it when some of my fellow Democrats said he's not my president. He is actually. And if you don't like that, work harder next time and get someone else elected. But he is your president. And it was equally disgusting when the shoe was on the other foot with Barack Obama and some conservatives started saying that Barack Obama wasn't really American or he wasn't really their president or that he was an enemy of the state, that he was a secret Muslim spy who wanted to destroy America. A Manchcerian candidate.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, he's totally irresponsible. And it's antithetical. It's the opposite of patriotism. It's revolting. Do you think in that case that maybe it's good that we have a guy like Donald Trump in the president? Because he is kind of like almost like a human hurricane. He's something to rally against. He's a problem that's occurred where there's the eroding confidence in the president now. I mean, it's palpable. People know he lies. He lies all the time. I mean, he just accused James Comey today of lying under oath when he talked about their conversations.

You know, I think Donald Trump is a very damaged and unhealthy person. I think he causes a lot of pain to people around him. And I'm guessing that he's in an enormous amount of psychic pain himself. Well, it's the only thing that makes sense for all the hate tweets and all the things. He's constantly going after Rosie O'Donnell. And I don't know why. I mean, what I've learned in my life is that if someone's acting badly, they're in pain. Yeah.

I mean, it's a really simple rule, right? They're either scared or they're in pain. I think he's both. And on some level, I feel kind of a kind of compassion for him. But what I, I mean, he already is and will be a completely failed president, but he may actually help this country in his failure. The GOP, I think, has abandoned all of its core values and core moral principles and decided that seems to have decided that anything that will help the party is more important than things that will help the country. And that is a very, very undemocratic way to think. think if Hillary Clinton had been elected and these things were coming out, the same kind of things about Russia, et cetera, were coming out, the GOP would be prosecuting her up to her eyeballs, right? So they have a complete double standard. And what I'm hoping is that the Trump administration

is such a failure that it gets the GOP to reevaluate its policy of partisan politics as a way to win power. And I hope it makes the entire country realize that the only way to really win power is through bipartisan politics. You can argue all you want, but you have to put the welfare of the country first. I read an amazing book called Our Political Selves, I think it was called, that about half of our political opinion is genetically determined. So genetically determined. Yeah. So and which makes sense.

So liberalism and conservatism, basically liberalism is concerned with fairness within the group and equality within the group and acceptance of outsiders as possible for possible inclusion in the group. Conservatism is focused on hierarchy and sort of law and order and a suspicion of outsiders. And they're very, very powerful evolutionary, adaptive evolutionary reasons for both of those worldviews. And they've done studies with identical twins that were adopted at birth and compared them to fraternal twins. And there's a far higher concordance of a political opinion in identical twins that were adopted at birth and put in different kinds of families than with fraternal twins. So that means that our political, apparently it's around 50% of our political beliefs are genetically determined, which means that those beliefs had adaptive value

in our evolutionary past, which means that the argument, I'm right, you're completely wrong, and you shouldn't exist, is a false argument. The country actually needs both parties very, very badly, and that a healthy society has conservatism and liberalism in a kind of dynamic tension where, yes, they might fight, they might argue, but they are roughly proportional in the population and equal weight is given to those two competing values. Was it taken into consideration that when these people are adopted, that growing up adopted without your biological parents puts you in a certain mindset automatically?

And that maybe it wasn't necessarily a genetic thing, but it was a circumstantial or a nurture thing? Well, they compared identical twins, who were genetically identical, of course, that were adopted to fraternal twins who were adopted. You understand? Yes. And fraternal twins are not genetically identical. But they still come from the same body. No, no, no, but their DNA is different.

Right, sure. They're two individuals, right? So both sets of twins were adopted. Right. So they all went through that, whatever that is, that process, the effects of that, whatever they are. One shared DNA, exact duplicates of their DNA. The other set of twins don't.

They're fraternal. So the twins that shared identical DNA were far more likely to have the same political beliefs than the fraternal twins. In other words, the genetic component was influencing their beliefs, and the environmental component was not as much compared to the fraternal twins. It's an amazing book. And to me, it makes sense. Both worldviews clearly were needed to keep our society healthy and strong and safe. I mean, a country that was run completely by liberals would get overrun by the enemy state next door immediately, right? A country that was completely run by conservatives would never get overrun by the

enemy, but it would be a heartless and brutal society, right? Where the poor weren't taken care of and et cetera, et cetera. So you can't have one or the other. You need both kind of dynamic tension. So it makes genetic sense that it works that way. Just like there would be genetic variations and all sorts of different aspects of people, height and personality and all those different things. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of character traits, right? I mean, they're partly genetic and they're partly determined by experience.

So, you know, courage or whatever, generosity, sensation-seeking is a genetic trait. But your impulse towards sensation-seeking is also determined by your experiences in life. I don't know what the proportions are, but in terms of political belief, it's roughly 50-50 your experience in life is a about 50% responsible for your political beliefs and the and the other 50% is genetics we're always looking for one reason right we're always looking for nature or nurture we're looking for one of it we're not looking at this just whole soup of different entangled influences yeah that create a person yeah and it's really interesting when I tell people that their genetics determine half of their political view, they get really upset, right? They want to be completely self-determining, right? I mean, that people want to think that

they are completely whatever they are, they've created themselves. And, uh, certainly something as emotional as political belief, they don't want to think that it's wired into their DNA at all, but you know, that's, that's the truth of it. Well, just determinism in general. I mean, I remember the first time it was ever really deeply explained to me by Sam Harris. I was rejecting it, like almost realizing I was. Like I didn't want to just be open-minded about it. I wanted to go, no, you could pull yourself up. You could figure it. It's willpower. You decide what you want to do with your life, but not really necessarily. I mean, listen, when I was young, I was a really good distance runner, right? And I ran the half mile mile on up to, you know,

10,000 meters marathon, whatever. I ran 412 for the mile, which is a pretty decent time. I really wanted to be like the fastest miler in the world, right? And I trained as fast as anyone has ever trained as hard as anyone's ever trained. And my ceiling was 412. I mean, that was genetically determined. Sorry, like you can run 130 miles a week like I did for months on end and still not go to the Olympics.

Yeah, there's no doubt about it. I mean, as a mixed martial arts commentator, the big factor that you can't do anything about is power. Some people are born with striking power and it doesn't make any sense. They look exactly the same. They look just like a person who can't hit nearly as hard as them. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, my understanding is the sort of sequencing of muscle groups in coordination that result in that kind of power is amazing. It's bone structure as well. There's a lot of variables. There's actually the geometry

of the shoulder, like how wide your shoulders are in terms of the hips to waist ratio. There's a lot of different factors. No kidding. Yeah. That's one of the reasons why men can hit so much harder than women is literally the shape of the hips. Women's hips are wider. The legs go inward more. It's a different sort of mechanical advantage.

Which is probably connected to the speed you can throw a baseball at. Yeah. Oh, for sure. It's you can throw a baseball at. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Connected to the same skeletal. Yeah. Apparently boys and girls can throw pretty much the same until puberty and then it really splits. And so it's probably for that reason. That'd be interesting. I would like to see what they do with transgender women to men who start taking testosterone.

I don't think it changes the shape of your pelvis. No. I mean, testosterone doesn't, you know, isn't going to change your bone structure. It does have some effects on bone density. And I think the width of the shoulders changes and certain characters, the face obviously changes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah.

And just the sort of muscle, I mean, explosive power of the muscles. I mean, as you get old, you lose explosive power as a man, right? So, I mean, testosterone is sort of key. I mean, you're at your peak in your early 20s, I guess. Yeah, but anyway, what we're saying is that there really are genetic limitations. There's no doubt about it. And this idea of like a fair fight, there's sometimes it's not fair. It's just not going to be. And with you is the

mile with some people, it's the, the ability to hit hard. It's some people it's just speed. You know what I mean? If you've ever seen like a Floyd Mayweather fight is incredibly clear that not only is he ridiculously skillful, but he's got some stupendous speed advantage over most human beings. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I also was watching a fight of his, and it was sort of slow-mo. I mean, I sort of slowed it down so I could really watch. And he got hit full in the face by somebody. I mean, right in the face.

And his eyes never blinked. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he couldn't get out of the way. He watched that thing come in and hit him square in the face, and his eyes never closed. Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah, really good boxers can do that. As they're getting punched in their face, their eyes are wide open, and they're looking for the Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah. Really good boxers can do that as they're getting punched in their face, their eyes are wide open and they're looking for the counter. It's really incredible. It's amazing. No flinch at all. I mean, nothing, absolutely

nothing amount of training you would have to do to overcome the end. It's one of the more, one of the more important reasons why it's so critical to learn striking in particular at a very young age, the body develops. Some people can pick it up late in life and still be really successful at it, but I don't think you ever really get like a real elite boxer that doesn't start training before puberty or around puberty. You're probably right. There's just something about the development of the body, like your body growing and maturing with this task,

learning how to strike and move and explode with combinations. Well, likewise for music and languages. I mean, if you're not learning that before puberty, you will never be like at a top, top, top world-class level.

Oh, that makes sense. In terms of languages, you will not be able to speak with a perfect accent. Really? Yep. After puberty, the brain is finished wiring itself and it cannot, it cannot exactly mimic a foreign accent. Really? Yep. After puberty, the brain is finished wiring itself and it cannot, it cannot

exactly mimic a foreign accent. And if you learn French or whatever, any language at eight, nine, 10, you can sound exactly like a native. And after puberty, you can't. Wow. Do you have kids? Yes. I have a three and a half month old daughter. Oh, well, when they start talking to you, man, that's when it gets weird. I have three, a 20, a nine and a seven. And what's what's really fascinating is watching the the traits that, you know, have come directly from DNA. Like parts of you emerge out of the kid and and maybe one kid and then the other kid none of it you know and some of it it'll be your wife and it's just it's it's so strange to because you try to piece it together like what are what are instincts right why are why are dogs barking at snakes they don't know what the fuck a snake is but they know something's wrong there's something deep in

their memory banks that say this is an issue, whereas a stuffed animal on the ground is not an issue. Right. Yeah, that's right. That's right. We don't know what that is entirely. Well, I tell you what it is, is that the dogs that weren't reflexively fearful of something that looked like a snake died more often and produce offspring. And so they'll bark at a crooked stick too, just to be on the safe side. And, you know, likewise, humans are scared of heights. Um, yeah, there's a, and if you're not scared of heights, you're more likely to fall and you won't pass on your genes. Right. Um, Lucy, the famous early, early human skeleton in, in, uh, East Africa. Um, I don't know. I mean, do you know Lucy from your science classes? Yeah. She died by falling out of a tree.

Wow. Yeah. They just figured that out from the fractures and stuff in her bone structure. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That must have been incredibly common. It's just all the different things that people are afraid of.

Arachnophobia, phidiophobia, fear of spiders and snakes. I mean, those are directly related to poison. I'm terrified of spiders. So you feel it's's genetic like maybe someone in your past or someone well i tell you i mean the the the range of things that of the common phobias that people have those those things have a have a sort of survival significance right so people usually aren't phobic of chairs because chairs were not a survival threat in our evolutionary past, but heights, spiders, snakes, uh, those kinds of things were, uh, were a threat. And so when children get phobias, they're choosing something that makes genetic sense. Yes. Why I chose spiders. I don't know. I was probably just

exposed to a frightening spider at the wrong moment in my insecure little life. Do you think you were exposed to it? Or do you think maybe is it possible that someone in your past, some ancestor, passed that through the DNA? Well, I mean, we're all predisposed towards being reasonably fearful of those things. Right. Right. A phobia is a panic disorder. Yeah.

So we're all nervous around barking dogs, snakes, spiders, heights, those kinds of things, right? Claustrophobia, being trapped in a small space, that's all normal things to be worried about. But when it crosses the threshold to a phobia, that's a panic disorder. And that is a function of something going on in your childhood where... But is it absolutely in your childhood? I mean, phobias start in childhood, yeah. But I mean, is it possible that someone could have aphidiophobia or arachnophobia and not have experienced spiders or snakes? So one of the things that happened to me when I was hosting Fear Factor is I would see people that were pretty risk-taking.

Yeah. And they would be willing to do the heights. They would be willing to jump a car off the top of a building. They would take chances. They were risk-takers. But you would put them in front of a snake, and they would freak the fuck out. And it was a deep cellular thing. Like you could see with some people that that they weren't cowards they weren't timid folks right but they would see that one thing whatever that thing is right well I you know I don't know I will tell you though that once I don't have a television but I was in the hotel so I like I watched TV when I'm traveling because of the I'm in a hotel and I saw Fear Factor and there was and

so keep in mind I've been terrified of I saw fear factor and there was, and so keep in mind, I've been terrified of spiders my entire life. And there was one, I mean, this was actually quite traumatizing to me. I mean, seriously, like traumatizing, like it affected me for days. There was like a very hot young woman in a bikini and you put her in a glass, like a glass box and you dumped a 55 gallon drum of tarantulas onto her. Yeah, I remember that. Her boyfriend threw up. It was so, and she finally stood up with tarantulas falling off her.

I mean, she couldn't take it. And I was like in the fetal position in the corner of my hotel room. Wow. Yeah. It was totally horrifying to me. I mean, it really messed me up for a few days. It's just so strange that there's particular things that resonate like that, like particular things, whether it's a snake or a spider. Just, I mean, I really wonder if, like, the things that human beings have, like, and that also animals have, these instincts, if we just don't totally understand what memory is.

We don't totally understand genetic memories. Right. Yeah, well, it's all stuff that helped us survive us survive. Um, those were all threats in our prime, in our primordial past. Now you've got a documentary out that you're, you're working on as well. Well, it's out. No, it's airing on Sunday. It's, um, it's called hell on earth. It's about the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS. And it's out on National Geographic Channel, 9 Eastern, 8 Central, this Sunday. This Sunday. Is it going to be available? I mean, you can obviously watch it at the time, but it's going to be available on Netflix or Apple TV or something like that,

where people can download it? I think eventually, yeah. I haven't even thought that far ahead. I mean, it's owned by National Geographic, so I don't know quite now how they're... I'm sure you'll be able to get it on their website at some point, but it's airing on Sunday. And what was your experience doing that? Well, I, you know, I was home writing tribe actually. And so I wasn't overseas and you couldn't really get into Syria anyway. I mean, it was a suicidal thing to do. Um, and, uh, so what we did, my colleague, Nick, the guy who was here earlier, um, we basically sort of worked the border border areas around Syria, looking for people who were living in Syria, who knew people in Syria who could shoot for us.

And we found some very, very brave people who documented their lives under ISIS, their lives with the Free Syrian Army. There was a lot of combat. And we accumulated about an hour, a thousand hours of footage and interviews we did with experts. and we accumulated about 1,000 hours of footage and interviews we did with experts, and we put together Hell on Earth, trying to explain how really quite peaceful democratic protests turn into violent demonstrations and finally into a civil war. And, of course, it was the repressive government.

I mean, people protest in the street, and they're met with machine gun fire, and eventually civilians are going to get some machine guns themselves and fight back. And that's how you get a civil war. How do you take thousands of hours like that and boil it down to one show? Well, that's it's very, very hard. I mean, that's what filmmaking is. And it's figuring out what's the one percent that goes into the film and how do I structure it? How much time does it take to do something we had a really good i mean this is the first i've made this is my fifth film most of the films i've made it was me and an editor and so another person in the room or whatever this we had a big team and so we had some very very smart young people who are going through

all this footage and categorizing it like here this is a section about you know this material is about um whatever escaping isis and this is about trying to about, you know, this material is about, whatever, escaping ISIS. And this is about trying to find, you know, whatever. They would sort of put it into categories. And then I would start to look through some of that material and we could gradually sort of build a structure. The situation in Syria seems to be, for someone who just hasn't studied it that much but just looks at it from the outside, one of the bleaker, darker situations that we have here in the world. I mean, it's the tragedy of this generation, I think. Over 400,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, have died.

The equivalent death toll in this country would be, I think, 7 or 8 million Americans, the sort of equivalent amount of people. And half the country, half the Syrian population has been displaced from their homes and millions are outside the country's borders in Europe and even in this country. What did you take out of the documentary? I mean, it seems like no one has a solution for Syria. No, I mean, civil wars are tough that way. Um, I think ISIS, ISIS eventually is going to be defeated on the battlefield. Um, they're going to be eradicated and I hope they are because they're a ghastly, brutal group. Um, and Assad who is, who's killed way more people than ISIS.

He just didn't do it publicly like they did. He's the leader of Syria, president of Syria. He's propped up by Iran and by Russia. And so he's not going anywhere. I mean, if you have those two countries as your allies, like you're not going anywhere. So I think what's going to happen ultimately is that ISIS will be defeated and the country will be partitioned along sectarian lines. And eventually there may be a kind of delicate peace. It seems like with all those Middle Eastern countries, any country that's run by a brutal dictator, as soon as that dictator is removed or as soon as somebody dies, there's this massive power vacuum. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that would be the argument for not trying to remove him.

I mean, he's a complete criminal and sadist and, um, uh, he's horrible, but it was the argument for keeping Saddam Hussein in power. It was the argument for keeping Gaddafi in power. Yeah. I mean, basically it's sort of utilitarian argument, you know, from John Stuart Mill, like what's going to, what's going to cause the least human suffering or promote the most human happiness. And, and, uh, you know, I, sometimes, um, I can understand the reasoning behind, look, the guy's a dictator, but we should leave him in place because the alternative is a lot of other innocent people suffering when we remove him and the country collapses. This country has already collapsed. So the problem is, the question is, okay, we make a tentative peace deal with him, we'll leave you in power,

we won't try to topple you, but let's stop fighting. I mean, I could support that, yeah, personally. Wow, isn't that crazy, the idea of keeping that guy in power, just so less people suffer. You keep a brutal, murderous dictator in power yeah and we're better off that way yeah well i mean you know the war killed almost half a million people so if you want to if you want that to continue like right yeah that's i mean those are the awful moral choices um it's very frustrating for people though because they would like to see like we'd like to see some solution

like on the tape but that doesn't seem like a solution well it's a solution to the violence right i mean any any peace deal is a solution to the violence. So, and the first thing that has to happen, I think, is that the violence stops so that people stop dying. Um, the pursuit of justice is a secondary, it's important, but it's a secondary matter after that. I know you're running out of time here. So just, what, what brings you, what brings you satisfaction when you, when you do something like this documentary or, or your book tribe? I really like the, um, I like the sort of game of ideas, right? Like I like exploring a topic and starting to make sense of it

and starting to see connections between things. So when I was writing Tribe, when the central thesis of it sort of occurred to me and all these disparate facts suddenly aligned themselves in an orderly way and I felt like I'd shown a little bit of light onto the world and shown how it worked, like that's

totally intoxicating to me and likewise when you're making a documentary you suddenly start to see themes and structures in the film in human affairs and they sort of come out and and and when and when you work on that level it's incredible to me it's like incredibly gratifying and because that means that I've now made sense of something. There's a disorderly confusing world, and I've managed to organize it in an understandable way. And that means other people can understand it. And then we can have a conversation about how the world works and how people work. And that, to me, is the point of journalism.

It's the point of all intellectual endeavor. And to be even a small part of it to me is incredibly exciting. You nailed it. And you definitely nailed it with this, the thing I was talking about, how just beginning the first chapter, I had a real urge to get out of the city. I had a real urge.

There's this thought, like, could I live in the woods? Could I live in a tribal society? Like, it seems like you were outlining almost like a mathematical problem. Yeah. Yeah. Or chemical, maybe even a chemical problem. Well, you know, I studied anthropology in college, my understanding of humans is that we are a social primates that prefer to live in groups of about 50 people in a challenging environment. That's what human beings are.

And to the extent that we depart from that, we lead lives of dissatisfaction and frustration. And that's how I understand life. How do you manage that in your own life? I mean, I wish I was part of a communal group fighting to survive in the wilderness. Like, I mean, I had some taste of that with the platoon that I was with, and that was intoxicating.

It has downsides, obviously, and you can't stay out there forever. But it made me at least understand that the source of my dissatisfaction in life wasn't internal. It made sense. It was that I was having a healthy reaction to circumstances in society that humans were not adapted for. And even that was enough to bring a kind of peace of mind for me. I also very consciously and deliberately try to live in places where there is the possibility of a sort of close communal neighborhood. I live in a very poor neighborhood in New York City, which for some of the hassles at least has the sort of rich fabric of human connection that you just don't

get in wealthy neighborhoods. So you do it on purpose? Oh, yeah. I don't want you to say where you live. Do you want to say where you live? I live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I mean, it's not very, very poor, but it's a Dominican neighborhood. Half the people in that neighborhood really don't speak English very well. So it's a very rich or ethnic neighborhood.

People are quite poor. And I know everybody. I mean, everyone knows each other by sight and we look out for each other. And during Hurricane Sandy hit New York, I mean, a lot of the people that had young children had to leave because there was no light. There was no water. The power was out, right? Half of Manhattan was completely dark. It was actually quite dangerous at night in the dark half of Manhattan where there was no streetlights. at night in the dark half of Manhattan, where there was no streetlights. And so this building, it's a tenement building that I live in with my wife.

And a lot of the people left, and they were worried about being robbed. And these are poor people, right? This is not a wealthy building at all. It's quite a poor building. And so they organized a guard shift. One of the people, one of the women in the building had a machete. And they organized guard shifts at the front door with a machete. And the young men in the building took turns like two hours at a time guarding the building with a machete. Whoa.

Yeah. And, you know, I wasn't associated with the building at that time. But boy, would that have made me feel good to be part of that. You know what I mean? Like that is what human beings, that's what they are. Right. It's that. Like that, you know what I mean? Like that is what human beings, that's what they are. Right. It's that right. And you didn't see that in a wealthy neighborhood, partly because the wealthy neighborhoods actually had light. Right. It just seems weird to make the choice

to live in a community like that because of those factors. Well, my wife lived there and I moved in with her. So, uh, but, but the re the reason I was happy to move in with her, one of the reasons I was happy to move in with her one of the reasons i was happy to move in with her is precisely because it wasn't an affluent neighborhood like the kind i grew up in that to me is just soul death right i mean it's just i grew up in an affluent suburb and it's just the most boring thing on the planet like it's just deadly to me and and i you know like had i not grown up like that maybe i'd be living in a neighborhood like that. I mean, I get it. Right. But I did grow up like that. And the one thing that I just cannot survive is that kind of complacent affluence. Like it just kills me. It's so funny because that's the one thing that people try to achieve when they grow up in that

sort of poor community. They want to get out and live in that big house, the big yard. Look at their suicide rates, their addiction rates, their depression rates. I mean, seriously, if you look at those alcoholism, depression, suicide in affluent neighborhoods, I mean, it's astronomical. It's brutal. Boy, but try to convince people to abandon that way. That's where it's really odd. It seems like so counterintuitive to them. It's like, no, no, no, you're going to live in a safe neighborhood. No, no, no, you're going to have a big house. You're going to have a nice car and a great job. You're going to do great. Well, think about it in evolutionary terms. The impulse towards safety and luxury

is a totally healthy one in a situation where nature doesn't offer that very often. Right. Right. So we're programmed to go for those things. Right. What we're not prepared for is to go for those things and have it happen all the time. Ah, right. You see what I'm saying? Like totally healthy instincts, of course. Right. But we didn't involve in a world where you could actually achieve that 100 percent of the time. are programmed and a lot of dog species are programmed will will eat until they've eaten so much that that they'll kill themselves eating right it's because there wasn't enough food to like the programming to keep eating as long as their food is great if there's a scarcity of food right right as soon as there's a plenitude of food that becomes maladaptive and the dog dies and you know likewise people put fat on very easily because in a harsh environment with not much food you have to be able to put fat on easily or you'll die now with the the reason there's so many obese people is because we have

that impulse to eat and eat and eat and the food's there to do it with and we don't have the mechanism for stopping it and so that's why there's so many fat people oh it's also sugar that's a big yeah absolutely but our taste for sugar and for fat is programmed by evolution, right? Because there wasn't much of those things. So now you can have as much as you want, and suddenly people weigh 350 pounds, right? I mean, it's evolutionary programming run amok in a world where there's too much of something that is very good but was very scarce. is very good, but was very scarce. You highlight some really profound issues with culture in your book, but I would wonder if, how many people come up to you after they've read it and go, what do I do? Like, you're right, you're right, but what do I do? I mean, here I am, I'm this guy, I have this house, I have a mortgage, I have kids, I have a job that's good, and I don't want to leave it, but what do I do? Because you're right, I'm fucking miserable. What do you, what do I do? I don't want to leave it, but what do I do?

Because you're right. I'm fucking miserable. What do I do? Like, what do you tell those people? I mean, you know, it's really a question of you can't have it all. And what I would say to them is sell your house, like, sell your car if you can, move into a community where you have to be inter-reliant with the people around you, and you have to interact with them every day. Like, that is what makes people feel good. But the thing is, people are understandably not willing to give up the pleasures of an affluent life in order to have social connection.

I mean, I get it, right? But you really can't have both very successfully. It's extremely hard to. Yeah, I have a buddy of mine who lived in Venice, in a real nice, tight-knit community. They had this cul-de-sac, and everyone knew everybody. I live in a cul-de-sac. They're great.

And he started doing well. And the first thing he did, he moved out. And he got this really nice house and this big yard, and he fucking hates it. And he's miserable. When we talk about it, he goes, I fucking hate it. He goes, I don't know my neighbors. He goes, I have this big yard. I just stare at it and go back inside my house. He goes, I used to know everyone on the block., I have this big yard. I just stare at it and go back inside my house.

He goes, I used to know everyone on the block. I knew everyone in the community. Yeah, that's right. Well, that guy is, I mean, that lifestyle is correlated with higher depression and suicide rates. I mean, he's literally at a statistical risk, increased statistical risk of suicide and depression because of that change. Wow. and depression because of that change. Wow.

So you, regardless of how much money you would make, you would always move into a neighborhood where people are relying upon each other and stay tight to each other? Oh, yeah. I'm not. Yeah, absolutely. Wow. I mean, it's not even a, yeah.

No way. It's not even a choice. Yeah. I mean, I just get instantly depressed in affluent neighborhoods. Wow. That's so crazy. Yeah. I mean, I crash. I mean, hard. Do instantly depressed in affluent neighborhoods. Wow. That's so crazy. Yeah.

I mean, I crash. I mean, hard. Do you accumulate any material possessions? Are you one of those dudes who has like a notebook and a couple of pairs of shoes? You know, I mean, minimally. But yeah, I mean, we live in a very small apartment, so there's not room for much. But you're happy with that? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, listen, the less you have, the happier you are. Wow. At the end of the day Like you can probably make that as a empirically true statement empirically true What you really and I'm not listen I'm not talking about poverty lack of food lack of resources I mean, I'm obviously course you're not talking about that. I'm talking about material possession right stuff cars and yeah boats and shit I always feel like once you get a boat, you're probably falling

apart. You know what I mean? Like, dude, unless you're a fisherman, you know, you're going out there and getting a boat. It's like, what you just, you know, what are you doing? Well, you know, it's interesting, like that kind of mature, those kinds of material possessions. Also they, I mean, again, evolution, right? Like, uh, particularly for males in the society, if you control resources, you, you? Like, particularly for males in the society, if you control resources, you have a reproductive advantage over males that don't control resources, and, you know, girls will like you better, right?

So when you're an 18-year-old boy, the instinct to get a car, to get a boat, maybe one day to get a private airplane, you know, a private airplane, whatever, that instinct has huge evolutionary advantage because it gives you access to women, right? Not all women, but enough so that it's a great strategy for meeting girls. Right, right. The problem is that once you're sort of further on in your life and you have children, you have a family, if you don't have a community and what you have instead is a huge lawn, an overpowered boat, and a ridiculously expensive car, you have taken things that were a definite reproductive advantage at 18 and you have dragged them into midlife where instead of making you feel good, they will depress you.

In my opinion, like that's, that's what happens to those guys. So it's not that those things are a stupid idea at an earlier point in your life, but definitely when you're 50 years old, again, I'm sure like you could correlate if you did the proper study, you could, you could make a correlation between those kinds of material possession and alcohol abuse, depression, suicide, all that stuff. I wonder if that's the case with like rappers and people that grow up in these poor black communities that go on to have insane material wealth. I've always been fascinated by the ridiculous hip hop culture of just giant houses and 50 cars and throwing money up into the air. just giant houses and 50 cars and throwing money up into the air and just this celebration of excess coming from a place of nothing and having this deep desire to achieve all those things that

seemed unattainable. Look, I mean, I think athletes have the same problem too, you know, and particularly, I mean, they have the fraternity of their team until they retire. And apparently retired athletes, professional athletes are a real risk of depression yes um and uh i mean listen i met a young woman who had survived cancer and she said to me rather sheepishly she said you know when i had when i was six she was on a cancer ward and she knew all the other cancer sufferers survive sufferers on the ward and her family and her basically her tribe rallied around her she didn't know if she was going to survive she was down there going chemo and all that awful, awful stuff.

And she looked at me really sheepishly and said, and I survived and now I miss being sick. She missed the community of cancer sufferers on that ward and her own community that rallied around her. She was lonely. Now if soldiers are missing war and cancer survivors are missing cancer,

like something's missing. Yeah. Well, there's a struggle that's missing for sure. You know, in my own life, I'm a very addictive person. I have an addictive personality and I've found a lot of happiness in martial arts. And one of the things about martial arts is, particularly in jujitsu, because it's one of the rare martial arts that you could practice going 100% and not really hurt each other too much because you're not hitting each other. Right.

You're just choking each other and tapping each other out and stuff. But there's a camaraderie and a bond between people that choke each other all the time that you just don't see with other men, or I don't see. Well, yeah, listen, I hear you, man. I mean, I started when I, when my marriage started falling apart, I started boxing, right. And I just needed something. I'd always been a pretty

intense athlete when I was young and I was sort of smoked cigarettes and drank for a while. And then suddenly my life's in crisis at 50 and I started going to a boxing gym, Mendez boxing in New York city. So at 50, you're learning how to box. Yeah. That's crazy. I'd always had a pretty intense relationship with my body as an athlete, right? So I wasn't starting from zero. I've always been in really good shape. But I'd never boxed before.

I'd never done anything like that. And what I loved about Mendes, it's an old gym in New York. And it's like Gleason's. It's in Manhattan. And what I loved about it is that there were some very tough kids from the outer boroughs, right? There was like suits that would come in from Wall Street at lunchtime to box. There was women. There was all kinds of people, wealthy people, poor people, black, white, whatever.

Everyone's in there, right? What I loved about it is that no one brought their street identity into the gym, right? It's just like a platoon in combat. You were judged in there, not for whether you're young and black and poor or wealthy and affluent and white or whatever, but how you act in the gym. And there is no prejudice that I can see

against the young black kids that are in there, but there's also no prejudice against the wealthy white guys. As long as you leave it at the street, you're whoever you are in that space and you get all the respect you want if you act well. And that is the deep egalitarianism of a tribal society.

You're judged by how you act and that's it. That's the same thing with jujitsu schools. You're judged by your effort and how well you can perform on the mats. Right. And listen, I'm a middle-aged guy, right? I mean, I'm never going to win a championship.

I mean, what am never gonna win a championship. I mean, what am I gonna do professionally with boxing? It's not happening. But I work out really, really hard. I'm not afraid to get hit. Like, and I have all the, I mean, everyone in the gym knows me, and I have all the respect I could ever want.

And through that struggle, also, you achieve some feeling of peace. Because you're, I mean, it's a brutal struggle, boxing, for people who've never tried struggling. It's a brutal struggle boxing for people who've never tried it. It's unbelievably exhausting. I, I, I mean, I thought a four 12 mile was the hardest thing I could imagine. I had no idea what a one hour session, like a really intense one hour training session was like much less sparring. Yeah. Much less getting hit in the liver. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just, I I mean annihilating and and but I

was in a lot of psychic pain and I needed it yeah I really feel like especially physical struggle I mean there's a lot of people that are averse to exercise and like I can't stress it enough I think the body needs physical struggle I think if you don't I think there's an overflow of energy and stress that's unmanaged and it manifests itself in a very physical way. There was a, there was a study that I read of, um, I mean, there are a few hunter gatherer societies that are still in existence and the average amount of physical activity in subsistence level hunter gatherer societies,

which of course is our evolutionary past. I mean, that's what we are designed to do, is something like two hours of hard walking per day. Like on average, men and women moved like vigorously for two hours a day, usually walking quickly, right? That's what our bodies are designed for. And it's what, if we do that, we're tuned up at that level, right? Where our mind feels good, our bodies feel good. And if you don't do that, I mean, you can lay around all day, but you will experience a psychological deficit and a physical deficit. Yeah, I think that, I mean, there's no way to make people do it. But I think if you could give people advice, that would be one of the big ones. And you know, in Western society, the older you get, the more money you tend to have and the more

sedentary you are. And there's a corresponding decline in testosterone levels in males, right? What they found in these very mobile physical societies is that testosterone levels in males really didn't decline until the 70s. 70s? Until the 70s. I mean, it declined slowly, but it didn't go off a cliff like it does in our society at 35 or whatever it is. Like, it was a gradual decline. And if there was a cliff, it was in the mid-70s. And that's because, I mean, the theory was that it was because that constant intense physical activity,

testosterone allows for it, but that activity actually keeps those levels high. I mean, it's a symbiotic relationship. No, it completely makes sense. I mean, one of the things that they prescribed to middle-aged men is sprints, you know, run up hills, like carry heavy things, do squats, do things that stimulate your entire body. Right. Yeah. Or boxing. Yeah. Or boxing. Yeah. All those things. Well, listen, man, I've taken up enough of your time, and I really appreciate it. And I'm really enjoying your book, and I'm looking forward to your documentary. And it's Hell on Earth, and it's available this Sunday.

What time is it? Does it say up there what time it is? 11. 9 Eastern. June 11th, 9 Eastern, 8 Central. And I've enjoyed your work over the years, man. So it was a real pleasure to sit down and talk to you. Thank you.

I really enjoyed this conversation. It was really, really nice, great conversation. All years, man. So it was a real pleasure to sit down and talk to you. Thank you. I really enjoyed this conversation. It was really, really nice, great conversation. All right, man. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. My pleasure. That's it, folks. See you.