The Press Box - Masks Off. Now What? Plus, Sebastian Junger on His New Book.

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss the new CDC guidelines that state fully vaccinated people can stop wearing masks in most situations. They touch on the impact the new guidelines have had, and weigh in on this new phase of the pandemic (4:42). Later, Sebastian Junger joins to talk about his new book, ‘Freedom,’ and his journey to uncover what the word “freedom” really means (29:13). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline.  Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Sebastian Junger Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The ringer's music critic Rob Harvilla curates and explores 60 iconic songs for the 90s that define the decade. Rob is joined by a variety of guests, so break it all down as they turn back the clock. Check out 60 songs that explain the 90s exclusively on Spotify. Sports Center anchor Kenny Maine announced he was leaving ESPN last week after 27 years. What I want to know is, what will we miss about Kenny Maine on ESPN?

Wow. I mean, listen, let's be honest, I don't watch ESPN or I watch ESPN regularly, I don't watch ESPN on a schedule. And so when I would see Kenny Maine, or when I would hear Kenny Maine, more often not, you know, it was a great, it felt great.

It was like an old friend sort of popping into my house and, you know, reading me, I mean, it felt like a highlight, which is, you know, I know it sounds like a pun, not deliberately. but so I mean so the way ESPN is built right now it's just it's I'm not sure how much of a loss a quantitative loss his absence will really be but that's sort of a sad statement I think that for a lot of people I was just thinking about this we I would love to pull the ringer staff because it wouldn't shock me if the younger half of our staff if if for them if Kenny main was sort of the

voice of ESPN you know I mean he he was he had such a distinctive voice such a distinctive voice such a distinctive delivery so that when you think about ESPN like when we were going up when we thought about ESPN we thought about Keith and Dan obviously but you would think about them

and Stuart Scott you would think about Berman's highlights you would think about the people with a distinct delivery to a degree that outstripped their actual presence on the network right because you were

you knew ESPN you knew Sports Center is sort of this oddball thing and so you like associated specifically with the more unique voices, like literally unique voices. And I think Kenny Maine is in some ways just like the epitome of that

after that first round of people. I mean, Seward Scott obviously is not one of the dinosaurs, but, you know, he tragically lost his life. Not that, I mean, in the not so distant past, but in the past, I think Kenny Maine was the voice of the network for a long time. 27 years. that isn't that is an eternity and then another eternity in television and I totally agree with

when you're saying like we're actually kind of mourning two things one it sucks that he's not going to be on ESPN anymore and it also sucks that ESPN isn't set up anymore that it's a showcase for Kenny Mayne because that was a really cool time in in media when that was the case and it was almost like all those guys and they were mostly guys some women too who did Sports Center back in the 90s. They were journalists, but they were also really, really funny, many of them. And there was a little bit of like a night at the improv, you know, aspect where this guy does it this way, this guy does it another way, Kenny Maine does it his way, Stuart Scott

does it his way. Yeah. She was getting all these approaches on the same network and on the same show, which is really, really interesting. I think the Kenny Main delivery is what I will appreciate about him. You know, we talk about how Droll he is, how understated he is.

I also feel he's like those running backs, you know, who run really fast and they do those kind of stutter steps and kind of run slow and then fast. He had that kind of delivery where you couldn't quite tell where he's going to stop, which made him very appealing. Just a great, just a great sports center.

It's kind of amazing in retrospect that ESPN had the monopoly on sports highlights, but then was that good, right? Because it could have just been, in generic sports highlights and we just rule the universe because we're so big and no one else is going to stop us. But they did that and then they were

creative and weird within that space, which is really, really cool. Farewell, Kenny Mayne, we look forward to what's next. Coming up on today's show, the CDC says fully vaccinated people can take their masks off indoors. Now it gets really complicated. Plus,

the writer Sebastian Younger stops by to talk about his new book, Freedom, all that more on the press box, a part of the ringer. Podcast Network. Hello, media consumers, Brian, Curtis, and David Shoemaker here along with Erica Cervantes. So right after we finished last Thursday's show, there was a huge announcement from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control.

After more than a year of mask wearing, David, the CDC said this, if you are fully vaccinated, you can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic. And fully vaccinated people can resume activities. can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing. Now, there are exceptions. You still have to wear a mask on an airplane and businesses can still make their own rules. But this is huge. Were you as staggered as I was to hear good news in such a public forum?

Yeah. I think as with so many other things over the past year plus, It's a, I think I was surprised at the way that I felt. It wasn't just the surprise. It was the surprise at like the feeling of relief of, of joy, you know, of this is, you know, I mean, I may maybe it's because the vaccine rollout was a rollout. You know, I mean, it was sort of an ongoing process. It wasn't just one day we all got, we all showed up and got one. this felt like

kind of weirdly more of a this is like the holiday that we will commemorate or something you know

it's a it was a it was a it was a wild sensation yeah the vaccine news felt like an announcement

that good news was going to happen in the future yeah this felt like good news or at least new CDC

recommendations if we can sort of call those news was here Well, you're right, that's exactly the right way to put it, because even when the vaccine news, such as it was, came out, I think we were all justifiably confused about the timeline, even if even the optimistic timelines, which I think we basically hit all the optimistic timelines, but even if you were sort of convinced of that, there's, I think what we've learned over the past year is that optimism is a weird psychological phenomenon and you can say a thing and not necessarily internalize it, you know, and, and, and the feelings of, of, of, of, like I said, relief of joy that have come have been sort of after the fact over the past year kind of beside the point sometimes.

This was a real moment where it just seemed like it felt like relief. So jumping off optimism. I think optimism is hard to process for two reasons. One is we just had the year from hell. Good news feels really weird. The second thing is, and I don't want to jump off the political cliff right at the beginning of this podcast, but when we have heard quote unquote, positivity, about the coronavirus over the last year.

It has often been from the mouths of cranks. And I think you and I have been conditioned to kind of rear up. You hear that, oh, it's not such a big deal. It's the flu. It's okay. You don't need to. And all of a sudden, you rear up and go, uh-oh, no,

mind, disregard what you just heard, right? Optimism, positivity, bad. Then you hear the CDC do it, and it's almost like you've got to rewire yourself completely and go, oh, that's not coming from, this guy who hosts a sports radio show, that's coming from Anthony Fauci. There's just a very weird sensation.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, a couple weeks ago, when I was on with Claire, we were talking about this, about the sort of new wave of tisking, even from like the sort of level-headed left online about people who were like, well, if you're not wearing a,

if you're not taking your mask off, then you're as bad as the deniers, sort of. you know, like you're ignoring the science. And my, I mean, obviously that's kind of deliberately arched, but, but, you know, my response was a lot of science, for better or worse, is built in this sort of, has this sort of over caution built into it, right? You know, I mean, like, if you take, if you take, you know, six peptobismal tablets in 24 hours, you're probably not going to die. But they tell you're not supposed to just so you don't take 15, you know? I mean, it's, it's, there's a lot, a lot of that is like part and parcel. with the way that our medical, that medicine works, you know?

And to me, I was frankly shocked, well, there's a lot of more that more that goes into than just that. But, but yeah, I mean, it was, it was kind of jarring that we went from a moment of overcaution, deliberate overcaution to the kind of other end of the scientific spectrum, just sort of information nihilism, right? It's like, it's okay. We're just going to say it's okay. We're done trying to be paternalistic about this.

It's kind of a record scratch. For sure. But I also thinking what you're talking about is because partly it's science. It's this whole idea of science and what is the recommendation that we actually need and what is the recommendation that they are kind of going two or three feet past what you need to keep everybody safe. There's that. But then there's also the whole thing with masking was about social cues and messages that people were sending by wearing a mask or not wearing a mask. I don't know about you, but in my case, I have overworn a mask throughout the pandemic. I get out of my car to walk my kids in the park, I am wearing a mask. It turns out I probably did not need to do that. And over the last couple of weeks, it became especially clear that I did not need to do that. But I was doing it anyway because, one, I was trying to be extra, extra, extra cautious. And two, I guess at some level I was trying to send a message in my own very small way of, hey, I think masks are a good idea.

Let's do this. Let's keep each other safe. Now with the new CDC recommendations, all those social cues that we had kind of, of learned and felt out a little bit, just got completely scrambled. I want to turn your attention to this paragraph that Mitch Smith wrote in the New York Times, because I love this. Quote, someone with no mask might still signify that they oppose masks and doubt the risks of COVID-19. Or it might mean the person is fully vaccinated and following CDC guidance to the letter. And someone with a mask might now be signaling their support for virus control efforts,

but rejection of the latest CDC guidance. Or it might mean that a person is unvaccinated and following the rules to stay masked. Or it might mean something else altogether. So, so you could tell something about someone or thought you could before. Guess what? Now, I don't know what, we're not going to know what masks mean anymore. There's going to be this enormous amount of, you know, again, the social cues we relied on. are now just completely scrambled up.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that even before this announcement, that was one of the things we talked about on the press box, right? Which is, it should be acceptable to project that you are, you know, trying to help, trying to be safe for everybody else, right? And to see somebody without a mask,

I still don't think, I mean, all weekend I was walking around seeing people without masks. I certainly, I don't think I ever got over the impulsive, reaction that the people I was looking at were, I mean, your first instinct is that these people are, you know, anti-mask, anti-science, and then you realize, no, they're probably just vaccinated, right? I mean, but the first instinct is, I think it's a fair one. It's what we've lived with for so long. And yeah, I mean, and also, I just think there's a big practical element to it, right? I mean,

I can't, obviously, this doesn't go for everybody, but, well, I mean, I wore a mask all the time just like you. But as for specific moments when I was wearing a mask, like, of course, you wear a mask in the store, in the grocery store, because there's a lot of people around, but I also wore a mask from my car to the grocery store. Mm-hmm. Because if I didn't, I might forget to put the mask on in the grocery store, right? I mean, there's like, it's like, nobody, no one's like, nah, I mean, actually, I do know people like this.

Some people leave the house and they're like, you know what, I don't need my wallet today, and they roll out without the wallet, right? And they're, and they're, and maybe they're right. But never in my life would I ever say, nah, I don't need my wallet today. because I can't wrap my head around life to that extent. And I can't imagine ever being confident enough to do that, even if I could. So, you know, you wear the mask. Now we, now we don't wear the mask.

I was paddleboarding the other day, going off into the sunshine, having a great time. And then I realized several minutes into the session that I was still wearing the mask on the board. Yeah. By definition, I was not sick. I was more than six to eight feet away from the next paddleboarder. Mm-hmm. but it just became habit. Yeah.

And I totally get what you're saying about walking into the grocery store. I do the thing where if I have like two errands that are a block apart, I just wear the mask for the car ride from one to the other. Yes. Again, in hopes that I just won't forget or do something dumb. And, you know, it's been a year. Yeah. It's ingrained into our heads.

So we're talking about further complications. Well, here are some more. If being fully vaccinated now allows you to do all this stuff, we have to continue to confront the disparities about who has been able to get the vaccine. Out here in California, we have pretty good vaccination rates. 38% have at least one dose, more than 50% fully vaccinated. But as Rong Gong Lin the second notes in the Los Angeles Times, just 43% of people living in the most disadvantaged areas of California are at least partially vaccinated,

while 63% of people living in the most prosperous areas have received at least one shot. statewide, only 34% of Latino and 35% of black residents have received at least one dose of vaccine compared with 50% of white, 40% of Native American and 61% of Asian American or Pacific Islander residents. And the whole approach out here you remember, David, was, hey, we're going to open a vaccine site at Dodger Stadium and Disneyland and the forum. It's going to be like a Fromer's guide to L.A. from the 80s. Everybody just drive over there. well, what if you have to work during the day? What if you don't have a car, you know, and it wound up missing a lot of people? So there's this whole idea of, okay, well, if you're going to give all these privileges to people now who are fully vaccinated, you have to give everybody a fair shot at being fully vaccinated.

So that's one. So the other complication is what we saw in the, what we saw with Child Star Ricky Schroeder. Do you see this over the last couple of days? Oh, yeah. Going to a Costco and saying, hey, they just changed the rules. You can't make me wear a mask in this business. And doing this whole video that was online about it. And again, the CDC rules are very clear.

The businesses can make their own regulations about masks. But that was in Mitch Smith's New York Times article. Like, let's say I own a bakery or I own a little shop or whatever. And now that's already been attention of, no, no, you have to wear a mask in my shop, customer. Now customer is going to go, wait a second. I had to hear they just change the rules. Why do I have to wear a mask in your store

if the CDC is saying I don't have to wear masks inside anymore? This to me is the hardest one to feel sympathy for because it just there's like of all of the

listen I walked around a little bit this weekend down on a sidewalk with my mask off and once I like after after the first, you know, hour of uncertainty, it felt really, really nice. And there wasn't even a bit when I walked in the store. There wasn't a moment's hesitation of like, this is an okay thing to do. I didn't even look for the sign on the door, but especially if there's a sign on the door. You know, and, but then again, this is sort of the original protest of the COVID era,

of this whole year we've lived in. Like before there were national and state guidelines, there were stores saying put on a mask to come in. and there were people complaining about it, you know? And that was, and I'm not sure why there is the presumption that your liberty extends to the Isles of Home Depot. But, I mean, anywhere where someone's like allowed to videotape you with security cameras, I don't know why you think you have some kind of inherent right. But right to be maskless or whatever. Anyway, it's just, I guess it's a, I guess it's a normal impulse. I mean, Ricky Schroeder.

It is normal? I mean, do wait, normal to want to be maskless or normal to want to make a video yelling at the Costco supervisor? Well, I'm not going to try to understand Mr. Schroeder's motivations, especially after the past couple years he's had in the semi-public guy, bailing out Kyle Rittenhouse. and I'm sure a lot of other fun stuff, but that's kind of all you need to know about him. But yeah, I mean, I'm just saying, I mean, listen, I don't agree with it. I don't sympathize with it.

I can't associate myself with it, but it's prevalent enough that I can't say that I feel like, I mean, that it's a bizarre thing to feel. It's a thing I just can't fathom, but a lot of people seem to feel this way. It is weird, as a lot of people noted on Twitter that you would cut a promo on the manager of Costco,

who of course is not the person, who is setting the policy. It's not like the corporate big wig, you know, that you're outside their office or something like that. This is a person who's sitting there like up with a name badge on going, you know, look, I just been told like this is the rule of the store that everybody has to wear a mask. Yeah. So you're yelling at me and putting me on a national video.

Can I interject real quick, though? And actually, I believe this might be a variation on a Brianism or a David and Brianism. I don't remember how far back this goes. But I was with my 12-year-old the other day. At getting gas, he ran into the station, and he came back out with kind of a Coke and a shocked look on his face. And he was just like, dude, there was a guy in there who was just yelling at the guy behind the counter the whole time I was in there. Like, even when I was paying for my Coke, like this guy was just yelling about, and I forgot what the issue was.

But it was some incredibly minor grievance, you know, like you won't sell, you won't sell, you know, cigarettes to somebody without an ID or like, whatever it was. And I was like, well, here's the thing. First of all, if you're yelling at the guy behind the counter of any establishment, you know, you either must know that you're not yelling at the right person or you're too stupid to realize that. But I think more importantly, I think the people that are there yelling nonstop at the people behind the counter at the gas station are not unlike the people who were just like

overly friendly and wasting everybody's time at the Starbucks. You know, it's for those, for some people. for some people, whether they're nice about it or mean about it or whatever else, this is the most exciting thing that's going to happen for them in a day. The reason that the subway sandwich line sometimes takes 10 minutes is because there's somebody in line for whom this is the highlight of their day. And whether that's asking the employee's opinion on every topping possible for the sandwich or whether it's complaining about the way the bread recipe has changed to the point where

you're yelling and, you know, screaming at the person who's been working there for 15 minutes, this is the highlight of their day. And I think that there's a lot of people who are yelling about masks for whom. This is the highlight of their day, too. You don't think Ricky Schroeder had to get home to read the new Jonathan Franzen? You really think that was the way his day topped out? No. No, Ricky Schroeder, I'm sure, has a very vibrant life of, like, replying angrily to people who bring up silver spoons on Twitter. But, you know, this is, this is, you had to set out with this intention. Right? I mean, it's just, it's just, it's just sad.

How do we feel about the rise of the vaccine VIP section? This is this newly common practice where, like at Dodger Stadium, you have a fully vaccinated fan section. You have to have your vaccine. You have to be two weeks out. You have to show proof. But then you get to sit in the special section of the stadium. I think that's fine. I think it's fine. I mean, I, my, my only anxiety from it comes from the perceived, politicization of it, but it's that's irrational. I mean, that perception is irrational and that concern should be, I think, I think it's a good thing that we overlook, escape past it, whatever else. But that said, it's only going to be a matter of time before somebody fakes their way in and

just gloats about it online, and then that becomes the new story. Right. Or just sits there recording a video of them screaming at the usher about it, too. Don't rule that out. Yeah. New York Times had a whole roundup of these, the Washington, D.C. Bar, Adam's organ, remember that place? Then I spend a night or two in there. Says that only people who are fully vaccinated can get in as customers or even musicians performing at the bar. Special gym at Fort Bragg for military personnel who have been fully vaccinated. Jennifer Steinauer in the New York Times that reports this.

A spokesperson for Evite, you know, Evite, said 548,000 guests had received online invitations to events mentioning fully vaccinated. or using other vaccinated related terms since March 1st, 2021. A similar company, Paperless Post, has created a specific invitation design with the inoculated in mind, vaccinated only please RSVP. So when you get the invite, it will say you only get to come if you are fully vaccinated. That is the next step in our, and as a country, as we get around the new rules, get around these new ideas. David, I want to close by listening with you to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.

I don't know if you heard about this enticement, but in New York, you can go to Shake Shack. And if you order a burger or a chicken sandwich and you are vaccinated, you get a free regular-sized fries. You know those crinkle fries that Shake Shack has? Fantastic, yeah. Yeah, I would say they're pretty good. But okay, we can agree to disagree. Now, the problem with the Shake Shack Fries is that, as with almost everything, a shake shack is that is that the burgers are so the burgers are too good that's what it is yeah there's

no visit to shake shack there's no there's no there's no there's no there's no shake shack meal that that that well-rounded shake shack meal that wouldn't be better than its weight in shake burgers you would rather have four shake shack cheeseburgers than a double cheeseburger and fries and some chicken nuggets and a milkshake right are you sleeping on the shakes no the shakes are fantastic i'm just saying it's part of everything else so you're saying the fries are the weak leg of of the stool. The fries are Chris Bosch in this analogy. They'll talk about Chris Bosch that way.

I'm just saying the fries are fine, but the other two are absolute all-timers and the fries are really good. Shake-shack produces some of the best chicken around, but as a part of a shake-shack meal, I would just rather eat burgers all day. Fair enough. Fair enough. Bill de Blasio agrees with you, David. Because he was selling this free French-fry

program the other day by eating a hamburger during his press conference. I kid you not. I want you to hear Bill de Blasio encouraging New York City residents to get vaccinated while eating a hamburger. If this is appealing to you, just think of this when you think of vaccination. I'm getting a very good feeling. I'm teaching my kids right now not to talk when their mouth is full. And I feel it's very threatening to have the mayor of a major American city, the major American city talking while his mouth is full.

Even in the midst of a public health statement like this. Even if it's funny, even if it's endearing. Really, what he's missing is the point that the Biden administration has been so good on for the past, well, since the beginning of the year, which is even if you don't actually need to wear the mask, you need to project that mask wearing is a positive thing and you do that by wearing your mask around. He's not projecting to the children of America, Bill de Blasio, that eating the chewing with your mouth full is bad. You don't think chewing a hamburger and saying, mm, vaccination gets the job done like wearing a mask all the time. Joe Biden has some drawbacks as a politician, some weaknesses.

He has never resorted to this in Joe Biden's favor. eating a hamburger on camera and say, vaccination. So point to the White House on that one. All right, David, time for the overword Twitter joke of the week where we celebrated gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. David, an aquatic theme tweet from the New York Post,

quote, Diver Spots Fish wearing a gold wedding ring in Australia. Diver Spots Fish wearing a gold wedding ring in Australia. Now, I put the picture there in our Google Doc. The fish is not wearing the ring on its finger because the fish does not have fingers. The fish is kind of swam, swam into the ring. The ring is like encircling the fish, almost like a collar around the fish. Do you want to hear some of the best responses to the fish wearing a gold wedding ring in Australia?

Fish out here getting wiped up and I can't even get a text bag. Great. Great. now there aren't even plenty of fish in the sea. That's great. The fish went to Jared. I like that one. Drip or drown.

Very good. And my favorite, C said yes. C. Oh, I love it. I love it. Said yes. Thanks to Bernard McBurnerson

and Black Dickey Greenlee for that one. This one is for our Australian listeners. Last week, David, Matt Damon went on the Today Show, to talk about his new movie Stillwater, and Damon, looking rather scruffy, beamed in from an Australian sports book while having a beer.

It was an overworked Twitter joke to write Goodwill punting. Goodwill punting. Thanks to Nathan Schmuck. And this week's runaway winner, after the CDC said we could take off our masks if fully vaccinated, people started coming up with other things

the CDC is now encouraging Americans to do. Would you like to hear some of the best of those suggestions? Please. All right. New CDC guidance stipulates that vaccinated people no longer need to maintain a sourdose starter. It's just one alternative proclamation by the CDC. CDC announces you can put gasoline in a bag maskless if fully vaccinated. The CDC says vaccinated individuals may now gather in groups as large as 450,000

to invade the Russian Empire without adequate supply lines or a clear strategy. And my very favorite, CDC announces that emails need no longer be prefaced with. I hope this message finds you well in these extraordinary times.

Thanks to Joaquin Nagel, J. Fisher, Andrew Johnson, Scott Tobias, and Chad Orzel. If you helped America understand the new normal, congrats. You made the overword Twitter joke of the week. God, if the CDC came out and said no one is allowed.

You're going to be audited if you ever send an email about these extraordinary times again. I just think all of America would be behind that. Joe Biden would get his second term right now. We wouldn't have to worry about it. All right, David, in the notebook dump. I don't think any press box nonfiction pantheon is complete without Sebastian Younger. He is the author, of course, of the Perfect Storm. He's made a number of documentaries lately, including Restrepo.

Well, Younger has a new, very slender book. book out called Freedom. And it's a meditation on the concept that proceeds from a very long walk that Younger took along the East Coast along railroad lines. He explains, here's Sebastian Younger. All right, Sebastian, freedom is built around a 400-mile walk that you and a couple of companions took from Washington, D.C. to Connellsville, Pennsylvania, by way of Philadelphia. What prompted the walk? Well, the short version is I wanted to see my country from the inside out. And the real road lines, you know, it's illegal to walk on railroad lines. And, and, uh, you see the backs of everything, the farms, the factories, the ghettos, the suburbs. You're, you're really right inside

America. And it's, it's sort of no man's land. And so there's a very marginal people out there. There's, there's, uh, almost no police, almost no surveillance. And you can sort of sleep anywhere. I mean, it really is a sort of like, you can really kind of do what you want. And I wanted to experience my country in that way. you said railroad lines in the book are pathologically efficient ways. I love that phrase of getting from one point to another in this country. Yeah, I mean, they're the most unsentimental thing imaginable. They try to go as straight as possible and as level as possible.

And so, you know, they cut right across riverbends and they go right through hills and and right through towns and right through everything. And so if you're, you know, I mean, I've been spending. a lot of time in the wilderness and I'm you know I love being in the wild but what I wanted here was something where I was sort of marginal but but connected to society I mean we got our food in towns and we had to dodge the police I mean at one point they had a helicopter looking for us and a guy shot at us in Pennsylvania and also people were incredibly nice to us as well so you know it really was an encounter with my country and with each other there was um you know most of the time

there was four people on the trip we'd all been in a fair amount of combat. And so we needed each other. You know, the book is called freedom, and it's about where our freedom comes from. And one of the points I make is that no one can survive by themselves anywhere in the wilderness along the railroad lines anywhere. It's very, very hard. So you basically, you can survive if you're in a group, a survival group, but that means you have to you have to do what the group needs, and then you lose your freedom. And so it's like they're really is no way to be completely safe, completely comfortable, and completely free. It's a, that's a fantasy. Yeah, and that's a tension you explore in this book.

From, you know, Pilgr, or I should say, from people who went out into the frontier, the American frontier back in the 1700s to your walk in particular, this tension in between, I'm going to be free, I'm going to, nobody's going to tell me what to do. And, uh-oh, how am I going to survive till tomorrow? Yeah, I mean, part of where we walked, you know, we walked from along the road, lines, mostly along their lines, from D.C. to Philly to, that we turned west. We were going to go to New York, and we changed our minds. We headed west. And we went to Pittsburgh, outskirts of Pittsburgh, to Connellsville. And so a lot of it was along the Juniata River, which was sort of this

gateway. It was the only river that runs east-west in Pennsylvania. And so it was sort of gateway through the mountains for settlers in the 1700s who were pushing into Indian lands. And it was incredibly dangerous time for those people. And so, you know, they were, they were fleeing economic oppression, political oppression. They didn't like the government breathing down their neck. They didn't like the church breathing down their neck. The wilderness was freedom. But what they found when they got out there, of course, is that the wilderness is incredibly dangerous, particularly when it's filled with hostile native people who don't want you there. And so to survive that, they had to basically have a communal defense pact where if there was an Indian raid along the frontier, everyone sort of like gathered at the stockade and collectively fought off the threat.

And if you weren't willing to do that, as an adult male, if you weren't willing to carry a flitlock rifle, a scalping knife, and a tomahawk at all times, you were basically cast out of the community. And so there went your freedom. You're free of government oppression, but suddenly you're being, you're experiencing the, I don't want to call it oppression, but the forced collaboration of your peers. You were giving into the strictures of society and the demands of your neighbors and things like that. So that's the irony here. The closer you get to quote unquote freedom, the more you have to give it up. Right.

I mean, the closer you get to freedom in that context, the more danger you're in, the more you need other people in order to survive. you have to abide by their norms. And that, you know, like that is the human condition. I mean, we've, humans evolved for hundreds of thousands of years to survive in groups of 30 or 40 people, typically. None of the individuals in those groups, and they're very egalitarian groups. And egalitarianism in a group in a society is a very powerful form of freedom. And they were extremely egalitarian. There are basically no, no accumulation of wealth, no social classes in those, in those kinds of groups.

But, you know, they were completely dependent on their peers for their own survival and vice versa. So that kind of, it's like complete autonomy. I'm alone and I can do whatever I want. It's just, you know, it's a Western fantasy. It's complete nonsense. You consider so many interesting notions of freedom over the course of this book. And I perked up when I saw the words infrastructure plan since Congress is considering one right now.

How to infrastructure plans and freedom intersect? Well, any society, whether your hunter-gatherers in East Africa 100,000 years ago, or Americans in 2021, every society comes to collective decisions about what to ask from its individuals and how to use its resources and how to share things in a fair way that continue the survival of the group. That's just what humans do. And so what our nation, what every nation does is figure out, what do we need from the population in order to safeguard life and maintain our standard of living? And the Biden administration is deciding that we depend on our infrastructure and that it's got to be fixed.

It's got to be improved. You know, I'm a journalist and I'm agnostic on policy. But I will say as a former anthropologist that the fact that we all collectively owe something to the our sort of group welfare is not a radical and new idea. It's extremely ancient. Yeah, you mentioned Albert Gallatin, who had a very interesting, who had a very old idea of an infrastructure plan at that point, roads and railroads. That involves seizing people's land, right? And in a sense, taking away some of their freedom. Oh, yeah, Galatine was a, he was a Swiss, he was a citizen of Switzerland.

He came to this country in the 1800s. And so he, he was a citizen of Switzerland. He came to this country in the 1800s. And so he or earlier, but in the early 1800s, he devised a plan to build a national railroad system. I mean, what was happening is that the East Coast cities, I mean, does this sound familiar? The East Coast cities were cosmopolitan, they were increasingly affluent, and the interior were sort of languishing because they were out of touch. They had no easy way to get to the coast to transport their goods, their crops. to the coast. It costs as much to transport a bushel of corn to Philadelphia from the, from Western Pennsylvania as it was worth in the market. So what Galatine just realized is that the United States did not invest in the railroads and canals, something way beyond

the scope of private industry to do, if on its own, if they didn't invest, you know, basically the country would become sort of pot-bound. I mean, we would grow and grow, but we'd be confined to this little strip of coastal plain before the Appalachians, and what could be the mightiest nation in the world would never be. So eventually his plans were implemented in a different fashion, but basically the federal government undertook this massive project of building a railroad system that could cheaply and easily transport produce all around the country. And eventually, that system reached all the way to California.

What they had to do, though, is use eminent domain to seize private property when it was in the way of the route of the railroad. And so, you know, this all went to, this all went to court. And the court agreed that it was in the public interest. The railroads were so much in the public interest. This huge infrastructure project was so much in the public interest that it gave the government the legal right to seize property from private property. people and compensate them. And the court's wording was it was the railroad's ability to annihilate distance that made it so valuable. So there you have the courts and the government deciding this is for the greater good. Some people are going to be hurt by this. We're trampling on their individual

right to own property. But at some point, society has to make large-scale decisions that benefit everybody and that's what we're going to do. You also have a really interesting discussion of numbers called genie coefficients, which you say are a measure of freedom? How do they work? The genie coefficient. Yeah, I know, basically it measures the difference in income between the more affluent parts of society and the poorer parts of society. And so the greater the spread between those two, the more, the larger the basically, well, the income gap. And you can infer economic injustice and all that from that number. basically hunter-gatherers who are extremely egalitarian have a genie coefficient of 0.25.

It's under, you know, it basically ranges from 0 to 1.0. So 0.25, basically one quarter, is much closer to complete equality, complete egalitarianism than it is to complete monopoly. The United States has one of the highest genie coefficients. In other words, is one of the most unequal in terms of income in the Western world. It's on a par with the Roman Empire. The genie coefficient is, if I'm remembering correctly, in the low 40s, 0.41, 0.42. Medieval Europe was 0.79, unbelievably unfair.

And that was brought down by the great plague, the black death, which killed so many people, killed one third of Europe. And suddenly there was a shortage of labor because so many people died. So that sort of redistributed the wealth. And as you write, it would be nice to think that egalitarian societies are going to be the ones that rise up to dominate world events. But that's not exactly the case. Right. I mean, my personal history is, I came from a very liberal environment and went to a liberal college, a liberal family, and I vote Democratic. So, you know, when I, I just, as I was writing the book, I just assumed like a, you know, a very economically unfair system.

is bound to collapse and sort of like rearrange itself in a more in a more fair way and that those countries aren't going to do very well, that sort of social justice and economic justice are basically very, very, they're socially healthy and will make for powerful countries. And actually, it's the reverse. I mean, if you look at, I'm sorry about the noise, I'm in New York City right now, and the windows are open, it's a hot day, I don't have a seat. So if you look at the really powerful empires throughout the world, the Han Dynasty, the Roman Empire, America, they're typified by a high genie coefficient.

Really egalitarian societies, I mean, there's many good things to recommend them. And personally, they're to my taste, right, political taste. But they actually, they're actually historically not very powerful. The societies that have really dominated the territory of the world and the population of the populations of the world typically have high are not quite, are not very economically fair. They have high genie coefficients. You had a nice phrase,

a sweet spot of economic injustice is what seems to propel a country into world power. Right. And I'm not, you know, to be clear, I'm not saying we should. Not endorsing, yes. I'm not endorsing it. I'm just,

I'm just pointing out the research of other people that have shown that a, not a very high, but a moderate amount of economic injustice basically collects, a lot of capital in the hands of relatively few people, and that capital can be used in sort of dedicated ways to expand the power of that country, of that empire. And so that seems to be a path to territorial and population control that a very egalitarian hunter-gatherer society will never even aspire to, much less attain. So you and your companions are walking along the railroad tracks, and you note that when

you're doing this, you are technically trespassing at pretty much every moment. How did you guys avoid authorities on your trip? Well, the nice thing about railroad line is it's dead straight a lot of the time. And you also got, we got very sensitive to feeling trains coming. I mean, we couldn't even hear them, but you could, you know, they'd be miles so often. You just, something would change in the air. And you know, these big freight trains or the Amtraks that were going really, really fast and see, you could just kind of feel it. And we'd look at it. And we'd look at it. other and we'd all you know the engineers will call you in so we sort of dive into the underbrush when we could uh but you know also like everything everything everything out there you can see from

quite far off off you know like patrol cars police patrol cars so you know when we were when we thought someone was looking for us you know we'd just go into the woods for a while you know boil some coffee smoke a cigarette wait see if see if some cops went by one point they were looking for us with a helicopter uh that was a surprise and i'm not crap than that that I caused so many, so many people, you know, wasted their time for a few hours. You know, I think they just didn't know what we were and were worried about it. It was quite late at night. And you also read, you were constantly worried about locals and all these towns that you're

walking through. Why worried about how locals would react to you? Oh, you know, just there were a lot of, there was a lot of gunfire in Pennsylvania. There was, you know, you just hear pick up trucks full of guys going by on the, on the local roads, you know, yelling and throwing beer bottles out of the windows and sometimes shooting out of the windows. And, you know, we're outsiders and we, you know, we're basically vagrants. And that makes some people extremely friendly and other people not so much so. And we, you know, we just, it was paranoid of us, but we also, it's, you know, America can be a weird country.

Every country can be a weird country. And we were outsiders everywhere we went. And we were exhausted. We were filthy. You know, we, some people, I think, could have seen us as a threat maybe. Anyway, we were very careful. We slept in places where we were hidden. We could sort of see out fairly well. If we were worried about anything, we'd walk at night because anything on the lines at night has to have a headlight on it. And we don't.

And so we could see that coming a mile off. And so our ultimate refuge was walking at night because nothing could get close to us out there at night. There's one point in the book where you guys were forced to sleep on the track bed itself. So a couple of feet away from where train. would pass. How does one pass a night on the track bed? Oh, that was hellish. One guy, we woke up in the morning and, you know, these freights would go by like a few feet from our head. And we were on the top balance, which is this crushed rock that they make railroad beds out of.

And there just was no room anywhere else. It was just a miserable spot. And, you know, we didn't stop walking until about midnight. We just sort of lay down and stretched down. And these freights would bunder by and wake us up every 20 minutes. It would really, And so this guy, you know, this guy woke up in the morning and we all woke up and the first thing he said was, you know, frankly, I'd rather be mortared. And we'd all been, we'd all had experiences being mortared. So we all knew exactly what that meant. And I was like, yeah, man, I think I might be with you. Like, that might have been easier.

Every 20 minutes. No, whatever. I mean, the freight, you know, they run the freight's at night because the passenger trains aren't going. And so the sort of freight's own the nighttime. And they just push those things through. You know, we're on the East Coast, the East Coast corridor. Like, they were pushing that stuff through constantly. And I love the freight chains.

I mean, they were long. They didn't go that fast. And they were just, I mean, America moved so much stuff around, right? I mean, cattle and coal and tractors. And he just tanks, Humvees, like, you name it. It's going by on a flatbed or in a car. And it just is sort of fascinating to watch it go. Freedom's one of your shorter books,

133 pages before the notes. What's different for you about writing a book like this versus writing one two or three times as long? Yeah, well, you know, my first book, The Perfect Storm, was about something that happened, a huge storm that sank a fishing boat out of Gloucester. A death in Belmont was a cold case of a murder in 1963. War was about a single deployment with a platoon in eastern Afghanistan.

These are all events that, you know, you really want to document not endlessly, but very, very, very. thoroughly. That takes some time. It takes some pages. My book Tribe and this book Freedom, they're not documenting events. They're about an idea. And I feel that the more efficient you can be in explaining the heart of your idea and the basis for your thinking, the more people will retain it. And really what you're trying to do, I mean, I'm not trying to be comprehensive. You could write almost endlessly about the topic of freedom. And it goes to the core of the human

experience. It's a word that's horribly misused. You could write on and on and on about it, never sort of reached the end. But what I'm trying to do is give people a sort of way of thinking about it and then starting a conversation with them that they can then continue. And so for me, when I'm writing about an idea, a concept, I try to get in and out very quickly. I use as few words as possible, and I really try to get people, just to implants an idea, and then as a writer, leave. Do you get a different kind of satisfaction as a writer finishing a short book versus a long one? Yeah. I mean, yes, I do. I mean, again, it's, it's conceptual. So did I communicate the sort of core concept that I set out to communicate? I'm not trying to recreate a world or a situation. It's an idea.

And so, you know, very briefly, throughout human history, freedom for our purposes means can we maintain our autonomy from a greater power that wants to control us? That's what freedom means and for our purposes. So traditionally throughout history, which obviously we're going back 100,000 years at least, the first thing that people, that a community, a group will do is try to outrun their oppressor. And humans are very effective at that. I mean, sort of larger, powerful societies are actually not very mobile. They're rooted in place to towns.

They have a lot of equipment. Bureaucrats, whatever, it doesn't move very easily. Nomads move extremely effectively. So outrun your oppressor. If you can't do that, you're going to have to outfight them. Humans are just about the only mammal where a smaller individual or a smaller group of individuals can defeat in combat, physical combat, can defeat a larger individual or group. That is not true in any other mammal.

And I looked at MMA statistics, mixed martial arts. The larger man in a mixed class MMA fight only wins 50% of the time. Size and strength are a poor predictor of outcome. That is not true for chimpanzees, for other mammals. But in humans, it is true. and the smaller group can outfight the larger group. The Taliban fought us to a standstill for 20 years, the greatest military power ever in history,

and we are pulling out on their terms, right? I loathe the Taliban. They're an awful regime. They are antithetical to human freedom. But the fact that a small group can actually defeat or outlast the will to fight of the greatest military in history means that freedom is possible. It means that we had a chance at fighting the Brits, winning against the Brits in 1776, and in fact, we did win.

Over the last year, I think I heard the word freedom used mostly in terms of the coronavirus. You know, you are infringing on my freedom when you make me wear this mask or take some precaution. What did you make of that usage of the word? I mean, they're misunderstanding the word. They're really, the word they're looking for is rights. You're infringing on my rights. freedom and rights are not the same thing. There are unfree societies where people have specific rights,

and there are free societies where you don't have specific rights. And for example, just an interesting example, I mean, rights are conferred by the group to the individual. So in our society, it's not illegal to cut the line at the bank, right? It's not illegal. There's no laws against that. No. But you don't have the right to do it because the group of people in the line

will object. They haven't granted you the right. If you run in and say, you know, I got to take, you know, I got a baby. I got to take them home. I got to get some money. Do you mind if I cut the line? The whole line might say, yeah, go ahead, man, no problem, right? You get your rights from the group. So the individual actually is not in a position to determine their rights. You can't decide that you just want to not stop at red lights or drive on the left-hand side of the road. That's not something the individual has the power, the authority, the right to do. If you're part of the, if you're of society, whether you like them or agree with them or not, the rules that society comes up with are your rules. And if you want, you can leave. You can go to a country that doesn't have

rules like that. Somalia is an awesome place if you don't want rules and no government. There are places in the world where you can do that. It just doesn't happen to be America. Two more before I let you go. You've done a lot of magazine writing in your career. We've seen lately the magazines have shrunk. The frequency has gotten less because the world has changed. The media world has changed. you think that kind of writing is going to go somewhere else, or do you think it's just going to disappear? I think the heyday of magazine writing in the 90s, early 2000s, is that what they're called?

I think that's pretty much over with. I mean, a lot of writing has shifted online, which is sort of good and bad, I think. I mean, I made a living for a while as a magazine writer. I really enjoyed it, and I regret that it's gone, because I wish another generation of young journalists had that as a forum. It's amazing, you know, but I think I think that's for economic reasons that's pretty much over with. Finally, until 2019, you were the co-owner of a bar on the west side of Manhattan called the Half King,

which I went to a lot, attended a lot of readings at, and had a lot of drinks at that weren't attached to readings. What did you get out of owning a bar in that whole experience? You know, me and a few friends built that in 2000. And we were all involved in the world of foreign reporting and journalism and publishing. And we wanted to create something that was both a sort of local community place for the local neighborhood and a sort of gathering place for people in our line of work. And it worked. And what did we get out of that? we had, I had a place to invite people to and extend our hospitality to and, and whole

conversations about the world and about our work. After 9-11, that became a very important place. I mean, what we don't have now is a, a communal central space for people to gather and talk and exchange ideas and have a sort of reciprocity of ideas. And bars are that now in an urban context. And that was ours for a little while. And I loved sort of being generous with what we had. It's an amazing feeling to own a place and buy someone at dinner. It's the best feeling in the world that you can welcome people into your place

and return their thoughts with something. you know, like something like that. And I really regret that it's gone. A lot of people really missed it. And I mean, I have two kids now. I don't think I'd be up there much. But, you know, there was a lot of grief in the community about it ending. Is it true what you told the New York Times that your original conception of a bar was to buy a building in Red Hook, put the bar on the bottom floor and have a fireman's pole where you could come down from your apartment into the bar?

Yeah, that was a long time ago. Yes, me and my good friend Scott Anderson, another foreign report. Porter. That was our, before we realized that it would actually help to make money at the bar. That was our idea. All right. When the kids grow up, you promise me your next bar is going to have the fireman's poll. So you can just descend and do a reading. Sebastian Younger's new book is Freedom. Sebastian, thanks so much for coming on the press box. Thank you.

All right. It's time for David. Chumaker. Guess is the strained pun headline. Yeah. Last Thursday's headline about a Peloton data leak was, I know where you worked out last summer. This week's headline comes from Stephen Elliott. It's from the alt-weekly, the Nashville scene. I think it's first appearance on this feature. Stephen Elliott himself wrote a report about four months of the Republican-controlled Tennessee legislature.

And two of the subjects, the legislature addressed, David, and please put on your listening years, as they say in pre-K, were handgun permits and the COVID vaccine handgun permits and the COVID vaccine. The paper went very Jared Diamond in their front page treatment for this story. What was the Nashville scene

strain pun headline? Handgun permits and the COVID vaccine. So guns, germs, ends. And, uh, okay. Two of the subjects. They're very carefully here. guns, germs, and What do we do at a legislature?

Squeal. That's the pulled pork they serve in Tennessee. I know. That's actually a great restaurant. Guns, germs, and appeal. Yeah, you know, lawmakers, they get together. They want to make.

Deal, deal. Gun germs and deals. Very nicely done. That's good. Very good. One of the things I love about you, David, is I can say Jared Diamond and there doesn't need to be any more explanation. Yeah.

You don't say who's that or what book did he write. You just say it. By the way, I don't want to spring this on you, but I think we might have a runway here for a new feature on the press box. Oh, do tell. Our friend Chad Orzel sent in a headline the other day from his local newspaper, I believe. And the headline was activists, colon, more reforms. that was the headline. Now, as you know, by definition,

activists in this country want more reforms. You would not be an activist if you wanted things to stay the same. And he suggested that maybe we have a contest for the most generic headline possible. As it happens, we had just recently gotten another headline. There was right up, right up this alley. It was from our friend John Walters, and this was the headline, police searching for man. Okay?

So we've got a pretty good, that's it. Police searching for man. Presumably, all crimes are not solved, so police are always searching for someone. But police searching for man was the headline. Oh, that's great. So press box listeners, this is your job. Find it the most generic headline possible.

The two to beat are activists, colon more reforms, and police searching for man. Oh, I love it. we will collect them in a later date. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We are back Thursday with Jeff Gwynn, author of the new book War on the Border.

And Brian's childhood mentor. Absolutely. Plus more lukewarm takes them about the media. See you then, David. Later, Brian.