Sebastian Junger

00:02four three two welcome back man hey thank you good to be here great to see you again yeah i like your new spot thank you thank you very much man you have a real flip phone i do have a real foot and you said that you you didn't go back to it you never left i never left her so you never went like iphone android never no no never never even thought about it never even thought about it no you see people taking pictures and using apps nothing nothing i i i don't need the apps i'm good there's no draw at all not using the internet answering emails i have a laptop at home and i do access the internet yes but when you're out you don't want to mess with it no i when i'm out i want to be out i'm in the world you know right if you're if you're looking at your phone you're not in the world and so you don't get either you don't get either thing you get along very well my friend ari

00:59he he went back to a flip phone uh and he looks disdainfully sort of like a former alcoholics look at everybody with a drink like there's no way you could just enjoy one drink you lose her right you know that right yeah no i i um i just look around at this i mean i'm an anthropologist and i you know i'm interested in human behavior and i look at the behavior like literally the physical behavior of people with with smartphones and it doesn't it looks um anti-social and unhappy and anxious and i don't want to be i don't want to look like that and i don't want to feel like i think those people feel wow that's deep i'm a junkie you know it's really interesting because i was at a restaurant the other day and i was looking around and literally everyone in the restaurant was looking at their phone no one was talking to to anybody and i was thinking what if there was a drug that did that

01:46what if there was a drug that didn't kill you but it just sucked up all your time and you just stared blankly at your hand and did everything generation is the phrase social media it really isn't it's anti-social media and it has a lot of uses and you know whatever but it's not social in any human sense and and if you look at suicide rates depression rates ptsd rates anxiety rates they're doing nothing but going up in our society mass shootings speak you know just something tragic just happened yesterday all those things they're indicators of something and they're all going up in our society despite the fact that we're a very wealthy powerful relatively peaceful society like something's going on i can't prove that it's you know the internet or social media what i mean obviously that but but the fact that those things are happening at the same time does make me wonder that these new

02:50devices certainly don't bring happiness because the numbers are going in the wrong direction well i don't think they're designed to bring happiness but they're certainly designed to give you access to information perhaps maybe with some discipline they can be used in some sort of a way that that benefits us and not well yeah i mean all that information is available on your laptop at your desk at home right i mean i think the problem is when when people want to be socially and socially connected constantly no matter what they're doing and that i think keeps people from actually fully experiencing whatever they're actually doing i think there's definitely some truth to that but i do like the fact that i can ask my phone questions like if i don't know anything and i can add there's a new feature on this google pixel where you squeeze the side of it and the google assistant comes up and

03:38you can ask your questions you squeeze it and ask a question i mean that's that's some space age man yeah or it's downright creepy i mean you know how you look at it i mean i you know i get it like i mean you have all of human knowledge in your front pocket yeah accessible at every moment like i i do understand the power of it and the appeal of it i'm not saying there aren't great things about of course there are um it's just for me the downside outweighs the upside for other people i guess it doesn't but if you look again if you look at mental health statistics in this country we're doing something wrong because they're all going in the wrong direction i agree with you i just wonder if the mental health statistics are indicative of other issues you know i think lifestyle what you do with your time during the day and a lot of people live like very deeply unsatisfying lives and i don't

04:27know if the phone accentuates that problem i mean we were talking the other day about uh we were at the airport we were waiting to fly home and there was some girl and she was talking we were just eavesdropping and she was talking about like the amazing race and uh how she you know oh this show's so boring now and i can't wait to and i'm gonna eat this and then i'm gonna eat that and i'm supposed to get a raise at work it's like all nonsense non-engaging not interesting there's no real life to anything she's talking about like this is most of our country or a large part of our country oh absolutely i mean the thing about social media is that it sort of weaponizes blandness i mean i mean it allows it gives people a platform for the most mundane uninteresting um aspects of their lives because they have to constantly constantly be producing some kind of output of communication

05:21well and if not producing it certainly absorbing it right yeah or both i always feel like i'm mining when i'm on twitter like nothing nothing nothing nothing oh rape oh murder yeah oh look at this no monkey found oh i mean there no i mean there's other people you could have on the show that could speak more intelligently to this but i know that i mean i've heard that um risk of suicide and face uh facebook are correlated in other words people that are are on facebook and social media they are at an increased risk of depression and and thoughts of suicide and that and that that's terrifying do you think that that's correlation equals causation though you know what i mean like do you think that people on facebook all the time are doing that because they're already depressed well right i mean that's that's the question and and but the correlation means we have to look at something more

06:11closely anxiety rates and teenagers have skyrocketed um anxiety partly comes from a sort of painful self-awareness and of course that's amplified by social media because you can never escape the opinions of your peers i mean that's crippling to people i mean when i you know i wasn't the most popular kid in class by a long shot and when i came home whatever my pro whatever my issues were were on hold until you know when i was a kid in high school right those issues were on hold till 8 a.m the next morning right you got a 12-hour break from your problems now you don't and it's really tough on kids yeah i could only imagine growing up today i you know i think we got very lucky that the we experienced the internet in adulthood you know for me i was um i think i was 27 the first time i ever got online and that's a that's nice you know and no one knew what online was back then you

06:59weren't leaving any traces you were just going out and looking at stuff yeah you know it wasn't that's right that's right yeah i was uh how old was i uh i was about 36 i remember i remember a girl asked me said you ever logged on and i was like i don't know what she had to explain to me what that meant and then i literally said to oh that's never going to catch on come on that's like really yeah wow yeah isn't that what they said about the first computers like that was one of ibm's initial reactions to the idea of the personal computer i think that's the reaction to the first of everything except maybe the bow and arrow i mean like when they invented the bow and arrow everyone was like no that is going to catch on that is cool right but everything else i think that's you know skepticism like we don't we don't need anything more we're good and then you realize i mean that's the

07:47amazing thing about the human mind is that we invent this stuff and it doesn't mean that it's good i mean we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to live a very different environment that we live now so these things that we invent it doesn't mean that they're sort of psychologically good for us but they definitely are incredible i mean they're definitely amazing things yeah i don't think that necessarily they're good for us but i don't think this is going to sound weird but i don't even think they're necessarily designed for us i think they're designed for the future i think and i don't even think it's a design i just think that all things move in an ever more complex direction and that whatever a person is now is not going to be the same thing a thousand years from now or a hundred years from now even i think there's going to be some sort of symbiotic connection between us and

08:29electronics like we're going to have it installed in our bodies well you know that gets to um a kind of profound question like what is the point of existence of human existence what's the point of it um is the point for as many humans as possible to leave to lead safe um human fulfilled lives or is it for the human race as an entity to produce the highest technological achievements and scientific insights you know and i don't have a vote either way but that that does sort of seem to be the the question and that technology i mean we know does not lead to fulfillment and happiness but it does lead to scientific insight and to you know incredible um under i mean profound understanding of how the universe works in a physical sense yeah i wonder if what we're doing is just being caught up in the momentum of all this innovation and instead of like using discipline or using some sort of a

09:26rational objective analysis of like what it takes to be happy and then maybe pushing pushing some of that stuff aside and engaging in actual physical activities going out and doing things and and making that almost like a prescription like hey you know look let's look at your daily chart hey you don't you didn't get enough vitamins buddy and hey you didn't get enough activity like you need you need that in order to be in order to feel right to feel feel balanced right and if feeling right is the point of existence then iphones are probably not a good development no right if the exchange of data if the exchange of information uh is the point then then they're a great innovation so it really depends on what we're all here for i i was in san francisco with my wife and um we were walking behind these two kids who were talking about about robots and one was saying they were sort of geek

10:15kids i was sort of sort of in the know about all this stuff and one guy was saying you know they're taking over you know in 50 years you know we're we're going to be humans are going to be completely unnecessary and i said to my wife you know we always were unnecessary like none of this had to happen it's not like the world needs human beings to exist and for some purpose right we just we are here um but we didn't have to be here and so if robots replace us we go right back to where we would have been if we hadn't if we hadn't um evolved yeah and it was it was just a funny way of thinking about it like none of this is actually necessary it doesn't have to be happening no it certainly doesn't i mean look if we are finite life forms if you're only going to live to be you know if you're lucky 90 years and when your health's going to fail and then you're going to die what the what should be

11:02our goal is to feel good right to have community in relation that's a big part of that book tribe you're your book's fantastic by the way i've read it twice since i read it again i read it before and then i read it again since uh since our first podcast oh thank you very much yeah i've been getting a lot of i keep getting a lot of good responses to it and you know i think partly i mean whether you're a democrat or republican this is a pretty unsettling time in this country and um and i you know i think people are coming to the book a little bit just partly because they're wondering what is the glue that holds us all together and is there does that exist still like i mean i think there's a real question in people's minds about what is it that binds us together well there certainly is and you really covered a lot of the sort of just not commonly discussed aspects of it like

11:52the need for real community the need to really and the need to have something on the line you know the need to be in situations where there's real consequences and that it seems that this is part of the glue that holds us together well i mean the thing about technology is it buffers us from real consequences in the physical world which is what's great about it right and uh but the downside is that as you as humans get buffered from consequences they need they need each other less and less in order to survive so now sort of modern modern homo sapiens in a suburban house with an iphone and a garage door opener and all that stuff you know you get a paycheck at work and you don't need your neighbors you know to to help you gather food or hunt food or defend yourself from the gang from the other neighborhood i mean it all kind of gets taken care of which is a great liberation

12:43from your neighbors from your community but it deprives you of that essential human reliance on other people around you that's what makes people feel good and safe and like they're leading meaningful lives and so with that transition to having a life that's not part of any community that is a really tough one for people and i think that's part of the reason for high depression rates and such and high ptsd rates in our society yeah i think that lack of community is a very confusing thing when you see most people just sliding into their garage and shutting the door or going into their house and they don't even know their neighbors how that then that's really highlighted in your book how alien that is to the human experience until fairly recently like this idea of like living in these in like i was in new york city this past weekend and this enormous apartment like my friend

13:35jim was talking about this he lived jim norton lives in this enormous apartment building goes i don't know anybody there yeah he goes i live in a house a building essentially a house with a thousand people i don't know any of them yeah and listen i mean i live in a little tenement building but it's the same same idea these little cubby holes we all live in but you know i got to say and i grew up in a suburb but i got to say at least in the building i live in i'm in the lower east side at least in the building i live in i run into people on the landing on the staircase there's no elevator in the staircase and you get to know them a little bit the problem with the suburbs is that everything's a stone you know everyone's a stone's throw away and behind a big hedge and you and you don't you don't have to share an elevator with anyone you can be totally isolated and i i grew up in

14:17that environment it was crushing and i you know we were i was in a material sense i was lucky we were affluent family um but in i was not lucky in any human sense that's so fascinating you say it was crushing to live the american dream i mean a lot of people's ideas the american dream is living in a nice quiet suburb yeah and listen there's a lot that's dreamlike about it but but um the the the data will tell you that people in those situations are not happy i mean by the the the metrics by which we measure human fulfillment human happiness mental health they suck in the suburbs um and uh and and generally in modern society i mean as affluence goes up in society the suicide rate goes up the depression rate ptsd ptsd rate all that stuff goes up within with without fluence yeah i've noticed that in some of the circles that i i i'm hanging around with now because of

15:13nice people but the children of uh my children my children's friends uh parents yeah so i i'm interacting with these people that i don't know from work i don't know from social circles and you just and most of them are great but a lot of them are on pills like a lot of them yeah like like half of them are on pills and pills yeah yeah and you're like and they're they're taking adderall they're taking anxiety medication and they're taking antidepressants and they're mixing it all together with alcohol and there's some new freak out every week and there's literally no physical fear for anything everyone's driving a mercedes everyone's living in a gated community everybody's it's all smooth edges and nerfed corners right everything is uh very soft and easy and the the big appeal seems to be the newest objects chase the newest objects and it's a really well-known phenomenon if you

16:14introduce a disaster into that environment if you introduce the blitz in london or an earthquake or what have you a flood a tidal wave a war um people wake up out of their dream i mean they're in a kind of dream state um in part some and for some people that's in you know induced by pills and some people it's just induced by isolation but they're in a kind of dream state where they're not part of society uh in a meaningful way and a catastrophe wakes them up out of that and and people i mean over and over again you can hear testimony of people saying well i really miss those days you know the days after the earthquake during the blitz i mean you from generation after generation that goes through their their their things right they're tough things those days are missed and they're missed because people the thing they actually like most is being an essential part of a small

17:04group that is struggling to survive like that is the human experience for hundreds of thousands of years we're wired for it we're wired to like it uh the people that responded to that challenge tended to pass on their dna the people that didn't respond well didn't pass on their dna were the descendants of the people that sort of took some thrill and from that challenge and and acted well and with sort of vigor and with community in the face of hardship and danger we're the descendants of those people inevitably and uh because the people that didn't act well didn't survive as as well right they didn't pass on their genes and uh so that's one of the things we're missing and the big the big trick is i mean i'm not saying burn down the suburbs banned the car and live in a lean too i mean no one would say that huge benefits to this society too but the trick is how can we have that close

17:53communal connection that buffers us from our from mental health problems that makes us feel meaningful and fulfilled how can we have that and have the benefits of modern society you know like can we do can we do both and i think that's the big challenge because what i see in america i love this country what i see in my lifetime i mean when i grew up we didn't have mass shootings i mean you know like that that didn't happen you go into a church with a machine gun and kill as many people as you can it just didn't happen what is going on i mean to me it's a country and kind of i mean those things are all a symptom of a country that's in the kind of psychic pain yeah you know all the people on their iphones i sort of get it but but also it makes me think you're anxious like you're so anxious that you can't bear not to look at your feed for more than 20 seconds

18:44it's an addiction for sure i mean you're literally getting dopamine shots every time you check your feed yeah and and they're very small it's a trickle it's not like a real like it's not really worth it you don't get any real good feeling very rarely it's like fast food like the end of at the end of it you know you go to pull the drive in you know get get your cheeseburger and fries and shake it whatever afterwards you're full but you were you didn't get any nutrients and social media is the same way you're sort of socially full but actually it's all calories there's no nutrition i mean there's nothing that nothing to sustain you yeah well i found for me personally that people get a lot of fulfillment out of uh tribes for lack of a better word of like-minded people doing similar things that are difficult absolutely like i see it amongst like rock climbers a lot of rock climbers they

19:34they find like real community and other rock climbers and runners get it uh jiu-jitsu it's huge in the jiu jitsu community of course you know um and uh i experienced it in a deep way the first time i ever went hunting because hunting was almost like like i had a wall that i didn't know there was a door on it and i opened up the door and oh there's a whole new area back here like your your dna like goes up we know what to do with this we're hunting now and you feel like wow this is crazy like this is lighting up parts of my brain or parts of my my genetics yeah listen i had i went through that same door when i started boxing and i started late in life i was 50. i was going through a big life change my first marriage ended and um i need something i need something a little different and i think one of the things that really works for people is a situation where they're evaluated

20:30for their behavior rather than for how and where they were born yes right so or how much money they have right which is a function you know is you know is a function of to some degree of how how you were born where you were born uh and yeah but so you know in high school you evaluated for the family you come from for how you look for all that stuff you don't have control over any of that stuff yeah but in the boxing ring out hunting you know whatever there's a million things like this you're evaluated by your peers for your conduct and that you have complete control over soldiers the same way you know and i was with this platoon in combat off and on for a year in eastern afghanistan those guys didn't care if you were good looking or bad looking if your dad was in prison or not at least give a right that what they cared is how you acted in that situation and would you would you

21:19would you put the group the welfare of the group ahead of your own welfare and that was this basic human basic human question is the group more important to you than you are to you and if we all answer that question yet with a yes then we're good and so you know when you're in situations hunting in the gym jujitsu whatever it is where you're not bringing your street identity in there you're just you're just a human being trying to act as well as possible with dignity and respect for others you're good and it doesn't matter it doesn't matter if you suck at jujitsu right as long as you have that basic uh respect and hard work ethic and being freed from those things you're not responsible for and so and are not judged for it that is a huge liberation and it really makes people feel close to each other yeah so people need well and it's also do you think that a lot of what's going

22:10on today is just the fact that i don't think people are supposed to work in an office all day i think it's probably bad for your biology i think it's sitting in a chair all day is terrible for you i think staring at a computer all day is terrible for you all these things that people do or just counter to their contrary to what your your body was designed for and that must cause a lot of depression and anxiety in people uh yeah i mean if you if you want to know what we were evolved for you can look at um modern-day hunter-gatherers who more or less anthropologists agree represent our evolutionary past and you'll find that there's at least two hours of pretty vigorous movement every day you know fast walking basically two hours a day by virtually everyone in the community um you are almost never out of contact with uh i mean out of physical proximity with other people that you

23:06know extremely well um there's about four or five hours a day devoted to survival food gathering that kind of thing we work eight ten hours a day right the the most quote primitive hunter-gatherers in some of the harshest environments in the world spend around four hours a day surviving but it survival is a group endeavor it brings everyone together everyone's needed high protein low you know no processed foods obviously i mean the diet you know obviously it's a very pure diet um and people who live like that have extraordinarily good health um and if they survive you know childbirth in those first early years um often live into their into their 70s 80s to 90. i mean you know west basically live as long as westerners do with no medical intervention i mean it's pretty extraordinary that is extraordinary when you think about it i mean what we i saw an article and i didn't i didn't

24:01read the article but the headline was something along the lines of it was talked about artificial intelligence and it was uh whether or not the rise of artificial intelligence will uh will even out inequality and i remember looking at that and one and just boy that's like giving in to the hive mind like artificial intelligence is going to cure all the woes of the world like let the computer think for you and everything's going to be even and you know now that i'm thinking about it the two guys we were walking behind in san francisco it wasn't robots it was artificial intelligence they were talking about i mean obviously they're connected yeah and and uh but yeah it was it was ai and and um you know it's i mean it's either ai is either the final blossoming of the human mind or it's the end and i don't think anyone knows which it is it could easily be the end i've been

24:48thinking for the last few years that it's we're some sort of a electronic caterpillar that's giving birth to some new butterfly yeah and what we're doing is we're we're the biological thing that makes the electronic thing and that the electronic thing is going to go thanks we got it now and then i mean we we assume that the things that we hold dear like emotions and camaraderie and this feeling that we have of community that that's important but if we live and we die like it's important to us while we're alive but would if we didn't exist is it important in you know air quotes to the universe is it important to the planet not necessarily it's just important as a human my understanding of physics is that it was incalculably unlikely that the universe would exist and that life would start on this particular planet or on any planet it was extremely unlikely

25:43um that even the universe would exist yeah yeah yeah and um so it's hard to say that anything would be important right to a system that that uh statistically shouldn't have happened and that doesn't have a conscious and moral mind behind it like i mean no of course we're not important i mean if we were sitting on the moon and you watched a nuclear exchange between russia and the united states that obliterated civilization if you were sitting on the moon you'd barely be able to see it you would barely notice anything happened yeah right that's the moon and that's pretty close of course it doesn't matter yeah so keep in mind that all those emotions everything we are had survival value in our past or we that we wouldn't have those things right we're the legacy of an evolutionary process that went on for two million years so if we feel sadness if we feel anger

26:38if we feel shame all of those things had survived survival value for humans and and the individuals that had the capacity for those emotions made better citizens within their little community we're better hunters we're better whatever and so those emotions we find them meaningful but actually what they are is they they helped us survive and now we have so altered our circumstances that survival is no longer a question and so what do we do with those feelings what do we do with those capacities the ability to hunt the the dopamine that you get from hitting a target i mean teenage boys will sit in a basement for hours days years playing video games they're practice they're training for hunting right they're training for hunting in war and they're getting rewarded with dopamine which is exactly what should have been happening for 500 000 years and now there's nothing to hunt nothing

27:32to fight they're still doing the behavior as they should because they're wired for it but there's no useful purpose for it and they're making themselves irrelevant they're human casualties of this technology and it's i find it really tragic are they more irrelevant than someone who plays sports i mean i think our relevance comes from our um our relationship with our community and with society right and and i mean at least if you play sports you're part of you you're part of the human community and and when you're in you know when you're playing a video game by yourself you're really not by yourself but a lot of kids what they're doing now is they're playing these online games they're playing against other people they talk to each other online they have like headsets and they i mean esports is a big growing thing and it's uh i mean it's it's a fascinating thing because it's also

28:25sort of based on your ability to perform you know the the ones who are the heroes or the ones who are like um when i was playing quake there was this dude named fatality was his uh his name he just killed everybody he was awesome but it was you know he was the he was the king because he was just the best at the game so in the community of people that were only judged by their performance he had risen to this very high level but it was a community well you know if you look at humans you look at chimpanzees we clearly need the proximity of others like the physical proximity of others so i mean the only way i can evaluate that is to say that's an that's awesome training for hunting in war right and the military does use those games to train their soldiers and so i get it it's effective what i would do is look at suicide and depression rates in gamers and see are they above or below the

29:14national average for that age group and if they're above then there's a problem yeah either depressive people are seeking that as a refuge or that activity makes people withdrawn and depressed and you know like either way it's a problem that needs to be solved i have no idea what the data is but that's that's where i would look now when you're researching all this data and you're putting together a book like tribe and you're uh you're putting it out are you thinking to yourself that you have that it's not just an interesting study on human behavior but it's also probably important for people to read to kind of get an understanding and these uh to get an understanding of what it is that's causing people to have all this depression and anxiety that maybe this is this is something that needs to be said i mean any that's a categorical categorical statement i shouldn't make but a lot of

30:05authors when they write books it's their firm conviction that their book needs to be read by the public and that will help the public in some way right it will illuminate life illuminate america eliminate the world in some way that's important i mean that's just a starting point for the two years of work that a book takes right you have a child your assumption is the child is going to be a good person in the world not a terrible person wound up shooting up a church right it's just a starting basic assumption so for me when i was writing tribe i was trying to make sense of a number of different a number of different things i mean one was that what the soldier that i was with in afghanistan i was really struck some months later that a lot of them wanted to go back to this sort of flea bit and god forsaken outpost where they got shot at every day and didn't want to come home to the u.s

30:48it's like that needs explaining yeah right um and it made me think of this uncle that i had a sort of surrogate uncle named uh named ellis ellis settle he was a he was lakota sue and apache he was born in 1929 out west and he had a very rough interesting life and he was very well-read and i remember him telling me he was a sort of mentor figure for me i remember him telling me when i was in my 20s he said you know all throughout the history of the united states along the frontier this is how he put it he said white people were always running off to join the indians and the indians never ran off to join the white people and so here was this fact again like oh no one wants to go go back to or go to the sort of modern world and this wasn't even the modern world this is the modern world in 1865 right i mean right or 1755 or whatever i mean at the the the the

31:39um right at the time it was the modern world right right uh but so no one no it's basically the post-agricultural rel uh revolution world the industrial world the world of organized religion organized government of of uh an industrial economy and an agriculture-based system where people had jobs and you got up at dawn and plowed the fields all day and went to bed and your minister and your king told you what to do and you know whatever that's the modern world and that's what nobody wants to be part of including the soldiers i was with at restrepo right and so it just made me think maybe what the soldiers are missing isn't war although that certainly has its charms for some people but it's community it's that they were with each other community with consequences that's right exactly community with consequences likewise for the native americans for the tribal societies in north america

32:35maybe what the young young men and some young women along the frontier were looking for was an escape from the sort of oppressiveness of the congregation on sunday mornings the oppressiveness of the society that they were toiling in the regimented nature of an agrarian society maybe what they longed for was the closeness and freedom of a of a tribal society and and indeed i mean there was this incredible sort of hemorrhaging of people from the frontier to the to the tribes and some and even when people were kidnapped on raids by the indians kidnapped from their log homes along the frontier and abducted and forcibly adopted into these tribal societies when when given the chance to come home to be repatriated um some years later very often these people refused to go they didn't want to go back they wanted to stay with their adopted tribe their adopted community

33:34that that is that's amazing to me and it says a lot about what the way humans are wired to want to live yeah that's that was one of the craziest aspects of your book i'd never heard that before and how many people had done that were they they were kidnapped and then they said we like it here better yeah that's right and again we're talking about more than 100 years ago so that what we think of as modern society today has only escalated those anxieties and woes and all the things that separated them from the tribal world that's right and one of the things about tribes is that they're sort of inherently egalitarian it's very hard to pass on pass on wealth in a non-capitalist society and in a mobile nomadic society it's impossible to pass on wealth because you can't carry it i mean there's no way to carry wealth when uh when you're in a nomadic hunter-gatherer society so

34:28so they're very very egalitarian and they also guard against the sort of abuses of power sort of one alpha male trying to sort of like bully people and take more than his share um or for that matter people sort of freeloading and not contributing to the group survival effort and sort of scamming a little bit of food here a little bit of whatever there both of those sins against the community are really harshly punished so it's very egalitarian and egalitarianism is something we are all wired for right and i think one of the distresses of a modern capitalist society is that it can't be egalitarian um and and and that's that's painful for people but then if you introduce a crisis um the blitz in london for example an earthquake in in italy that i studied um what happens is that money doesn't matter anymore when the flood waters are rising when the bombs are falling social class

35:18doesn't matter at all it it's like being in the in the boxing gym how you conduct yourself with respect to the others around you is actually what gets evaluated and you know a poor man can be brave and generous just as easily as a rich man there's no advantage to being wealthy or powerful when it comes to those basic human uh uh qualities uh and that is a huge liberation and so i mean i live in new york city and after 9 11 there was a bit of that in new york city i mean you know there's a lot of poor people in new york a lot of rich people you know whatever obviously we all know that but after 9 11 no one was rich or poor or anything we were all new yorkers wondering if there was going to be another bomb dropped on us basically another attack on the city so what happened in new york the suicide rate went down the the violent crime rate went down vietnam vets in new york said who had

36:07people who suffered from ptsd said that their symptoms disappeared after 9 11. everyone was needed and people and everyone for a while everyone was equal because we were all facing some danger that terrified us and that for all of its tragedy that is an intoxicating social state to be in for human beings that's so bizarre it's so bizarre but it also so makes sense one of the things that i also thought was fascinating in your book we were talking about ptsd ptsd sufferers and how people in these veterans hospitals would be absolutely furious if they thought someone was faking their symptoms and that that they had to be physically restrained to keep from attacking people that they thought were just juking the system and how many people were on ptsd benefits yeah i mean the numbers are really elusive but um you know what i have sort of anecdotally from veterans as well as people within the

37:04the va administration who are you know acting as therapists or whatever uh group counselors is that there's certain number of people and i you know i don't know what the fraction is but there's a certain number of people who were not traumatized in war and ptsd is hard to prove or disprove and it's you know sort of obviously wide open for um either an unintentional misdiagnosis or an intentional uh misrepresentation whatever and so i mean of course any bureaucratic system gets scammed and ptsd benefits are no different and but it really is traumatizing i mean seriously angering and traumatizing to soldiers who really were traumatized because they really were in combat and keep in mind only about 10 of the us military experiences direct combat how would they know if someone was seriously traumatized and the other thing that's fascinating is that as you were talking about in

37:58these small societies freeloaders are looked down upon as are the the greedy alpha males who try to dominate the wealth like that in these societies like egalitarian ideas are much more much more openly expressed it's much more important that this is represented by these people that are legitimately suffering seeing someone scamming the system and angry whereas like say if you had a hurt knee or something like that and you were going to the doctor and you saw someone who was faking a back injury you wouldn't be upset right they were just robbing money from the insurance company and just getting free well yeah i mean because he doesn't have a sort of emotional cargo to it right but combat does i mean if you're in combat and you lost your best buddy and you got trauma from that as well you should um and then you're in some group therapy thing at the va with some guy who was on

38:51a rear base the whole time and is claiming 100 ptsd disability for something that never happened like yeah that would make you angry it would make me angry you know because combat is is extremely emotional and again i don't know is it one in a million one in a hundred one thousand i have no idea what the rates are i'm not even sure what the if the va does and there's there's you know in some ways incentivize not to find out but but it's i'm i can tell you from like the real deal combat vets that happens they smell it instantly and one way it gets sorted out is that those guys who are misrepresenting themselves get questioned by the combat vets oh so what uni were you with like he said what happened exactly oh a mortar hit the other side of the base that's a pretty big base i've been there you know i was a mile away and you're traumatized are you kidding like you know i mean they'll get

39:37questioned right right um so i mean like you might question someone who's bullshitting you about how much you know how much uh fighting he's done with the mma or i don't know whatever you know whatever your area of expertise is i'm sure you can smell a fraud instantly right yeah well everyone can that's one of the things that's one of the characteristics of humans is that because we live in collective societies where we have to sort of trust one another we're extremely good at smelling out misrepresentation and fraud we're really really good at it um and it's one of the things that feels intolerable is to have someone who was unfairly gain gaining from the hard work of the rest of us and right and and i should just say when i say egalitarianism i don't mean that there's no hierarchy right right i mean complicated systems need hierarchy need order right need heart i

40:24mean groups need hierarchies so that not everyone's a general not everyone's a private i mean you need organization within the group but um egalitarian means that nobody gets extra rights you know like we all have the basically the same rights in the group that's what that means well it i mean it all completely makes sense it particularly makes sense the idea that these people who were real combat vets who saw real action would be instantaneously able to discern whether or not someone was faking it yeah and this but that this it sort of mirrors what you're saying about these small tribes that in these small tribes someone who's a freeloader is uh extremely dangerous to the group like you're looked at as a liability you looked at as someone who just can't be trusted and you need trust yeah you need community and this is this is like what you're saying about

41:16uh combat troops that what they want to know is that you're going to be willing to put your own safety secondary to the safety of the troop right and and if everyone does that everyone's safer but if no one if some one person doesn't do that i mean that's always in the movies right it's always the one guy who runs away or the one guy who sells out or yeah that's right and you know those those human themes are enduring and very powerful so sometimes i speak to a lot of liberal audiences right and uh and so i i love doing this to them like and i'm a democrat so i sort of know those people pretty well right i grew up in massachusetts and i get it you know and so uh you know i'll say to them okay who here is against war and doesn't want to know anything have anything to do with war and of course everyone raises their hand right and um and then i say okay who here has paid money to go be

42:10entertained by a hollywood war movie and everyone raises their hand it seems like a contradiction but what then i go on to say to them is look if if if war can get a room full of pacifists to go pay money to watch it is there something important going on in that narrative yeah it's not you're not going to the movies to watch people get killed right you're not you guys aren't all sociopaths you're going to the movies to see these very ancient human concerns of who's loyal to the group who's a coward who's brave who's willing to risk their life for someone else i mean these are these are things that have kept humans alive or endangered them as the case may be for a million years of course they're compelling narratives and in war you see those things happen like in a sort of accelerated intense rate i mean that you know you grew up in a suburb you almost never

43:03see someone have to choose between their own safety and the community it never happens that's the problem with the suburbs in war that happens every moment every day right so so it gives you this sort of like human narrative in this incredibly compressed intense form which reconfirms the value the human values we all have about okay if you're in a group you you have to love that group even if you're if you dislike some of the people in it like that's what it means to be part of a group and that's what has kept humans alive for a very long time you even see that narrative in science fiction futuristic movies like the matrix right the one guy who sells out the the the other humans to the to the matrix and just says look i want you know i want to be in the matrix i want to have a great life and eat good food and yeah i mean listen once you once you are aware of this narrative you see it

43:51everywhere and i mean one part so some research that i did that didn't actually make it into the book i couldn't quite fit it in but i i i um interviewed someone who um had a consulting firm in hollywood that did basically sort of like market research for the big studios and they would they would screen films for audiences and then ask the audiences questions about the ending about the characters about how to construct the plot they were sort of trying to figure out what's the public want to see right so what they found was that in disaster films very typically um where a community was facing a a disaster right a plague or you know a flood or a war or whatever when you know when the community had to rally to survive right an alien invasion what there's a million scenarios but it's all the same basic story you have these different characters there's usually a a

44:45male figure that takes the lead to physically defend the space right there is often a female figure that's connected to him that sort of takes place of the of the community that's being defended take takes care of the dresses the wounds dresses the emotional wounds i mean takes care of all that stuff while the man or the men are sort of physically defending the place there's all and then there's a guy who often was really wealthy or well off before the catastrophe who's continuing to act in a self-serving way even during the catastrophe when everyone's needed and everybody gets mad at that guy well that guy always dies yeah always dies and then there's another character and again this is just very common in these narratives weasley beta male 1 yeah no exactly yeah exactly um no but that keep in mind that these narratives are formed by public opinion right this

45:44isn't the studios trying to make the public um force-feed the public like gender roles and you know whatever this is the public saying i like that i don't like that so the studios are responding to the questionnaires that these researchers give out so one of the really interesting things and this is totally inflammatory but the the role of the person defending like physically physically defending the community when they try to put a woman in that role people have a problem with it and and and frankly often women have a problem with it like it's really it's really really interesting and women are just as important as men in a crisis or in anything right but the what the public seems to want is the guy with the sword and the woman with the bandage you know or with the sort of reassuring you know like it gets divided like that and it's not again it's not the studios

46:36forcing something on people it's the people watching these films saying just voting on what they the narrative that they like best but the the other character that i thought was really hilarious there's often that there's an estranged husband who's betrayed his wife and family in some way he's on the outs right uh with his family and his with his wife and then the crisis happens the martians invade the flood waters rise whatever it is and he comes to the rescue and does the right thing and saves his wife and family and maybe even the wife's new boyfriend i mean he even could have gotten to that stage right and because he does the right thing she takes them back god it's funny man it's really just playing out these ancient archetypes that's exactly what it's doing i mean they i mean those story lines resonate because they're ancient and because those those roles in society helped us

47:27survive and there's always the woman who in absence of the strong male figure rises to the condition herself right i mean some of the research i did with tribe what i found i studied this coal mine disaster in canada so it was all men trapped uh two or two miles down in these collapsed passageways two miles down i mean two miles down a an angled uh shaft but two miles down yeah so they had an explosion some gases ignited and the passageways collapsed so they're two miles in their gas light their their their batteries last you know 24 hours their water lasts 48 hours pretty soon they're just sitting in darkness not knowing not only if they'll survive not knowing if their bodies will ever even be recovered they have no waveness sitting in darkness trying so whoa this is what happened i mean obviously a situation like that takes needs leadership so in the first minutes and hours

48:22there were these sort of alpha males that weren't necessarily crew bosses right they didn't they weren't within the higher traditional hierarchy they were just guys who grabbed a pickaxe and a shovel and said come on guys we're going to try to dig our way out and they basically i mean literally attacked the problem of these collapsed uh mine shafts there was too much rubble to dig through they were two miles down so and so they would they they dig dug and dug and dug and it required these these guys and again it was all men down there but there was one sort of leader was this very aggressive he didn't care how anyone else felt oh you're scared i don't give a grab a shovel we got to solve this problem like totally unempathic right when they realized they couldn't dig their way out and they ran out of batteries and they're sitting in darkness a new kind of leader was required

49:11and that was someone who was able to keep people's spirits up who was empathic who listened if a guy was really scared was able to say hey listen man it's going to be all right it's okay to be scared we're all scared you know that kind of voice it's a different kind of leadership now typically in society the male role would be the guy with the pickaxe attacking the problem the female role would be the person sort of like trying to keep the group emotionally together and and um and functioning and but what happens in a situation where there's all of one sex those gender roles will be filled no matter what it'll just be filled by people of the same sex so if it was all women down there someone woman would have grabbed the pickaxe and taken on what would be typically considered a quote male role but she's female right so the gender roles that society needs to survive in adversity

50:08in war in nature in a collapsed coal mine it needs both gender roles but either sex can fill those roles it's amazing and we will sort it out so it doesn't matter who's male and female what matters is that those two basic kinds of leadership and caretaking get taken care of wow so how did those guys get out they eventually i mean the rescuers eventually got to them how long were they down there for they're over a week i might even been two weeks i mean they they oh yeah oh eight days i can't remember actually it's something something like a week uh how did they survive i mean barely i mean you know they did i mean they ran out of water they were they were eating the bark off the timbers that you know the support structures they were um eating coal i mean eating cold they were trying to yeah they were drinking their own urine i mean you know yeah and the guys died i mean not everyone

50:59survived um one guy was trapped his arm was trapped between two collapsed timbers and they were you know it was a pretty lively conversation about he was begging them to cut his arm off so that he could at least be free and there was a pretty lively conversation with the other men in the group like did we do that or not right and they decided not to that if they all they had was an axe like we chop his arm off and free him he might die from that right we just and he was removed from where those guys were so he was lonely that was the thing he was lonely he was like cut my arm off i want to join you guys and they didn't any and he died whoa amazing yeah amazing it's intense yeah um and so you know i mean not to whatever to steal this conversation too much but you i mean that's a that's a microcosm some ways for america right i mean every country is potentially trapped in the coal mine

51:51trying to figure out how to survive we don't know i mean the day before 9 11 we didn't know 9 11 was coming right we don't know what's coming right and the only way for any group of people whether it's 330 million or you know 18 people as it was in that coal mine the only way for any group of people to survive is to act collectively right humans don't survive in nature by themselves and so in that coal mine both kinds of people were needed they happened to be all men but it didn't need to be whatever it doesn't matter gender doesn't matter i mean sex doesn't matter they needed both kinds of people they needed aggressive alphas that attacked the problem and didn't care how people felt and were interested in like strict law and order in the group you do this you do that you do what i say this is a survival you needed those kinds of people and you needed

52:40the other kind like hey we're going to be all right are you feeling okay yeah we're you know like that kind of collaborative empathic person you needed that also so when you look at the politics in this country you need both conservatism and liberalism right you you cannot i mean a completely conservative america will be well defended right no one's gonna mess with us right america first like no one will mess with us but what will let what will be left unaddressed is some of the internal dynamics of this country which is you know frankly not at the foremost of conservative thought i mean sort of racial disparity economic disparity and all that stuff like you know i mean that's not at the foremost of the conservative agenda and it shouldn't be it doesn't need to be it doesn't need to be because it's the forefront of the liberal agenda and god forbid you have a country that's

53:32completely run by liberals it'll get overrun immediately by the nearest armed neighbor right liberals just aren't wired that way to be suspicious of the world but what liberals do quite well is to try to figure out a sort of system of fairness within the group that gets that you know just tries to equalize things and get everyone to sort of participate and to be valued and taken care of like i mean that it's all lovely right i mean that's needed also and so the every country is at its best when you have both of those dynamics going on and they're in a kind of dynamic tension with each other but neither completely takes over one of the things that breaks my heart watching this country is there's this idea on both sides on the liberal side and on the conservative side that the other not only is totally wrong but it's totally immoral and shouldn't exist right it's just not true and this

54:23country is not going to find peace until both sides of that political equation sort of reach across and shake the other person's hand and say look i disagree with you on almost everything but i'm glad you're with us i need you and i need you because i don't think like you do i need you to think like you do and until this country figures out how to do that we're going to be in this sort of awful partisan strife that eventually will destroy us like bullets are not going to take down this country words will and they're going to be our words and it just breaks my heart to see this dynamic not only going on and on but getting worse and worse it does seem to be getting worse and worse and what seems to be new is the idea from the liberals to silence people on the right and to to think that free speech is important that what's important is their ideas and that their ideas are especially i think

55:12now that trump is president and i think people feel even more emboldened and locked up in this i mean listen i mean i think it's both i mean honestly i think it's equally both sides but but i agree with you i mean the problem with the right with the left for me and again i'm a democrat so i you know i love evaluating my own side's problems because they drive me they make me more upset than the right wings problems right because because they're my people right and i'm like come on could you like can you act a little better please see the irony though that you've chosen a tribe and the tribe of people that you don't even know and that these people are just it's a political tribe well i mean listen i i share those politic some of those political ideals and the conservative ideals i don't i don't share and but i would hate to live in a country that didn't have conservatives in it

55:57right even though i just i mean because i disagree with them right i don't want to be surrounded by people i agree with right and there are conservatives that do not want liberals in this country right shame on them sure right and likewise for liberals i may hear it on both sides so i think both sides try to silence the voices of the other side frankly i don't you know that's that's a sin i think that's committed equally on both sides but one thing i wanted to bring up because i actually made a mistake last time i was on your on your show i mentioned a book and i got the name wrong and it's such a good book and i wanted to i just saw on twitter the people trying to find it and they couldn't because i got the name wrong it's called our political our political nature it's by a guy named avi tushman and he collected an awful lot of data about the fact that political opinion is about fifty

56:44percent determined by genetics in other words you inherit about half of your political opinion whoa and the other half is acquired through experience through exposure so if you grew up in a liberal family you know you probably you're you're about 50 likely to wind up being a liberal because you absorb that way of seeing the world if and i'm a democrat have i had i grown up in a conservative family i think i'd be a conservative and i actually think having read this book i think i'm actually a genetic conservative that adopted liberal values because of my environment and i think there's a lot of people who are genetic liberals who have adopted conservative values i mean it it's about 50 50 but the point is so it's avi tushman our political nature that's the name of the book i got it wrong i just wanted to correct that but the point of this to me is that and he knows this i mean

57:36scientists know this because when they look at um identical twins that share almost all of their dna identical twins later in life are far more likely to have the same of political opinion than fraternal twins which don't share all their dna you understand what i'm saying yeah yeah so that's how they know this when they look at identical twins there's a much higher concordance of a political opinion later in life than for fraternal twins that's how they know that it's around 50 of your political view is determined by genetics if it's determined by genetics that means it had survival value that means that liberalism and conservatism both had survival value in our evolutionary past and is and as a result has become become encoded in our dna like other behaviors like generosity other character traits like generosity courage things like that those are all encoded in our gna because they had

58:27survival value well likewise conservatism and liberalism which means that in the argument the discussion in this country about politics you can disagree with people go for it democracy comes out of disagreement and compromise is great but what you cannot do is point your finger across the aisle and say not only are you wrong but you shouldn't exist like go away disappear you're not part of what america is it's that assertion is completely contradictory to evolution and if and if it's contradicted your evolution it won't work well it seems to me that people have a really difficult time managing conflict even managing verbal conflict that when someone disagrees with them they want to silence that person they want to yell at that person they want to scream and they they think about their own thoughts rather than putting themselves in the position of the other person or

59:15objectively recognizing that there is an important uh factor that both it's it's important to have both sides it's important to even be challenged on your ideas so you can solidify what what's the root cause of your ideas what is where where they're coming from what what how how much have you examined these ideas are you just married to them because they were given to you are these uh things you've adopted or are these really well considered thoughts that you've put through the mill right i mean the thing is there are rules to contests right i mean there are rules in mma right there are rules in boxing there were rules in marriages right i mean if you would never stay in a marriage where your spouse treated you the way the political parties treat each other right now you never stay right i mean this incredibly contemptuous mocking disparaging tone that both sides have like you you're

60:10like i'm out of here you know my wife clearly just thinks like i'm a complete dirtbag or no one talked you know you don't talk to someone like that that you have any respect for right i'm out of here i think no one would stay in a marriage like that and what's happened and this is new right this we didn't grow up with this like this is a new thing where the political parties talk to each other i mean disagreement is great right come from you know eventually you compromise and you figure something out where nobody's happy but that you know the machine goes on right that the ship sails on what's new now is this contempt and it's toxic in marriage and it's toxic in a country too and this is a new thing and i th and i think um if you really if you really take in the reality that this truth that half of our political opinions are genetically wired you got to get rid of the contempt you

61:00know yeah i mean it's part of what we are i don't think most people are aware of that no they're not right that's why i'm talking about it i mean you know um and congress plays on this right it's a great campaign strategy to like say things that are um hateful things about the other side and consolidates your base and if you consult and both sides do this right and if you consolidate your base then you're more likely to win the election you have a you're in a more solid political position so they can and we know but behavior behavioral psychologists will tell you that one way to make a group cohere make it close ranks and strengthen its group commitment to itself one way to do that is to introduce an enemy and when there's no enemy groups naturally disperse because people just go off to do their individual thing of course you know you have the freedom to do that

61:48there's no threat anywhere introduce a threat boom everyone's in a group so what politicians do is they they create a threat where there is none you know they say that other political party they're actually trying to destroy democracy they're not part of the democracy they're actually trying to destroy it they're trying to destroy this country um the same thing happened at the beginning of the spanish civil war my father grew up in spain and i studied the spanish civil war quite a lot the democratic reforms that were that were coming in the 30s you know just land redistribution things like you know with the vote for women you know you know pretty normal things but they were a threat to the the power structure in spain and the military and the um sort of far right in spain the fascists basically said that those democratic reforms where people were trying to destroy spain

62:34so you create an enemy that consolidates your power and you go on to win the election it's great campaign strategy it's just terrible for the nation you know this lock her up lock her up when when uh trump was running that was the big thing right the enemy this was the enemy that was hillary clinton she represented the evil democrats who just had been stealing and robbing and right and i you know i listen i totally understand being in disagreement with democrats right but it's a different matter to say that they're actually antithetical the democrats are antithetical to free democratic ideals but just seems to me to there's not a good party right now the republicans are a mess the democrats are a mess there's not right no they both suck yeah and and so reform them right i mean or created yeah isn't there also an issue with just having two sides right having the yankees versus the red

63:26sox every year in the world series well those two sides do represent the sort of the genetic strains in our liberal and conservatives yeah i mean that it's gonna it's gonna break down one way or another in that direction right and so i mean it is sort of a binary i mean our brains are sort of binary in that way i mean as humans surviving in the wild you have to defend your group and you need fairness within the group those are the two things you have to do to survive and remain a group right right and and so those tasks have been sort of like subcontracted out to conservatives into liberals and it's been that way for a very long time and you can even see some of those same behaviors like in search in chimpanzee society right so this is very very ancient behavior so i like it or not i think you have two groups but that doesn't mean that two groups have to

64:14act so abysmally with each other and and i really think that if you want to save the if you want to sort of save this country morally politically nationally maybe um you really you know really what you need is a bipartisan committee in congress that calls people out and calls them out for doing and saying things that undermine our sense of unity as a nation so when democrats say he's not my president that undermines the understanding of what democracy is he's your president like he got voted in man like that's what happens in the democracy is the guy you didn't vote for ends up being your president that's what a democracy is so just deal with it right i hate that i hate that i'm a democrat i didn't vote for him but i hate when people say that and likewise when donald trump said when citizen trump was accusing barack obama and i understand not liking obama i don't

65:10really care if you don't like him or don't like him but when citizen trump accused barack obama of not being a citizen and the gop didn't repudiate that i mean think about it citizen trump was telling every veteran and soldier fighting overseas that their commander-in-chief was an imposter was a fraud was not an american citizen and has usurped the white house right that's a terribly destructive thing to tell men and women in uniform or in a trench getting shot at right and the gop like the dnc with this stupid he's not my president thing the dnc is not rejecting that idea they let people say it they don't denounce it right the gop never repudiated that stupid idea that trump came along with and for the good of the nation they both had to right and this isn't a free speech issue right everyone has the right legal right to make a fool of themselves go for it but that doesn't mean the two

66:06political parties have to stay silent in the face of things that are completely toxic to our democracy and they really should have spoken out and i think some kind of bipartisan commission in congress that would call out those out the worst outrages and call on the political parties to denounce them that that would be enormously positive thing in this country i agree with you but i think it would take a truly exceptional person to look at the other side's faults and and not capitalize on it you know and and especially even if it's a false thing like the obama thing with uh with trump or any any number of things you could find in that regard but it seems to me like this is like the perfect time if there was ever going to be a time where a third party would some sort of centrist type party would come around this would be the perfect time where people are so and we

66:55also i think people recognize that what we're seeing on the right and the left in regards to hillary clinton or donald trump is you're seeing people that are pretending to be this thing right with donald trump he's a lifelong democrat yeah and then all of a sudden he's a republican he's talking about god and and i mean this is it's like it's a show it's a little dog and pony show on the right and on the left you got this woman who was a part of the the clinton foundation there was essentially it was a pay-to-play scheme they were making millions of dollars and hundreds of thousand dollars for speeches that they would give to banks and this is not some sort of a a real liberal this is not that the the ideas that you were embracing about liberal values i mean no i mean the two parties basically have become sort of cartels to keep themselves in power yes so that's a great way to put it

67:41right and yes and um and you know hillary was absolutely part of that on the on the on the left and you know it uh all of its antithetical to the highest ideals of the framers of the constitution and the people that established this country and i and and i mean i hear you about the centrist party that would be great but there's you know i mean the way the power structure works the way the cartels work is they got all they have access to all the funds right all the money right where you where do you where do you get the money for something like that yeah you need to build something from from scratch and get up to speed and turn in time to win an election that's very very hard to do but at the very least i mean a centrist party could fall prey to that kind of toxic rhetoric as well i mean but i feel like there should be norms where freedom of speech is an absolute i mean we we get it

68:29but that the parties don't they have a moral obligation to denounce things that they know undermine the unity of this country i don't mean people in disagreement with one another i mean a basic level of respect for the other person's personhood for their citizenship for their right to participate in the democratic process and when someone accuses the president of not being a citizen of the u.s they're basically saying i don't respect this system uh like i i i think the entire system is a lie and and and i don't even think donald trump thought it was true i think it was a tactic and and that the gop never called that out it was really shameful you don't think he thought it was true that that obama was actually born in kenya because i think he did because i know that he's really good friends with alex jones and talks to him all the time i think he believes

69:18a lot of very wacky conspiracies you know i think he starts out believing that but by the end i mean does he i mean did he did he he did it for seven years so many people did believe it though i know but he but the thing is he was doing something that worked he's a pragmatist one of the things i really like about him in a way i mean i hate i find him sort of amoral in the way that gives me the chills but he's also a pragmatist right so i think he's completely capable of advocating a position that he doesn't believe in but i don't think he needs to believe it he's like enough people believe in this that this is working for me what was the benefit for him even chasing that idea down i mean he wasn't running for president back then do you think he was considering it i think he's been i think he was considering it for a long time so he was doing it to sort of

70:01deteriorate the democratic party yeah and yeah and to see see if this you know there's immigration stuff also man i mean maybe he believes in that stuff maybe he doesn't but it doesn't it doesn't matter what he figured out very astutely is he identified a democrat demographic that feels like the country's getting overrun by immigrants right and you know statistics don't really bear that out but people feel that way and people feel that way they vote that way and he figured that out right and so i mean more power to him right like i mean i i'm not questioning his um i mean it worked for him right but the only thing that i would say is like please don't say anything that um undermines the nation's sense of unity right you know that's the crucial thing that's the thing that's keeping us safe in the world is that we're a unified country yeah and when you disparage the courts for example

70:51you're splitting the country apart and the intelligence agencies don't do it right like you're drilling holes in your own boat man are you astonished that all that works that he can do that that he can disparage the intelligence communities that he could disparage the courts and that no one calls him out no one says this is outrageous this is stupid especially knowing all of his campaign's ties to russia that are coming out now even more so well listen i mean some process is happening that will eventually catch up with him like i mean i i mean i i don't know how it's going to turn out am i surprised yes of course i'm surprised i'm also surprised that the the the democrats that you know within my lifetime went from being a party that was deeply concerned with the poor with the working poor uh with people with with people working in factories you know what i mean

71:40i mean those are at least the highest ideals right in my lifetime they went to they became a completely elitist organization they didn't give a about those people right so like that surprises me too right so along comes bernie sanders who whatever you know whatever his issues he's at least sincere you know you know what i mean at least you trust the guy like that guy is speaking his mind like and the thing about donald trump he's speaking his mind like he's not trying to he's not doesn't have these awful poll tested opinions like hillary did and jeb did and all those guys like he's like no no this is how what i think i don't care how people you know how people react on this is as martin luther said here i stand for i can do no other a lot of places that trump stands i don't agree with but i actually i'm actually impressed by his ability to say something no matter what the

72:25repercussions this is kind of cool well it is definitely a first yeah you know i mean yeah he's i mean at the debate when he was talking to hillary clinton and i forget what exactly what she said you know uh and he said because you'd be in jail and the whole place went crazy like who the has ever done that dude no presidential debate it's amazing and it worked and i you know like my hat's kind of off to him although i disagree with him on almost every political point that he says he holds but i but i gotta say like like it worked and he i wrote an essay and i was talking about different kinds of courage and you know there's sort of physical courage right and and i mean literally you know being courageous in the face of harm to your body and i feel like trump is you know he's a bit of a bully and i think that to me bullies and cowards are sort of the same thing right

73:11they're just two different sides of the same character trade i said but that's not all trump is he's actually morally he's actually very courageous like he's not a moral coward he will say exactly what he thinks no matter what he the opinion is going to be he has extreme confidence in who he is or he doesn't give a i mean that's moral courage like this is what i believe and i'm going to say it i don't care if i don't win i don't care if i go to jail here i stand for i can do no other it's a part of his elitist mentality because he does believe that he's above right a lot of the repercussions for saying these things but a lot of people who are elitists are cowards and the thing and i disagree with trump on just about all of his policies right but the thing i do kind of have to tip my hat to is that he's not a moral coward he would he will say thing that every political pundit in

73:58the world will say no that's going to get that's going to destroy you you're going to attack john mccain and you're going to hope to win the republican nomination and you're crazy right no right and he did it and it worked not just that but he attacked him for being captured i know it's it's amazing and i think trump truly feels that way and i don't agree with them but i do respect the fact that he said it in the face of all political advice he didn't give a he said it because he believed it that's moral courage i just disagree with his opinions but i that moral courage very few people have it and he has it and i just i wish he used it to unify the country and he's still splitting the country and i don't think he has any desire to unify the country i know it's very self-serving i i agree and i you know i don't think hillary did either you know and none you know what i mean and that's the

74:45problem with our parties right now is that they're serving themselves before they serve the country well i think it speaks to what you're talking about in your book that no one is looking at this like a real tribe this is a enormous tribe of 350 million people but there's no one person that's standing out as a real leader and at least what obama was i mean whether you agree with his policies and there's a lot that i don't agree with it's particularly in where the way he flip-flopped about whistleblowers and freedom of the press those things disturbed me greatly because i know how intelligent he is i know he's a lawyer he was a statesman though i mean he really came across as a guy who you go oh well that that guy should be the president he sounds like the president he's he's he has a fantastic vocabulary he speaks clearly he he's very he's a highly honed human being that's right

75:39that's right no i no i agree and i you know there are things i didn't like whatever that about him but but absolutely as a person i mean he brought a huge i thought he brought a huge sort of gravitas and dignity to the office dignity yes definitely without a doubt you mean he's probably one of the best ever at that but i think that what we need now um is someone who genuinely wants to help the country be unified and someone who genuinely wants to help the country not help their party not not help themselves not just think well hey when this is all done i'm going to make a million dollars a year doing speaking fees or whatever however much right they make when they do that well yeah and you're gonna i mean we need i mean we need that to stay to remain a country yeah right i mean like i mean it really is headed towards a bad place i think and um so i that person is going to have to

76:36overcome the sort of the reflexive reaction of the left wing you know he's not my president like and the reflexive reaction of the right wing the right wing hated obama in ways that were completely out of proportion to obama's actual policies right and you know when mitch mcconnell said you know the republicans job in congress their foremost job is to make sure that barack obama is a complete failure as a president like that's not serving the country not at all right so so you need a leader who's actually able to overcome that toxic thinking in both parties right right i mean who like is jesus coming back like like who's gonna do this right who is gonna do this but i think the start is a bipartisan commission that starts to call people out right so you have republicans calling republicans out because they're on this commission you have democrats calling democrats out you need it

77:30you got the free speech to make a fool of yourself go for it but you're not going to undermine this country without being called out by this commission and um and i was talking with someone in government pretty high up about this and i said you know i said my thing you know bullets aren't going to destroy this country al qaeda is never going to destroy this country um but our own words will can destroy our democracy like that actually could do it if we play this hand wrong and i said that makes partisan rhetoric actually a matter of national security and when you can think about as a think about it as a national security concern then you actually have a sort of political and legal basis for forming a commission that addresses it and i really truly think that should happen and and if it doesn't hopefully something else will happen that works but it's the only thing i can think of

78:20that will begin to address that that can they can rise up above the partisan interests of both parties because those the parties clearly don't seem capable of doing it on their own now when you write a book like try when you outline all these issues that people have and all these issues historically that people have had do you try to consider a solution i mean do you do you have a solution are you just examining all the various problems that we have so i mean tribe was me trying to make sense of sort of what ails us right starting with you know people hemorrhaging off the frontier to the american indians like and on up to the soldiers i was with mass shootings you know what something's something's not working for us right so it was foremost an analysis um and towards the end um i talked a little bit about solutions and one of the solutions i talked about

79:16was making a concerted effort to get rid of contemptuous partisan rhetoric and government and i really felt that like that trickles down and pollutes you know it pollutes the water stream down like downstream it blows everything so that everyone all us citizens are drinking toxic water um from from that rhetoric and wondering if the unity can survive like will this will the center hold um you know you hear your parents screaming at each other in the bedroom and saying unforgivable things to each other as a child you might rightly think wow this marriage isn't lasting this family's not lasting that's how it feels to be a citizen of the united states right now like mom and dad are screaming at each other and so i talked about contempt disagree if you want don't speak with contempt about someone you share a combat outpost with and that's what this country potentially

80:07is don't you think also with the mom and dad analogy that it it also shows you how to behave in your own life and i think that's one of the things that's really important about the president is the president does sort of represent the best example of what we can be when we were kids growing up that was the thing like you ask a kid what they want to be if someone said i want to be president we're like holy you're really going for it kid you want to be the biggest job that's the number one position so you're supposed to be the best person ever which is why we hold someone to such an incredible microscope which is almost even more impressive that trump won after that grab the uh audio recording and then he could just brush that off that's locker room talk yeah that's right in a way he's kind of right i mean it really is kind of up that they did try to use that on him and pull

80:52it out the last minute but it does give you also an understanding of how he thinks and behaves when no one's around right i mean you know my problem with him um was that i like if i look at the worst of his behavior um i mean people send society sends people to jail for the worst thing that they did so it is actually legitimate to judge people's worst behavior sure and evaluate them on that basis so if i look at the work look at the worst of his behavior even if i was a die-hard republican who who adhered to all of the things he says he believes in if i looked at the worst of his behavior mocking a gold star family like mocking a disabled person that wasn't real though you know that mocking a disabled person was sort of trumped up he does i hate to use that word he does that whenever he's talking about anyone like he's like when he acts flustered like oh what are you going to do here

81:46like that they tried to say that he was mocking a reporter that it was disabled but it's pretty clear that that's not right right well i mean maybe so but with a dis with a question from someone who's visibly disabled maybe you just don't do that right you know what i mean like if you think that's a speech pattern it does though well maybe maybe i'm giving him more of the benefit of the doubt than i should if it was the only example then i wouldn't be thinking about it but there is a sort of pattern that that that um model from mexico who gained some weight that he was mocking i mean like the mockery of less powerful people is sort of endless and right so to me i wouldn't i wouldn't have that person at my dinner table right you know what i mean like i just with my close friends like someone who was acting like that he started acting like i started doing that at my dinner table i'd walk

82:34around i'd get up i'd walk around the table right put him in a headlock and i drag him out of my house right right i don't want to think that about my president right i want my president to be someone i'd be like glad to have at my dinner table i would have i didn't vote for george bush but i'd love to have that guy at my dinner table ronald reagan did it you know what i mean like he's the first president i mean like no man i don't want to subject my my friends to that you ever read woody arrow uh woody harrelson's account of uh dinner that he had with trump no he said literally he had to get up in the middle and go outside and smoke a joint just to just relax himself yeah i was talking about it i think he said early 2000 he had a dinner with trump and he said he never met someone so narcissistic so self-obsessed yeah and you know the you know my worry

83:17like in this conversation is that it will somehow seem partisan and like i would be saying the same things if trump were a democrat well you said something about george bush that you would be happy to have him over i just think i hope that what comes out of this is that a hero will rise and that someone will someone who's really a legitimately good person will say look this is a this is a travesty like some someone who actually could assume the role correctly will step into place and it will see that very clearly in comparison right well what i mean to get back to your question one of the solutions that i talk about it's not in my book but when i talk about this is national compulsory national service with a with a military option and your question was how do we make this nation feel like a nation right right and the problem psychologists will tell you that the more you sacrifice for

84:08something the more you value it right and if if you're part of something that doesn't require any sacrifice at all you just don't value it very highly right the advantage of national service it and i don't mean the draft i think i don't mean military service i mean national service with the military option i don't think it's moral to force someone to fight a war that they don't believe in what sort of service would you you know whatever whatever it is the nation needs a lot of stuff done right and and whatever that may be but the point of it is so if you had a military option but otherwise you could teach in schools otherwise you could dig ditches i don't whatever the nation needs done this work this core of workers at 22 23 years old does it for a year my first wife was from from the eastern from eastern europe and the young people formed work brigades in the summer

84:58and and helped harvest like harvest wheat and stuff like that was what she did when she was a teenage girl and it was incredibly good for the kids over there and it made them feel like they're part of something right and so what what i would say there's a downside to national service which is the government's telling people what to do of course there's also an upside which is it makes everyone feel like they're part of this thing called the united states and it puts white people and black people everyone puts them all into a big pot and stirs them up just like the military does and they get to know each other and so everything's there's an upside and a downside to everything right so national service has a very obvious downside but the upside isn't discussed much which is that it creates an american identity a shared experience that all americans have

85:47that they like in israel this compulsory service and that is a common ground that every single israeli has whatever wherever they fall in the political spectrum they all have that shared experience and it's an enormously potent thing in that country keeping it bound together and this country i think needs something like that i think would be very very helpful well it would be nice if people did have some i mean if you if you some sort of connection to what it takes to keep things running whether it's help fix the streets whether it's you know help do something but the the problem that i would have it probably i would have with it is the idea that someone from the government would be able to require you to do something and that if you didn't do it they could treat you the same way the irs treats you if you don't pay your taxes they just lock you in a cage

86:35which is well i mean one made it one way to do it might be to incentivize it by and so instead of making it mandatory incentivizing it by giving people really large tax breaks for doing it yeah but young people aren't going to think about tax breaks they're going to think about that man i want to skateboard all right i don't want to go all right then they have to i mean listen i mean listen for most of this nation's history we've had a draft that's the government telling people what to do right and likewise with taxes you don't pay your taxes you go to jail like i mean the government does you know the government puts red lights at intersections and you have to stop i agree but to try to do that today would be extremely difficult the distrust of the government is so high and if the government comes along and says you have to do all these things and then

87:15we go wait a minute are you doing these things are you going to join the military you're 55 years old your senator are you going to go pick wheat or fix the roads it definitely has to start i mean you can't you're not going to get 60 year olds in in national service right they're already involved in their lives the great thing about 18 19 20 year olds 22 year olds is their their lives haven't really started yet i mean that's why it works in israel yeah so are people going to objective of course they are but the question is how do we unify this country the the truth is like if we wanted to unify communities you'd ban the car right right people can you know they they're living they're spending their whole lives within walking distance of their home that will that will unify communities we're just not willing to do that what will unify the country is national

87:59service we may not be willing to do it but that's a different conversation from would it work or not my opinion is is that it would help it's a good opinion i mean i i definitely see merit in it i definitely think that would be something that would be a fascinating debate to have back and forth i just wonder if people at any point in their lives today would be willing to give up freedom for the government i think people are used to this kind of like free ride i pay my taxes and that's all you got from me i don't have to vote i don't have to do anything you know in australia you have to vote and if you don't vote you get fined well that you know that's what you said it right there that's the misconception it's not for the government it's for your neighbor it's for your fellow citizens everything you you pay your taxes not for the government you pay your taxes for the country but

88:45you pay them to the government you pay them to the government there's no auditing of your taxes and i think that's one of the things that freaks people out today like you don't know where that money's going they don't have to tell you and if you don't give it to them they'll lock you up right and that's the problem with the large-scale society is that collective effort it's not clear that that collective effort is going to the whole entity it looks like it's going to the tax man right it's not i mean that's an illusion right but i mean the check is to the irs the irs hands it over to the government that then spends it on the country i mean that's the reality but it looks like the irs is oppressing you yeah but that's actually not what's happening right the irs is an arm of government that you elected in right and it's been charged with getting getting money from people like that's just

89:30the irs isn't doing anything i mean it's like it's like tsa i was standing in line at tsa and someone was complaining about how long it was taking and and and the guy next to her they didn't even know each other and the guy next to her he said look they're not doing it for them they're doing it for us right they're searching all our stuff they don't care right they're not on the damn plane they're searching our stuff for us likewise with the government the government isn't doing it for itself it's doing it for us right we like to think of it as one entity right we like to think of the irs as the government right you know they're collecting the money we almost think of it as them spending the money as well right we don't think of it as them as distributing it to the rest of the government that's right yeah that's right so if you want to gin up a sort of like

90:16anti-government screed like it's easy to play on that misperception because it's an easy misperception right to have i mean you get a 200 parking ticket in new york and it definitely feels like the parking bureau is like is is vengeful is you know what i mean has targeted you personally is going to take your 200 and spend it on itself that's what it feels like right the truth is that that 200 paves the fills in the potholes that you're going to be driving across next year yeah that's the truth of it right you know we're talking about solutions for the woes of society and the end particularly the individual you have sort of found your own solution in journalism and in embedded journalism in these very dangerous environments that this is how you have sort of reinforced your tribe and you talk about that in the book about how you know how well you slept in this

91:05very tight confines in these bases with all these like very loud snoring men but but the fact that you guys were all together in this very hostile environment that was your solution well i mean it wasn't a solution in this in a sense i mean it wasn't a long-term solution right but it did give me this experience of sort of um a sort of shared uh a shared fate right i mean sorry collective effort right i was part of this group um and my my my welfare was tied to the welfare of the group my actions could help or hinder the group i was judged by how i behaved in the group right and that's that's our evolutionary past and it felt great right yeah and um so you know the trick is we you know we live in a dispersed modern society where that's just not going to be the 24 hour a day reality for most people throughout their lives but it may not need to be you may just need a little bit of it

92:06you know maybe you get a little bit of that sort of collective um that collective norm at the boxing gym you know maybe you get it in the military you know maybe you get it hunting you know whatever like there are ways to experience it and maybe you just you know maybe you get it at church you know i mean i'm not religious but i i understand church to be a profoundly communal activity and so i'm not saying burn down the suburbs and ban the car although that would work pretty well um maybe for your own personal sense of sort of meaning and fulfillment in life finally find that collective experience in little bits and pieces and the little goes a long way yeah and doing something doing something difficult i think is also very important absolutely i mean getting together shoe pool with your buddies every thursday night that's great but it's not quite what we're talking about yeah

92:57yeah difficult things and things that test you physically and mentally for some reason there'll seem to be a requirement for people and when people don't don't fulfill that requirement it seems to me that those are the people that are most unhappy yeah i mean the state there have to be stakes involved yes there are no stakes to pool right to golf right they're pleasurable gambling right right but that yeah but that's not a collective you know what i mean that's not a collective state right and um they're pleasant activities but what you know what what reproduces our evolutionary past is being in a small group where the stakes are um but the stakes are serious if not life and death but even even if it's not life and death at least they're real physical consequences and that collective action makes you mo makes the group more able to navigate those adversities successfully

93:48and when you do that um it is it's an intoxicating feeling it's what we're wired for um it's what we're missing in our sort of like modern lives and you you don't need you don't need a huge amount of it to feel better another thing that seems to make people feel very fulfilled is creating things working with their hands creating anything whether it's furniture art just making something doing something where your mind is involved in an actual task of bringing forth something into existence that didn't exist before well think about it i mean again in terms of evolution if doing something successfully produces a chemical reaction that feels good a little bit of dopamine or in terms of communal connection a little bit of oxytocin the the the trained monkey that we are will continue doing that good thing so so basically the tasks that helped with survival get rewarded

94:46with neurochemicals that feel good yeah and the things that are dangerous to us uh and and lessen our chance for survival don't feel good so being isolated being alienated from your group being an outcast feels bad and your survival chances go down right right you don't want to stay in that place you want to join the group again and so there's these neurochemical reward incentives and punishments to get to herd people towards behaviors that help survival build doing things accomplishing things building things that all feels good it's clearly what we needed to do in our evolutionary past and is reinforced and and creativity factors onto that how that like say like art like painting or something like that like there's something deeply satisfying to people that are painters well yeah and what they're i mean art um they know from the from the incredible paintings

95:43on the caves and in the caves in france and spain let's go and the other caves um that art is one of the things that's used to bind communities together in ceremonies i mean you can see in church i mean there's no there is no church in the land that doesn't have art on the walls right right um the depictions of christ or whatever or what one of the visual aids that helps bind people into a group like oh we all believe in the same thing right so art is a great binding force music is an incredible binding force so rhythmic like rhythm a heavy drumming rhythm will get a whole group of people sort of moving in unison um and jonathan hate has talked about i talked about that sort of hive behavior and how it works and very very powerful so what i would say and i'm just guessing here but i would say is that the arts that are so intoxicating to be engaged in their survival value is that it makes

96:36the group cohere around a unified idea and the music does that um the visual arts do that um the spoken word poetry song all those do that as well and so that's you have a group of people that are that are unified on these all all these different levels so what happens when the enemy comes i mean the music starts the sort of like visual pageantry starts like and you get you know like the you know the wartime posters showing heroic soldiers with rifle and bayonet right you get the art the war art right you get the marshall music all of that galvanizes the public spirit to face the enemy and it works extremely well wow so you think that that's one of the reasons why art is so satisfying i mean i just assume that our evolution has produced that anything that feels good to us had survival value in our past so if creating art feels good that's because we are genetically

97:31predisposed towards doing things that bind the group together generosity feels good right if you walk down the street and you give someone five dollars you're just a random dude you just give him five bucks and you measure the the neural chemicals in his brain and your brain you get more of a high than he does right so generosity feels good it's clearly adaptive and helps groups cohere right yeah and art as well so that art like when you create something amazing what you're realizing is that someone's going to see that and go wow that's incredible like they're going to get a great feeling off of seeing your art yeah you have the same vision right like oh i painted that tree and this other person or that antelope or that bison or whatever you find in the walls of lasko and this other person comes like oh my god that's an incredible bison there's no like you did something that the other

98:19person connected to now you the two of you are joined in your understanding of what that painting means right and that's a very powerful thing so if you drew that bison and no one else in the world ever saw it i'm guessing that the chemical rewards for that creativity would be less will be lower yeah i you know i noticed that in my children my kids love to draw and one of the things that they love is showing their drawings i mean they love to draw but like not yet not yet not yet and then when they're done like look that's right and then they're just like boom they did they're getting that little rush themselves and you get the rush and i mean look i mean just do it it's easy to test like take a musician measure their neurochemicals while they're practicing in a room by themselves and then put them in a in a stadium filled with 10 000 people and see what happens right

99:07i'm guessing that the guy yeah in the stadium with bruce springsteen in front of 10 000 people is experiencing a neurochemical reality that he's not getting in his living room not only that probably a neurochemical reality that very few human beings will ever experience that's right some sort of a strange but think about the power of that i mean you know any musician on space on stage is basically acting sort of in the role of the shaman yeah right like i'm going to act i'm going to act as a um conduit between you all and the divine right and my music is going to do it my words are going to do it my dancing is going to whatever it is but i'm the conduit right i don't matter i'm connecting you with with a divine feeling and that feeling is going to unify all of you and i'm going to play these chords i'm going to sing this song and like magic you all are going to be

99:54tapping your feet in unison yeah like how do you get 10 000 people do the same thing at the same time you sing them a song it's the only way to do it that's an incredibly powerful thing and that's the i mean that's the power of the shaman i mean bruce springsteen isn't a shaman literally but he occupies that space in a modern secular secular society doesn't have shamans but but in the old days that's what he would be do you feel that way when you put a book out like when you put the book out when you know it's done you read it it's done and you send it out there do what kind of weird feeling that you get or that's all these people are going to read it's an interesting thing about a book because you actually never observe in real time people's reaction to it right i mean i'm not perched in someone's arm chair watching them read in bed you know what i mean like they're not

100:38the general public what about like reviews yeah but it's also very it's very distant but when i started making documentaries for the first time i had the experience at the experiencing of watching other people's experience when i'd done right i'm not watching the audience i'm in the audience and i'm watching people react to restrepo yes i never got to see people react to the books i've read because i'm not in their damn bedroom right right but i am in the movie theater i'm watching people react to the things that the films i made and i wouldn't say well it's apple's oranges i don't know which is one better ones but you know whatever but it's a very different experience and it's incredibly powerful which do you like one better i mean movies just can't they don't have enough bits of information right i mean a book you can really communicate information right very sophisticated ideas um and

101:33they're permanent right there they are on the person's bookshelf and the person can underline that paragraph and go back to it you know you've actually affected the sort of communal thinking you've affected the way people understand the world a film is an experience more than it is a sort of data dump and um or a philosophical argument and that experience is very very powerful it acts on a different part of the brain than a book does um it's much more emotional um i mean i've you know i've i've choked up i've teared up uh watching my own films because they're personal to me you know i've never done that reading my own book rereading a book that i've written so it's a different experience and i would and i would say there's just different parts of the human mind like you need you sort of need both so no a long answer i don't have a preference i feel like i

102:20i need both now this documentary on syria yeah um when is this available well it we make it's called hell on earth um our website is hellonearth.com it's um how'd you get that it seems like that would have already been taken right different websites that are available yeah it's true i haven't even thought about that i didn't i wasn't in charge of getting it but it's funny it's a wizard that's right you might have to pay for that one so it's called hell on earth it's about the syrian civil war um we made it for national geographic i made it with nick cuesta my partner and all the films that i've made um and it brought it broadcast last june it's gonna you know net geo rebroadcast everything that they do obviously you can also go to their website and stream it it's about to stream it today yeah absolutely it's about the syrian civil war how it started um and and particularly how isis why

103:11isis rose up out of that and we all know what isis is this is grotesquely violent radical jihadist movement um and and that i mean we have all seen you know seen their video heard of their videos where they're you know beheading people and you know in front of a video camera and a ghastly ghastly things he said why did that you know why did that happen in syria how did that that mutation occur at this point in history in that place and so the the film examines that and um were you there did you go to syria no you know after my friend tim hetherington was killed uh tim obviously i made restrepo with and he was a brother and a good friend and a colleague and he was killed in libya in 2011 on an assignment that i was supposed to be on with him the last minute i couldn't go and he got killed and so i stopped war reporting after that frontline reporting

104:02syria was so dangerous that you couldn't think of going in there i mean the numerous kidnappings and beheadings um it was basically a suicide by the time we started working on this story it was a suicide mission so we actually worked with syrians in syria who were documenting their own war wow um and including an incredible family that was living under in territory under isis control and and surviving they were trying to figure out like do we try to escape or not and of course if you try to escape and you're caught you're dead they will drag your family out of a pickup truck and line you up on a wall machine gun you but they were worried that if they stayed they'd also die and they decided to escape we got a camera to them and a very non-descriptive cell phone camera and they self-documented life under isis and the decision to leave and the um their flight through the isis

104:53checkpoints through the front lines all the way to turkey and they self-documented and it's part of it's the sort of through line in the movie absolutely extraordinary family wow and so then they're in turkey now here in turkey they tried to get to greece on a rubber raft on the zodiac they returned again this is also documented by them it's in the film they returned back at the last moment by the greek by the turkish coast guard sent back and now they're increasing they're actually doing really well they started a small business they're incredibly hard-working resourceful beautiful people i mean they're you know like i wish they could come to this country we'd be lucky to have them and they'd be lucky to have us they're an incredible family and and if you see the film you'll see what i'm talking about that's a that's a big point that a lot of people

105:32felt was missed at all the criticisms of uh immigrants coming over to this country you know stop close the borders stop allowing muslims stop allowing all these people to come over from these these dangerous areas that somehow know these people would be agents of these dangerous areas coming to destroy our democracy but these people are trapped a lot of these people are people that are experiencing these horrible conditions much like many of the people that originally made it to america in the first place yeah i mean our country is immigrants that's what the country is my my father is a two-time war refugee right i mean he fled spain during the civil war i mean he's passed away he was born in 1929 1923. he fled spain during the civil war and then he fled france because the nazis rolled in and he came to this country he was a brilliant physicist and we were lucky to have him right and

106:17he was eternally lucky to be part of this country as well um so what was odd about trump's trial i mean not to get political again but i got to say what was odd about trump's travel ban that there were countries that we'd never been attacked by right like no one from those countries had ever attacked this country like what are those countries doing on the travel ban this lunatic that killed people in new york uzbekistan like that wasn't on the travel ban like i mean i understand trying to create a filter that keeps bad people out of course every country does that i just didn't understand the specific logic of those countries on the list it made no sense to me no it made no sense to anybody and it's also you you're assuming that everybody in these areas is bad including the people that try and escape that sounds that sounds insane and that sounds it's just it's cruel and anti-human

107:09to not want people to have a chance i'm not saying don't vet these people out don't interview them and communicate with them and find out what their backgrounds are as much information as you can get yeah of course are you are you concerned because this is something that's been bothering me i was concerned about my own reaction to yesterday's mass shooting that uh i was almost nonchalant about it i was like well there's another one like that we're getting numb to mass shootings you know i asked myself two questions and and i didn't mean to ask them and i'm just being honest in telling people this i asked myself i wonder if it was a white church or a black church and i asked myself i wonder if the attacker was an islamic radical and a foreigner or was he a homegrown american i assumed it was a he obviously yeah um and i i don't even know what that says what those questions say about me or

107:59about the country but it's really interesting those are the first things i asked and i didn't like i didn't like that those questions came to my mind so quickly there was something about it that didn't feel good and they're very obvious questions to ask i mean you know it's clear that those are very important things to know but i didn't like that it came to me so quickly yeah i asked the exact same questions but i also felt like it's just these are patterns there's they're inescapable patterns whether it's the vegas massacre or this one or the the orlando shootings it's always a man and is it a muslim or is it a crazy white guy well you know i in tribe i write about mass shootings they're a very particular thing i mean there's gang shootings in chicago or whatever that may have a kind of logic to them right like you're controlling turf there's money

108:44involved drugs yeah it makes sense they would say a bunch of innocent people get shot that's the price you pay for gang wars there's a logic to it there is mass shootings are completely nihilistic right it's someone killing as many people that he doesn't know right as possible before he dies it's totally nihilistic and what i found and i did a lot of research into it that that kind those kinds of mass shootings typically happen in middle-class communities like otherwise safe middle-class communities or small low-crime christian communities they have never happened in the inner city literally never happened um they they happen in communities that are otherwise very safe very christian very very um boring frankly um and it really made me wonder like is there i mean lots of countries have as many guns as we do every country has crazy people in it in them right

109:45we are the only country that does this to ourselves and we do it only in a certain kind of community right it doesn't happen in high crime low income communities right it happens in the most sort of like small quiet christian low crime bland suburban or rural communities that's where it happened so what does it say why is it that these communities are not producing crazy people but somehow those people um come to a place where they think this is a good thing to do like why is that happening my theory is that the the deep alienation of the suburbs of small town america the la the lack of um real community effort and the lack of national unity in the pa i mean the mass killings have risen abruptly in the last 15 years and i you know it's hard for me it's you don't murder people in your own community when that happens it means the community doesn't exist at least for the murderer

110:49and do you see any connection or do you consider any connection between psych drugs i mean i don't know how many of these people are on psych drugs tremendous amount yeah like there was a study that uh did see if you could find it jamie they connected all the mass shootings that have happened over the last two decades with uh all the different medications that people were on and every single one of them was on something or was withdrawing from something okay so there's here's the question are the drugs creating the behavior or the drugs treating a mental disorder that itself is tied to the behavior very good question right i mean there's no way to know the mass shootings of the nihilistic sort that i'm referring to started abrupt abruptly rose in the 80s okay and then doubled since 2006 and i think they're increasing even more since then so every mass shooting over the last 20

111:47years has one thing in common and it isn't guns yeah this is it right but that's not that's not it's just positive right you know what i mean right so you're right it's not correlation doesn't i mean it could be addition it could be the depression is rising in alienated communities and the depression is getting unsuccessfully treated with drugs so all these people are on drugs but really what's happening is that and this is true suicide depression ptsd anxiety alienation all of these things are going up in society i mean that's just statistically true unquestionably the question uh that i would have about this though is that when i've talked to psych a psychiatrist about it they say that the dissociative aspect of the psychiatric medications are part of the problems that people do not feel they don't feel the connection even to their actions that they can do something horrific like

112:36shoot people and they might be even doing that to try to get some feeling listen that's totally possible i would also offer this idea that the massive national addiction to violent video games is a dissociated experience you're shooting people they're not real people that doesn't happen you know right i mean i'm connected somehow i don't know but i'm just saying what you just described happening in the streets of america is exactly duplicated digitally in video games right but the video games doesn't it doesn't keep you from feeling things in the real world where the psych medications do right but the experience of shooting at human targets that aren't real right if you incorporate that into how you feel about shooting and then you go out into the real world it may not be that hard to particularly with the age of aid drugs and whatever depression is sort of endemic in the society right

113:29now it might not be hard to to transpose that dissociated experience in a video game with digital images transpose it onto actual humans in the real world if you're sufficiently disturbed that's a very good connection and an interesting question because i've heard it uh discussed when they talk about war and uh how kids that grow up playing like call of duty and things along those lines that get really good at it would be actually better in combat they would have the tactics mapped out in their mind better yeah yeah absolutely absolutely i mean look there's a tv program called active shooter right like and they go back i just heard about it i haven't seen it i would never watch it but it's it's they go back and recreate they re interview everyone who survived an active shooting incident and recreate it and now people watch for i mean in some sense entertainment right tv is

114:18entertainment they watch for entertainment recreations of acting shooting incidents that are i think partly the result of the kind of deep alienation that happens in a in a media obsessed society that where no one's talking to each other you know i mean it's a perfect circle right like well they're definitely escalating right i mean we had the event in new york where the guy runs over all those people and then a couple of days later we're having the one in in texas like this is this is happening not over the scale of one a year one every few years we're getting them once a week well yeah and what's interesting i mean in new york there was an ideology behind it so it wasn't nihilistic i mean it felt nihilistic to us but to that guy he actually believed in what he was doing but the real mass shooters that they're just out there to kill as many people as possible

115:03it's hard to know what the ideology is well this guy was dishonorably discharged from the military for something i forget what it was so he was in a position what's up it was uh abuse on his spouse and child right and he uh didn't have a license to own a gun right you know he owned whatever guns that he had he got them illegally in colorado right he drove to colorado that's what i heard he got it was in texas i think he got him into colorado did he get him at a gun show or something like that i don't i don't know where he goes but yeah i mean we're looking at little tiny details the real question is how the does a person do something like that i mean shot babies you know he shot five-year-olds and the whole thing is just it doesn't even make sense and i don't know if he was on a psych medication or if they know he was but you know just the staggering numbers

115:53of broken individuals that are committing these crimes is just very very confusing right and you think that it's tied to what was what you were saying too about communities about um inner cities where you have uh impoverished high crime areas but they're not seeing these things do you think because in these high crime communities are dealing with much more life and death and the struggle is much more real that they feel more connected oh you know i this is totally a theory i mean i have no idea it's just the the truth is that those awful school shootings and mass shootings in the streets have never happened in a high crime uh high crime neighborhood and so one has to wonder what is it it's possible that for all the very real stresses and traumas of poverty that for all of those things there is also more face-to-face communal connection in poor neighborhoods

116:49than in wealthy neighborhoods or in middle class neighborhoods and that that communal connection i mean literally meeting people on the landing of your apartment building right meeting people on the door stoop on the street you know what yeah that those kinds of human interactions even at even in this in an economically stressed neighborhood that those create enough of a sense of community that people who might otherwise go crazy and turn their guns in this nihilistic way and on people on innocent people that they just don't do it because like why would i do that to my own people right that's the and what i fear in this country is that we're losing the sense of what our own people are yeah what are our own people and if you're doing that in the streets of the neighboring town like you know clearly there's been some loss of like some idea of what what we belong to and

117:38that's where you know national service or a congressional commission that really um calls out rhetoric that that undermines our sense of who we are as a nation like you know it might start at the top changing that might start at the top it might help do you think there's any incentive that these people experience to be someone who creates this big event where everybody has to look at them yeah like yeah i mean i i i mean i'm guessing but i'm i'm i'm imagining that someone like that feels powerless and insignificant and abused by society and at least they'll be famous in their last acts and their death they're gonna cause a lot of reaction they're gonna they're like oh you messed with me my whole life at least for the last five minutes of my life you you guys are the ones that are gonna be scared you're gonna be begging me for mercy no i begged you for mercy my whole life

118:32now you're going to be begging me for mercy i'm totally guessing right i'm just riffing here but i i wouldn't be surprised if there was something of that to it well it's a good guess i mean this this has been a very common conversation lately as to whether or not you discuss these people and even bring up their names and i know in some places and some even media outlets they don't want to report on the person the individual is creating this chaos well you know one of the things i think is the problem is that if you love this country there is a certain pressure to think it's the best possible country ever right yeah and i think it's very painful for americans to actually look at the actual statistics and say you know for example with mass shootings we're the only country that does this to ourselves the only one there's not another country that has not at the rate that we do right

119:27i mean in china there you know there's a rash of knife attacks right i mean it's not that it doesn't happen at all but if you really look over the last like 20 years since more than that since the 80s when this started like we're the only country that does this regularly to ourselves is regularly to the point where it's like every month practically right right so it's it's a sign i mean if your child was acting out in a violent way and punching kids in the playground you'd think okay he's in pain right he's acting out like what's wrong with this kid like he's clearly in pain in some kind of pain and he's lashing out well the society is in some kind of pain like what is it you know and you know you you know you can dismiss me as a like bleeding heart liberal like you know whatever i don't mean you but one could dismiss me as a bleeding heart a little bit like okay well then what's your

120:11what's your question then my question is what what what why are we in so much pain right that's the question that i think might begin to lead to an answer of why there's such high suicide rates in such a wealthy society why there's mass killing that would begin to answer those questions if you don't like that question what's your question to answer those terrible tragedies what's your question well what you're saying is very compelling and it's it's an aspect of this that i don't think is being considered and i think your book is very important when it comes to that i think the questions that you raise and the all the the various examples that you give they're it's it's really food for thought and i don't think it's being discussed in very many other circles it's everyone's looking at the psychiatric drugs everyone's looking at the white men with guns and the gun problem the

121:01nra and all these various aspects they're not looking at the root cause of this depression anxiety and this uh detachment that we have from our neighbors in our community look i mean somalia's got a lot more guns than we do right and there's plenty of violence in somalia but no one's walking down the streets of their own neighborhood massacring their own people only we do that and what is you know in in a sense it's a call to a cry for help by our society like uh not by that person i'm saying generally the phenomenon within our society is a kind of cry for help like we are something is wrong psychically spiritually wrong christians will say we're not a christian enough country but i you know like that's that's that's that's a that's not true that's not the problem right there are um peaceful muslim societies and very violent christian ones and you can't correlate it with christianity

121:49um i think the one thing you can they're a democrat there are there are oppressive societies they're very low violence and they're full democracies like us with lots of violence so it's not the democratic system right what is it and my guess and it's only a guess my guess that is that a certain amount of the high suicide rates the high depression anxiety drug addiction porn addiction child abuse mass shootings shootings in the streets my guess is that the common denominator in all those things is the um sort of catastrophic lack of communal connection that many americans experience well it's it's a very compelling argument it's a very compelling point that again i don't see being discussed in very many other areas and i really appreciate it man i really appreciate your book i think it's great and uh i really suggest anybody who's interested in this subject please go read it

122:42tribe sebastian younger thank you brother appreciate it man i really enjoyed it thank you very much anytime come on bye all right thanks everybody awesome