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hey everybody welcome to another episode
of conversations with tom i'm here with
somebody that i think is going to melt
your brain
he is a best-selling author war
correspondent and
academy award nominated documentarian
sebastian
younger welcome to the show thank you
very much
dude super excited to have you on the
book freedom uh
is really really interesting you talk
about a topic that i've
been steeped in my entire life as you
know a child of the 80s growing up in
america
but never really thought about the way
that you talk about
in the book and i think before we get
into what i will say
is the most fascinating question from
the book which i will spill in a second
but first define freedom for people that
probably are doing what most of us do
which is confuse it with rights
yeah so i mean there's a lot of ways of
uh defining it but
um a lot of different kinds of freedom i
should say there's emotional freedom
physical freedom
but for my purposes i'm talking about
freedom as a as a core human value that
that humans have
fought for for tens of thousands of
years in that sense it means
that you are not unfairly controlled by
a by a greater power
that you're self-def that you're
self-defining uh within the limits of
course of the laws that bind all of us
and and uh you know for a lot of human
history that
wasn't always a given there are many
oppressed peoples um
there there are many of many cultures
and regimes and governments
that make a practice of overpressing
people and enslaving them and killing
them
and so freedom is the struggle against
that
uh that sorry human reality that's been
part of our history for so long
okay so now that people have that sort
of north star
orienting idea of what freedom is and i
think that will ring really true to
people
the thing i found most interesting in
the book is this idea
that you will never be free unless you
can
effectively defend yourself and
i read a quote one time that i found
really
sort of on its surface when you don't
have
society enveloping you and its loving
embrace to be sort of self-evidently
true
but also at the same time really
horrifying which is
that the weak sorry the strong do as
they will and the weak suffer as they
must
and i was just like oh god so what do
you mean
that uh you will never have freedom
unless you can defend yourself
well i i mean it's sort of fairly
obvious and
history shows that
that powerful groups often
subjugate or enslave or annihilate less
powerful groups and
and you can see instances of that
throughout human history and
archaeological evidence of it from
pre-history uh
just as a quick example the yamnaya of
the eastern steppe
5000 years ago during the neolithic era
they were a nomadic uh
very aggressive group that fought from
horse-drawn chariots at a time when
horses
really weren't in widespread use they
fought with battle axes they traveled in
all male groups
uh you could think of them as the first
uh sort of motorcycle gang
and they carved they carved their way
through europe and they
and they invaded the iberian peninsula
five thousand years ago
and in about a hundred years they killed
all of the men in iberia
all the men right and they wiped
male iberians from the from the human
gene
gene pool and mated with the women of
course um you could say that the
iberians because they couldn't defend
themselves experienced a radical loss of
freedom
um so if you're if you're vulnerable to
predatory groups like that
you will you you may not remain free for
very long but if you can defend yourself
uh you and your group have a chance of
being free
but then what you have to guard against
is
internal oppression which is a whole
different a whole different matter
basically if you're
well armed enough militaristic enough
aggressive enough and well organized
enough
to defend yourself against a group like
the yamnaya
you are vulnerable to a an errant
leader you using that that militaristic
machinery
to oppress his own people and that's the
eternal human
sort of balancing act is to defend
themselves but then not wind up being
oppressed by their own leaders
who so this is a really fascinating
sort of a super high level concept for
me is that so many things
the magic is in the friction between the
two things and even when you take
the political parties that we have here
in the us and i'm not a political guy
but
um it's fascinating to me that you talk
about this intrinsic desire for
freedom and then i will say that one of
the core
theses in the book is what we just
talked about which is sort of
as a natural state like people are going
to dominate those that are weaker you
get this idea of
other versus in tribe but the the idea
that i'm talking about
is that the friction exists between
let's say
on the left you have people that really
lead with compassion
and then on the right you have people
that lead with sort of responsibility
now if you only have compassion your
society is going to devolve into madness
if you only have um responsibility your
society is going to devolve into tyranny
and it's like you need this friction
between the two
you need each side to sort of respect
each other
so how do we or how do you think about
the balance between those two
in a modern context as we try to move
through life
well there's a fair amount of data that
the our our our basic political
orientations
are partly genetically endowed that
they're inherited
um and which which sort of makes sense
like if you have a human group
uh picture that a primordial human group
of 30 40 50 people
surviving in the natural world if you
have
half of them that are genetically
oriented towards maintaining
a sort of hierarchical system that's
faced
sort of outwardly face to protect
against enemies uh
a classic conservative uh viewpoint
and then half half of the group are
genetically predisposed
towards regulating the internal dynamics
so that it's basically
egalitarian and that one uh you know
that leaders don't dominate
and and sort of carve out extra rights
um for themselves
if you have those groups in sort of a
rough balance within the
uh within the society within the little
group um you're probably going to do
pretty well you know likewise if you
have
basically equal numbers of men and women
in a group
men and women bring different assets
different sensibilities to the table
it's a very good it's a very good
combination so you know what i would say
is that in any society
the nation of 330 million or a sort of
human survival group
uh 50 000 years ago that when you have
these
two things in balance they're in a
dynamic tension where there's
probably a sort of low level of of
argument
argument and conflicts um but
neither side completely dominates and
and and and that's
where i think that's where humans are
like
very well tuned up for their environment
and do very very well
and how do you think about it at the
personal level so if
if i recognize that human history has
been this long parade of
people clawing their way to power um
steamrolling over people with less power
you know thinking back to
wait in fact this will set this question
up perfectly
what is the root of the word freedom
like from an etymological standpoint
yeah so um freedom comes from the the
middle german
buridum v-r-i-d-o-m uh and it means
beloved
and basically the term means that the
the the people who
are considered to be eligible for
freedom who cannot be arbitrarily killed
or enslaved
are the people in your immediate group
the people you care about the people in
your clan
in your tribe in your community in your
family and everybody else and just ask
the yamnaya
everybody else is eligible for you know
whatever horrors you can visit upon them
and you know if you think in terms of
adaptive behavior
um it's very clear that armed aggression
can is very adaptive that that it it um
helps the aggressive group survive and
thrive
um the yamnaya's genes are still
in the iberian population the original
genes
of the male neolithic population have
been wiped
out right so there is aggression can be
very adaptable though in our society we
think
no i think that's not true but clearly
it's a very commonplace thing in the
world if it weren't adaptive it would
have died out
so um so just from the definition of the
word it's
clear that the word that the idea of
freedom
is really only refers to the people
within your own community and yet what
happened with
as as western society evolved
uh the medieval system of royalty and
serfs
eventually broke up um there eventually
there were international norms and
international laws that protected even
small societies
from the aggression of larger societies
and certainly after world war ii
after the world suffered um what
the the the fascists in spain and then
in germany tried to do to europe
there was an agreement that we must all
defend
all of us against predatory aggression
by an armed state and that you know
that's a fairly modern development
you know what's interesting to me is
that the way that we do it is um
ultimately to build up a strong military
to
get tough to find strength and
you talked about i don't remember if
this was in the book but i've heard you
talk about it where you were like you
know my
my sort of left leaning
nature found it very surprising maybe
i'll let you speak for yourself but this
idea that
we were protecting these freedoms and
saving people by
having jets with really big guns and
bombs you know fly in
and that wasn't sort of the liberal
fantasy
that you had how do you think about that
tension well i you know i think people
have
are well wired for survival and i think
if if mainland usa were invaded by a
a a a massive armed force i don't know
what that would be
maybe the chinese or i don't know what
but you'd have to use your fantasy here
but i think i think people would
understand the need for
for an armed defense regardless of their
political views and i think where it
gets tricky is
is where administrations
both democratic and republican
administrations say oh you know we're
defending ourselves by flying ten
thousand miles
which is you know to the other side of
the world and dropping bombs on
mountains you know like that's that's a
little
that kind of defense is a little bit
more theoretical
and i think it's less it's understood in
a less visceral way
in the yom kippur war in israel um there
were israeli soldiers that were
literally defending
their their own villages
from attack by the surrounding arab
nations and
the sort of moral the moral reasoning
reasoning behind
using violence and killing other people
when
when you're defending your own town is
much more obvious
than even an incursion into lebanon
right and
um there were there are threats i mean i
have absolutely no allegiance to either
side of the israeli-palestinian debate
so i'm completely
i know nothing about it i'm completely
agnostic on that but just from a sort of
logical standpoint like even
even if there are even if the israel can
identify
absolutely identify armed threats coming
from from lebanon just
going into a foreign country to defend
oneself
puts the military and the whole society
on more precarious moral grounds and
that's where the big
argument happens about use of force and
certainly for the u.s
flying you know like fighting a war 10
000 miles away in afghanistan
um you know it's a tougher sell to the
population particularly as we get
farther and farther from the horror of 9
11.
here's where all of this gets
interesting and the reason that i wanted
to go through that
is i want people to understand that a
lot of the things that are playing out
in our lives
are the result of something that is
an evolutionary adaptation and so it
plays out on sort of this bigger and
bigger scale with bigger and bigger
weapons and certainly more terrifying
consequences
but the reality is if you look at the
human animal as an adaptation machine
something that's changing in response to
like
what works you get this sense of now
bring it back down to the individual so
i am very compelled by the idea that we
have
subconscious processes running in our
brains
that come from an evolutionary place and
one of those
is to be capable to defend yourself
because if you weren't i mean you've
already talked about literally being
wiped out of the entire gene pool
so now you've got the subconscious
process that
only has reward and punishment so pain
and pleasure
to move you towards a behavior that's
going to be uh
you know positive from a moving on in
the gene pool perspective
and so people that don't take time to
either get courageous maybe the right
word
certainly to develop some kind of um
physical strength i think there is
a sense of unease or dis-ease that comes
with that
and i don't know you well enough to know
the answer this question but your
neck tells me that it's true do you work
out
um my neck's always betraying me i don't
lift weights or anything but um i i was
a a
very very competitive long-distance
runner when i was young um
i ran a pretty pretty good mile timer at
412 when i was a kid and
uh 221 marathon so i was a long distance
runner and then recently
uh meaning about 10 years ago i started
boxing
um and uh yeah i just very you know
and i have to emphasize on a very very
friendly casual level
i'm not i'm not visiting gyms around the
country and asking who wants to spar
right i mean this is an extremely like
relaxed level but it's an amazing
amazing workout the training and the
sparring and so
um so i've so yes i work out and i've
been an athlete my whole life and it's
saved
it has saved my life um i think several
times including about a year ago
um when i we can talk about this later
but i had a undiagnosed aneurysm in my
pancreatic artery and it ruptured and i
lost 90
of my blood into my abdomen and
my you know there's almost this is
almost a zero survival rate from that
and i survived
like my heart kept beating that is a
crazy story we'll definitely talk about
that
um first though i wanna i wanna see what
you think about this idea that
if you are doing something so you break
down
the fight for freedom basically and run
fight or think
and those are basically the ways you
address uh your enemy so it's
interesting that you're a runner
equally interesting that the other thing
that you do is boxing yeah
um it's the thinking i have trouble with
yeah right as the guy writing these
extraordinary books
i have a very hard time believing that
but
do you i'll ask point blank do you think
that people
need to do something to feel
secure in their ability to defend
themselves physically that will play
into their mental wellness
i mean the first thing you need to do in
order to feel safe is to be part of a
group
that has a kind of common agreement to
defend itself
against any threat and and in turn to
to treat all the the group members
equitably
and fairly that's the first thing you
need to do humans die
immediately on their own they do not
survive alone in nature they die
and we throw that at a country level
association
well i i mean by group it could mean a
survival group of 30 people in
50 000 years ago or it could mean an
armed nuclear state like america
i mean regardless we get our we get our
security our safety from being part of a
group
and if you're in a platoon in
afghanistan and you wander off
uh as beau bergdahl did uh i i think you
probably remember that that story from
2009 or 10. um you can't defend yourself
what happened uh beau bergdahl was a
soldier who
left he left the wire right he by
himself he left an outpost in
afghanistan
and just started wandering around and
was taken captive by the taliban
um and was eventually five years later
the taliban gave him up
uh gave him back to the united states
but but he could you know he was by
himself wandering around afghanistan he
couldn't protect himself in a platoon
he would have been safe so our safety
comes from being part of a group that
can defend itself
and um you know i think that there's but
that's
there are other issues i mean in human
society are there lots of people there
are
you know there are women who are
pregnant for example there are children
there are old people whose job is not
it's not to be a warrior defending
themselves personally
they're part of a group and there is a
division of labor
and typically it's young males that take
on the physical defense of the group
although young females
often do that as well more on an
individual level
but you know the the the ability to
defend yourself
by yourself is not something that humans
have needed to do very much of because
we're social primates
and we lit and we live in groups and so
um
the the the ability physically to defend
yourself
in a complex modern society is actually
becomes relevant again because you
are um you're walking around in
a world where most of the people you
encounter i live in new york city
are complete strangers right so every
stranger is potentially an enemy who
might hurt you
and that's where being an individual and
being physically capable of running away
or fighting or whatever it may be
can become important but i think that
is actually the the incidence of sort of
aggression like that
random aggression visited upon people
walking down the street is
quite low you know i don't think i think
obesity and things like that are way
more of a threat to your
to your life than that kind of
aggression so
i'm all for exercising but i think it'll
probably pay off more in terms of
your health and longevity than anything
else
you know i'll definitely agree with that
in sort of a highly tactical way but
when i think about what's going on in
your brain your brain is trying to
from an evolutionary standpoint and and
this is my hypothesis
is trying to move you towards certain
behaviors and away from others
and for the vast majority so first of
all i'm not like a super tough guy
i'm not a trained fighter like by any
means but that's part of why i've
thought about this
um and what i have focused on though
is lifting and so while i'm never going
to win any strength competition
when i think about how strong i used to
be versus the level of strength that i
have now and the times in my life where
i've sort of
gotten too busy or allowed myself to get
too busy and wasn't working out
consistently versus when i am
i feel very differently when i have
physical strength
versus when that physical strength
begins to wane
and one of two things is true either
that's just a societal thing that's
reinforced and i've glommed onto that or
there is something that where i get a
reward
for improving my levels of strength at a
subconscious
self-worth level that i find utterly
fascinating
well it's not either war i mean i think
um
size and strength are noted by other
people
and there's a whole very unconscious
subtle dominance
thing going on in society and every
subway car and every
every on every sidewalk where humans are
constantly
sort of assessing each other for for a
potential threat
and you know as as you get bigger and
stronger you become a potential threat
and which means that other
particularly other males are sort of
conflict-averse
and um and there's a there's a very
subtle
conversation that that happens on the
unconscious level
particularly between males who are
assessing each other and
um being larger makes gives you a
different
um it gives you a different role
in a different conversation right and if
you're small it's a it's a it's a
different matter entirely i should say
that they did a study of um they looked
at these sort of match-up videos like
they have boxers that they
you know before a fight they sort of
stand chest to chest and glare at each
other and you know whatever it's a whole
little ritual which is kind of
interesting right and
the one of the things that people do uh
they're called
appeasement cues if you want to avoid a
conflict that might be costly to both
people
you give a little signal like hey man
i'm not a threat we're good like you
don't need to mess with me i'm not going
to mess with you
like and those appeasement cues me are
are often like
uh not steer not looking at the person
in the eye so if you get stopped by a
police officer
uh that uh almost all for almost all of
us except the sociopaths the the the
fault reflex is look away do not look
the officer in the eye because that's a
physical challenge
right and the other is a quick smile
right and
and sometimes it's very fast and
unconscious so what they found
when they studied these videos is that
if someone smiled in these
match-ups they were way way more likely
to lose the fight
than the guy who didn't smile that's so
crazy if you're feeling big and strong
and tough you're less likely to smile
you're less likely to
sort of emit an unconscious appeasement
cue so that the other big guy in the
room doesn't
you know whatever it just like keeps
things sort of from from escalating
but the other thing is that i i believe
lifting weights produces more
testosterone which feels really good
testosterone makes people feel great and
so when you i know when you do short
like uphill sprints and stuff like that
there are violent explosive activities
that will raise testosterone levels
particularly in men as they get older
um and uh so you know a number of
different things are going on when you
when you bulk up but i should also say
finally
by so my books divided into three
sections run fight and think
and the the easiest and the most
reflexive way to avoid a dominant power
is to run away the apache are a great
example of a society that just
was so mobile that even the us cavalry
could not quite corner them and catch
them
but then if you can't outrun your your
antagonist you're going to have to out
fight him and
the really interesting thing about
humans is that a smaller
fighter or a smaller group
is capable of defeating a larger fighter
or a larger group that size and strength
are not the ultimate predictor of
victory in combat and that's
both true on an individual level if you
look at boxing or the mma and what have
you
um the smaller guy even or woman
even though he's he doesn't have the
advantage of strength
he has the advan he has a kind of
cardiovascular advantage because his
those those huge muscles use up a lot of
oxygen
but it scales up very well so in
afghanistan the
the the taliban had no they were
equivalent of a very small fighter in a
boxing ring they had no air force they
had no artillery they had no tanks
some of them didn't even have any boots
and they fought the us military to a
standstill for 20 years i mean the
most powerful military ever in history
and we left
on their terms right in inconceivable
in primate in in other primates or in
any other mammal
yeah that one to me is is not only crazy
but it's
predictable like if you look at how many
people what do they say it's
afghanistan is where empires go to die
it's like
so many people have tried to conquer
them and have failed
um i'm super curious so you obviously
have spent a lot of time
embedded with uh military personnel you
spent time in afghanistan if i'm not
mistaken
um and what is it other than just like
mobility because obviously there's
there's more than just they're better at
running when they fight they must be
doing something right or they're
recruiting more people so it's like no
matter how many people you defeat they
just keep coming
like what is it that makes them so
impossible to quote unquote break
well insurgencies like smaller fighters
in the ring
require fewer resources so their effort
is sustainable in the long term
um so if you have two guys in a ring and
one weighs 250 and the other way is 180
god forbid the big guy get the small guy
in a headlock the fight is over
with right and if that fight is taking
place in it in a shower stall
that's where it's going to wind up but
once there's like real
room real mobility around the fighters
um
every movement that a small fighter
does uh uses up less metabolic resources
less oxygen than the same movement by a
large person
right so if you you know at the end of a
three-minute round where both fighters
are moving sort of an equivalent
amount the large fighter might be
completely winded in the small fight or
not so the so the the analogy for
afghanistan
is for every year in afghanistan that
the taliban
doesn't lose they don't have to win
right
the small guy in the ring does not have
to win they just have to keep not losing
long enough for this for the larger
entity to run out of resources
and and as it turns out in the united
states that took 20 years
i mean we just can't sustain the level
of spending
uh i mean tactically we could stay there
for another century but the nation
itself actually
can't sustain that level of of monetary
expenditure
or the equivalent would be that level of
um
you know what muscular activity that's
you know putting us into oxygen debt
in the case of a single fighter we can't
sustain that
indefinitely and the taliban can they're
they're a fighting force that is part of
the society that it that it's from um it
doesn't um
it it just it's not fighting halfway
around the world
um and the the assets that the u.s has
like air power
work very poorly against you know a
handful of men scattered across a
mountainside i mean
you will all us will always be able to
kill a dozen guys in any fight
but those numbers don't really make a
difference in the long term
uh and what you get is this someone
asked me once
you know if the taliban take over
afghanistan
uh it's hard to see that freedom you
know that freedom will have been
increased
right i mean the taliban you know i
loathe the taliban they're an awful
repressive regime with no respect for
human rights
uh and i said well it depends how you
define it but i would say that the free
the taliban freedom will have been
increased
because they've gotten the you know the
invading empire out of their backyard
like we're out of their business and so
they
they will be able to be self-defining
right that's the key like are you able
to be self-defining
defining the taliban will be able to be
self-defining so all the taliban have to
do
is to keep not losing and
recruiting men recruiting fighters
by saying look your freedom is at stake
the honor and the dignity of your women
of your families of your heritage it's
all at stake it's worth dying for
right and increasingly i think it's
hard clearly it's hard it's been harder
and harder
to convince americans that winning in
afghanistan is worth dying for
right i mean i don't i'm talking about
soldiers who are trained to do what
they're told to do i'm talking about the
american public
like is that situation worth dying for
in the days and months and even years
after 9 11 it clearly
seemed worth dying for because we'd been
attacked by a group that was hiding
there
and they killed three thousand americans
who brought down the twin towers and
and and crashed a plane into the
pentagon like that's an easy case to
make like this is worth dying for
because it could happen again
uh but now it's been 20 years it's a
harder argument to mount
wow that's crazy man you just brought up
some really really interesting wildly
controversial ideas
okay so the
freedom in the sense that the taliban is
a horrible
repressive regime uh
that in country i'm sure there are some
people that don't love that idea
uh of that continuing on if they're the
people being oppressed
um but there is some level of freedom
that goes up
that i uh i'm not sure what to do with
that that's very interesting
so how do you process through that
is it a net good well i mean it
it's not and that anything is is i mean
that we're we're trying to understand a
word that we have that describes a state
of being and the state of being is
a free person is someone who can say i
am not unfairly controlled by an outside
power
and you know the this is no um
this this isn't a a is i'm not approving
of the taliban here i'm just saying that
a taliban fighter
can now say because the us is leaving
afghanistan can now say
i cannot be controlled by an outside
power i mean that's a state of freedom
for that person
i wish it weren't so i wish the taliban
would disappear i think what they're
going to do to afghanistan is horrific
and there's other people women come to
mind in afghanistan
and and ethnic minorities come to mind
who will experience a horrible loss of
freedom i'm just
i'm just saying that if we understand
what the definition of freedom is
a taliban fighter can now with real
justification say i am freer because the
united states is gone
right wow super interesting thing i know
in the book you
well in your interviews you talked
specifically that in the book this isn't
a philosophical book like this is a
really sort of concise exploration of
what freedom is
um very interesting philosophical
conversation to be had
along those lines um i want to talk
about the
the culture in afghanistan which i you
know i'll plead wild ignorance
but are they a hurting culture is it a
an
honor culture well uh
yeah there are um yes there it's a mixed
agriculture
uh agriculture and hurting society there
are
um ethnic groups that practice herding
um i think most villages have herds of
goats and etc
um but they are not necessarily
migratory
they're not necessarily mobile society
so a lot of the villages in afghanistan
that i've been in
they had uh fields with crops rice and
wheat and things like that
and also uh herds of uh
mostly goats i've heard so
i've heard multiple people talk about
this idea of honor cultures rising up
when you have a hurting
um society because there's you know it's
hard to
like maintain where your animals go and
so they may cross over into somebody
else's
area and i've heard you specifically
speak about
this and how when you've got the animals
just sort of wandering everywhere you
better be a pretty
badass person for people to be afraid to
swipe
your animals and the way that that plays
out in a larger society one i'd love to
get
the sort of color and nuance around that
idea and then to put it in the context
of
is that part of what makes them so
difficult to deal with is that
at a cultural level they
revere people that you know are willing
to fight
if it's hard to to monitor your
resources
having a reputation for violence helps
keep people
from messing with you right so i just as
a very mundane example
um you know we all at least on a sort of
like
myth mythic level understand the the
potential for violence
of say the hell's angels of a motorcycle
gang right you see those guys go by on
the highway
you're like whoa i'm going to get into
the right-hand lane because i don't want
to get i don't want to have a problem
with those guys there's 30 of them on
motorcycles
they all have beards like i'm just going
to stay out of the way
well likewise when they park their bikes
on the street
i mean a motorcycle a you know expensive
motorcycle
parked in new york city is it is it is
vulnerable right i mean every car in new
york city is dented
right you know what i mean so so what
happens when you're parking
and there's a motorcycle behind you are
you really really careful you don't tip
that thing
on you know onto its side by backing up
into it yeah you're really careful
you're probably more careful than you
would be
with like a volkswagen or whatever right
so
their reputation for violence is the
thing that protects that makes people
careful around
that motorcycle even if they're not
there looking at it right
so that's a very important sort of like
uh
way it's a tactic that that people
maintain uh
sort of control of their belongings just
by being scary and intimidating so
in case you're even thinking do you know
don't even think about it guy you know
because i will freaking kill you
if you dent my bike right well likewise
pastoralist societies
that have these herds that roam over
mountain sides and valleys and et cetera
and it's
very hard to keep track of 3 000 sheep
right
but if you have a reputation for
ferocity
um the opportunity to steal those sheep
might be less appealing for someone
because they know that they
and their entire community will be
killed will be attacked and killed
right so so that's that's the theory
behind the aggressive
nature of pastoral societies i should
say that there is
also the mobile societies that are
materially poor
but they have a lot of they're highly
egalitarian within their group
uh and they're very highly autonomous
like it's very hard to sort of pin
down and force consent force cooperation
from a mobile society because
you know the king tries to tax the the
the the shepherds the the the the
the nomads and the next morning their
tents are gone and they're in the
mountains right and so
so so those kinds of societies are often
very very
uh arrogant about their superiority even
though they have
their their less wealthy than the
farmers
right um but they're more militaristic
and they're they're more able to to be
self-defining
and autonomous and they ca it's very
hard to sort of
trap them in a in a hierarchy where most
people are sort of
like under the thumb of a ruler so there
was a group
um named the yomut in northern iran
and they lived aside by their
pastoralists they they were herders
and they were very warlike and they
lived side by side with these wealthier
sedentary agriculturalists and they had
this saying
which was i'm quoting from memory here
i do not have a mill with willow trees
in other words i'm not a farmer
i do not have a mill with willow trees i
have a horse and quirt a quirk is a kind
of whip
i have a horse in court i will kill you
and go
right so that that's the threat that's
the sort of abiding
threat of a mobile society to make sure
that you don't steal
any of their precious livestock
yeah societies get
more of what they incentivize as with
anything
like for instance if you look at um
europe or south america with the um
soccer teams they're just
unbelievable because you know your dad
played soccer or loved it and so you
play it and love it and you know that
just goes on for generation after
generation
one of the most fascinating examples of
this to me is in
japan how they have given birth to
these manga artists who are just
unbelievably talented
and as somebody who publishes that kind
of material it is
ridiculously hard to find those same
artists here in the u.s
because that style has just for you know
whatever 100 years
been going on in japan and here in the
us it's really only gained like
widestream popularity and say the last
15-20 years
so it's not refined over multiple
generations
and i'm curious you know when you look
at a culture like afghanistan
where it's you know at least partly a
hurting culture
and they're more militaristic and so you
would revere the greatest warriors
um do you see that in different
societies where
what they're rewarding just like they
become sort of diamond hard at that
thing
yeah well i mean the the um
yeah there are aspects of afghan society
they're definitely very
uh suspicious of outsiders and
if you mess with them you incur a blood
feud that can go on for generations the
albanian traditional albanian society is
the same way
um and they're very dangerous societies
to mess with i mean the pashtuns of the
afghan-pakistan border
are are just infamously warlike
and if you you know you're sort of
poking the hornet's nest if you go in
there
um and the taliban were primarily
pashtun
right um and uh you know like
likewise i mean there's many groups
around the world that are like that the
albanians
or the montenegrins for example it's
nearby different society
nearby um very very warlike society they
sort of wild mountain people
and the ottoman empire invaded them in
the early 1600s and
outnumbered the ottoman the ottoman
soldiers outnumbered the the montenegrin
warriors
12 to one right and they had
the ottomans had artillery and cavalry
and the um the montenegrins fought like
wild men
and killed one-third of the ottoman
force and drove the rest of them out of
their country
right so you know those are and
you know they were very very warlike
autonomous
proud mountain people and um
you know when you invade people who
basically have an
ethos of you know we will protect our
communities and our women
at any cost from outsiders
and we'd rather all of us die than live
under the thumb of the oppressor i mean
that's what happened
famously in 73 a.d in masada
the romans had besieged the the city of
the
city of masada that was up on a on a
plateau
on a mesa and they very slowly breached
the walls
and it seems like i mean this is partly
shrouded in a myth but it seems like
what we've been
what we know from what's been passed
down is that the entire
population of masada men women children
everybody
could basically committed mass suicide
rather than live under
whether rather than be enslaved by the
romans uh so when you have societies
that would rather die
than be captured um you have a very very
costly fight on your hands
yeah that certainly has uh sounds like
it rhymes a bit with world war
ii japan i know that in iwo jima and i'm
sort of getting all of my history from
movies so forgive me if
if this is like wildly inaccurate but
you know that sense of that that you
you literally fight to the death you are
not going to be taken
um alive and it doesn't matter if you're
losing like you're just
you're you're going out with a bang for
sure
um all of that to me is
is incredibly fascinating when you put
it then in the larger context of
and and in fact maybe i'm wrong about
this maybe this is just because
this is where i grew up i'm curious to
see your take so
you've got these societies they're
rewarding this sort of militaristic
fighting like wild men
underdog they still win um
why is it then that at least from my
perspective sort of the
the big sedentary society
seems to win
right well the that i mean that's maybe
one of the tragedies of human history
agriculture is a very very effective way
of
of accumulating wealth accumulate
storing food
meat can't really be stored unless it's
on the hoof
as a herd but grains can be stored
and uh once you can store food you can
um you can feed enormous populations
right you can have city-states you can
maintain
armies of tens of thousands of people
um and the the one of the first cities
in the world some
i think 10 000 years ago or so was the
city of uruk and they had
they had um i think 40 000 people
in within the walls of uruk and an
enormous
enormous standing army and so it's very
easy for a group like that to control
territory
um against a much uh a
against a mobile society which just has
fewer people
and um so you know what you have is is
the these massive city-states these
massive empires that practice
agriculture which started about 10 000
years ago
um able to control a huge percentage
of the world's population um
and uh i can't exactly remember the
figures but
starting you know five thousand years
ago or so
an enormous percentage of the human
population was controlled by these mega
states
um they're just very good at controlling
territory but
but what the mobile society has to do
isn't controlled territory they just
have to stay out of reach
of the u.s cavalry in the case of the
apache or what have you they just have
to not
not be rounded up and caught and
slaughtered or enslaved
and mobility is is um
this key factor and if humans weren't so
mobile wouldn't work
right i mean chimpanzees don't run very
fast they don't they can't walk very far
humans are
amazing at moving over territory right i
mean the
the human record for 1 000 miles
is 10 days right i mean a horse couldn't
do that
right yeah 100 miles a day for 10 days
right um and back at you know at the
other end of the scale
the human record for a quarter mile
averages to
around 20 miles an hour right i mean
design a machine that can do all that
humans can do it and it means that it's
it's quite easy for a lightly armed
group like the apache
um the apache warriors were expected to
be able to run 70 miles a day 7-0
70 miles a day they could outrun u.s
cavalry in broken country
that's crazy yeah the whole society was
able to move
not at a run but at a sort of walk jog
all day long men women children
everybody and
and uh and so when when uh and the
taliban were the same way they were very
lightly armed lightly dressed so where
the american soldiers might be able to
squeak out a mile an hour
in in steep terrain you know the taliban
were you know moving at running pace and
just ran
circles around the american soldiers
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take care be legendary
so here's where this falls into the land
of the fascinating though so
you've got the apaches doing an amazing
job they
make it i mean to some pretty modern
times before they're finally
um you know overcome by the westward
expansion
um you've got people that are they
either flee
western society you know this is back in
whatever the 1800s
early 1900s or they get kidnapped by
tribes
of native americans and they don't want
to come back
so they take this you know more sort of
old school
tribal approach to life they prefer it
they don't want to go back i forget
who it was maybe a president who was
like we have people that
leave to go live a native life but we
don't have any natives that come to live
a modern life
and yet my friend at the end of the day
it was modernity that took over
everything
so if we have this sort of
and by the way to really drive this
point home
reading your book freedom you describe
this amazing moment where you guys are
like you've dug out these perches along
this river bed
there's like four of you sleeping next
to each other your dogs at your feet
you're like nobody knows who we are and
you know if there are things better than
this there aren't going to be many of
them and this idea of nobody knowing
where you
are is freedom itself so
if we have this innate pull to that why
does
tokyo win you live in new york city
the guy describing nobody knowing who
you know where i'm at is one of the
greatest things
and yet you live in new york city help
me and and by the way tokyo and new york
are like two of my favorite places on
planet earth i could not be more
obsessed
so why do they win if we have this
innate call to the wild
well we have a lot of different things
that appeal to us right so
um autonomy is one of them and uh a
the the life of within a hunting society
um within egalitarian tribal society is
very very appealing
it was benjamin franklin who sort of
lamented the fact that young
young men and women along the frontier
were constantly sort of absconding
off to the natives and that there was no
you know for
and the natives were never returning to
favor and and
and and coming to white society right
plowing a field just isn't that much fun
compared to hunting right the sort of
the the the sexual uh
strictures in a very conservative
christian society just aren't that much
fun
compared to the more libertarian
instincts of a tribal society i mean
on every human level like christian
agricultural christian society and along
the frontier just
wasn't that good at time you know and
and the tribal societies really were and
so
so but that's a so those are individual
choices made by a few people
right but as long as the majority of
people
i mean agriculture is a powerful system
the enlightenment produced a very very
powerful way of thinking that allowed
for the innovations of science
advances in technology you know one of
the
instincts that we have an instinct for
autonomy we also have an instinct for
you know not being uncomfortable and
being safe and
and having our ease you know not having
to not having to toil from dusk
uh from dawn to dusk uh or dusk to dawn
uh you know so so so modern society that
western society that mechanized the
survival processes
uh that also was appealing because it's
adaptive to
want to save energy and relax that's
also adaptive right and you know what i
think you could say
i mean you know i i really avoid value
judgments in my book but i do like to
point out differences between things
i think one could say that the the level
of comfort and ease
permitted by modern society has allowed
a lot of people to become overweight to
become lethargic to become
non-athletic to not have any sense of
the processes that keep them alive they
don't grow their own food they don't
build their own
houses they don't you know whatever and
they're not really participating
in their immediate community we're wired
for communitarianism right i mean
anytime there's a disaster immediately
people act in communitarian ways they
share water they share shelter
they share defense and then when you
take the
catastrophe away and you fix it whether
it's the blitz in london or a hurricane
or
tornado or whatever it may be later
people often miss
the tough days because they miss being
communitarian and which is not communism
right like let's not
slide into a in into an inappropriate
political conversation i'm not talking
about communism i'm talking about
groups of people relying on each other
for survival and that you know it's very
very adaptive for people to enjoy that
because it works extremely well
and it makes people feel like they're
doing something meaningful and crucial
for those around them and that's an
intoxicating feeling so
so you just have to look at humans as
being sort of pulled in many different
directions each of which is adaptive in
a certain
kind of uh situation in evolutionary
terms
yeah that idea of meaning and purpose
and um you know get so my wife and i
could retire at any time
never need to work again but we're
working harder now than we've ever
worked and
when i'm trying to explain that to
people my thing is always
ultimately what you're looking for is a
sense of fulfillment which i'll call a
neurochemical state you want to feel
some kind of way about yourself about
your life
and what i realized thankfully very
early on in my life is that if i was
only doing things that benefited me
that didn't make me feel the way that i
wanted to feel i didn't feel alive
but once i started doing something that
served me for sure
but also put me in a social context and
allowed me to serve other people then i
had a sense of meaning and purpose then
i felt the way that i wanted to feel
and it's you know fulfillment is a far
more resilient emotion than happiness or
even fear like those things
sort of ebb and flow but when you're
like what i'm doing
matters what i'm doing is meaningful i
show up every day and i'm playing with
purpose
like that is that is very profound and
you know going back to your london blitz
example that's
utterly fascinating to me that people
going into mental institutions went
down during the blitz they thought they
were going to have some just massive
catastrophe of psychological damage
and they didn't that people would like
you said reflect back on those times and
say that they were positive
talk to me about what it means to be a
social primate
and why that would be true because that
seems so counterintuitive
uh why it's true that we're social
primates i mean we're we
know why it's why it's true that you
would so
to say it another way when somebody goes
to war
they don't usually have the ptsd during
war they have the ptsd when they come
back and are isolated
so what what is it about i think you
even
talked about a study where you can give
a rat ptsd or a mouse ptsd
but they won't develop those symptoms
unless you isolate them
yeah so um it seems that being
in a uh in a group buffers individuals
even mice
from uh psychological distress and
you know one of the tragedies of modern
society which we should just
immediately acknowledge comes with a
huge amount of good right i mean let's
not forget the
the laundry list of good things that
comes with modern society and the
affluence that we enjoy
our democratic rights our our you know
our system of government legislature and
and the courts and everything i mean you
know we have encodified a basic sort of
egalitarianism within our society that's
that's imperfect but but enormously
um an enormous blessing for everybody
right so
let's just acknowledge that but sort of
moving on what happens in an affluent
society
individuals need others less to survive
uh and so they're able to live more and
more individualistic lives
that are are more focused on their own
experience and less focused on the
experience of others it's less
communitarian it's more individualistic
which has huge advantages right but the
disadvantage
is that it makes people vulnerable to
psychological disorders the psychiatric
disorders
and so it there's a very close
correlation as wealth goes up in a
society
broadly um the rates of depression and
suicide tend to go up
and in poorer societies despite the
stresses of poverty
rates of depression and suicide tend to
go down
um likewise with ptsd life is traumatic
there's car accidents there's wars
there's
kids get hit by cars at intersections
there's houses collapsed and crushed
people you know whatever
i mean there's a lot of stuff bad a lot
of bad stuff happens in life in any
society right and it's all traumatizing
um with but what they found was that in
the poorer the society the
less um the lower the the the
level the the occurrence of ptsd and in
wealthier societies there were higher
levels of ptsd
from from a given trauma and um
there the the reason proposed by the
researchers
was that in poorer societies there's
like there's a lower expectation
of life that it's just assumed that life
is going to be
uh dangerous and hard and so when that
happens it's less of a
it's less of a shock right um what they
don't mention but i think is also
possible
is that in poorer societies are poor
societies are forced to be more
communitarian a sharing of resources
and time and collaboration and all that
um i mean there's
nothing lonelier than you know a wealthy
suburb or
you know you know those sort of well the
rich part of town is
nothing lonelier than those those
neighborhoods i grew up in one it's
gastly
in human terms it's gastly um and so in
those kinds of societies
um there is less group interaction and
so people are
are are not buffered from their trauma
by the proximity of others
every kid has their own bedroom every
family has their own house
you know neighborhoods are isolated
there's no sense of a broader community
within the town and
certainly not within the you know the
country or whatever like everyone's on
their own and that that's very very hard
for social primates
like humans god this stuff is so
fascinating to me you know it's so easy
to
think of yourself as a human and sort of
above it and you even quote in the book
uh that from the bible and i know you're
not religious nor am i but
in the bible it says god tests man so
that he will remember he's an animal or
something like that
um and it's so interesting when you
conceptualize us sort of pull us back
down to earth as
as a primate and begin to realize okay
i'm having this
um physiological experience
and when you can understand like what we
need to thrive like the fact that if you
isolate a human long enough their psyche
will break even as an adult like that
seems so weird
that you can kill a child just by not
touching them by not showing them any
love
they will actually die like that is so
strange and yet so potent to understand
and then it gets really messy and i want
to i want to go back to that because i
know you have a fascinating way that
you've raised your
raising your children but that
to confound it is that
you went on this journey that the book
is about
partly anyway where you guys are walking
the four of you by yourselves totally
isolated off and on for a year
and that there was like all this sort of
uh i don't think you ever use the word
healing that's me putting something on
it
um but that's interesting that there is
this sort of power to isolation to some
degree
and then this tribe commitment on the
other hand is incredibly healing
so interesting talk to me about how
you're raising your kids they're like
fact you guys sleep in the same room the
skin to skin contact when they were
infants like it's all really interesting
yeah so i mean just
just keep in mind that we're primates
and that um
baby primates cling to their mothers
because their sense of security and
safety
comes from you know they're totally
defenseless
right so they're not safe unless unless
they're with an adult unless they're
with their mother and that's also where
they get their sustenance
the heart rate of the of the mother uh
helps regulate
the the biological processes of the of
the
of the baby and they can feel the heart
rate from skin to skin contact
um so that's what baby primates need and
of course baby humans are baby primates
and so when you separate them from the
parent
uh and and from the mother specifically
you're
you're making the baby do something
that's completely
um non-human and non-mammalian
right i mean there is no mammalian
species that puts their young in a
different place and then goes off and
goes to sleep it's insane
there's no human didn't you say that's
quite recent
yeah the british invented it 200 years
ago like along with
most the rest of the stuff that feels
bad i mean it uh
and you know it's spread through the
british empire and that's sort of
supposedly the norm but most
for most of human history and still
today in most human societies
uh there's a huge amount of parent-child
physical contact
and and and people sleep in uh
in in collectively right families sleep
collectively and
um so i mean what we're doing is not i
mean it's
it i wish it weren't fascinating i wish
it were the norm because i think it's
it's certainly in keeping with all of
our evolutionary past until 200 years
ago but
um we we have a four-year-old and a
one-year one-and-a-half-year-old both
little girls
and we live in a very small new york
apartment we sleep on the ground and
on a pad so no one can roll out of bed
and
uh and we sleep and we sleep with the
kids and they you know they're they're
in physical contact with us the whole
night and so they never
um they never have sort of night frights
or almost never have certain night
fights and night terrorism we're not
locking them in some other in another
dark room like they sleep with us and
uh and you know we we we live on a walk
you know
a walk-up you know walk up without an
elevator and
and so you know we don't have strollers
or anything we just you know i carry the
girls
and you know that my oldest girl is what
she weighed 35 pounds and the
little one weighs 20 pounds and so one
goes on my shoulders and the other goes
in my chest and
you know what is that 55 60 pounds
something like that i mean i can walk
all day long with that kind of weight i
mean i'm
a fit person and every human should be
able to do that
and uh so and you get to feel your
children right there on you they're next
to you like a dog barks and like they
don't
they know they're on daddy and they're
safe you know and on some level that's
extremely important for young
for for you know what's called like
secure attachment to the parents you
know it comes from
physical physical contact and and uh
you know what i mean this is just a
segue to something else you mentioned
so part of the part of my book is an
account of this trip that i took with a
few other guys that
you know we'd all been in a lot of
contact uh a lot of combat
and we walked from washington dc to to
philadelphia to pittsburgh along the
railroad lines
um this sort of weird no-man's land and
we were sleeping under bridges and
abandoned buildings and drinking getting
our water out of creeks and
cooking over fires and you know we were
the only people every night we were the
only people who knew where we were
right definitely a form of freedom but
what we had was each other
right i mean that same trip done by
myself would have been absolutely
terrifying and miserable
we were doing it in a group in a pr in a
survival in a human survival group
of a few other you know there was four
of us we trusted each other
with each other's lives and because it
was a group experience it felt good
rather than scary
and just to wrap it up you know we were
carrying every we called it high-speed
vagrancy right we were moving 10 15 20
miles a day
it was totally illegal so we had to be
able to avoid the cops and everybody
else
and we were carrying everything we
needed you know we were carrying what 60
pounds on our back something like that
like you know so basically the same
weight that i carried from dc to philly
to pittsburgh
that's what my children weigh and so
that's how we move around and my
daughter's four and she likes to run and
walk and so now
now i just carry the little one unless
the big one gets tired and that's how
humans have done it
for 200 000 years right the stroller
wasn't
was invented you know what a couple
hundred years ago probably
yeah the the idea of walking and
um thinking might not quite be
the right word meditating maybe more
useful but the
the sort of ingrained you talked about
us as being these sort of ultimate
running machines but our ability to
traverse
long distances clearly would need to
bake its way into our dna
psychologically as much as physically
and i know
at least two of you guys were going
through some pretty heavy sort of life
changes at the time
was that part of what prompted the
desire to do that was it
did walking make that transition time
more useful
yeah so specifically two there was four
of us
two of us were getting divorced in the
middle of getting divorced so half the
group
right where it was four men we'd all
been in a lot of combat
half of us sorry about the sounds of new
york out there uh
half of i don't know if you can hear the
honking from the cars um
yeah yeah i'm so used to new york it's
all good so half of us were getting
divorced so first of all
no we didn't do the trip as a form of
therapy um we did the trip because we
wanted to encounter america
in this sort of weird way um and we
wanted to recreate
something about the sort of feeling of
combat where you're reliant on other
people
in in a in a complicated environment
where you have to be on your guard
and that's physically hard so the trip
was about that
and about encountering this country um
we we never i mean as it's sort of
extraordinary and
maybe this is a male thing i don't know
i'll leave that to others to decide but
the two guys who were getting divorced
never brought it up in 400 miles off and
on for a year
neither of us brought it up and the two
other guys
who knew we were getting divorced they
never brought it up either
it just was never mentioned for 400
miles
and the reason is because the trip was a
respite from that divorce is hard work
it's painful it's incredibly sad and i
had
about as good a divorce as you can have
i'm still good friends with my ex-wife
like
you know we're just totally blessed that
it went like that
and i'm very grateful to her but it was
you know incredibly sorrowful time and i
needed a break from feeling
bad right and the break that i found was
out there with my buddies
moving 10 or 15 miles a day it's hard it
sucked
it was cold it was hot it was everything
right
but we had each other and it was there
was something about the physical
exertion
and the challenge of avoiding the cops
and the small
sort of micro challenges of like cooking
dinner over fire getting clean drinking
water
and you know like sleeping in the
underbrush outside of like some suburban
home along the tracks and they never see
us
those challenges were just like a drug
they just
put us mentally in a different place
that was
in enormous in a weird way enormously
relaxing yeah that's interesting that
it seems like you've sought challenge
out a lot in your life
um i know some of your early jobs i mean
you're such a profoundly
um talented writer it's odd to think
that you used to
you know climb very high trees cut them
down with chainsaws
you know that you embedded yourself on
purpose in war zones
um what is it about that notion of
challenge of
sort of testing your metal that you find
interesting useful not sure what the
word
is well you know people have different
levels different thresholds of
where something goes from challenging to
unbearable
it goes from exciting to terrifying you
know we all have our different
thresholds
um but
i think for most people having our
skills tested
our resilience tested being presented
with with challenges that you have to
solve you have problems you have to
figure out
uh feels good and and again if you think
about it as an adaptive trait
um for humans if overcoming challenges
and solving problems
um feels good people will do more of it
and then suddenly you've invented the
bow and arrow or you whatever like it
the
the human capacity uh in part comes from
humans pushing the limits
and pushing limits can feel good up
until the point where it feels horrible
and so we're adapted to sort of
challenge ourselves because if we never
challenged ourselves
we would still be in the treetops like
like chimpanzees right i mean we would
not that's where evolution comes from
is testing new things and evolving
physically and psychologically to adapt
to them
um this huge change that came six
million years ago
as humans came down from the treetops
and started walking and walking upright
um it made us very vulnerable
right because we don't have claws we
don't have teeth we can't climb trees we
can't run that fast
uh compared to some predators but it
also gave us these incredible human
abilities that are still with us today
yeah it's really interesting to put this
into
a male context and i i know earlier you
you uh abdicated that uh
leaving it to other people but i'm super
curious to
know how much of what you've gone
through in terms of spending time
you know in war zones in terms of this
trip which was all men
how much of that do you think is is
uniquely male
and do you think at all about the sort
of dynamic
dance that happens between men and women
and you know is there
anything of of interest there for you
well yeah i mean the the the sexes are
clearly biologically
emotionally psychologically um
significantly different that said there
are individuals in both groups male and
female
that are much more like the the female
norm or the male norm in other words
there are individuals that are much more
like the norm of the opposite sex
than the norm of their own sex so when
you talk about
um when you generalize about groups
which is a completely legitimate thing
to do
i mean it's a bell curve where averages
right i mean you can say basketball
players are tall
it doesn't mean that tall people
that all tall people play basketball or
that some basketball players aren't
short
you're making a generalization it's a
completely legitimate thing to do but
you must remember that when you do that
you're talking about a group
average and implicit in the idea of a
group average is that some individuals
will
will be way outside that norm and in
fact adhere more to the group
average from some other group so there
are
um there are there are clearly sort of
tendencies and traits in each sex
and there is in every human society
there's a division of labor starting
with the most basic one which
is that only one sex can get pregnant
and give birth
which means that there are other tasks
that fall to men because they're not
running running the enormous risks and
and suffering the enormous
physical pain of of childbirth um
other tasks fall to men so
and then there is there are preferences
and tastes
that each sex is like slightly average
is slightly different for the two sexes
so so
all people value freedom and suffer its
loss
human i mean all humans male or female
it doesn't matter right the way that
people go about
preserving their freedom sometimes
breaks down
along gender lines because the sexes are
better adapted to different things
men are um are physically larger they
have more testosterone which is crucial
in running and in fighting and
weightlifting and a lot of physical
tasks
they have on average more upper body
strength they they have
quicker physical reflexes
they are more capable of picking out a
shape in a broken background like seeing
a lion in
foliage it just those things are
empirically true about men right which
makes them quite good at fighting
compared to women and so when you have a
a primordial group that is trying to
defend itself against an aggressor
most but not all of the people with the
the axes and the spears and the bows and
arrows are going to be male
right um but most but not all
it's really important to remember that
and so
in a in a closed society meaning
western a modern western country when
you try to change that society
towards what you believe to be a greater
degree of freedom
you're not necessarily trying to topple
the government you're not necessarily
trying to outrun the society and hide in
the mountains
you're trying to actually change it
right i mean the taliban were trying to
get rid of us they weren't trying to
change us
but within this society for example the
labor movement a hundred years ago
um you know these are very disempowered
people
often migrants to this country some many
didn't barely spoke english
they're working in the textile mills and
the steel mills
uh in new england and um they were up
against
the us government and corporate
interests and the national guard that
was sort of
stood at the you know it was at the
disposal
of the government and they won
right and one of the reason this is in
my the last third of the book is called
think
the way they did this was out thinking
their opponents
and uh for you know there's a couple of
commonalities to the groups that
manage to do this well one is that the
leadership has to be completely selfless
like you need leaders who will die for
you anything less than that is not a
leader
they're an opportunist and so if you had
in the labor movement if you had
leaders who were sort of literally
hiding behind other people when it got
dangerous
that that's not going to work right and
um
i looked at the easter rising in ireland
the the leaders
um at that time in 1916
that you know they were fighting the
british empire basically and the leaders
were incredibly courageous and there was
one
one leader named conley who you know his
aides kept trying to drag him out
you know back to cover you know during
gunfire because he kept wandering out
into the street trying to figure out
where to put the sandbags and you know
his aides were like please sir get you
know take cover you're going to get shot
right he got shot twice and then when
the when the uprising failed he was
um executed by firing squad by the
british incredibly brave man right
that's leadership
um i would say that most of our
political leadership uh
fails to rise to that standard even
anything close to it
um but the other the other the other
commonality to the to successful
underdog groups
is using women women are really really
interesting in this context
first of all the authorities are
reluctant uh more reluctant than with
men to use
mass violence against groups of women in
the street in public
for a variety of reasons and so what the
striker started to do
when confronted with national guard
troops with fixed bayonets
they started putting women on the front
line and these kids the national
you know the kids in the national guard
were like 18 19 years old
they're not going to start bayoneting
women right come on
that order will never work and so so
what happened was tactically on the
street the women
actually tipped the balance and one
very frustrated police captain at the
time in lawrence massachusetts said
one good cop can handle 10 men but it
takes 10 cops to
handle one woman the other advantage
that women have
um is that they they don't tend towards
vertical hierarchies they tend towards
lateral egalitarian networks
both are important neither is superior
or inferior to the other you need both
and men happen to be very good at
vertical hierarchies
the problem is if you take out the guy
at the top you risk taking out the
entire thing
right with women's lateral networks
there is no way to take out the
woman at the top because there is no top
it's lateral it's a spider web and so
it's very very hard for the authorities
to penetrate and monitor yeah i found
that really
interesting this idea that you could um
it was far easier to disrupt what the
guys were doing and so they stopped
passing information
amongst the guys if they were trying to
organize or rally people and they
started
not only putting the women on the front
lines but that they were using them
as like the information network to get
the times and places and everything out
there
yeah that to me is um it's utterly
fascinating when you
think about so the sort of raging debate
about
men v women to me isn't very interesting
to me they're of equal value they're
just
there are these fascinating differences
in the way that we each
operate um that i find so intriguing as
you put us back into a historical
or you know mammalian context and and
begin to see things that way
so so so intriguing um speaking of
men and women it is interesting to me
that you've done some
what i will call seriously manly
whether it is boxing
or embedding yourself uh you know or
walking
you know 400 miles of the country just
with some other dudes
that you have two daughters have they
changed at all
like your take on life in general
do you think it would be different if
you had two boys versus two girls
well i'm sure it would be different i
mean boys and girls by all accounts
act quite differently starting very very
early um
i mean there's there are tests i mean
not to like i hope i hope i'm not boring
people with
like arcane studies of
humans but um even by three months um
infant girls will baby girls will
are much more likely to look at a face
and
b and and infant boys are more likely to
look at movement
um track movement um and that that that
difference shows up
very very early on way before any kind
of socialization could have taken place
um it's really really interesting and if
you think of
you know that sort of classic
gender gender division of labor men
overwhelmingly in human societies are
the hunters and the warriors where
tracking movement would be very very
important
um and women overwhelmingly
do the majority of child care and
are completely reliant on on lateral
social networks
for collective child care and and
gathering i mean you know i mean
it's almost impossible for one person
male or female by themselves to raise
children it's incredibly hard right but
in a group all of a sudden it's doable
so those sort of lateral networks depend
on really
um subtle interpersonal relationships
where
noticing what the other person noticing
the other person's facial expression
which reveals how they're feeling is
enormously advantageous if you're going
to make
you know have maintain relations like
that
men in top-down hierarchies it doesn't
really matter how everyone's feeling
because
men are much more programmed programmed
to to sort of follow orders from an
alpha male
so i mean i know like in the platoon in
afghanistan
it was amazing this one guy said to me
he said you know it's amazing we
he said some some guys in the platoon
straight up hate each other but we'd all
die for each other
in other words the way they were all
feeling personally had nothing to do
with their level of commitment to the
group
right that's that's not a classic female
way of being um and they're powerful
powerful
advantages to both ways of being when
you put them together in a society then
that's a society
that's very adapted for survival um so
that said yes i have two young girls
because i'm i'm
male i think i have more to learn from
from women than from men from girls than
from boys i kind of know how boys
operate
i don't think i think it would have been
a profound joy to have a
son but it's an equally profound joy to
have daughters and i'm learning like
crazy
right i mean it's you know they're
different right and they bring out i
gotta say
they bring out something really
wonderful in me that i'm not sure boys
would have you know like i mean it's uh
it's and also i'm older i'm 59 right you
know if i had children at 29 maybe you'd
be different but i'm 59 i'm in a much
gentler place in my life
um and you know the the connection the
sense of connection emotional connection
and um just love that that i
that i have with my family like it's
just i mean it's the ultimate and i
would say it's the ultimate freedom
you know i'm i'm no longer focused on
myself
i'm focused on others in a very very
profound way and that's
you know in some ways being freed from
the uh
obsessive interest in oneself which is
adaptive when you're young
being freed from that is is is a pro
i mean that's you know maybe the final
stage of freedom where you're not
thinking about yourself anymore you then
you are really
truly released from from fears from
all kinds of sort of ego driven actions
like it's quite a profound state of
freedom
that is interesting and if anybody else
had said that i'd be like amazing and
that would be the end of that part of
the conversation
but in your oh god do you talk about in
the book i've now
intake i've taken in so much data from
you i forget where i picked everything
up
but going back to the near death
experience that you mentioned earlier
you said that there was a crippling
amount of fear as you were coming out of
that and realized you almost died and
left your kids
alone so it doesn't seem to me that
that's an end to all fear maybe a
different kind of fear i don't have kids
so you're gonna have to tell me but
um talk to me now in terms of that
near-death experience and your
relationship to fear and what that looks
like
well yeah i mean my fear was it wasn't
fear
precisely it was anguish uh wasn't the
fact
it wasn't over the fact that i myself
had almost died
it was that had i died i would have left
my children fatherless
it was about them right um
it wasn't the loss of myself that
tormented me i've i've
nearly died a number of times overseas
and it you know it gets your attention
but i wouldn't say it's
unduly tormenting what what is really
because there's no one else
yeah you know and my wife too of course
i mean you know like i mean
you know we're a family and my wife
would have suffered an incredible loss
as well
um but your peers are not quite
vulnerable in the same way that once
children are
and and the the confusion that they that
the eldest would have experienced
of having me disappear from her life at
age three in a
three and a half is so horrifying for me
to contemplate that she might have had
to go through that
like i just i can't even think about it
it's just too
it's too upsetting to me right so when i
you know when i when i woke up in the
icu the next day
i mean i'll rewind for a moment um so i
got to the
i had a aneurysm in my pancreatic artery
it ruptured
it was undiagnosed asymptomatic ruptured
without warning
within a few minutes i wasn't able to
stand up i'd lost so much blood into my
own abdomen
um about 10 minutes later i started to
go blind
the ambulance finally showed up
and it took another hour plus to get to
the the er
by the time i got to the er i i was down
to about 10
of my blood um i was almost flatlined
but i was conscious and um
they started to cut my neck open to put
a line into my
neck to try to get blood into me fast
enough to save my life
and uh the doctor asked for permission
to do that i said yes
i had no idea i was dying i mean i was
like why would you do that i mean in
case there's an emergency he was like
this is the emergency sir like we need
to do this so i had no idea i was dying
i was very confused and
uh then suddenly this black hole opened
up underneath me and i started to get
pulled down into it
um i didn't know i was dying but i did
not want to go into that hole
and with every fiber of my being i was
like i do not want to go down there
and just as i started getting pulled
down into it my father appeared my
father's dead
right and he appeared above me and
started sort of consoling me
and um the last thing i remember saying
what to the doctor was you got it you
got it you got to move fast you're
losing me right now
i knew i was going i could feel it i
didn't know where i was going but i knew
i was going
and uh that was a long
painful process after that that lasted
about eight hours
um and they finally found the leak in me
and plugged it
and stabilized me were you awake through
the whole thing
yeah yeah i mean i was in and out of
consciousness oh
i had no anesthesia they can't if your
vitals are that low they can't give you
anesthesia it will kill you
so i was waking up oh god yeah so i had
no anesthesia at all
and um and my kidneys were failing i
mean i was in agony and it went on for
eight hours
and uh um
so i you know eventually i they
eventually i survived
they i mean they were gene i mean the
doctors were just i mean they saved my
life straight up
like they were geniuses and um
they put a catheter in through a vein
and threaded it through and they
they did a catheter embolism that
blocked the they finally found the
ruptured artery and blocked it with a
catheter embolism you know they went in
through my groin you know but i'm
like conscious for all this right and
and uh oh my god
but they pulled it off and i survived
and the next day i woke up in the icu
and the the nurse the nurse said to me
um
it's a miracle you're alive like nobody
survives what you survived you're you're
you almost died yesterday and it's a
miracle
and i had no idea i had no idea that
there was a mirror i mean i had no idea
what had happened i just
you know appendicitis i mean whatever i
mean i didn't know what it was i had no
concept that i'd almost died
and um immediately what i was thinking
about was my little girls and what that
would have meant for them
um and then the nurse came back about an
hour later
and said how are you doing mr younger i
mean i was doing terribly i was throwing
i mean i was alive and i was throwing up
blood and i was in a huge amount of pain
and you know i was totally rattled by
this news and i said
i said well physically i'm okay but
honestly i'm really
tormented by what you told me it's
really upsetting and i almost died in my
own driveway in front of my family
like what do i do with that and she said
you know
it was so incredibly wise she said
don't think about it as something scary
think about it as something sacred
like you were a lot you were you brought
to the threshold of death and you got to
see what it looked like
and then you came back and you saw
something sacred
we're all headed there i mean she didn't
say all this but this is the sense i
made of it later
um right and uh you were privileged to
to be
to to see what you saw and to make it
back
and um and that gave me something as an
atheist i'm not religious my father's a
physicist
was a physicist that gave me something
to sort of like
it gave me a way of making some meaning
out of it rather than just a sort of
randomly terrifying thing that i barely
survived
were you tempted to give that a
religious meaning
no no it's interesting so i know you're
writing your next book or
you have said that you're writing your
next book about this incident
um as you explore that
how are are you going into the meaning
of it all are you going into the physics
of it all
well meaning is what we i mean meaning
is something we give to things
right so
sunset sunsets aren't beautiful right
they're beautiful to us they're just
sunsets right you know what i mean like
they're just
it's the earth rotating and the sun
disappears over the horizon that's all
that is it's not beautiful it's a
mechanical process it's a physical
process
right to us it's beautiful right and you
know likewise like
the meaning that we give to life and the
meaning that we give to death
it doesn't say anything really about the
nature of existence it says something
about
how we as humans create a place for
ourselves in the world
on this crazy planet we live on
so yeah i'll be talking about meaning
plenty but understand that it's not a
transcendent meaning that
encompasses something like universal
in existence it's something very
subjective that humans bring to the
table
to give themselves a sense of a sense of
purpose
purpose a sense of significance you know
in a universe that otherwise might
seem like a howling void that's
interesting
so as you
you've written so many fascinating books
on
like some of just the most profound
topics
what is it about this book and is
is the book specifically going to be
about near-death experiences or is it
going to be about
something else and what is it that draws
you to the thing that you're writing
about
well at this moment i think i'm going to
call it pulse
and it's going to be something along the
lines of
if it had a subtitle it'll be something
like
what keeps us alive and what it what
happens when we die
i'm really interested in the fact that a
very thin piece of
tissue ripped in my abdomen
and within minutes i was actively dying
right i mean it was an artery an artery
wall tore that's it
it's all that separates all of us from
eternity
right just something that is so thin you
almost can't measure it
and i want to understand how that works
and how did they save my life i mean
they pumped ten units of blood into my
neck
and they did it they pulled it off it's
extraordinary and then they threaded a
tube into my
vascular system and found use a
fluoroscope to figure out where the leak
was and they popped something that looks
like a pipe cleaner
into the end of it and then and it uh
blood coagulated around the pipe cleaner
and they pulled the tube out and now
like
you know it's plumbing basically right
it's really crazy plumbing
so i want to explain that but really
more deeply i want to
i i want to talk about what i think
about the fact that
we all are alive i want to talk a little
bit about
what it means to have some that
what the existence means what's it mean
that things exist that we exist
like seriously like think about we take
it for granted because if we didn't we
wouldn't be able to function
every day but just stop for a moment
just think how
mind-blowing it is that there's a
universe that exists and that we're
conscious in it to contemplate it
that's insane i mean really like um
and finally i had what's called a
near-death
experience an nde right and
the the dead ancestors showing up is
very very common
right and there are mechanisms that
explain hallucinations like that like
and endogenous ketamine or dmt
in the brain or low oxygen levels and
stuff like all all these mechanical
processes in the brain that
might explain hallucinations but
actually what they found
is that it's only in people that are
dying that they s
that they have some of those experiences
where they see dead ancestors who come
aid
to aid them or advise them or comfort
them right you can give a person dmt or
or ketamine and they don't see their
dead father
and i'm really curious about that and
i'm curious as as the son of a scientist
as a non-religious person like how does
that work and are we encountering
something
about existence in a physical sense
right that we just don't understand you
know something about death
that which is be we don't understand or
maybe it's beyond our understanding but
we're encountering a certain edge of it
um in those experiences
that's super interesting i can't wait to
read that um
i know that you said that the fear or
going through that experience
has sort of you know removed fear for
you
you've also said previously that you
have a pretty interesting relationship
with fear in terms of your ability to
to compartmentalize it and to have sort
of a functioning relationship i don't
did you develop that in in being in
these sort of war-torn places or was
that something else and and what is that
ability well when i was young i was i
was a distance runner and i was i was
pretty good and i was
i would all you know the you know
running the maya or the two-mile or
whatever was incredibly painful
and i would get very very anxious
beforehand very fearful
everybody did it's like before a boxing
match it's just horrible or
public speaking will do that to people
right
and so what you learned to do is to
compartmentalize it's
a kind of denial you're like okay i just
remove yourself
from experiencing that feeling of
anxiety and fear and and
it's essential for i mean
you couldn't live without that right
every time you went to the dentist you
would you would be incapacitated with
dread i mean you have to be able to
put that feeling somewhere else and um
so i got very good at that because i was
racing all the time and i just very
got very good at sort of like distancing
myself from what i was feeling
and um the uh
and then you know i was later in my 20s
i was a climber for tree companies and
some of it was really scary you know
i'd work 70 80 maybe 100 feet in the air
hanging on a rope with a with a chainsaw
running in my hand
taking the tree down in pieces sometimes
large pieces of tree above my head i'd
have to cut it right it would
fall on top of me and you know etc and
it was all you know
pretty scary right and and you have to
be able to like
separate yourself from your feeling of
fear you won't be able to do it
and you know when people say oh you know
men should get in touch with their
feelings it's like
yes and no i mean you know some feelings
that you get in touch with
prevent you from being for doing
something that needs to be done
like um that ability to
to to to create that ability and
emotional denial
is absolutely crucial when you're doing
something that is scary or horrifying
um and um so
uh i i got good and then when i was in
in war i likewise you know i'd be
about to do something that seemed like
it was going to be pretty scary and
dangerous and i just
there's i know the feeling there's just
like you get more and more anxious and
then i cross this line and i just feel
myself just turn to ice
i just like stopped down but
i just it's hard to explain i just go
dead and i don't care about anything
and um you know it's classic classic
process
i mean i'm very i mean a lot of people
do this and you know and it happens very
naturally if you go into shock if you if
you're attacked
if someone attacks you right on the
street and all of a sudden some guy's
coming at you with a knife or something
that's never happened to me but
you know people or if you're attacked by
a by a predator like a bear or a
mountain lion
people will say that it's not that scary
because they go into shock immediately
and they are actually removed from their
sense of fear the sense of terror
it's an adaptive mechanism and you can
learn to do it
to yourself when you have to do
something scary or unpleasant
and uh so i you know i'm i'm i'm not
exceptional this is it's just it's a
human
trait that's necessary i remember jaco
willing talking about
during his deployments he would i think
he had kids
even when he deployed and so he would
not keep photos of his wife and kids he
didn't want to constantly be reminded
to some extent he just had to like shut
that part of himself
off so that he could focus on what he
was doing
that makes total sense to me i mean
again i think i would have had a very
different experience
with my near you know
near death last year had i not had
children i mean it was
that that event in the context of having
children that made it
so um you know so anguishing
do you think that's part of why you
fought so hard not to go
into the pit that was opening up or you
would have always rejected that
i don't know i mean what you know we're
i mean i our our bodies are
are adapted you know we're wired to
survive your heart's going to keep
beating as long as it possibly can
i mean we're the product of millions of
years of evolution that kept individuals
alive as long as possible so um
but maybe unconsciously i mean i didn't
consciously know that i was dying and
i'm so glad that i didn't
because i would have been terrified and
anguished
um i can't even imagine going through
that knowing i was dying it would have
been
horrible um you know again mostly
because of my family
but maybe unconsciously you know maybe
if i didn't have children
i mean i gotta say having stood in that
having spent a little while in that
twilight zone between life and death
and come back with some memories of it
you know death was just like a half step
to the left i mean it was not a big deal
i mean when you finally get to that
place the final transition
is not a big one it's a small one and it
looks rather mundane it wasn't appealing
but it looked like a rather small step
and all you had to do is just all i had
to do
literally it felt like i just if i just
take one little step over to the left
that's it and um
maybe i didn't do that because i had
children and unconsciously i was hanging
on i don't know but i gotta say
they were shocked that i was conscious
enough to be talking
i mean i had ten percent of my blood my
pulse i can't believe that's possible
i know i i mean it needs me neither
right i mean my blood pressure was 60
over 40.
my hemoglobin count was 1.2 right you're
supposed to be at 15.00
1.2 hemoglobin is the stuff that moves
the oxygen around
right 1.2 like i mean i mean i googled
that you can't even find it
or you can hardly find it it's very rare
to survive that
and i was still talking to the guy right
and and to the doctor
i don't care i can't explain it and what
the doctor said is that you have an
athlete's heart you have a very strong
heart you have an athlete's body
and you know this you know he didn't say
this but in my mind like this was the
race i was
this is the race i did i was preparing
for my whole life it wasn't the chat you
know championship cross-country
division three cross country in 1984 at
wesleyan in connecticut
right it was this this was the
championship and i and i
and i did it like it's amazing
jesus dude so extraordinary i cannot
wait
uh for that next book but i have to say
freedom smash for me it was so
interesting um yeah you you are
a very profound voice in literature
uh it's yeah really really incredible
man i'm so grateful that you put it out
where can people connect with you follow
along as you
um you know promote freedom and beyond
that
yeah so if you go to my website
sebastianyounger.com and it's
j-u-n-g-e-r uh sebastian
younger dot com from there you can get
to facebook and twitter and all that
stuff i
i i i don't i don't really do social
media but i have some people helping me
with it right now
uh because the book is out and they're
doing a great job so
um and so everything you need to find
out is on my website
you can go to amazon or preferably your
local bookstore
which should be open now support your
local bookstore you can go or to amazon
or barnes noble
uh and or and order the book if it
interests you
love it guys i think it really will
interest you he doesn't tell you what to
think about it but he introduces these
just
really incredible ideas that are going
to make you think a long time after you
finish the book
which is very high praise indeed and
speaking of things that you will think
about long after they are over if you
haven't already be sure to subscribe and
until
next time my friends be legendary take
care
[Music]
you