Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiKtWUclJE8
[Music] good to see you man how are you uh really good very good to see you too yeah i see you're uh very prepared look at that yeah look at all those notes on those note cards yeah yeah serious stuff yeah we were talking before this there's so much to talk about but we were talking before and you were saying that uh over the last year you almost died because you had some crazy internal and uh you had an aneurysm in your pancreas is that where you said it was yeah i had an undiagnosed asymptomatic aneurysm which is a sort of ballooning in the blood vessel in the artery in my pancreatic artery and out of the blue it was a congenital thing like i apparently had developed during my whole life it um it was just from a structural problem and uh and one afternoon one beautiful june afternoon last year at burst and um you know i just felt this pain shoot through my stomach i was like damn what is that within a few minutes i couldn't stand up and within about 10 minutes i would start go blind and my wife called them the ambulance and those guys got there and and um you know i was tanking really fast and the hospital is an hour away and i said by a miracle i don't even think the doctors understand it but by a miracle i was still alive when i got to the hospital i lost 90 percent of my blood into my abdomen and i didn't know i was dying but i was dying and i was right in that sort of twilight zone and um the uh that a black pet opened up underneath me and i felt myself starting to get pulled down into it and i i didn't want to go like it was cold and dark and black and bottomless and i just knew like do not go down there i was getting pulled down into it and right at that moment my father who passed away in 2012 um my father sort of appeared next to me
and started trying to communicate trying to communicate with me and comforting me and um i um i sort of waved him away and the last thing i remember saying to the doctor i was sort of losing consciousness and the last thing i said to the doctor was you're losing me right now you got to hurry he was trying to put it he'd cut my neck open he was trying to put a line into my neck you know they pumped 10 10 units of blood into me and that's what brought me back it was really close wow um when you say you you felt like you're you were sinking into a pit like do you were you seeing this i mean you know your perceptions are very weird because i you know very little oxygen in the brain i had a hemoglobin count of 1.2 if you're a doctor you know what that is it's almost unheard of and so i just felt this pit underneath me and it was pulling me into it and i didn't want to go and you can see a pit like yeah i mean again c feel your perceptions are very weird when you're like that and then my father also was sort of floating above me he was a presence i don't know if seeing him is quite the word it's another perception wow yeah so coming out of that once you regained your health you must have had an incredible newfound appreciation for all the people in your life and just everything it was a long path you know i mean i'm a really healthy guy later the doctor said you know it was your you know i was a marathon runner when i was young and um i don't drink i'm i am athletic and i use my body pretty vigorously and he said that saved your life like you didn't have a heart attack like you you you owe your life to that wow but the next morning you know i didn't know that i'd almost died i had no idea i have two little girls i have a four year old and a one and a half year old and the most precious things to me i mean i can't even describe it
obviously and the fact that they almost lost their dad was just devastating when the icu nurse came in and said how are you doing mrs younger you're one lucky guy you almost died yesterday i had no idea and then she came back an hour later and um and she said how are you doing and i said you know physically and i was throwing up blood i was i'm not i was not doing very well physically but i said i was i said but you know i'm really struggling with what you told me and it's really terrifying i didn't know and i mean i said i almost died in my own driveway in front of my family and i didn't even know like and i said i keep thinking about it i can't stop and she said the wisest things one of the wisest things i've ever heard she said um she said stop thinking of that moment as scary and start thinking of it as sacred and she didn't elaborate she didn't need to in the next five days in the icu i thought about the word sacred and what the experience was now giving me access to and you know not to sound sort of like trite but um life is a freaking miracle and you know i'm not religious i you know whatever i i don't think any of us few of us i certainly didn't quite understand um what a miracle it is that we're alive that we exist that we draw breath that we can think about ourselves that we're here for even one day is a freaking miracle and you can forget that because your life gets busy and all of a sudden i feel like life was sort of returned to me meaning that i understood how sacred it is and um again i'm an atheist i don't mean sacred in a religious sense i mean in the sense that it's has a profound value and you mustn't mustn't forget it's so easy to lose sight of that when you're caught up in your bills or traffic or your [ __ ] and yeah there's so much so much of life that is
essential in in in order for you to just keep on existing in society but not really important yeah and you know we're humans we're i mean you know we're wired to react to things you know someone pisses you off or you're you're tired it's not that we shouldn't have those reactions those reactions also keep us alive i mean our emotional physical reactions are adaptive and they protect us right but at the end of the day you don't want them to run away with your experience of life you want to reclaim it and just go right you know all i have to do is go back to that moment of what happened in that driveway and that i was spared getting pulled into that pit that didn't happen and my daughters get to have a father i get to experience whatever the rest of my life is whatever it is who knows how long i'll live but i get i i that gift was returned to me um and i don't even know i don't even know who to say thank you to uh other than i've started giving blood 10 10 people 10 people donated blood and saved my life i'll never know who they are and that um you know it makes you part of this sort of web of life um in a way that it's you know when i gave blood for the first time you know like after this happened i gave blood and i made me feel so good uh and now i've i can't wait to do it again like you're i'm part of something bigger and and that's one of the most profound human joys is to be part of something greater than yourself that is a beautiful thing and a beautiful way to think about it and i think i'm fine if this is true maybe someone told me this is giving blood actually good for you i think your body having the opportunity to replenish its blood supply actually stimulates some aspects of your system yeah i can i mean i'm not a doctor but i can i mean not a doctor
i don't know if this is even true though i mean i'm it's one of those things where i'm like it's in a dusty corner of my brain i'm like what is that is that real or is that horseshit there's a lot of those things in my brain by the way benefits of donating blood side effects advantages and more side effects of donating blood donation health benefits of donating blood including good health and reduce risk of cancer hemochromatosis it helps in reducing the risk of damage to the liver in the pancreas donating donating blood may help in improving cardiovascular health and reducing obesity so yeah okay good i'm always worried about my [ __ ] memory so there you go i knew there was something there yeah yeah so it's good news actually good for people right for you to donate blood and good for you as well yeah so all right let's donate blood jamie and lower blood pressure what kind what do you got for uh what what kind of blood what type great question you don't know no he's how do you not know you're a [ __ ] grown ass man i know sebastian i know well i just found out a year ago i'll learn soon yeah that's awesome though um so this this experience um that how long did it take you before you were fully recovered well you know i had i had a you know gallon of blood in my abdomen and a gallon well whatever that amount of blood in your body get it out something like that they can't you know it's a hematoma and my body had to gradually reabsorb it so you know that takes months and uh and now i'm left with this sort of psychological residue of the experience which is i have this um uh you know renewed reinvigorated appreciation for life um but also the the truth about life is that none of us know for sure we're going to be alive at sunset you know i mean we all know you can get cancer or you can die at a car accident
or whatever but really the truth is the thing that we're we're alive because the tiniest membranes in your body are are are not rupturing you know what i mean like the system that your body is is like incredibly complex and if something goes wrong you can be dead in minutes and you can be totally healthy and that can happen and the fact that the universe can just randomly take you out for um no apparent reason um that's pretty startling news if you think about it i didn't know it worked that way and it can make you kind of paranoid did it make you paranoid no totally yeah i mean i just every day i was like i mean this is gradually going away but i just i realized like you don't know you just don't know that you're going to be alive in an hour from now and you're going running you're you're reading a book to your daughter or whatever having dinner with some friends and now i like an hour from now i could be dead or the guy i'm talking to could be dead and none of us know and none of us can do anything about it and that's just what life is we're we're living on a rock hurtling through the universe i mean we're we're part of the universe and we exist that it's um and it's mercy really were you afterwards contemplating what that pit was and what it means and what it means to slide into that and like you know i started to do a little research into the death i want to write a book about this i think i'm going to call it pulse ooh the thing that keeps us alive that's a good name and why we're alive and what happens when you die and i've just started doing some research into this and and the the the the visitation by dead ancestors is very common for people um and often um i mean there's all kinds of reasons that you might hallucinate when your brain's low on oxygen but i you know i didn't hallucinate anyone in my family i didn't lose i hallucinated my dead father right
and that's very very common and i didn't know i was dying so it's not like i conjured him up because i knew i was headed somewhere uh i was very confused and there he was trying to comfort me and that's a really common experience so i looked into it and so they have they have all these you know release of ketamine and all like they have all these dmt and they have all these sort of neurochemical explanations for the subjective experience of dying for the person and we only know this because people come back like i do and report what they saw and it's usually pretty weird but it's pretty weird in predictable ways like a lot of people see the dead it's as if they show up to help and i want to repeat i'm an atheist i'm not religious i don't believe in anything my dad was a physicist so i want to sort of explain what happens in ways that he would respect scientifically and so one of the things they said is that you can take low oxygen ketamine all these things that physically could happen in the brain you can you can subject a a healthy person to those things and they don't have the same kinds of hallucinations those hallucinations are particular only to the dying and i want to know i want to try to figure out what is going on in that weird twilight space you should um you should see if someone will do a therapeutic dmt trip with you i've heard about that yeah yeah they'll do it um you know it's they were doing it out of uh university of new mexico uh rick strossman was um doing it and he he had full federal approval for these studies and there was a book called uh dmt the spirit molecule that he wrote about the the experience of taking these people and doing an iv drip dimethyl trip to me but they all had these insanely profound experiences that stayed with them for you know depending on the person but for long periods of time afterwards and
profoundly changed their lives well an endogenous form of dmt is released in the brain of dying people yeah maybe he wrote about that but he they speculated on it he said what the problem was for the longest time is uh the pineal gland and the pineal gland is uh what you know ancients used to call the seed of the soul and it's this small gland that they think in in reptiles it actually has a retina and a cornea and i think even a lens it literally is a third eye yeah google that i think the pineal gland in reptiles has it definitely has a retina i believe and i think it has a lens but it's like the third eye the concept of the third eye it actually is an eye in some strange way and it also just recently they confirmed here we go the pineal complex of reptiles is a more morphologically and functionally connected set of organs it originates in an evangenation of angination of vagination of the roof of the oh boy it's formed by two structures the pineal organ and the uh paredial eye paritial pareto pareto parietal parietal yeah uh both the pineal gland and the parietal eye are photosensitive yeah it acts go there which reptile has a third eye click that um so there literally are re well anyway point is this has always been thought of as the third eye if you look at you know eastern mysticism and whenever people are enlightened or depicted they're depicted with that third eye and this organ the cottonwood research foundation was the first group that uh they actually discovered that for sure the pineal gland does produce dmt in living rats because before they knew that it was produced by the liver and the lungs and there was a lot of anecdotal evidence that pointed to the pineal gland but they couldn't prove it because you'd have to actually cut into someone's head there was a lot of problems just based on the
you know the structure of the brain and getting in there but through through this cottonwood research foundation which was working on different dmt studies so they don't know why and they don't know what it is but they think that this is also responsible for dreams right they think it's responsible for some of the insane visuals and weird things you experience in dreams but they also the really spiritual the the people that are like willing to go way out on the limb right think it's a chemical doorway to the afterlife well let me tell you um i mean that's that's a pretty stunning thought and we we all i mean i'm not a mystic but also we all need to be humble about what we know and don't know and we have no idea what there is after death and i mean we might not even be able to be capable of understanding it with the brains that we have you know so maybe that's why we keep bumping into the unknowable because it's just unknowable to us at any rate let me tell you that two nights before i almost died i um you know i had a pain in my abdomen for a year that i ignored and i'm come back was a pain um you know it was i could tolerate it which to me meant okay well if you can bear it then it's not going to kill you you know what i mean probably ended with being a tough guy and the other the corollary to that is if you can't bear it you should learn to bear it because you know what i mean like so toughness will kill you if it doesn't save you it will kill you and um so it just sort of came and went right in the area where the bleed happened and uh but i ignored it and ignored it and then it kind of stopped happening for a month or so and i had a dream right around dawn and my family and i we all sleep in the same same place not even a bed it's a you know like pat on the floor and uh so i woke up i was woken up around 6 a.m by this stream and the dream was that i died and i died unnecessarily
i died i made a mistake i just screwed up and i'd crossed over and now i'm dead and i'm looking back at my family and they're grieving and they're my family that i love more than anything more than i could imagine loving something i love them you know and i can't go back because i've crossed over and i'm i'm just thinking you stupid [ __ ] you you screwed up and now you're dead and there's nothing you can do about it and i woke up with a start oh thank god i'm not dead i'm alive and here's my my daughter was right next to me i put my arm around her is like oh thank god about 36 hours later i was dying wow yeah do you think that that was your body trying to tell you hey man this shit's about to blow listen i mean for a year my body tried to tell me with pain that something was wrong and i ignored it and then 36 hours left to go it sent me a dream and on the morning of the um on the morning of the day that it happened you know i i l we live in a i live partly and we live partly in new york city and partly in a really remote area at the end of a long dead-end dirt road in the woods and it gets overgrown right and the fire department said listen you got to clear that because we can't get trucks in there you're going to have to clear that dirt road you know it's a small town everyone knows each other it's like listen clear that stuff and that morning you know i'd been meaning to do this for two years right i was an arborist for a long time i know i've used chainsaws my whole life like i do all that work myself and i i've been meaning to do it for two years and and that morning i was like i got to clear that damn driveway and i took my chainsaw and i took a few hours and i cleared the whole length there's a long dirt driveway through the woods i cleared the whole thing so emergency vehicles could get in and a few hours like three hours later i was dying so imagine if you didn't do that well exactly right and so the thing is like the
the body i think can communicate with the unconscious mind and then the unconscious minds tries to communicate with the conscious mind but your conscious mind's a freaking idiot right and it doesn't take little hints it doesn't take clues bomb it with pain it ignores it you know bomb it with dreams it was like wow that was weird but at the end of the day your body's trying to keep you alive and it sent me out there with a chainsaw and i don't you know i i i'm actively avoidant of mystical explanations for things but i honestly don't know how to explain any of this and my i'm going to try to with my book pulse like my whole life as a journalist i've gone to front lines in wars in foreign countries and come back and reported what i saw there right and this is the ultimate front line it's that twilight place between life and death and i was privileged that i could go there and come back i made it back and i want to report what i saw wow i want to read it it's uh it's the thing that we all wonder what is this is this a a pit stop or is this the life you know is the life a never-ending infinite experience that goes on forever in many forms or is it just this or is this a thing that you do over and over and over again until you get it right i had that conversation with a friend of mine once and they were really really bummed out about it and i said if this is life if the life that that we all live like right now just you have to do this over and over again for infinity until you get it right they're like oh [ __ ] that i don't want to keep doing this i'm like but wait a minute don't you want to do this right now because i want to do this right now i love life i have great friends i love my family i love what i do for a living i'm enjoying life why wouldn't i want to keep doing this because if you told me i was going to die tomorrow i'd be like [ __ ] not yet i have too much to do but
if you told me i have to do this forever i'd be like oh my god that's forever that's so long why why what is what is this is it the concept of infinity or infinite time is so enormous it's impossible for our puny little brains to grasp so we just we think of it as like a run that you can never end or an exercise program that's just going to drag you in into the depths of hell you're never going to get out of it what is it that bothers us about the idea of living this life forever and ever that's a good question uh i mean for a lot of people life is painful and it may just be that they don't want to go through that their whole life but my friends doesn't have a painful life yeah okay well right that's fine he's a comedian he's fun i i hear the comedians are the most in the most pain and they deal with it through comedy don't believe that no no there's uh there's a lot of mental illness right strong mental illness lines you know that's like probably the underlying if there's like one primary factor mental illness is a big one it's usually from traumatic childhood yeah right yeah but overall you know fairly resilient because of the fact they have to deal with adversity constantly most people don't deal with the kind of adversity that you deal with when you're bombing or you go on stage and you're dealing with hecklers and stuff you're dealing with it's a different level of adversity they're that the in the the adage of like you know the the tears of a clown like that is really they're really depressed and on stage the only place to get to be like not really true either you get us together when we're around our people yeah pretty fun i bet we have a good time i vet that's that's awesome to hear i'm glad to hear that there's a tremendous amount of camaraderie in the comedy community right right because not that many of us just maybe right on earth like i don't know a thousand
i mean i don't know maybe in other countries i miss it but i can tell you in america in america there might be legitimately a thousand professional comedians out of those 1 000 maybe 500 of them are good right so i might even be overestimating there like in terms of like who can make a living on the road and it's not that many of us i just watched on youtube the beginning of good morning vietnam wow yeah just sheer genius yeah you know i know he you know i i know he was a he was in a lot of pain i mean he like he suffered right i mean he had like some serious physical problems you know he had louis body syndrome no i didn't he had a heart attack and then um a friend of mine is a doctor actually wrote a paper uh about the effects of long-term uh anesthesia when when someone's put under for a long period of time for like a heart attack right things like that often times depression follows yes yeah yeah and he was talking about that in terms of the uh impact on your endocrine system so he was writing about that and he was saying that there could have been a co he was a robin williams fan as well and he was saying that probably could have been a correlation between robin williams going through that heart attack right having open heart surgery and then depression following afterwards then there was the louis body syndrome and then all this uh medication they had to take which also had profound side effects i um i lost a very dear friend who was the funniest man that i knew and pretty much i think the funniest person on the planet you know he just wasn't a professional comedian but he you know he had a long long illness uh and and some serious mental instability and he took his own life and um you know it just he you know he was the most brilliant among us you know what i mean and so the
you guys you comedians there must be every once in a while like a real tragedy to process that must be very hard yeah i mean like it's it's not that common that comedians take their own lives i mean it does happen with rob and robin was a big one for a lot of people because he was he was not just a comedian he was like a cultural icon in terms of like his films you think all the different movies like i was in and he had such a range too that's what you like to me when you know how brilliant a person really is like do you remember that film that he did about the uh crazy uh film processing guy it was like 24-hour film remember those little film booths photo booths that people would go to back in the old days you youngsters we would have a camera and the camera would have film in it and you'd have to bring the film to a place for processing and robin williams did a film about a guy who was a psychopath who was obsessed with someone from processing their picture one hour photo that's what it was nice it was [ __ ] great and you just from that film you realized the range this man had right right you know i mean from goodwill hunting from you know so many different yeah he was he's a genius yeah yeah and the human race is so lucky to have geniuses in it you know what i mean like we all feed off them yeah we do we get we they elevate us and it costs them sometimes but we all need we need those people you know yeah to be a guy like that to be just dealing with the kind of rpms he was dealing with yeah you know like it he would spit out his amazing works but you know just a cost on himself you know good good morning vietnam in the in the initials you know a few minutes like it's pretty clear that it wasn't scripted because the p you know there's this like kid in the control booth i mean the conceit is that
as a it's a military dj a radio announcer during vietnam right and and uh the military command didn't really like him because he was saying things that were sort of like not not sufficiently sort of respectful of the war or whatever but of course the troops loved him he was a real guy right and so robin williams it was pretty clear if you watch the beginning it's worth watching it that he that it wasn't scripted because the kid in the in the sound booth behind him you could watch him react to this like three minute like the outpouring from robin williams where he's like channeling different people and it's all coming out it's totally insane yeah and this kid can't even stand up he's laughing so hard i'm like that's not acting right that's a guy yes he actually has had no idea this was coming right right right it's amazing yeah i met him only once and i met him after one of my shows i didn't know i was talking to him until a couple minutes into the conversation hit a crazy big white beard and he waited in line with everybody else to meet me and uh i was talking to him when he was telling me i was telling oh i love this bit i love that and i love how you put that together i was like oh thanks man thanks i'm like holy [ __ ] this is robin williams i didn't know i literally had no idea until like several minutes into our conversation he must have loved that that was pretty cool man that's very cool it was cool that you know he first of all was cool that he just went to the show by himself right you know he decided he wanted to come see me maybe somebody told him i was funny and he came to and then he waited in line to meet me and then wanted to talk about individual bits and how he loved how i put this one together and that one it was crazy it was like i realized in the middle of it i'm like oh my god that's awesome it was it was was pretty wild but that just shows you what kind of
thoughtful person he was you know he wasn't into being seen in fact he had a baseball hat on and glasses and his crazy big white bushy beard couldn't even recognize him he's snuck around i mean i think i think prominent people have even more of a duty to be humble than people that aren't prominent i mean the burden is even more on them yeah for sure right it's part of the responsibility of this unusual position it's like it is you you need to be in that sense you need to be an example yeah if you can absolutely absolutely do your best yeah yeah absolutely yeah i think just for his mental health i think was probably important too i mean the the amount of fame that that guy experienced for the amount of decades that he had experienced that's a it's a crazy intoxicant it's not healthy you know right right um you know i mean there's something i write about a little bit in freedom um i mean i will be talking about that later but just to sort of mention it like real leadership real leadership is someone who is willing to sort of put put their put themselves last you know and you can see it in the military like i would i was watching this one officer lieutenant piosa and we were in a very bad situation and he stood up in this situation it was hard to imagine doing that and he stood up because he needed to know where everyone was on the side of the mountain and we were about to get absolutely hammered and um and the sergeant said sir please sit down it's our job to get shot at it's your job to stay alive and direct this [ __ ] show right and that's real leadership um there was a um a leader during the easter rising in ireland that i write about and that the head of the whole easter rising in dublin the head of the whole thing i mean the general petraeus of the irish rebels
um would go out into gunfire in the street to figure out where to put the positions and the guns and the sandbags and everything with bullet smack and all around him he was ahead of the whole damn thing and it's like aids were like sir please take cover we need you and he would you know wouldn't do it that's that's real leadership and that and and that can be a military leader it can be a comedian who's beloved by people like if you if you make yourself one of everyone else then you're really really a leader make yourself one of everyone else like when you use your position of power to protect yourself to insulate yourself from things that everyone else is going through you're actually not a leader you're an opportunist mmm that's interesting so how would you guide one to do that how would you guide one to to be a leader in that situation you know i think there are people that have that in them and people that don't and i think there are people who want leadership positions because it gives them opportunity um i think there are people that are um a cowards that wind up in leadership positions you know and they're not then they're not going to do that they're going to protect themselves and that you know in western society we have huge margins between where we are and survival right huge margins so we can have bad leadership that's sort of like opportunistic and self-serving and it doesn't matter we're going to muddle along okay but the easter rising couldn't afford to do that um and so when someone like robin williams comes along and does not privilege himself in a comedy club and just is like everyone else i'm like i really tip my hat to that like that that's real grace and dignity yeah i do as well in this way you're describing leadership like i think this is what everybody wishes we could recognize in our political leaders like we wish there was a shining example and i think if there was one in the past election it was tulsi
gabbard because you're talking about a woman who had served overseas twice in medical units had literally worked with people who had been shot and blown up and had served as a congresswoman for six years or i guess eight years at the end so she really was an example of that but other than that you saw just a lot of more of the same and it was really frustrating for people so they had to pick a horse and they had to pick a horse that they weren't exactly excited about right and that's that's what led us to what we have in the white house currently it's not it's like this fake excitement about this supposed leader that doesn't really exhibit any of these characteristics that we would be hoping to see when someone was running the show well you know i think the the the willingness to tell the truth as a political leader even if it puts you in disfavor with your own party is a a strong indicator of moral courage and you know both parties i think have a deficit of that and um i you know i mean i'm a registered democrat you know i've whatever it's not that it really matters but just just to be like in the open about it but i think you know that you know liz cheney i mean she's possibly destroyed her political future i don't know and i i i don't know what the truth about anything is but the fact that she's willing to go against the sort of republican orthodoxy to me means that she's putting what she believes to be the truth ahead of her own political uh future i'm not totally aware of what's going on can you explain that oh she uh yeah so she's been calling out um the um the january 6 uprising and calling out the sort of big lie the election was stolen right and you know the entire republican leadership has has acknowledged that it was a free and fair election and then there's been a lot of sort of hemming and hawing and liz cheney's like look
the democracy is more important than either political party the country's more important than either political party and we um the country will will collapse if we if we keep feeding lies to it and this is a really dangerous lie and so she's she's like i mean i don't know where you are politically it doesn't matter to me none of this matters really other than to point out that she was saying something that she was gravely punished for and she did it knowing she would be punished for it and she did it anyway because she really believed in something and you know this example is on the left as well of that and that to me is like that's leadership it's putting what you believe to be the welfare of the group ahead of your own personal interests and that is what i would look for in a leader yeah and that's what it's i just think by the time someone gets to the position that they're going to run for president you've already been compromised yeah you've already gotten through all the checks and balances they've laid in place to make sure that you represent the interests of the special interest groups and all the powerful lobbyists and corporations and everybody who's gotten you to the position you're at well right i mean the gop you like yanked liz from her position from her role right so she does not have the establishment behind her and without that you're never going to be president i don't know if she wants to be but is it because they want to keep that narrative out there that the election was stolen or is it because they don't want to take credit or take responsibility for the capitol hill riot i i think it's a mix of things i mean they're i mean honestly they're in a really tough place and i think it's a tough place of their own devising but they're in a tough place like something like 70 percent of republican voters think the election was stolen is that real yeah 70 7-0 right so
so what you're not gonna what are you gonna do with that politically like if so and then someone like liz cheney comes along and sort of calls out the lie and um that's a very tough position for the gop to be in and i think in the short term it was probably a a um disreputable but smart move politically in the long term i don't think is a good move i think at the end of the day truth wins out and it will catch up with them um you know as if things have caught up with their democrats as well you know when they say that 70 think that is this just based on a narrative or is it based on something they believe in in terms of like they think there's an actual like event that took place or a series of events that took place that stole the election or is it just a narrative that gets out there like the lib stole the election you know that kind of [ __ ] i mean i don't know if poll takers can make distinguish that i mean i don't know how you would phrase the question to to sort of split that like what makes you i would like just that that answer or even a multiple choice what makes you think the election was stolen right i mean i think a lot of it is just sort of uh what's called virtue signaling like i will say the election stolen because that means i am part of the current sort of conservative ethos yeah i'm part of the tribe right and so they might not even personally themselves think it was literally stolen but that kind of mythic truth can be more powerful politically than the than the literal truth and people go with it we're humans we're emotional creatures so yeah we love being tribal right right so i think there's a lot of tribalism there but nevertheless you know people are saying the election was stolen 70 of the gop is saying it was stolen so that's a that's a tough that's a tough demographic to to go up against if you're a republican politician who wants to get elected like
what are you going to do with that you're going to kind of have to go along with it well conceivably what you would say is we have to try to steal it next time that's where it gets really scary if you believe if you really believe that the other side is cheating and you say well we have to cheat because we have to win this back because we were the right rightful winners of the 2020 election and they they stole it from us right i think it could get real squirrely oh totally and then you you know you get i mean as i said i'm a democrat but so you know so i'm particularly harsh with wrongdoing by my people right and some of the you know sort of far lefty fringe woke stuff is really scary to me you know like and i feel like they're uh they're a direct equivalent of the of the crazies on the far right like they kind of they're sort of the mirror image of each other and um oh you might like this actually i thought i was like there's there's mega we know the word mega there should be a word for the sort of the mirror image of that on the left like what is it and i came up with wagga woke america gets angry right and right and the thing about them is i mean there was much smaller percentage of the democratic vote but it's the same kind of channeled thinking like on both sides the extremes feel like they personally own the truth and that they can dictate what this country should be yes right and they sort of poison the like well of of public discourse by by rejecting any legitimacy to the other side yes you know and that public discourse is the only thing at the end of the day that's going to keep this country together and save us and it's like we all get most the vast majority of people that voted for trump or voted for biden are good righteous decent people we need clean water to drink in in our public discourse like we get thirsty we need to drink out of that well and they've
the extremes on both sides have poisoned it yeah and i feel like if we if we were all in a big life raft and someone poisoned the water we would throw them overboard and at some point this country is going to have to do that with the politically speaking with the extremists on both sides because they're basically rejecting the idea that we can all get along i couldn't agree more and i think it highlights some of the problems with communicating in text form over the internet and social media websites because a lot of what these people have whether it's the q and on people or the woke people you have extremely low status people who want to import impart some control on other people they want to get other people to listen to them they want to get other people to to comply with whatever rules they're setting forward they want to enact change they want to grab power again whether it's the people that storm the capitol hill or the the the woksters it's the same kind of mentality it's just they've adopted different ideologies but it's almost all low-status people who have sought new meaning and virtue out of this form of control attacking the left or attacking the right or attacking what they perceive to be outside of the boundaries of the accepted ideology that they like to enforce on everyone else totally and they and you know you can tell it's not a a good faith effort because they will no no good faith actor will tell you how you have to think exactly right though you know they will they will make do give you their best pitch they'll hope that you come to their to their way of thinking but when you're told and this is one of the things i don't like about religion when you're told i mean organized established religion when you're told you have to think like this and if you don't think like this you are satan's spawn or you are an enemy of the country
or you're a racist or you're this or that when you're told how to think and speak or you're unworthy of being part of this community that's how you know that that person does not mean the country well yeah i think you just nailed it i think that's exactly what's missing in uh both sides the far left and the far right and a big part of that is one of the core tenets of being a human being which is compassion compassion and empathy both of those sides with the far right people who want death to the far left and the far left people want the far right to be ostracized it's the same thing it's like there's a complete lack of empathy and a complete unwillingness to accept that the other side are just human beings with differing opinions and maybe there's some common ground we all have common ground especially people with children right your common ground is you want the world to be a safer place for these delicate little creatures that you love more than anything in life itself yeah that's right and i you know my fear is that i mean i feel like right now this sort of radical voice is now um is now speaking for a large proportion of the gop politically i mean that seventy percent figure is like pretty amazing it's pretty alarming right my fear is that that will happen on the left i mean whatever you think about joe biden he's not like that kind of liberal radical but that way of thinking that woke way of thinking god forbid that completely take over the democrats because he's complying with it though i don't think he thinks that way but i think he thinks it's a good political strategy to get the really aggressive radicals on the left to go along with them the the perceived progressive like the extreme end of it like the like the tribe right like you know aoc and those type of people that really want a much more progressive much more uh socialist socialized medicine social you know it's
a different strategy in terms of like control of the left right and he's complying with that i think to try to get a little bit of their their base well i mean listen i mean every politician has to somehow collect as much of the caucus as possible under one tent and so if you completely ignore that voice of course you're creating a splinter group that could be really dangerous to the party and the country so i i think he you know more or less you know he's to me he's a pretty centrist democrat like well one of the first things he did in office though was make it so that biological girls had to compete against trans girls in sports right i got i was so horrified by that i actually thought that's i mean i'm a former athlete right and and and um i i just like the the the role of of um hormones i mean you know more about this than me but the role of hormones and athletics of testosterone is so dominant and i mean that's why at 59 i'm not the runner i was at 20. yeah i used to have lower testosterone right and and what that could do to girls supports to me seems like really really puzzling like are you sure you want to do that it's just ideologically driven it's not driven by science it's not driven by logic it's certainly not driven by compassion for biological women it's it's driven by what you would call the oppression spectrum right right like who's at the highest end of the oppression spectrum trans people maybe uh interracial trans people would like maybe black trans people would trump that like what what is the top perceived most oppressed everyone else has to sort of capitulate everyone else has to sort of like figure out a way to comply with whatever rules are going to benefit them biological women are clearly not going to benefit from trans girls competing in girls sports they're just not it's not good for them
and if you think it is good for them then i i get how you would want it to be inclusive and you would want everyone to just feel fully accepted but we have to look at sports as a different thing there's a reason why boys don't compete against girls right right you know what one thing that helps for me when i think about any kind of conflict or disagreement is to start out assuming that the other person or the other group that appears to be proposing something outrageous just start with the assumption they're trying to achieve something good and they're doing it through means that you don't think will work right and i do that with the right wing i you know you i mean i can you know i could look at a bunch of policies that that still came in under trump and think oh my god that just seems cruel or that seems this or that the border stuff i mean there's so many things life's co the world's complicated right the solutions are complicated and messy and and and imperfect but i really tried to think okay so are they are they just evil or are they trying to achieve a good thing by means that i don't quite understand or agree with and i would say that about the the gender issues like some of it makes no sense to me uh i mean look i'm an older white guy i'm in a really lucky place in the world you know and i mean people will tell me that right so i'm not even really going to judge but i but what i would say is what are they trying to achieve that's good that we can maybe achieve without other girls paying a price in athletics and maybe it's not possible i don't think it's possible right now because i think right now we have to wait until the water hits the wall before it pushes back right because right now the water's about to hit the wall in the olympics
because they are allowing this woman who was a elite male power lifter who transitioned over to female and now is going to compete in the olympics i think for new zealand i think that's the australia or new zealand i forget which but uh everyone's kind of freaking out about this because this this person is just gonna dominate right right especially in things like powerlifting where there's so many advantages to being male you know i looked at that in my in my book freedom so one of the things that i say in my book is that you know there's like three ways of maintaining your freedom your autonomy in the face of a greater power and one of them is literally running like staying so mobile that the heavier like the heavier entity they have the bigger guy the bigger the empire just cannot like find you and that was what the apache did in the southwest so at any rate i looked at the difference between male and female world records in running events compared to weight events and the difference if i'm remembering correctly the difference in running was about 11 percent in other words women were much closer to me that the top the top female runners were much closer to the top male runners than in the weight events that the split was like 30 or 50 and so what i sort of hypothesized in my book is that it was more adaptive to have women be able to keep up with the men while they were trying to avoid a threat than to be of equal strength to the men to share in the fight if they couldn't outrun it that there was more adaptive to be mobile than to be big and strong and it's a really interesting difference and the other the other interesting thing about that is that you as you increase body size um if you double body weight you don't double strength right so if you go from 150 pounds to
300 pounds the amount you bench press press doesn't double which is really interesting in other words but depending upon what see because you could double your bench press if you don't lift weights like if you don't lift weights and you weigh 150 pounds and of course bench 150. you could get up to 300 pounds in a few years oh of course but if you look at the world records for those weights right i see what you're saying if you look at the world records the 150 pound man can bench about two-thirds of the weight of a 300-pound man so the 300-pound man is stronger for sure he's he's definitely stronger but he has doubled his body weight right which means that he's a lot less mobile right and he burns through a lot more oxygen in a fight or in anything so there's this interesting negative payoff for for being stronger which is that you're you burn through less oxygen so if you don't win a fight in the first minutes right you're now struggling in terms of oxygen debt compared to the guy who weighs less than you and there's a sort of sweet spot where you're smaller and have an oxygen saving but you're not completely dominated physically there's a sort of sweet spot where you being a little bit smaller is actually a sort of tactical advantage in a fight and and so i looked at i looked at all that and and the it it made total sense because humans are the pretty much the only mammal we're a smaller a smaller combatant can defeat a larger one you know in chimpanzees the smaller chimpanzee loses the alpha male right humans that's not true the smaller individual can win and wins about 50 of the time i i um i called espn and they're amazing they they gave me a statistician who looked at all this stuff right and he and and he said yeah the the larger that size is not a predictor of yeah but in what sport boxing no mma
in mma yeah really that's what he said that doesn't make sense because there's weight glasses and on top of that in the heavyweight division the scariest guy is the biggest guy the scariest guy is francis ingano right i mean if you have if you cut weight to make the 265 pound weight limit right i mean with it you know if you i mean there are limits of course so if you have a guy's much much stronger and you're in an enclosed space i mean look if you and i had a fight in a phone booth you're going to win right like if we had a fight in the field i would run away until you were i ran a 412 mile i'm gonna outrun you right and when you're really exhausted i'm gonna turn around right like that would be that would be the tactic of the smaller the smaller adversary and it's and it scales up uh so if there's too big a difference and you're in an octagon there isn't a lot of room to move around eventually weight and strength will dominate but it doesn't always i know what you're saying it's like there is there's a borderline like for instance there's a guy uh his name is israel adasana he's the usc middleweight you know yeah of course stylebrender is in my opinion one of the most impressive and most interesting fighters and he's so [ __ ] smart and one of the reasons why he's so interesting is how smart he is he was facing this guy paulo costa who's this just behemoth of a man just supremely muscled looks like an adonis he looks like a superhero and stylebender although he's you know he's obviously very impressive he doesn't look like that and he doesn't have like this kind of same one strike knockout power but he said look everybody has power i have precision and i'm gonna [ __ ] this guy up and he said just watch and in the fight he did and he did it by not hitting him as hard but hitting him much more than he could hit him
right yeah and it's more technique right and you know as you as you as you use up oxygen your movements get slower and less precise right and yeah it takes less effort to slip a punch than to punch right so if a guy if i if the big dude tries to punch you 10 times in a row and you slip all of them right he's going to be tired he's going to be exhausted so so i looked at i mean this is really interesting so i looked at reaction time right so they did a test with muhammad ali back in the late 60s or something like that any sort of it is in his heyday and early 70s something like that and so they they they put up a balsa wood board in front of them and they had some crazy camera timer thing right and they said okay hit the board with a jab right when you see the light flash so he the light would flash and fifteen hundredths of a second later his glove would hit the board so they broke it down it took eleven hundredths of a second for his brain to perceive the flashing light and to trigger the punch and only four hundredths of a second for the punch to travel from where from his resting position to the board you see what i'm saying it took longer to perceive the punch to perceive the the signal a lot longer to perceive the signal than to deliver the punch which means that if you're fighting muhammad ali or i'm fighting you or whatever you're never going to beat a punch right the punch takes 400th of a second your brain takes 11 hundredths of a second you'll get punched every time except except that before you punch you can't help it your body sends very subtle signals that you're going to punch and it sends signals of which hand you're going to punch with and the brain is really good at reading unconscious signals right so they did this thing where they had a videotape
of poker players right putting chip their chips into a bet right and the people the test subjects were watching the like two second video clips of people just placing bets and all they did was look at the arm and hand move the chips and people who didn't even know how to play poker were asked to assess the confidence with which they moved the chips and some incredible percentage of the time they could tell who had the winning hand just by the way they moved the chips in other words the brain's very perceptive and the body is very very not the face but the body is very very revealing so that means that in a fight the big dude comes at you and for any any person there's always a bigger person right i mean we all every i don't care how big you are there's always a bigger guy out there right so that person comes at you and is about to throw a sort of haymaker right to end your life your brain will see that coming a mile away and it's very easy to slip and that's where a smaller person if they really are adept at this can just win the guy and i interviewed a mma former mma fighter named kyle sonnet and he told he spoke about this really eloquently he said kyle sonnet sonnen son jail sonnen does yeah i'm sorry i didn't know how to pronounce it yeah chelsea yeah uh so he said you want to fight a guy that's one weight class above you that's the sweet spot he's out of his [ __ ] mind let me tell you something right now jon jones beat the [ __ ] out of him and jon jones is bigger than him yeah this i know i know what you're saying here but in absolutes it's not applicable right this this thing of like there's actually an adage and that the bigger bet the bigger fighter will beat a smaller better fighter well statistically is 50 50. i don't know what that means though because there's weight classes like how is it how is it possible that it's 50 50. it really depends on the skill level like skill like there's there's
incredibly skillful big guys and then there's small guys that are fast but they're not as technical they're not as good well of course and that's where that's that's why size doesn't always dominate and and either the split is within the weight class or or what mixing weight classes either way what this statistician said was that size is not a good predictor of a win as long as the differences aren't too extreme um and of course the smaller the arena the more size will dominate and you know if you're you and i are in a shower stall like i said like i'm not going to do very well i would just want to state like i'm a big fan of chael sonnen i agree with most of the things that he says and he's a real legend when it comes to fighting and and his prime a tremendous wrestler and a beast of a fighter yeah yeah but he also he's a showman and he says a lot of crazy things sometimes because i think he thinks it's fun right and you know he gives hot takes and opinions on things and some of them are good and some of them aren't but well that fight you were talking about that's when i think that's when he got out of mma i mean he was like no he fought after that fight oh did he yeah there was one fight that really like put him over the edge and his wife was like you know yeah what are you doing well i go back to the fight he he fought nate marquart and marquardt was in his prime and he worked him yeah and you know chael sonnen came that close to beating anderson silva for the middleweight title i mean he's a beast he's a beast but a good big man will almost always beat a smaller better man there's there's just things about size and strength and power and in mma it's even more prevalent because there's so many things that go on like like you can slip a punch right but if you slip a punch that's designed to set you up for a leg of course you're still stationary and you're gonna get cracked is
but here's the thing is the guy you're fighting one dimensional or does he have a comprehensive game is he throwing that punch not really because he wants to hit you because he wants to set you up for a takedown is he throwing that punch because he wants to kick the outside of your calf like what is he actually doing with that punch well that well right and that's why fighting so fascinating it's complex right and that's the difference between us and chimpanzees yeah we can think about it and learn and yeah listen the smaller chimpanzee will never win you know what i'm saying i mean that's the difference and you know we can go around and around about like how it breaks down but the fact that a smaller human ever wins right that's what's uniquely human and what if you could teach a chimp jujitsu well you know then you'd have a very scary scary check at a smaller champion which decides no [ __ ] i'm the alpha yeah no this takes the big chimps back and strangles them now what what that's right now what listen what will work with shims is a coalition of males can dominate at an alpha male and it's crazy that they actually organize that's right and that's where sociability and language and all these things come into play with humans because the we're no longer i mean no group of humans is is can be dominated by a single alpha individual right because a coalition can always take them down and that that and that makes society livable right we're not in this sort of like horrible hierarchy uh where the where the the biggest person gets to decide everything yes yes it's um but what we're talking about i mean there's there's just i just hate absolutes when it comes to fighting because the variables are so extreme and there's so many things that come into play there's so many styles right
of how to i mean there's there's a a big man that will beat a better smaller man in one way and then a better smaller man who has a different skill set will beat that big man in a different scenario yeah yeah the way they interact will change if they fight ten times one guy might win six right you know and then the other guy might win four and you can't predict you have no idea right well they you know someone at espn crunched all the numbers and said that that size wins about half the time but when they say that like how much size are they talking about because the fact that we're talking about weight classes that's why i'm confused unless they study only the heavyweight division which has the largest disparity in weight it might have been that i didn't ask him specifically but he was he was he he was pretty clear about it it was like it's not you know if you're gonna put your money on someone weight is not that necessarily the best variable skill is the best variable yeah no totally yeah exactly but that's exactly what i'm saying about humans it's skill yeah it's not physical dominance this is right the the problem that we were talking about with this trans athlete athlete thing is is just a problem of ideology it's not a problem of fairness if you talk to most people who actually understand sports they don't think it's fair right but the people that want to support trans people and think this is a good time to make the society more inclusive they're the ones who want to support it even though like what's really fascinating to me is that caitlyn jenner is now being accused of being transphobic because caitlyn jenner stood up and said i don't think it's fair it's a question of fairness and you're talking about someone who when she was bruce was a [ __ ] olympic gold medalist and one of the greatest athletes the united states has ever produced was on the cover of wheaties 1976 i remember
yeah amazing catholic that same person is saying that it's a question of fairness and that you shouldn't have biological males competing against biological females and they came after her yeah right which is crazy i mean this is if there is an icon in the 21st century uh of a true icon of transgender rights and of transgender acceptance it's caitlyn jenner right no right i mean while they're calling her transphobic well what i mean what i mean you know again i don't have a dog in this fight so i don't really you know i i i don't i don't really care what happens particularly um and i understand people are trying to do usually do the right thing but i mean why isn't i mean could there be a third category competitive category that would be the best way to do it for sure but here's the problem even in that category you would have to say okay we're going to have a trans category but are we going to have trans males and trans females compete together right well if the answer is no then that says a lot about trans computing in right right i mean and also do we have enough trans females and trans males to have a whole separate category for each of them so you have biological biological males versus biological males biological females versus biological females trans females versus trans females trans males versus trans males i mean it might there might be four categories at the olympics look if they do that i'm 100 in favor yeah totally yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah i mean it's an interesting idea i mean these are very much first world problems i think right yeah in many ways and i think also there's going to come a time where through crispr or through some other much more sophisticated form of manipulating the human body where we're going to be able to change what a person is really not just in terms of how they
express and how they represent but actually you can become a biological female right i don't know if that's going to be within our lifetime but i think that's the future right and then that really is a biological female right 100 percent exactly yeah 100 yeah i mean they're the things that they can do now in terms of genetic manipulation are witchcraft compared to 100 years ago 200 years ago so if we go into the future another 100 200 years we might have no problem with this it might all go away yeah and we might be back to male versus female or excuse me you know male categories versus male female versus female you know one thing that gets lost in all this is um just what an extraordinary creation the human being is as an athlete i mean i was looking at athletic performance particularly with running because i was you know my book is divided into run fight and think like the three ways you can defeat a a greater power or at least have a chance of it right and if you run if you cannot run them out fight them if you cannot fight them you're going to have to out think them and um that's what happens with social change within a society like the labor movement in this country 100 years ago but uh so i was you know i was looking at our capacity to run right and i mean i'm a former runner right i ran competitively in college i didn't even realize how amazing we are there was uh there's a ultra marathoner named jim walmsley who has won the western states 100 a bunch of times it's 100 miles over the sierra nevada right huge elevation gain his time is 14 hours and nine minutes and he is beaten and and along the same course they run a horse and rider horse and rider teams like basically the same course he beat the horse and rider team in his year and i and in almost every other year for the previous 20 years he's a human being on foot you imagine
and the thousand-mile world record is 10 days guy ran a thousand miles in 10 days do you do you know what the moab 240 is no but i can almost guess but it's a run through the moab mountains and right there's a woman named courtney dewalter i i interviewed her in my book she's in my book [ __ ] monsters she's amazing she's amazing yeah she beat the second place men by 10 hours yeah 10 [ __ ] hours so if she took an eight hour nap just laid down for eight hours and just yawned stretched her feet and put her shoes on and had breakfast and drank a cup of coffee she'd still beat him by two hours which is [ __ ] bananas well think about this so the in the american southwest that just that same area right there were two kinds of of people but when when the whites showed up when europeans showed up right they were the pueblo people who they were very wealthy and they they irrigated uh they cultivated they lived in towns the towns that looked a lot like small towns in europe right up on on top of mesa is very well defended um in material terms they were doing very well right um and then there were the apache and the navajo they're complete nomads they're very mobile materially poor i mean they only had what they could carry but no one could sort of catch them right so when the when the spanish arrived in the late 1500s what happened they defeated the pueblo communities immediately like sometimes within hours they could they could roll these pueblos right the apache remained free until the last band of a wild apache were finally sort of cornered in 1886 that's almost within my grandmother's lifetime and they did that because they were so mobile the whole community was expected to be able to move 40 miles a day on foot whatever the children if they were the enemy was near the children would
would sleep with with food tied around their waist in case they had to run away in the middle of the night and there was finally the warriors were supposed to be able to go 70 miles in a day if they had to and they keep that up right and um so there was one war leader named nana nana nada and in the 1880s i mean i mean the machine gun's been invented the light bulb the what else the the four-stroke engine like it was a really modern society at that point right and he led like a dozen apache warriors on a raid that ra over six weeks they covered 1500 miles and nana was 75 years old so the human the human being right is meant to move it's also really good fighting and it's also really really good at thinking but if you just think of us as sort of animals like one of the things that has allowed people throughout the ages to maintain their autonomy is that they're they were mobile and big powerful empires aren't that mobile i saw that in afghanistan i mean the american army is invincible until it's fighting a bunch of guys you know barefoot guys in the mountains who don't have an air force you know and then we're not so invincible it's because they were so mobile so this sort of like the the discussion we had about mma it scales up right like a small insurgency can defeat an empire and if that weren't true if the empire always won or if the largest person in the room always won i mean there would be really no chance for freedom and and you know we we defeated the british in 1776 precisely because a small mobile force can sometimes squeak out a victory that's it's interesting that we that we can keep bringing this back to fighting because i think in many ways fighting is an analogy there's there's many comparisons for life there's a lot of what takes place in life it plays out in fighting right and
choices that you make in terms of strategy and also what you bring to the day what skills like we were talking about channel sun and before chelsea was an elite wrestler and in my opinion wrestling is the single best skill for mma right because the the great wrestler dictates where the fight takes place he can decide to take the opponent down or if he's like a chuckle adele who's a superior striker who's also a wrestler he could decide you have to strike with him you can't take him down right so right that it's just the single pillar and it's in life there's things that you can be good at and there's strategies that you can apply that really there it's very similar in that way it's like what you choose to be strong with right you know whether it's strong with your willpower or your education or your your kindness your approach to life it's like these are all like interconnected skills and strategies that help you get through life and you see this play out through one-on-one martial arts combat right you see there's there's analogies there there's things there's there's comparisons there it's right no it's a no it's an amazing analogy for life and um you know and that that comes out in in the more organized form of fighting which which is war yeah and you know what again i mean like i looked at the montenegrins who were these sort of wild mountain people in the 1600s and the ottoman empire which was the most powerful military force in the world at that time um kept invading montenegro and you know one point they were they outnumbered the montenegrins twelve to one they had a cavalry they had artillery they had everything and the montenegrans just handed them their hat i mean they just like destroyed them they killed a third
of the ottoman forces so it's just that that has allowed humans some groups of humans to maintain their autonomy in the face of a great power and often great powers are very oppressive and i mean sometimes people ask me like why write about freedom what like why now why what what's what's what is about freedom that's interesting to you and you know my last book was called tribe and we we talked about that and i realized people are willing to die for their community for their tribe for their people right and people are willing to die for their freedom these two core things that that without which life can seem not worth living and people have have struggled and died to defend both and to me that may you know that if you start to understand both of those things you start to get towards the sort of core of the human experience isn't it funny that someone would say why do you why is freedom interesting to you like that's that's like saying why is life interesting to you if you're if you just came back from your experience like you're with your aneurysm yeah and you realize like oh my god life is so precious it's so important right and then some person is just living normally like well what's so important about life like what do you know when once freedom is taken away from you then you realize how crucial it is that's right that's right well we're very lucky that we live in a free society and a democracy and you know it's imperfect obviously and we're trying you know i think we're all trying to improve it most people are trying to improve it but i think it's easy to take that for granted we we um uh we walked part of the part of the book is about this bizarre trek that i took um we walked along the railroad lines from washington dc me and a few other guys we'd all been in a lot of combat and we weren't going back to combat and we were trying to figure out what to do with ourselves
and we walked along the railroad lines from dc to philly and we're going to go to new york then we decided to turn west and we headed for pittsburgh we wound up right right outside of pittsburgh so over the course of a year on you know trips of 50 to 100 miles we sort of like journeyed through america along the road lines were sleeping under bridges and abandoned houses and you know cooking over it's really interesting i i just started it a few days ago but it's really interesting i'm enjoying it very much thank you thank you when you did this how old were you a few years ago and you just decided this would be a thing to do like what i was taking the amtrak down to dc with my buddy tim that i'd been over in afghanistan with we made a film called restrepo and and uh i was looking out the window we were trying to think of our next project and um i was looking out the window i was like tim man you could walk this whole damn thing like there's a dirt bike trail or a maintenance road or a corn field or whatever you could and the thing about railroad line is it goes right through the middle of everything right right through the ghettos right through the suburbs right through the farms you see america from the inside out and it's this weird swath of no man's land like the cops aren't really out there and it's illegal so you know eventually people will spot you and you have to hide from them we had a helicopter looking for us at one point why i think they were worried we were up to no good i mean it was like sometimes we walked at night when it was hot or if people were looking for us we'd walk at night and uh you know one in the morning we were like along railroad lines that passed near air force base i think i don't know we were in some sensitive area i mean we didn't know that we were just moving and uh and all of a sudden this
helicopter came riding up on us and uh they didn't see us we could have crouched down and it did its grid and missed us with its flood light but um but that but but the thing is is this weird no man's land so you can sleep out right you can pump your water out of creeks you can build a fire you have to stay low and you know we'd walk through towns and get food and we keep moving and it was just this weird experiment in autonomy and autonomy i got to say it's hard it's physically hard right i mean the more the safer and more comfortable you are the more entangled you are in society right and in some ways the less free you are we were like every night we were the only people in the world who knew where we were but that was hard one we were carrying 70 pounds on our back and we were walking all day long and we're dodging the police and you know sometimes we drank pretty shitty water and it made us sick did you have filters we had a pump filter but some i mean we we drank the yokogany river outside connellsville and one guy was sick for a week i wasn't i have a pretty strong stomach but it really wrecked them so uh so it's hard one but look we were on our own like no one knew where we were and it's that's one definition of freedom there are many right i mean there are many definitions of freedom but that's one of them how long did you guys do like how long was this journey it was off and on for years 400 miles wow yeah and so part of the part of my book freedom is about that trek because it was my own personal experience with being uh physically autonomous and it was hard like i said it was hard one um i write about the frontier as well because we walked through the what used to be the pennsylvania frontier we the railroad lines go along the juniata river it's the only uh waterway that trends east-west in pennsylvania and um you know the rivers sort of
carved through the mountains and so the indian trails followed the rivers and then the settlers roads followed the indian trails and eventually the railroads followed the settlers roads and so we were walking through you know up the juniata river going west and um i i wrote in the book i write up because that was the heart of like the indian wars along the pennsylvania frontier in the 1700s and you know a lot of people that went out there they were very poor they were often immigrants they were often there were people that just didn't want the government breeding the colonial government breathing down their neck that was one of the more interesting things about the beginning of the book we were talking about a sign that you found on someone's property that says that they will resist the federal government by any means necessary that's right so so fast forward 300 years we passed a sign nailed to a tree like along the juniata waterway and it's very wild there right it's very very beautiful yeah there's a sign saying yeah we you know this is private property we will we will resist the federal authority by any means necessary how old do you think that sign was oh it was contemporary right and this was a few years ago this is 2012 2013 that we saw that sign so uh but you know 300 years ago the people that settled that area were absolutely like that was what they wanted but the price that that came with was horrific so basically you go into the wilderness and you're a lot more free but you're in a lot more danger and danger is a loss of freedom right it's its own kind of loss of freedom and so what the settlers did was they um for example of course there's no fire department these are people are living in log cabins in the wilderness so and they their chimneys were made out of wood right they're interlocking logs that they caked with mud and the mud insulated the wood it was like little tiny log cabins that ran up the side of the house that was the chimney
and so they they had ropes at the top of the chimneys because if the chimneys caught fire the whole house would go up and if a chimney caught fire they would pull the whole stack down with that rope that was their fire department was having a rope at the top of the chimney right so but when it came to the indian wars i mean just you can't imagine how bloody this was right and no mercy given on anybody people were tortured to death on both sides right it was absolutely horrific so what they did there was no colonial militia there was nothing out there they just had each other so the calling the settlers were had a kind of mutual defense pact and if you were out there you owed your life to the common defense of the community and uh if you were if you didn't do that you were an outcast in fact if you were an adult male and you failed to carry a gun and a scalping knife and a tomahawk in your belt at all times if you didn't do that you were mocked and you were cast out from the community which obviously is not really a form of freedom i mean freedom includes the freedom to not fight if you don't want to fight right and but so basically my point is pick your poison do you want the government to tell you what to do or do you want the community to tell you what to do and the more danger you're in you're in the more you need one or the other and there it really is no way to be completely safe completely comfortable and completely free without obligation to your tribe right when you uh wrote this how much studying did you wind up doing on the various north american tribes and their strategies because that's also something you talk about in the iroquois and you you go pretty deep into a lot of that as well yeah i mean i i i researched that after after the trip i mean i did the trip years ago and then as i was and i wanted to write about freedom and
i thought wow interesting to um you know in the book itself there's a lot of research into topics right so like like mma and the apache and all that i thought would be really interesting to sort of weave my narrative about this walking trip uh we called it high speed vagrancy i mean we really moved right 10 20 something you know 25 miles a day sometimes um we're really interesting to weave this trip into um into the research that that i did and so um that's that's how i came to form the book but the so the the native tribes of that area they were dominated by the iroquois and so this is where this great truth about um freedom comes in the more people you're with the more the better you can defend yourself right so the iroquois were indomitable um until the europeans showed up and one reasons the europeans were couldn't be defeated was because they came with diseases that just decimated the ranks of the native people right so you know you can play the sort of thought experiment if the say smallpox didn't exist and the native peoples of of north america had their original populations the iroquois were an extremely well organized huge organization and um there you know you can make a pretty good argument that the the europeans actually could not have defeated them militarily um and but you know what was their strategy i mean for all those native people the the strategy was why why fight a quote fair fight in the open when you could ambush people surprise attacks creep up on them at dawn you know like you're just going to lose more people if you fight in the open you know bows and arrows against firearms why would you do that yeah of course yeah and they were extremely effective at it and the iroquois were so mobile speaking of mobility they were so mobile
that the colon the settlers often thought they were fighting five to ten times as many iroquois as or this applied to any of the tribes five or ten times as many men as they really were that was the tactical advantage of that kind of mobility well that was the issue with texas and the comanches with the tactical ability of the comanche to fight off horseback when the settlers hadn't figured out how to do that yet and they were still using muskets and the comanche could launch multiple arrows they could they they would keep their arrows interlaced in their fingers and they would shoot one arrow and then another hour and then now so like these guys would shoot one musket and then they'd have to reload it took like 30 seconds by the time that happened the comanche would be on them and filling them full arrows these settlers that i wrote about um some of them got were able to to load their rifle at a dead run and this is with a ramrod pushing that you know they put your ball in the barrel and a patch and then pour the powder in and that or the other way around the powder and then the ball anyway they could do this at a dead run but still it was no match in some ways no match for a bow and arrow like in the woods but if you had ranks of riflemen who were alternating firing and reloading um you know you do that it's just suicide to charge them in a field of course that's what happened to the um that you know that that's what happened in european warfare the casualties were horrific it's really interesting about the comanche um uh i'm sure you know empire of the summer moon yeah yeah i was gonna ask you yeah yeah amazing right uh amazing writer amazing book um there's a direct equivalent in genghis khan in in uh east asia um a horseback culture that the um that the european powers really didn't know how to deal with militarily and in my book freedom i i talk about the sort of basic difference between mobile societies and sedentary ones
you know like about 10 000 years ago people started planting grains and settling down and it allowed for an accumulation of wealth and in some ways unfortunately the beginning of a stratification of society as soon as you can accumulate wealth some people are going to accumulate more than others and they become rulers and they can oppress people etc etc in mobile societies like the apache it's very it's very hard to have social classes because you can't accumulate anything right and so the um in history the s sedentary people although more powerful where they stood and more wealthy in material terms often had this sort of like strange insecurity and about their what like if they were look you know like are we living better lives than the nomads and the nomads themselves had an incredible arrogance about the settled people right and they just thought they were badasses and that the farmers were not and it was very clear there was a group called the yamut in northern iran and they had i'm doing this by memory but they had this this sort of saying this sort of song that dates back to this era you know hundreds and hundreds of years ago the sort of eternal clash between the migratory nomadic people herding herding cultures and the farming cultures we do not i do not have a mill with willow trees i have a horse and a court i will kill you and go i will kill you and go wow so of course those people lost i mean the world is dominated by sedentary people that accumulate wealth and can amass huge armies and blah blah blah but it's good to keep in mind that mobility was for a very very long time was a very effective and rational choice that some societies made and that they felt themselves to be superior to the to the wealthy settled people in the valleys yeah that was genghis khan's thing totally he had massive disdain for anyone who didn't live in a tent oh totally yeah absolutely absolutely and they
thought they were weak yeah that's right yeah um and uh yeah i mean you can make an argument that that wealth and sedentary life make people weak right i mean you can make that you can make that argument certainly from the eyes of a nomadic culture that's what it looks like right and you know even the sort of ancient uh biblical story of fratricide of cain and abel you know even i mean you know uh kane was a was a farmer and abel was a was a nomad and it goes they you know the the the thinking the ethnographic thing or the anthropological thinking about this is this this story goes back to this original bifurcation between uh farmers the sedentary people and the mobile ones but but kane cain kills abel because abel is a shepherd and has sheep and when it comes time to make a sacrifice to god cain abel can sacrifice a fat sheep and all cain has his vegetables and he's jealous and he kills then his nomad brother because he's jealous of what what abel can offer god and there you see the the the affluence but the insecurity that wealthy sedentary people have for you know those who quote have nothing nothing left to lose there's um there's a great allure to the kind of freedom that we're describing right to the ability to just live off your back and go hiking and and live in the mountains and and do that kind of thing it's like it appeals to us in a strange way where we know there's something wrong with sedentary lifestyle and with living in a city and dealing with the just the [ __ ] of traffic and and this unnatural environment that we've created with concrete and asphalt and pollution there's something massively appealing almost like your dna like your your essence calls out for a time where life was simpler and more pure and more interconnected with nature
and well so when you see someone who's doing that this party goes ah i want to do that right well you know it's the mobile i mean it's the mobile groups that are that we see as romantic right i mean you know that you know motorcycle gangs and stuff like that i mean you know they're bad actors right i mean some of those guys don't necessarily bring a lot of joy and happiness to the world some do i suppose but whatever we're they're romantic the point is they're romanticized yes right and and and people the mobile groups are often romanticized and you know they're sort of like guerrilla fighters you know whatever i mean over and over again in our imagination like that's uh that's an appealing thing is that is the group that is over that they're they're overmatched they're the underdog but they're so skilled and mobile that they eventually win like that's very very appealing to humans hmm yeah that is right it's a there's a it's a classic tale that's right that's right um and it's even in the bible in the way you know and they cl that cain and abel it's our seminal story fratricide um goes all the way back that sort of division goes all the way back in the jealousy of the mob that jealousy that we wealthy sedentary people have for the mobile people like it's very very ancient um one thing i should point out uh and i think it's worth talking about there are we were talking about a little bit before that our our safety in the world comes from the fact that we have people around us that we trust who will who will help in defense of that help defend our community right and um and because we're we if we're if we don't have a community if we're not part of a tribe if we're not part of some group we're alone in the world we're very vulnerable humans die pretty quickly by themselves in the wilderness um and the larger the group the safer it is from attack from other groups i mean just as a basic fact of human human existence
and so one of the things that i mean you can sort of divide it up in an interesting way when you use the word freedom freedom works and it's sort of simple the word freedoms are works in the simplest form in the context of freedom from oppression by freedom from being oppressed by an outside group by an enemy group right when you're talking about your own society the society that you have signed on born into and have signed on to you're really talking about your rights they're kind of different things so as an example um the i looked at a group called the yamnaya and the yamnaya were um these nomadic this nomadic horse culture from the eastern step from the russian step 5 000 years ago okay and they they they fought on horse-drawn chariots with battle axes and they traveled without their women they traveled without women these groups of male raiders would go out and they complete they they swept through europe and they entered the iberian peninsula spain and portugal about five thousand years ago and um they had a real warrior culture and when they rode into neolithic spain that they're very very mobile and they're very good fighters and they rode into neolithic spain and that society didn't even know what a horse was right they were completely over matched and over the course of about a hundred years the yamnaya completely eliminated all the men in iberia think about that all the men not the women who clearly were mated with and the the iberian population now are the descendants of the yumnaya and the neolithic women and then other population groups that moved in the moors and et cetera et cetera but the neolithic men were completely scrubbed from the gene pool because they could not defend their territory so one point i want to make is and this isn't a pitch for militarism i just it's a pitch for realism which is
and a very important part of freedom comes from being able to defend yourself and the people you love and if you can't do that um i mean i mean in ancient historical terms you know now there's international laws and there's defense pacts and there's nato and you know whatever like uh liechtenstein does not really have to worry about being invaded because it's part of a you know an agreement between nations but throughout most of human history if you could not defend yourself you were very very vulnerable to having your freedom taken away and invariably would there's a resistance in today's culture particularly from people that are more in line with progressive uh thinking there's a resistance to accepting the fact that the military is important right i mean i think i think there's a sort of lovely idea that peace is sort of the default state and if you just don't have a military and start thinking in militaristic terms that peace will take over and then no one will need a military and then we're all going to be fine but that clearly has not been true throughout history i mean you look at history and the nation you know nations that couldn't defend themselves i mean look montenegro was not overrun by the ottomans because it could defend itself right right right um and for a lot of human history and this is true in a playground fight as well i mean if you can't defend yourself you might end up having to do what someone else tells you to do right that's just an eternal human truth and so the trick is how do you become well enough armed and militaristic enough and sort of badassed enough and hierarchical enough because military groups depend on hierarchy in order to fight effectively a hierarchy of command not of honor but of command how do you do that and also have a society which is just an egalitarian and you
know as i say in my book a society that's well enough organized to defend itself can also oppress its own people under the wrong leadership so how do you how do you have it both ways how do you defend yourself against outsiders but also not use the apparatus of the military to then oppress your own people the way pinochet did and franco did and you know etc i mean that's the history of dictators my father grew up in spain uh and left when franco took when the fascists took over in spain i just wrote an article about how that happens um you know the the the spain had a democratically elected government and franco came in and said that's [ __ ] that the the the um it was a fraudulent election and we're going to take over and he took over with the military so that's an example of a military force that's used that was used improperly to oppress its own people and so that's for me that's the eternal human dilemma if you be strong enough to defend yourself and not allow that to oppress your own your own people well it's interesting too because we're we're talking about here this utopian concept of you know peace being a default state there's a lot of people that they have similar utopian beliefs about policing in the united states and that's one of the reasons why people think we need to defund the police and that people if you leave them alone they're probably not going to commit the same amount of crime and will find a default state and if you have social workers that deal with people that have domestic disputes instead of police officers will probably have less confrontation and less and i think there's also a deep resistance to avoid militarizing our police department right and there's but there's a lot of a lot of there's a lot of confusion as to what's the correct way to go about this and what is the correct way of actually ensuring that people are safe and
protected and that law and order is is achieved and that people respect this rule of land because it makes our society and our culture better and safer for everyone it makes it easier for people to innovate and easier for people to live their lives but it's how do you how does that balance out and how does that balance out without the kind of right without the kind of leadership that you do see being necessary in the middle in the military well here i mean here's what i think is happening i think the people that say defund the police i'm not even quite sure what that means right i mean i remember like during covert there was like a there was a phrase like abolish rent and i'm like i'm not even sure what that means like what how would you implement that like what do you specifically are you talking about but likewise with the defund i mean i sort of i get the gist of the idea like people are hurting abolish rent but then that has crazy unintended consequences right right so likewise with defund the police i kind of know where you're coming from i just don't quite know how it would work so i think what those people are doing is they're saying we have given up trying to reform the police and clearly there are some police departments that need reform we all remember rodney king right yeah um and you know many many other uh disgraceful incidents since then i think what they're saying is we have given up trying to reform the police police unions block any reform all right you know what [ __ ] it let's we're just going to defund you right that's i you know again i don't think that's the right solution there's good policing bad policing and no policing we can look at situations with no policing so one of the things i looked at in my in my book was you know in on the on the on the frontier
in the 1840s 50s 60s 1870s on the american frontier out west um there was little to no policing you know a sheriff you know one sheriff in 500 square miles whatever it was minimal policing and it was a largely male population okay so there weren't even you know if you want to just put it this way i mean one of the one of the constant causes of violence between individual men is competition over over women right i mean bar fights in all kinds of situations that is a it is there's one seed of conflict between men so there were very few women out there to even have conflicts over right the murder rate was so high that i mean it completely eclipsed the highest murder rates in the eastern cities there was one town a railroad town that killed seven percent of the population died by murder in the first three months if i'm remembering my numbers correctly seven percent right [ __ ] right so you know in what a couple of years if at that rate without more people the town's gone they've killed them so crazy but bodies were piling up so far and these were virtually all male towns right with no police force so you got to be careful about saying oh you know if you if you take the police out of the equation people will be peaceful no we know that they won't be there are a lot more peaceful when women are there and what started to happen as the frontier filled up with women and those women had children and families and that there's a very strong correlation between sex gender imbalance and violence and the worse the gender imbalance is the more violence there is and as you bring men and women's numbers into align with each other violence goes down well then how do you explain places like japan or china where there's a far there's far more males in in china i believe
than there are females because of that one child policy isn't there a disproportionate amount of males i you know not on the i mean i don't know anything about china and you know you're talking about a huge huge country and i frankly can't answer that question but they know from the sort of lab experiment okay you take one community you have it be 99 men i mean look what happens there'll be more violence there'll be more i mean look what happens in president right okay so right so then you introduce women to these communities you know in this 1870s 1880s more and more women were going out west uh and they were having families you know so so what happens is that um in those situations you know men men want women to like them and they on some level they understand that if they act too badly they're not they're they will not get a mate women are the balancing act they are right and and the other thing is that men get married they have children and they're not they don't you know the last thing they want is violence right right that's a threat to their everything they they live for yeah right and i mean i have two young kids i mean if i'm you know on the new york subway you know a couple of years ago my my oldest daughter was you know two years old and i'd go on the subway you know with her in a carrier and if some guy was acting weird i mean i got in another car i wanted nothing to do with it right right without her i might not have i'm like all right this will be interesting let's see what happens right you know what i mean by god with your with your child on your chest you're out of there right you know yeah um i couldn't agree more about this idea that uh defunding the police and having no police is going to lead to horrific violence because look that's what you're seeing in new york city they've already tried it right i mean you live there right how much difference is it like where you
are uh have you noticed well you know fortunately the violence isn't isn't a very common thing um but what you can see of are all these sort of social indicators of violence are they they're correlated with violence like there's a lot of um a lot more sort of visible drug abuse visible household oh just people shooting up on the street really yeah i never saw that but i rarely saw that before now you know it just really whacked out people um people walking down the street completely out of their mind screaming you know i mean there's stuff that would happen you know whatever it's new york city you see everything eventually but it just happens a lot more um and uh you know i live in the lower east side and it's you know pretty you know mixed income area a lot of different stuff going on there you know um but yeah i saw an eerily interesting you know in terms of the police restraint i mean i like i saw this amazing thing living on a small street and and this through street small through street in the way lower east side and and there was a cop car pulled over on the sidewalk and another car pulled up and the woman inside rolled her window down to ask the policeman some of the directions are i don't know what right so they're talking through you know through their open windows right but that's stopping traffic so the car behind i mean i can't imagine doing this the car behind the woman who stopped starts honking at her she's talking to a cop right he's swearing like like get the [ __ ] out of get your car out of the street then he gets out of his car and goes over and starts screaming at the woman while she's talking to the cop right and uh everyone involved was african-american just so happens right everyone involved in those in that situation was african-american and the cop didn't get out of the car um nothing
like and i was just amazed at like i think it was probably that guy he was obviously a little off and i was like that was probably a smart move like no one was being threatened with violence yet and he did he de-escalated he stayed in the car eventually the woman drove on way way better solution than the cop getting out of the car with his belly club and then you know then you don't know what's going to happen right right so well you know i think my point is in that situation to me i was looking out the window to me it looked like good policing good wise policing and he he resisted escalation he seemed to resist escalation as long as possible and it resolved itself so i think the real conversation is however much funding the police get how do we make it the best policing possible with the money that we're going to allocate i do think that there is a great benefit to these police officers realizing that you can't abuse people anymore yes i think the cameras on the phones and the fact that people are willing to film perceived injustices and that this becomes national news i think that's great i really do i think that's great for all involved but i don't think defunding the police is the way to get out of this mess i think you've got to fund them and i think you got to train them much better right and you got to make higher standards for people to get into it and you got to it's got to be i don't know how to shift the public's perception of what a police officer is though like right now it's it's in vogue to call crops [ __ ] right [ __ ] and losers and it's like to hate a cop is is actually popular which is unfortunately because of the george floyd case because of multiple other cases it's it's a thing now and it's a narrative and if you say you support like you know i'm i'm a supporter of law enforcement i i always have been i
think it's important i i'm always respectful to police officers i know that they treat me differently than they would a young black man or you know in a crime ridden area or you know in various situations and various cops are going to treat people more discriminatory and i know i know that's true and i wish it wasn't but i think the solution to that is not defunding the solution is better training picking better qualified applicants and i don't know how you do that at this point it seems like a long uphill road a long battle to try to get the respect of the general population again to get the population to respect police officers but i think that has to take place you can't have right like what de blasio's done in new york city by hamstringing the police and by telling them to stand down when people are looting and smashing windows you've just made things more violent and more chaotic and more uncontrollable well yeah and you know there's a zero-sum game going on i mean i think if the police unions were even a little bit amenable to disciplining you know what seemed to be rogue cops who have who have violated their training and their oath yes and abused people uh even in really egregious cases the police unions really won't acknowledge it i think they think it's a slippery slope oh i'm sure they do i'm sure they do but the problem with that i mean when i was in afghanistan um with american you know i was in afghanistan in the 90s and whatever before 9 11 but when you know my last trip there was with american forces and you know i was there off and on for a year and i got to know the military very very well and i really like them right i really like the us military i grew up during vietnam i hadn't really expected to have that reaction i just love them and but one of the sort of amusing things was the sort of military bureaucracy and that was the further you got from the quote front
lines the stronger the bureaucracy was and one of these um you know public affairs guys you know i mean they're you know they're technically they're soldiers but they're not really fighting they're in public affairs and they deal with the press and you know whatever and he was a really nice guy and he said to me listen tell me how do i get journalists to to trust me i was like oh that's easy offer them something tell them something true that makes you look bad right that makes you look like the military made a mistake at some point because if you're willing to acknowledge a mistake if you're willing to acknowledge a mistake then people will believe but think you're an honest actor in this and they will believe it when you tell the truth when you when you say something positive about yourself right so i you know i think the i mean this is how negotiations stop is that neither side thinks the other side is acting in good faith and so they don't give an itch that's what's happening politically right now with our two political parties was the same thing i think with the police unions are like uh uh uh i mean yeah secretly i know the election wasn't stolen if you're you know mega whatever but i can't say that because if i admit that it wasn't stolen that's a slippery slope and suddenly who knows what's going to happen that you know the commies are going to take over whatever whatever they're telling themselves right you know likewise if you're in the police union like no no okay i know this guy this cop really shouldn't have done what he did it's pretty clear from the video but if we acknowledge that all of a sudden all cops are even for things that were complicated and um and confusing and you know whatever like this sort of gray area where i mean every fight gets into a gray area where no one quite knows what's going on you know i mean a lot of fights do right and and i know a lot of cops and they have they they're in some really bad
situations i think the police union is probably worried about that all that stuff that will start to come up under review and then nobody nobody's career is safe so you can't do that you have to call out bad actions yes always always everywhere the union's got to step up the left has to step up the right has to step up the only thing saving this country is if we can all decide that there is ways to act that are okay and ways to act that aren't and if you don't call out your own then we're all screwed and that was yeah i feel like the original sin with the republicans was and everybody's got ev both political parties have an original sin but i you know with the republicans just watching this unfold was when trump was introducing this sort of nonsense about that barack obama was not an american citizen i mean come on the entire gop elected gop knew that that's nonsense but no one said it was nonsense but he was doing that before he was running for president yeah exactly right right he wasn't doing that he what but he kept doing it while he was a gop candidate yeah right and the institution of this did you really use when i was running for president he was doing that yeah of course he was right the whole time and that's an important thing like we're fighting a war the commander-in-chief has to be perceived by our soldiers as being legitimate he's the head of the whole thing right so if you have a very powerful figure in american politics saying he's actually an imposter and he's not an american citizen isn't really president that's very dangerous and the gop didn't call that out and there's equivalent sins on the left you know and like you have to call it out isn't it kind of crazy though when you really stop and think about it that we're a nation of immigrants and you can't be an immigrant and run the nation of immigrants
like you have to been born on this patch of dirt to be legitimate right it's very weird right you can't be an immigrant like arnold schwarzenegger for example who is an american citizen cannot be the president of the united states because he was not born here even though he was the governor of california he could never be the president right you have to be right through no fault of your own it has to be like a dumb luck thing where you're born on this patch of dirt isn't that bizarre well i think it's to preempt it doesn't really do this obviously as we just saw barack obama i think it's a preempt sort of like um suspicions that this is uh you know that yeah that this is a a bad actor who's come come you know come here expressly to take over our country some charismatic russian who sneaks over here exactly yeah right i mean it's a great move on purpose right a great movie right so so i kind of i mean there's something very powerful about you know this idea of of a birth in your community and for us a community of 330 million but still it's a community right it's unwieldy it's at odds with itself but it is a form of community that we're trying to make work and maybe the only identifier to it is that you were born here yeah you know so i got i kind of understand that the the ultimate that sort of like paramount leader of this whole crazy circus that we have was also has to be born here i kind of get it and that sort of group allegiance um it doesn't guarantee group allegiance being born here but it it signifies something powerful one of the things i wrote about was you know i was talking about how you're you're in a dangerous environment your safety comes from being part of a group and that works because each individual in the group is willing to risk their safety their life to protect the whole group and if no
one's willing to do that you really don't have a group and no one's safe so the the collective deal is that okay we're all part of the hell's angels or we're all part of second platoon or whatever it is yeah and we all value the safety of the group more than our own individual safety and our individual safety comes from the fact that we're part of this group so if everyone does that everyone's safer that's a very ancient human arrangement and i looked at this um group in um it was a criminal gang in chicago in the 1960s called the vice lords right the term didn't mean that they were committing lots of moral vices though i'm sure they did occasionally right it meant that once you were in we had you like you're in a vice it was it was a it was a strength of brotherhood term not a sort of moral corruption term right so the thing about the vice lord is a very very dangerous part of uh chicago in the 60s and if you were an unaffiliated young it was african-american community unaffiliated young male that you were not in a gang you were really in danger right to other predation by other gangs they would rob you they would beat you up whatever you were in danger you had to join a gang to stay safe once you joined that gang you owed your life to that gang and everybody did and if you failed that the these the litmus test of being a vice lord was that there were constant fights and fracases and shootings and knifing i mean it was a very violent time right and the one of the litmus tests of being a vice lord and if you fail this like you're really in trouble is if you see another vice lord in a fight even if he's completely outnumbered if you don't run to his aid you are not a vice lord there's a completely functional definition of what it means to be a vice lord is you run towards the fight if any of your brothers are in danger if you go the other way by definition you're not a vice lord and what they did with those guys they didn't beat them up
they didn't nothing they put him in the back of a car and they drove him to the heart of enemy territory of some rival gang and they just pushed him out of the car like that's what it means to betray your group and um what in exchange and this is why it works so well and this is what i wish we could get back to on some level in this country though it's much harder with this many people there were there was no rank in the vice lords there was a leader he had more responsibility he had the responsibility of sort of organizing people but he didn't have extra rights you know what i mean he couldn't boss people around he didn't get more money he didn't get more wine he didn't you know whatever like there was no he had no advantages personal advantages to being a leader he just had more responsibility and so what that meant is that they were all it was a completely egalitarian society in that sense and when they drank a really interesting ritual when they drank i mean you can do ritual things that signify that you're part of a group right and those rituals are very important and i'll if i if you know if i may i'd like to suggest ways to richly participate in being part of this country i think there's some things that you can do that sort of remind you in very gratifying ways that you're part of this huge crazy 300 million person enterprise but for the vice lords what they would do is they'd pull their money i mean these guys kids were always broke right and they'd pull their money their dimes nickels and dimes whatever and they'd buy a bottle of wine they drank wine you know right and uh they'd buy a bottle of cheap wine and everyone in the group would get the same amount of wine regardless of how much money they put in and if you didn't have any money to put in you still got the same amount of wine and
that is the that's a ritual egalitarianism between everyone who has pledged their life in defense of the group and the first thing they did is they poured out a little bit of wine to the vice lords that were in prison and the ones who were dead so you didn't even have to be alive to be part of this brotherhood and that's a very very powerful thing that humans do naturally in small groups the question for this country in every large country is how do you do that in an eclectic group of 300 million people that you know is often you know screaming at each other because they're in disagreement like how do you do that how do you do that so glad you asked [Laughter] well what we know is that the more adversity there is the more people band together um and so there was incredible coming together after 9 11 in this country and there very briefly there was distinctions of race and class were sort of like took a back seat to we're all americans we were attacked we have to defend ourselves as a very natural human reaction um you know one of the amazing benefits and uh privileges of a affluent powerful society is that you're not in fear for your life constantly from an outside enemy and so we have we're not on a war footing anymore so how do you maintain that cohesion even though circumstances don't require it and um i've given a lot of thought to it because people keep saying how do we how can we act like a tribe within this country how can we return to that state of mind and so the three ways and part of this came comes out of what happened to me last june i'm alive my daughters will have a father because 10 people i needed 10 units of blood it's an unbelievable amount of blood 10 people donated blood right so the first thing you can do to be to to experience being part of
this place this nation is donate blood the amazing thing about blood is it it it has no it doesn't discriminate right like blood is blood is blood a rich poor white black it doesn't matter right all blood saves all people if you're in within the blood type and all of these awful distinctions between people that that are so painful to the society they disappear when it comes to blood and when you donate blood you might you might be a republican you might be saving the life of a democrat or vice versa you know i don't know whose blood's in my veins right i don't care we're all human and they saved me i owe them i owe the universe 10 units i'm i can't wait i've donated it once i'm going to keep doing it how many units are you doing at a time one one and how much is that like a quart uh i think it's about a pint pint what am i talking about actually don't record a plug that's a so how much do you carry in your body at any one time about 10 units i needed i lost all my blood basically wow and i was still talking that's why my heart was still beating right so um that's why that nurse said think of it as a sacred moment something something powerful happened to you and uh don't think about it in fearful terms so but anyway and we also learned today that it's actually good for you so that's right yeah that's right and lose weight yeah uh so the other the other way um is vote vote when you vote it means that you need your nation and that your nation needs you right it's part you're part of a collective that's collectively coming to hopefully wise decisions some days you're going to lose and your candidate's not going to win and some days he or she is going to win but if you just don't vote what you're kind of doing is saying you know what i don't really care what happens um i'm not i don't really feel part of this thing
and so you all do whatever you want i'm not in and that's you know what you're one person out of 330 million the nation's not going to notice you're really depriving yourself of the experience this very profound human experience of being part of something greater and you know and finally finally jury duty um the jury duty is the only thing that allows that keeps one person from deciding the fate of another person um we do not have a system where someone who's accused of a crime may or may not have committed it um we do not have a system where that that accused person comes before one other person they just decide what to do with them that's too much power in one person it's that power is put in the hands of 12 people who hopefully come to a wise informed decision and it's the jury duty is why we don't live in oppression and tyranny it's the mechanism that keeps us in a relatively fair society you do those three things jury duty donate blood and vote you will feel like you're part of a country it also would be if we all relied on this jury system which we do it should be incentive to educate people it should be incentive to encourage people to have a more balanced perspective because you're gonna maybe one day be on the side of those people while they choose your fate absolutely yeah and listen you're put right into the middle of the american drama right i mean it's like a subway car in new york city right there's rich people there's poor people you know whatever and it's amazing and you i mean i was on a jury on a jury once it was a corrupt cop in new york city and um the uh the experience of it was really really fascinating and one of the cops oh he was like he would go to these like illegal street vendors and he would like extort them to pay him off to not bust them or he'd confiscate their goods and then
he knew this like russian guy like somewhere downtown and he would sell the stole the conversation it's to the russian guy and he'd sell them on the street i mean it was a whole scam and he was like this sort of sad sack overweight cop who you know abused the systems of the tune of you know six thousand dollars right it wasn't that much money and i was you know mostly i just felt sort of sad for him i was like and um we we um convicted on some counts and not on others and he you know none of us really wanted him to go to jail but he definitely was a bad cop right so there was this sort of happy medium where we at the ver when the the defense attorney saw where this was going and and pled out um no jail time you know whatever whatever it was but um it was a it was a righteous decision i mean it was gonna get removed from the police oh yeah yeah i mean i'm sure a bunch of stuff happened to him but you didn't do jail time have you ever seen the documentary the 7-5 no oh yes i'm sorry yes i have yeah yeah yeah it wasn't quite like that but it was a sad sack version of that but how crazy is that documentary when you realize that this is at least at the time where michael dowd was in the police force this was how it was run yeah and from the very first day on the job he was introduced to this kind of corruption the fact that there was this sort of brotherhood of silence and of acceptance of this corruption and you had to participate in it so you could be trusted right well you know you don't have a democracy really at the small scale or at the large scale if you don't have an oversight mechanism that examines the mechanism that has power over us yeah right i mean if the if if the thing that has power over us which is the military the government and the police if there aren't mechanisms for examining them
then we're at risk yeah right i mean that's why you have federal investigations and you have congressional investigations and you have journalists with the military and all this other stuff and you know people bridle at the oversight and they call it all kinds of nonsense but at the end of the day that's why we don't we're not living in a freaking dictatorship yeah yeah when so when when you set out to write this book you're you're incorporating a lot of different things right you're incorporating your personal journey uh along the railroad lines and you're also incorporating all your thoughts about sort of the mechanisms of freedom like how did you organize this how did you so the the account of my trip um i we just pop up here and there throughout the narrative um and you know we are outside of direct control by society i mean we're moving along the margins in the shadows you know on this no man's land of the railroad lines but we're dependent on society right i mean we're getting our food in town right and we walk into town we look like [ __ ] we go to a store buy some supplies some rice some oatmeal some whatever and then we keep moving and and then we're out of town again so we're in this weird symbiotic relationship as everyone is and we're trying to figure out like the sort of balance between dependency and autonomy that's true for everybody right it was just true in very raw physical terms for us so that so so the journey comes and goes throughout the book and it talks about that level of freedom and then the rest of it the research material is divided into run fight and think um mobility gives people freedom from an oppressor oppressors are often um they're more powerful they're more uh in sort of like military terms they're often more mechanized like a more mechanized army um they and again oppression is in the
eye of the beholder the taliban felt oppressed by the us military they are now free they have their quote freedom the reason that they were able to fight us uh to not lose for 20 years is that they were more mobile and we were more heavily armored and slower and it costs us a lot more like a bigger fighter uses more oxygen a bigger military uses more money for every day that they're fighting then the insurgency is over you know much much much less so they can sustain it indefinitely that's run fight is when it comes down to a fight um how does the smaller entity win be it the montenegrins or a smaller fighter in the ring or um you know what you know at every scale uh and then finally think and what i looked at there is how does change come like if you're part of a society you're it's not you're really not talking about freedom i mean you can be free of our society you could go or i could go to somalia and be free of the authority of the united states it's basically a failed state uh maybe there's some corners in alaska where the government wouldn't find you or whatever you can you can get your freedom from your country by simply leaving right if you're going to stay within the within your community you're really talking about your rights so how do you how do you maintain your rights or gain the rights you should have within the community that you're in and so the um and that requires i mean almost by definition no individual is stronger than the us government and the us military and the police and blah blah blah so you have to sort of out think it right so the in the easter rising in in ireland um the irish rebels were completely outgunned right and they lost the initial fight and they took over dublin and the english army
came in it just it just rolled them up right um but they were playing the long game and eventually the it was too costly for the british to keep control of ireland and they gave them their freedom um and uh you know likewise in this country you know 100 years ago the you know labor conditions in this country were horrific and um the uh you know unions were not legal and i mean you know unions commit tons of abuses of their authority and so i know they're very problematic but if you go back a hundred years um what happened to labor in the absence of unions was really horrific and uh um so the the striker they you know they started going on strike and these are very very poor people a lot of them were immigrants right and they were facing the us the national guard the u.s government i mean they were they were facing unbelievable odds and they out thought them and one way they out thought them was by and this is super important they had leadership that was willing to die for the cause like literally willing to die like michael conley in dublin during the easter rising leadership that was willing to die they did not put themselves behind the people the front those are the front line people they were with them right and the other thing is that they brought women into the fight and the interesting thing about women is that um the authorities this is true all around the world and not without exception but they are more reluctant to kill women than to kill men the political ramifications for for killing men are much lighter than for killing women and and it's such a powerful factor um that if you put women on the front line of a labor strike the cops don't know what to do and so that's what they did in lawrence massachusetts on the the mill strikes in lawrence and you know these i mean just you have to understand how abusive the
labor relationship was with the factories back then um and they were their protests were long incoming and completely legitimate and you know they just you know the authorities just put the national guard out there with fixed bayonets you know what were the guys going to do and then they put women out there and the strikers put women out there and you know these boys in uniform they had mothers they had sisters they weren't going to start bayoneting women they didn't know but they they they were complete they were tactically stymied and this one cop police captain in lawrence massachusetts said it's such a wonderful line he said one cop can handle 10 men but it takes 10 cops to handle one woman and that started to change the dynamic and the other advantage that women had is that their their their social relations tend not to be hierarchical like men are i mean you need a hierarchy if you're going to ask people people to charge machine guns you need a hierarchy right you need a command and control mass on the street and charge right women tend to have more lateral social relations and lateral social relations are really hard to penet for the authorities to penetrate you can't just take out one person and the whole thing collapses right it's a it's a spider web and so the lateral female relations in the sort of slums of these of loras massachusetts the authorities could not penetrate they couldn't get any intelligence and so they used women for this sort of like information sharing planning strategy stuff they use women for that and the authorities just could not get inside it they couldn't get ahead of it so that's the um sort of think part of this it's like how do you freedom really means freedom from being controlled by a stronger power a bigger power and how do you do that you can run you can fight in the end of the day you might have to think and that for thousands of years that's how humans have done it
when you're putting this all together are you thinking of this as a study on freedom is it a guidebook is it a a series of personal experiences and historical references to freedom like you know it's in the eye of the beholder uh i mean it's all of those things i wanted to figure out with this with us using as few words as possible what allows human beings to be free and this is what i came to understand about it um and you know if you it's not a philosophical tract right i mean you could write a thousand pages on this philosophical implications of and metaphysical implications of freedom and you'd never get to the end of the conversation and no one would read it right i wanted do like really physical animal visceral terms why are we self-defining how can humans be self-defining either as a group or as an individual and this is what i came up with and you know what i would say is just to reiterate this point about how much we all need groups to be free and then you have to maintain your freedom your rights within that group i mean that's the sort of the the one two step of being self-defining is the group you're in is not oppressed by someone else and then within the group you're in you have your rights so two-step process but um the you're the more the higher the obligations within the group the more autonomy people have within the group and so what i would say is that the um the freedom means you you freedom is you don't you have the right to not be oppressed by your leaders but you don't have the right to be free of obligations so that the question for a modern nation is what are reasonable obligations to ask of people in a crisis and not at a crisis what is reasonable as a very simple example we don't have the right to drive on the left-hand side of the road because we'll friggin kill people
right that's not a diminishment of your freedom it means that you're part of a group and you understand that its rules keep human life as sacred if you don't think so you really shouldn't be here and this is one way we keep people from dying in the highways is everyone everyone drives on the right-hand side of the road i i had a journalist friend who was in goa i think which was a portuguese colony and eventually reverted to india i can't quite remember the diesels at any rate it was going from a right a left-hand system to a right-hand system right so my friend this is like 20 years ago my friend said to the taxi driver well when the big day comes and you change you know you cha you change jurisdiction what are you gonna what are you gonna do with the roads right how are you gonna change from the left hand side to the right hand side or the other way around and the taxi driver said oh we'll do it gradually imagine what that would look like right so right so sometimes left sometimes right at this part of town you're right that part gradually yeah so so basically you're part of a group your group is making decisions about how to keep everyone safe that's one of the obligations is you follow those rules right right and when those rules impinge on your rights then you in a democracy you have fair recourse through the courts and through elections to make a change what you don't have the ability to do is give yourself rights right so if you're late for your airplane and you get to the airport and there's a huge line at security you actually are not you cannot give yourself the right to go to the front of the line but what you can do is say it's my daughter's wedding tomorrow i'm going to miss my plane so all you guys do you mind if i go first right rights are given to you right you can't take them you can take power right through violence and you can take your
freedom through violence from it from an enemy but rights are given by the group to the individual and you have to go to that line and say would you mind and they all say no of course not go for it congratulations that's what rights are it sort of brings me to the the right of freedom of speech because we all agree that it's important that people be able to express themselves but we also impose at least the limitations on that where you can't yell fire in a crowded theater right we have limitations in terms of i mean right you're you're able to express yourself but it's that's a little slippery right like when do we decide that what you're doing is not technically freedom of speech you you it falls under incitement to violence it falls under some unprotected category that although we allow you to express yourself freely we we have to maintain some sort of structure in some sort of order well you know i'm not a lawyer um but i'll try to try to think my way through this with you so you're not a doctor or a lawyer no can you believe that's just crazy what did i do with my life okay i'll continue my disappointment so donald trump um said an untruth right he said our president barack obama is not a u.s citizen he has every right as a matter of free speech to say that right i think it was unwise for the gop to not call him out on it but regardless that's a political question but as a matter of free speech he he was allowed to say something that is was demonstrably not true right had he said barack obama is not a citizen someone should kill him he does not have the right to say that right he has crossed over into incitement of violence and god knows what else and he would undoubtably would have been arrested for that he you know just to be clear he didn't say that i'm sure he would never say that but just as a sort of thought experiment that's where that line is
and so i know i don't know how the courts sort of like slice this but if they feel that a certain kind of inflammatory speech will lead to loss of life um and you know i think in a democracy it's fair to say speech that will undermine i mean our the the democracy we have is part of our physical security in the world democracies are very strong systems dictatorships don't do very well i mean they're very unstable i mean for all the obsession with control that dictators have they're they're the dictatorships are very usually very short-lived regimes rarely transition power to the like the son of the dictator or whatever it just doesn't work very well democracies are very resilient and they transfer power very very well and so our you know our security in the world comes from the strength of our impart from the strength of our democracy and the amazing military that protects it um and so i think you could argue that if someone says something which is like immediately like viscerally obviously a threat to our democratic system you can sort of argue you know you play that out a few more steps real lives are actually going to be in danger and um so then you're you are sanctioned and you know that that's the big argument with donald trump that's the big argument with with the capitol hill exactly yeah that's right should he or should not should he not have access to the the sort of megaphone of twitter and facebook if he's saying things that um some people believe got some folks killed on capitol hill and that may that are a you know a great you know grave threat to the democratic process um i i'm i'm not gonna weigh in that's not a journalist role but i think that seems to be what the discussion is about it's a great discussion yes it's a it's an interesting one because um he didn't exactly say do that right but he didn't say don't do it right right yeah exactly i know he's got to know
that in this insanely volatile situation where people are really thinking that the relationship between the voters and the the the politicians and this whole thing is like inexorably flawed and that they're stealing the election and it's over everything democracy has crashed we're going to lose the the republic this is all madness storm the capitol hill right like you got to like what are we saying here right do what when you get there like what happens when you get there you got to show a force show of force okay what does that mean right and that's where it's open to interpretation right well look yeah it is open to interpretation but if you don't just look at donald trump but the people who are close around him so his personal look correct me if i'm wrong but by if memory serves lynn wood his personal one of his personal attorneys literally said before the january 6 insurrection insurrection is too dignified a word whatever that mob was literally said mike pence the vice president should be tried for treason and hung right this is the lawyer to the president speaking now did donald trump say that or okay no i'm pretty sure he didn't mike pence should be tried for treason and check me on google if you want please do what is what was the premise because because he validated the election results an election an election that the republican leadership eventually admitted was free and fair that was the context yes tried for treason and hung that is a crazy thing to say and there was a lot of rhetoric by other people in that group about what they could do with nancy pelosi and you know other people that they thought had betrayed betrayed what but imagine if the real mob
got to mike pence yeah and murdered him after that yeah oh exactly and really did believe that he was a treasonous person right exactly so so i mean again if i'm wrong i stand corrected but that's my memory of what he's what he said this says uh he should be executed by a firing squad oh it was firing squad [Laughter] that's uh the same yeah yeah so that's you know that's the crazy personal attorney to the american president that's so crazy firing squad while he was still president i mean he's still president at this point and jesus christ right and he didn't you know the president ex president trump did not say oh wait a second what do you see you know you let it go right so what's this have to do with free speech well free speech is there because it's closely tied to human dignity and self-definition and autonomy and all that stuff but if your free speech undermines the dignity and the autonomy and the safety and the lives of other people you stop having that right you cannot drive on the left-hand side of the road like that it's the equivalent of that uh that situation yeah that makes sense um what you you got a lot of little uh tabs on that book there oh you know it's if someone like if i'm doing a radio interview or something and someone says oh read me that section about you know the apache and i can find it fairly quickly that's all that's all that is but did you have anything in those notes that you wanted to bring up that we hadn't discussed no you know we're covering most of it i mean most of it's in my head but um sometimes i worry that i'm going to forget something important to bring up and and uh so that's just my it's like a security blanket like if i can put that next to me then i never need to look at it that's how it works well i always enjoy your work man and i really enjoy your books on tape because
there's something that i always appreciate about an author reading his own work or her own work and you do an exceptional job of that i think you got a great voice for it thank you thank you it um it's reading is hard like they put you basically in something the size of a phone booth and you read for hours and hours and hours but i'm i'm proud that i can do it well like it's very very gratifying to like read your own work and um you know there's a section in my book about a guy named michael mallon um who was one of the insurrectionists in dublin and um you know the the the the the the you know the dozen dozen or so top insurrectionists were executed by firing squad by the brits and michael mallon was one of them when they were taking him to the place of his execution the uh the carriage went right by his own house and he saw his dog and he got to you know in the in the hours before his execution he wrote to you know had four little children and a wife and he wrote a letter to them and it's um almost kind of stream of consciousness i mean he's hours from being shot right he's never going to see them again he's never going to nothing it's over right and he gave his life for ireland and he writes this letter and i rep i i it's in my book i reproduce it in my book i quote it in my book that what he the words that he said the last words that he said to his beloved family and it's almost dream of consciousness he's very upset right and he repeats things and he's oh my god my god i'll never hold you again i mean it just i mean particularly if you're a parent it's just heartbreaking at any rate i was reading that that section and um i got so choked up and the engineer got so choked up that we actually had to stop for a while i mean you know this is a hundred years later this man's words that he wrote in the hours before he was tied they stood in front of a firing squad and shot
that they can still produce so much empathy in us that we cry that's what humans are like that's the amazing thing about humans and um so it just i don't know like obviously poor michael malin is never going to know that his letter is still bringing a tear to people's eye but it but it is well it's also the amazing thing about utilizing language and and you know putting the words together in a way that's going to best represent the way your thoughts are and how to reach someone else's imagination and have them recreate these thoughts in their mind that's right and you know when you have a sort of certainty of purpose like he did um a sort of sense of meaning of what what you know what you're doing it gives you courage and hopefully a courage that you'll use justly and so apparently there was a medical examiner at all the executions it was in the stone breakers yard uh in the in the central prison in dublin and uh the executions were held in the stonebreaker's yard and uh it's a sort of stone enclosure i mean a very small place and and there was a medical examiner witnessing this and you know one after another there was one woman um slated for execution of the last moment they this is what i was saying they they they withdrew the execution because they they knew that executing a woman the brits knew it would make their lives way you know their job much much harder in ireland they didn't dare do it the men were no problem um but the medical examiner testified that at the moment before at the moment where the man stood facing the firing squad ready aim fire that the only person there who wasn't troubling was the condemned that all these young boys i mean they're just 19 20 year old boys in the army right they didn't want to be executing people they didn't sign up for that and they
were all trembling and they could hardly hold their rifle barrels still imagine imagine giving that responsibility to a person based on what your government is telling you is right or wrong yeah it's time for you to take a life and you know what if you don't do it the next person up in front of the firing squad is going to be you yeah so it's always been fascinating to me too how one person would get blanks yeah that's right you don't know that's right and you know like if society really wants to take moral responsibility for killing they should make sure no one has you know no one has blanks and then we really have a real conversation about if we want to be in this business or not one of the um someone someone pointed out uh i wish i could claim this thought but i can't it's so brilliant that amazing photograph of tiananmen square where there's that man standing in front of a column of tanks not moving and you know he's so obviously he's so brave take i've stood in front of tanks they're huge right i mean they crush you in a second right i mean they're scary things right and he's standing in front of this tank and he's not moving and the tanks have stopped and someone pointed out you know there's two brave people in that photograph there's the guy in front of the tank and then there's the driver of the lead tank there it is there's the driver of the lead tank and he's risking possibly being executed by his own government for insubordination and he's not running that guy over and he's the other unseen courageous person in that photo is the the guy who's not look look at that think of the courage for both of them think of that think of the courage in the conversation the tank driver and that man could have had if they were if it were allowed the conversation they could have the government they could form the good they
can do in the world imagine if that were allowed that is such an intense video is he gonna climb up i don't even remember this yeah no that's someone who believes in democracy more than his own life or someone who's just [ __ ] losing his [ __ ] yeah but why right why because he's being depressed yeah exactly yeah but that's someone who does not care what happens to himself yeah or herself right that's that's someone who has put their society their people ahead of their own their own welfare and that i mean if you can watch that in art stock ryan you're you know like it's incredible how does this play out i don't remember eventually they got him out of there i think he negotiated something with the i ca it go yeah it got resolved something got resolved he i mean something was said that made him able to save his own life beautiful right yeah terry [ __ ] and heavy [ __ ] to think that that government to this day is still a dictatorship yeah and they killed thousands of people in tenement square their own people they machine gun them yeah and you can't find out about it no so you live there and you try to research it online yeah it's unavailable yeah that's right is there a better example of freedom in the world than the united states okay so freedom and democracy are not the same thing right right and democracy gives people rights within a country right freedom really is um i mean it's up to you to define how you want but the working definition i'm using is freedom means that you are safe from an outside power controlling you right if you consider the us government to be an outside power which i don't personally but if you consider it if you think of it that way then yes the word freedom is sort of appropriate in the context of january 6 or whatever but really what when people say you know i want my freedoms right my freedoms to
not pay taxes or not wear a mask or whatever it is you know my freedom's to compete in women's sports and i'm trans you know whatever it is they're really talking about their rights and so you know the american democratic system is uh deeply flawed and deeply amazing and you know like we're still working at it and we make mistakes but we're improving it you know whatever and the civil rights movement in the 60s was a huge leap forward clearly clearly clearly it was not a just country before those laws were enacted and it's still not entirely just in its application right um freedom is is a freedom is really a different matter and so i would say we are a free country because we are not under the control of another power uh and that are on paper our rights are amazing and transcend the rights of into you know most people throughout almost all of human history um but obviously it's we're flawed we're human we're racist we're biased we're this we're that we're rich we're poor we don't apply it in fairways all the time but is there a better example of what the way society can be structured anywhere else um i mean you need so you need this sort of balance of a country that is can defend itself and its borders and defend its democracy a balance between that and a system that's fairly fairly just and egalitarian i mean one of the worrisome things in my opinion in terms of justice which is another category uh is that the gap between between rich and poor in this country the income gap what's called the genie coefficient is growing larger not smaller and the larger that gap gets um arguably the less just the society is and the people at the bottom of that gap are arguably not as quote free as the people at the top right i mean just in terms of the choices they have available to them right and that trend has been going on for decades and it's correlated with all kinds of
um things that aren't very that are dangerous to a society to a democracy and exacerbated by the pandemic oh of course yeah yeah but it's been going on for a long time so the genie coefficient is named for an italian economist around 100 years ago and it measures the gap the income gap between rich and poor what's really interesting is that you have a hunter-gatherer societies that are you know really very egalitarian they have a gini coefficient of 0.25 it's on a scale from 0 to 1.0 so they're much closer to sort of like complete equality than they are to complete monopoly and as you go up the scale um you you start to find countries you know really corrupt countries have high g coefficients you know terrible gap between rich and poor america has one of the highest genie coefficients i think 42 41.41.42 of of any of the western democracies right it's on a par with the roman empire wow one of the the highest uni coefficients uh was in medieval europe and that was rectified by the by the the black death the great plague it killed so many people the black death killed one third of the population of europe one out of three people died there was a huge labor shortage and that actually brought the genie coefficient back down um and and so it's the the weird thing about the genie coefficient is that i mean you obviously don't want too high a one because it's not just it has its own instability but really low genie coefficients typically are not associated with powerful countries so the empires that have dominated world events the han dynasty the roman empire the ottomans on and on america the british empire they have like fairly high genie coefficients so as a good lefty i like to think oh well a just unfair egalitarian society eventually will be the most powerful country in the world because everyone's happy and
you know we all pulled together and blah blah blah it's really not true like the the you know typically that really really large dominant empires have like moderately high genie coefficients so ruin my liberal fantasies about all that is that because it's never been attempted successfully in a better way or is i mean like think about democracy right we didn't have democracy until the 1700s didn't exist in terms of like a global leadership like global government but now we have it and it's thought to be the shining example but if you look at 1776 to the rest of human history we're talking about a drop in the bucket a blink of an eye right right comparison of the hundreds of thousands of years that people lived under the bloody rule of dictatorship and monarchies well i mean here's the thing hunter-gatherers are not democracies right right but they have very low genie coefficients in other words in material terms they're fairly egalitarian right um and in a lot of those societies women are in a subordinate role and all kinds of other things that would offend our modern sensibilities what i think we really want is to make sure that the people that are at the very top are not abusing the people at the bottom and that the people at the bottom have a standard of life that's acceptable that's right so even if you're fairly poor but if you're you have access to good housing safe communities and good food that's what you want that's what everybody wants right if you're not a person who wants the the trappings of financial success you don't want a giant house and the cars and all the the stress and all the hassle that goes along with it this genie coefficient i mean does how does it relate to those things like is it well some of that i want yeah i mean some of those decisions are personal decisions like you know some people don't want to be a corporate lawyer or whatever and work they don't even want to be wealthy they just want to be okay yeah exactly i mean
as mike tyson said i was freeze when i was poor right and so and and just to be clear i'm not advocating for a hygienic coefficient for the united states i'm just sort of pointing out historically the really dominant empires in the world have had fairly high genie coefficients and you could make a very good case for a low genie coefficient in south america after all those awful dictatorships the united states supported through the 70s and 80s there was initiatives for real economic reforms that brought the genie coefficients down those countries are way more stable now because they're fairer countries right economically politically legally fairer countries the genie coefficients have come down it's just that ecuador is never going to be a world power you know i mean it's a the world powers throughout history for the past thousand years uh have not been very fair societies and that's is it because insane amounts of money are needed to fund military and to fund these corporations that are innovating and that's going to keep you at the cutting edge of of cultures in terms of like your ability to change things your ability to affect things globally i mean look there's an accumulation of capital yeah and that rule very powerful rulers uh then depend on a huge sort of uh um labor pool to fill enormous armies um that labor pool isn't going to be there in an egalitarian society everyone has more or less the same amount of of material wealth so but you know you need a sort of unfair system to put people in a position of of of accepting the the rule of of a despot and you know let's be clear about it through most of human history empires are run by despots and absolute power um so you know i mean i don't know i don't know if there is an answer but i'm just guessing that that kind of top-down hierarchy that comes with the
accumulation of wealth also creates a labor pool for your armies and then those armies are then very very capable of defeating the enemy but once sometimes it doesn't go the right way so king darius of persia who at the time was the most powerful military leader of the world massive massive army went rode north to fight the scythians over this sort of wild marijuana smoking nomadic people right completely whacked out out there people and had amazing warriors and they were totally outgunned by the iran by by darius right and the ba and the the the city and sort of avoided him for days and darius finally got them into a position to fight him right and this is mobility versus strength it's exactly that right he finally got them in a position to fight him and right before the battle i mean imagine how scared and nervous everybody is right the huge armies are drawn up facing each other at the last moment the scythians noticed that there were a lot of rabbits hopping around in the underground underbrush and they took their bows and arrows and they started hunting the rabbits so they would have something to eat for dinner and darius saw this and you know back in the back in the day armies were drawn up within sight of each other right this isn't a big standoff they're all looking at each other right across a football field basically he saw that the scythian warriors were so calm that they were hunting rabbits in their spare time waiting for the fight to begin and it unnerved him so deeply that he pulled out he retreated and they fled that wild that is wild yeah just the rabbit hunting he was like anyone who can hunt rabbits before a battle like this has got to be sure they're gonna win i want no part of it now there must be an equivalent in mma right the guy that yawns before the fight or whatever like i mean those mma guys must communicate
confidence in a variety of ways there is a way that you can tell if someone's overwhelmed by the moment you could feel it and see it but it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to lose right no but i mean before the fight together before before before that's a lot of what psychological warfare that a lot of fighters engage in the whole point of it is to get the other person thinking and get them upset there's a lot of unconscious dominance and submission with humans and all the social primates and so one they did this one study is fascinating they looked at the sort of pre-fight like poses where they have the fighters in boxing uh they sort of like stand next to each other and face each other and they they examine those for like unconscious uh sort of body language those kind of visual cues and sometimes so one um signal uh sorry it's called called an appeasement cue right it's a little signal like i'm not a threat to you don't hurt me right and it's an appease an appeasement cue is usually used by someone who feels that the other person is a threat to them can hurt them and they don't want to get into a fight so a smile and we've all seen people do this we've all done it ourselves to cops or whatever like when someone seems to be you know more powerful than you what you do is what people do is they sort of do a sort of forced smile it's called an appeasement cue what they found when they look at these videos was that the once in a while these fighters would sort of briefly smile and that was overwhelmingly correlated with losing the fight is that wild that is wild i don't even think he knew he'd i don't think they know they do it right it's unconscious thing wow so they're they're trying to find some peace in a place where they're 100 percent committed to violence right and they're trying but they're sending a signal don't hurt me i'm not a threat to you i'm like it's an appeasement cue like
i'm yeah i'm not a threat to you you don't you don't need to kill me wow right which is what we all do that with cops oh sorry officer i didn't know you know yeah whatever i mean it's it's automatic we're primates right it's wired into us yeah right so the what the scythians were doing was the opposite of an appeasement queue they were basically yawning before a big fight like oh what is the time to fight now okay well let me kill a rabbit so that i have dinner afterwards right how badass is that that's pretty badass um just one more thing i just wanted to i wanted to know what your thoughts are on i mean i i like what we're saying here in terms of the imbalance of income in society but i'm also a person that believes in motivation and i believe that people have to be incentivized to do things absolutely but i don't think that the society as structured is fair and i don't think that it's fair that some people grow up in poverty-stricken crime-ridden gang-infested inner cities and some people grow up in the beautiful bird chirping suburbs right like but how does one balance these things out to the point where i don't believe in equality of outcome but i think it would be wonderful if we had a quality of opportunity if people had the chance in all walks of life in all parts of the country right to to advance with at least similar obstacles right so but do we make it more difficult for the people that live in the bird chirping suburbs do we make it easier for the people that live in the crime infested cities how do we do that and do we do that through things like universal basic income which in my mind like i'm ignorant when it comes to economics but i've always found that appealing because i don't think that money should be the motivating factor for someone to choose what to do or not to do with
their life right but i do know that for people that were poor including myself the incentive to do better is often what spurs you ahead and makes you act and do things and those things wind up being beneficial and some people they don't if you give them money just for free they no longer have incentive and they don't do anything it's just a part of human nature totally how does that balance out well i mean you said it it has to balance right so so there's no so if you had a system where everyone got the same amount of money no matter what they did you're d you're disincentivizing effort yes you can't have you can't have equality of outcome right so i mean that was the big experiment with communism yes right it didn't work very well um i was my first marriage was to a woman who grew up in bulgaria and there were a lot of great things about that society i mean we could talk about that if you want but you know people were not incentivized to um in fact they were disincentivized um not only were they not as financially incentivized to sort of like redouble their efforts um but other people would also look at them with sort of suspicion like what are you doing right you're throwing you know you're destabilizing everything so but then the other the other hand if it is so economically unjust then no matter how much effort you put into it you will never achieve the outcomes that a different kind of person will achieve um that is distance that that doesn't incentivize effort either right so yeah i mean you know you can make a pretty good case that if you're like an african african-american kid in a really really poor community with a really shitty school and you know in a single family home etc etc all the correlates to bad outcomes um you can try as hard as you want and
you know once in a while someone gets through or whatever but you know the odds are stacked so much against you i mean you can make this case as a stack so much against you is that it's not an unreasonable thought to have which is well [ __ ] it i'm not gonna even try right yeah so how do you equalize that education we need good schools everywhere right single parents need some help because they can't work and take care of a child uh i mean you know that their are structural things we can do that make the society collaborative and just in the way that a small-scale hunter-gatherer society is collaborating collaborative and just i mean basically in a small-scale society there's collective parenting and no one parent or set of parents does all the child raising which allows people to do other things that the group needs done and the hunter hunts and the basket weaver waves back you know whatever we have to institutionalize that in this society because it won't happen organically in the kind of way that it does among the but even the problem with institutionalizing something like that you you want someone who's actually motivated to help people you don't want someone just doing it as a job one of the things that's frustrating for people that that you know when you see some of the school teachers in these crime-ridden communities they have no incentive they're not motivated or motivating they're not good at what they do and there's no incentive for them either because it's a dangerous job and it's better to show up and collect your paycheck and just do the minimum amount that you have to do and recognize the fact that this is a shitty situation for everybody which nothing gets better in that way well i yeah i mean i would say that for every teacher that's like that there's another teacher that's buying you know pencils and erasers out of their pocket for the kids because you know whatever like it's hard to
generalize but my answer would be well that's an institutionalized solution that's not working right we need one that that one that works i i you know i don't think we have time to figure out what that is with the education system but you know theoretically they do but i just wish somebody else was you know and i think you're right that it is the education that education is the key but also community is the key like having a safe area where you can go to whether it's community centers or something with some kind of counseling something where you feel like you're a part of something bigger that incentivizes you to continue to try to do better with your life well listen we need to feel community at every level we need to feel at the macro level in our nation right all the way down to the micro level of our neighborhood and it's lacking at every level i will um i mean let me just quickly tell a story that sort of exemplifies this i was um i i was on i was on a book tour some years ago and in norfolk virginia i'd gone i talked spoken at the naval base and i was coming out of my hotel in the morning and there was this old guy like in his like 70 mid 70s like in a wheelchair and he was missing half his right leg and it clearly you know he was bandaged he clearly had just lost half his right leg he was in a wheelchair and he was trying to get into a car it's like seven in the morning i was going to the airport he was trying to get into his car and it was locked and i went up to him and i said sir can i help you and i was waiting for my ride there was no one else out there and he said oh no i'm okay i'll just wait for my wife to come out she's got the keys and uh and i looked down at the situation right and i said wow that seems really really hard you know what you're doing i
mean you're missing your right leg and and he and he said you know zero self-pity which is that's enormously noble thing right he said well i don't know if it's hard but it's interesting it's different get used to it you know i was like all right you're a tough old bird like wow you know i'll try again and i said uh i said wow well i gotta say you seem really brave about it and he looked at me like i was the biggest fool that he'd met in a long time and he said brave about it there's young people in this country missing both their legs don't think i'm brave there's a person who's who's thinking about the entire country that he's part of a country and some people are doing worse than him and don't waste any pity on him because there's other people who need help first and i gotta say i you know i wish i knew who he was so we could put up a statue to him right like if we all thought a bit like that boy would be we'd be doing better i just don't know how to get people to do it well i think if any way your work you know i mean i think tribe is a fantastic testament to that and i think you're doing more of the same with freedom and you know it's what you always are sort of encouraging people to to look at the world in that regard and look at our communities in that way thank you thank you um that and my children are the most profound satisfactions of my lives and my family i should say i feel very honored very privileged to be able to do this it comes through it comes through in your work i appreciate you very much thank you man thank you i love talking to you i love talking to you too i can't wait to write another book and come back all right again let's do it again pulse yeah and freedom is out right now thank you thanks man bye everybody [Music] you