Sebastian Junger examines how European settlers—including kidnapped individuals and volunteers—often preferred Native American tribal life over colonialism’s hierarchy, citing egalitarianism, communal bonds, and lack of wealth obsession as key contrasts. His war journalism in Afghanistan revealed soldiers’ trauma from returning to modern isolation, while disasters like 9/11 briefly restored social cohesion. Junger argues affluence without struggle fuels depression, suicide, and even political views shaped by genetics, linking evolutionary instincts to maladaptive modern behaviors. He finds fulfillment in boxing as a "modern tribe," where effort replaces status, and advocates for physical adversity—like hunter-gatherers’ daily activity—to combat Western decline, predicting ISIS’s defeat won’t heal Syria’s deeper fractures. [Automatically generated summary]
Into the first chapter, I wanted to move in with the Native Americans.
One of the more interesting aspects of it was something that I didn't know about, which was the European settlers that had been kidnapped and were living with the Native Americans, and then when they were rescued, many of them wanted to go back.
Yeah, or they would go into hiding so they wouldn't have to be repatriated to colonial society.
They wanted to stay with their adopted tribes.
And there was also a lot of young white people, particularly white men, but young women too, who basically absconded across the frontier into tribal society.
They fled white society.
They didn't like it.
And as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, we have lots of young colonials fleeing to the Indians, and we have not one example of an Indian, as they were called, fleeing to white society.
Yeah, I mean, Indian society, Native society, wasn't crushed by Christian morality.
So you could divorce, you could marry as a woman, you could marry whom you wanted, you could get divorced, you could do whatever you wanted.
It was very, very egalitarian.
What they've shown is that the...
In societies where everyone is necessary for food production, everyone's more or less equal.
And in agrarian societies, agricultural societies, industrial societies, you have large segments of the population, often women, who are not involved in food production, they're involved in reproduction, and so their equality goes down.
Society as we've created over the last couple of hundred years is almost totally incompatible with With human genetics or with the human body or the the human spirit or whatever well if you look at I Mean genetics are complicated.
Yeah, that was, I think, one of the more disturbing parts about this idea that these people were kidnapped by the Native Americans and wanted to stay with them, was that whatever that Native American life was, like, however they were living, that just seemed to just resonate with them.
Well, we're wired to want to feel like we belong to a group.
Native American society was sexually quite relaxed.
It was quite egalitarian.
In a hunter-gatherer society, you really can't accumulate wealth very well because these societies are often nomadic, so you can only accumulate as much wealth as you can carry, which isn't much.
And ultimately, in societies like that, as in a platoon in combat, which is another part of my book, obviously, you're primarily valued for your contribution to the group.
And that has been lost in modern society.
People are enormously self-serving.
Capitalism basically instructs us to do so.
That's a whole other evolutionary imperative, which is also important.
But in our society, it's way out of whack.
So we are wired to serve ourselves, and we are wired to serve the group.
And in a healthy society, those two are in a dynamic tension with each other and in balance.
In modern society, there really is no group to serve.
And it leads to a really profound sense of meaninglessness for a lot of people.
Yeah, I also found it pretty fascinating that when you were really young, when you were working, I think you said you were working construction, is that what it was?
You were just saying that you were talking to someone you were working with and they were telling you to slow down because some of us have to do this for a lifetime.
It was really interesting that you were longing for something, you were saying, almost to go wrong, so everybody had a band together, whether it was a hurricane or something, and that that mundane life of just work and doing things you don't really want to do...
Well, I mean, the irony about modern society is that it has removed hardship and danger from everyday life, and it's in the face of hardship and danger that people come to understand their value to their society.
And they get their sense of meaning from that.
And so what you have is when, you know, during the Blitz in London, for example, 30,000 people were killed by German bombs.
It was a horror show over the course of six months.
It was ghastly.
But people were sleeping shoulder to shoulder in the tube stations and putting out fires with bucket brigades and digging people out of rubble.
And they were acting as a unified society.
And the English government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties because there's a civilian population getting bombed to bits.
And the opposite happened.
Admissions to psych wards went down during the Blitz and then back up after the bombing stopped.
And then afterwards, there was enormous nostalgia in England for the Blitz for those days, as tragic as they were, because English society felt, people felt like they were together.
Later, I went back to Sarajevo, where I'd been during the siege of Sarajevo in the early 90s, and civilians would tell me, you know, this is 20 years later, 20 years after the war, people would say, you know, a lot of us missed the war because we were better people back then.
Well, adversity produces pro-social behaviors in people.
Adversity makes people act well.
The lack of adversity, safety, and comfort allow people to act selfishly.
So after 9-11, the suicide rate went down in New York.
The violent crime rate went down in New York.
Vietnam vets reported that their PTSD symptoms went down after 9-11.
What happens is...
People suddenly feel that they're needed by their society, by their people.
And if you feel needed, you are able to ignore your own personal troubles.
As once someone in England, an English official said during the Blitz in London, he said, it's amazing we have the chronic neurotics of peacetime driving ambulances.
And if you think about it in terms of evolution, if adversity and danger produced bad human behaviors, we wouldn't be here today.
Another way to say that is we are the descendants of the individuals 100,000 years ago who acted well in a crisis.
The people that acted badly in a crisis and just took care of themselves and didn't take care of their people, their group, those groups died out.
It's people, it's groups that encourage a form of altruism and self-sacrifice of individuals for the group during a crisis.
Well, this book came to me in a sort of two-step process.
You know, first of all, when I was a young man, I had a surrogate uncle figure in my life, a very important person to me named Ellis Settle.
He was half Lakota Sioux, half Apache, and he was born in 1929 on a wagon out west.
He had lived an extraordinary life.
He was very, very educated, self-educated.
And at one point he said to me, you know, it's so funny, all throughout the history of this country, white people were always running off to join the Indians, and the Indians never ran off to join the white people.
And I filed that away in my mind.
I kind of liked the idea of it.
I hoped it was true.
I didn't know if it was true.
And then decades later, I was with American soldiers on a remote outpost in Afghanistan.
called Restrepo, and I made a documentary film by that name with my colleague Tim Hetherington.
And there was almost daily combat.
There was no link to the outside world, no internet.
There was no electricity for a while.
They just slept in the dirt.
They got shot at every day.
We got shot at every day.
There was no women out there.
There was nothing but combat and tarantulas and pallets of water and MREs and ammo.
That was it for a year.
Those boys were out there for over a year.
And they were very psyched to come back to Italy, where they're based, at the end of their deployment.
You can imagine they had some pretty good parties planned.
But after that died down, a real depression set in.
And And by the time I got caught up with them again in Vicenza and interviewed them, many of them said that they didn't want to come back to America.
They wanted to go back out to Restrepo.
And it reminded me of what Ellis had said.
And I thought, why is it that no one wants to come home?
And I realized, it's not that they want war.
They're not sociopaths.
They don't want to be out there killing people and getting shot at.
They missed each other.
They missed the intense communalism of life in a platoon on a remote hilltop in combat.
And it struck me, I studied anthropology in college, oh my god, a platoon in combat effectively reproduces our human evolution, right?
I mean, we evolved to live in groups of that size in a harsh environment.
That's what a platoon is.
And so of course it resonated with them, resonated genetically with them.
And I got to say, as tough as it was out there, there was a weird, also a weird, I don't quite want to call it a euphoria, but a strange sense of well-being out there that I missed enormously when I left as well.
I mean, you know, I've been covering war since the early 90s.
I started going to Afghanistan in the mid-90s.
I came back from Restrepo.
You know, we were in a lot of combat.
I almost killed a couple of times.
So I had some sort of trauma issues.
I mean, everybody did.
My marriage started to fall apart.
That was not coincidental, by the way.
I now realize that the timing was significant.
It took me a while to understand that—and I sank into a real depression— And it took me a while to understand that my depression was partly connected to the fact that I was no longer part of a group.
But it took a long time for me to figure that out.
While I was experiencing all that, I just felt like I was in some kind of...
that I was behind bulletproof plexiglass.
And I was on the inside, and everyone I cared about was on the other side of the plexiglass, and I couldn't reach them.
That they were somehow inaccessible to me.
I couldn't hear them.
I couldn't touch them.
I was alone in this plexiglass cage.
And that's what it sort of felt like.
I was incredibly depressed.
And then Tim, my good friend and brother and colleague who I made Restrepo with, he was killed in combat in Libya.
You know, I just, I had a year or so in the wilderness, I think, psychologically, and, you know, humans are evolved, obviously, to deal with trauma.
I mean, eventually, I mean, if trauma was incapacitating to people, For years or lifetimes, we wouldn't exist, right?
I mean, our history as a species involved a huge amount of trauma.
So we are designed to react to trauma by protecting ourselves emotionally and physically for a certain amount of time, for some weeks or months, maybe a year or two, and then to slowly come out of it and continue functioning.
I mean, obviously it's a terrible experience to be depressed for that long and to go through all that, but did you get some sort of an understanding of yourself out of it?
No, it just sort of happened, you know, financially, emotionally.
I wasn't working as a reporter for a while.
I'd stopped reporting after Tim got killed.
And I just sort of hit the reset button on myself as a person.
And I sort of, when I came back from that, the things I added to my life were very solid.
We're very very good things and I sort of started from zero again and that really kind of worked and And I also I mean, I didn't have a drinking problem, but I but I stopped drinking and I stopped drinking alcohol and that The drinking alcohol I mean me drinking alcohol made me feel good, right?
I'm a really happy drunk and when I was depressed for For a bunch of reasons if I drank I felt great and so there's a real incentive to do that and And I realized that it was depriving me of experiencing my actual life.
Like, my actual life was filled with some very tough things at the moment.
And if you self-medicate your way through them, those things are taken from you.
It's your life.
It's the life you're going through.
And I realized I might lose the experience of these things.
And my ex-wife and I are quite good friends now.
And it's partly because I decided to try and experience the loss of the marriage as directly as possible.
I was talking to someone professional about how I felt because I was a little worried about myself.
But as I said to her, I said, you know, if I was on antidepressants, it might make me feel good enough to accept a life that isn't really working very well.
And if you sort of think about it, think about us as a species, as an animal.
If you're presented with a challenge and you get a little dose of endorphins, of dopamine, or some feel-good chemicals, when you do a task well...
That will encourage you to keep doing that task and keep looking for success, small successes in your life, which is exactly how people adapt and survive in harsh circumstances.
The problem with affluent modern society is it takes away all of the tasks of survival, right?
No one in this room, I don't think, is having to figure out every morning how to literally physically survive.
Where am I going to get the berries I'm going to eat today?
Where am I going to...
Go to kill something that I can eat.
How am I going to avoid the enemy?
We're not thinking like that.
Which is an enormous blessing, right?
I mean, it's an enormous luxury to live like that.
The downside is you don't get this sense of mastery over your circumstances.
You actually don't feel responsible for your own survival.
You don't feel like you are earning your own survival in the world.
You feel like it's being handed to you.
And I grew up in an affluent suburb, and I never had a sense as a young man that I was contributing in any way to the fact that I was physically alive on the planet.
Well, that's very, very recent in human history that young men could afford to feel that way.
Again, it's a blessing, but also a bit of a curse.
It's the most disconnected amongst us are always spoiled rich kids that get handed everything to them and don't have an understanding at all about the consequences of their behavior.
Yeah, and that kind of life is correlated with depression.
And drug abuse.
Yeah, all that stuff.
And the suicide rate is rising fastest among middle-aged white men who, if you listen to some people, are apparently, arguably, the demographic that are most privileged in this society.
Big part of the biology right and the thing about this this quest for stuff You know and one of the things I thought was really interesting in the book we were outlining the key factors for happiness and That wealth is not the primary one but being good at something being recognized for being good at something Being a part of a group like all these things were primary Yeah, I mean if you think about it and again in evolutionary terms We are safest when we are needed.
Yeah, so if you're in a group and the group needs you Your status in the group is secure.
And it had better be because humans do not survive alone in the wild.
A lone human in nature is a dead human, right?
We're primates.
We're social primates.
A lone primate in nature is a dead primate for most of the species.
And we get our safety, our protection, From the fact that we work very, very well in groups.
We don't have long claws.
We don't have sharp teeth.
We can't run very fast.
We can't climb trees worth a dam.
We're extremely vulnerable.
And we get our safety and our dominance in the natural world from our ability to work in a group.
So if you're necessary to that group, you're safe.
So people get very depressed when circumstances in their life change and they're suddenly not needed, right?
When people get old and retire, they're at very, very high risk of depression and sometimes suicide.
When people lose their job and can't find a job, they're at extremely high risk of depression and suicide.
So when the economy takes a downturn, as it did in 2008, and the unemployment rate goes up, the suicide rate immediately goes up.
It tracks the unemployment rate almost exactly.
And one of the points I make in my book is that a very small number of mostly men collapsed the U.S. economy in 2008, and most of them working on Wall Street.
And there was a direct—I read an article in an academic journal on epidemiology, That there was a directly attributable to the financial collapse, there were 5,000 or 6,000 additional suicides in the United States, mostly middle-aged white men, okay?
And sort of professional people of all classes.
And I realized that that was...
Almost exactly the casualty rate from the two wars from Iraq and Afghanistan.
In other words, something that happened at home economically killed just as many Americans as both wars did.
And nobody went to prison.
Not one of those guys was prosecuted, the people responsible for the collapse of our economy.
Nothing happened to those guys.
And you could argue they killed just as many people as our enemies did overseas.
I think most people aren't even aware of how screwy the whole thing was.
There's a great documentary that I always recommend to people called An Inside Job.
It's fantastic.
When that guy starts questioning those economics professors, the guys who eventually got jobs in the government, or went from there and got jobs at big corporations, and you see them folding under the weight of the actual truth of what they've done.
I mean, listen, there were companies that were getting bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of billions of dollars, right?
Bailed out.
And the corporate leaders, the corporate heads of those companies who had bankrupted their countries and asked the country to bail them out, While they were getting bailed out, these men were taking year-end bonuses of $10, $20, $30 million.
I mean, we do seem to be in a deep state of confusion.
And I think one of the things you're seeing with people, even like Trump supporters, people that are these online frog people, you know, the little frog avatars, I think one of the things that they like about it is that they've become a part of a troublesome little group.
Not just safety and luxury, but this staggering change in what has been a normal way of living for people for thousands and thousands of years.
When you were writing this book and you were thinking about all the ways that human beings have altered the environment around them, You were saying that, and I've read this before, that genetics essentially were riding on the same genetics that were 10,000 years ago from the same people.
And the only way genetic change happens in a population is that there is a difference in survival between people with one trait and people with another trait.
So if you have a certain genetic trait and it leads to you having fewer children...
Eventually, 10,000 years from now, people with your genetic trait will tend to die out because you're passing on less DNA to the next round, right?
And if you have a trait that allows you to raise more children to maturity, they carry your DNA and then they'll be more successful and that trait tends to spread.
So does unhappiness lead to lower fertility rates?
Probably not.
You know what I mean?
Often, depression starts in midlife.
By that time, most people have one or two children.
They've passed on their DNA. It only acts through reproductive rates.
There must be some way where human beings are going to become accustomed to this bizarre way we're living, stacked on top of each other, constantly in traffic.
I've always just looked at all this reliance upon electronics and our fascination with innovation, and I've wondered if that's where we're headed.
I mean, it's almost like it's priming us for some sort of a symbiotic relationship with machines, that we become more reliant on technology, stack more and more people into places, make it easier and easier to survive.
That's the one constant, is that we're constantly embedded in technology.
Now when you live in this life, when you're a war journalist and you're in these insane places, and then you come back to New York City, what kind of like a decompression period do you have to go through?
Well, you know, often the developing world that I've worked in, I'm no longer covering wars, by the way, but the developing world is often a very chaotic urban mix of, you know, poverty and cars and pollution and buildings that are, you know, whatever.
I mean, it's not necessarily not urban.
But what I would say is that there's a...
There's something I would describe as a kind of disappointment to have the...
If you wake up in the morning and your survival is a kind of question mark and you know that you have to act well and with sort of clarity and precision and quickness in order to survive, that is intoxicating, right?
The challenge of that's intoxicating and you feel like you're sort of, in a way, earning your existence.
And when you leave that...
It's a relief, but it's also a disappointment.
Because you're no longer earning anything, right?
So it's a relief, but it's also kind of disappointing.
And in that disappointment, you can get quite depressed.
So I know that the depression rate, like when Peace Corps volunteers come back from two years service overseas, they're not in war zones, but they're in the developing world.
They're living in small communities.
They're living a much more difficult, physically difficult existence than most people in our society.
When they come back to America...
The land of cars and everything you can want in the supermarket and nice beds and everything that you think people want.
When Peace Corps volunteers come back to this lovely environment, around 25% of them get profoundly depressed.
So clearly what makes people feel good is challenge, not ease.
That's the conclusion I draw.
And not just challenge, but challenge in the context of a community of people.
Here we have ease in the context of oneself or one's individual family, but not in the context of the community.
And so, you know, if you look at catastrophes, Hurricane Katrina, I was just in Mississippi, and I was amazed, not amazed, actually, in some ways, to have people, many people say, well, we really miss Hurricane Katrina.
We were all so close afterwards.
You know, this is a society with a lot of racial division and all kinds of stuff.
None of that mattered after Hurricane Katrina.
Everyone cooperated, everyone helped each other, made people feel great.
There's a group of friends that I have that are bow hunters, and one of the things that people have gotten really addicted to is solo hunting, where even regular bow hunting is not quite difficult enough for these psychos, so they go deep, deep, deep, 20 miles plus into the wilderness by themselves.
And one of the things they say about it is how profoundly lonely and sad it is.
And even though they know they could walk those 20-plus miles back anytime they want, but there's something about being out there by themselves that when they do return, they just feel invigorated and alive and energized, and they feel like they've accomplished something, especially if they come back with an animal.
Well, listen, I mean, that's an ancient narrative, right?
I mean, the hunter goes out and kills the game and brings it back and feeds his people.
I mean, that's a beautiful story, and it has kept human beings alive for decades.
You know, for hundreds of thousands of years.
You know, some hunting is well done in groups, and some hunting is a solo enterprise, depending on the animal.
And there absolutely is a role for that sort of solo endeavor.
Scouts, you know, often work by themselves because—I mean, in a Native context— Like, for example, the American Indians, the scouts often worked by themselves because they were just harder to detect.
And I'm sure a terrifying endeavor, but you're doing it for your people.
And so you come back from that solo experience, which is so frightening.
I mean, we're a social species, so being alone and in danger is terrifying.
You come back from that to your community, you've served your community and you're among your people again.
Did you feel compelled at all to come up with a solution?
I mean, in deeply describing and Just going over the various aspects of these problems that we're facing as a culture as a society Did you did you have some sort of a need?
I didn't I mean listen if I thought if there was a solution that I was capable of thinking of I would have put it in the book Either I'm not smart enough or there's no solution.
I don't know which it is Yeah, I think there's some things we can do around the edges that will help But we're talking about a systemic problem in society that got its start 10,000 years ago and really got its start in the Industrial Revolution and really got going in the technological revolution.
I mean, we're not going to ban the car, right?
The Amish in Pennsylvania don't use cars.
They have a very low rate of suicide and depression because they spend most of their lives within their community, right?
Right?
That buffers them from suicide and depression.
We're not going to ban the car, right?
We're not going to burn down the suburbs and live in lean-tos.
We'd probably be happier if we did, but we're not going to do it.
But what can we do?
The biggest community that we have is the nation, is the country.
And I think one thing that would help enormously is to treat our nation as if we all belong to it, and as if we all respected it, and that it was meaningful to all of us.
And which means, among other things, it means insisting that politicians who denigrate other politicians, who denigrate segments of the population, who rank American citizens in terms of value, in terms of being, quote, American, whatever who rank American citizens in terms of value, in terms of being, quote, American, whatever that means, politicians who do that are undermining
And I think that has a trickle-down effect, which is extremely demoralizing and gives you the equivalent of feeling like, wow, feeling like you're a child in a family where the parents might get divorced.
I remember during the campaign between Donald and Hillary, I sort of felt like, wow, are mom and dad going to split up?
Like, the type of person that should be a leader is not the type of person that puts that idea out there to the point where it gets into the zeitgeist and people say, well, hey, maybe we really are in trouble.
And, you know, these are ancient human behaviors, and if you tell...
Your people, that there's a threat, your people will rally behind you.
I mean, it's an adaptive behavior, right?
The problem is, as a politician, if you tell your people that the enemy is actually the other political party, you are effectively splitting the country in half.
I mean, tribalism has a very negative connotation as well.
You can act in that tribal way all you want as long as you define your tribe as the country, the entire country.
Right.
And if you start slicing off parts of the country, demographic groups in the country, political groups in the country, say, you know, you're actually not really American.
Like, you really shouldn't be part of this?
When you start doing that, you destroy the country.
You're way more of a threat to our democracy than ISIS is, than Al-Qaeda is.
It was one of the things that was most disturbing about the debates when Donald Trump said that if Hillary Clinton won, he wouldn't necessarily accept the decision.
But I really didn't like it when some of my fellow Democrats, after he was elected, and he was elected, right?
I mean, one way or another, I mean, you can investigate Russia if you want or whatever, but the fact is that he got the most electoral votes and he's our president.
And I really disliked it when some of my fellow Democrats said, he's not my president.
He is, actually.
And if you don't like that, work harder next time and get someone else elected.
But he is your president.
And it was equally disgusting when the shoe was on the other foot with Barack Obama and some conservatives started saying that Barack Obama wasn't really American or he wasn't really their president or that he was an enemy of the state, that he was a secret Muslim spy who wanted to destroy America.
Do you think in that case that maybe it's good that we have a guy like Donald Trump in the president because he is kind of like almost like a human hurricane.
He's something to rally against.
He's a problem that's occurred where there's the eroding confidence in the president now.
I mean, it's palpable.
People know he lies.
He lies all the time.
I mean, he just accused James Comey today of lying under oath when he talked about their conversations.
He already is and will be a completely failed president, but he may actually help this country in his failure.
The GOP, I think, has abandoned all of its core values and core moral principles and seems to have decided that anything that will help the party...
Is more important than things that will help the country.
And that is a very, very undemocratic way to think.
I think if Hillary Clinton had been elected and these things were coming out, the same kind of things about Russia, etc., were coming out, the GOP would be Prosecuting her up to her eyeballs, right?
So they have a complete double standard.
And what I'm hoping is that the Trump administration is such a failure that it gets the GOP to reevaluate its policy of partisan politics as a way to win power.
And I hope it makes the entire country realize that the only way to really win power is through bipartisan politics.
You can argue all you want, but you have to put the welfare of the country first.
I read an amazing book called Our Political Selves, I think it was called, that about half of our political opinion is genetically determined.
So liberalism and conservatism Basically, liberalism is concerned with fairness within the group and equality within the group and acceptance of outsiders for possible inclusion in the group.
Conservatism is focused on hierarchy and sort of law and order and a suspicion of outsiders.
And they're very, very powerful evolutionary, adaptive evolutionary reasons for Both of those worldviews.
And they've done studies with identical twins that were adopted at birth and compared them to fraternal twins.
And there's a far higher concordance of a political opinion In identical twins that were adopted at birth and put in different kinds of families than with fraternal twins.
So that means that our political, apparently it's around 50% of our political beliefs are genetically determined, which means that those beliefs had adaptive value in our evolutionary past, which means that the argument, I'm right, you're completely wrong and you shouldn't exist, is a false argument.
That the country actually needs both parties Very, very badly in that a healthy society has conservatism and liberalism in a kind of dynamic tension where, yes, they might fight, they might argue, but they are roughly proportional in the population, and equal weight is given to those two competing values.
Was it taken into consideration that when these people are adopted, that growing up adopted without your biological parents puts you in a certain mindset automatically?
And that maybe it wasn't necessarily a genetic thing, but it was a circumstantial or a nurture thing?
Yeah, but anyway, what we're saying is that there really are genetic limitations.
There's no doubt about it.
And this idea of like a fair fight, sometimes it's not fair.
It's just not going to be.
And with you, it's the mile.
With some people, it's the ability to hit hard.
For some people, it's just speed.
You know, I mean, if you've ever seen like a Floyd Mayweather fight, it is incredibly clear that not only is he ridiculously skillful, but he's got some stupendous speed advantage over most human beings.
I also, I was watching a fight of his, it was sort of slow-mo, I mean, I sort of slowed it down so I could really watch, and he got hit full in the face by somebody, I mean, right in the face, and his eyes never blinked.
The amount of training you would have to do to overcome the end, it's one of the more important reasons why it's so critical to learn striking, in particular, at a very young age.
The body develops.
Some people can pick it up late in life and still be really successful at it, but I don't think you ever really get a real elite boxer that doesn't start training before puberty or around puberty.
There's just something about the development of the body, like your body growing and maturing with this task, learning how to strike and move and explode with combinations.
Well, when they start talking to you, man, that's when it gets weird.
I have a 3, a 20, a 9, and a 7. And what's really fascinating is watching the traits that you know have come directly from DNA. Like, parts of you emerge out of the kid.
Yeah.
Maybe one kid and then the other kid, none of it.
Some of it will be your wife.
It's so strange.
Because you try to piece it together.
What are instincts?
Why are dogs barking at snakes?
They don't know what the fuck a snake is, but they know something's wrong.
There's something deep in their memory banks that say, this is an issue.
Whereas a stuffed animal on the ground is not an issue.
Well, I tell you what it is, is that the dogs that weren't reflexively fearful of something that looked like a snake died more often than it produced offspring.
And so they'll bark at a crooked stick, too, just to be on the safe side.
Likewise, humans are scared of heights.
Yeah.
And if you're not scared of heights, you're more likely to fall and you won't pass on your genes.
It's just all the different things that people are afraid of, arachnophobia, phytophobia, fear of spiders and snakes, I mean, those are directly related to poison.
Or do you think maybe is it possible that someone in your past, some ancestor, passed that through the DNA? Well, I mean, we're all predisposed towards being reasonably fearful of those things.
It's just so strange that there's particular things that resonate like that, like particular things, whether it's a snake or a spider.
Just, I mean, I really wonder if, like, the things that human beings have, like, and that also animals have, these instincts, if we just don't totally understand what memory is.
Well, you know, I was home writing Tribe, actually, and so I wasn't overseas.
You couldn't really get into Syria anyway.
I mean, it was a suicidal thing to do.
And so what we did, my colleague Nick, the guy who was here earlier, we basically sort of worked the border areas around Syria looking for people who were living in Syria, who knew people in Syria who could shoot for us.
And we found some very, very brave people who documented their lives under ISIS, their lives with the Free Syrian Army.
There was a lot of combat.
And we accumulated about an hour, a thousand hours of footage and interviews we did with experts.
And we put together Hell on Earth trying to explain how really quite peaceful democratic protests turn into violent demonstrations and finally into a civil war.
And of course, it was the repressive government.
I mean, people protest in the street and they're met with machine gun fire and eventually civilians are going to get some machine guns themselves and fight back and that's how you get a civil war.
We had a really good I mean, this is the first I've made this is my fifth film most of the films I've made it was me and an editor and so another person in the room or whatever This we had a big team and so we had some very very smart young people who are going through all this footage and Categorizing it like here.
This is a section about you know, this material is about Whatever, escaping ISIS. And this is about trying to find food, you know, whatever.
They would sort of put it into categories.
And then I would start to look through some of that material and we could gradually sort of build a structure.
The situation in Syria seems to be, for someone who just hasn't studied it that much, but just looks at it from the outside, one of the bleaker, darker situations that we have here in the world.
I mean, it's the tragedy of this generation, I think.
Over 400,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, have died.
The equivalent death toll in this country would be, I think, seven or eight million Americans, the sort of equivalent amount of people.
And half the country, half the Syrian population has been displaced from their homes and millions are outside the country's borders in Europe and even in this country.
It seems like with all those Middle Eastern countries, any country that's run by a brutal dictator, as soon as that dictator's removed, or as soon as somebody dies, there's this massive power vacuum.
I mean, basically, it's sort of a utilitarian argument from John Stuart Mill.
Like, what's going to cause the least human suffering or promote the most human happiness?
And, you know, sometimes I can understand the reasoning behind, look, the guy's a dictator, but we should leave him in place because the alternative is a lot of other innocent people suffering.
When we remove him and the country collapses.
This country has already collapsed, so the question is, okay, we make a tentative peace deal with him, we'll leave you in power, we won't try to topple you, but let's stop fighting.
Like I like exploring a topic and starting to make sense of it and starting to see connections between things.
So when I was writing Tribe, when the central thesis of it sort of occurred to me, And all these disparate facts suddenly align themselves in an orderly way.
And I felt like I'd shown a little bit of light onto the world and shown how it worked.
Like, that's totally intoxicating to me.
And likewise, when you're making a documentary, you suddenly start to see themes and structures in the film, in human affairs...
They sort of come out, and when you work on that level, to me it's incredibly gratifying.
Because that means that I've now made sense of something, there's a disorderly confusing world, Manage to organize it in an understandable way.
And that means other people can understand it.
And then we can have a conversation about how the world works and how people work.
And that, to me, is the point of journalism.
It's the point of all intellectual endeavor.
And to be even a small part of it, to me, is incredibly exciting.
You nailed it, and you definitely nailed it with the thing I was talking about, how just beginning the first chapter, I had a real urge to get out of the city.
I had a real urge.
There's this thought, like, can I live in the woods?
Can I live in a tribal society?
It seems...
It seems like you were outlining almost like a mathematical problem.
Well, you know, I studied anthropology in college, and my understanding of humans is that we are social primates that prefer to live in groups of about 50 people in a challenging environment.
That's what human beings are.
And to the extent that we depart from that, we lead lives of dissatisfaction and frustration.
I mean, I wish I was part of a communal group fighting to survive in the wilderness.
Like, I mean, I had some taste of that with the platoon that I was with, and that was intoxicating.
It has downsides, obviously.
You can't stay out there forever.
But it made me at least understand that the source of my dissatisfaction in life wasn't internal.
It made sense.
It was that I was having a healthy reaction to circumstances in society that humans were not adapted for.
And even that was enough to bring a kind of peace of mind for me.
I also very consciously and deliberately try to live in places where there is the possibility of a sort of close communal neighborhood.
I live in a very poor neighborhood in New York City, which for some of the hassles at least has the sort of rich fabric of human connection that you just don't get in wealthy neighborhoods.
And I mean, it's not very, very poor, but it's a Dominican neighborhood.
Half the people in that neighborhood really don't speak English very well.
So it's a very rich or ethnic neighborhood.
People are quite poor.
And I know everybody.
I mean, everyone knows each other by sight, and we look out for each other.
And during Hurricane Sandy hit New York, I mean, a lot of the people that had young children had to leave because there was no light.
There was no water.
The power was out, right?
Half of Manhattan was completely dark.
It was actually quite dangerous at night in the dark half of Manhattan.
And where there was no streetlights.
And so this building, it's a tenement building that I live in with my wife.
And a lot of the people left and they were worried about being robbed.
And these are poor people, right?
This is not a wealthy building at all.
is quite quite a poor building and so they they organized a guard shift one of the people one of the women in the building had a machete and they organized guard shifts at the front door with a machete and the young men in the building took turns like two Wow.
You know, I wasn't associated with the building at that time, but boy would that have made me feel good to be part of that.
You know what I mean?
That is what human beings, that's what they are.
It's that, right?
And you didn't see that in a wealthy neighborhood, partly because the wealthy neighborhoods actually had light.
Well, my wife lived there and I moved in with her.
But the reason I was happy to move in with her, one of the reasons I was happy to move in with her is precisely because it wasn't an affluent neighborhood like the kind I grew up in.
That to me is just soul death, right?
I mean, it's just, I grew up in an affluent suburb and it's just the most boring neighborhood.
Thing on the planet like it's just deadly to me and and I you know like had I not grown up like that Maybe I'd be living in a neighborhood like that.
I mean I get it right But I did grow up like that and the one thing that I just cannot survive Is that kind of complacent affluence like it just kills me?
It's so funny because that's the one thing that people try to achieve when they grow up in that sort of poor community They want to get out and live in that big house the big yard Look at their suicide rates, their addiction rates, their depression rates.
You highlight some really profound issues with culture in your book, but I would wonder how many people come up to you after they've read it and go, what do I do?
Like, you're right, you're right, but what do I do?
I mean, here I am, I'm this guy, I have this house, I have a mortgage, I have kids, I have a job that's good, and I don't want to leave it, but what do I do?
I mean, you know, it's a question if you can't have it all.
And what I would say to them is, sell your house, sell your car if you can, move into a community where you have to be inter-reliant with the people around you, and you have to interact with them every day.
That is what makes people feel good.
But the thing is, people are understandably not willing to give up the pleasures of an affluent life in order to have social connection.
So you, regardless of how much money you would make, you would always move into a neighborhood where people are relying upon each other and stay tight to each other?
Those kind of material possessions also, I mean, again, evolution, right?
Particularly for males in the society, if you control resources, you have a reproductive advantage over males that don't control resources, and girls will like you better, right?
So when you're an 18-year-old boy, the instinct to get a car, to get a boat, maybe one day to get a private airplane, whatever, that instinct has huge...
Evolutionary advantage because it gives you access to women, right?
Not all women, but enough so that it's a great strategy for meeting girls, right?
The problem is that once you're sort of further on in your life and you have children, you have a family, If you don't have a community, and what you have instead is a huge lawn, an overpowered boat,
and a ridiculously expensive car, you have taken things that were a definite reproductive advantage at 18, and you have dragged them into midlife, where instead of making you feel good, they will depress you.
In my opinion, that's what happens to those guys.
So it's not that those things are a stupid idea at an earlier point in your life, but definitely when you're 50 years old, again, I'm sure if you did the proper study, you could make a correlation between those kinds of material possession and alcohol abuse, depression, suicide, all that stuff.
I wonder if that's the case with like rappers and people that grow up in these poor black communities that go on to have insane material wealth.
I've always been fascinated by the ridiculous hip-hop culture of just giant houses and 50 cars and throwing money up into the air and just this celebration of excess coming from a place of nothing and having this deep desire to achieve all those things that seemed unattainable.
And, I mean, listen, I met a young woman who had survived cancer, and she said to me rather sheepishly, she said, you know, when I was six, she was on a cancer ward, and she knew all the other cancer sufferers on the ward.
And her family and basically her tribe rallied around her.
She didn't know if she was going to survive.
She was going chemo and all that awful, awful stuff.
And she looked at me sheepishly and said, I survived and now I miss being sick.
She missed the community of cancer sufferers on that ward and her own community that rallied around her.
She was lonely.
Now, if soldiers are missing war and cancer survivors are missing cancer, like something's missing.
You know, in my own life, I'm a very addictive person.
I have an addictive personality, and I've found a lot of happiness in martial arts.
And one of the things about martial arts, particularly in jiu-jitsu, because it's one of the rare martial arts that you could practice going 100% and not really hurt each other too much because you're not hitting each other.
You're just choking each other and tapping each other out and stuff.
But there's a camaraderie and a bond between people that choke each other all the time that you just don't see with other men or I don't see.
Yeah, I really feel like, especially physical struggle, I mean, there's a lot of people that are averse to exercise, and I'm like, I can't stress it enough.
I think the body needs physical struggle.
I think if you don't, I think there's an overflow of energy and stress that's unmanaged, and it manifests itself in a very physical way.
There was a study that I read of, I mean, there are a few hunter-gatherer societies that are still in existence, and The average amount of physical activity in subsistence-level hunter-gatherer societies, which of course is our evolutionary past, I mean that's what we are designed to do, is something like two hours of hard walking per day.
On average, men and women moved vigorously for two hours a day, usually walking quickly.
That's what our bodies are designed for, and if we do that, we're tuned up at that level.
Our mind feels good, our bodies feel good.
And if you don't do that, I mean, you can lay around all day, but you will experience a psychological deficit and a physical deficit.
I mean, it declined slowly, but it didn't go off a cliff like it does in our society at 35 or whatever it is.
Like, it was a gradual decline, and if there was a cliff, it was in the mid-70s.
And that's because, I mean, the theory was that it was because that constant, intense physical activity, testosterone allows for it, but that activity actually keeps those levels high.
I mean, one of the things that they prescribe to middle-aged men is sprints, you know, run up hills, like carry heavy things, do squats, do things that stimulate your entire body.