Sebastian Junger recounts his near-death aneurysm in June, where 10 anonymous blood donors revived him after a 90% blood loss left him blind and hallucinating—his father appeared before he collapsed. Now an atheist giving blood regularly, he explores Pulse, a book linking DMT release and ancestral comfort during dying moments. His pre-aneurysm dream of unnecessary death spurred chainsaw clearance of his driveway, hours before the rupture. Junger contrasts self-serving "leaders" with true ones like Robin Williams or Liz Cheney (who defied 70% of GOP’s stolen-election narrative), warning extremist factions—MAGA and WAGA—undermine compromise. Mobility, not brute force, enabled nomadic groups like the Apache to resist empires; yet policing collapse in male-dominated areas risks higher violence, as women historically temper aggression through social incentives. His book frames freedom as run (Taliban’s guerrilla tactics), fight (women disrupting labor strikes), and think (collective sacrifice overpowering oppressors). Egalitarian societies thrive only with shared purpose—like the Vice Lords gang or a Norfolk amputee veteran—while inequality fuels systemic failures, proving collaboration overcomes brute strength. [Automatically generated summary]
We were talking before, there's so much to talk about, but we were talking before, and you were saying that over the last year, you almost died because you had some crazy internal, you had an aneurysm in your pancreas.
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 was just from a structural problem.
And one afternoon, one beautiful June afternoon last year at burst.
And, you know, I just felt this pain shoot through my stomach.
I was like, damn, what is that?
And within a few minutes, I couldn't stand up.
And within about 10 minutes, I started to go blind.
And my wife called the ambulance.
And those guys got there.
And, you know, I was tanking really fast.
And the hospital is an hour away.
And 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% 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 a black pit opened up underneath me, and I felt myself starting to get pulled down into it.
And 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, my father sort of appeared next to me and started, trying to communicate with me and comforting me.
And 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.
They pumped 10 units of blood into me and that's what brought me back.
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.
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 they're 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, Mr. Younger?
You're one lucky guy.
You almost died yesterday.
I had no idea.
And then she came back an hour later.
And she said, how are you doing?
And I said, you know, physically, I was throwing up blood.
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.
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, 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.
And the next five days in the ICU, I thought about that word sacred and what the experience was now giving me access to.
And, you know, not to sound sort of like trite, but life is a friggin' miracle.
And, you know, I'm not religious.
I, you know, whatever.
I don't think any of us, few of us, I certainly didn't quite understand 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 again, I'm an atheist.
I don't mean sacred in a religious sense.
I mean, in the sense that it has a profound value and you mustn't, mustn't, mustn't forget.
I mean, our emotional and 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.
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 that gift was returned to me.
And I don't even know who to say thank you to other than I've started giving blood.
Ten people donated blood and saved my life.
I'll never know who they are.
And that, you know, it makes you part of this sort of web of life 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 it made me feel so good.
And now I can't wait to do it again.
Like I'm part of something bigger.
And that's one of the most profound human joys is to be part of something greater than yourself.
Well, you know, I had a gallon of blood in my abdomen and whatever the amount of blood in your body or something like that.
They can't.
It's a hematoma and my body had to gradually reabsorb it.
Whoa.
So, you know, that takes months.
And now I'm left with this sort of psychological residue of the experience, which is I have this, you know, renewed, reinvigorated appreciation for life.
But also, 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 in a car accident or whatever.
Really, the truth is the thing, we're alive because the tiniest membranes in your body 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 no apparent reason, that's pretty startling news if you think about it.
They were doing it out of the University of New Mexico.
Rick Strassman was doing it, and he had full federal approval for these studies.
And there was a book called DMT the Spirit Molecule that he wrote about the experience of taking these people and doing an IV drip, dimethyltryptamine.
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.
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 you go, the pineal complex of reptiles is a morpholog morphologically and functionally connected set of organs.
It originates in an evangination?
Evagination?
Of the roof of the, oh boy, all these.
It's formed by two structures, the pineal organ and the parietal eye, parietal, parietal, parietal, eye, parietal.
Parietal.
Both the pineal gland and the parietal eye are photosensitive.
Yeah.
Go there which reptile has a third eye.
Like that.
So there literally are, 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 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 structure of the brain getting in there.
But 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.
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 people that are like willing to go way out on a limb think it's a chemical doorway to the afterlife.
Well, let me tell you, I mean, that's a pretty stunning thought.
And 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, you know, I'd had a pain in my abdomen for a year that I ignored.
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 morning of the day that it happened, 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, 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'd been meaning to do it for two years.
And that morning, I was like, I've got to clear that damn driveway.
And I took my chainsaw and I took a few hours and I cleared the whole length.
It was 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.
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 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, fuck 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, shit, 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 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 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?
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.
And the old adage of like, you know, the tears of a clown, like that is really, they're really depressed and on stage is the only place they get to be.
And then a friend of mine is a doctor actually wrote a paper about the effects of long-term anesthesia when someone's put under for a long period of time for like a heart attack, things like that.
And he was talking about that in terms of the impact on your endocrine system.
So he was writing about that and was saying that there could have been a, he was a Robin Williams fan as well.
And he was saying there probably could have been a correlation between Robin Williams going through that heart attack, having open heart surgery, and then depression following afterwards.
there was the Lewy body syndrome and then all this medication they had to take, which also had profound side effects.
Yeah, I mean, it's not that common that comedians take their own lives.
I mean, it does happen with Robin.
Robin was a big one for a lot of people because he was not just a comedian.
He was like a cultural icon in terms of his films.
You think of all the different movies like I was in.
And he had such a range, too.
That's when you, like, to me, when you know how brilliant a person really is, like, do you remember that film that he did about the crazy film processing guy?
It was like 24-hour film.
You remember those little film booths, photo booths that people would go to?
You know, in Good Morning Vietnam, in the initial few minutes, like it's pretty clear that it wasn't scripted because there's this like kid in the control room.
I mean, the conceit is that as a military DJ and a radio announcer during Vietnam, right?
And the military command didn't really like him because he was saying things that were sort of like 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 wasn't scripted because the kid in the sound booth behind him, you could watch him react to this like three-minute outpouring from Robin Williams where he's like channeling different people and it's all coming out.
It's totally insane.
And this kid can't even stand up.
He's laughing so hard.
I'm like, that's not acting.
That's a guy who actually had no idea this was coming.
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.
You know, there's something I write about a little bit in Freedom.
I mean, I know we'll 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 themselves last, you know, and you can see it in the military.
Like 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 a sergeant said, sir, please sit down.
It's our job to get shot at.
It's your job to stay alive and direct this shit show.
And that's real leadership.
There was 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, 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 bullets smacking all around him.
He was head of the whole damn thing.
And his aides were like, sir, please take cover.
We need you.
And he wouldn't do it.
That's real leadership.
And that can be a military leader.
It can be a comedian who's beloved by people.
If you make yourself one of everyone else, then you're really, really a leader.
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 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.
I think there are people that are cowards that wind up in leadership positions.
And 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.
And 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.
And this way you're describing leadership, 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.
And that's what led us to what we have in the White House currently.
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 in someone who's running the show.
Well, you know, I think the willingness to tell the truth as a political leader, even if it puts you in disfavor with your own party, is a strong indicator of moral courage.
And, you know, both parties, I think, have a deficit of that.
And, you know, I mean, I'm a registered Democrat.
You know, I've, whatever.
Not that it really matters, but just to be 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 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 future.
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.
You've already gotten through all of 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.
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 event that took place or 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 shit.
I mean, I think a lot of it is just sort of what's called virtue signaling.
Like I will say the election is stolen because that means I am part of the current sort of conservative ethos.
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 literal truth.
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 rightful winners of the 2020 election and they stole it from us.
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 our public discourse.
Like we get thirsty.
We need to drink out of that well.
And the extremes on both sides have poisoned it.
And I feel like 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.
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 QAnon people or the woke people, you have extremely low status people who want to impart some control on other people.
They want to get other people to listen to them.
They want to get other people 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 woesters, 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.
They'll hope that you come 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 a 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.
I think that's exactly what's missing in 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, the far right people who want death to the far left and the far left people who 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.
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 perceived progressive, like the extreme end of it, like the tribe, like, you know, AOC and those type of people that really want a much more progressive, much more socialist, socialized medicine, social, you know, it's a different strategy in terms of like control of the left.
You know, 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.
And I do that with the right wing.
I mean, I could look at a bunch of policies that 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.
The world's complicated, right?
The solutions are complicated and messy and imperfect.
But I really tried to think: okay, so 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 gender issues.
Like, some of it makes no sense to me.
I mean, look, I'm an older white guy.
I'm in a really lucky place in the world.
And I mean, people will tell me that, right?
So I'm not even really going to judge, 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?
Because right now the water is about to hit the wall in the Olympics because they are allowing this woman who was an elite male powerlifter 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 everyone's kind of freaking out about this because this person is just going to dominate.
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, the bigger guy, the bigger the empire just cannot 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%.
In other words, women were much closer to men, 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 it was more adaptive to be mobile than to be big and strong.
And it's a really interesting difference.
And the other interesting thing about that is that as you increase body size, 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 doesn't double, which is really interesting.
So if you have a guy who'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 a field, I would run away until you were, I ran a 412 mile.
I'm going to outrun you, right?
And when you're really exhausted, I'm going to turn around.
Right?
Like, that would be the tactic of the smaller adversary.
And it scales up.
So if there's too big a difference and you're in an octagon, there isn't a lot of room to move around.
So they did a test with Muhammad Ali back in the late 60s or something like that.
He was sort of in his heyday and early 70s, something like that.
And so they put up a balsa wood board in front of him and they had some crazy camera timer thing.
And they said, okay, hit the board with a jab, right?
When you see the light flash.
So the light would flash and 15 hundredths of a second later, his glove would hit the board.
So they broke it down.
It took 11 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 it from his resting position to the board.
You see what I'm saying?
It took longer to perceive the punch, to perceive 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 four hundredths of a second.
Your brain takes 11 hundredths of a second.
You will 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 putting their chips into a bet, right?
And the people, the test subjects, were watching the 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 move 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 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 it's 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 spoke about this really eloquently.
And that's where sociability and language and all these things come into play with humans because we're no longer, I mean, no group of humans can be dominated by a single alpha individual because a coalition can always take them down.
And that makes society livable, right?
We're not in this sort of horrible hierarchy where the biggest person gets to decide everything.
But what we're talking about, I mean, 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 of how to, I mean, there's 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.
And then the way they interact will change if they fight 10 times.
One guy might win six, you know, and then the other guy might win four, and you can't predict.
The problem that we were talking about with this trans-as athlete thing 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.
But the people that want to support trans people and think this is a good time to make society more inclusive, they're the ones who want to support it.
Even though what's really fascinating to me is that Caitlin Jenner is now being accused of being transphobic.
Because Caitlin 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 fucking Olympic gold medalist and one of the greatest athletes the United States has ever produced.
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?
Well, if the answer is no, then that says a lot about trans competing in Well, 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 males versus biological males, biological females versus biological females, trans females versus trans females, trans males versus trans males.
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.
I don't know if that's going to be within our lifetime, but I think that's the future.
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.
So in the American Southwest, just that same area, right?
There were two kinds of people.
But when the whites showed up, when Europeans showed up, right?
There were the Pueblo people who were very wealthy.
They irrigated, they cultivated, they lived in towns, towns that looked a lot like small towns in Europe, right?
Up on top of Mesas, very well defended.
In material terms, they were doing very well, right?
And then there were the Apache and the Navajo.
They were 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 Spanish arrived in the late 1500s, what happened?
They defeated the Pueblo communities immediately.
Like sometimes within hours, they could roll these pueblos, right?
The Apache remained free until the last band of 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 the enemy was near, the children would sleep with food tied around their waists 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 so there was one war leader named Nana, N-A-N-A, Nana.
And in the 1880s, I mean, the machine gun's been invented, the light bulb, what else?
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 over six weeks, they covered 1,500 miles.
And Nana was 75 years old.
So the human being, right, is meant to move.
It's also really good at 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 we're 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 that don't have an air force, you know, and then we're not so invincible.
And it's because they were so mobile.
So this sort of like 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, you know, we defeated the British in 1776 precisely because a small mobile force can sometimes squeak out a victory.
And so part of my book, Freedom, is about that trek because it was my own personal experience with being physically autonomous.
And it was hard.
Like I said, it was hard won.
I write about the frontier as well because we walked through what used to be the Pennsylvania frontier.
The railroad lines go along the Juniata River.
It's the only waterway that trends east-west in Pennsylvania.
And, you know, the river is 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 I wrote in the book, I write it because that was the heart of the Indian wars along the Pennsylvania frontier in the 1700s.
And a lot of people that went out there, they were very poor.
They're often immigrants.
And often there were people that just didn't want the government breathing, the colonial government breathing down their neck.
That was one of the more interesting things about the beginning of the book where you 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.
But 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, for example, of course, there's no fire department.
And these are people who are living in log cabins in the wilderness.
So 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 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, 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 settlers 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 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, the more you need one or the other.
And there really is no way to be completely safe, completely comfortable, and completely free without obligation to your tribe.
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, you know, in the book itself, there's a lot of research into topics, right?
So like MMA and the Apache and all that.
I thought, well, it'd be really interesting to sort of weave my narrative about this walking trip.
We called it high-speed vagrancy.
I mean, we really moved, right?
10, 20, 25 miles a day sometimes.
It would be really interesting to weave this trip into the research that I did.
And so that's how I came to form the book.
But so the native tribes of that area, they were dominated by the Iroquois.
And so this is where this great truth about freedom comes in.
The more people you're with, the better you can defend yourself.
So the Iroquois were indomitable until the Europeans showed up.
And one of the reasons the Europeans couldn't be defeated was because they came with diseases that just decimated the ranks of the Native people.
So you can play the sort of thought experiment.
Say smallpox didn't exist and the Native peoples of North America had their original populations.
The Iroquois were an extremely well organized, huge, huge organization.
And you can make a pretty good argument that the Europeans actually could not have defeated them militarily.
But what was their strategy?
I mean, for all those Native people, the strategy was why fight a quote fair fight in the open when you could ambush people, surprise attacks, creep up on them at dawn.
You're just going to lose more people if you fight in the open, bows and arrows against firearms.
Speaking of mobility, they were so mobile that the settlers often thought they were fighting five to ten times as many Iroquois as 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, was 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 would keep their arrows interlaced in their fingers, and they would shoot one arrow and then another arrow.
So 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 of arrows.
The settlers that I wrote about, some of them were able to load their rifle at a dead run.
And this is with a ramrod, put the ball in the barrel and the patch and then pour the powder in and da-da-da, or the other way around, 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 in the woods.
But if you had ranks of riflemen who were alternating firing and reloading, you know, it's just suicide to charge them in a field.
Of course, that's what happened to the, I mean, that's what happened in European warfare.
There's a direct equivalent in Genghis Khan in East Asia, a horseback culture that the European powers really didn't know how to deal with militarily.
And in my book, Freedom, I talk about this sort of basic difference between mobile societies and sedentary ones.
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, et cetera, et cetera.
In mobile societies, like the Apache, it's very hard to have social classes because you can't accumulate anything.
And so in history, the sedentary people, although more powerful where they stood and more wealthy in material terms, often had this sort of like strange insecurity about their what, like if they were lucky, 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 sort of saying, this sort of song that dates back to this era, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
This sort of eternal clash between the migratory nomadic people, herding cultures and the farming cultures.
We do not, I do not have a mill with willow trees.
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 wealthy settled people in the valleys.
And I mean, you can make an argument that wealth and sedentary life make people weak, right?
I mean, you can make that argument.
Certainly from the eyes of a nomadic culture, that's what it looks like.
And even the sort of ancient biblical story of fratricide of Cain and Abel, I mean, you know, Cain was a farmer, and Abel was a nomad.
And it goes, you know, the thinking, the sort of ethnographic thing, or the anthropological thinking about this is that this story goes back to this original bifurcation between farmers, the sedentary people, and the mobile ones.
But Cain, 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 is vegetables.
And he's jealous.
And he kills his nomad brother because he's jealous of what Abel can offer God.
And there you see the affluence, but the insecurity that wealthy sedentary people have for those who, quote, have nothing left to lose.
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 live in the mountains 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 just the bullshit of traffic 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 essence calls out for a time where life was simpler and more pure and more interconnected with nature.
So when you see someone who's doing that, this part of you goes, ah, I want to do that.
And it's even in the Bible, you know, in the Cain and Abel.
It's our seminal story of fratricide.
It goes all the way back.
That sort of division goes all the way back in the jealousy of the mob, the jealousy that we wealthy sedentary people have for the mobile people.
Like it's very, very ancient.
One thing I should point out, and I think it's worth talking about, we were talking about it a little bit before, our safety in the world comes from the fact that we have people around us that we trust who will help in defense of, help defend our community, right?
And because 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.
And the larger the group, the safer it is from attack from other groups.
I mean, just as a basic fact of 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 in its sort of simple, the word freedom sort of works in its simplest form in the context of freedom from oppression by an 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 born into and have signed on to, you're really talking about your rights.
They're kind of different things.
So as an example, I looked at a group called the Yamnaya, and the Yamnaya were these nomadic, this nomadic horse culture from the eastern steppe, from the Russian steppe, 5,000 years ago.
And 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 swept through Europe and they entered the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, about 5,000 years ago.
And they had a real warrior culture.
And when they rode into Neolithic Spain, and 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 overmatched.
And over the course of about 100 years, the Yamnaya completely eliminated all the men in Iberia.
Just think about that.
All the men, not the women, who clearly were mated with, and the Iberian population now are the descendants of the Yamnaya 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, it's a pitch for realism, which is 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, I mean in ancient historical terms, now there's international laws and there's defense pacts and there's NATO and whatever.
Liechtenstein does not really have to worry about being invaded because it's part of 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.
I mean, 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 nations that couldn't defend themselves.
I mean, look, Montenegro was not overrun by the Ottomans because it could defend itself.
Right.
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.
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 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 etc.
I mean, that's the history of dictators.
My father grew up in Spain and left when Franco took when the fascists took over in Spain.
I just wrote an article about how that happens.
You know, Spain had a democratically elected government, and Franco came in and said, that's bullshit.
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 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 people.
Well, it's interesting, too, because what we're talking about here, this utopian concept of 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.
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, we'll probably have less confrontation and less.
And I think there's also a deep resistance to avoid militarizing our police department.
But 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 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 how does that balance out?
And how does that balance out without the kind of kind of leadership that you do see being necessary in the military?
I think the people that say defund the police, I'm not even quite sure what that means, right?
I mean, I remember during COVID, there was like a phrase like abolish rent.
And I'm not even sure what that means.
Like, how would you implement that?
Like, what do you specifically are you talking about?
But likewise with the defund the police.
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.
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.
And many, many other 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?
Fuck it.
We're just going to defund you.
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 book was on the frontier in the 1840s, 50s, 60s, 1870s, on the American frontier out west, there was little to no policing.
A sheriff, one sheriff in 500 square miles, whatever it was, minimal policing.
And it was a largely male population.
So there weren't even, if you want to just put it this way, I mean, one of the constant causes of violence between individual men is competition over women.
I mean, bar fights in all kinds of situations.
There's one seed of conflict between men.
So there were very few women out there to even have conflicts over.
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 7% of the population died by murder in the first three months, if I'm remembering my numbers correctly.
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 there is a very strong correlation between 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 line with each other, violence goes down.
Well, then, how do you explain places like Japan or China, where there's far more males in China, I believe, than there are females because of that one child policy?
I mean, if I'm, you know, on the New York subway, you know, a couple of years ago, my oldest daughter was two years old, and I go in the subway, you know, with her in a carrier.
And if some guy was acting weird, I mean, I got in another car.
People walking down the street completely out of their mind screaming.
You know, I mean, the stuff that would happen, you know, whatever.
It's New York City.
You see everything eventually.
But it just happens a lot more.
And, you know, I live in the Lower East Side, and it's a pretty mixed income area.
There's a lot of different stuff going on there, you know.
But, you know, I saw an really interesting, you know, in terms of the police restraint.
I mean, like, I saw this amazing thing.
We're living on a small street and a through street, a small through street in the way Lower East Side.
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 something, directions, or I don't know what, right?
So they're talking 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?
Swearing, like, get the fuck out of the way.
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 everyone involved was African-American.
Just so happens, right?
Everyone involved in that situation was African-American.
And the cop didn't get out of the car.
And I was just amazed.
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 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 billy club.
And then you don't know what's going to happen.
Right.
So, 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 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 think the cameras and 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.
And you've got to make higher standards for people to get into it.
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 in vogue to call cops shitheads, assholes, and losers.
And it's like to hate a cop is actually popular.
Unfortunately, because of the George Floyd case and because of multiple other cases, it's a thing now and it's a narrative.
And if you say you support, like, you know, I'm a supporter of law enforcement.
I always have been.
I think it's important.
I'm always respectful to police officers.
I know that they treat me differently than they would a young black man or in a crime-ridden area or in various situations and various cops are going to treat people more discriminatory.
And 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 like what the 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 violated their training and their oath and abused people, even in really egregious cases, the police unions really won't acknowledge it.
But the problem with that, I mean, when I was in Afghanistan with American, you know, I was in Afghanistan in the 90s and whatever, before 9-11, but my last trip there was with American forces and I was there off and on for a year.
And I got to know the military very, very well, and I really like them.
I really liked the U.S. military.
I grew up during Vietnam.
I hadn't really expected to have that reaction.
I just love them.
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 their bureaucracy was.
And one of these public affairs guys, I mean, they're technically their soldiers, but they're not really fighting.
They're in public affairs, and they deal with the press and whatever.
And he was a really nice guy.
And he said to me, listen, tell me, how do I get journalists to trust me?
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, think you're an honest actor in this, and they will believe it when you tell the truth, when you say something positive about yourself, right?
So 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.
It was the same thing, I think, with the police unions.
They're like, uh-uh-uh.
I mean, yeah, secretly, I know the election wasn't stolen if you're MAGA, 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?
The commies are going to take over, whatever they tell themselves.
Likewise, if you're in the police union, like, no, 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 confusing and 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.
I mean, a lot of fights do, right?
And I know a lot of cops, and they're in some really bad situations.
I think the police union is probably worried about that all that stuff will start to come up under review.
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, I feel like the original sin with the Republicans was, and everybody's got, both political parties have an original sin.
But with the Republicans, is 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.
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.
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 have been born on this patch of dirt to be legitimate.
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.
Well, I think it's to preempt, it doesn't really do this, obviously, as we just saw with Barack Obama.
I think it's to preempt sort of like Suspicions that this is a, you know, that this is a bad actor who has come, you know, come here expressly to take over our country.
You know, so I kind of understand that 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, it doesn't guarantee group allegiance being born here, but it signifies something powerful.
One of the things I wrote about was, you know, I was talking about how 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 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.
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 group in, it was a criminal gang in Chicago in the 1960s called the Vice Lords.
The term didn't mean that they were committing lots of moral vices, though I'm sure they did occasionally.
It meant that once you were in, we had you like you're in a vice.
It was a strength of brotherhood term, not a sort of moral corruption term, right?
So the thing about the vice lords, a very, very dangerous part of 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, 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 one of the litmus tests of being a vice-lord, I mean, 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.
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.
And 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 him 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 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 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, it was 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 if I may, I'd like to suggest ways to ritually 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, those kids were always broke, right?
And they'd pull their money, their dimes, nickels and dimes or whatever, and they'd buy a bottle of wine.
They drank wine, And 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 is often screaming at each other because they're in disagreement.
Well, what we know is that the more adversity there is, the more people band together.
And so there was an incredible coming together after 9-11 in this country.
And very briefly, there was distinctions of race and class were sort of like took a back seat to we are all Americans.
We were attacked.
We have to defend ourselves.
It's a very natural human reaction.
You know, one of the amazing benefits and privileges of an affluent, powerful society is that you're not in fear for your life constantly from an outside enemy.
And so we're not on a war footing anymore.
So how do you maintain that cohesion even though circumstances don't require it?
And I've given a lot of thought to it because people keep saying, how can we act like a tribe in this country?
How can we return to that state of mind?
And so the three ways, and part of this 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 experience being part of this place, this nation, is donate blood.
The amazing thing about blood is it has no, it doesn't discriminate, right?
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 going to maybe one day be on the side of those people while they choose your fate.
Oh, he was like, he would go to these 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 Russian guy somewhere downtown.
And he would sell the confiscated goods 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 abused the system to the tune of $6,000.
It wasn't that much money.
Mostly I just felt sort of sad for him.
I was like, and we convicted on some counts and not on others.
And 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, when the defense attorney saw where this was going and pled out, no jail time, whatever, whatever it was.
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.
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.
Well, 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.
I mean, 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.
I mean, and 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're not living in a friggin' dictatorship.
So when you set out to write this book, you're incorporating a lot of different things, right?
You're incorporating your personal journey along the railroad lines, and you're also incorporating all your thoughts about sort of the mechanisms of freedom.
So the account of my trip, we just pop up here and there throughout the narrative.
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?
I mean, walk into town, we look like shit.
We go to a store, buy some supplies, some rice, some oatmeal, some whatever, and then we keep moving, 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 the jury 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.
Mobility gives people freedom from an oppressor.
Oppressors are often more powerful.
They're more, in sort of like military terms, they're often more mechanized, like a more mechanized army.
And again, oppression is in the eye of the beholder.
The Taliban felt oppressed by the U.S. military.
They are now free.
They have their, quote, freedom.
The reason that they were able to fight us 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.
The insurgents use much, much, much less so they can sustain it indefinitely.
That's run.
Fight is when it comes down to a fight, how does the smaller entity win, be it the Montenegrins or a smaller fighter in the ring or at every scale.
And then finally, think.
And what I looked at there is how does change come, look, if you're part of a society, 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.
Maybe there's some corners in Alaska where the government wouldn't find you, but whatever.
You can get your freedom from your country by simply leaving, right?
If you're going to stay within your community, you're really talking about your rights.
So how do you maintain your rights or gain the rights you should have within the community that you're in?
And so the, and that requires, I mean, almost by definition, no individual is stronger than the U.S. government and the U.S. military and the police and blah, blah, blah.
So you have to sort of outthink it, right?
So in the Easter Rising in Ireland, the Irish rebels were completely outgunned, right?
And they lost the initial fight and they took over Dublin.
And the English Army came in and just rolled them up, right?
But they were playing the long game.
And eventually, it was too costly for the British to keep control of Ireland and they gave them their freedom.
And likewise in this country, around 100 years ago, the labor conditions in this country were horrific.
And the unions were not legal.
And I mean, unions commit tons of abuses of their authority.
And so I know they're very problematic.
But if you go back 100 years, what happened to labor in the absence of unions was really horrific.
And so the striker, they started going on strike.
And these are very, very poor people.
A lot of them were immigrants, right?
And they were facing the U.S., the National Guard, the U.S. government.
I mean, they were facing unbelievable odds and they outthought them.
And one way they outthought 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 Connolly in Dublin during the Easter Rising, leadership that was willing to die.
They did not put themselves behind the people, the frontline 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 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 killing men are much lighter than for killing women.
And it's such a powerful factor 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 mill strikes in Lawrence.
And, you know, I mean, just you have to understand how abusive the labor relationship was with the factories back then.
And 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.
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 social relations tend not to be hierarchical like men are.
I mean, you need a hierarchy if you're going to ask people to charge machine guns.
You need a hierarchy, right?
You need 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 for the authorities to penetrate.
You can't just take out one person and the whole thing collapses, right?
It's a spider web.
And so the lateral female relations in the sort of slums of these, of Lawrence, 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 used women for that, and the authorities just could not get inside it.
They couldn't get ahead of it.
So that's the 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, and at the end of the day, you might have to think.
And that for thousands of years, that's how humans have done it.
I wanted to figure out with using as few words as possible what allows human beings to be free.
And this is what I came to understand about it.
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 to 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 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 the higher the obligations within the group, the more autonomy people have within the group.
And so what I would say is that the freedom means you freedom means you have the right to not be oppressed by your leaders.
But you don't have the right to be free of obligations.
So 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 drives on the right-hand side of the road.
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 details.
At any rate, it was going from 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 change jurisdiction, what are you going to do with the roads?
How are you going to 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.
And when those rules impinge on your rights, then 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.
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?
Rights are given to you.
You can't take them.
You can take power through violence, and you can take your freedom through violence 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?
This sort of brings me to 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.
We have limitations in terms of, I mean, you're able to express yourself, but that's a little slippery, right?
Like, when do we decide that what you're doing is not technically freedom of speech?
It falls under incitement to violence.
It falls under some unprotected category.
That although we allow you to express yourself freely, we have to maintain some sort of structure and some sort of order.
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 was allowed to say something that 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.
He has crossed over into incitement to violence and God knows what else.
And he undoubtedly would have been arrested for that.
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 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, and I think in a democracy, it's fair to say speech that will undermine, I mean, 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 of the obsession with control that dictators have, dictatorships are usually very short-lived regimes, rarely transition power to 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 security in the world comes from the strength of our, in part from the strength of our democracy and the amazing military that protects it.
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 so then you are sanctioned.
And, you know, that's the big argument with Donald Trump.
Should he or should he not have access to the sort of megaphone of Twitter and Facebook if he's saying things that some people believe got some folks killed on Capitol Hill and that may that are a grave threat to the democratic process.
I'm not going to weigh in.
That's not a journalist's role, but I think that seems to be what the discussion is about.
He's got to know that in this insanely volatile situation where people are really thinking that the relationship between the voters and the politicians and this whole thing is like inexorably flawed and that they're stealing the election and it's over.
But if you don't just look at Donald Trump, but the people who are close around him.
So his personal lawyer.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if memory serves, Lynn Wood, one of his personal attorneys, literally said before the January 6th 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.
And there was a lot of rhetoric by other people in that group about what they could do with Nancy Pelosi and other people that they thought had betrayed, betrayed what?
Oh, you know, like if I'm doing a radio interview or something and someone says, oh, read me that section about the Apache, and I can find it fairly quickly.
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.
They put you basically in something the size of a phone booth and you read for hours and hours and hours.
But I'm proud that I can do it well.
It's very, very gratifying to read your own work.
And there's a section in my book about a guy named Michael Mallon who was one of the insurrectionists in Dublin.
And a 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 carriage went right by his own house, and he saw his dog.
And he got to, you know, 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 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 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 stream 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 section, and 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 100 years later.
This man's words that he wrote in the hours before he was tied, he 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 so it just, I don't know.
Like, obviously, poor Michael Mallon's never going to know that his letter is still bringing a tear to people's eye, but it is.
Well, it's also the amazing thing about utilizing language and 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.
And you know, when you have a sort of certainty of purpose, like he did, a sort of sense of meaning of 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 Stonebreaker's Yard in the central prison in Dublin.
And the executions were held in the Stonebreaker's Yard.
And it's a sort of stone enclosure.
I mean, a very small place.
And there was a medical examiner sort of witnessing this.
And one after another, there was one woman slated for execution at the last moment.
This is what I was saying.
They withdrew the execution because they knew that executing a woman, the Brits knew, would make their lives their job much, much harder in Ireland.
They didn't dare do it.
The men were no problem.
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 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.
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, someone pointed out, I wish I could claim this thought, but I can't.
It's so brilliant.
That amazing photograph of Tenement 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.
I've stood in front of tanks.
They're huge, right?
I mean, they crush you in a second.
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 guy who's not.
Look, look at that.
Think of the courage for both of them.
Think of that.
Think of the courage.
And the conversation the tank driver and that man could have had 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.
And democracy gives people rights within a country.
Freedom really is, I mean, it's up to you to define it how you want, but the working definition I'm using is freedom means that you are safe from an outside power controlling you.
If you consider the U.S. 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 6th or whatever.
But really 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, my freedoms to compete in women's sports and I'm trans, you know, whatever it is, they're really talking about their rights.
And so the American democratic system is deeply flawed and deeply amazing.
And 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?
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 and that on paper, our rights are amazing and transcend the rights of most people throughout almost all of human history.
I mean, you need so you need this sort of balance of a country that can defend itself and its borders and defend its democracy, a balance between that and a system that's fairly just and egalitarian.
I mean, one of the worrisome things, in my opinion, in terms of justice, which is another category, is that the gap between rich and poor in this country, the income gap, what's called the Gini coefficient, is growing larger, not smaller.
And the larger that gap gets, 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.
I mean, just in terms of the choices they have available to them.
And that trend has been going on for decades.
And it's correlated with all kinds of things that aren't very, that are dangerous to a society, to a democracy.
One of the highest Gini coefficients was in medieval Europe.
And that was rectified by 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 Gini coefficient back down.
And so it's the weird thing about the Gini coefficient is that you obviously don't want too high a one because it's not just.
It has its own instability.
But really low Gi 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 Gi coefficients.
So as a good lefty, I like to think, oh, well, a just and fair egalitarian society, eventually will be the most powerful country in the world because everyone's happy and we all pull together and blah, blah, blah.
It's really not true.
Like typically the really, really large dominant empires have moderately high genie coefficients.
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.
So even if you're fairly poor, but if 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 trappings of financial success, you don't want a giant house and the cars and all the stress and all the hassle that goes along with it.
This Gini coefficient, I mean, does it relate to those things?
And just to be clear, I'm not advocating for a high Gini coefficient for the United States.
I'm just sort of pointing out historically that really dominant empires in the world have had fairly high GINI coefficients.
And you can make a very good case for a low GNI 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 GI coefficients down.
Those countries are way more stable now because they're fairer countries, economically, politically, legally fairer countries.
The Gini coefficients have come down.
It's just that Ecuador is never going to be a world power.
The world powers throughout history for the past thousand years have not been very fair societies.
And that's 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 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 and that very powerful rulers then depend on a huge sort of labor pool to fill enormous armies.
That labor pool isn't going to be there in an egalitarian society.
Everyone has more or less the same amount of material wealth.
But you need a sort of unfair system to put people in a position of accepting the rule of a despot.
And let's be clear about it.
Through most of human history, empires were run by despots and had absolute power.
So 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, who were 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 Darius, right?
And the Scythians 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.
And at the last moment, the Scythians noticed that there were a lot of rabbits hopping around in the underbrush.
And they took their bows and arrows and they started hunting the rabbits so that they would have something to eat for dinner.
And Darius saw this.
And, you know, 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.
But I don't think that 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?
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 to advance with at least similar obstacles.
Right.
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 completely 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.
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.
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, in fact, they were disincentivized.
Not only were they not financially incentivized to sort of like redouble their efforts, 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.
But then on the other hand, if it is so economically unjust, that no matter how much effort you put into it, you will never achieve the outcomes that a different kind of person will achieve.
That doesn't incentivize effort either, right?
So, I mean, you can make a pretty good case that if you're like an African-American kid in a really, really poor community with a really shitty school and in a single family home, et cetera, et cetera, all the correlates to bad outcomes, you can try as hard as you want.
And once in a while, someone gets through or whatever, but the odds are stacked so much against you.
I mean, you can make this case.
Odds are stacked so much against you that it's not an unreasonable thought to have, which is, well, fuck it.
I'm not going to even try, right?
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.
I mean, there are structural things we can do that make the society collaborative and just in the way that a small-scale hunter-gatherer society is 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 weaves 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 CONS.
But even the problem with institutionalizing something like that, you want someone who's actually motivated to help people.
You don't want someone who's just doing it as a job.
One of the things that's frustrating for people 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 just 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, yeah, I mean, I would say that for every teacher that's like that, there's another teacher that's buying pencils and erasers out of their pocket for the kids, whatever.
It's hard to generalize.
But my answer would be, well, that's an institutionalized solution that's not working.
We need one that works.
I don't think we have time to figure out what that is with the education system.
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 needed to feel it 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, I mean, let me just quickly tell a story that sort of exemplifies this.
I was on a book tour some years ago in Norfolk, Virginia.
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 mid-70s, like in a wheelchair, and he was missing half his right leg.
And it clearly, you know, it 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, and 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 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 he said, you know, zero self-pity, which is an enormously noble thing, right?
He said, well, I don't know if it's hard, but it's interesting.
It's different.
Getting used to it.
I was like, all right, you're a tough old bird.
Wow.
I'll try again.
And I said, wow, well, I got to 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 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 got to say, 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, we'd be doing better.